God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all categories of human thought. . . . It’s as simple as that. —Joseph Campbell, in an interview with Gary Abrams of the Los Angeles Times

 

Joseph Campbell was born on March 26, 1904, into a staunch Roman Catholic family and enjoyed an upper-class upbringing in New York state. He undertook academic studies at Columbia University and at the University of Munich, where he studied Sanskrit and Indo-European philology. In 1934 he began his teaching career at Sarah Lawrence College and soon after married dancer and choreographer Jean Erdman. Between the years 1949 and 1983, he published his major works on comparative mythology. He died in Honolulu, Hawaii, on October 31, 1987.

Campbell was first drawn to mythology by his interest in Native Americans. After seeing Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show at Madison Square Garden, he read every book he could find about American Indian tribes and toured the American Museum of Natural History whenever he had time, enthralled by the Indian exhibits there. In prep school he studied the ancient cultures of the South Pacific, and by the time he entered college he had a wide knowledge of folklore and mythology. At Columbia University, Campbell earned degrees in English and medieval literature, and as a member of the university’s track team he traveled to California, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, and Cuba. On one of those trips, a meeting with Jiddu Krishnamurti sparked his interest in Hinduism and Buddhism. Campbell dropped out of the doctoral program at Columbia when he was told that mythology was not a fit subject for a dissertation.

For several years after his exodus from Columbia, Campbell studied mythology on his own. In 1927, on an excursion to Paris to study Old French and Provençal, Campbell encountered James Joyce’s labyrinthine novel Ulysses. When he got to chapter 3, “Proteus,” he was puzzled by the opening: Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read. . . .” He took his enigma to Sylvia Beach, at Shakespeare and Co., 12 Rue de l’Orlean, in a high state of academic indignation, and she gave him the clues he needed to read it. This conversation changed his career. What Campbell discovered became the foundation of his work in comparative mythology and moved him to explore Joyce’s literary creations for sixty years. When he returned to the United States, he spent a year and a half in a cabin in the woods around Woodstock, New York, reading scholarly works on mythology, legends, and folklore. In 1932 he took a teaching position with his old preparatory school. A year later he sold his first short story, “Strictly Platonic.” The next year he moved to Sarah Lawrence College where he taught literature until 1972.

During his years as a teacher, Campbell produced a massive body of work in the fields of comparative mythology, folklore, and religion. He began in the 1940s by editing the unfinished works of the late Heinrich Zimmer, a noted lecturer in Indology at Columbia, who was his friend and mentor. After ten years of work on Indian art and philosophy, Campbell made a long-postponed journey to Asia, which became another turning point in his life. His six months of disillusionment and revelation in India is recorded in his published journals Baksheesh and Brahman.

Campbell’s first book as sole author, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), took him four years to write. In this work, Campbell attempted to unite the world’s mythologies into a “monomyth,” the single underlying story that all myths tell. He found that story to be an outline of the proper way for humans to live. Early reviewers were put off by the volume’s mystical tone. In the four-volume work The Masks of God (1959–1968), Campbell surveyed the world’s mythologies while he argued on behalf of his idea of the monomyth. The first volume begins with the religious ideas of the Bronze Age. The second turns to the East to trace the emergence of the particularly Asian idea of reincarnation and transcendence of the ego. The third begins with the prehistoric belief in a mother-goddess and follows the course of Western religious belief down through the centuries. In the concluding volume, Campbell shifts his attention away from the anonymous myths of the past toward the personal myths of the present created by artists and writers such as Dante, Joyce and T.S. Eliot, and argues the need for a new mythology that speaks to the entire human race in modern terms. With The Mythic Image (1974), Campbell turned to the origins of myth. His argument is that the human unconscious mind, particularly dreams, form the basis of all mythology. Four hundred illustrations collected from all over the world and ranging from prehistoric cave paintings to avant-garde works of the present day are used as evidence of the relationship between myth and dream in humankind’s artistic creations. Swiss psychologist Carl Jung had earlier raised the same point with his theory of the Collective Unconscious. In The Mythic Image, Campbell gave the theory clear and splendid demonstration. In 1983 Campbell published the first of a planned six-volume series titled Historical Atlas of World Mythology. Campbell meant this work to relate the mythological history of the world in a single, all-encompassing narrative. The intended six volumes of the Atlas were never completed.

In addition to writing, Campbell produced a number of video interviews with Bill Moyers for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television special The Power of Myth. These interviews, broadcast together in 1988 as a six-part series, drew an audience of 2.5 million people per episode. A best-selling book based on the televison program was also released. A second PBS program, Transformations of Myth through Time, collected thirteen of Campbell’s lectures on the evolution of myth. In 1989 the series of lectures was released in book form.

Since Campbell’s death in 1987, several volumes of interviews, essays, and other works have been published. An Open Life is the transcription of ten years of interviews on diverse subjects. A more intimate collection of interviews is contained in The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Works. Campbell’s exposure via PBS made him known to more people after his death than while he was alive. This exposure transformed him into the rarest of intellectuals in American life: the serious thinker who is embraced by popular culture. He will be remembered for his efforts to rediscover, for a world deprived of meaning, the fundamental mythological pattern of the human spirit.

Robert Petrovich, 2001

This article was previously published in the Community Communique. Used with permission of the author.