A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) (22 page)

Wisdom and foolishness

are practically the same.

Both are indifferent

to the opinions of the world.

According to legend, when Avalokiteśvara looked down upon this suffering world he was filled with such compassion that his head burst into innumerable heads…while from his body sprang a thousand helping arms and hands, like an aura of dazzling rays, and in the palm of each hand there appeared an eye of unimpeded vision.…

Every pore of the body of Avalokiteśvara contains and pours forth thousands of Buddhas, saints of all kinds, entire worlds. From his fingers flow rivers of ambrosia that cool the hells and feed the hungry ghosts.…He appears to brahmans as a brahman, to merchants as a merchant, to insects as an insect, to each in the aspect of its kind.…
¹¹³

"T
HE
goddess alone knew of the all-moving, secret world energy which had helped the gods to victory; it was the power within them, of which they were unaware. They believed that they were strong in themselves, but without this force, or against it, they could not so much as harm a blade of grass. The goddess knew of the universal force, which the Vedic priests called
brahman
and which Hindus call
śakti
, for
śakti
,
i.e
. energy, is the essence and name of the Great Goddess herself, hence she could explain the mysterious being to the gods, she could teach them its secret—for it was her own secret.”—
Zimmer
¹¹⁴

In Hinduism, all power,
śakti
, is female. So, the female represents the totality of the power, and the male is imaged as the agent of the female. In that sense, the power that a female feels from the male—the animus, in Jungian terms—is a specification of the female power, a mode of application of that power.

Every being has a twofold aspect, reveals a friendly and a menacing face. All gods have a charming and a hideous form, according to how one approaches them; but the Great Goddess is the energy of the world, taking form in all things. All friendly and menacing faces are facets of her essence. What seems a duality in the individual god, is an infinite multiplicity in her total being.…

She is the mute security of life in itself; from the ashes of burned forests she raises eager fresh flowers whose decay is pregnant with new life, a new life which all around it sees only life in its transitions and transformations with no shadow of death, just as we ourselves, when we sink our teeth into a ripe fruit, or draw a living plant from the garden, are without awareness of death.

Whatever you do, in waking or sleeping, consciously or involuntarily in the cycle of your flesh to the accompanying music of your soul; whatever you do as your body builds and destroys, absorbs and excretes, breathes and procreates, or bestows joy infringing on the limits of rage and pain—all this is a mere gesture of the Great Mother, jaganmay
i
(consisting of all worlds and beings), who unremittingly does likewise with her world body in endless thousands of forms.…To see the twofold, embracing and devouring, nature of the goddess, to see repose in catastrophe, security in decay, is to know her and to be saved.…She is the perfect figuration of life’s joyous lures and pitiless destruction: the two poles charged with the extremest tension, yet forever merging.—
Zimmer
¹¹⁵

Also, in Hinduism, the sun is female and the moon is male: he is born of her, dies into her, and is born of her again every month. Śiva, this great power, is the moon god. Pārvatī, his consort, is the sun power. And although the worship in the masculine-oriented action systems in India is directly to Śiva, it’s to the goddess Kālī, that the worship finally goes. So that, actually, in India, Kālī is the great divinity.

…the Hindu goddess Kālī…is shown standing on the prostrate form of the god Śiva, her spouse. She brandishes the sword of death, i.e., spiritual discipline. The blood-dripping human head tells the devotee that ”he that loseth his life for her sake shall find it.” The gestures of “fear not” and “bestowing boons” teach that she protects her children, that the pairs of opposites of the universal agony are not what they seem, and that for one centered in eternity the phantasmagoria of temporal “goods” and “evils” is but a reflex of the mind—as the goddess herself, though apparently trampling down the god, is actually his blissful dream.
¹¹⁶

The Goddess

gives birth to forms

and kills forms.

I
t’s interesting that in the North, in the European systems—and in the Chinese system, where one hears of
yang and yin
—the man is the aggressor, the active principle, and the woman is the receptive and passive aspect. It’s just the opposite in India. The Hindu position is that woman is the
śakti
, the serpent power that comes up the spine, the life-energy principle. She’s the activator, and the man just wants to be left alone. The man, psychologically, is interested in other things, but when this power field goes by, he’s activated. As Joyce writes in
Finnegans Wake
, “With lipth she lith-peth to him all to time of thuch on thuch and thow and thow. She he she ho she ha to la.”
¹¹⁷
And wouldn’t it be nice to sthart the world again? And he thinks, “My god, yeah, it would.” And that’s it, he’s gone. He gets involved that way because she’s the whole damned energy in any of it’s aspects.

Similarly, in the mythological systems of what we call, basically, the Bronze Age, the female was the great divinity and the source of all power. For instance, in the Egyptian image of the Pharaoh on the throne, the throne being what gives him his authority, the throne is the goddess Isis. The same mythic image comes up in Byzantine iconography of the Virgin and the Christ: the Christ Child sits on the Virgin’s knee just the way the Pharaoh sits on the throne: she is his power. He is called the world ruler, but she’s behind him all the way. Likewise, in old pictures of Presidents of the United States, one usually sees the President’s wife standing behind him. She’s Isis, and he’s the child on the throne.

There is a Pygmy dance where the woman ties the whole male community up with a rope. They stand there completely immobilized and one of them says, “She has made us all silent.” Then she loosens them, and as each one is loose, he sings. They know this basic, basic mythological stuff that we’ve lost.

Her womb is the field of space, her heart the pulse of time, her life the cosmic dream of which each of our own lives is a reflex; and her charm is the attractive power, not of a yonder shore, but of this. In short: in Biblical terms, she is Eve; or rather, Eve extended to be the mother, not only of mankind but of all things, the rocks and trees, beasts, birds and fish, the sun and moon and stars.
¹¹⁸

 The male power comes in with the Semites and Indo-European Aryans, masculine-oriented societies of herding peoples for whom the specific function of the energy was to control the animals on the plains. Then you have the problem of the relationship between male and female mythologies.

Where agriculture

is a main means of support,

there are earth and goddess powers.

Where hunting predominates,

it’s male initiative

that empowers the killing of animals.

In the Semitic tradition, the goddess is wiped out, and a prominent feature of that orthodoxy is a masculine fear of the female body, the prime anthropomorphic symbol of Nature’s allure and power. This went to such extremes in Christianity that nuns were not even allowed to look at their bodies. In Islam, the most male-oriented of the modern religions, a woman is nothing but a vehicle for producing sons, and the male function is, in large part, the protection of the women. I was in PakistanI for only a few hours, but what I saw! Those women were going around in tents! Even their eyes were covered with cheesecloth, so you did not know if it was an old hag or a glorious goddess walking around. And you can’t respond to a tent.

Male = social order.

Female = nature order.

The male’s job is to relate to life.

The female’s job is to become it.

The prime function of the male is to set up an eco-logical situation in which the woman can give birth, to prepare the field so that the female may bring forth the future, because she is the life. She is the totality. He is a protecting factor, the agent of her power. If a woman loses her husband, she has to take over a male role, but it is a mistake to regard that as something foreign to her own energy. The animus function is in every woman, but it is usually delegated to somebody.

What I think has happened now—with so many women, left without husbands, being thrown into the field of male achievement—is that women have been sold a bill of goods—perhaps not intentionally, but actually. With our strong emphasis on such dramatic and conspicuous male activities as building cities filled with skyscrapers and sending jet-propelled rockets to the moon, women have come to believe that only the aims and virtues of the male are to be considered, and that male achievement is the proper aim for everyone, as though that is what counts. No indeed.

Women used to know how to run the world, but when they move into the secondary energy position of doing the job of the man—who is, in fact, just the agent of the female power—women lose their real power and become resentful. Spengler said, in a telling sentence that got into me when I read it: “Man makes history. Woman is history.” She’s what it is about, and the man fashions the field within which she can produce history and be history.

The man’s function is to act.

The woman’s function is to be.

She’s “It.” She is Mother Earth.

So, the female is “It.” When you say the woman brings forth children, that’s part of just
being
, fulfilling a role that is already there in the very body itself. And the production need not be children. It can be in represent-ing that power, that quality, that being in life which the woman represents. This is why the woman’s beauty or quality of character is so important in mythological tales, which does not mean that a woman who’s not physically beautiful does not have this power. It’s right there in the female presence.

The mythological figure of the Universal Mother imputes to the cosmos the feminine attributes of the first, nourishing and protecting presence. The fantasy is primarily spontaneous; for there exists a close and obvious correspondence between the attitude of the young child toward its mother and that of the adult toward the surrounding material world.
¹¹⁹

When Heinrich Zimmer, a great devotee of the Goddess, was trying to find his place in America, he was helped by the old ladies of the Jung Foundation. They were getting him jobs, helping his wife to find a place and so forth. He said, “When I look into those eyes, I say, ‘I see you there.’” So, she’s operative in every woman in a way that the god is not operative in a man. I’ll never forget that wonderful twinkle in his eye when he said, “I see you there.”

W
oman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know. As he progresses in the slow initiation which is life, the form of the goddess undergoes for him a series of transfigurations: she can never be greater than himself, though she can always promise more than he is yet capable of comprehending. She lures, she guides, she bids him burst his fetters. And if he can match her import, the two, the knower and the known, will be released from every limitation. Woman is the guide to the sublime acme of sensuous adventure. By deficient eyes she is reduced to inferior states; by the evil eye of ignorance she is spellbound to banality and ugliness. But she is redeemed by the eyes of understanding. The hero who can take her as she is, without undue commotion but with the kindness and assurance she requires, is potentially the king, the incarnate god, of her created world.
¹²⁰

A little girl has a golden ball. Now gold is the in-corruptible metal, the sphere is the perfect sphere, and the circle is her soul. She likes to go out to the edge of the forest, the abyss, and sit beside a little pool, a little spring, the entrance to the underworld, and there she likes to toss her soul around: toss the little ball and catch it, toss the ball and catch it, toss the ball and—bing!—she misses it, and it goes down into the pond.

She starts to weep. She has lost her soul. This is depression. This is loss of energy and joy in life. Some-thing has slipped out. It is the counterpart of Helen of Troy being stolen in the classic story of the
Iliad:
Helen of Troy was stolen, so they want to get her back.

So, the little golden ball has dropped, her soul has been swallowed by the wolf of the underworld. Now, when the energy goes down like that, the power that’s at the bottom of the pool, the inhabitant of the under-world, comes up—a dragon, or in this case, a little frog. He says “What’s the matter, Little Girl?” And she tells him, “I’ve lost my golden ball.” And he says, “I’ll get it for you.” And she says, “That would be very nice.” And he says, “What will you give me?”

Now, she has to give up something, there has to be some kind of exchange, so she says, “I will give you my golden crown.” He says, “I do not want your golden crown.” “I’ll give you my pretty silk dress.” “I don’t want your pretty silk dress.” “Well,” she demands, “what do you want?” “I want to eat with you at the table, be with you as your playmate, sleep with you in your bed.” So, underestimating the frog, she says, “Okay, I’ll do that.”

The frog dives down and brings up the ball. Now he is the hero who is on the adventure. She, without so much as a thank you, takes the ball and goes trotting home, and he comes flopping after her, saying, “Wait for me.” He’s very slow.

She gets home, and that evening, when the little princess and King Daddy and Queen Mother are having dinner, doing very nicely with their meal, this green creature comes flopping up the front steps: plomp, plomp, plomp. The girl goes a bit pale, and her father asks, “So, what’s the matter? What’s that?” And she says, “Oh, just a little frog I met.” And he says, “Did you make any promises?”