Careful With That Axe, Eugene

I was watching Bill Moyer’s interview with Joseph Campbell in the first part of The Power of Myth yesterday. Campbell was expounding on his "Hero With a Thousand Faces" theory – the fact that many of the motifs in mythology are recurrent, and may have had a common source. Good stuff.

 

At one point he was describing the motion of a flowering vine as it wound up his porch in Hawaii. And then he said something that made me sit up bolt upright:

Erm, well I think it’s heliotropism, Professor Campbell. And if we’re going to redefine that as consciousness, then I reckon I’m going to have to call the thermostat on my central heating system conscious as well. Sometimes, you can have such an open mind that your brain falls out…