Campbell: Read myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get the message of the symbols. 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 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 is a long time love affair, they will be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is recognition of a spiritual identity....it is a mystery.
Moyers: If marriage is this reunion of the self with the self, with the male and female grounding of ourselves, why is it that marriage is so precarious in our modern society?
Campbell: Because it is not regarded as a marriage. I would say that if the marriage is not a first priority in your life, you are not married. The marriage means that 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. One not only biologically, but spiritually. 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 is 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 inorder to produce children. The second stage is more spiritual.
Marriage is a relationship. When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you are sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship. A single self that is formed by a spiritual union between you and your partner. Marriage is not a simple love affair, it is an 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 is not simply ones own thing, you see. It is, in a sense, doing one's own thing, but the one is not just you, it is 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 marriage, which I call the alchemical stage, of the two experiencing that they are one - spiritually, mythologically.
In the above excerpt from the book, "The Power of Myth", Campbell beautifully puts forward Archetype of marriage. Today, in India it takes 4 days to get married. There are several rituals, Vedic oaths taken infront of Fire and Spirits, and Blessings bestowed from elders, both from the physical world, and the world of the dead. Similar mythic rituals ordain this special even in one's life in various ancient civilizations. Unfortunately, in most of the cases, the mystic invisible holiness of the occasion has been lost or defiled. This disappearance of the mythical essence of marriage is even more visible in the modern developed societies. Marriage seldom transcends beyond a means of achieving personal ends, individually. Here Campbell stresses on the concept of true union, where individuals are no more different, but are the same. It is important to recognize that the state is not about graduating from a "I" to a "We". Rather it is about embracing the other in I. That is important. Only then, each individual can really related to the other, and be in harmony. It is only then, both the individual sees a new world - which they were unable to see when there were separate. So truly expressed by Campbell, marriage is not just an institution for genetic proliferation, and social order. Rather it is a sanctification of a person to a different order - an order in which they see things differently, they understand the world differently.
Marriage is an opportunity to transcend one's individual ego. It is about going out of one's own needs and whims, and relating to the other. Not only it is about relating to the other, but also appreciating the other as the self. This philosophical exercise to achieve oneness is the starting step to get an Idea what is God. God is not an entity out there, as most of the ancient traditions have repeatedly proclaimed. Rather God is one's own self, from a different vantage point. It is about appreciating unity with one's life, circumstance, people around, challenges, and also God at the same time.
Marriage is about gaining a perspective. It is about coming closer to the Truth.
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