Life

Campbell was born and raised in New York City in an upper middle class Roman Catholic 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. At Dartmouth College he studied biology and mathematics, but later transferred to Columbia University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1925 and a Master of Arts degree in 1927.

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.

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, Japanese, and Sanskrit in addition to English. Campbell began his literary career by editing the posthumous papers of Indologist Heinrich Zimmer.

Campbell studied the ideas of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who had been a colleague of Sigmund Freud. Campbell also edited the first Eranos conference papers and helped to found Princeton's Bollingen Press. Another dissident member of Freud's circle who influenced Campbell was Wilhelm Stekel (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. Though, much of this work is regarded as complete fallicy by the general public.

Campbell was a professor at Sarah Lawrence College from 1934 until 1972. He married his student, Jean Erdman, a dancer, in 1938. He died in 1987, in Honolulu.

Select works

James Joyce was an important influence upon Campbell, particularly the novel, Ulysses. Indeed, Campbell's first important book A Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake (1939), was based upon Joyce's final work.

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. In addition to Freud and Carl Jung, this text was also influenced by Arnold Van Gennep's The Rites of Passage.

His four-volume work The Masks of God covers the world of mythology.

Campbell's widest popular recognition came with his collaboration 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. The series presented his ideas on archetypes to millions and remains a staple on PBS. A companion book, The Power of Myth, containing partial transcripts of their conversations, was released shortly afterward.

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.

Campbell's original voice

Campbell relied on the texts of Jung as an 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.” 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,

"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, and that nobody is right but everyone is searching for the same unknown, and indeed unknowable, answer. His fascination dealt with purely surface level comparisons, which in most cases, completely contradict each other when one examines the deeper meanings or compares literal facts between religions. He began to look paradoxically at moral systems as both incorrect and necessary. Like the postmodern relativists he believed such things as 'right' and 'wrong' are just contrived ideas. In one of his interviews, he goes on to discuss how the horrors of the world, such as greed, murder, and racism, are neccessary, and should not be rejected, but indeed embraced as part of the world. In this way he melded also the concepts of modernism and postmodernism, although some interpretations place him as a postmodernist before his time.

In his four-volume series of books "The Masks of God", Campbell tried to summarize the main spiritual threads of the world, in support of his ideas on the "unity of the race of man"; tied in with this was the idea that most of the belief systems of the world 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.

He believed all spirituality is searching for the same unknown force (which he spoke of as an immanent, rather than transcendent, force, or that which is both within and without, as opposed to only without) from which everything came, in which everything currently exists, and into which everything will return. He referred to this force as the connotation of what he called "metaphors", the metaphors being the various deities and objects of spirituality in the world. Any information to the contrary was regarded as "ridiculous" and ignored, so that what remains may be forcibly pushed into this worldview.

Hero mythology and the monomyth

Heroes played a crucial role in his comparative studies. In 1949 The Hero with a Thousand Faces set out the idea of the monomyth, a streamlined version of all the archetypal patterns Campbell recognized (Campbell's archivist at the Pacifica Graduate Institute says he borrowed the term from James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake). The monomyth involves the hero receiving a "call to adventure" – to leave the ordinary world which he has psychologically or spiritually outgrown. After passing "threshold guardians" (often with the aid of a wise mentor or spirit guide) the hero enters a dreamlike world – generally a dark forest, a desert, an underworld or a mysterious island. After a series of trials in which the hero eventually surpasses his mentor, the hero achieves the object of his quest (often an atonement with the father, a sacred marriage or an apotheosis) before returning to his homeland, bringing with him a spiritual boon. Campbell wrote that almost all hero myths, throughout history and across cultures, can be shown to contain at least a subset of these patterns. In contemporary popular culture, three film series, Star Wars, The Matrix, and The Lord of the Rings (along with Tolkien's original The Lord of the Rings trilogy of novels) hew very closely to Campbell’s archetypal pattern.

Heroes were important to Campbell because they conveyed, to him, universal truths about how one should live one's life and about an individual's role in society.

Influence

Campbell's ideas regarding myth and its relationship to the human psyche are heavily dependent on the work of Carl Jung, whose studies of human psychology, as previously mentioned, heavily influenced Campbell. The Jungian method of dream interpretation, which is heavily reliant on symbolic interpretation, is closely related to Campbell's conception of myth: “Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths." ("Sukhavati")

Campbell's "Follow your bliss" philosophy was influenced by the Sinclair Lewis character Babbitt, who, in the book's last page, laments, "I've never done a single thing I've wanted to in my whole life! I don't know if I've accomplished anything except just get along. I figure out I've made about a quarter of an inch out of a possible hundred rods. Well, maybe you'll carry things on further. I don't know. But I do get a kind of sneaking pleasure out of the fact that you knew what you wanted to do and did it. Well, those folks in there will try to bully you, and tame you down. Tell 'em to go to the devil! I'll back you. Take your factory job, if you want to. Don't be scared of the family. No, nor

Campbell also referenced the Sanskrit concept of "Sat Chit Ananda". Sat (Being) Chit (Full Consciousness) Ananda (Rapture). He said, "I don't know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don't know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being." (The Power of Myth)

Campbell himself has influenced many writers, particularly those in the film industry. Chris Vogler, a Hollywood film producer and writer, created a now-legendary 7-page company memo, A Practical Guide to The Hero With a Thousand Faces, based on Campbell's work. Vogler's memo was later developed into a book, The Writer's Journey, which later became the basis for a number of successful Hollywood films, most notably, Disney's The Lion King. More recently, it has been taken up by computer game companies in search of new ideas and techniques for storyboarding and developing new products. Responding to those who would view his book as mere plagiarism or debasement of Campbell's complex ideas, Vogler has continually warned against viewing his book as a simple "formula" or "recipe" for writing success. Instead, Vogler encourages writers to delve into the world of archetypes and mythic structures as a deep source of enrichment for their own creative work. Creativity in writing emerges during the (conscious and unconscious) processes of deciding which archetypal elements to use, transmute, or discard.

George Lucas based the Star Wars series on ideas in The Hero With a Thousand Faces and other works of Campbell. Indeed, The Power of Myth, the 1987 series of interviews with Bill Moyer were filmed at Lucas' Skywalker Ranch. During these interviews, 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 contemporary times. Moyers and Lucas later film an interview released as the, Mythology of Star Wars with George Lucas & Bill Moyers in 1999 to futher discuss the impact of Campbell's work on Lucas' films . 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 Mythk which discussed the ways in which Campbell's work shaped the Star Wars films . A companion guide of the same name was published in 1997.

Musician and composer Tori Amos has also acknowledged the influence of Campbell in the ideas on mythology and archetypes she employs on her album projects.

Quotes

• “This is an essential experience of any mystical realization. You die to your flesh and are born to your spirit. You identify yourself with the consciousness and life of which your body is but the vehicle. You die to the vehicle and become identified in your consciousness with that of which the vehicle is the carrier. And that is the God.” - Tape 4, Power of Myth.

• "The one radiance shines through all things." - Tape 4, Power of Myth.

• "Art is the clothing of a revelation" - Transformations of Myth Through Time

• “Participate joyfully in the sorrows of life” - this was not an endorsement of masochism, but rather a recognition that life contains hardship and an individual should embrace the experience of being alive by living affirmatively in the face of inevitable sorrow and suffering. This was an echo of a Buddhist teaching that calls for "joyful participation in the sorrows of the world."

• “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. Campbell intended it to mean that one should follow the natural order and cycles of life, though, like Aleister Crowley's “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” it has been misunderstood by critics as a call to craven libertinism.

• "I don’t have to have faith, I have had experience."

Joseph Campbell explains his maxim to 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.

• "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."

Criticism

Soon after Campbell's death, Brendan Gill criticized him in an article, "The Faces of Joseph Campbell," published in the New York Review of Books on September 28, 1989, accusing him of "reactionary" political beliefs. A National University professor named Tom Snyder wrote an essay in 1991 entitled "Myth Perceptions: Joseph Campbell's Power of Deceit" that accused him of launching a single-minded vendetta against organized religion.

Campbell's scholarship has also come under attack; and the American novelist Kurt Vonnegut satirized Campbell's views as being excessively baroque by offering his interpretation of the monomyth, called the "In The Hole" theory; loosely defined as "The hero gets into trouble. The hero gets out of trouble."

A few years after his death, some scholars accused Campbell of anti-Semitism. Robert Segal, a theology professor at England's University of Lancaster, once suggested that "nearly all of references to Jews and Judaism are disdainful and hostile." ("Joseph Campbell on Jews and Judaism." Religion Volume 22, Issue 2, April 1992: 151-170.) Later in Segal's article, Segal suggests that Campbell's "dislike of Judaism" stems, at least in part, from his general dislike of Western religions.

Others disagree. Stephen and Robin Larsen, the authors of the biography "Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind," (2002) comment on what they refer to as "the so called anti-Semitic charge" (p.x) stating 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" (p.x).

Bibliography of works by Campbell

Books

• Campbell, Joseph and Henry Morton Robinson. A Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake, 1939 (reprint 1961).
• The Hero with a Thousand Faces Princeton University Press; (1948) (Reprint edition 1972) ISBN 0691017840
• The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion-New World Library (Reprint Edition 2002) ISBN 1577312090
• The Masks of God: Creative Mythology (Masks of God) Penguin Books; Reissue edition (1995) ISBN 0140194401
• Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal (Collected Work of Joseph Campbell Series) New World Library (2003) ISBN 1577314034
• Myths to Live by Penguin Books; Reprint edition (1993) ISBN 0140194614
• Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: On the Art of James Joyce By Joseph Campbell, Edmund L. Epstein, Joseph Campbell Foundation New World Library (2004) ISBN 1577314069
• Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation New World Library (2004) ISBN 1577314719

• Creative Mythology New York: Arkana (1991) ISBN 0140194401
• Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor New World Library (2001) ISBN 1577312023
• Transformations of Myth Through Time Perennial; 1st edition (1990) ISBN 0060964634

Books based upon interviews with Campbell

• Cousineau, Phil and Stuart L. Brown (eds.). The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work. New World Library; 1st New World edition (2003) ISBN 1577314042.
• Moyers, Bill and Joseph Campbell. The Power of Myth. Anchor; Reissue edition (1991) ISBN 0385418868

DVD/Discography

• Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth (1988)
• Joseph Campbell - Mythos (2002)
• Sukhavati - Place of Bliss: A Mythic Journey with Joseph Campbell (1998)
• Joseph Campbell - The Hero's Journey (1997)

Secondary Sources

General

• Golden, Kenneth L. Uses of Comparative Mythology: Essays on the Work of Joseph Campbell. New York: Garland, 1992.
• Harris, Stephen L. and Gloria Platzner. Classical Mythology: Images and Insights, third edition. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing, Co., 2001.
• Jones, Steven Swann. The Fairy Tale: The Magic Mirror of the Imagination. New York: Routledge, 2002.
• Larsen, Stephen and Robin Larsen. Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2002.
• Vogler, Christopher. The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, second edition. Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 1998.

Books and articles critical of Campbell

• Robert Ellwood, The Politics of Myth: A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell
• Ford, Clyde W. The Hero with an African Face: Mythic Wisdom of Traditional Africa. New York: Bantam, 2000.
• Manganaro, Marc. Myth, Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority: A Critique of Frazer, Eliot, Frye, and Campbell. New Haven: Yale, 1992.
• Daniel C. Noel, editor, Paths to the Power of Myth
• Pearson, Carol and Katherine Pope. The Female Hero in American and British Literature. New York: R.R. Bowker, 1981.
• (Article contesting George Lucas's claim that Star Wars was influenced by Campbell).
• Brendan Gill from New York Review of Books, September 28, 1989

Defenses of Campbell

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