The death of Osiris was symbolically associated with the annual rising and flooding of the river Nile, by which the soil of Egypt was annually fertilized. It was as though the rotting of the body of Osiris fertilized and vitalized the land.
Osiris went floating down the Nile and was washed ashore on a beach in Syria. A beautiful tree with a wonderful aroma grew up and incorporated the sarcophagus in its trunk. The local king had just had a son born to him and happened at the time to be about to build a palace. And because the aroma of that tree was so wonderful, he had it cut down and brought in to become the central pillar in the main room of the palace.
Meanwhile the poor goddess Isis, whose husband had been thrown into the Nile, started off on a search for his body. This theme of the search for the God who is the spouse of the soul is a prime mythological theme of the period: of the Goddess who goes in quest of her lost spouse or lover and, through loyalty and a descent into the realm of death, becomes his redeemer.
Isis comes in time to the palace and there learns of the aromatic column in the royal palace. She suspects this may have something to do with Osiris, and she gets a job as nurse to the newborn child. Well, she lets the child nurse from her finger—after all, she’s a goddess, and there’s a limit to the degree of stooping to conquer. But she loves the little boy and decides to give him immortality by placing him in the fireplace to burn his mortal body away. As a goddess, she could prevent the fire from killing him, you understand. And every evening, while the child is in the fire, she transforms herself into a swallow and goes flying mournfully around the column in which her husband is enclosed.
One evening the child’s mother comes into the room while this little scene is in progress, sees her infant in the fireplace, lets out a scream, which breaks the spell, and the child has to be rescued from incineration. The swallow, meanwhile, has turned back into the gorgeous nurse and goddess, who explains the situation and says to the queen, “By the way, it’s my husband there in that column, and I’d be grateful if you would just let me take him home.” So the king, who has appeared on the scene, says, “Why, yes! Certainly.” He has the column removed, turns it over to Isis, and the beautiful sarcophagus containing Osiris is placed on a royal barge.
On the way back to the Nile Delta, Isis removes the lid of the coffin, lies upon her dead husband, and conceives. This is a motif that appears in the ancient mythologies all the time under many symbolic forms—out of death comes life. When the barge has landed, the Goddess gives birth in the papyrus swamp to her child, Horus; and it was the figure of this divine mother with her child conceived of God that became the model for the Madonna.
MOYERS: And the swallow became, did it not, the dove?
CAMPBELL: Well, the dove, the bird in flight, is a pretty nearly universal symbol of the spirit, as in Christianity, of the Holy Ghost—
MOYERS: —associated with the sacred mother?
CAMPBELL: With the mother as conceiving of the spirit, yes. But one more little detail here. The jealous younger brother, Seth, meanwhile, has usurped the throne of Osiris. However, properly to represent the throne, he should marry Isis. In Egyptian iconography, Isis represents the throne. The Pharaoh sits on the throne, which is Isis, as a child on its mother’s lap. And so, when you stand before the cathedral of Chartres, you will see over one of the portals of the western front an image of the Madonna as the throne upon which the child Jesus sits and blesses the world as its emperor. That is precisely the image that has come down to us from most ancient Egypt. The early fathers and the early artists took over these images intentionally.
MOYERS: The Christian fathers took the image of Isis?
CAMPBELL: Definitely. They say so themselves. Read the text where it is declared that “those forms which were merely mythological forms in the past are now actual and incarnate in our Savior.” The mythologies here referred to were of the dead and resurrected god: Attis, Adonis, Gilgamesh, Osiris, one after the other. The death and resurrection of the god is everywhere associated with the moon, which dies and is resurrected every month. It is for two nights, or three days dark, and we have Christ for two nights, or three days in the tomb.
No one knows what the actual date of the birth of Jesus might have been, but it has been put on what used to be the date of the winter solstice, December 25, when the nights begin to be shorter and the days longer. That is the moment of the rebirth of light. That was exactly the date of the birth of the Persian God of light, Mithra, Sol, the Sun.
MOYERS: What does this say to you?
CAMPBELL: It says to me that there’s an idea of death to the past and birth to the future in our lives and our thinking: death to the animal nature and birth to the spiritual. These symbols are talking about this one way or another.
MOYERS: So Isis is able to say, “I am she that is the natural mother of all things. Mistress and governess of all the elements. Chief of the powers divine, queen of all that are in hell, but principal of all them that dwell in heaven. Manifested alone and under one form of all the gods and goddesses.”
CAMPBELL: That is a very late statement of this whole theme. That comes in Apuleius’ Golden Ass, second century A.D. The Golden Ass is one of the first novels, by the way. Its leading character, its hero, has been by lust and magic converted into an ass, and he has to undergo an ordeal of painful and humiliating adventures until his redemption comes through the grace of the Goddess Isis. She appears with a rose in her hand (symbolic of divine love, not lust), and when as an ass he eats this rose, he is converted back into a man. But he is now more than a man, he is an illuminated man, a saint. He has experienced the second virgin birth, you see. So from mere animal-like carnality, one may pass through a spiritual death and become reborn. The second birth is of an exalted, spiritually informed incarnation.
And the Goddess is the one who brings this about. The second birth is through a spiritual mother. Notre Dame de Paris, Notre Dame de Chartres—our Mother Church. We are reborn spiritually by entering and leaving a church.
MOYERS: There’s a power there unique to the feminine principle.
CAMPBELL: In this novel it has been put that way, but it’s not necessarily unique to her. You can have rebirth through the male also. But using this system of symbols, the woman becomes the regenerator.
MOYERS: So when the Council of Ephesus met in the year 431 after the death of Christ, and proclaimed Mary to be the Mother of God, it wasn’t the first time?
CAMPBELL: No, in fact that argument had been going on in the Church for some time. But the place where this decision was made, at Ephesus, happened at that time to be the greatest temple city in the Roman Empire of the Goddess Artemis, or Diana. And there is a story that when the council was in session, arguing this point, the people of Ephesus formed picket lines and shouted in praise of Mary, “The Goddess, the Goddess, of course she’s the Goddess.”
Well, what you have then in the Catholic tradition is a coming together of the patriarchal, monotheistic Hebrew idea of the Messiah as one who is to unite the spiritual and temporal powers, and the Hellenistic, classical idea of the Savior as the dead and resurrected son of the Great Goddess by a virgin birth. There were plenty of such saviors reborn.
In the Near East, the god who descended into the field of time was originally a goddess. Jesus took over what is really the Goddess’ role in coming down in compassion. But when the Virgin acquiesces in being the vessel of the incarnation, she has herself already affected the redemption. It has become more and more apparent that the Virgin is equivalent in her suffering to the suffering of her son. In the Catholic Church now I think she is called the “co-savior.”
MOYERS: What does all of this say about the reunion of the male and female? For a long while in primitive societies, the female is the dominant mythological image. Then along comes this masculine, aggressive, warlike image, and soon we’re back to the female playing a role in creation and recreation. Does it say something about the basic yearning of men and women for each other?
CAMPBELL: Yes, but I think of it rather in historical terms. It is a very interesting thing to see that this Mother Goddess was the queen right across to the Indus Valley in India. From the Aegean to the Indus, she is the dominant figure. Then you have the Indo-Europeans coming down from the north, into Persia, India, Greece, Italy, and you have a male-oriented mythology coming in, all along the line. In India it’s the Vedas, in Greece it’s the Homeric tradition, and then about five hundred years later, the Goddess begins coming back. There is actually an Upanishad from about the seventh century B.c.—which is just about the time she is coming back to force in the Aegean as well—where the Vedic gods are together, and they see a strange sort of amorphous thing down the way, a kind of smoky fog, and they ask, “What’s that?” None of them knows what it could be. So one of them suggests, “I’ll go find out what that is.” And he goes over to this smoky thing and says, “I’m Agni, the Lord of Fire; I can burn anything. Who are you?” And out of the fog there comes flying a piece of straw, which falls on the ground, and a voice says, “Let’s see you burn that.” Agni finds that he can’t ignite it. So he goes back to the other gods and says, “This surely is strange!” “Well, then,” says the Lord of Wind, “let me try.” So over he goes, and the same sort of thing takes place. “I’m Vayu, Lord of the Wind, I can blow anything around.” Again a straw is thrown. “Let’s see you blow that.” And he can’t. So he, too, returns. Then Indra, the greatest of the Vedic gods, approaches, but as he draws near, the apparition vanishes, and where it had been, a woman appears, a beautiful, mysterious woman, who instructs the gods, revealing to them the mystery of the ground of their own being. “That is the ultimate mystery of all being,” she tells them, “from which you boys yourselves have received your powers. And It can turn your powers off or on, as It wills.” The Indian name for that Being of all beings is brahman, which is a neuter noun, neither male nor female. And the Indian name for the woman is Maya-Shakti-Devi, “Goddess Giver of Life and Mother of Forms.” And there in that Upanishad she appears as the teacher of the Vedic gods themselves concerning the ultimate ground and source of their own powers and being.
MOYERS: It’s the female wisdom.
CAMPBELL: It’s the female as the giver of forms. She is the one who gave life to the forms and she knows where they came from. It is from that which is beyond male and female. It is from that which is beyond being and nonbeing. It both is and is not. It neither is nor is not. It is beyond all categories of thought and the mind.
MOYERS: There is that wonderful saying in the New Testament, “In Jesus there is no male or female.” In the ultimate sense of things, there is neither.
CAMPBELL: It would have to be. If Jesus represents the source of our being, we are all, as it were, thoughts in the mind of Jesus. He is the word that has become flesh in us, too.
MOYERS: You and I possess characteristics that are both male and female?
CAMPBELL: The body does. I don’t know anything about the actual dating of all this, but sometime in the fetal period it becomes apparent that this child is going to be male, and this one is going to be female. Meanwhile, it’s a body with the potentialities for either inflection.
MOYERS: So through life we are honoring or suppressing one or the other.
CAMPBELL: And in that yin/yang figure from China, in the dark fish, or whatever you want to call it, there is the light spot. And in the light one, there’s a dark spot. That’s how they can relate. You couldn’t relate at all to something in which you did not somehow participate. That’s why the idea of God as the Absolute Other is a ridiculous idea. There could be no relationship to the Absolute Other.
MOYERS: In this spiritual transformation that you’re talking about, won’t the changes depend on those feminine characteristics such as nurturing, creativity, and collaboration instead of competition? Isn’t this at the heart of the feminine principle we’re discussing?
CAMPBELL: Well, the mother loves all her children—the stupid ones, the bright ones, the naughty ones, the good ones. It doesn’t matter what their particular character is. So the feminine represents, in a way, the inclusive love for progeny. The father is more disciplinarian. He’s associated much more with the social order and the social character. This is actually the way it works in societies. The mother gives birth to his nature, and the father gives birth to his social character, you might say, how he is to function.
So moving back toward nature will certainly bring forth the mother principle again. How it will relate to the patriarchal principle I do not know, because the organization of the planet is going to be an enormous operation, and that’s the male function, so that you can’t predict what the new thing is going to be. But certainly nature is coming back.
MOYERS: So when we say, “Save the earth,” we’re talking about saving ourselves.
CAMPBELL: Yes. All this hope for something happening in society has to wait for something in the human psyche, a whole new way of experiencing a society. And the crucial question here, as I see it, is simply: With what society, what social group, do you identify yourself? Is it going to be with all the people of the planet, or is it going to be with your own particular in-group? This is the question, essentially, that was in the minds of the founders of our nation when the people of the thirteen states began thinking of themselves as of one nation, yet without losing consideration for the special interests of each of the several states. Why can’t something of that kind take place in the world right now?
MOYERS: A question arises in discussing all this—the male-female principle, the virgin birth, the spiritual power that gives us the second birth. The wise people of all times have said that we can live the good life if we learn to live spiritually. But how does one learn to live spiritually if one is of the flesh? Paul said, “The desires of the flesh are against the spirit and the desires of the spirit are against the flesh.” How do we learn to live spiritually?
CAMPBELL: In ancient times, that was the business of the teacher. He was to give you the clues to a spiritual life. That is what the priest was for. Also, that was what ritual was for. A ritual can be defined as an enactment of a myth. By participating in a ritual, you are actually experiencing a mythological life. And it’s out of that participation that one can learn to live spiritually.
MOYERS: The stories of mythology actually point the way to the spiritual life?
CAMPBELL: Yes, you’ve got to have a clue. You’ve got to have a road map of some kind, and these are all around us. But they are not all the same. Some speak only of the interests of this in-group or of that, this tribal god or that. Others, and especially those that are given as revelations of the Great Goddess, mother of the universe and of us all, teach compassion for all living beings. There also you come to appreciate the real sanctity of the earth itself, because it is the body of the Goddess. When Yahweh creates, he creates man of the earth and breathes life into the formed body. He’s not himself there present in that form. But the Goddess is within as well as without. Your body is of her body. There is in these mythologies a recognition of that kind of universal identity.
MOYERS: That’s why I’m not so sure the future of the race and the salvation of the journey is in space. I think it might be right here on earth, in the body, in the womb of our being.
CAMPBELL: Well, it certainly is. When you go out into space, what you’re carrying is your body, and if that hasn’t been transformed, space won’t transform you. But thinking about space may help you to realize something. There’s a two-page spread in a world atlas which shows our galaxy within many galaxies, and within our galaxy the solar system. And here you get a sense of the magnitude of this space that we’re now finding out about. What those pages opened to me was the vision of a universe of unimaginable magnitude and inconceivable violence. Billions upon billions of roaring thermonuclear furnaces scattering from each other. Each thermonuclear furnace a star, and our sun among them. Many of them actually blowing themselves to pieces, littering the outermost reaches of
space with dust and gas out of which new stars with circling planets are being born right now. And then from still more remote distances beyond all these there come murmurs, microwaves that are echoes of the greatest cataclysmic explosion of all, namely the big bang of creation, which, according to some reckonings, may have occurred some eighteen billion years ago.
That’s where we are, kiddo, and to realize that, you realize how really important you are, you know—one little microbit in that great magnitude. And then must come the experience that you and that are in some sense one, and you partake of all of that.
MOYERS: And it begins here.
CAMPBELL: It begins here.
VII
TALES OF LOVE
AND MARRIAGE
So through the eyes love attains the heart:
For the eyes are the scouts of the heart,
And the eyes go reconnoitering
For what it would please the heart to possess.
And when they are in full accord
And firm, all three, in the one resolve,
At that time, perfect love is born
From what the eyes have made welcome to the heart.
Not otherwise can love either be born or have commencement
Than by this birth and commencement moved by inclination.
By the grace and by command
Of these three, and from their pleasure,
Love is born, who its fair hope
Goes comforting her friends.
For as all true lovers
Know, love is perfect kindness,
Which is born—there is no doubt—from the heart and eyes.
The eyes make it blossom; the heart matures it:
The Power of Myth Page 24
