Why study myth, Moyers asks Campbell? Campbell responds:
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. ...
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.
If we have a problem today with rampant abuses of our sexuality in general, inter-gender sexual assaults, and rapes, can anyone imagine that problem to be completely separate from how we view marriage? We pay lip service to the idea of finding and marrying our soulmates, but admit it: our minds too often are "distracted by certain sensuous interests." How high does the divorce rate have to climb until we admit that we are generally at sea about finding that "spiritual identity" with the right person?
Campbell adds that marriage is not ultimately about sex or procreation:
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. ...
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 an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.
Is a life of "doing one's own thing" inimical to marriage, Moyers then asks? Campbell responds that marriage ...
... 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.
Campbell then tells Moyers that our presumptive commitment at the altar to stay married "for better or for worse" is now only ...
... the remnant of a ritual. ... If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times [for] the news of the day, including destructive and violent acts by young people who don't know how to behave in a civilized society.
I'm suggesting in this series (see "A New Awakening, Part 3") that a lot of today's crimes and personal misbehavior — bullying, sexual harassment, rape, etc. — are perpetrated by "adultescents," people who are well above the erstwhile threshold age of adulthood but are still only "half-adults." Another term for them is "post-adolescents."
One of the four primary functions of myth, Joseph Campbell said, is the pedagogical function: guiding the individual through the stages of life. That used to include stories which undergirded rites of initiation by which young people were ushered post haste into adulthood. It doesn't do so anymore ... which is one reason half-adult "adultescents" commit a plethora of depredations one would have thought rare in an "enlightened" society such as ours ...
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