CAMPBELL, JOSEPH

CAMPBELL, JOSEPH (1904–1987). Joseph Campbell was perhaps the best-known mythologist of the twentieth century. His fame was largely due to his highly acclaimed public television interviews with Bill Moyers in 1985–1986 and his posthumously published best-selling book, The Power of Myth (1988), based on that series, and in no small part to movie director George Lucas, who gave Campbell credit for inspiring his movie Star Wars (1977). Campbell's books on myth had many admirers, from literary critics who found his analysis of hero myths interpretatively rich, to the general public, who loved Campbell's retellings of his "myths to live by." Campbell believed that the world's great myths symbolized the ultimate human spiritual goal of living joyfully and mystically, at one with one's true self and the cosmos, and generations of fans took his advice to "follow your own bliss."

Early Years

Campbell was born in New York City in 1904 to a prosperous Irish-American family who gave their gifted child every advantage. He was trained in Roman Catholicism at parochial school, but became fascinated by non-Western traditions after seeing American Indians at Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Campbell read widely, including many Indian myths that, he noticed, shared common motifs with stories from the Bible. After entering Columbia University in 1921, Campbell continued his studies in languages and literature, and studied anthropology with Franz Boas and philosophy with John Dewey. Campbell was introduced to Eastern religions on a trip to Europe before his college graduation. There he met Jiddu Krishnamurti and read Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia, with its translations of Asian religious classics like the Upaniṣads and the life of the Buddha. Both Hinduism and Buddhism were to have a major impact on Campbell's interpretation of myths.

After graduating in 1926 with a master's degree in medieval literature, Campbell lived abroad in Paris and Munich on a two-year traveling fellowship, studying Romance philology and Sanskrit. He was deeply influenced by the contemporary European intellectual scene, and particularly intrigued by the fictional heroes of novelists James Joyce and Thomas Mann, cultural morphologist Adolf Bastian's notion of elementary ideas, ethnologist Leo Frobenius's idea of culture circles, and Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung's theories of dreaming and the unconscious. Jung's theory of collective archetypes and their role in the psychic process of self-integration had a lasting impact on Campbell's thinking.

Scholarly Work

In 1934, Campbell began his teaching career at Sarah Lawrence College, where he was a popular instructor until his retirement in 1972. His first major publication, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944, with Henry Morton Robinson), was in the field of literature, but Campbell's broad scholarly interests soon shifted to mythology. He was influenced by his friendship with the German Indologist Heinrich Zimmer, whose positive views of Indian myths as repositories of timeless spiritual truths greatly impressed him. After Zimmer's untimely death in 1943, Campbell edited his manuscripts, publishing Zimmer's Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization (1946) and other important books on Indian philosophy and art, along with several volumes from the Eranos conferences in Ascona, Switzerland, for the Bollingen series.

Campbell's fascination with myth, Eastern religion, and Jungian psychology finally led to his own famous study of hero myths, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). Several other notable studies on comparative mythology followed. The Masks of God (1959–1968), written after an eye-opening trip to India in 1954, was a monumental four-volume survey of "primitive," "oriental," "occidental," and modern literary "creative" mythology. His goal was to write a "natural history" of myths that traced "the fundamental unity of the spiritual history of mankind" by revealing themes with a worldwide distribution, such as "fire-theft, deluge, land of the dead, virgin birth, and resurrected hero" (vol. 1, p. 3). This was followed by The Flight of the Wild Gander (1969), a collection of Campbell's important essays on the biological, metaphysical, and historical-cultural origins of myth as well as his own positive essay on the "secularization of the sacred" in the modern world.

After retiring from Sarah Lawrence in 1972, Campbell moved to Honolulu, where he continued writing. Books from this period include Myths to Live By (1972), his argument that the modern world has a desperate need for new myths; The Mythic Image (1974), his exploration of the intimate connection between dreams, myths, and art; The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (1986), a collection of lectures arguing that the true meaning of myth is symbolic, universal, and mystical; The Historical Atlas of World Mythology (1983, 1989), a two-volume attempt to trace the historical origin and diffusion of myths; and The Power of Myth. Campbell died of cancer in Honolulu in 1987.

Concepts of Myth

Campbell was hostile to organized religion. Intellectually, his antipathy owes much to John Dewey's critique of organized religion in his A Common Faith (1934). Dewey dismissed religion as a set of fossilized doctrines and institutions based upon a now scientifically discredited belief in the supernatural and physical immortality, weighted with historical doctrines and rituals that obscured the powerful personal experiences underlying it, and mistakenly believed to be literally rather than symbolically true. While institutional religion had little value for Dewey, however, its symbols did. They expressed the "religious moral faith" of the individual who conscientiously harmonized the self to the world through a pragmatic "adjustment" of human ethical ideals in response to an experience of the "imaginative totality" of the Universe (Dewey, 1934, pp. 18–19).

Campbell agreed with Dewey that taking such stories as the virgin birth, heaven, and resurrection as literal truths was absurd, and argued that they must be understood symbolically rather than doctrinally. In other respects, however, Campbell abandoned Dewey's self-conscious pragmatism for a Jungian perspective. Campbell saw parallels between religious and dream symbolism and followed Jung's view that dreams symbolized the collective patterns, or archetypes, of the unconscious psyche. Campbell considered dreams to be personalized myths, and myths to be depersonalized dreams. He believed that myth's symbols expressed a psychic-spiritual wisdom that could free ordinary people from the debilitating anxieties and social chaos of modern secular society.

Campbell believed that religious doctrines were nothing more than misunderstood mythology. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which he considered his most important work, Campbell drew on Freudian and Jungian psychology to argue that hero myths worldwide use a universal narrative formula to describe rites of passage, each one a local example of what James Joyce called the mono-myth, a narrative magnification of a basic three-part structure: separation, initiation, and return. Despite their various historical and cultural particularities, the stories of Jesus, Buddha, Gilgamesh, and other mythological heroes ultimately shared an underlying archetypal unity of common motifs, symbols, and themes. They also had a shared meaning—a common psychological and metaphysical reality was at work in these tales. This universality explains why ancient myths, even those of other people, are still powerful today.

Campbell believed that myth functioned as a kind of comforting second womb. He focused his work on the latter half of human life, where dealing with despair and anxiety, and especially old age, sickness, and death, is unavoidable. Myths responded to the reality of suffering and mortality by revealing a spiritual way to transcend the universal tragedies of humanity. Campbell supplemented Jung's theory of psycho-developmental integration of the unconscious and conscious with the mysticism of Hinduism and Buddhism. He believed world myths pointed to the possibility of apotheosis, of discarding personal ego and realizing an enduring oneness with the cosmos. The power of myth was its ability to shatter "forms and our attachment to the forms" and through "comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy," to evoke an ecstatic feeling of being alive (Campbell, 1949, pp. 28–29).

Campbell modified his views after his trip to India in 1954. In the latter volumes of The Masks of God, Occidental Mythology, and Creative Mythology, he rejected what he came to consider a dehumanizing monism in Eastern theology and instead embraced a Western spiritual individualism that did not dissolve the ego into a larger social and cosmic mystical whole. In Creative Mythology, Campbell claimed that this ideal, with origins in pre-Christian European paganism, was classically formulated in the twelfth-century Romantic literature of courtly love. Stories like those of Tristan and Isolde, in which the heroic lovers achieve an ecstatic spiritual and physical union while preserving their separate identities, exemplified the ideal of individualism. He found parallels in contemporary Western literature in the novels of James Joyce and Thomas Mann. The male heroes of Mann's Magic Mountain (1924) and Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939) personify a kind of spiritually radical monism that is not self-sacrificing but rather a self-fulfilling realization of the "soul in the body, heaven on earth, and god in humanity" (Segal, 1990, p. 138).

Critical Views

Several criticisms have been lodged against Campbell's comparative mythology. Folklorist Alan Dundes argues that, like many other universalists, Campbell is prone to sweeping generalizations. To show the universality of his Belly of the Whale motif, for example, Campbell often cited stories in which a hero is swallowed. Dundes, however, points out that Campbell's motif of a fish swallowing a person is not actually found worldwide; it is not found in sub-Saharan Africa, for one, so how can it be a universal structure? He further argues that Campbell's examples include both Jonah being swallowed by a whale and Little Red Riding Hood being swallowed by a wolf. But Little Red Riding Hood is a heroine, not a hero; her story is a fairy tale, not a myth; and a wolf, not a whale, swallows her. Campbell does not explain to what level of generality an analysis can go to find the mythic pattern in myths.

Other critics, including Wallace Martin, fault Campbell for emphasizing what stories have in common, an approach that inevitably blurs distinctions "and thus makes it impossible, within the theory, to show how and why stories are different" (Martin, 1986, p. 103). Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty dismisses this as Campbell's "TV dinner approach" to myth, boiling it down to its bloodless archetypes. She sees this reductionism in The Historical Atlas of World Mythology, where Campbell abandoned Jungian theory for a supposedly historical analysis tracing the origin of his mythic motifs through diffusion. What Campbell forgot, O'Flaherty notes, is that a phallus, for example, may be archetypal, but it is "always someone's phallus." It is in the "banal details" of myths, their variants, and their culturally specific forms that meaning resides (O'Flaherty, 1988, pp. 34–35). Because of his decontextualizing approach, she argues, Campbell ignored indigenous interpretations and trivialized the many and often contested meanings of myths within their cultures of origin.

Although he recognized different functions of myth, his critics claim that Campbell ignored the social, political, and ethical to focus exclusively on the mystical. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell left Jung behind with a metaphysical, spiritual perspective that envisaged the role of myth "not to cure the individual back again to the general delusion, but to detach him from delusion altogether and this not by readjusting the desire (eors ) and hostility (thanatos )—for that would only originate a new context of delusion—but by extinguishing the impulses to the very root, according to the method of the celebrated Buddhist Eightfold path." (Campbell, 1949, pp. 164–165). Thus Campbell argued that the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh told the same story as the Dao de jing and Indian Tantrism: that physical immortality was impossible and that the only eternity was in the realization that all was one here and now (p. 189). Hindu mysticism and the eightfold path of Buddhism provided the key for Campbell's understanding of hero myths, and he later relied upon Kuṇḍalinī Yoga and European paganism as well. This one-meaning-fits-all approach, critics claim, reveals more about Campbell's own brand of philosophy than anything else.

Several critics, including Brendan Gill and Robert Segal, have also accused Campbell of being anti-Semitic. Campbell was hostile to organized religion generally, but his critics argue that he singled out Judaism especially, using what Segal calls "the crudest of stock epithets" for his vitriolic attacks on it as chauvinistic, fossilized, tribal, patriarchal, and literalistic (Segal, 1999, p. 462). Campbell's biographers Stephen and Robin Larsen sympathetically portray him as, at most, anti-Zionist, but other critics believe Campbell's prejudices left him indifferent to the Holocaust and blind to the dangers of what the philosopher Paul Tillich describes as the "mythical powers of origin of the soil and blood" that culminated in the Nazi worship of a German paganism that lay at the heart of its terror (Tillich, 1977, pp. 13–18). Campbell's limited focus only allowed him to see this paganism nostalgically, as the source of a Western romantic individualism buried under the historical encumbrances of Christianity and Judaism.

Bibliography

Campbell, Joseph. A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, with Henry Morton Robinson. New York, 1944.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York, 1949.

Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God. 4 vols. New York, 1959–1968.

Campbell, Joseph. The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension. New York, 1969.

Campbell, Joseph. Myths to Live By. New York, 1972.

Campbell, Joseph. The Mythic Image, assisted by M. J. Abadie. Princeton, N.J., 1974.

Campbell, Joseph. The Historical Atlas of World Mythology. 2 vols. New York, 1983, 1989.

Campbell, Joseph. The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion. New York, 1986.

Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers, edited by Betty Sue Flowers. New York, 1988.

Dewey, John. A Common Faith. New Haven, Conn., 1934.

Doniger, Wendy. "A Very Strange Enchanted Boy." New York Times Book Review, February 3, 1992.

Dundes, Alan, ed. Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth. Berkeley, 1984.

Ellwood, Robert. The Politics of Myth: A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell. New York, 1999.

Friedman, Maurice. "Why Joseph Campbell's Psychologizing of Myth Precludes the Holocaust as Touchstone of Reality." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66 (1998): 385–401.

Gill, Brendan. "The Faces of Joseph Campbell." New York Review of Books 36 (September 28, 1989): 16–19.

Larsen, Stephen, and Robin Larsen. Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind. Rochester, Vt., 1991.

Martin, Wallace. Recent Theories of Narrative. New York, 1986.

Noel, Daniel, ed. Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion. New York, 1994.

O'Flaherty, Wendy Doniger. Other People's Myths. New York, 1988.

Segal, Robert. Joseph Campbell: An Introduction. Rev. ed. New York, 1990.

Segal, Robert. "Joseph Campbell on Jews and Judaism." Religion 22 (1992): 151–170.

Segal, Robert. "Joseph Campbell as Anti-Semite and as a Theorist of Myth: A Response to Maurice Friedman." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67 (1999): 461–467.

Tillich, Paul. The Socialist Decision. Translated by Franklin Sherman. New York, 1977.

Mark W. MacWilliams (2005)