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Hello, I'm Susan Sarandon. In the previous program of Mythos, Joe Campbell began his story of humankind with an exploration of our inner world, the soul, where myths come from. The idea of a living mythology, which organizes and gives meaning to life, does not ring true to our modern sensibilities. How does it work? What is it like to live a myth? Like those who never experience the transforming power of love, we quite literally don't know what we're missing. Nevertheless, to understand this power, if not to actually experience it, we need only to look to those who were here before us: the American Indians. In this program, Campbell initiates us into the world of the American Indian, but first, he considers modern society and the cycle of life we all travel through.
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I was given by some of my friends a magazine article from a prestigious sociological journal called Foreign Affairs. This is their 60th anniversary. I was shocked to realize that, because I subscribed to the first edition, and in it is an article called "The Care and Repair of Public Myths," where the author says that a society that does not have a myth to support and give it coherence goes into dissolution, and that's what's happening to us. He defines myth in an incomplete way. He defines it as an order of acceptable ideas concerning the cosmos and its parts, and nations, and other human groups. But it concerns also the mystic dimension that informs all this. And if that's not there, you don't have a mythology, you have an ideology. It concerns also the pedagogy of the individual, giving him a guiding track to guide him along. It coordinates the living person with the cycle of his own life, with the environment in which he's living, and with the society which itself has already been integrated in the environment.
Now, uh, this picture that I've put on the screen is from W.B. Yeats, his curious and remarkable book, "A Vision," and he has taken it from an alchemical work of the 16th century, "Speculum Hominis et Angelorum," the Mirror of Men and Angels. What it represents is the cycle of the moon as a counterpart to the cycle of a human lifetime, with the 15th night of the moon corresponding to the 35th year of a lifetime. Using the terms that Yeats applies to this, we are born from the transcendent mystery, and immediately the society begins putting its imprinting upon us. The mask that we are to wear is put on us by the society, and Yeats calls this the primary mask. The eighth night of the moon is the night of adolescence, of puberty. At that time, light begins to dominate over darkness, and so the attitude of dependency and submission has to be transformed now into one of maturity.
There are two kinds of maturity, however. There is that of a traditional society, where the individual moves over into the role of the authority which has been that of the society. Let's say he becomes the, uh, executor, the one who administers the rituals and so forth, which carry the sense of the culture. He continues in the way of the primary mask. On the other hand, in our culture world, where we have a more open view, the individual at this time, when he may be able to have the sense of a destiny and world, uh, work of his own, of which the society had no notion, we begin to get a separating. The individual begins to find his own path, and the drag, you might say, of the primary mask is gradually thrown off. This is what is known as the left-hand path. The right-hand path is that of living in the context of the ideology and mask system, persona system of one's local village compound. The left-hand path is that of the individual quest.
Each of us is an individual. Earlier societies did not pay much attention to this. In our world, the individual, particularly in the European world, the individual is recognized as a positive, not simply a negative, of power. And so there comes in our world the antithetical mask, the mask of the individual's own life, pulling against the other. Now, even where the youth is encouraged to find his own path, there is nevertheless a psychological lag. So this is a period of great tension. We are not reborn as easily as primitives or as people in traditional societies. We have a more complicated birth.
We come then to the 15th night of the moon. Now, the image here is of these two great lights: the lunar light, which dies and is resurrected, dies and is resurrected, and the solar light, which is independent of the vicissitudes of time. At this moment, the moon and the sun are equivalent lights. Out on the plains, on the 15th night of the moon, at the time of sunset, looking to the west, you see the sun at a moment just resting right on the horizon. And if you look then to the east, the moon will be in the same position on the eastern horizon. I've seen it twice in my lifetime, and both times mistook the moon for the sun.
When lecturing on this subject in, uh, Oklahoma, I got the cry from the group of young people, "So what's new?" They see it every month. This is a moment of great mystical, uh, importance here. Your consciousness, your body, and its consciousness are at their prime, and you are in a position to ask yourself, "Who or what am I? Am I the consciousness, or am I the vehicle of consciousness? Am I this body, which is the vehicle of light, solar light, or am I the light?"
I once had the task of talking about these matters, talking about Buddhism, in fact, to a group of prep school boys, youngsters between the ages of about 12 and 17. And when it came to this problem of explaining what this Buddha consciousness or Christ consciousness was, I looked up at the ceiling for an inspiration, and I found one. I said, "Look up, boys, at the ceiling, and you will see that the lights (plural) are on, or you might also say the light (singular) is on." And this is two ways of saying the same thing. In one case, you are placing emphasis on the individual bulbs. On the other, you're placing emphasis on the light.
Now, in Japan, these two alternatives are called respectively the jihokai and the rihokai. Jihokai, the individual realm. Rihokai, the general. And then they say, "Gemu gei, individual general, no obstruction." Same thing. And now I say, when one of those light bulbs breaks, the superintendent of buildings and grounds doesn't come in and say, "Well, that was my particularly favorite bulb." He takes it out, throws it away, puts another one in. What is important is not the vehicle, but the light. And I say, now looking down at all your heads, I ask myself, "Of what are these the vehicles?" They're the vehicles of consciousness. How much consciousness are they radiating? And which are you? Are you the vehicle, or are you the consciousness? And when you identify with the consciousness, then, with gratitude to the vehicle, you can let it go. "O death, where is thy sting?" You have identified yourself with that which is really everlasting, this consciousness that throws up forms and takes them back again, throws up forms and takes them back again. And then you can realize that you are one with the consciousness in all beings. You are one with them, and you can say, "Gegai bugei, individual individual, no destruction." This is the ultimate mystic experience on earth. That's the crisis here. So that's the death and resurrection here. The death and resurrection on the eighth night is to death to the infantile ego, birth to the mature. Here is death to the body, identification with the eternal aspect that lives in the body. And from then on, it's a wonderful thing to watch the body go, following the course of nature, until the 22nd night of the moon. Darkness begins to preponderate. The body becomes more and more submissive to the primary rules of the society and of nature. I remember one gentleman asked, when I was talking about this, "What is it happens?" I said, "You'll find out soon enough."
So, and then we have here these signs indicating the nuclear moment of the crisis, temptation, the cup of Tristan and his older, not of Isolde and King Mark, the marriage arranged for by the society, but the awakening of the meeting of the eyes and the awakening of the individual destiny, life and its realization. Then here, Pulchritude, beauty, the glorious moment. I'm told that after the resurrection of the body, the last day, the joining of the body to the soul in heaven, we will all be 35 years old. So then we come on here to the decline and violence against yourself, holding yourself in form for the last lap, and finally, sapientia, the fruit, wisdom. Not a bad score. And so this also is part of the mythology of the body, the body going through its inevitable course.
The long body. Campbell challenges us to ask ourselves difficult questions: Are you the vehicle of consciousness, or are you the consciousness? Joe has once asked, "What does that have to do with anything?" by a man who said that his life was perfectly happy without ever considering these ideas. He responded that there really was no need to think of these things ever. After all, a dog has a perfectly happy life without thinking about anything. It is, however, a dog's life. Perhaps Joe was a bit tough on this guy, but he would say to those interested in a human life that an understanding of his or her place in the world is a pressing concern. For the American Indian, this place was firmly established in an intimate relationship with the natural world, a relationship epitomized in a letter written by Chief Seattle, after whom the city of Seattle was named.
"The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the spark of the water, how can you buy them? Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect, all are holy in the memory and experience of my people. We know the sap that courses through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins. We're part of the earth, and it is part of us. Perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadow, the body heat of the pony and man, all belong to the same family.
The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water, but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you our land, you must remember that it is sacred. Each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father. The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst, they carry our canoes, and feed our children. So you must give to the rivers the kindness you would give any brother. If we sell you our land, remember that the air is precious to us. That the air shares its spirit with all the life that it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. The wind also gives our children the spirit of life. So if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers. Will you teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth. This we know. The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. All things are connected, like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. One thing we know: our God is also your God. The earth is precious to him, and to harm the earth is to keep contempt on its creator. Your destiny is a mystery to us. What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered? The wild horse is tamed? What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men, and the view of the ripe hills is blotted by talking wires? Where will the thicket be gone? Where will the eagle be gone? And what is it to say goodbye to the swift pony and the hunt? The end of living and the beginning of survival. When the last red man has vanished with his wilderness and his memory is only the shadow of a cloud moving across the prairie, will these shores and forests still be here? Will there be any of the spirit of my people left? We love this earth as a newborn loves its mother's heartbeat. So if we sell you our land, love it as we have loved it. Care for it as we have cared for it. Hold in your mind the memory of the land as it is when you receive it. Preserve the land for all children, and love it as God loves us all. As we are part of the land, you too are part of the land. This earth is precious to us. It is also precious to you. One thing we know: there is only one God. No man, be red man or white, can be apart. We are brothers, after all."
Okay, compare that with Genesis 3. Uh, and you see what's happening. Furthermore, the land is the holy land, and the land where you are, not the land someplace else. Not only the body, but the specific landscape in which the people are dwelling is sanctified in these old mythologies, and you don't have to go someplace else to find the holy place.
Now, this is a painting that was made by a friend of Black Elk, you know, John Night's book, "Black Elk Speaks." Uh, it's a beautiful book. Fortunately, it was a poet who received this message from old Black Elk, who was in his 90s, of the vision that this guardian of the Oglala's medicine pipe had experienced when he was a boy of nine, a vision that foretold in a magical way, really, the destiny before his people, came to him long before they had had their first encounters with the cavalry and the Wounded Knee and all that. Old Black Elk, when he was quite a youngster, 14 or so, participated in the battle of with Custer. At one point in his vision, he said, "I saw myself on the sacred central mountain of the world." And here he is on the central mountain of the world with the axial tree and the three birds round about, and Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John round about as well. And, uh, he said, "The central mountain of the world, this highest mountain, is Horní Peak in South Dakota." And immediately after that, he said, "But the central mountain is everywhere."
Now, there's a man that knew the difference between the folk cultic symbol and the reference of the symbol. The holy land is everywhere. And so when you come into a landscape for the purpose of the cult and worship, so that you can address your minds to the mystery, designate this is the center, this is the north, this is the south mountain, and so forth. This word of this wise old man reminds me of a sentence that comes from a text of the 13th century, 12th century, that was translated from Greek into Latin, called "The Book of the 24 Philosophers." It says there, "God is an intelligible sphere." Intelligible means known to the mind. An intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. And so it's right here. And the function of the ritual and the myth is to let you experience it here, not somewhere else.
A long time ago, I'm going to take as the model for this sanctification of the land, the world that we're in here, the world of the Navajo and the mythology of the Navajo and their sand paintings. And I just want to run through a little series of these sand paintings and the mythic matter associated with them. The people of Iceland have a term, "landnám." This means land claiming or land taking. And land taking consists in sanctifying the land by recognizing in the features of the local landscape mythological images. Every detail of the Navajo desert land has been sanctified and recognized as a vehicle of the radiant mystery. This sand painting is called "The Curtains of the Sky." And what you, you get are the four directions here, colors associated with each of the four directions, and the center, the center dog, the abyssal dog, out of which all things come, back into which they go. And when appearances emerge, they break into pairs of opposites. This is all basic mythological stuff that we found in India. The sun rises here. It's the, the place of birth, of emergence, new light. When the Buddha achieved illumination, he was facing east. The New Testament is the testament of Sunday, the rising of the, the new eastern sun. Then, in the height of the sky, the blue sky of noon, this is the midpoint, the 35th year of life. Then the west, where the sun sinks, and then the north, where the sun is going underground. In the north is always an area of, uh, ore and mystery and danger, the danger of that which has not been accommodated in the forms of the social order. And then, so we see the sun in these various aspects.
Now, all of these mandalas that I'm going to be showing will be open to the east, not closed, open to receive the transpersonal, the transcended light shining through. All things are to be transparent to transcendence. When a deity like Yahweh in the Old Testament says, "I'm final," he is no longer transparent to transcendence. He is not, as the deities of the older cultures, a personification of an energy which antecedes his personification. He says, "I'm it." And when the deity closes himself like that, we too are closed like that. So we're not open to transcendence either. And you have a religion of worship, whereas when the deity opens, you have a religion of identification with the divine. And that was what Christ mentioned when he said, "I and the Father are one," and he's crucified for it. Said the same thing. And all of these are saying the same things. We're particles of that mystery, that timeless, endless, everlasting mystery, which pours forth from the abyss into the forms of the world.
Then you see the main plant of their sustenance. Just as the animal of the hunter, the animal that is the principal animal of his, uh, life becomes the animal master, so when planting comes in, the main plants are sanctified. Also, there are Pueblo myths and Huichol myths in, in Mexico, telling of the Corn Maidens. And one of them, in one of these myths, is compelled by the young hero's mother to grind the corn, and as she's grinding, her own arms disappear, and she disappears. She's grinding herself away. Our whole life is sustained by the mystery. Life, and everything that you eat, whether vegetable or animal, is the life that is being, uh, given to you through its own willingness to become your own life substance.
So all of these monologues that I'm representing here are going to be placed with the east at the top, and you'll see it's open. And then there are the guardians of the gate. In this case, they are a little figure known as "Donso Big Fly." I'm told that as one walks on the desert, sometimes a big fly comes down and sits on one's shoulder. This big fly is the counterpart of the Holy Spirit. It is the voice of the mystery, and it is your guide. And it can be called Big Fly, or in another aspect, Little Wind. And isn't this interesting? The wind, spiritus, the spirit. We got it in Chief Seattle's. That's an archetype. The recognition of breath as the breath of life.
Now I want to, uh, go back to the main myth of the Navajo, and it's a Pueblo myth as well, as the one that is universal in this part of the world. It is of the first people having come up from the womb of the earth through a series of four stages. And they go from one stage to another. Some accident happens in the lower stages. Flood comes as a punishment for of impropriety of some sort, breaking of a taboo, or something of the sort. And they come on up, and finally they come to the top level, the earth on which we are now. This is brilliant, out of the earth birth. And here's the ladder of emergence. And these are the first people with the plants and the animals roundabout that they discover here. And here is a special kind of mirage enclosing it.
Now, I must tell you, uh, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, some, many years ago, a team of Navajo singers came to show sand paintings and how they were made. And it was marvelous to watch these men take a colored sand in their hand and with great precision prepare these marvelous paintings. When they would prepare them, they would always leave out one detail. Now, when they're given to artists, such as these have been given to artists to copy and then store in that museum of, uh, the Navajo art, something will be left out. That is to protect those who are dealing with the painting from its power. They're not supposed to have the power turned on. Well, they made one painting in the museum, and then they were asked, "Couldn't you just complete one painting? Complete this one, for instance?" And they laughed and they said, "If we finish this one tomorrow morning, every woman in Manhattan would be pregnant." So these things carry power. And then it was also interesting to watch them when the paintings were being destroyed, when they were being removed. They took that sand, and it was the only thing I could think of was a Roman Catholic priest with the consecrated host in his hand. That's to say, there was sacred power here, and they were not just brushed off and thrown away. They were put in a special container to receive them and taken to somewhere else, of which we know nothing.
So here's the first part of the, the legend, the legend of emergence. Now, I said that in, uh, Iceland, we have this concept of landnám, land claiming. A specific place is identified on the reservation as the place of emergence. It wasn't the place of emergence, it is the ritual symbol of the place of emergence. And you consider the emergence mystery when you address yourself to that place. Then there's the mountain of the north, and the mountain of the south, and a mountain of the east, and the mountain of the west. The land is consecrated. It is a holy land in this way. Where did the myth come from? It came with the people to that place, and then they consecrated the place in terms of the myth that was with them.
To many, the myths of the American Indians seem like quaint superstitions. Did they really believe that man emerged from the womb of Mother Earth on a ladder? Maybe. But to ask such a question is to miss the point. For the American Indian, the place of emergence would actually shift from village to village or tribe to tribe. Its importance lay in its symbolic value, the ritual place to focus on the mystery of life. For the American Indian, everything in the world had both its concrete physical reality and its spiritual reality. The rivers, the woods, the buffalo, all were secular and sacred at the same time. It is a way of perceiving the world totally alien to many of us, whose experience of the sacred is reserved for an hour or so a week in church. The myths of the American Indian connected them to the mystery of life. Those same myths also provide the rituals to prepare them for the obstacles they face living in the real world. How does it work? The power of a story is in its telling.
Now I want to go through a specific legend, and this is the legend of "Where the Two Came to Their Father." These paintings I'm going to show now are not sand paintings, but pollen paintings. They're called. They're made of ground-up corn and ground-up petals of flowers and so forth and so on. When the Second World War started and the young men on the Navajo reservation were being drafted into the army, there was an old singer there named Jeff King. And a friend of mine who now is living in Carmel, Maude Oakes, had gone down to the Navajo country to learn the legend lore and to make paintings. She was a competent artist of the same paintings and so forth. Well, she had to really to seduce the old men into giving their stories to her. And the thing that persuaded them was the realization that the young men weren't learning these things anymore. These rituals are of one night, three nights, or nine nights, and the singer has to know by heart an extremely elaborate mythology and ritual system, and there must be no mistakes. And there's always a second singer to supervise, to make sure that no mistakes are made in the chanting. Young men are not putting themselves to learn all this anymore, and so the rituals are dying out. And the plea was that, uh, if they would give to the modern anthropologist investigator this material, it would be stored and would be kept as a treasure in the museum there of the American Indian, of the Navajo.
At that time, this is back in the '30s, uh, the normal Navajo family is described as having been of a father, a mother, one child, and two anthropologists. The Navajo was a real hunting ground for the anthropologist at that time. Well, when the young man, when a young man would be drafted, his family might go to old Jeff King, who had been a military scout for the American army when they were fighting the Apache, Geronimo, and so forth. And old Jeff King, who died in the middle or late '90s of his years, is buried as a, a military hero in the cemetery at Arlington. Well, Maude got him to give her the rite that he was performing over the young men going into the army. It was an old warrior ritual called "Where the Two Came to Their Father."
Having emerged from the underworld, the people were settled in this little place here, and in the four directions are the mountains of the four directions, filled with the seeds of all things. This is the house of Changing Woman, a wonderful figure in the Navajo mythology. She was born miraculously of a cloud, and she became the mother then of these boys by miracle, by virgin birth. She was bathing at a little spring, and the sun shone upon her, and when she came home, she gave birth to a little boy. There were monsters troubling the neighborhood, and so she dug a little hole and put the boy down there in a kind of under-earth cradle to protect her from the monsters, and then went back to the spring to wash herself, and she conceived again, this time of the moon. And so she comes back, and here are her two little boys. The boy who was born of the sun is called Killer of Enemies, and here's the way he appears in the dance rituals. He is the warrior, outward directed. The boy who was born of the moon is called Child of the Water, and he is the medicine man, the shaman. The twin hero motif is common to many, many mythologies of the world, and they represent the warrior chieftain and his magician priest.
Well, they're living with their mother, and they see that not only their mother but the whole neighborhood is being troubled by monsters. And so they think they had better go and get help from their father, the sun. The sun is ultimately the father of them both, because the sun lights the light and the moon, so far and so on. To help their mother. Now, their mother had told them, "It's it's dangerous around here, boys, and you can go to the east, to the south, to the west, but don't go north." So they go north, as the only way to get new material. Don't obey the community, they're the ones that are stuck or in trouble. So they are guided by Rainbow Man. They go to the mountains of the four quarters. Everything in the American Indian things is in fours. They circumambulate the world and are on their way.
This is a typical hero quest myth. When they come to the end of the known world, then say, when they reach the horizon, they are confronted by this threshold guardian whose name is White Sands Boy. He is the guardian at the east. He has long arms. He seizes people and buries their head in the sand and so smothers them. He is the one who sees to it the people don't go beyond the bounds of the mythology. The boys give him praise. They say, "Oh, wonderful White Sands Boy, there never was a thing in the world like you." And he'd never received such praise in his life, and so he said, "Okay, you can go on." And they, they make the rounds. There's White Sands Boy and Blue Sands Boy and so forth and so forth. And now they are beyond the bounds of the world. They're going along a kind of featureless landscape, and they see an old, old woman, and her name is Old Age. And she says, "Oh, hello boys, what are you doing way out here, you earth people?" They say, "We're on the way to our father's house, the sun, to get weapons to save our mother from the monsters." "Oh," she says, "that's a long, long way. You'll be old when you get there." But she said, "I'll give you some advice. Don't walk on my path, walk to the right of it."
So the boys start walking along to the right, but then they forget. I know the heroes always forget, and they, uh, are walking on the path again, and they begin to feel old, and they have to pick up sticks and walk with these, and then finally they can't walk at all. And all the old age, the old woman has been watching them. She comes and says, "I told you." Well, they said, "Can't you make us young again?" Or she said, "If you'll be careful now, I'll do that." And so she spit on her hand and took moisture from under her armpits and from between her legs, and she rubs it over them, and they're made young again. "This year, now, you stay on the right of the path."
So they go along, and pretty soon they see another little old lady, black little old lady. Who's this? This is Spider Woman. Now, these spiders live in the ground, and this is kind of a fairy godmother, the counterpart of the fairy godmother. She's the spirit of the Earth Mother itself, um, in the form of the old spider. And again, "Oh, hello earth boys, what brings you out here?" "Oh, we're on the way to our father, the sun, to get weapons to save our mother." "Oh, that's a long, long trip. You better come down into my little house, and I'll fix you up for that journey." And so she made the sun go fast. She has power over the sun itself, so that it should set, and they'd have to spend the whole night with her. Well, they thought it was a very little hole, "How can we fit through that?" But when it came time, there's no problem at all. They go down, and she feeds them certain food and gives them, uh, certain, uh, pieces of ebony and, uh, lapis lazuli, or turquoise, to swallow, and fixes them up for the journey, and tells about the problems they're going to be that they're going to make. And she gives them a feather to protect them.
Here's the feather off here that, uh, little old Spider Woman gave the two boys. She says, "Hold this feather close, and you'll get through all obstacles." Here are the obstacles: the, uh, cactus that cut, and the reeds that pierce, and the rocks that clash together. They have been omitted because they're so powerful. Well, with these to help, the boys start on their path, and they do pass through these obstacles. Standard stuff. We've gone past the known world. Magical help comes to us in the form of some of the fairy mother godmother. The ways of the journey are predicted and overcome. The boys then come to the ocean that surrounds the world, as a standard mythological motif. Okay, Homer's Odyssey, and so forth and so on. We know that it surrounds the world because here are the four mountains of the four directions. In other words, they have translated a space into a flat picture. By the way, I might point out, in these pictures, the animals are not rendered naturalistically. These people know how to render all these things naturalistically. They're rendered in the form of their spiritual reference. The transformation of nature in art is rendering the nature phenomenon transparent to transcendence.
The boys now cross the water with the feather between them, by the magic power that has been given them. Then they are approaching the house of the sun, and this is guarded by four types of animal guardian. First, we have the serpents, the four serpents. The young man who is being trained to be a warrior, having his psychology transformed from that of secular to military consciousness, comes walking in along this line, kneels down here with his head over this basket of yucca suds. He undergoes a ceremonial washing of purification. Purification before you have the revelation, and that's the sense of this rite. These then are the guardian bears. These are the guardian thunderbirds, and these are the guardian winds. The boys, having passed these, come to the house of the sun.
Now, here's the sun's house. It's a microcosm of the macrocosm. But the four directions, here is the sun's daughter, here is the sun's horse. He rides around the world with his sun's shield. These are the steps of the boys and pauses where they meet the obstacles, uh, on the way. They arrive. The sun is off on his daily trip, and the boys are met by their son's daughter. She says, "Who are you?" And they say, "We're the sons of the sun." "Oh, you are? Are you?" Huh. So she says, "Well, Daddy's not home now, but when he comes home, he's going to make it tough for you. So I'll protect you." And she wraps them in clouds of the four colors and stores them over the doors of their proper color. Over this, her door, she stows, uh, Killer of Enemies. And over this one, Child of the Water.
So in the evening, the sun arrives. He gets off his horse, he comes into the house, he hangs his shield on the wall, and it goes clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk. Time. He turns to his wife and says, "Who are those two young men I saw coming in here today?" She says, "You've always told me, you behave yourself when you go around the world. These boys say they're your sons." "Oh, they do? Do they?" So he searches the house, and by gosh, he pulls them down, and then he submits them to tests. This is a favorite motif in American Indian stories, the, the father test, or the father-in-law test, or whatnot. He throws them against spikes of the four colors in the four directions, flint spikes. They hang onto the feather. Two boys, one feather. Don't worry, this is myth. They, uh, survive. He gives them poison to back of the smoke. They survive. He puts them in a sweat lodge and tries to sweat them to death. They survive. He finally says, "Well, I guess you are my sons. Come into the next room."
So he takes him into the next room. He stands one of the boys on a black buffalo skin, the other on a white, and he tells them their true names, and each acquires his own true character. You remember before, they were both black and the same size. Now they're taller, and the water is blue. Well, the description of that moment of initiation in that room, where the thunders come in and lightnings come in, and wow, it's, it's something terrific. But now they know who they are. This is the second birth through the father. The same thing we've been talking about. And when they have survived that, they are so powerful, they split into four. This yellow is the counterpart of the Killer of Enemies, and the white, the counterpart of, uh, Child of the Water. And now, in full power, they start back across the cosmic ocean. They come to the hole in the sky.
Now, the feather that they're riding on here is not the one that Spider Woman gave them. It's one their father has given them. Their father now, at the hole in the sky, gives them a final examination. "What's your name? What's the name of the northern mountain? What's the name of the hole in the earth?" And all this kind of thing. And the answers are whispered to them by Big Fly and Little Wind. Now, you may say this is cheating, but it isn't cheating. If they, if they weren't worthy of this, they would not have received the inspiration. So, uh, there you are. If you're meant to pass the exam, you'll pass.
So, having passed the exam, they come down to the central mountain, Mount Taylor. There you see their footprints landing on the mountain. Now, before they go to work to kill the specific monsters that are troubling their mother, they have to kill the archetypal monster, and he lives here by this lake, and his name is Big Lonesome Monster. Now, the characteristic of monsters is that they mistake shadow for substance. And so this Big Lonesome Monster sees the two boys reflected in the lake, and you see these are the other two, the second two holy things. "I can drink them up and digest them to death." So the Big Lonesome Monster, mistaking shadow for substance, drinks up the lake and digests hard, and then spits it out again, and by gosh, there they are. He drinks up the lake four times. Now, even a monster is worn out after that performance, and so the boys move in. Now, interestingly, this monster is also a son of the sun, but the sun moves in to help the boys kill the monster. You've got this ambiguity about virtue and vice and pairs of opposites and all that. So the monster is killed, and now they're ready to go home.
When they come past the foot of Mount Taylor, they trip, and their father's weapons are gone. They have moved from the realm of sheer male fire into the mixed realm of water, where the fire is mingled with earth. And so they are met by Talking God, who is the male ancestor of the female line of the gods. He is mixed of male and female, and he gives them a talking prayer stick to guide them, that is made of male and female corn. They're given double weapons here, now male and female weapons, and this energy coming from them in the form of flints indicates that they're, they're filled with magic power, and they're still riding on the feather.
Just to show you this very interesting god, Talking God. His mouth and eyes are made of masculine rain and female mist coming up in this form. His nose is of a corn stalk. He has given them the weapons to kill the earthly monsters, and after a terrific series of battles, killing these tremendous monsters, the boys are nearly wiped out. They're so worn out, they've lost their arms and legs, and Child of the Water is in danger of just becoming the reflection of Killer of Enemies. And so the gods come down and enact a ceremony over them, and they're given health again. And what do you suppose the ceremony is? It's the one I've just told you, the ceremony of their own life story. Just as the psychoanalyst leads you back to remember all those things of childhood, and you put you on your proper path again. So they, and when they have passed this test and gone through this ceremony, they are again four. And this is the strongest, uh, sand painting of the lot. The four boys, each standing on the mountain of his own color.
Now, when Maude Oakes had received this ceremony from Jeff King, she had omitted this picture. And when he had finished, he said, "Well, that's it." More said, "No, Jeff, there must be another picture." Now, she knew enough to know what was required in a mythological ceremonial situation. "No," he said, "I've given you everything." "No, Jeff," she said, "Okay." He said, "I'll give it to you." So, so we got the whole story here. This is a typical mythological adventure, leaving the bounded world in which you have been brought up, going beyond all that anybody knows into domains of transcendence, and then acquiring what is missing and coming back with the boom. Perfectly beautiful example of this system.
Campbell has often said that people think of myth as other people's religion. For many, the subject of study, fascination, or even spiritual insights, but always at a safe distance. Things get a bit tricky when we flip the equation and try to think of our religion as myth. Our spiritual tradition in the West is Judeo-Christian, the Old Testament, the Bible. To talk about this tradition as mythology and to compare it to the myths of the American Indian is to invite controversy. Campbell does compare them and offers his opinions with a passion. For him, the American Indian stands as an example of a people with a living, vital mythology in harmony with the natural world. But what of our mythology, our religion? Can it be reconciled with our modern scientific understanding of the natural world?
And so I thought I would conclude with this figure of the Spirit Land again, back to our Navajo. And you have the central source and the mountains of the four directions, the figures that we've learned to know. But important here in a new way are these four rocks, which are interpreted as the four stages of a lifetime: infancy, childhood, maturity, and age. I would say that there's no conflict between mysticism, the mystical dimension, and its realization, and science. But there is a difference between the science of 2000 BC and the science of 2000 AD. And we're in trouble on it because we have a sacred text that was composed somewhere else by another people a long time ago, and has nothing to do with the experience of our lives. And so there's a fundamental disengagement. And besides, when we look back at that text, it is a text that speaks of man as superior to nature, man's mastery over nature as being what, what has been given to him. And, uh, just compare that with the words of, uh, of Black Elk. This is the difference between mythology as a petrofact, something that has dried up, is dead, and is not working, and mythology as something that is working. You, when the mythology is alive, you don't have to tell anybody what it means. It's like looking at a picture that's really talking to you. It gets to you. And if you have to ask the artist, "What does that mean?" If he wants to insult you, he'll tell you. The, the myth must work like a picture. And, uh, it can be explicated, yes, if you've already got it interpreted, amplified, and so forth, but it must work. And we've lost it.
What exactly have we lost? How and when did we lose it? And who is the "we" Campbell is talking about? Join us next time as Jill Campbell introduces us to our mythic forebearers and gives us some of his answers to these questions.
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