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Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) |
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American writer on mythology and comparative religion who gained fame with such works as The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1948), an examination of the archetype of the hero, The Masks of God (1959-1968), exploring the complex mythological heritage and its implications for modern humanity, and the multi-volume Historical Atlas of World Mythology (1989),
of which only the sections on the early stages of human culture were
completed. "Whether the hero be ridiculous or sublime, Greek or barbarian, gentile or Jew, his journey varies little in essential plan. Popular tales represent the heroic action as physical; the higher religions show the deed to be moral; nevertheless, there will be found astonishingly little variation in the morphology of the adventure, the character roles involved, the victories gained." (The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, Novato, California: New World Library, 3rd ed., 2008, p. 30) Joseph Campbell was born in New York City, the son of Charles and
Josephine Campbell. When he was a child, his father took him to Buffalo
Bill's Wild West Show at Madison Square Garden, and to the Museum of
Natural History. At school Campbell principal interests were writing, biology, and mathematics. By the age of twelve, Campbell became a reader of American Indian folklore. The family lived next door to the public library and Campbell used to borrow stacks of books from there. "I think that's where my life as a scholar began," he once said. About 1917 in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania he met Elmer Gregor, who had written books about American Indians. Gregor could communicate with Indian sign language. He became Campbell's first "guru," or teacher. Reading Dimitri Merejkowski novel The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci (1900) made Campbell to realize, that he didn't know anything about art and culture. "My whole world shifted with that book." (The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work, edited and with an introduction by Phil Cousineau, foreword by Stuart L. Brown, Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2003, p. 27) Campbell devoted himself again mythology while working on a master's degree. In a college band he played saxophone. Before attending Columbia University, he traveled with his family through Central America and Europe. Campbell received his M.A. in English and medieval literature. He then returned to Europe for postgraduate study in Arthurian romances at the Universities of Paris and Munich. Campbell discovered that many themes in Arthurian legend resembled the basic motifs in American Indian folklore. The idea inspired Campbell in his unending study of such authors Thomas Mann and James Joyce, whose work he regarded as a kind of guide for his own interpretation of mythological material. Campbell was also caught up in the theories of Jung and Freud. Because much of the relevant literature was written in German, he learned to read and talk in German in three months. Back in the United States Campbell retired for five years to
Woodstock, New York, and Carmel, California. During this period he put
together his guiding thesis that perceived mythology as "the song of
the imagination." "I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses,
the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem
and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you." (The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell, with Bill Moyers, edited by Betty Sue Flowers, New York: Anchor Books, 1991, p. 65) In 1931-32, on a journey across the country in his mother's
Model T Ford, Campbell stopped in San Jose, where he met Adelle Davis.
She introduced him to John and Carol Steinbeck and their neighbour, Ed
Ricketts, with whom he traveled up coast of British Columbia to Alaska.
In 1934 Campbell began teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in
Bronxville, New York, where he remained for thirty-eight years. With
Henry Morton Robinson, another Joyce scholar, he published in 1942 an
article in The Saturday Review of Literature in which they claimed that Thornton Wilder's play The Skin of Our Teeth was an Americanized re-creation of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.
Wilder did not publicly respond to Campbell and Robinson. "But is was
just as the war had broken out, just after Pearl Harbour, and Wilder
was in the army. He was a captain. The next thing you know he was a
major and the next thing you know he was something more than that. So
the newspaper boys came down on us from all angles just like a bunch of
dive-bombers. !Who was this pair of Micks? This wasn't the civilization
we were fighting for."" (The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work, p. 116) In 1938 Campbell married Jean Erdman, one of his early
students from Sarah Lawrence, who founded a dance company and school of
her own. Between 1956 and 1973 Campbell was a visiting lecturer at the
Foreign Service Institute. In 1985 he received the National Arts Club
medal for honor for literature and was elected in 1987 to the American
Academy of Arts and Letters. The popular PBS television program The Power of Myth
was made in 1985 and 1986 mostly at the ranch of Campbell's friend, the film director George Lucas.
Joseph Campbell died at age of eighty-three on October 31, 1987, at his home in Honolulu, Hawaii,
after a brief illness. Campbell's concept of the hero's journey was one of the sources for Luke Skywalker's story in Star Wars. Lucas recalled: "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 classical motifs. . . . Joe said that "what I needed to
find would evolve out of my own experience." It seemed that these deep
psychological motifs are all there in everybody, and that they've been
there fir thousands of years." (A Fire in the Mind: The Life of Joseph Campbell by Stephen and Robin Larsen, New York: Doubleday, 1991, p. 541) While writing the script for The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Lucas listened to Campbell lectures on tape.
However, they did not meet until 1983. Lucas felt that the mythologist,
whom he called "my Yoda," was much more powerful as a speaker than a
writer. Because Campbell had never seen any of the Star War movies, Lucas invited him as a guest to his Skywalker Ranch for a screening of the trilogy. "I tell you, I was really thrilled," Campbell said. ('Joseph Campbell, George Lucas and the Monomyth' by John Shelton Lawrence, in Finding the Force of the Star Wars Franchise: Fans, Merchandise, & Critics, edited by Matthew Kapell & John Shelton Lawrence, New York: Peter Lang, 2006, pp. 21-34) He was especially impressed by the way Lucas dealt with the relationship between man and machine: is the machine going to be the servant or master of human life? Campbell thought that Lucas had put the newest and most powerful spin to the story of the hero: the intuition. His writing career Campbell began as a literary critic, co-authoring with Henry M. Robinson A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944), a study of James Joyce's major novel. He then turned his attention to explicating the great myths of the world's religions in terms of Jungian concept of the collective unconscious. He also popularized the key discoveries and the psychology of Jung. Campbell saw that world's mythologies, ritual practices, folk traditions, and major religions share certain symbolic themes, motifs, and patterns of behavior. His theories influenced a wide range of writers around the world, among them the Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski in his Tiarnia series. The Hero with a Thousand Faces is often cited as Campbell's best work. It has sold nearly one million copies in various editions. Jung had a copy of the book. In addition, Campbell's theories were made popular with Public Broadcasting System series of television interviews with Bill Moyers. The PBS interviews were also published as a book, The Power of Myth (1988), which became a bestseller. Jung argued, that Freud's concept of unconscious mind can be extended into a collective unconscious, shared by the entire human species. On the other hand, James G. Frazer noted that certain patterns of mythic stories were spread worldwide. Campbell developed the ideas further, and discovered that many mythical heroes around the world share similar features. He juxtaposed these myths from Native Americans, ancient Greeks, Hindus, Buddhists, Mayans, Norse and Arthurian legends, and the Bible to elucidate the hero's path of adventure through rites of passage to final transfiguration. Like Jung, he saw the approach of old age as a step toward the time of wholeness and oneness. From the late 1950s, Campbell began to work on his four-volume series,
The Masks of God. Later he said: "It was horrible really,
carrying one idea around in your head for twelve years, and never being
able to allow yourself to think of anything else during that time." (The Innateness of Myth: A New Interpretation of Joseph Campbell's Reception of C.G. Jung by Ritske Rensma, New York: Continuum, 2009, p. 88) In Myths To Live By (1972) Campbell suggested that new myths would replace
old ones, perhaps drawing symbols from modern technology. "I like to think of the year 1492
as marking the end – or at least the beginning of the end -
of the authority of the old mythological systems by which the lives of
men had been supported and inspired from time out of mind. Shortly
after Columbus's epochal voyage, Magellan circumnavigated the globe.
Shortly before, Vasco da Gama had sailed around Africa to India. The
earth was beginning to be systematically explored, and the old,
symbolic, mythological geographies discredited." (Ibid., p. 6) In 1954 Campbell met Carl Jung in Bollingen, where they had tea; Campbell had no trouble with him: "No 'Herr Doktor Professor.' He was just a genial host," recalled Campbell. "Jung was a beautiful man to be with. That's all I can say." (Ibid., p. 88) They shared a mutual friend, Heinrich Zimmer, an Indologist and historian of South Asian art. By the request of Zimmer's widow, Campbell had edited four volumes of his posthumous writings. Jung, who had met Zimmer in 1932, had edited one of Zimmer's German works, entitled Der Weg zum Selbst. Campbell compiled as an editor six volumes of Eranos Yearbooks (1954-69), based on "shared feast" lectures various fields of learning held at Ascona in southern Switzwerland and originally published in the Eranos-Jahrbücher. Campbell also assisted Swami Nikhilananda in producing a translation of The Gospes of Sri Ramakrishna (1942), edited The Portable Arabian Nights (1952), and provided folkloric commentaries for The Complete Grimm Fairy Tales (1944).
Campbell often used skillfully down-to-earth examples when he clarified the influence of myths on modern day thinking. In the essay 'The Impact of Science on Myth' (1961) from Myths to Live By he depicts a discussion he heard at a lunch counter. A young boy tells his mother, that his friend Jimmy wrote a paper on the evolution of man, but the teacher said he was wrong: Adam and Eve were our first parents. And the boy's mother confirms this fundamentalist claim. "What a mother for a twentieth-century child!" Campbell said.
Selected works:
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