Joseph Campbell

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. His work covers many aspects of the human experience, including mythology, religion, literature, and psychology.

Campbell’s best-known work is his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), in which he discusses his theory of the hero’s journey, an archetype shared by world mythologies, termed the monomyth. He also wrote extensively on the symbolism of mythology, and his work has been influential in a wide range of fields, including psychology, philosophy, literature, and film. He died in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1987 and is buried there.

Campbell and Mythology

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 in New York City, 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 1924, Campbell traveled to Europe with his family. On the ship during his return trip, he encountered the messiah elect of the Theosophical Society, Jiddu Krishnamurti; they discussed Indian philosophy, sparking in Campbell an interest in Hindu and Indian thought. 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.

Campbell’s view of mythology was by no means static and his books describe in detail how mythologies evolved through time, reflecting the realities in which each society had to adjust. Here is an excerpt from one of his works:

“As the first agricultural societies evolved into the high civilizations of Mesopotamia and Babylonia, the observation of the stars inspired them with the idea that life on earth must also follow a similar mathematically predetermined pattern in which individual beings are but mere participants in an eternal cosmic play. The king was symbolized by the Sun with the golden crown as its main metaphor, while his court were the orbiting planets.”

Although regularly labeled a Jungian, Campbell differed from the Swiss psychologist and psychoanalyst in many ways. He analyzed the personality in largely Jungian terms but rejected the balance Jung saw between the conscious and unconscious mind. He did disagree with Sigmund Freud and this quote form Campbell is a popular one:

“Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. The only one to blame is oneself.”

Throughout his life, Joseph Campbell was deeply engaged in the study of the Grail Quests and Arthurian legends of the European Middle Ages. He also studied Greek myth.

While Campbell was a Christian, it has been noted that the stages of the Hero’s journey that he describes matches the stages of a Buddha quest. He also noted that the life and Death of Jesus is an example of the Hero’s Journey, as in this quote:

“If we think of the Crucifixion only in historical terms, we lose the symbols immediate reference to ourselves.”

Campbell’s Writing Career

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 are recorded in his published journals Baksheesh and Brahman. n 1944, he co-authored (with Henry Morton Robinson) the book “A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake,” a work of literary criticism.

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. He also wrote and edited over a dozen books in the Bollingen series. A 1972 book titled “Myths to Live By” is a collection of Campbell’s essays. With The Mythic Image (1974), Campbell turned to the origins of myth. His argument is that the human unconscious mind, particularly dreams, forms 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 a 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.

Beyond Writing

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 television program was also released. In The First Storytellers, part of his Power of Myth series, Campbell talks with co-host Bill Moyers about the function of story as a means of communicating culture and values. 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.

Final Word

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 the mythologist 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.

Campbell’s work has been influential in a wide range of fields. His ideas have been used by psychologists such as Carl Jung and James Hillman to understand the human psyche. They have also been used by philosophers such as Mircea Eliade and Joseph Needham to understand the nature of myth and religion. In addition, Campbell’s work has been influential in literature and film. His ideas have been used by authors such as James Joyce, J.R.R. Tolkien, and George Lucas of Star Wars fame to create their own stories. Luke Skywalker is a prime example of the hero of myth. And George Lucas is not the only one to rely on Campbell’s work. Hollywood owes much to Joseph Campbell.

Campbell believed that in the modern world, the function served by formal, traditional mythological systems has been taken on by individual creators such as artists and philosophers. In the works of some of his favorites, such as Thomas Mann, Pablo Picasso, and James Joyce, he saw mythological themes that could serve the same life-giving purpose that mythology had once played

In 1991, Campbell’s widow, choreographer Jean Erdman, worked with Campbell’s longtime friend and editor, Robert Walter, to create the Joseph Campbell Foundation.

Initiatives undertaken by the JCF include The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell, a series of books and recordings that aims to pull together Campbell’s myriad-minded work; the Erdman Campbell Award; the Mythological RoundTables, a network of local groups around the globe that explore the subjects of comparative mythology, psychology, religion, and culture; and the collection of Campbell’s library and papers housed at the OPUS Archives and Research Center.

Campbell’s work remains relevant today. In 2022, Filmmaker Brett Morgen has credited Joseph Campbell and The Hero With a Thousand Faces in creating his latest documentary film.

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A shorter version of his article was previously published in the Community Communique and written by Robert Petrovich in 2001.