The Seba library treats Eel in 6 passages, across 1 author (including Campbell, Joseph).
Snakes, for example, are unknown in the islands. The role of the serpent has to be played, therefore, by the closest possible counterpart of the serpent, a monster eel.
Campbell establishes the eel as the oceanic structural equivalent of the mythological serpent, filling an ecological and symbolic vacancy in island cultures.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959thesis
Te Tuna presently appeared, and there were with him four companions... The Monster Eel stripped off his soiled loincloth and held it up in the sight of all, when at once a vast billowy surge reared up and roared landward from the sea.
Campbell narrates the eel Te Tuna as a phallic-chthonic adversary whose confrontation with the trickster Maui enacts the mythological drama of sexual rivalry, cosmic power, and sacrificial transformation.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959thesis
We have already noted the case of the role of the serpent assumed by an eel. We are now considering that of the same serpent role assumed by a harmless lizard.
Campbell articulates the principle that archetypal mythological roles migrate across species through the process of 'land-nāma,' with the eel serving as the paradigmatic example.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959thesis
Te Tuna's melancholy chant of lament for the loss of Hina, when the people had convinced him that he should go to win her back.
The eel-figure Te Tuna is presented as a lamenting divine consort who has lost his goddess to the trickster, situating the eel within a triangular mythological structure of love, loss, and confrontation.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting
Okeanos, precisely, is the great serpent, Ocean, biting his tail, who surrounds the world. He supports it, also, in the form of the waters of the abyss and consequently is a counterpart of Hades.
Campbell establishes the cosmic serpent-ocean complex against which the eel's symbolic role can be understood as an aquatic variant of the same archetypal configuration.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting
since Persephone was the great serpent's bride she must have been able to assume the form of a serpent as well as that of a pig. Such metamorphoses are all part of the game of goddesses.
By tracing the goddess's serpentine nature in Mediterranean myth, Campbell provides comparative grounding for understanding the eel-goddess relationship in Polynesian parallels.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959aside