Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell
Jchead.jpg
Joseph Campbell, circa 1984
Born Joseph John Campbell
March 26, 1904(1904-03-26)
White Plains,
New York,
United States
Died October 30, 1987 (aged 83)
Honolulu, Hawaii, United States
Occupation Scholar
Nationality American
Influences

Joseph John Campbell (March 26, 1904 – October 30, 1987) was an American mythology professor, writer, and lecturer best known for his work in the fields of comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work is vast and covers many aspects of the human experience, and his philosophy is often identified with the phrase he coined: "Follow Your Bliss".

Contents

Childhood and education

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 after his father took him to see the American Museum of Natural History in New York where he saw on display featured collections of Native American artifacts. He soon became versed in numerous aspects of Native American society, primarily in Native American mythology. This led to Campbell's lifelong passion for myth and to his study of and mapping of the cohesive threads in mythology that appeared to exist among even disparate human cultures. He graduated from the Canterbury School (Connecticut) in 1921. While at Dartmouth College he studied biology and mathematics, but decided that he preferred the humanities. He transferred to Columbia University where he received his B.A. in English literature in 1925 and M.A. in Medieval literature in 1927. Campbell was also an accomplished athlete, receiving awards in track and field events.

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 remainder of his life.

He was highly influenced while 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 London, 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 in this climate that Campbell was also introduced to the work of Thomas Mann, who was to prove equally influential upon his life and ideas. Also while in Europe, Campbell was introduced to modern art, becoming particularly enthusiastic about the work of Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso. A new world of exciting ideas opened up to Campbell while studying in Europe. Here he also discovered the works and writings of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. It was during this time, as well, that he met and became friends with the young 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 he engaged 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) [2].

Campbell's independent studies led to his greater exploration of the ideas of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, a contemporary and estranged 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 professor at Sarah Lawrence College (through the efforts of his former Columbia advisor W.W. Laurence). Campbell married one of his former students, dancer and dance instructor Jean Erdman, in 1938. He retired from Sarah Lawrence College in 1972, after having taught there for 38 years.

Death

Joseph Campbell died at the age of 83 on October 30, 1987, at his home in Honolulu, Hawaii, from complications due to esophageal cancer [3] shortly after completing filming of 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 [4] (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 -- the cycle of the journey of the hero, an idea which he directly attributes to Joyce's Finnegans Wake[5].

The Masks of God

His massive four-volume work The Masks of God covers mythology from 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 on (the “folk ideas”). In other words, where The Hero with a Thousand Faces draws perhaps more from psychology, the Masks of God books draw more from anthropology and history. The four volumes of Masks of God are as follows: Primitive Mythology, Oriental Mythology, Occidental Mythology, and Creative Mythology.

The Historical Atlas of World Mythology

At the time of his death, Campbell was in the midst of working upon a large-format, lavishly illustrated series entitled The Historical Atlas of World Mythology. This series was to build on Campbell’s idea, first presented in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, that myth evolves over time through four stages:

• The Way of the Animal Powers -- the myths of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers which focus on shamanism and animal totems.

• The Way of the Seeded Earth -- the myths of Neolithic, agrarian cultures which focus upon a mother goddess and associated fertility rites.

• The Way of the Celestial Lights -- the myths of Bronze Age city-states with pantheons of gods up ruling from the heavens, led by a masculine god-king.

• The Way of Man -- religion and philosophy as it developed after the Axial Age (c. 6th century BC), in which the mythic imagery of previous eras was made consciously metaphorical, reinterpreted as referring to psycho-spiritual, not literal-historical, matters. This transition is evidenced in the East by Buddhism, Vedanta, and philosophical Taoism; and in the West by the Mystery Cults, Platonism and Gnosticism.

Only the first two volumes were completed at the time of Campbell's death. Both are now out-of-print.

The Power of Myth

Campbell's widest popular recognition followed his collaboration with Bill Moyers on the PBS series The Power of Myth, which was first broadcast in 1988, the year following Campbell's death. The series exposed his ideas concerning mythological, religious, and psychological archetypes to a wide audience, and captured the imagination of millions of viewers. It remains a staple of PBS television membership drives to this day. A companion book, The Power of Myth, containing expanded transcripts of their conversations, was released shortly after the original broadcast, and became a best seller.

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 often upon the writings of Carl Jung as an explanation of psychological phenomena, as experienced through archetypes. But Campbell did not necessarily agree with Jung upon every issue, and had very definite ideas of his own.

A fundamental belief of Campbell's 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 exists before words and knowledge. Although this basic driving force cannot be expressed in words, spiritual rituals and stories refer to the force through the use of "metaphors" - these metaphors being the various stories, deities, and objects of spirituality we see in the world. For example, the Genesis myth in the Bible ought not be taken as a literal description of actual events, but rather its poetic, metaphorical meaning should be examined for clues concerning the fundamental truths of the world and our existence.

Accordingly, Campbell believed the religions of the world to be the various, culturally influenced “masks” of the same fundamental, transcendent truths. All religions, including Christianity and Buddhism, can bring one to an elevated awareness above and beyond a dualistic conception of reality, or idea of “pairs of opposites,” such as being and non-being, or right and wrong. Indeed, he quotes 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 with what he viewed as basic, universal truths, expressed in different manifestations across different cultures. For example, in the preface of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he indicated that a goal of his 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 common throughout the world. Tied in with this, was his 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

The role of the hero figured largely in Campbell's comparative studies. In 1949 The Hero with a Thousand Faces introduced his idea of the monomyth (as stated above, a word borrowed from Joyce), which outlined some of the archetypal patterns Campbell recognized. Heroes were important to Campbell because, to him, they conveyed universal truths about one's personal self-discovery and self-transcendence, one's role in society, and the relationship between the two.

Organizations and Archives

The Joseph Campbell Foundation

In 1991, Campbell's widow, choreographer Jean Erdman, worked with Campbell's longtime friend and editor, Robert Walter, to create the Joseph Campbell Foundation. The mission of the foundation is to preserve, protect and perpetuate Campbell's work, as well as supporting work in his field of study.

Among the initiatives undertaken by the JCF include: The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell, a series of books and recordings that aims to pull together Campbell's myriad-minded work; the Erdman Campbell Award; the Mythological RoundTables®, a network of local groups around the globe that explore the subjects of comparative mythology, psychology, religion and culture; and the collection of Campbell's library and papers housed at the OPUS Archive and Research Center (see below).[6]

The Joseph Campbell Collection

After Campbell's death, Jean Erdman and the Joseph Campbell Foundation donated his papers, books and other effects to the Center for the Study of Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, California. The 'Center' became OPUS Archives and Research Center and is the home of the collection. Campbell had frequently lectured at Pacifica, a private school that supports graduate work in mythology and depth psychology. The founding curator, psychologist Jonathan Young, worked closely with Ms. Erdman to gather the materials from Campbell's homes in Honolulu and Greenwich Village, New York City. The Campbell Collection features approximately 3,000 volumes and covers a broad range of subjects, including anthropology, folklore, religion, literature, and psychology. The collection also includes audio and video tapes of lectures, original manuscripts, and research papers. The current curator and librarian is Richard Buchen.[7].

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 known as the The Tibetan Book of the Dead). In his 1981 text The Mythic Image, Campbell 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).

The "follow your bliss" philosophy attributed to Campbell following the original broadcast of The Power of Myth was possibly influenced by the 1922 Sinclair Lewis 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 mythology under Professor Heinrich Zimmer while a young student at Columbia. Zimmer taught Campbell that myth (rather than a guru or spiritual guide) could serve in the role of a personal mentor, in that its stories provide a psychological roadmap for the finding of oneself in the labyrinth of the complex modern world. Zimmer relied more on the meanings of mythological tales (their symbols, metaphors, imagery, etc.) as a source for psychological realization than upon psychoanalysis itself. Campbell later borrowed from the interpretative techniques of Jung and then reshaped them in a fashion that followed Zimmer's beliefs- interpreting directly from world mythology. This is an important distinction because it serves to explain why Campbell did not directly follow Jung's footsteps in applied psychology.

Campbell's influence on cinema

George Lucas was the first Hollywood filmmaker to openly credit Campbell's influence. Lucas stated following the release of the first Star Wars film in 1977 that its story was shaped, in part, by ideas described in The Hero With a Thousand Faces and other works of Campbell's. The linkage between Star Wars and Campbell was further reinforced when later reprints of Campbell's book used the image of Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker on the cover.[8] Lucas discusses this influence at great length in the official biography of Joseph Campbell, Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind by Stephen and Robin Larsen:

I [Lucas] 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).

It was not until after the completion of the original Star Wars trilogy in 1983, however, that Lucas met Campbell or heard any of his lectures.[9] The 1988 documentary The Power of Myth was filmed at Lucas' Skywalker Ranch. During his 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 the contemporary viewer. 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.[10] 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.[11] A companion guide of the same name was published in 1997.

Christopher Vogler, a Hollywood screenwriter, was also highly influenced by Campbell. He created a 7-page company memo based on Campbell's work, A Practical Guide to The Hero With a Thousand Faces,[12], which led to the development of Disney's 1994 film The Lion King. Vogler's memo was later developed into the late 1990s book The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers.

John David Ebert, a former editor who worked with the Campbell Foundation, was also highly influenced by Campbell, and this is especially evident in Ebert's book Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society (Cybereditions, 2005).

Controversy

A few years after his death, some of Campbell's critics accused him of anti-Semitism. The charges began 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 Association 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 be perhaps blunt at times in his critique of certain aspects of various organized religions, which Campbell, in his valedictory series of lectures, Transformations of Myth Through Time had stated was his job.[13]

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).

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

General references

On the Life and Work of Joseph Campbell

Books

Articles

Secondary References

Books

References

  1. ↑ Joseph Campbell Foundation website
  2. ↑ Pacifica Graduate Institute | Joseph Campbell & Marija Gimbutas Library | Joseph Campbell - Chronology
  3. ↑ "Joseph Campbell - A Scholar's Life", www.folkstory.com.
  4. ↑ Joseph Campbell Foundation - Works - Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, A
  5. ↑ Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. the Bollingen Foundation, 1949. p. 30, n35. Cambell cites James Joyce, Finnegans Wake. NY: Viking, 1939, p. 581
  6. ↑ The Joseph Campbell Foundation Website
  7. ↑ OPUS Archives and Research Center on the campuses of Pacifica Graduate Institute
  8. ↑ Campbell, J.: The Hero with a Thousand Faces
  9. ↑ George Lucas Interview: Well Rounded Entertainment
  10. ↑ Films for the Humanities and Sciences - Educational Media - The Mythology of Star Wars with George Lucas and Bill Moyers
  11. ↑ Star Wars @ NASM, Unit 1, Introduction Page
  12. ↑ Pacifica Graduate Institute | Joseph Campbell & Marija Gimbutas Library | Joseph Campbell and the Skywalker: Meetings with George Lucas
  13. ↑ Transcribed in book of same name [ISBN 0-06-096463-4]

See also

External links

Organizations:

General:

Interviews:

Critical Essays: