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Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell:Joseph Campbell
Joseph Campbell
For other uses, see Joseph Campbell (disambiguation).

Joseph John Campbell (March 26, 1904 – October 31, 1987) was an American professor, writer, and orator best known for his work in the fields of comparative mythology and comparative religion.


Contents

Life

Childhood

Joseph Campbell was born and raised in White Plains, New York[1] in an upper middle class Roman Catholic family. As a child, Campbell became fascinated with Native American culture when his father took him to see the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He soon became versed in numerous aspects of Native American society, primarily in its mythology. This led to Campbell's lifelong passion with myth and to his mapping and study of its seemingly cohesive threads among disparate human cultures.

Education

While at Dartmouth College he studied biology and mathematics, but decided that he preferred the humanities. He transferred to Columbia University where he received a B.A. in English literature in 1925 and M.A. in Medieval literature in 1927. Campbell was also an accomplished athlete, receiving awards for track and field.

Europe

In 1927, Campbell received a fellowship provided by Columbia to study in Europe. Campbell studied Old French and Sanskrit at the University of Paris in France and the University of Munich in Germany. He quickly learned to read and speak both French and German mastering them after only a few months of rigorous study. He remained fluent in both languages for the rest of his life.

He was highly influenced in Europe by the period of the Lost Generation, a time of enormous intellectual and artistic innovation. Campbell commented on this influence, particularly that of James Joyce, in The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work (1990, first edition:28):

CAMPBELL: And then the fact that James Joyce grabbed me. You know that wonderful living in a realm of significant fantasy, which is Irish, is there in the Arthurian romances; it's in Joyce; and it's in my life.
COUSINEAU: Did you find that you identified with Stephen Daedalus...in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?
CAMPBELL: His problem was my problem, exactly...Joyce helped release me into an understanding of the universal sense of these symbols . . . Joyce disengaged himself and left the labyrinth, you might say, of Irish politics and the church to go to Paris, where he became one of the very important members of this marvelous movement that Paris represented in the period when I was there, in the '20s.

It was within this climate that Campbell was also introduced to the work of Thomas Mann who was equally influential upon his life and ideas. While in Europe Campbell was introduced to modern art. He became particularly enthusiastic about the work of Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso. A whole new world opened up to Campbell while studying in Europe. Here he discovered the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. It was also during this time that he met and became friends with Jiddu Krishnamurti, a friendship which began his lifelong interest in Hindu philosophy and mythology. In addition, after the death of Indologist Heinrich Zimmer, Campbell was given the task to edit and posthumously publish Zimmer's papers.

Return to the United States and the Great Depression

On his return from Europe in 1929, Campbell announced to his faculty at Columbia that his time in Europe had broadened his interests and that he wanted to study Sanskrit and Modern art in addition to Medieval literature. When his advisors did not support this, Campbell decided not to go forward with his plans to earn a doctorate and never returned to a conventional graduate program (The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work, (1990, first edition:54).

A few weeks later, the Great Depression began. Campbell would spend the next five years (1929-1934) trying to figure out what to do with his life (Larsen and Larsen, 2002:160) and engaging in a period of intensive and rigorous independent study. Campbell discussed this period in The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work (1990, first edition:52-3). Campbell states that he "would divide the day into four four-hour periods, of which I would be reading in three of the four hour periods, and free one of them...I would get nine hours of sheer reading done a day. And this went on for five years straight."

He also traveled to California for a year (1931-32), continuing his independent studies and becoming close friends with the budding writer John Steinbeck and his wife Carol (Larsen and Larsen, 2002, chapters 8 and 9). Campbell also maintained his independent reading while teaching for a year in 1933 at the Canterbury School during which time he also attempted to publish works of fiction (Larsen and Larsen, 2002:214) [1].

Campbell's independent studies lead to greater exploration of the ideas of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, a contemporary and colleague of Sigmund Freud. Campbell edited the first Eranos conference papers and helped to found Princeton University Press' Bollingen Press. Another dissident member of Freud's circle to influence Campbell was Wilhelm Stekel (1868 - 1939). Stekel pioneered the application of Freud's conceptions of dreams, fantasies of the human mind, and the unconscious to such fields as anthropology and literature.

Sarah Lawrence College

In 1934, Campbell was offered a position as a professor at Sarah Lawrence College (through the efforts of his former Columbia advisor W.W. Laurence). Campbell married one of his former students, Jean Erdman, in 1938 and retired from Sarah Lawrence in 1972.

Death

Campbell died on October 31, 1987, in Honolulu due to ongoing complications with cancer, shortly after filming The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers.

Select works

James Joyce and early works

As noted above, James Joyce was an important influence on Campbell. Campbell's first important book (with Henry Morton Robinson), A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake [2] (1944), is a critical analysis of Joyce's final text Finnegans Wake. In addition, Campbell's seminal work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, discusses what Campbell termed the monomyth cycle of the journey of the hero, which he directly attributes to Joyce's Finnegans Wake (Campbell, 1949:30).

The Masks of God

His four-volume work The Masks of God covers mythology around the world from ancient to modern. Where The Hero with a Thousand Faces focused on the commonality of mythology (the “elementary ideas”), the Masks of God books focus upon historical and cultural variations the monomyth takes (the “folk ideas”). In other words, where The Hero with a Thousand Faces draws more from psychology, the Masks of God books draw more from anthropology and history. The four volumes of Masks of God are: Primitive Mythology, Oriental Mythology, Occidental Myth, and Creative Mythology.

The Historical Atlas of World Mythology

At the time of Campbell’s death he was producing a large-format, beautifully illustrated series titled The Historical Atlas of World Mythology. This series was to follow Campbell’s idea (first presented in The Hero with a Thousand Faces) that myth evolved over time through four stages: The Way of the Animal Powers (the myths of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers with their focus on shamanism and animal totems), The Way of the Seeded Earth (the myths of Neolithic, agrarian cultures with their focus on the mother goddess and fertility rites), The Way of the Celestial Lights (the myths of Bronze Age city-states with their pantheons of gods up in the heavens), and The Way of Man (religion and philosophy as it developed after the Axial Age). Only the first two parts were completed… and are unfortunately now out-of-print.

The Power of Myth

Campbell's widest popular recognition came from his collaboration with Bill Moyers on the PBS series The Power of Myth, which was first broadcast in 1988, the year after Campbell's death. The series presented his ideas on archetypes to millions and remains a staple on PBS. A companion book, The Power of Myth, containing expanded transcripts of their conversations, was released shortly afterward.

Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

A recent compilation of many of his ideas is titled Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor. In it Campbell writes:"...Mythology is often thought of as other people's religions, and religion can be defined as mis-interpreted mythology." In other words, Campbell did not read religious symbols literally as historical facts, but instead he saw them as symbols or as metaphors for greater philosophical ideas.

Campbell had previously discussed this idea with Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth:

CAMPBELL: That would be a mistake in the reading of the symbol. That is reading the words in terms of prose instead of in terms of poetry, reading the metaphor in terms of the denotation instead of the connotation.
MOYERS: And poetry gets to the unseen reality.
CAMPBELL: That which is beyond even the concept of reality, that which transcends all thought. The myth puts you there all the time, gives you a line to connect with that mystery which you are (Campbell, 1988:57).

Campbell's original voice

Campbell relied on the texts of Carl Jung as an explanation of psychological phenomena, as experienced through archetypes. But Campbell didn’t agree with Jung on every issue, and certainly had a very original voice of his own.

A fundamental belief of Campbell was that all spirituality is a search for the same basic, unknown force from which everything came, within which everything currently exists, and into which everything will return. This elemental force is ultimately “unknowable” because it is before words and knowledge. Even though this basic driving force cannot be expressed in words, spiritual rituals and stories refer to the force through the use of "metaphors" - the metaphors being the various stories, deities and objects of spirituality in the world. For example, the Genesis myth in the Bible is not to be taken as a literal description of actual events, but rather its poetic, metaphorical meaning is to be examined for clues about the fundamental truths of the world.

Accordingly, Campbell believed all the religions of the world to be “masks” of the same fundamental, transcendent truths. All religions, including Christianity and Buddhism, can be an elevated awareness above “pairs of opposites,” such as being and non-being, or right and wrong. Indeed, he states in the preface of The Hero with a Thousand Faces: "Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names." which is a translation of the Rig Vedic saying "Ekam Sat Vipra Bahuda Vadanthi."

Campbell was fascinated by what he viewed as basic, universal truths, expressed in different manifestations in different cultures. For example, in the preface of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he indicated that a goal was to demonstrate similarities between Eastern and Western religions. In his four-volume series of books "The Masks of God", Campbell tried to summarize the main spiritual threads throughout the world. Tied in with this was the idea that many of the belief systems of the world which expressed these universal truths had a common geographic ancestry, starting off on the fertile grasslands of Europe in the Bronze Age and moving to the Levant and the "Fertile Crescent" of Mesopotamia and back to Europe (and the Far East), where it was mixed with the newly emerging Indo-European (Aryan) culture.

Heroes and the monomyth

Heroes played a crucial role in his comparative studies. In 1949 The Hero with a Thousand Faces introduced his idea of the monomyth (borrowed from Joyce as stated above), which outlined some of the archetypal patterns Campbell recognized. Heroes were important to Campbell because, to him, they conveyed universal truths about one's life and role in society.

Influence

Scholars who influenced Campbell

Campbell often referred to the work of modern writers James Joyce and Thomas Mann in his lectures and writings. Anthropologist Leo Frobenius was important to Campbell’s view of cultural history. He often indicated that the single most important book in his intellectual development was Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West.

Campbell's ideas regarding myth and its relationship to the human psyche are dependent on the work of Carl Jung, whose studies of human psychology, as previously mentioned, greatly influenced Campbell. Campbell's conception of myth, is closely related to the Jungian method of dream interpretation, which is heavily reliant on symbolic interpretation. Jung's insights into archetypes were in turn heavily influenced by the Bardo Thodol (also referred to as the The Tibetan Book of the Dead). Campbell in his 1981 text, The Mythic Image, quotes Jung on the Bardo Thodol who states that it "belongs to that class of writings which not only are of interest to specialists in Mahayana Buddhism, but also, because of their deep humanity and still deeper insight into the secrets of the human psyche, make an especial appeal to the layman seeking to broaden his knowledge of life"... "For years, ever since it was first published, the Bardo Thodol has been my constant companion, and to it I owe not only many stimulating ideas and discoveries, but also many fundamental insights" (Campbell 1981:392).

Campbell's "Follow your bliss" philosophy was influenced by the Sinclair Lewis 1922 novel, Babbitt. In The Power of Myth Campbell quotes from the novel:

Campbell: "Have you ever read Sinclair Lewis' 'Babbit'?
Moyers: "Not in a long time."
Campbell: "Remember the last line? 'I have never done the thing that I wanted to do in all my life.' That is a man who never followed his bliss" (Campbell, 1988:117).

Campbell studied under mythology Professor Heinrich Zimmer while a young student at Columbia. Zimmer taught Campbell that myth (instead of a guru or person) could serve as a mentor, in that the stories provide a psychological roadmap for the finding of oneself in the labyrinth of the complex modern world. Zimmer relied more on the meaning (symbols, metaphor, imagery, etc.) of mythological fairytales for psychological realizations than on psychoanalysis. Campbell later borrowed from the interpretative techniques of Jung and reshaped them in a fashion that followed Zimmer's beliefs- interpreting directly from world mythology. This is an important distinction because it helps explain why Campbell did not directly follow Jung's footsteps in applied psychology.

Campbell's influences on others

George Lucas

George Lucas was the first Hollywood filmmaker to openly credit Campbell's influence. He stated during the release of the first Star Wars films during the late 1970s that they were based upon ideas found in The Hero With a Thousand Faces and other works of Campbell. Indeed, the 1988 documentary The Power of Myth, was filmed at Lucas' Skywalker Ranch. During these interviews with Bill Moyers, Campbell discusses the way in which Lucas used The Hero's Journey in the Star Wars films (IV, V, and VI) to re-invent the mythology for contemporary times. Moyers and Lucas filmed an interview 12 years later in 1999 called the Mythology of Star Wars with George Lucas & Bill Moyers, to further discuss the impact of Campbell's work on Lucas' films [3]. In addition, the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution sponsored an exhibit during the late 1990s called Star Wars: The Magic of Myth which discussed the ways in which Campbell's work shaped the Star Wars films [4]. A companion guide of the same name was published in 1997.

Lucas also granted an extensive interview to the official biography of Joseph Campbell, Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind by Stephen and Robin Larsen. He states:

I came to the conclusion after 'American Graffiti' that what's valuable for me is to set standards, not to show people the world the way it is...around the period of this realization...it came to me that there really was no modern use of mythology...The Western was possibly the last generically American fairy tale, telling us about our values. And once the Western disappeared, nothing has ever taken its place. In literature we were going off into science fiction...so that's when I started doing more strenuous research on fairy tales, folklore, and mythology, and I started reading Joe's books. Before that I hadn't read any of Joe's books...It was very eerie because in reading 'The Hero with a Thousand Faces' I began to realize that my first draft of 'Star Wars' was following classic motifs...so I modified my next draft [of 'Star Wars'] according to what I'd been learning about classical motifs and made it a little bit more consistent...I went on to read 'The Masks of God' and many other books (Larsen and Larsen, 2002: 541).

Chris Vogler

Other members of the film industry were also inspired by Campbell. Christopher Vogler, a Hollywood screenwriter, created a now-legendary 7-page company memo, A Practical Guide to The Hero With a Thousand Faces, [5], based on Campbell's work which led to the development of Disney's 1993 film, The Lion King. Vogler's memo was later developed into the late 1990's book, The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers, which would become the basis for a number of successful Hollywood films.

Tim Miller

- American writer Tim Miller has cited Campbell's work as an essential early influence on his own poetry, which generally centers around mythology and religion. He admits now that what is useful and most valuable in Campbell's work aren't his theories of how or why myths came to be, but rather his retellings of the myths themselves, and his passion for the importance of myth and religion in modern society. Miller credits Campbell with, at the very least, pointing his way to a direct experience of the sacred texts and stories, as well as inroducing him to the work of other scholars, Mircea Eliade among them. Miller's long poem-in-progress To the House of the Sun is in many ways directly related to Campbell's early influence on his writing.

Controversy

A few years after his death, some accused Campbell of anti-Semitism beginning with Brendan Gill's article, "The Faces of Joseph Campbell," published in the New York Review of Books, Vol. 36, Issue 14, September 28, 1989, pages 16-19. Gill, who identified himself as a friend of Campbell from the Century Club in New York City, notes in the article that he wrote it in reaction to the enormous popularity of The Power of Myth series in 1988. Professor of religion Robert Segal followed Gill's contention of anti-semitism with the article, "Joseph Campbell on Jews and Judaism" ( Religion Volume 22, Issue 2, April 1992: 151-170). Later in the article Segal also suggests that this view of Campbell stems, at least in part, from his tendency to critique aspects of different religions, which Campbell, in his valedictory series of lectures, Transformations of Myth Through Time had stated was his job.[2]

Other scholars disagreed both with Gill's general critiques as well as the accusation of anti-semitism. A few months after Gill's article appeared, the New York Review of Books, Volume 36, Issue 17, November 9, 1989, pages 57-61, published the series of letters "Brendan Gill vs. Defenders of Joseph Campbell" (cover of New York Review), "Joseph Campbell: An Exchange" (title of letter collection). A number of the letters, from former students and colleagues, argue against the accusations. In particular, Professors Roberta and Peter Markman argue that "we were dismayed because this piece of character assassination was unsupported by any evidence." Gill, in a response to these letters, continued to uphold his claims.

Stephen Larsen and Robin Larsen, the authors of the biography "Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind," (2002) also argued against what they referred to as "the so called anti-Semitic charge" (x). They state that: "For the record, Campbell did not belong to any organization that condoned racial or social bias, nor do we know of any other way in which he endorsed such viewpoints. During his lifetime there was no record of such accusations in which he might have publicly betrayed his bigotry or visibly been forced to defend such a position" (2002:x).

Footnotes

  1. ^ Joseph Campbell Foundation website
  2. ^ Transcribed in book of same name [ISBN 0060964634]

Bibliography of works by Campbell

Books by Joseph Campbell

Books based upon interviews with Joseph Campbell

Audio Tapes of Joseph Campbell

Video/DVDs of Joseph Campbell

Books edited by Joseph Campbell

Secondary Sources

General

Books and articles critical of Campbell

Brendan Gill:

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Defense of Campbell

Biographies and Credits:

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