Read Online A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) by Joseph Campbell - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Joseph Campbell
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the boy is in the men’s house, where there are these masked forms that he believes to be deities and punishing powers. One of them comes forward, and the boy has to wrestle with him. The man whom he's fighting almost puts the boy down, but then he yields. He lets the boy defeat him and pull off his mask. Then the mask is not simply regarded as a fake. It is both conquered and worshiped, because it represents both the bounding and the bonding power of the society. The boy puts the mask on himself, and he is now that power. What was feared is transformed into what is now supported.
I was very much interested in the work of George Catlin, who did hundreds of paintings of American Indians. He traveled among the Mandan Indians in 1832 and painted a series of pictures depicting their initiation rites. The young men are hung from the ceiling by spikes through their chests and spun around until they collapse. One young man said to him, “Our women suffer, and we must learn to suffer too.”
That was, to me, a very interesting observation, because suffering overtakes women. There is nothing they can do to avoid it. When a girl has her first menstruation, she's a woman.
Now the fear of menstrual blood, which is almost biological in the male, is in primitive cultures emphatic. There is a real fear of it that incorporates the whole mystery and power. Consequently, the girl’s initiation at that time usually consists of her sitting, isolated, in a little hut, realizing that she is a woman. Next thing she knows, in most societies, she’s a mother.
I’ve been told by some women that the first crash-through of this blood is a shock and a fearful thing. It’s a threshold-crossing that you’ve been pushed across. You don’t have to strive for anything. What you have to do is come to know what’s happened: appreciate the implications of the biological change that’s taken place without effort. After listening to many women, I have had the realization that the woman’s characteristic experience is having to endure something, and that the prime requirement is tolerance, the ability to endure.
The man, on the other hand, has to go out to seek the problem. The boy, accordingly, has to be systematically withdrawn from the women and put in the men’s camp in order to find his action field. As a man, he will have to endure only moments of great pain and struggle and difficulty with things just out of sight, which is what gets thrown at him in the initiation rites. The boy has to enact being a man. The girl has to realize that she’s a woman. Life overtakes her.
The man never has a comparable experience. That's why many male initiation rites are so violent—so that the man knows for certain he is no longer a little boy. And that’s also why a young man has to be disengaged from his mother. In our culture, there are mothers who understand this and assist in the separation. A clinging mother is a terrible weight on the life of a young man. In the primitive cultures, they are definitely separated.
I was just reading of a Hindu rite in Bengal, where the woman’s condition is extremely blocked. As a girl, she has to do what her father tells her to do; when she marries, she has to do what her husband tells her to do; when he dies, if she doesn’t throw herself on the funeral pyre, she has to do what her oldest son tells her to do. She’s never her own boss. Her only strong emotional connections are with her children, and the strongest is with her son.
So, there is this ritual to enable the woman to let her son go. Over a series of years, the family chaplain, the guru, comes and asks her for some valuable thing that she must give him. It starts with some of her jewelry—about the only possessions she has—and then she has to give up certain food that she likes. She has to learn to be quit of that which she values. Then comes the time when her son is no longer a little boy, and by then she has learned how to say that the most
I was very much interested in the work of George Catlin, who did hundreds of paintings of American Indians. He traveled among the Mandan Indians in 1832 and painted a series of pictures depicting their initiation rites. The young men are hung from the ceiling by spikes through their chests and spun around until they collapse. One young man said to him, “Our women suffer, and we must learn to suffer too.”
That was, to me, a very interesting observation, because suffering overtakes women. There is nothing they can do to avoid it. When a girl has her first menstruation, she's a woman.
Now the fear of menstrual blood, which is almost biological in the male, is in primitive cultures emphatic. There is a real fear of it that incorporates the whole mystery and power. Consequently, the girl’s initiation at that time usually consists of her sitting, isolated, in a little hut, realizing that she is a woman. Next thing she knows, in most societies, she’s a mother.
I’ve been told by some women that the first crash-through of this blood is a shock and a fearful thing. It’s a threshold-crossing that you’ve been pushed across. You don’t have to strive for anything. What you have to do is come to know what’s happened: appreciate the implications of the biological change that’s taken place without effort. After listening to many women, I have had the realization that the woman’s characteristic experience is having to endure something, and that the prime requirement is tolerance, the ability to endure.
The man, on the other hand, has to go out to seek the problem. The boy, accordingly, has to be systematically withdrawn from the women and put in the men’s camp in order to find his action field. As a man, he will have to endure only moments of great pain and struggle and difficulty with things just out of sight, which is what gets thrown at him in the initiation rites. The boy has to enact being a man. The girl has to realize that she’s a woman. Life overtakes her.
The man never has a comparable experience. That's why many male initiation rites are so violent—so that the man knows for certain he is no longer a little boy. And that’s also why a young man has to be disengaged from his mother. In our culture, there are mothers who understand this and assist in the separation. A clinging mother is a terrible weight on the life of a young man. In the primitive cultures, they are definitely separated.
I was just reading of a Hindu rite in Bengal, where the woman’s condition is extremely blocked. As a girl, she has to do what her father tells her to do; when she marries, she has to do what her husband tells her to do; when he dies, if she doesn’t throw herself on the funeral pyre, she has to do what her oldest son tells her to do. She’s never her own boss. Her only strong emotional connections are with her children, and the strongest is with her son.
So, there is this ritual to enable the woman to let her son go. Over a series of years, the family chaplain, the guru, comes and asks her for some valuable thing that she must give him. It starts with some of her jewelry—about the only possessions she has—and then she has to give up certain food that she likes. She has to learn to be quit of that which she values. Then comes the time when her son is no longer a little boy, and by then she has learned how to say that the most
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