Campbell on the Odyssey and the Grail

God is a metaphor for something transcendent of the metaphor itself.

So now people are beginning to get excited about the god and the goddess, and since the only goddess anyone seems to know anything about is the mother goddess, they're all interested in the mother. But all you have to do is read the Odyssey to know that the goddess can appear in other aspects.

I will talk now from the standpoint of the male in relation to the female image. First, the goddess as mother. You are still a child. You have to break from the mother's house, move into adulthood, and then one of the other aspects of the goddess will appear. Who are they? Well, I can't speak for the Chienese and Tibetans but I can speak for the Europeans from the time of the Odyssey. Odysseus met them. They were three nymphs. They were Circe, Calypso, and Nausicaa.

Circe is the seductress, the temptress, the one who leads us into the world of sin. That's to say, sin as an expression of life outside of the social roles, outside of the social norms. Here we see the woman as initiator, a conduit between the particular, local experience and the larger, universal experience. What our ethically oriented religion doesn't seem to realize is that the metaphysical and the transcendent go beyond the local ethical system. So it's a surprise that Circe is actually the initiator of Odysseus. Circe, the pig woman, turns men into swine and then, when they're turned back into men, they're handsomer and wiser than before. She introduced Odyseus to the mysteries of the underworld, the world of the biological ground out of which all life comes forth. And what does he meet in the underworld? he meets a lot of spooks, but he also meets Tiresias, that sage who had been a woman as well as a man and represents the thing that is the biological ground - the androgyne motif. He understands the male is not superior to the female as the male was in the Iliad, where woman was simply property or booty. After this experience, Odysseus sees woman as the counter player, the other side of this dual being, the androgyne. Then he comes back to Circe and she says to him, "Now that you've learned that lesson, you can go to the island of my father, the God of the Sun," who represents total consciousness. So she introduces him first to the biological ground, that dark abyss out of which our life comes, and then to the totally luminous consciousness, which we can also experience. Now, these two are the same. They're two aspects of the same.

The second role is that of Calypso, the wife, who is the one who integrates this realization with the living of a harmonious and productive life. She is the one who restores the man who's been shattered by the temptress and the seductress initiator. She puts him back together again into life.

Woman as temptress, woman as wife, and now, woman as daughter - the little Nausicaa, the virgin goddess, the virgin nymph - the lovely charm of life. Because the female is the image of life and the male is the image of achievement, the woman's body is the basic body. It's the body out of which life comes. The male's body is a body to defend that basic body, to set up a field within which it can function and bring forth. When women don't realize that anymore they've lost their womanhood to the male propaganda that worldly or social achievement is something that's important. Such achievement is meaningless when it does not honour the life impulse. It's the ladder against the wrong wall.

Now, these three goddesses - three nymphs - Circe, Calypso, and Nausicaa, correspond exactly to the three great goddesses. Circe, the seductress, corresponds to Aphrodite, the goddess of lust representing the dynamic of the erotic powers. Calypso, the wife, is the countrepart of the great goddess Hera, the consort of Zeus, who represents the mature energy priunciple, represented in a man's life as governor, a man in control of life, a man of authority. And Nausicaa is the counterpart of Athena. She's a patron saint of heroes - she supports them - but she's also a hero-worshipper.

It;s interesting that these three goddesses are exactly the three that in the Judgement of Paris stood before, what we used to call in my boyhood, " a lounge lizard" - a guy who judges women as though it were a beauty contest. Jane Harrison, a classical scholar of the last generation, pointed out that this was a put-down of the female power, that the male power had put down the three main goddesses of the classical pre-Homeric pantheon: Aphrodite, the goddess of love who informs the whole universe; Hera, the consort of Zeus who represents power and energy functioning in the field of timel; and Athena, the patron goddess of heroic deeds. Having put them down, you are left quite simply with two ideas of women - property and booty, which is the attitude the warrior holds towards woman. In the Iliad that is the way woman appears. When Agamemnon and Achilles come to deal with the captured Trojan girl Briseis, the question is, "Who gets the blonde?" This is no way to relate to the female in a mature male/female, androgyne relationship. So it's Circe who introduces Odysseus to the recovery from that male put-down and to getting a good domestic relationship to the female power. As he's returning from ten years of warrior life, where women are booty, to his domestic life, the gods see to it that he gets these initiations of three females - the same three that were put down.

Now, if people don't have a notion of who they are when they're in a certain life relationship to the opposite sex, they may have no image to give meaning to what is happening to them and not know how to proceed. Say, for example, that the person receiving the impact of a love - and, you know, that kind of thing does happen, and it's a calamity if you go through life without ever having had it happen - say this person has a very elementary idea of relationship, so is forced to ask questions like "How do I relate this love to my actual social condition? To my actual age? To the actual role that I'm playing?" If the person has only one image of relationship, namely jumping into bed, then there will be great difficulties handling the power of love. There are many ways of relating this tremendous experience of the male/female identity both in transcendence and to the actualities of a life, and that's what the myth helps us to see. I hear often from so many young people, "Oh, we had a love affair, but now we're friends." So they have two images of relationship: one is friendship, and the other is lust. That's not enough. there are plenty of ways to relate, and the myths give these clues.

There is a prayer from the twelfth or thirteenth century which indicates two different mythological possibilities. "O Lord, who taught Mary to conceive without sinning, teach me to sin without conceiving." Here are two totally different mythologies in collision with each other. The one, of delight in a life which is regarded as being sinful; the other, as the zeal to bring forth the world's saviour. Well, when you're caught between those with no bridge, you're in a pretty bad spot, I think.

Would you distinguish Aphrodite from the principle of unrelated sexuality, of promiscuity, or is that the energy she personifies?

Aphrodite is no whore really. She is not a prostitute. A prostitute is a kind of spin-off, you might say, from Aphrodite, in which she's moved into the realm of commerce. As soon as you get into the realm of commerce, you've lost touch. This is true in the arts too, and is the problem of the commercial artist. "What can I do to make money from my art?" not, "How's my art enabling me to flower?" This is an important problem.

What distinguishes Aphrodite from promiscuity?

The fact that Aphrodite represents a power that has nothing to do with commercial or social advantage; she is simply the impact of Eros on one.

One of the great moments of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was the introduction of courtly love in the troubadour tradition. Until then, marriage had always been looked at as a social business. The couple being married often had never even seen each other. This still goes on in the Orient and in many parts of the world to this day - I was interested to see in New Delhi that the daily newspapers carried columns of advertisements for wives put in by families or by marriage brokers. The requirements had nothing to do with the meeting of the eyes of two individuals, and in that sense the erotic relationship had nothing to do with the individual experience of Eros. It was impersonal, and, in that context, without recognition of the individual experience. Now, in religious discussions of Eros, there were, and still are, two parts, both of which are impersonal. First is lust, which I define as a purely biological zeal of the organs for each other, and the other is agape or spiritual love - love thy neighbour as thyself. Both are impersonal. Well, it's in the twelfth century, with the troubadours, that a new idea of amour, love, emerges. Amour is seen as personal and as a primary principle in the shaping of an aristocratic society.

The troubadours had many debates as to what the definition of love would be. One of the most interesting and precise debates states that the eyes are the scouts for the heart, and the eyes go forth to find an image to recommend to the heart. When the image is found and recommended, if the heart is a gentle heart - that is to say, a heart that is capable of love and not simply of lust - then love is born. If, on the other hand, it is not a gentle heart, then all you have is lust - the pig heart. You don't have love. And the problem of the woman in the twelfth and thirteenth century ciurtly tradition was to guarantee to herself that the address of the man challenging her love was not of lust but of a gentle heart. This idea of a gentle heart or, in another sense, the noble heart, is a basic one to twelfth and thirteenth century romance and is a very important thing. It represents a stage, you might say, of psychological transformation.

Why is it so important?

It's important because it brings into the field of actual cultural traditions and ideals a principle that is of individual, and not simply general, biological significance. The whole meaning of the Grail tradition has to do with the problem of a person living an authenthic life out of the spontaneity of his heart when that heart is a noble heart whose spontaneity is based on compassion rather than possession and conquest. In the Grail tradition, the individual was conscious of facing the wasteleand, a land of people who do simply what they are supposed to do, or what is thought by the society well to do - people professing beliefs because they have to, holding jobs that they've inherited, not earned, and so forth - a group of zombies, you might say. That's what the story of Perceval represents in the Grail romances - the principles of compassion with suffering, in which you recognize your essential transpersonal identity with the very life that's there facing you. That's what the Grail legend is all about.


Fraser Boa, The Way of Myth: talking with Joseph Campbell, 57-70.