#456: The Power of Myth — The Hero’s Adventure with Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers

Tim Ferriss (0:24)

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, lemurs and squirrels. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is normally my job to interview and deconstruct world class performers of all different types. This episode flips the script, but you get an absolutely masterful interview in the process. So I'm cheating, I suppose. It features the first program or chapter titled The Hero's Adventure of the six part series, The Power of Myth, which I recently digested. I'm going to be listening to it again in full. The series is just incredible. I found it oddly and profoundly calming, and I really wanted to share the first program with you. So I reached out to many different people and had to figure out rights and get it all sorted out and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. End of the day was able to get this for you. Here's the short description and why I'm so excited about it. Forty years ago, renowned scholar Joseph Campbell, you might know that name because George Lucas consulted with Joseph Campbell. On writing the original Star Wars, sat down with veteran journalist Bill Moyers for a series of interviews that became one of the most enduringly popular programs ever on PBS. In dialogues that adroitly span millennia of history and far-flung geography, the two men discuss myths as metaphors for human experience and the path to transcendence.

You can listen to the full series on Audible. Simply search for The Power of Myth and it will pop right up. It has an average of 4.7 stars out of 5 with nearly 4,000 ratings.

It's outstanding. I highly recommend you check it out. You will not be disappointed. And in the meantime, here's a taste test.

Please enjoy the first program, The Heroes Adventure.

And without further ado, here are Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers.

SPEAKER_3 (2:16)

Program 1, The Heroes Adventure.

Joseph Campbell (3:22)

We have not even to risk the adventure alone. For the heroes of all time have gone before us.

The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path.

And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.

SPEAKER_3 (4:14)

Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, The Hero's Adventure.

Bill Moyers (4:38)

Joseph Campbell believed that everything begins with a story. So we begin this series with Joseph Campbell with one of his favorites. He was in Japan for a conference on religion, and he overheard another American delegate, a social philosopher from New York, say to a Shinto priest, We've been now to a good many ceremonies and have seen quite a few of your shrines, but I don't get your ideology. I don't get your theology. The Japanese paused as though in deep thought, and then slowly shook his head. I think we don't have ideology, he said. We don't have theology. We dance.

Campbell could have said it of his own life. When he died in 1987, at the age of 83, he was considered one of the world's foremost authorities on mythology, the stories and legends told by human beings through the ages to explain the universe and their place in it. The twenty books he wrote or edited have influenced artists and performers as well as scholars and students. When he died, he was working on a monumental historical atlas of world mythology, his effort to bring under one roof the spiritual and intellectual wisdom of a lifetime. Some of his books are classics, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which established his fame forty years ago, and his four-volume study of mythology, The Masks of God. Joseph Campbell was one of the most spiritual men I ever met, but he didn't have an ideology or a theology. Mythology was, to him, the song of the universe, music so deeply embedded in our collective unconscious that we danced to it even when we can't name the tune.

Over the last two summers of his life, we taped these conversations in California at Skywalker Ranch, the home of his friend George Lucas, whose movie trilogy Star Wars had been influenced by Campbell's work. We talked about the message and meaning of myth, about the first storytellers, about love and marriage, gods and goddesses, religion, ritual, art and psychology. But we always came around to his favorite subject, the hero with a thousand faces.

And why the hero with a thousand faces?