Bill Moyers on the origins of the religious 'impulse,' according to Joseph Campbell

I borrowed a great book from a friend: The Power of Myth. In it, decorated journalist, Bill Moyers, supplies the manuscripts from his interviews with Joseph Campbell in the years just before Campbell's death in 1987. The stuff of these interviews became the popular PBS documentary series, Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth.

Campbell had a way of stringing stories together that was basically mesmerizing. He had a sort of benevolent, paternal authority about him—a grandfatherly command over conversation. In a way, he seems to embody a bygone masculinity. This passage isn't meant to illustrate any of that, but it does provide an interesting account of what is sometimes called the "religious instinct."

Bill Moyers recalls Joseph Campbell's view:

He imagined that this grand and cacophonous chorus began when our primal ancestors told stories to themselves about the animals that they killed for food and about the supernatural world to which the animals seemed to go when they died. "Out there somewhere," beyond the visible plain of existence, was the "animal master," who held over human beings the power of life and death: if he failed to send the beasts back to be sacrificed again, the hunters and their kin would starve. Thus early societies learned that "the essence of life is that it lives by killing and eating; that's the great mystery that the myths have to deal with." The hunt became a ritual of sacrifice, and the hunters in turn performed acts of atonement to the departed spirits of the animals, hoping to coax them into returning to be sacrificed again. The beasts were seen as envoys from that other world, and Campbell surmised "a magical, wonderful accord" growing between the hunter and the hunted, as if they were locked in a "mystical, timeless" cycle of death, burial, and resurrection. Their art—the paintings on cave walls—and oral literature gave form to the impulse we now call religion.