Thai Stick Jumping Dance. Has Western pop culture tried to do that yet?
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Campbell: The troubadours were the nobility of Provence and then later other parts of France and Europe. In Germany they’re known as the Minnesingers, the singers of love. Minne is the medieval German word for love. They were poets of a certain character, yes. The period for the troubadours is the 12 century.
The whole troubadour tradition was extinguished in Provence in the so-called Albigensian Crusade of 1209, which was launched by Pope Innocent III, and which is regarded as one of the most monstrous crusades in the history of Europe. The troubadours became associated with the Manichean heresy of the Albigensians that was rampant at that time-though the Albigensian movement was really a protest against the corruption of the medieval clergy. So the troubadours and their transformation of the idea of love got mixed up in religious life in a very complicated way.
The troubadours were very much interested in the psychology of love. And they’re the first ones in the West who really thought of love the way we do now- as a person-to-person relationship.
Before that, love was simply Eros, the god who excites you to sexual desire. This is not the experience of falling in love the way the troubadours understood it. Eros is much more impersonal than falling in love. You see, people didn’t know about Amor. Amor is something personal that the troubadours recognized. Eros and Agape are impersonal loves.
Eros is a biological urge. It’s the zeal of the organs for each other. The personal factor doesn’t matter. Agape is love thy neighbor as thyself- spiritual love. It doesn’t matter who the neighbor is.
Moyers: Now, this is not passion in the sense that Eros mandates it, this is compassion, I would think.
Campbell: Yes, it is compassion. It is a heart opening. But it is not individuated as Amor is.
Moyers: Agape is a religious impulse.
Campbell: Yes. But Amor could become a religious impulse, too. The troubadours recognized Amor as the highest spiritual experience… That’s completely contrary to everything the Church stood for. It’s a personal, individual experience, and I think it’s the essential thing that’s great about the West and that makes it different from all other traditions I know.
Moyers: So the courage to love became the courage to affirm one’s own experience against tradition- the tradition of the Church. Why was that important to the evolution of the West.
C: It was important in that it gave the West this accent on the individual, that one should have faith in his experience and not simply mouth terms handed down to him by others. It stresses the validity of the individual’s experience of what humanity is, what life is, what values are, against the monolithic system. The monolithic system is a machine system: every machine works like every other machine that’s come out of the same shop… the usual marriage in traditional cultures was arranged for by the families. It wasn’t a person-to-person decision at all… In the Middle Ages, that was the kind of marriage that was sanctified by the Church. And so the troubadour idea of real person-to-person Amor was very dangerous.
"- excerpts from The Power of Myth
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History, Historians, Storytellers and Liars
Learning about history shouldn’t be about who was wrong or who was right. It is not about imposing blame or the polishing of pride. It isn’t about guilt, heroes and role models. It is to simply understand why everyone is where they are now and to figure out how to get out of the holes we are stuck in.
