BILL MOYERS: ...We hear people say, "Get in touch with yourself." What do you take that to mean?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: It's quite possible to be so influenced by the ideals and commands of your neighborhood that you don't know what you really want and could be. I think that anyone brought up in an extremely strict, authoritative social situation is unlikely ever to come to the knowledge of himself.
MOYERS: Because you're told what to do.
CAMPBELL: You're told exactly what to do, every bit of the time. You're in the army now. So this is what we do here. As a child in school, you're always doing what you're told to do, and so you count the days to your holidays, since that's when you're going to be yourself.
MOYERS: What does mythology tell us about how to get in touch with that other self, that real self?
CAMPBELL: The first instruction would be to follow the hints of the myth itself and of your guru, your teacher, who should know. It's like an athlete going to a coach. The coach tells him how to bring his own energies into play. A good coach doesn't tell a runner exactly how to hold his arms or anything like that. He watches him run, then helps him to correct his own natural mode. A good teacher is there to watch the young person and recognize what the possibilities are -- then to give advice, not commands. The command would be, "This is the way I do it, so you must do it this way, too." Some artists teach their students that way. But the teacher in any case has to talk it out, to give some general clues. If you don't have someone to do that for you, you've got to work it all out from scratch -- like reinventing the wheel.
A good way to learn is to find a book that seems to be dealing with the problems that you're now dealing with. That will certainly give you some clues. In my own life I took my instruction from reading Thomas Mann and James Joyce, both of whom had applied basic mythological themes to the interpretation of the problems, questions, realizations, and concerns of young men growing up in the modern world. You can discover your own guiding-myth motifs through the works of a good novelist who himself understands these things.
MOYERS: That's what intrigues me. If we are fortunate, if the gods and muses are smiling, about every generation someone comes along to inspire the imagination for the journey each of us takes. In your day it was Joyce and Mann. In our day it often seems to be movies. Do movies create hero myths? Do you think, for example, that a movie like 'Star Wars' fills some of that need for a model of the hero?
CAMPBELL: I've heard youngsters use some of George Lucas' terms -- "the Force" and "the dark side." So it must be hitting somewhere. It's a good sound teaching, I would say.
MOYERS: I think that explains in part the success of 'Star Wars'. It wasn't just the production value that made that such an exciting film to watch, it was that it came along at a time when people needed to see in recognizable images the clash of good and evil. They needed to be reminded of idealism, to see a romance based upon selflessness rather than selfishness.
CAMPBELL: The fact that the evil power is nor identified with any specific nation on this earth means you've got an abstract power, which represents a principle, not a specific historical situation. The story has to do with an operation of principles, not of this nation against that. The monster masks that are put on people in 'Star Wars' represent the real monster force in the modern world. When the mask of Darth Vader is removed, you see an unformed man, one who has not developed as a human individual. What you see is a strange and pitiful sort of undifferentiated face.
MOYERS: What's the significance of that?
CAMPBELL: Darth Vader has not developed his own humanity. He's a robot. He's a bureaucrat, living not in terms of himself but in terms of an imposed system. This is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes? How do you relate to the system so that you are not compulsively serving it? It doesn't help to try to change it to accord with your system of thought. The momentum of history behind it is too great for anything really significant to evolve from that kind of action. The thing to do is learn to live in your period of history as a human being. That's something else, and it can be done.
MOYERS: By doing what?
CAMPBELL: By holding to your own ideals for yourself and, like Luke Skywalker, rejecting the system's impersonal claims upon you.
MOYERS: When I took our two sons to see 'Star Wars', they did the same thing the audience did at that moment when the voice of Ben Kenobi says to Skywalker in the climactic moment of the last fight, "Turn off your computer, turn off your machine and do it yourself, follow your feelings, trust your feelings." And when he did, he achieved success, and the audience broke out into applause.
CAMPBELL: Well, you see, that movie communicates. It is in a language that talks to young people, and that's what counts. It asks, Are you going to be a person of heart and humanity -- because that's where the life is, from the heart -- or are you going to do whatever seems to be required of you by what might be called "intentional power"? When Ben Kenobi says, "May the Force be with you," he's speaking of the power and energy of life, not of programmed political intentions.
MOYERS: I was intrigued by the definition of the Force. Ben Kenobi says, "The Force is an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, it penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together." And I've read in 'The Hero with a Thousand Faces' similar descriptions of the world navel, of the sacred place, of the power that is at the moment of creation.
CAMPBELL: Yes, of course, the Force moves from within. But the force of the Empire is based on an intention to overcome and master. 'Star Wars' is not a simple morality play, it has to do with the powers of life as they are either fulfilled or broken and suppressed through the action of man.
MOYERS: The first time I saw 'Star Wars', I thought, "This is a very old story in a very new costume." The story of the young man called to adventure, the hero going out facing the trials and ordeals, and coming back after his victory with a boon for the community --
CAMPBELL: Certainly Lucas was using standard mythological figures. The old man as the adviser made me think of a Japanese sword master. I've known some of those people, and Ben Kenobi has a bit of their character.
MOYERS: What does the sword master do?
CAMPBELL: He is a total expert in swordsmanship. The Oriental cultivation of the martial arts goes beyond anything I've ever encountered in American gymnasiums. There is a psychological as well as a physiological technique that go together there. This character in 'Star Wars' has that quality.
MOYERS: There's something mythological, too, in that the hero is helped by a stranger who shows up and gives him some instrument --
CAMPBELL: He gives him not only a physical instrument bur a psychological commitment and a psychological center. The commitment goes past your mere intention system. You are one with the event.
MOYERS: My favorite scene was when they were in the garbage compactor, and the walls were closing in, and I thought, "That's like the belly of the whale that swallowed Jonah."
CAMPBELL: That's where they were, down in the belly of the whale.
MOYERS: What's the mythological significance of the belly?
CAMPBELL: The belly is the dark place where digestion takes place and new energy is created. The story of Jonah in the whale is an example of a mythic theme that is practically universal, of the hero going into a fish's belly and ultimately coming out again, transformed.
MOYERS: Why must the hero do that?
CAMPBELL: It's a descent into the dark. Psychologically, the whale represents the power of life locked in the unconscious. Metaphorically, water is the unconscious, and the creature in the water is the life or energy of the unconscious, which has overwhelmed the conscious personality and must be disempowered, overcome and controlled.
In the first stage of this kind of adventure, the hero leaves the realm of the familiar, over which he has some measure of control, and comes to a threshold, let us say the edge of a lake or sea, where a monster of the abyss comes to meet him. There are then two possibilities. In a story of the Jonah type, the hero is swallowed and taken into the abyss to be later resurrected -- a variant of the death-and-resurrection theme. The conscious personality here has come in touch with a charge of unconscious energy which it is unable to handle and must now suffer all the trials and revelations of a terrifying night-sea journey, while learning how to come to terms with this power of the dark and emerge, at last, to a new way of life.
The other possibility is that the hero, on encountering the power of the dark, may overcome and kill it, as did Siegfried and St. George when they killed the dragon. But as Siegfried learned, he must then taste the dragon blood, in order to take to himself something of that dragon power. When Siegfried has killed the dragon and tasted the blood, he hears the song of nature. He has transcended his humanity and reassociated himself with the powers of nature, which are the powers of our life, and from which our minds remove us.
You see, consciousness thinks it's running the shop. But it's a secondary organ of a total human being, and it must not put itself in control. It must submit and serve the humanity of the body. When it does put itself in control, you get a man like Darth Varder in 'Star Wars', the man who goes over to the consciously intentional side.
MOYERS: The dark figure.
CAMPBELL: Yes, that's the figure that in Goethe's 'Faust' is represented by Mephistopheles.
MOYERS: But I can hear someone saying, "Well, that's all well and good for the imagination of a George Lucas or for the scholarship of a Joseph Campbell, but that isn't what happens in my life."
CAMPBELL: You bet it does -- and if he doesn't recognize it, it may turn him into Darth Vader. If the person insists on a certain program, and doesn't listen to the demands of his own heart, he's going to risk a schizophrenic crackup. Such a person has put himself off center. He has aligned himself with a program for life, and it's not the one the body's interested in at all. The world's full of people who have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are that they should be living for.
from: "The Power of Myth" by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers ISBN 0-385-24774-5 Doubleday, 1988 Chapter 5: "The Hero's Adventure" pages 143-147