Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers

On Marriage

Moyers: You changed the definition of a myth from the search for meaning to the experience of meaning.

Campbell: Experience of life. The mind has to do with meaning. What's the meaning of a flower? There's a Zen story about a sermon of the Buddha in which he simply lifted a flower. There was only one man who gave him a sign with his eyes that he understood what was said. Now, the Buddha himself is called "the one thus come." There's no meaning. What's the meaning of the universe? What's the meaning of a flea? It's just there. That's it. And your own meaning is that you're there. We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it's all about.

Moyers: How do you get that experience?

Campbell: Read myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get the message of the symbols. Read other people's myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts -- but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message. Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive. It tells you what the experience is. Marriage, for example. What is marriage? The myth tells you what it is. It's the reunion of the separated duad. Originally you were one. You are now two in the world, but the recognition of the spiritual identity is what marriage is. It's different from a love affair. It has nothing to do with that. It's another mythological plane of experience. When people get married because they think it's a long-time love affair, they'll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is recognition of a spiritual identity. If we live a proper life, if our minds are on the right qualities in regarding the person of the opposite sex, we will find our proper male or female counterpart. But if we are distracted by certain sensuous interests, we'll marry the wrong person. By marrying the right person, we reconstruct the image of the incarnate God, and that's what marriage is.

Moyers: The right person? How does one choose the right person?

Campbell: Your heart tells you. It ought to.

Moyers: your inner being.

Campbell: That's the mystery.

Moyers: You recognize your other self.

Campbell: Well, I don't know, but there's a flash that comes, and something in you knows that this is the one.

Moyers: If marriage is this reunion of the self with the self, with the male or female grounding of ourselves, why is it that marriage is so precarious in our modern society?

Campbell: Because it's not regarded as a marriage. I would say that if the marriage isn't a first priority in your life, you're not married. The marriage means the two that are one, the two become one flesh. If the marriage lasts long enough, and if you are acquiescing constantly to it instead of to individual personal whim, you come to realize that that is true -- the two really are one.

Moyers: One not only biologically but spiritually.

Campbell: Primarily spiritually. The biological is the distraction which may lead you to the wrong identification.

Moyers: Then the necessary function of marriage, perpetuating ourselves in children, is not the primary one.

Campbell: No, that's really just the elementary aspect of marriage. There are two completely different stages of marriage. First is the youthful marriage following the wonderful impulse that nature has given us in the interplay of the sexes biologically in order to produce children. But there comes a time when the child graduates from the family and the couple is left. I've been amazed at the number of my friends who in their forties or fifties go apart. They have had a perfectly decent life together with the child, but they interpreted their union in terms of their relationship through the child. They did not interpret it in terms of their own personal relationship with each other. Marriage is a relationship. When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship. The Chinese image of the Tao, with the dark and light interacting -- that's the
relationship of yang and yin, male and female, which is what a marriage is. And that's what you have become when you have married. You're no longer this one alone; your identity is in a relationship. Marriage is not a simple love affair, it's and ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.

Moyers: So marriage is utterly incompatible with the idea of doing one's own thing.

Campbell: It's not simply one's own thing, you see. It is, in a sense, doing one's own thing. But the one isn't just you, it's the two together as one. And that's a purely mythological image signifying the sacrifice of the visible entity for a transcendent good. This is something that becomes beautifully realized in the second stage of marriage, what I call the alchemical stage, of the two experiencing that they are one. If they are still living as they were in the primary stage of marriage, they will go apart when their children leave. Daddy will fall in love with some little nubile girl and run off, and Mother will be left with and empty house and
heart, and will have to work it out on her own, in her own way.

Moyers: That's because we don't understand the two levels of marriage.

Campbell: You don't make a commitment.

Moyers: We presume to -- we make a commitment for better or for worse.

Campbell: That's the remnant of a ritual.

Moyers: And the ritual has lost its force. The ritual that once conveyed and inner reality is now merely form. And that's true in the rituals of society and in the personal rituals of marriage and religion.

Campbell: How many people before marriage receive spiritual instruction as to what the marriage means? You can stand up in front of a judge and in ten minutes get married. The marriage ceremony in India lasts three days. That couple is glued.

Moyers: You're saying that marriage is not just a social arrangement, it's a spiritual exercise.

Campbell: It's primarily a spiritual exercise, and the society is supposed to help us have the realization. Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute.

Moyers: What happens when a society no longer embraces a powerful mythology?

Campbell: What we've got on our hands. If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.