Myths to Live By

by Joseph Campbell

  A second essential idea is that of the bear as a divine visitor whose animal body has to be “broken” (as they say) to release him for return to his other-world home. Many edible plants, as well as hunted beasts, are believed to be visitors of this kind; so that the Ainu, killing and eating them, are doing them no harm, but actually a favor.

  Fig. 2.9 — Death of the Bear

  There is here an obvious psychological defense against the guilt feelings and fears of revenge of a primitive hunting and fishing folk whose whole existence hangs upon acts of continual merciless killing. The murdered beasts and consumed plants are thought of as willing victims; so that gratitude, not malice, must be the response of their liberated spirits to the “breaking and eating” of their merely provisional material bodies.

  There is a legend of the Ainu of Kushiro (on the southeastern coast of Hokkaido) which purports to explain the high reverence in which the bear is held. It tells of a young wife who used to go every day with her baby to the mountains to search for lily roots and other edibles; and when she had gathered her fill, she would go to a stream to wash her roots, removing the baby from her back and leaving it wrapped in her clothes on the bank, while she went naked into the water. One day thus in the stream she began to sing a beautiful song, and when she had waded to shore, still singing, commenced dancing to its tune, altogether enchanted by her own dance and song and unaware of her surroundings, until, suddenly, she heard a frightening sound, and when she looked, there was the bear-god coming. Terrified, she ran off, just as she was. And when the bear-god saw the abandoned child by the stream, he thought: I came, attracted by that beautiful song, stepping quietly, not to be heard. But alas! Her music was so beautiful it moved me to rapture and inadvertently I made a noise.

  The infant having begun to cry, the bear-god put his tongue into its mouth to nourish and to quiet it, and for a number of days, tenderly nursing it this way, never leaving its side, contrived to keep it alive. When, however, a band of hunters from the village approached, the bear took off, and the villagers, coming upon the abandoned child alive, understood that the bear had cared for it, and, marveling, said to one another, “He took care of this lost baby. The bear is good. He is a worthy deity, and surely deserving of our worship.” So they pursued and shot him, brought him back to their village, held a bear festival, and, offering good food and wine to his soul, as well as loading it with fetishes, sent him homeward on his way in wealth and joy.4

  Since the bear, the leading figure of the Ainu pantheon, is regarded as a mountain god, a number of scholars have suggested that a like belief may account for the selection of lofty mountain caves to be the chapels of the old Neanderthal bear cult. The Ainu too preserved the skulls of the bears they sacrifice. Moreover, signs of fire hearths have been noted in the high Neanderthal chapels; and in the course of the Ainu rite the fire-goddess Fuji is invited to share with the sacrificed bear the banquet of his meat. The two, the fire-goddess and the mountain god, are supposed to be chatting together while their Ainu hosts and hostesses entertain them with song the night long, and with food and drink. We cannot be certain, of course, that the old Neanderthalers of some two hundred thousand years ago had any such ideas. A number of authoritative scholars seriously question the propriety of interpreting prehistoric remains by reference to the customs of modern primitive peoples. And yet, in the present instance the analogies are truly striking. It has even been remarked that in both contexts the number of neck vertebrae remaining attached to the severed skulls is generally two. But in any case, we can surely say without serious doubt that the bear is in both contexts a venerated beast, that his powers survive death and are effective in the preserved skull, that rituals serve to link those powers to the aims of the human community, and that the power of fire is in some manner associated with the rites.

  The earliest known evidences of the cultivation of fire go back to a period as remote from that of Neanderthal Man as is his dim day from our own, namely, that of Pithecanthropus, some five hundred thousand years ago, in the dens of the ravenous lowbrowed cannibal known as Peking Man, who was particularly fond, apparently, of brains à la nature, gobbled raw from freshly opened skulls. His fires were not used for cooking. Neither were those of the Neanderthalers. For what, then? To furnish heat? Possibly! But possibly, also, as a fascinating fetish, kept alive in its hearth as on an altar. And this conjecture is the more likely in the light of the later appearance of domesticated fire, not only in the high Neanderthal bear sanctuaries but also in the context of the Ainu bear festivals, where it is identified explicitly with the manifestation of a goddess. Fire, then, may well have been the first enshrined divinity of prehistoric man. Fire has the property of not being diminished when halved, but increased. Fire is luminous, like the sun and lightning, the only such thing on earth. Also, it is alive: in the warmth of the human body it is life itself, which departs when the body goes cold. It is prodigious in volcanoes, and, as we know from the lore of many primitive traditions, it has been frequently identified with a demoness of volcanoes, who presides over an afterworld where the dead enjoy an everlasting dance in marvelously dancing volcanic flames.

  The rugged race and life style of Neanderthal Man passed away and even out of memory with the termination of the Ice Ages, some forty thousand years ago; and there appeared then, rather abruptly, a distinctly superior race of man, Homo sapiens proper, which is directly ancestral to ourselves. It is with these men — significantly—that the beautiful cave paintings are associated of the French Pyrenees, French Dordogne, and Spanish Cantabrian hills; also, those little female figurines of stone, or of mammoth bone or ivory, that have been dubbed—amusingly—paleolithic Venuses and are, apparently, the earliest works ever produced of human art. A worshiped cave-bear skull is not an art object, nor is a burial, or a flaked tool, in the sense that I am here using the term. The figurines were fashioned without feet, because they were intended to be pressed into the earth, set up in little household shrines.

  And it seems to me important to remark that, whereas when masculine figures appear in the wall paintings of the same period they are always clothed in some sort of costume, these female figurines are absolutely naked, simply standing, unadorned. This says something about the psychological and consequently mythical values of, respectively, the male and the female presences.

  Fig. 2.10 — Venus of Laussel

  The woman is immediately mythic in herself and is experienced as such, not only as the source and giver of life, but also in the magic of her touch and presence. The accord of her seasons with the cycles of the moon is a matter of mystery too. Whereas the male, costumed, is one who has gained his powers and represents some specific, limited, social role or function.

  In infancy—as both Freud and Jung have pointed out—the mother is experienced as a power of nature and the father as the authority of society. The mother, has brought forth the child, provides it with nourishment, and in the infant’s imagination may appear also (like the witch of Hansel and Gretel) as a consuming mother, threatening to swallow her product back. The father is, then, the initiator, not only inducting the boy into his social role, but also, as representing to his daughter her first and foremost experience of the character of the male, awakening her to her social role as female to male. The paleolithic Venuses have been found in the precincts always of domestic hearths, while the figures of the costumed males, on the other hand, appear in the deep, dark interiors of the painted temple-caves, among the wonderfully pictured animal herds. They resemble in their dress and attitudes, furthermore, the shamans of our later primitive tribes, and were undoubtedly associated with rituals of the hunt and of initiation.

  Let me here review a legend of the North American Blackfoot tribe that I have already recounted in The Masks of God, Volume I, Primitive Mythology; for it suggests better than any other legend I know the manner in which the artist-hunters of the paleolithic age must have interpreted the rituals of their mysteriously painted temple-caves. This Blackfoo
t legend is of a season when the Indians found themselves, on the approach of winter, unable to lay up a supply of buffalo meat, since the animals were refusing to be stampeded over the buffalo fall. When driven toward the precipice, they would swerve at the edge to right or left and gallop away.

  And so it was that, early one morning, when a young woman of the hungering village encamped at the foot of the great cliff went to fetch water for her family’s tent and, looking up, spied a herd grazing on the plain above, at the edge of the precipice, she cried out that if they would only jump into the corral, she would marry one of them. Whereupon, lo! the animals began coming over, tumbling and falling to their deaths. She was, of course, amazed and thrilled, but then, when a big bull with a single bound cleared the walls of the corral and came trotting in her direction, she was terrified. “Come along!” he said. “Oh no!” she answered, drawing back. But insisting on her promise, he led her up the cliff, onto the prairie, and away.

  That bull had been the moving spirit of the herd, a figure rather of mythic than of material dimension. And we find his counterparts everywhere in the legends of primitive hunters: semi-human, semi-animal, shamanistic characters (like the serpent of Eden), difficult to picture either as animal or as man; yet in the narratives we accept their parts with ease.

  When the happy people of the village had finished slaughtering their windfall, they realized that the young woman had disappeared. Her father, discovering her tracks and noticing beside them those of the buffalo, turned back for his bow and quiver, and then followed the trail on up the cliff and out onto the plain. It was a considerable way that he had walked before he came to a buffalo wallow and, a little way off, spied a herd. Being tired, he sat down and, while considering what to do, saw a magpie flying, which descended to the wallow close by and began picking about.

  “Ha!” cried the man. “You handsome bird! As you fly around, should you see my daughter, would you tell her, please, that her father is here, waiting for her at the wallow?”

  The beautiful black and white bird with long graceful tail winged away directly to the herd and, seeing a young woman there, fluttered to earth nearby and resumed his picking, turning his head this way and that, until, coming very close to her, he whispered, “Your father is waiting for you at the wallow.”

  She was frightened and glanced about. The bull, her husband, close by, was asleep. “Sh-h-h! Go back,” she whispered, “and tell my father to wait.”

  The bird returned with her message to the wallow, and the big bull presently woke.

  “Go get me some water,” the big bull said, and the young woman, rising, plucked a horn from her husband’s head and proceeded to the wallow, where her father roughly seized her arm. “No, no!” she warned. “They will follow and kill us both. We must wait until he returns to sleep, when I’ll come and we’ll slip away.”

  She filled the horn and walked back with it to her husband, who drank but one swallow and sniffed. “There is a person close by,” said he. He sipped and sniffed again; then stood up and bellowed. What a fearful sound!

  Up stood all the bulls. They raised their short tails and shook them, tossed their great heads, and bellowed back; then pawed the dirt, rushed about in all directions, and finally, heading for the wallow, trampled to death that poor Indian who had come to seek his daughter: hooked him with their horns and again trampled him with their hoofs, until not even the smallest particle of his body remained to be seen. The daughter was screaming, “Oh, my father, my father!” And her face was streaming with tears.

  “Aha!” said the bull harshly. “So you’re mourning for your father! And so now, perhaps, you will understand how it is and has always been with us. We have seen our mothers, fathers, all our relatives, killed and butchered by your people. But I shall have pity on you and give you just one chance. If you can bring your father back to life, you and he can return to your people.”

  The unhappy girl, turning to the magpie, begged him to search the trampled mud for some little portion of her father’s body; which he did, again pecking about in the wallow until his long beak came up with a joint of the man’s backbone. The young woman placed this on the ground carefully and, covering it with her robe, sang a certain song. Not long, and it could be seen that there was a man beneath the robe. She lifted a corner. It was her father, not yet alive. She let the corner down, resumed her song, and when she next took the robe away he was breathing. Her father stood up, and the magpie, delighted, flew round and round with a marvelous clatter. The buffalo were astounded.

  “We have seen strange things today,” said the big bull to the others of his herd. “The man we trampled to death is again alive. The people’s power is strong.”

  He turned to the young woman. “Now, before you and your father go, we shall teach you our own dance and song, which you are never to forget.” For these were to be the magical means by which the buffalo killed by the people in the future would be restored to life, as the man killed by the buffalo had been restored.

  All the buffalo danced; and, as befitted the dance of such great beasts, the song was slow and solemn, the step ponderous and deliberate. And when the dance was ended, the big bull said, “Now go to your home and do not forget what you have seen. Teach this dance and song to your people. The sacred object of the rite is to be a bull’s head and buffalo robe: all who dance the bulls are to wear a bull’s head and buffalo robe when they perform.”5

  It is amazing how many of the painted figures of the great paleolithic caves take on new life when viewed in the light of such tales of the recent hunting races. One cannot be certain, of course, that the references suggested are altogether correct. However, that the main ideas were much the same is almost certainly true. And among these we may number that of the animals killed as being willing victims, that of the ceremonies of their invocation as representing a mystic covenant between the animal world and the human, and that of song and dance as being the vehicles of the magical force of such ceremonies; further, the concept of each species of the animal world as a kind of multiplied individual, having as its seed or essential monad a semi-human, semi-animal, magically potent Master Animal; and the idea related to this, of there being no such thing as death, material bodies being merely costumes put on by otherwise invisible monadic entities, which can pass back and forth from an invisible other world into this, as though through an intangible wall; the notions, also, of marriages between human beings and beasts, of commerce and conversations between beasts and men in ancient times, and of specific covenanting episodes in those times from which the rites and customs of the people were derived; the notion of the magical power of such rites, and the idea that, to retain their power, they must be held true to their first and founding form—even the slightest deviation destroying their spell.

  So much, then, for the mythic world of the primitive hunters. Dwelling mainly on great grazing lands, where the spectacle of nature is of a broadly spreading earth covered over by an azure dome touching down on distant horizons and the dominant image of life is of animal societies moving about in that spacious room, those nomadic tribes, living by killing, have been generally of a warlike character. Supported and protected by the hunting skills and battle courage of their males, they are dominated necessarily by a masculine psychology, male-oriented mythology, and appreciation of individual valor.

  In tropical jungles, on the other hand, an altogether different order of nature prevails, and, accordingly, of psychology and mythology as well. For the dominant spectacle there is of teeming vegetable life with all else more hidden than seen. Above is a leafy upper world inhabited by winged screeching birds; below, a heavy cover of leaves, beneath which serpents, scorpions, and many other mortal dangers lurk. There is no distant clean horizon, but an ever-continuing tangle of trunks and leafage in all directions wherein solitary adventure is perilous. The village compound is relatively stable, earthbound, nourished on plant food gathered or cultivated mainly by the women; and the male psyche is consequently in b
ad case. For even the primary psychological task for the young male of achieving separation from dependency on the mother is hardly possible in a world where all the essential work is being attended to, on every hand, by completely efficient females.

  It is therefore among tropical tribes that the wonderful institution originated of the men’s secret society, where no women are allowed, and where curious symbolic games flattering the masculine zeal for achievement can be enjoyed in security, safe away from Mother’s governing eye. In those zones, furthermore, the common sight of rotting vegetation giving rise to new green shoots seems to have inspired a mythology of death as the giver of life; whence the hideous idea followed that the way to increase life is to increase death. The result has been, for millenniums, a general rage of sacrifice through the whole tropical belt of our planet, quite in contrast to the comparatively childish ceremonies of animal-worship and -appeasement of the hunters of the great plains: brutal human as well as animal sacrifices, highly symbolic in detail; sacrifices also of fruits of the field, of the firstborn, of widows on their husbands’ graves, and finally of entire courts together with their kings. The mythic theme of the Willing Victim has become associated here with the image of a primordial being that in the beginning offered itself to be slain, dismembered, and buried; and from whose buried parts then arose the food plants by which the lives of the people are sustained.

  In the Polynesian Cook Islands there is an amusing local variant of this general myth in the legend of a maiden named Hina (Moon) who enjoyed bathing in a certain pool. A great big eel, one day, swam past and touched her. This occurred again, day after day, until, on one occasion, it threw off its eel costume and a beautiful youth, Te Tuna (the Eel), stood before her, whom she accepted as her lover. Thereafter he would visit her in human form, but become an eel when he swam away, until one day he announced that the time had come for him to leave forever. He would pay her one more visit, arriving in his eel form in a great flood of water, when she should cut off his head and bury it. And so indeed he came. And Hina did exactly as she was told. And every day thereafter she visited the place of the buried head, until a green sprout appeared that grew into a beautiful tree, which in the course of time produced fruits. Those were the first coconuts; and every nut, when husked, still shows the eyes and face of Hina’s lover.6