 Joseph Campbell, circa 1984 | |
| Born | Joseph John Campbell March 26, 1904 White Plains, New York, United States |
|---|---|
| Died | October 30, 1987 (aged 83) Honolulu, Hawaii, United States |
| Occupation | Scholar |
| Nationality | American |
Childhood and education
Joseph Campbell was born and raised in White Plains, New York 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 also 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).
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 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 (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.
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell
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