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Joseph Campbell (New York City, March 26, 1904 - Honolulu, October 30, 1987) was an American professor, writer, and orator best known for his work in the fields of mythology and comparative religion.

Life

He was born and raised in New York City in an upper middle class 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 its similar, seemingly cohesive threads among all human cultures. He studied at Columbia University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1925 and a Master of Arts degree in 1927.

Campbell is considered by some to be one of the most famous autodidacts, or 'self-educators' and is sometimes seen as a poster-boy for this methodology. After completing his master's degree, Campbell decided not to go forward with his plans to earn a doctorate; instead, he went into the woods in upstate New York, reading deeply for five years. According to poet and author Robert Bly, a friend of Campbell, Campbell developed a systematic program of reading nine hours a day. According to Campbell, this is, in a sense, where his real education took place, and the time when he began to develop his unique view on the nature of life.

He went on to study Old French and Sanskrit at the University of Paris and the University of Munich. He learned to speak at least French, German and Sanskrit in addition to English. With Henry Morton Robinson he wrote A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, for which generations of puzzled readers of James Joyce have been grateful.

Campbell studied the ideas of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who had been a colleague of Sigmund Freud. Campbell's work in mythology sought to bridge the seemingly disparate stances of Jung and Freud and their pivotal debate over the collective unconscious. Another dissident member of Freud's circle who influenced Campbell was Wilhelm Steckel (1868 - 1939), who pioneered the application of Freud's conceptions of dreams, fantasies of the human mind, and the unconscious to such fields as anthropology and literature.

Campbell was a professor at Sarah Lawrence College from 1934 until 1972.

Campbell was criticized in the New York Review of Books for his political beliefs, which were called reactionary in an article by Brendan Gill, as well as by other colleagues in a later exchange about the article in the same magazine.

Campbell's Original Voice

Campbell relied on the texts of Jung as a explanation of psychological phenomena, as experienced through archetypes. But Campbell didn’t agree with Carl Jung on every issue, and certainly had a very original voice of his own. Campbell didn't believe in Astrology or synchronicity as Jung had. Campbell's true study and interpretation is in the melding of accepted ideas and symbolism. His iconoclastic approach was as original as it was radical. His take on religion has been compared to Einstein's idea of science in his last days, the search is for a unifying theory. Joseph Campbell believed all the religions of the world, all the rituals and deities, to be “masks” of the same transcendent truth which is “unknowable.” Here we see Campbell as an agnostic, and he also shows his world view to be relativistic at times. He claims Christianity and Buddhism, whether the object is 'Buddha-consciousness' or 'Christ-consciousness,' to be an elevated awareness above “pairs of opposites,” such as right and wrong. Needless to say, many dogmatists dislike him and find his ideas heretical.

"Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names," he often quoted from the Vedas. Joseph Campbell was fascinated by what he viewed as universal sentiments and truths, disseminated through cultures which all featured different manifestations. He wanted to show his idea that Eastern and Western religions are the same on a very basic level, that nobody is right but everyone is searching for the same unknown, and indeed unknowable, answer. He began to look paradoxically at moral systems as both incorrect and necessary. Like the postmodern relativists he believes such things as 'right' and 'wrong' are just contrived ideas, but also like them he understands a moral system is necessary from the perspective of a student of mythology and psychology. In this way he melds also the concepts of modernism andpostmodernism, although some interpretations place him as a postmodernist before his time.

He believed all spirituality is searching for the same unknown transcendent force from which everything came and into which everything will return. He refers to this transcendent force as the connotation, the various metaphors being the various deities and objects of spirituality in the world. He viewed religion as defense mechanism which attempts to explain religious experience. Again here contemporary skeptics take notice, as what Campbell refers to as 'religious experience' may just be functions of brain chemistry, not necessarily any 'transcendent force.'

Influence of his works

Joseph Campbell was so fascinated by the notion that all the myths, spiritual systems and organized religions were the same he hoped one day all the earth would unite under one. He voiced concern about global instability and wished to see all humankind unite. Of course this again raises criticism, as who’s to say whose religion, or using Campbellian terminology 'connotation,' would be chosen. But to Campbell this wouldn’t matter as he saw all as of equal, with no preference at least in regard to which one is more 'right' than the other.

Heroes play a crucial role in his comparative study. In 1949 he published The Hero With A Thousand Faces which set out the idea of the monomyth, a shortened version of all the archetypal patterns Campbell recognized. It should note that most myths only contain a few but not all of these while at least two franchise-films, (Star Wars and The Matrix) exemplified all of Campbell’s archetypal patterns in the order he presented. Heroes were important to him because heroes are important for societies and often blend in with the mythology of a society. Campbell recognized societies must have heroes to incarnate the society’s 'values.' Again this seems paradoxical, as he agreed with the relativistic notion that there is no such thing as universal 'values,' but the fact that a society requires accepted 'values' does not make them universal, or objectively true. After long study, autodidacticism and contemplation, he wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces and twenty more books. He taught at Sarah Lawrence College from 1934 to 1972 and then he lectured across the country. He went on interviews on NPR, and then he went on PBS to converse with Bill Moyers. Regardless of criticisms, Joseph Campbell has incontestably had a great influence on contemporary world-view and religious debate. When the conversations between Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers aired on PBS, first in 1988, The Power of Myth series changed many lives. To many what Joseph Campbell was saying was either different and interesting, or different and blasphemous. Either way, Joseph Campbell was very original and very influential, perhaps one of the most influential Americans of the late twentieth century.

Seminal Joseph Campbell quote; “Follow your bliss.”

Campbell believed that at the heart of every hero myth was just that message. After the Power of Myth series aired it became a bit of a catch-phrase. Many agree with Campbell’s metaphysical argument that it is a conscious agreement with transcendent forces, but it has been likened by critics as a modern-day “Do what thou wilt,” as Aleister Crowley said, “shall be the only law.”

Joseph Campbell explains his maxim with Bill Moyers;

BILL MOYERS: Do you ever have the sense of... being helped by hidden hands?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a result of invisible hands coming all the time - namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.

Campbell also encourages others to read all the myths of the ages and peoples as he did.

"Read myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get the message of the symbols. Read other people's myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts -- but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message."

Works

The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949) is one of his best-known books: it discusses the monomyth cycle of the hero's journey, a pattern found in many cultures. His four-volume work The Masks of God covers the world of mythology.

Campbell collaborated with Bill Moyers on the PBS series The Power of Myth, which was first broadcast in 1988, the year after Campbell's death in Honolulu. They also jointly authored the book The Power of Myth associated with the series.

A recent compilation of many of his ideas is titled Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor. The book explains that religion and mythology are actually the same thing and he puts religious symbology in its proper mythological context. One of Campbell's favorite quotes is that "...Mythology is often thought of as 'other peoples' religions and religion can be defined as mis-interpreted mythology." He explains that by understanding religious symbols not as historical facts but rather as mythological images, the symbols can take on deeper and more-believable meanings for many people.

George Lucas is said to have based the Star Wars series on ideas in The Hero With a Thousand Faces and other works of Campbell.

Biography

Books

ISBN0140194401

DVD/Discography

External links

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