Joseph Campbell

Its life

Joseph Campbell was born and grew in the town of New York in a catholic family of upper middle class. Child, Campbell was discovered a passion for the Amerindian culture thanks to his father who took it along to visit the American natural history museum of natural history of New York. He very quickly became an expert in many aspects of the Amerindian company, and more specifically in his mythology. That worked the perpetual passion of Campbell for the myths and related (tales, legends…). He noticed thus that they had apparently all of the common features and that whatever the culture to which they belong. With the university of Dartmouth, he studied biology and mathematics, before going to study the social sciences with the university of Columbia, where he obtained a license in English Littérature and a control in medieval Littérature, respectively in 1925 and 1927. He was also an excellent athlete and gained several races of athletics.

After having completed her control, Campbell decided to give up the idea to obtain a doctorate; in the place, he preferred to isolate himself in wood located at the neighborhoods from New York, devoting himself mainly to the reading lasting the five years which followed. According to the poet and writer Robert Bly, one of his/her friends, Campbell had developed a systematic program enabling him to read during nine hours each day. Campbell considered that it is during this period that it received its true education, and it is at this time that it started to develop its single vision on the nature of the life.

He studied then the old French and the Sanskrit at the university of Paris like to that of Munich. He learned French, German, Japanese and the Sanskrit in addition to his native language. Campbell started her literary career by publishing posthumous articles of the specialist in the Indian Culture, Heinrich Zimmer. Then it Co-writing with Henry Morton Robinson, has skeleton key to Finnegans Wake , for which generations of readers who broke the head on the work of James Joyce were grateful.

Campbell also studied the ideas of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, a colleague of Sigmund Freud. The work of Campbell on mythology sought to connect the apparently disparate postures of Jung and Freud like their debate pivot on the Inconscient collective. Campbell published the first retranscription of a conference of Eranos, a think tank studying spirituality, and helped to found the Bollingen editions of Princeton, taking again the work of the foundation Bollingen, an organization of literary Mécénat. Another dissenting member of the circle of Freud which influenced Campbell was Wilhelm Stekel (1868 - 1939), which was the first to apply the designs of Freud to the dreams, imaginations of the human spirit, and the Inconscient with many fields like anthropology or the literature.

Campbell was professor at the university Sarah Lawrence of 1934 to 1972. It Maria in 1938 with her pupil, Jean Erdman, a dancer. He died in 1987, with Honolulu.

The original Voice of Joseph Campbell

Campbell was of agreement with the texts of Jung explaining psychological phenomena, those calling upon the prototypes. But Campbell was not agreement with Carl Jung on all the points, and had her own convictions which were rather original. In the difference of Jung, Campbell believed neither in astrology, nor with the Synchronicité. The originality of the theory and the interpretation of Campbell lies in fusion between the generally accepted ideas and the symbolism. Its approach iconoclast was as original as radical and its standpoint on the religion was compared with the scientific work Einstein during its last days: the search for a unifying theory. Indeed, Joseph Campbell believed that all religions of the world, that all the Rituel S and the deities, were only the “Masque S” of only one and even transcendent truth which would be “insaisissable" (unknowable). He described the Christianisme and the Bouddhisme, that the object is “the conscience of Buddha” or “the conscience of the Christ”, as being a level of perception above the “binary oppositions” such as the good and the evil. Useless to say that many integrist monks regard its ideas as heretics.

“The truth is single, but the wise ones name it many ways”, is a sentence drawn from the Veda S which he liked to quote. Campbell was fascinated by what he saw like Sentiment S and universal Vérité S, to express itself in various forms through the cultures. He sought to show that the Eastern and Western religions are identical on a basic level, and that nobody is in truth, but that everyone seeks the same unknown answer, and who seems to be imperceptible. It was interested in different the moral codes, regarding them paradoxically as at the same time incorrect and necessary. Like the postmodern relativists , it saw the good and the evil like highly subjective concepts, but like they, it also understood that a moral system is necessary to somebody studied mythology and psychology. In this way, it succeeded in amalgamating the concepts of the Modernisme and the postmodernism, although some of its interpretations made that it was regarded as a postmodernist before the hour.

In its series in four books, the masks of God ( The Masks off God ), Campbell tried to summarize principal the spiritual stories of the world, in order to support its ideas on " the unit of the species humaine" ; this theory includes the idea that the majority of the systems of beliefs of the world have a common geographical ancestor, on the basis of the fertile meadows of Europe during the Bronze Age then going until the Raising and the fertile Croissant of the Mésopotamie before returning to Europe (and in the Far East), where they mixed with the emergent culture Indo-européenne (Aryens).

It refers to this force as being the connotation of what it called “metaphor”, metaphors being the way in which it named the various divinities and objects of spirituality in the world.

The mythology of the Hero and the monomythe

In its test of 1949, the Hero with the miles and faces ( The Hero with has Thousand Faces ), appeared in French under the title of the Heroes are eternal , Campbell exposes her theory of the monomythe, affirming that all the myths follow the same archetypal diagrams .

Thus all the mythical heroes would begin their tour following a “call to the adventure” - what implies that the hero leaves the environment in which it grew. It will have to then deal with the “guard of the threshold”, first obstacle in its voyage which, once crossed (most of the time with the assistance of a mentor or a spiritual guide), will enable him to penetrate in a more spiritual world - generally represented by a forest sinks, a desert, a cave or even a mysterious island. It will undergo a series of tests there enabling him to exceed its mentor and to finally achieve the object of its search (generally a reconciliation with the father, a sacred union or a Apothéose) symbolically representing the emancipation. It will turn over then at his place completely transfigured by the experiment of its initiatory voyage .

Campbell defends that almost all the mythical heroes, whatever the time and the culture in which they live, follow a course containing at least part of this diagram. In more contemporary works, the trilogies Star Wars , Matrix , and the Lord of the Rings stick very close with this archetypal diagram.

See the article Voyage of the hero

According to Campbell, the heroes have a very important function in the company because they make it possible to convey universal means for émanciper and to open out.

Influences

Its influences

Campbell declared that James Joyce and Thomas Mann was his gurus. ( power of the myth , cassette n°3).

The philosophy of “Follow your happiness” of Campbell was inspired by the Babbitt character, resulting from the news éponyme of Sinclair Lewis, which in the last page of the book, deplores: “Of all my life, never I did not make only one thing which I really wanted! I do not believe to have achieved anything if it is not to have succeeded in remaining. I realize that I did not make half of the quarter of the things that it was possible to me to make. Eh well, perhaps you will achieve more things. I do not know anything of it. But I test a kind of pleasure ashamed of knowing that you knew what you want to do and which to you carried out it. Well, these people here will try to intimidate you, and to lower you. Say to them to go to the devil! I will support you. Take this work with the factory, if it is what you wish. Be not frightened by your family. Not, nor by the inhabitants of Zenith. Nor by yourself, as I was. Advance, old man! The world is with you! ”.

Campbell also referred to the Sanskrit concept of “Sat Chit Ananda” ( Sat (Être); Chit (full conscience); Ananda (bliss)). He declared: “I am unaware of if my conscience is completely conscious or not, and I am unaware of also if what I know of my being is well my own being, then let me cling to my bliss and that will bring both to me.” ( Power of the myth ).

Its influence

Christopher Volger, a Hollywood film writer and producer, wrote a memo of seven pages from now on legendary, an handy guide of the hero to the thousand faces , based on the work of Campbell. The memo of Volger was developed later in a book, The Writer' S Journey , which was used then basic for many Hollywood films which were a certain success, and whose most remarkable was the King Lion of Disney. More recently, it was used by companies of video games in the search of new ideas and techniques for the Scénarimage S and the development of new products. To answer those which would have taken its book like a simple plagiarism or a depreciation of the ideas of Campbell, Volger continuously warned against the fact that its book did not give a “formula” or a “receipt” allowing to undoubtedly write a success. Instead of that, Volger encouraged the writers to make use of the world of the prototypes and the mythical structures like major source of enrichment of their own creation, the creativity of the writing emerging during the process (conscious or unconscious) making it possible to decide which archetypal elements to use, modify, or reject.

George Lucas stated to be supported on the ideas of the book the Hero with the thousand faces as well as of other work of Campbell, to write the history of the saga Star Wars (and more particularly that of the episode IV which corresponds exactly to the diagram campbellien).

The musician and compositrice Tori Amos also recognized the influence which Campbell exerted on the ideas of mythology and the prototypes that it will use in her next albums.

Critical

Shortly after the death of Campbell, Brendan Gill criticized it in an article, “the faces of Joseph Campbell”, published in the New York Review off Books the September 28th 1989, showing it to have political beliefs “reactionaries”. Gill reported that certain colleagues of Campbell at the university Sarah Lawrence had described it as reticent with the idea that the biblical myth was a fiction. A professor of university named Tom Snyder wrote a test in 1991 heading Perceptions of the Myth: Capacity of deception of Joseph Campbell , who showed it to carry out a vendetta against the religions. The theories of Campbell were the target many others critical; the American novelist Kurt Vonnegut turned in derision the point of view of Campbell by describing it as excessively Baroque and by offering his own interpretation of the monomythe, which it named the theory “In the Hole”. It was summarized as follows: “The hero has problems, the hero solves his problems.”

Its work

the hero to the thousand and one faces ( The Hero with has Thousand Faces ) (1949) is one of its most known books: it described there the cycle monomythic of the Voyage of the hero, a model which one finds in many cultures. In another of its works, the masks of God ( The Masks off God ), it covers the world of mythology on four volumes (each one treating one period: primitive, Eastern, Western, and modern).

But what made known Campbell with the general public was her collaboration with the journalist Bill Moyers, of which was born a documentary series diffused on PBS: Joseph Campbell and capacity of the myth , which was diffused for the first time in 1988, the year following the death of Campbell. This series made it possible to present its ideas on the prototypes the greatest number and is regularly repeated on PBS. A book guide, Power of the myth ( The Power off Myth ), containing a retranscription partial of their talks, was published shortly after.

A posthumous book published in 2001, entitled Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor , proposes a compilation of tests not published treating mainly religions Judeo-Christians: it explains there why religion and mythology are in fact only one and even thing and replaces the religious symbols in a mythological context. One of the favorite quotations of Campbell was: “Mythology is often regarded as being the religion “of the others” whereas the religion can be defined as being mythology badly interprétée". He explains why by interpreting the religious symbols not like historical facts but rather like mythological images, these symbols can take significances much major and credible for much of people.

External bonds

Foundation Joseph Campbell
the library of Joseph Campbell in Pacifica Graduate Institute
Center of the history and the symbol
the voyage of the hero of Joseph Campbell with MonoMyth.org
the cycle of the hero in the saga Star Wars
Origins of Star Wars - Joseph Cambell

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