Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell in Conversation
This post first appeared on the Lane’s List in January 2015.
I’ve picked up my viewing of the classic interviews The Power of Myth with mythologist Joseph Campbell recently, having begun watching this seminal series of six astoundingly learned conversations with journalist Bill Moyers back in the autumn.
I think I went back to him for two reasons. Firstly, I was panicking about what the playwright Jack Thorne had reminded me, about what playwright Simon Stephens had said, via the intro to Jack Thorne’s Plays: Volume 1 (how’s that for a series of convoluted connections?)
Stephens’ comment was that every writer always writes in some variation about the same core idea. Every writer has their own myth, and they spend their lifetimes interrogating it in different ways.
The second reason was everything that’s happening in the world today that makes me want to shield my eyes from newspapers. How are you meant to respond to it? What is that’s underpinning atrocity, prejudice, anger and hate? How the hell do you respond to that as a storyteller?
As soon as I started watching the Campbell series again it made me immediately excited. There’s something about the theory he puts forward – that we are all connected from the same evolutionary path, that core creation myths are found to carry the same deep story dynamics despite those early settlements never meeting one another for tens of thousands of years – that I find stimulating and (let’s face it) quite romantically hopeful as a storyteller. The idea that shared principles of story lie in our DNA as a species is pretty powerful.
The episode I watched this week was about the first stories and the people who told them. Campbell visits a chamber of cave paintings that hold thirty-foot high images of buffalo, bears and men, and describes it as a ‘stirring of the mythic imagination – like a cathedral’. He questions to what degree the art is expressive or functional: in the same way that a spider’s web is both deadly and has a kind of instinctive beauty. We don’t know why they hold qualities of both.
Campbell can talk in advanced academic language, but he always reduces his world view to some resonant constants – beauty, life, death, story, the cosmos. He analyses with verbosity but his core ideas are traded in big gestures that sweep you up and deliver you into seductive imaginative realms.
The earliest recorded cave paintings coincide with the earliest appearances of the burial of the human dead. At some point, we dug holes and put our deceased in them and covered them up: the first ritual. Anticipating our mortality and seeking to organise our cosmos in relation to the passing away of life was the beginning of story – the beginning of us trying to explain the unexplainable.
Campbell talks about how mythology demands that we realign ourselves with the consciousness that lies within us: so that, for example, in terms of death we can simply watch the body fall away and accept its disintegration. It’s only a vehicle, because our consciousness lives on somewhere else and re-joins the world once we die.
Like a story, we are vessels for the discovery of meaning in the cosmos (humankind versus the rest of the universe), but when we die, our stories live beyond us.
His basic theme of all mythology is that there is an invisible plane in our world that’s supporting the visible one. That invisible plane holds the secrets to things we call love, fate, destiny, chance, luck, serendipity, blessings, miracles, grief, fortune and misfortune… it could be a roll-call for the basic ingredients of drama. They are the ambiguities that countless stories explore: which is why we keep on writing them. They are unsolveable, but we love to wonder around them.
And the invisible plane? It could be a world, an energy, an understanding, God – we don’t know. But what’s clear is that what we don’t know is in some way supporting what we do know. Same as in life as in with stories: through the act of creating myths, or simply telling stories about ourselves, we’re trying to harmonise and reconnect with that invisible plane and understand it – and human beings – a little better.
The world shifts of course, and belief systems die and redevelop in different ways – but what’s so compelling about Campbell’s thesis is that many of those belief systems still carry the same core ingredients the world over. Something unseen is connecting our spirit and our longing for understanding and connectivity with the world.
One such shift he focuses on is the fact that animals used to be viewed as sacred by humans when they were hunters – they were the things that helped us to live and grow and without them we would die: so we gifted them with respect. Killing was a ritual: the hunt became a ritual expressing a hope of resurrection (for the animal) – it took on a ceremonial aspect that gave the animal a divine agency, because the power of the animal master is that we were dependent on it. Early hunting people don’t have that relationship with animals of them being lesser beings – they simply have powers that we don’t have. Maybe the guilt of killing was wiped out by the myth they constructed around them.
Taking the slaughter of Native American culture via the ignorance of the white man’s treatment of the buffalo as an example, Campbell warns that ‘the ego needs to recognise the thou, not the it. When you paint anything as the it, you can kill it.’
Compassion for that beyond your own body – be that another culture, another species, another faith – is demanding of respect and value.
This can happen on a linguistic plane too. Raised as a Roman Catholic, Campbell suggests that reduction of ritual simply turns people into barbarians. It’s a very quick example, but he cites the translation of the Latin mass into plain English is an example of exactly what myth should not do: bring you closer to your own life.
The whole point of myth is that it throws you out, pitches you outwards beyond the comfortable, into the whirl of the cosmos to experience a moment of awe and understanding that challenges and advances your understanding of yourself in the world: not wrapping you up in cosy domesticity, within yourself. Those critics who bandy around the word ‘relatable’ as a value judgement on theatre should take a leaf out of Campbell’s book.
And on artists – storytellers in every form – and their relationship to a rapidly changing world as it cries out for a new myth to stabilise itself, Campbell has this to share:
‘A new vision of the universe must be kept alive. The only people who keep it alive are artists: their function is the mythologisation of the environment and the world. There’s an old romantic idea in German that the poetry of traditional ages come out of ‘the folk’ but they do not: they come out of an elite experience – the experience of people who are particularly gifted to turn their ears to the song of the universe: and they speak to the folk and then there is an answer from the folk – but the first impulse comes from above, not from below. [Storytellers] are the mythmakers of our day that reveal the power beneath. Particularly gifted people translate the message of the universe to the folk, and the folk listen.’
Every time you write, you are shaping a myth of the world for your audience. Whatever you are channelling is something you and you alone are able to hear in the song of the universe, and your job is to express that moment of listening to ‘the folk’ – to the audience – and perhaps find a way that might allow them to sing along with you.
No genre was ever forged called the Theatre of Hope, but as you look out of the window or read the newspaper these days, perhaps someone like Campbell would be a good person from whom to take the building blocks of a new movement: one that can reconnect everyone to that unified invisible plane of humanity.
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