Influences on Campbell
Art, literature, philosophy
Campbell often referred to the work of modern writers James Joyce and Thomas Mann in his lectures and writings, as well as to the art of Pablo Picasso. He was introduced to their work during his stay as a graduate student in Paris. Campbell eventually corresponded with Mann.
The works of German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche had a profound effect on Campbell's thinking; he quoted their writing frequently, often in his own translations from the original German.The "follow your bliss" philosophy attributed to Campbell following the original broadcast of
The Power of Myth (see below) derives from the Hindu Upanishads; however, Campbell was possibly also 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 a thing that I wanted to do in all my life.' That is a man who never followed his bliss."
Psychology, myth, anthropology
Campbell's thinking on universal symbols and stories was deeply influenced by James Frazer (
The Golden Bough), Adolf Bastian, and Otto Rank (
The Myth of the Birth of the Hero), among others.
Anthropologist Leo Frobenius was important to Campbell’s view of cultural history.
Campbell's ideas regarding myth and its relation to the human psyche are dependent in part on the pioneering work of Sigmund Freud, but in particular 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 Tibetan Book of the Dead). In his book
The Mythic Image, Campbell quotes Jung's statement about the
Bardo Thodol, 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."
In 1940 Campbell attended a lecture by Professor Heinrich Zimmer at Columbia University; the two men became friends, and Campbell looked upon Zimmer as a mentor. 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 road map 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 Jung's interpretative techniques 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.
Comparative religion
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 to
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 while examining their local manifestations. 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 Campbell's idea of the monomyth (as stated above, a word borrowed from Joyce), outlining some of the archetypal patterns that 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 relation between the two.
James Joyce; Navajo rites
The first published work that bore Campbell's name was
Where the Two Came to Their Father (1943), a Navajo ceremony that was performed by singer (medicine man) Jeff King and recorded by artist and ethnologist Maud Oakes, recounting the story of two young heroes who go to the hogan of their father, the Sun, and return with the power to destroy the monsters that are plaguing their people. Campbell provided a commentary. He would use this tale through the rest of his career to illustrate both the universal symbols and structures of human myths and the particulars ("folk ideas") of Native American stories.
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 (1949), discusses what Campbell called the monomyth ... the cycle of the journey of the hero ... a term that he borrowed directly from Joyce's
Finnegans Wake.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Originally titled
How to Read a Myth, and based on the introductory class on mythology that he had been teaching at Sarah Lawrence College,
The Hero with a Thousand Faces was published in 1949 as Campbell's first foray as a solo author; it established his name outside of scholarly circles and remains, arguably, his most influential work to this day. Not only did it introduce the concept of the hero's journey to popular thinking, but it also began to popularize the very idea of comparative mythology itself...the study of the human impulse to create stories and images that, though they are clothed in the motif of a particular time and place, draw nonetheless on universal, eternal theme. Campbell asserted:
Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives becomes dissolved.
The Masks of God
Campbell's 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.
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 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 evident in the East in Buddhism, Vedanta, and philosophical Taoism; and in the West in the Mystery Cults, Platonism, Christianity and Gnosticism.
Only the first two volumes were completed at the time of Campbell's death. Both of these volumes 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.
Posthuma: Collected Works
The
Collected Works of Joseph Campbell series is a project initiated by the Joseph Campbell Foundation to release new, authoritative editions of Campbell's published and unpublished writing, as well as audio and video recordings of his lectures. Working with New World Library, Acorn Media UK and Roomful of Sky Records, as of 2009 the project has produced seventeen titles. The series' executive editor is Robert Walter, and the managing editor is David Kudler.
Print titles
- Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor (2001)...An exploration of the myths and symbols of the Judeo-Christian tradition
The first title in the series, this book compiled many of Campbell's ideas on the mythic underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In it he 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 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.
- The Inner Reaches of Outer Space (2002)...The last book that Campbell completed in his lifetime explores the nascent mythology of the modern age.
- The Flight of the Wild Gander (2002)...A collection of some of Campbell's most far-reaching essays
- Baksheesh and Brahman: Asian Journals...India (2003)...The thoughtful diary of Campbell's life-changing trip to India
- Sake and Satori: Asian Journals...Japan (2002)...The continuation of Campbell's 1955 trip, including his eye-opening experiences in Japan
- Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal (2003)...An exploration of the central myths and symbols of the great Asian religions
- The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work (2003)...A wonderful series of conversations between Campbell and many of his associates and friends
- Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: Joseph Campbell on the Art of James Joyce (2004)...An exploration of the mythic impact of the 20th century's greatest novelist
- A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (2005)...co-written with Henry Morton Robinson and newly edited by Joyce scholar Edmond Epstein, this remains the seminal analysis of Joyce's masterpiece
- Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation (2005)...In this work, Campbell explores myth as it pertains to the individual
- The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959—1987 (2007)...A new volume of Campbell's far-ranging, thought-provoking essays
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces (2008)...A new edition of Campbell's classic exploration of the universal monomyth of the Hero Journey, and of its cosmic mirror, the Cosmogonic Cycle
Video titles
- The Hero's Journey (film): A Biographical Portrait...This film, made shortly before his death in 1987, follows Campbell's personal quest...a pathless journey of questioning, discovery, and ultimately of delight and joy in a life to which he said, "Yes"
- Sukhavati: A Mythic Journey...This hypnotic and mesmerizing film is a deeply personal, almost spiritual, portrait of Campbell
- Mythos...This series comprises talks that Campbell himself believed summed up his views on "the one great story of mankind."
Audio titles
- The Collected Lectures of Joseph Campbell, Series I...Recordings of lectures from Campbell's early years as a public speaker
- Mythology and the Individual
- The Collected Lectures of Joseph Campbell, Series II & III...In the coming years, the Joseph Campbell Foundation plans to release another sixty hours of recordings of Campbell at his finest, exploring myth, religion, history, literature and personal growth as only he could.