Tiresias

This is a transcript between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell from the Power of Myth series on marriage: "Campbell: Marriage is the symbolic recognition of our identity-two aspects of the same being. Moyers: You know the curious old legend of the blind prophet Tiresias? Campbell: Yes, that's a grand story. Tiresias was walking through the forest one day when he saw two copulating serpents. And he placed his staff between them and was transformed into a woman, and lived as a woman for a number of years. Then again, Tiresias the woman was walking through the forest when she saw two copulating serpents and placed her staff between them and was turned back into a man. Well, one fine day on Capitol Hill, the hill of Zeus- Moyers: Mount Olympus? Campbell:-Mount Olympus, yes-Zeus and his wife were arguing as to who enjoyed sexual intercourse the more, the male or the female. And of course nobody there could decide because they were only on one side of the net, you might say. Then someone said, "Let's ask Tiresias." So they go to Tiresias, and they ask him the question, and he says, "Why the woman, nine times more than the man." Well, for some reason that I don't really understand, Hera, the wife of Zeus, took this badly and struck him blind. And Zeus, feeling a certain responsibility, gave Tiresias the gift of prophecy within his blindness. There's a good point there-when your eyes are closed to distracting phenomena, you're in your intuition, and you may come in touch with the morphology, the basic form of things. Moyers: Well, what's the point-that Tiresias, having been transformed into a man and then a woman by the serpents, had knowledge of both the female and the male experience and knew more than either the god or the goddess knew alone? Campbell: That's correct. Furthermore, he represented symbolically the fact of the unity of the two. And when Odysseus was sent to the underworld by Circe, his true initiation came when he met Tiresias and realized the unity of the male and the female. Moyers: I've often thought that if you could get in touch with your feminine side, or, if you're a woman, your masculine side, you would know what the gods know and maybe beyond what the gods know. Campbell: That's the information that one gets from being married. That's the way you get in touch with your feminine side."