SOURCE: Ellwood, Robert. “Joseph Campbell and the New Quest for the Holy Grail.” In The Politics of Myth: A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell, pp. 127-201. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Ellwood provides a biographical and critical study of Campbell and his work, and traces his literary and ideological development.]

“THE SAVANT AS REACTIONARY”

Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) was probably the best known of all interpreters of myth to late twentieth-century Americans, thanks to a series of learned but highly readable books, assiduous lecture-hall performances, and above all his posthumous PBS appearances with Bill Moyers. The response to that series of six interviews was remarkable. As Mary R. Lefkowitz put it: “On television Joseph Campbell was the embodiment of the ideal academic: gentle, fatherly, informative, reassuring, unworldly, spiritual, and articulate without being incomprehensible. He was knowledgeable about what we didn't have time (or inclination) to discover for ourselves, pleasantly remote, and (unlike most of nontelevision professors) entertaining. Campbell could tell a good story.”¹

But perhaps Campbell's greatest triumph of all, though an indirect one, was in the overwhelmingly successful series of Star Wars movies, commenced in 1977 and directed by George Lucas. Together with that other science-fiction classic the Star Trek series, these films have created out of science fiction what seems to be the dominant living imaginative mythology of our time, comparable to the role of Arthurian fantasy in Victorian England or Wagner's heroes in Wilhelmine Germany. The sacred atmosphere of the Wagnerian Bayreuth festival in its golden age was reproduced on the opening nights of the Star Wars “Phantom Menace” in 1999, when crowds across the country cheered deafeningly, then settled into reverential stillness save for appropriate hisses and acclamations as the epic ground forward. While of course Campbell cannot be given full credit for this modern myth cycle, George Lucas freely acknowledges the influence of reading that savant's The Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Masks of God. Later, beginning in 1983, the relationship developed into a personal friendship over the last three years of Campbell's life.²

In the older Star Trek, cooperation among a diverse crew was the key to success in saving the galaxy. But in Star Wars the emphasis was more on individual heroism, a theme dear to Joseph Campbell's heart. Those films wonderfully combine ultra “high tech” computers and spaceships with gunfights and combat in one-man fighters reminiscent of a generation of matinee westerns or of World War II dogfights. Then, on a still deeper level of meaning, there came the swordplay of Jedi knights and the solitary quests of dedicated heroes like Luke Skywalker. The fundamental cultural message was that a great society is founded upon great individuals. One should be oneself, fighting for oneself and one's friends and comrades alone, except when freely joining a band of like-minded heroes to lose, or rather transcend, individual separateness in the mystique of a noble cause—which will be the cause of individualism against tyranny. Moreover, many subordinate themes of traditional mythology and folklore, often also themes made famous by Joseph Campbell, appear in the Star Wars cycle: the hero who is of noble blood but doesn't know it (Luke Skywalker), the intelligent robots in the role of the companion animal or faithful “sidekick” like Don Quixote's Sancho Panza.

Furthermore, an almost indefinable quality in Star Wars from the experience of the title frame on makes it like walking into a dream, above all if the film is experienced in the cavernous womb of a great theater with a wide screen. The unforgettable images of huge ships, archetypal monsters and heroes, and otherworldly planets loom into consciousness like denizens of the night. It is as though, along with wanting to make the world safe for individuals, Campbell/Lucas wanted to make it safe for dreams. The association of myth and dream-like mood in Campbell is no accident for, following Jung but if possible even more so, he thought myth and dream, as well as truly great literature, all came from the same place. His storytelling skill told us as much, for like an ancient bard he had the ability to bring the reader or hearer into the world of the myths he retold as into the secret places of one's own dreams, so that for the time the narration was the receiver's subjective as well as outer reality.

The heroic notes in Star Wars are not really about conquest, no more than are those in the Arthurian and Wagnerian cycles of myths. All three epics showed the ultimate futility of grasping for power. Rather, these stories make their way into subjective consciousness because they are about deep-level psychic identities—above all, one's own. Of that deepset individual identity the adventurous individual heroes of all great stories are symbolic vehicles. So Campbell profoundly believed. His message supreme above all was that all myths are really about oneself, one's profoundest identity, the innermost self still waiting to be found and realized. Campbell's conviction was that myths are not past but present, embodying the eternal essence of life.

Something in Campbell's message clearly resonated with the yearnings of the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years. Certainly the appeal of Campbell was rooted in a quality more fundamental than entertainment. When Moyers asked if myths “are stories of our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance,” Campbell replied:

People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That's what it's all finally about, and that's what these clues help us to find within ourselves.³

Campbell could make others believe with him that myths were important because they are vivid and timeless voices of the rapture of life, and clues to the identity of the enraptured self. People respond to people with passionate convictions about human life, and Campbell manifestly cared about human life and about myth—perhaps in that order.

For despite his academic credentials as a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, and though remarkably widely read in mythology, Campbell exhibited limited interest of the usual academic sort in his subject matter. He evinced little concern about mythic variants or philological issues, or even about the cultural or ritual context of his material. He was not really a folklorist, much less an anthropologist; he had started his scholarly career in literature and cultural studies, and always basically approached myth through the eyes of a cultural critic.

For him a myth seemed to be a rather disembodied, timeless story of eternal human significance. It might happen to come from here or there, but in the final analysis all myths are equal and interchangeable—with the possible exception of those of “the Yahweh cult” upon which the Judaic-Christian-Islamic tradition is based, and which Campbell clearly disliked. Otherwise, what myths all say, finally, is that behind all forms there is a Brahmanlike Oneness, and that in moving toward its realization one should “follow one's own bliss”—a saying no doubt capable of interpretation on several levels.

Despite the exoticism of many of Campbell's myths, the importance they gave to the inner experience of a pure and authentic self fitted with that American gnostic strand Harold Bloom detected in the national soul. We have noted Harold Bloom's provocative thesis that American religion is fundamentally gnostic in character; if that is so, this must also help explain Campbell's wide appeal in a culture so formed. Karen L. King in fact earlier had written of Campbell's “American Romanticism,” which held that truth lay in authentic experience of the often alienated but genuine inner self; a view which, she holds, was shared by the ancient gnostics and helped explain Campbell's interest in both the gnostic and romantic traditions.⁴

Robert A. Segal, probably Campbell's most measured and perceptive critic, confirmed that Campbell's draw lay in the “unashamed romanticism” of his theory of myth. Romanticism, along with Enlightenment post-Christianity, was the seedbed of modern mythology, and moreover was a significant strand in that “gnostic” Americanism of political individualism and individual salvation to which Campbell ministered. But Campbell was, if conceivable, even more romantic in spirit than Jung or Eliade. Disdaining any of the pretense to medical or historical science that remained with the two Europeans, he built firmly on the foundation of literary romanticism his equation of feeling-inflected consciousness and cosmic meaning.

For Campbell, a myth was an eternal, not merely a primitive, narrative. Nothing could supersede it, because it is not about protoscientific explanation but about the human condition, which in the last analysis is always expressed metaphorically, and always has to be spoken. Thus for Campbell, according to Segal, myth is indispensable, and the primitives who first bespoke it were really wiser than moderns because they knew implicitly that the metaphors of story tell human things better than the abstractions of science, and they constructed a worldview centered on their stories.⁵

Elsewhere the same commentator, Segal, remarked that actually Campbell “is oddly not much interested in myth—as myth. He is much more interested in human nature, which he simply finds revealed in myths. He sees myths as a repository of the experiences and beliefs of mankind. He is far more concerned with the information myths contain than with myths themselves.”⁶ But while it is easy for academics to disparage such an attitude, this is in fact no more than the approach that most predicants, more concerned with saving the world than with footnotes, take toward their scriptural and other sources, and no doubt represents one legitimate level of hermeneutics.

What of Campbell's social and political views? Although, unlike Jung and Eliade, he never expressed himself fully and explicitly in print on such matters, they were known to acquaintances, and posthumously created something of a furor. The ruckus was essentially started in a 1989 article in the New York Review of Books by Brendan Gill, who claimed to have known Campbell well. Gill complains that, though one might have expected a person given to a lifelong study of the world's diversity of cultures to accept a variety of points of view in his own culture, this Campbell was never able to do—toward minorities, toward feminists, or toward liberal social programs. The mythologist was reportedly anti-Semitic, anti-Black, and in 1940 unable to grasp the threat represented by Hitler. Needless to say, the sixties did not meet with his approval at all, despite his frequent lectures at one of the decade's most celebrated shrines, the Esalen Institute. Brendan Gill commented: “So far was Campbell from applying the wisdom of the ages to the social, political, and sexual turbulence that he found himself increasingly surrounded by that he might have been a member of the Republican Party somewhere to the right of William F. Buckley. He embodied a paradox that I was never able to resolve in his lifetime and that I have been striving to resolve ever since: the savant as reactionary.”⁷ Gill advanced several scraps of evidence, largely anecdotal and hearsay, to support Campbell's reactionism.

As to why Campbell's Moyers interviews were so well received, Gill opined that most viewers assumed his was a liberal message—religiously liberal, at least, with its relativistic openness toward the myths and faiths of many cultures. But, Gill claims, the covert message of the tag-line, “Follow your bliss”—whatever makes you happy—is none other than the philosophy of “Wall Street yuppies, junk-bond dealers,” or of an Ayn Rand type of elitist individualist with no discernible social conscience.

Gill's article was followed by an orgy of letters-to-the-editor activity. Further anecdotal support was given the legend of Campbell's rightist biases. He was called a “romantic fascist” and virulent anti-communist, was said to have objected to admitting Blacks to Sarah Lawrence, and at the time of the Moon landing in 1969 to have remarked that the earth's satellite would be a good place to send all the Jews. One woman recounted that she had been in a class of his at the height of the sixties campus upheavals; Campbell had said he would flunk any student who took part in political activism—and when she did, he made good on his threat

Other correspondents rose as vehemently to the mythologist's defense. One contended that his position at Sarah Lawrence had to be understood in light of the fact that he had fallen foul of a faculty “Marxist clique”—the same academic politics satirized in Mary McCarthy's Groves of Academe. Others argued that “Follow your bliss” has nothing to do with Ayn Rand individualism, much less materialistic selfishness, but the opposite—follow your own way to spiritual liberation.

Admittedly, it is hard to connect the Campbell of the bigot stereotype with a man who for nearly forty years was an immensely popular teacher at Sarah Lawrence, until recently a women's college and one which has long had a reputation as a liberal bastion with a large Jewish enrollment. Yet, if even some of the anecdotes are true, there does appear to be a paradox, the paradox of what Gill called “the savant as reactionary”—in this case, not so much a sophisticated intellectual reactionary, a de Maistre or even a Jung or Eliade, as a smooth articulate nonpolitical mythologist who, off the record, dropped remarks one might have more readily expected to hear from a country club Bourbon. One almost senses a double life.

That perception would not, however, be correct; there were relationships between the mythologist and the political reactionary, and Campbell's political views, though strongly held and on occasion forcefully expressed, were more subtle than might appear on the surface. Campbell loved a good argument, often taking “contrarian” positions at polar opposite to those of his circle or his interlocutors perhaps as much to spark lively debate as anything else. Yet he expressed himself with such charm and contagious intellectual enthusiasm that even many who disagreed strongly with his views remained friends and fans.

At the same time, he held deeply to political and social opinions usually identified as conservative. In his way of thinking, they stemmed from the passionate belief in individual intellectual and artistic liberty that had always been important to him. Thus, in the early fifties, he saw liberty as far more threatened by communism than by the transitory phenomenon of McCarthyism and said so, appalling his more liberal colleagues. In the sixties, despite a long infatuation with pacifism, he supported the Vietnam War on the same antitotalitarian grounds against a hostile intellectual atmosphere. Yet in 1940 and 1941 he had not been able to muster a similar opposition to Hitler, then holding instead to a very high view of the artist's and intellectual's need to remain an independent observer above the political passions of the moment.

WANDERING AND WONDERING

One can begin to understand Joseph Campbell by looking at his life. He was born in 1904 of Irish-American parents, who moved frequently but always in or around New York. Both his grandfathers arrived in the United States as poor immigrants escaping the Irish potato famine, but Joseph's father, Charles W. Campbell, was a successful salesman who raised his family to upper-middle-class status with all the advantages pertaining thereto: travel, entertainment, good private schools. They were a lively bunch, the parents always ready to give Joseph and his younger brother and sister exposure to the art and culture of the world. They went to concerts, plays, and museums, and traveled at home and abroad. Practicing Catholics without excessive piety, his family and Catholic schools doubtless bestowed on Joseph an innate sense of religion and its symbolism, and at the same time presented him with an experience of religious institutionalism he was later to rebel against. The well-rounded family also loved sports, and Joseph had ample opportunity to develop his natural skill as an athlete. The children all made something of themselves: Joseph's brother, Charles Jr., became an actor; his sister, Alice, a sculptor.

Like Eliade, Joseph was both an avid Boy Scout and a precocious reader. While still in grade school, particularly after being taken by his father to Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, he cultivated a strong interest in American Indians. He admired the Native Americans both for their simple way of life and their heroic though futile resistance to the Whites. He imitated Indian practices on camping trips, and by the time he was ten or eleven was reading the voluminous reports of the Bureau of American Ethnography.

After attending Canterbury, an upscale Catholic boarding school, Joseph enrolled as a freshman at Dartmouth in 1921, soon transferring to Columbia. He took English, comparative literature, and languages, and listened to lectures in anthropology by the distinguished Franz Boas. He combined an outstanding academic career with national-class, and some thought potentially Olympic, dash and middle distance running, a sport of course emphasizing individual strength and competitiveness. Handsome and outgoing, he was socially popular as well. In 1923 Joseph and the family returned to the east coast from a trip to California by ship, passing through the Panama Canal and visiting points in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean en route. Campbell's letters and journals indicate he was mainly impressed by the heat, dirt, and flies of that impoverished part of the world, a “culture shock” he was much later to experience again in India, and one much in contrast with the experience Europe was to be for him the following year and later.⁸ But Campbell never really resolved a deep-level conflict between love at a distance for the culture and myths of exotic places, and a virtually physical revulsion at their characteristic lack of order and cleanliness when confronted first-hand.

In 1924, between his junior and senior years, Joseph traveled to Europe with his family, in part to attend the Olympic Games held in Paris that year. As it happened he was on the same ship with the young spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti and a small coterie of supporters. Although Krishnamurti was then being advanced by many in the Theosophical Society as the “vehicle” of a coming World Teacher, Campbell encountered him chiefly as an attractive youth full of unpretentious but deep wisdom. The American toured England with this group, and through his new friends and their circle enjoyed his first real encounter with oriental spirituality. Rosalind Williams, later Rosalind Rajagopal, one of the young “messiah's” youthful companions, gave Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia to Campbell to read on shipboard; he was enthralled by this poetic story of the Buddha's quest for the greatest treasure of all, supreme enlightenment.

Joseph's undergraduate career at Columbia was followed by graduate studies in medieval literature at the same institution. He took an M.A., writing a dissertation on the Grail legend, a theme to which he was to return throughout life. In 1927 Campbell received a munificent grant through Columbia enabling him to spend two years in Europe studying Old French and Provençal in preparation for the Ph.D. he later received from the Sorbonne. Like any intelligent young man abroad he studied many other things as well. He read the Parisian publication of James Joyce's Ulysses while that controversial novel was still banned in the U.S. He kept in touch with Krishnamurti, visiting him at Eerde in Holland, a center for the Krishnamurti movement. It was after hearing Krishnamurti lecture in Paris in 1928 on rejecting all dependence on external authority that Campbell stopped attending mass; he remained free of formal religious attachments for the rest of his life.

He was soon to find philosophical and mythological grounds for his own subjective deinstitutionalization of religion. Traveling on to Germany, he found himself deeply drawn to German language and culture. During this time he read Freud and Jung and, no less significantly, the novelist Thomas Mann. A little later, though undoubtedly on the basis of the love of Germany and German scholarship acquired on this trip, he also delved deeply into the work of the historian of the West's decline, Oswald Spengler, and that of the anthropologists Adolf Bastian and Leo Frobenius.

Joyce, Freud, Jung, Mann, Spengler, Bastian, Frobenius … these are the names, whether in fashion or not, which recurred by far the most frequently in Campbell's writing up until the very end of his life. It is indeed remarkable the extent to which Campbell's intellectual life from then on was set in grooves cut in those two wonderful wandering years in the gay but tormented Europe of just after the Great War, the Europe of giddy futurism and reactionary pessimism, of Weimar Germany and the Paris of the “lost generation.”

Except perhaps Freud, the Germans who so deeply influenced Campbell were then parts of an antimodern reaction that set against Weimar's democratic ideals the romantic organic view of society to which we have already alluded, a perspective often associated with “volkish” thought, and with mythology, in that era. (Mann was, to Campbell's distress, later to renounce much of this credo.) The position also entailed what Spengler and Frobenius called “cultural morphology,” the idea that societies possess distinctive and interlocking cultural patterns in all areas of expression, a concept important to Campbell to be discussed later.

First an even more significant Campbellian issue initially derived from the cultural pessmimism side of Weimar Germany. Although differing in many particulars, these three—Mann, Spengler, and Frobenius—also agreed that it was important to look at the calamitous events of recent history from the perspective of a larger screen on which whole cultures and epochs flourish and decline like biological units. And they believed in standing back from the screen. Facing this stupendous panorama, the true artist and scholar maintains personal autonomy, observing and interpreting, but disdaining both fatuous optimism and the soiled passion of practical politics.

For Campbell, such artistic independence was certainly associated with an advanced view of artistic freedom, like that of Joyce publishing in Paris despite censorship in the United States, not to mention in his Catholic Irish homeland. Something of the Parisian and, above all, late twenties German, intellectual worlds found an abiding home in Joseph Campbell. (The apparent dissonance between cultural morphology, with its implication of cultural and historical determinism, and Campbell's fierce individualism might seem to be another contradiction in the man, although he tried to deal with it by claiming, with Frobenius, that a new era of individualism was what the cycles of history had scheduled for the world now emerging.)

After returning to the United States as the great depression began, Campbell spent several unsettled but immensely valuable years continuing life as a sort of intellectual pilgrim. He lived among writers and artists in the Catskills 1930 to 1931, sampling the life and times of the avant garde. In 1931 to 1932 he was with John Steinbeck, Robert Jeffries, and their circle in Monterey, California. In the summer of 1932 he shipped with a biological expedition to Alaska, where he made observations of Native American culture. He taught briefly at his old school, Canterbury. During all this time he was also attempting a career as a writer, and he sold a few short stories. In the early thirties, like many intellectuals of those desperate years, Campbell harbored a sympathetic and hopeful interest in communism and the Russian “experiment,” though he was never politically active. Then, in 1934, he joined the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, where he was to spend the remainder of his academic career.

Campbell thus had the opportunities to absorb two brief but fabulous cultural eras of the twenties that have since passed into legend: the Paris of the famous expatriates, of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, Joyce, and the rest; and the raucous, “decadent,” yet desperately and brilliantly creative Weimar Germany of its purple twilight years before night fell. With his bright curiosity and his knack for meeting the right people and being in the right place at the right time, the young visitor from overseas returned with an abundant hoard of memories and stories of a Europe all too soon to be forever gone. Upon his return to gritty depression-era America he managed to add to his repertoire of experience another hardly less extraordinary culture circle: the California writers around Miller and Jeffries. And he added to his pack yet another experience of a sort that helped credential not a few American writers: a year of Jack Londonlike labor with the sailors and loggers of the great Pacific northwest, and up the coast to Alaska. Amid all these encounters with various worlds within the world, he went through a common early thirties infatuation with the Soviet venture and flirtation with the radical left, before settling down to the kind of comfortable academic life in which such halcyon days as these could be recalled at leisure—though his work was not over and the skies outside continued to darken.

WAR AND PEACE

The environment at Sarah Lawrence changed Campbell politically and ideologically. The first course he taught, on “Backgrounds to Literature,” was based on “Spenglerian morphology.” In his third year he taught a course on Thomas Mann and the influence of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche on that writer. By now the Germany he loved was under the Nazi boot. His German interests brought him in close contact with another faculty member, the artist Kurt Roesch, a refugee from Hitler who was antimarxist as well. Campbell came to realize that a maverick individualist like himself would not fare well in a dictatorship of either left or right, nor would the values of inner-directed free expression in the arts that were almost a religion to him. By the late 1930s he claimed to be nonpolitical, and his interests were moving in the direction of mythology under the influence of cultural morphology.

The tormented thirties ended with the opening shots of the greatest war in history. Campbell, who knew more intimately than most Americans the intellectual Europe in which its demons had gestated, was now safely on the western side of the Atlantic. But the miasma of a world sorely divided did not escape him, no more than it did the United States generally. Campbell was eminently affected in two ways: through a controversial lecture on values in time of war he gave on December 10, 1940, to which Thomas Mann responded; and through his association with two distinguished refugees from Germany, the indologist Heinrich Zimmer, and the publisher Kurt Wolff, who was to found the Pantheon Press.

The talk, “Permanent Human Values,” was given at Sarah Lawrence in days that were dark indeed for the Western alliance, just after the fall of France and the Battle of Britain. Britain and its empire stood alone against the tyrants of Berlin and Rome, and the United States was still an island of peace in a world of war. Campbell clearly wished it to remain so, and he wished moreover to maintain an attitude of even-handedness toward the belligerents. He made such statements as, “Permanent things … are not possessed exclusively by the democracies; not exclusively even by the Western world. My theme, therefore, forbids me to be partial to the war-cries of the day.” In light of “the duties of objective intelligence in the face of sensational propaganda,” “no educated gentleman can possibly believe that the British Empire or the French Empire or the American Empire was unselfishly founded in ‘kindly helpfulness,’ without gunpowder or without perfectly obscene brutality.” After speaking of the original sin in all and the admonition of Christ to “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” he added, in his most inflammatory sttatement, that “We are all groping in this valley of tears, and if a Mr. Hitler collides with a Mr. Churchill, we are not in conscience bound to believe that a devil has collided with a saint.—Keep those transcendent terms out of your political thinking—do not donate the things of God to Caesar—and you will go a long way toward keeping a sane head.”

As for the permanent values at risk in time of war, they included capacity for critical objectivity, the apparently useless diligence of the disinterested scientist and historian, the work of the literary man and the artist, education as human beings rather than as patriots, the preaching of religion free of those “always ready to deliver God into the hands of their king or their president.” (“We hear of it already—this arm-in-arm blood brotherhood of democracy and Christianity.”)⁹

Much of this is of course unexceptionable on one level. Few sober observers can deny that the evil which is war has its ways of corrupting participants on all sides, that the first casualty of war is often truth, and that the best means of maintaining some degree of sanity amid war's horror is to keep in contact with permanent values forever above and beyond the battlefield. But in 1940 the apparent moral equivalency which Campbell, unnecessarily, kept positing between the democracies and their totalitarian adversaries, as though no more was involved than a personal quarrel between “Mr. Churchill” and “Mr. Hitler,” or as though Britain, for all its faults, was on the same abysmal moral level as the Nazi regime, was more than many then or since could swallow. One critic was his one-time idol Thomas Mann, who by now had fled to America. In his Weimar period Campbell had been much influenced by Mann's 1918 Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (“Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man,”) a disillusioned statement from the end of World War I. In that tract for the times the great novelist wrote with disdain of the one-sided tendentiousness of every political achievement, and celebrated instead the balanced and full-blooded portrayals of the human condition accessible to the artist and poet. That transcendent vision, Campbell thought, Mann had achieved in his own many-layered and luminous novels. But by 1940 Mann had undergone a considerable awakening to the profound evil of which politics was capable, and the danger of viewing evil in the Hitlerian degree with aloof neutrality.

Campbell had sent to Mann a copy of the “Permanent Human Values” talk at the suggestion of Mrs. Eugene Meyers, an older student who knew both the professor and the German exile. Campbell had earlier met the novelist through her mediation. Even then, Campbell had been disturbed by Mann's 1938 book The Coming Victory of Democracy, in which the refugee from the land of concentration camps had simply identified the good with democracy and evil with fascism. The once “Great Master of Objectivity,” as Campbell called him, who had started out as the supreme advocate of seeing both sides of every question, was now so far in the partialities of the temporal world as to see God, or the timeless Absolute, as on the side of the “democracies.”

Then, in a letter of January 6, 1941, in response to the talk, Mann pointedly asked Campbell what would become of the five “permanent values” of which he spoke if Hitler triumphed. “It is strange,” the novelist declared, “you are a friend of my books, which therefore in your opinion probably have something to do with Permanent Human Values. Well, those books are banned in Germany and in all countries which Germany rules today. And whoever reads them, whoever sells them, whoever would even publicly praise my name, would end up in a concentration camp, and his teeth would be beaten in and his kidneys smashed.”¹⁰

Campbell replied to Mann equivocally enough, but to his journals he confided his disappointment: “The letter which I received from Thomas Mann in reply was one of the most astonishing revelations to me: it signified for me the man's practical retraction of all his beautiful phrases about the timelessly human which no force can destroy, and about the power of love over death and about the Eternal altogether. It exhibited a finally temporal-political orientation, and not only that, but a fairly trivial and personal view of even the temporal-political.”¹¹

Here as elsewhere in his journals, he set against the evils ascribed to the fascist side the British role in Ireland and India, the American conquest of the continent and its native population, and the situation of “Negroes” in the South, together with all the graft and hypocrisy of which democracy was capable. It would be unjust to say Campbell was then or ever pronazi or profascist; he several times expresses his distaste for the crudeness, brutality, and anti-Semitism of Germany's present masters. But against all that, he put his freely admitted love for Germany as a country and a culture, and also the passion of hatreds closer to home. He possessed an Irishman's bitterness toward the British Empire, and he was the sort of American intellectual who despised many of his countrymen's shallow patriotism and self-satisfied complacency with the vitriol of an H. L. Mencken, whom he read. Unfortunately, it was perhaps his yearning for transcendent, mythical purity of thought, together with a lack of such actual experience as Mann had had, that kept him from willingness to admit any degree of proportionality in the political evils of the world, or any absolute moral obligation to oppose as well as transcend the worst of them.

Moreover, not only did Campbell like to see himself as an Olympian above the fray, as we have seen he also liked a good argument and had a tendency, which more than once got him into trouble, to argue for the opposite point of view from that prevailing among the company he was keeping. As American public opinion moved more and more decisively toward Britain, whose claims to superior virtue left Campbell quite unimpressed, he remained blind to anything but equivalency and a deeply felt pacifism. When the United States entered the war on December 8, 1941, Campbell wrestled with his conscience, reading among other things pacifist literature from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, for nearly three months before finally registering for the draft. He soon found, to his immense relief, that he was just past the age limit for being called up to active service.

Refugees from the other side, however, kept coming into his life. And while it is clear that Campbell had long felt deep inner currents flowing in the direction of mythological interests, the new contacts during World War II seem to have moved him decisively in that direction. Both connections were with Germans who, like Mann, were in the United States because of Hitler. Heinrich Zimmer, an Indologist whose wife was part Jewish, and who was a friend of both Mann and Jung, had fled Nazi Germany in 1938. After teaching at Oxford for two years, he had come to New York and Columbia University in 1941. There Campbell was among his first pupils. He had first met Zimmer through Swami Nikhilananda of the Vedanta Society. When Zimmer died prematurely in 1943, Campbell received the responsibility for editing his manuscripts for publication.

That was through the agency of the other new contract, Kurt Wolff, a half-Jewish German publisher who, after a few years in Italy, also arrived in New York in 1941. There, initially on a shoestring, he established the Pantheon Press, dedicated to books of intellectual and spiritual significance. Among its first projects was the Bollingen Series, a Jungian-tinged (it was of course named after Jung's hideaway) set of volumes on myth and world religion funded by Paul and Mary Mellon. At Zimmer's suggestion Campbell was named first editor of the series. An early work was Maude Oakes, Where the Two Came to Their Father: A Navajo War Ceremonial. Zimmer, knowing of Campbell's lifelong interest in American Indian lore, recommended that the Sarah Lawrence professor write the scholarly commentary on that text. After 1943, Campbell continued to prepare Zimmer's works for posthumous publication in the Bollingen series, sometimes slipping in his own writing when the older scholar's notes were disconnected or incoherent. The results were such classics of Indology under Zimmer's name as Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization (1946), The King and the Corpse (1948), the magisterial Philosophies of India (1941), and the two-volume Art of Indian Asia (1955). Though it required putting aside his own work for a time, the Zimmer efforts undoubtedly laid a very solid foundation for a mythological career.

The Zimmer and Wolff connections enabled Campbell to become attached to the famous Eranos conferences held at the villa of Frau Froebe-Kaptayn in Ascona, Switzerland, overlooking the deep blue waters of Lake Maggiore. These more or less annual conferences brought together the cream of the world's mythology and history of religions scholars: persons of the rank of Eliade, Gershom Scholem who had revived the study of Jewish kabbalah, the student of Gnosticism Giles Quispel, Henri Corbin of Iranian mysticism, D. T. Suzuki the apostle of Zen, and many others, including he who was by now the grand old man of them all, Carl Jung. Campbell had been set to work in 1946 by Pantheon preparing selections from seventeen previous Jahrbücher (Annuals) of the Eranos conferences for English publication in the Bollingen series. In 1953, 1957, and 1959 Campbell attended the legendary conclaves himself, presenting papers at the last two. After the 1953 event, he and his wife Jean had the rare privilege of an invitation from Jung to visit him at his medieval tower retreat, Bollingen, outside Zurich. The conversation moved over many topics; Jean noted that when speaking of psychology and mythology, the great man was brilliant and wide ranging, but on social or political issues, “he became more parochial, sort of like a small-town Swiss.”¹²

In the meantime, Campbell's own writing was continuing apace. His first book, written with Henry Morton Robinson (later author of the best-selling novel, The Cardinal), was on James Joyce. A Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake (1944) consummated his daring discovery of Joyce in the Paris of the twenties.

The big event, however, which truly transformed Joseph Campbell into a major figure in the world of mythology and of midcentury culture generally, was the publication in 1949 of his own Bollingen series book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.¹³ This sweeping and engrossing study of the hero myth was Campbell's first single-authored work. It had a definite influence on a generation of literary critics and historians of religion.

Campbell's two-page preface splendidly defined the context and mission of the book in short space. He began, significantly, with a few lines from Sigmund Freud's The Future of an Illusion: “The truth contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and systematically disguised, that the mass of mankind cannot recognize them as truth.” Campbell wrote, of course, in the heyday of Freudian psychoanalysis as an intellectual vogue, and the Freudian Campbell behind the Jungian version must never be forgotten. Yet the lines bespeak Campbell even more than the Viennese doctor. They are Campbell's way of saying that the whole mythological enterprise must be understood not as mere antiquarianism, but an important intellectual venture conducted in the midst of the modern world, with full awareness of its thought currents and its needs. Campbell's mythology readily concedes all that modern skepticism claims, and still argues for the discipline's contemporary importance.

Campbell then proceeded to explain what he was doing in his own words: “It is the purpose of the present book to uncover some of the truths disguised for us under the figures of religion and mythology by bringing together a multitude of not-too-difficult examples and letting the ancient meaning become apparent of itself.” When this is done, using psychoanalysis as a tool, “the parallels will be immediately apparent; and these will develop a vast and amazingly constant statement of the basic truths by which man has lived throughout the millenniums of his residence on the planet.” This unified story he called, after James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake, the “monomyth.” That was the account of the hero's adventure from departure through initiation to return, where he underwent along the way such intriguingly named experiences as “The Crossing of the First Threshold,” “The Belly of the Whale,” “The Meeting with the Goddess,” and “Atonement with the Father,” after which he becomes “Master of Two Worlds.” A second part of the book, “The Cosmogonic Cycle,” discusses such related themes as the Virgin Birth and various forms of the hero: warrior, lover, emperor, redeemer, saint. In all, the book has Campbell doing what he does best: he tells stories and tells them well, bringing them together with profound-seeming undergirdings of timeless meaning, and says it is all very important for our lives today.

The basic monomyth informs us that the mythological hero, setting out from an everyday home, is lured or is carried away or proceeds to the threshold of adventure. He defeats a shadowy presence that guards the gateway, enters a dark passageway or even death, meets many unfamiliar forces, some of which give him threatening “tests,” some of which offer magical aid. At the climax of the quest he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward: sacred marriage or sexual union with the goddess of the world, reconciliation with the father, his own divinization, or a mighty gift to bring back to the world. He then undertakes the final work of return, in which, transformed, he reenters the place from whence he set out.¹⁴

Hero [The Hero with a Thousand Faces] resonated with its times. The Bollingen aura was in the air. In some circles, the midcentury intellectual mood was saturated with myths, dreams, mysticism, psychoanalysis, and archetypes. Stanley Edgar Hyman, reviewing Hero in the Kenyon Review, remarked that “Myth is the new intellectual fashion, apparently.” He was not fully impressed, however. Agreeing that myths can tell “basic truths,” he found Campbell a bit too general and “mystical.” One can say “yes” to the notion that myths have meaning, but still ask “when, and to whom?” “The study of myth continues to be the least rational of the humanities. Joseph Campbell … now comes forward with an amiably befuddled volume the purpose of which is to discover the ‘secret’ truths concealed in the myths and to apply these truths to our desperate modern situation.” Hyman also pertinently noted that Campbell was still fundamentally literary; folk tales were to him inferior, “undeveloped or degenerate” in relation to the “great mythologies” of the higher civilizations.¹⁵ The distinguished folklorist Richard Dorson also later observed that Campbell emphasized the universal, dreamlike quality of myth, calling attention to the fact that he was actually a “professor of literature.”¹⁶

Significantly, Hero, like most of Campbell's work, went down better with literary and drama critics, and the literate public, than with professional folklorists or anthropologists. Campbell, basking in his popular success, came to take this phenomenon in stride. The issues were larger, in his mind, than whether a particular volume was “amiably befuddled.” They were no doubt also larger than the later complaint of a Soviet critic who, laboring under the terminology of doctrinaire marxism, complained that Hero completely divorced myth from “the real actuality in which it arises and develops” as it overlooks “the social role of a given work, its specific national traits, its artistic imagery and ideological peculiarities.”¹⁷ The universalizing and psychoanalytic study of myth in the Campbell mode would, from this perspective, undoubtedly represent its appropriation by bourgeois consciousness; the latter, in marxist eyes, tends to subjectivize and aestheticize myths and stories that had their real roots in social alienation and economic deprivation.

Campbell's own socioeconomic setting, at the time of Hero, was the unprecedented affluence of postwar America and the coldest years of the Cold War. Schools, colleges, and adult education programs were, like churches, growing briskly as veterans enrolled under the GI bill. More families had money for college than ever before, and schools and businesses prepared for the new world of the baby boomers now beginning to see the light of day. Mythology was not a major part of postwar education, but it was not an entirely insignificant factor either. To recapitulate themes from our introductory chapter, we may recall that literary discourse in the New Criticism style was serious then, and Campbell's elegant, lightly psychoanalytic and literary-critical style of mythology fitted in well. Its appeal was enhanced by the postwar yearning to retrieve the best of the premodern past, articulated in generalized mythology as well as in Vedanta, Trappist monasticism, Zen, and the Thomism of Catholic campuses. A big issue that obsessed the early fifties was the individual versus “mass society.” The existentialists and social critics like David Riesman of The Lonely Crowd approached it in their own ways; Campbell did it by making the hero the central figure in myth and showing that, therefore, only in the individual is there true glory.

THE MATURE MYTHOLOGIST

Campbell was very much a part of this world; but as usual everything was a little different for him. In the McCarthy days his problem was not to avoid blacklisting, as it was for many professors, Hollywood figures, and others; it was rather the disdain that come in such circles to one perceived as being on the other side. But Harold Taylor, president of Sarah Lawrence at the time and a friend of Campbell's, said of him that “Campbell's view was always more complex than could be easily grasped by most people.”

One of the things Joe really didn't like was Communists. … [But] he didn't think we should, as a college, be just one thing; each person who came in should be given legroom to move in whatever direction his legs took him. … He was a man of strong, independent views. … He was very fond of the college and a lot of the people in it, but he was annoyed by the politics of the habitual liberals on the faculty.¹⁸

Campbell got to know Alan Watts around this time. They were two of a kind, lively, sensual, still youngish lovers of spiritual traditions who also knew how to enjoy good food, drink, and all-night parties. In his autobiography, In My Own Way, Watts described Campbell in this manner, “… his attitude to life is Tantric: an almost fearsomely joyous acceptance of all the aspects of being, such that whenever I am with him his spirit spills over into me.”¹⁹

Like Watts, Campbell was part of a movement to bring the wisdom of the East into the classrooms and living rooms of the West. But for him this process was a bit more complicated than simple praise and appropriation. For one thing, he was never quite sure just how much he liked the East. Confronting it, he could swing from fulsome accolade to acerbic impatience; he loved the mythology and philosophy he had explored in the Zimmer years, and even as far back as the meeting with Krishnamurti. But the social and political reality of Asia today could be something else, above all when they seemed at right angles to the mythologist's proud individualism and staunch political opinions. In the end, he fell back on one of his first loves: the pagan or quasi-pagan myths of the West, from the Odyssey to the Grail to James Joyce.

The issue was exacerbated in 1954 and 1955, when Campbell took an extended tour of India, a country he had of course studied intensively by virtue of his work on the Zimmer manuscripts. He was accompanied by Swami Nikhilananda and a couple of prominent members of the New York Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center. The Ramakrishna Mission had arranged lectures and opened doors for him. But his opinions and observations, recorded in an engrossing journal, were his own.²⁰ Neither he nor Zimmer had actually been to the land whose rich art and thought had so influenced them, and of which they had undoubtedly constructed a half-fantasy land of wonder. India on the ground was an experience that left Campbell shaken by no small degree of culture shock.

Campbell admitted in a letter to his wife, Jean, that nothing in the real India “was quite as good as the India I invented” in New York before the trip.²¹ The religion, the temples, the gurus, the mythological background of course was there. But all was interfused with the heat, the poverty, the dirt, the beggars, and the chauvinism of the newly independent state. The repressive qualities of the ancient civilization were also more than evident, in the evils of caste and the hopeless drudgery of those on its lower rungs. For one whose ideal was obviously the cleanliness and order of Germany, India with its filth and chaos clearly left much to be desired, just as had the Central America of an earlier trip. A few scenes approached the Germanic ideal. Of the state of Orissa the visitor was able to say that it was “the best thing so far in India: lovely air, beautiful skies, fertile flatland by the sea, and, after Calcutta, clean and orderly looking people.”²²

But much of India was highly unsuitable to one of Campbell's values and temperament. Most infuriating to him were the ubiquitous and persistent con-men and self-appointed guides and attendants, all clamorous for baksheesh. On top of that, he had to deal with the officious but inefficient bureaucracy, and to listen to tirades from intellectuals claiming that the United States—not even Britain—was somehow responsible for India's problems. At the same time India was, at this moment, enamored with socialist visions and the idea of friendship with the Soviet Union and the communist bloc. All this definitely hit a sore spot in the devoutly anticommunist mythologist.

He found himself becoming more patriotically American than ever, and more promodern as well. Once, in response to a comment by Swami Nikhilananda that “there is no progress, only change,” Campbell replied, “I used to think that too, Swamiji, but since coming to India I have changed my mind. I think there is progress, and I think India will begin to experience progress too, pretty soon.”²³ Even Gandhi did not enjoy from Campbell the whole-hearted admiration he received from Eliade; the American called him and his disciple Vinoba “primitivists,” whose “alienation from the inevitables of modern life makes for a kind of romantic escapism.”²⁴

Campbell also learned something about himself and his own alienation in India. In a telling remark in his journals, he said, “In the Orient I am for the West; in the West for the Orient. In Honolulu I am for the ‘liberals,’ in New York for big business. In the temple I am for the University, in the University for the temple. The blood, apparently, is Irish.”²⁵ That sort of independent, contrarian individualism was what he missed in modern India.

After The Hero with a Thousand Faces and the journey to India came the four-volume series of collected and annotated mythologies called The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (1959), Oriental Mythology (1962), Occidental Mythology (1964), and Creative Mythology (1968).²⁶ In this series the attitude toward East versus West was gradually changing, though often wavering back and forth. In Hero Campbell had, despite the individualistic theme, praised the East for its mythological subtlety, and so did he in the Oriental volume of Masks [The Masks of God]. But by the time he got to the Occidental volume, and in Creative Mythology, he was increasingly hostile to the East for its suppression of the individual.

Like most of Campbell's work the Masks series impressed literate laity more than specialists. Writing from the latter side about Occidental Mythology, Stephen P. Dunn vividly declared in the American Anthropologist that

Campbell's book is in a sense a throwback to an earlier heroic age of anthropology, when the air was dark with flying hypotheses and comparisons rained down like acorns in autumn. Reading it, the case-hardened social scientist derives the same sort of nostalgic half-shamefaced pleasure as the ordinary adult would from reading G. A. Henty or Robin Hood to his children. Campbell uses the traditional equipment and methods of the literary critic, for whom comparison and analogy are tantamount to proof and fact. He writes in a curiously archaic style—full of rhetorical questions, exclamations of wonder and delight, and expostulations directed at the reader, or perhaps at the author's other self—which is charming about a third of the time and rather annoying the rest.²⁷

Like Eliade, Campbell was not really a social scientist, and those in the latter camp could tell. Dunn felt that Campbell did not distinguish sufficiently between great and little traditions of religion; none of the latter, so far as he was aware, really embraced the mysticism or pantheism that he saw behind all myth. Nor were his views on Hebrew or Greek religion particularly novel. But a poet, as Campbell was at heart, can see what he wants in the lives and beliefs of nonpoetic folk, and in so doing make their lives sing.

An interesting document of Campbell's East-West wobbling is a 1967 paper, “The Secularization of the Sacred.”²⁸ This curious essay has the feel of something transitional. It commenced with rather standard remonstrances against the “anthropomorphic” God of the West, at first exalting Eastern religions over the Western for their ability to see the divine in everything rather than in a particular place, and because the East seems to point beyond the image rather than limiting God to the literal and the particular.

But then Campbell came to the theology of love and the transformation of human to divine love, of eros to agape, kama to prema. (His study of this process is one of his more significant contributions to comparative religion.) He saw this exchange as an important sector of several spiritual traditions. In bhakti, love for the particular form becomes love for the universal divine. In Christianity it becomes a relationship in which love for the human beloved is more and more replaced by the love of God for divine lovers like Saint Francis and Saint Bonaventure. But, in a move Campbell loudly applauded, in the West pagan love was then surreptitiously revived in stories like Tristan and Isolde or Parsifal, in which the heroes and heroines remain separate and earthly in all their glory.

In making this point, “The Secularization of the Sacred” became an affirmation of something early in Celto-Germanic and Greco-Roman culture, which was subsequently weakened by Christianity with its “Semitic” absolutizing of the particular sacred. “It is my thought, that the wealth and glory of the western world, and of the modern world as well (insofar as it is still in spirit, western) is a function of this respect for the individual, not as a member of some sanctified consensus through which he is given worth.”²⁹

Those words were written at about the same time as turmoil over the great trauma of the late sixties, Vietnam, raged through the United States. Regarding the war, Campbell's contrarian instincts were to rile up. In fact, as Campbell's biographers, Stephen and Robin Larsen, point out, his position in 1967 had similarities as well as differences with that taken in the 1940 “Permanent Human Values” speech. During World War II he favored nonintervention. But in the sixties, while he continued to loathe war, he seemed to believe that communism represented such a mind-enslaving system that violent opposition to it was justified. However his main concern at Sarah Lawrence was, as in 1940, that students should be students, concerned with more permanent values than those of day-to-day politics, or the activism associated with the decade. With perhaps a touch of self-deception, he saw himself as a nonpolitical classroom professor, and insisted he was there to teach, and students on campus there to learn what he had to teach and for no other reason.

The Larsens state that, contrary to what was sometimes alleged, Campbell did not actually fail students for political activism as such, but did hold them responsible for material presented in class even during strikes and demonstrations. They describe the late sixties atmosphere at Sarah Lawrence vividly, evoking the highly visible posters of Mao, the Vietcong flags, and the student strikes, which so inflamed the conservative mythologist, though he himself had been infatuated with communism in the early thirties.³⁰ The Larsens were friends of Campbell and their biography is generally sympathetic, though they acknowledge that in the Vietnam era they “leaned to the left” and often disputed Campbell's prowar Republicanism with him, trying to get him to see such sixties dramas as the march on the Pentagon sympathetically as contemporary events of mythic dimension. They attribute his then-unpopular (at least in the circles in which he and they generally moved) stance to his visceral anticommunism, his idealization of American individualism, and his stubborn independence. They point out that later he also had problems with the Republicanism of the eighties on three important points: its alliance with Christian fundamentalism (he believed strongly in separation of church and state, and did not care for either Catholic or Protestant authoritarianism), its opposition to abortion (perhaps because of his radical individualism, he believed in a woman's right to choice), and the GOP's inadequate stand on ecology (a great lover of nature, Campbell supported strong measures for its protection). As the decade advanced, he claimed he was so disillusioned with all parties that he might not vote at all.

It might also be added that Campbell enjoyed friendship with, and influenced, a number of prominent figures of the sixties and seventies who did not necessarily share his political views but appreciated his creative intellect and who applied his mythic vision to their art or social role. In addition to the filmmaker George Lucas, these included Bob Dylan, The Grateful Dead, the psychologist Joan Halifax, and California governor Jerry Brown.

How did Campbell come by the conservatism that set him apart from what otherwise ought to have been a very congenial decade for one of his vision? One view is presented in Toby Johnson's The Myth of the Great Secret, an interesting account of the author's personal movement away from conventional Roman Catholicism under the aegis of Campbell's perception of myth. Johnson, who did not and does not share Campbell's politics, reports he was quite taken aback when, unaware of Campbell's views, he first met him in 1971, during the years of upheaval over Vietnam, and found that his mentor identified himself as a Republican and a supporter of Nixon and the war. (Johnson had, in fact, steeled himself to oppose the war through the power of certain lines about the hero's resolve in Campbell's 1949 classic, The Hero With a Thousand Faces.) He found also that Campbell was opposed to sixties-style sexual and psychedelic drug experimentation, and “sounded like he'd been listening to too much Art Linkletter.”³¹

In further conversations, Johnson came to understand Campbell better. The mythologist called himself a “classical conservative,” citing the story of the Grail Quest as an example of the staunch individualism on which that position is allegedly based: the knights agree among themselves that they will not follow in another's footsteps, but that each should pursue his own path to the holy object, beginning at that place in the forest that was darkest and most alone. Campbell, in fact, according to Johnson prided himself on not really being part of the modern world. He never watched television and had no interest in popular culture. (Eliade too, incidentally, during the Chicago years when I knew him, never read newspapers or sat in front of a TV and had virtually no awareness of what was happening in the outer world.)

In Campbell then we see, in this context, an extreme and obviously idealized individualism—the assumption that the knights of capitalism would voluntarily all start equally distant from the prize—combined perhaps with something of the puritanism of his Irish Catholic background, were the dominant constituents of Campbell's social views. He explained to Toby Johnson that the real danger in modern society was the threat of swamping personal freedom with concern for collective needs, which would lead the government to meddle in people's lives and cater to pressure groups.

By the time the Masks series had been completed, Joseph Campbell was famous. He had reached several audiences who believed that what he had to say about myth and contemporary civilization was worth hearing. The Hero with a Thousand Faces had fascinated a quorum of writers and literary critics like himself, and together with the rest of the postwar myth-mood had helped launch the “myth criticism” of scholars like Northrop Frye. The Bollingen Series work, especially the edited Eranos Yearbooks, had made him a familiar name in the large professional and lay circles interested in comparative religion, Jungianism, and related inquiries. Now the Masks series hit the nation's bookshops and coffee tables in another decade, the sixties, much taken with recovering the wisdom behind myths and symbols from out the race's occult past. Their impact was abetted by active lecturing and media appearances on the part of an author who looked so much the Hollywood image of the popular, winsome yet wise professor. There were critics, but few of them had royalties to match Campbell's.

The next book, Myths To Live By (1972), reworked lectures given over many years at the Cooper Union in New York.³² Emmett Wilson, Jr., in the Saturday Review called it “badly written,” retaining “the cloying chatter of a rather unstructured lecturer talking to an undemanding audience.”³³ The book did, however, continue something of a new departure for the mythologist begun in Creative Mythology: writing directly and centrally concerned with the contemporary need for new myths in a time of what he called “pathology of the symbol,” when religions based on outdated views of the cosmos have been losing their force, but the new gods have not yet arrived. In Creative Mythology he had become very concerned with the role of mythology in social stability:

For those in whom a local mythology still works, there is an experience both of accord with the social order, and of harmony with the universe. For those, however, in whom the authorized signs no longer work … there follows inevitably a sense both of dissociation from the local social nexus and of quest, within and without, for life, which the brain will take to be for ‘meaning.’”³⁴

In Myths To Live By Campbell returned to Spengler and Frobenius for ways of understanding the current critical eschatological situation, and talked of finding new mythologies in Outer Space. J. A. Appleyard, writing in Commonweal, was disconcerted by Campbell's “we-know-better” attitude toward the wisdom of the past, but others, like Peden Creighton in the Journal of Religious Thought recognized that the present symbol situation was schizophrenic, and whether or not Campbell had all the answers he was at least asking the question.³⁵

There were other books by the mature mythologist: The Flight of the Wild Gander, a collection of his most scholarly papers; the late three volumes of the Historical Atlas of World Mythology, and another lecture collection, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, as well as posthumous journals.³⁶Transformations of Myth Through Time was the posthumous publication of his last lecture tours, also videotaped for a PBS series.³⁷ That final collection of lectures no doubt gratified Campbell's numerous fans, but did little to quiet critical concerns about the mythologist's oversimplification of historical matters and tendency to make myth mean whatever he wanted it to mean. Indeed, one has a familiar but disturbing sense of an old man becoming more and more set in his opinions as the years advance. That is apparent in his treatment of the Semitic element in European and American culture.

In Transformations [Transformations of Myth Through Time], he recalls scolding a student of his at Sarah Lawrence for saying that if she didn't think of herself as Jewish, she wouldn't know her identity. Campbell told her that he knew who he was even apart from thinking of himself as an Irishman. On the same page (91) he presents a confrontation he had with the celebrated Jewish theologian Martin Buber, whom he took to task for expressing horror at the sacrifice of children to the pagan god Moloch despite Abraham's willingness to obey Yahweh's command to sacrifice his own son Isaac. Whatever the rights or wrongs of the argument, it is apparent that examples of what Campbell considers bad religion often seem to involve Judaism and its progeny. The return from East to West did not necessarily mean a return to these religions. In chapter 11 of the same book, “Where There Was No Path: Arthurian Legends and the Western Way,” he makes those famous stories speak of a lingering pagan individualism standing over against an oppressive “Near Eastern tradition” imported by Christianity, buttressing the case through hopelessly selective use of the material, and despite the fact that we know King Arthur only as a Christian hero. Anyone who, despite great learning, could so forget both the ruthless and repressive sides of tribal paganism, and the stunning examples of Jewish and Christian individualistic heroes from David to Jesus, to embrace such a simplistic view of European culture, is beyond rational argument.

Regrettably, in Joseph Campbell one sees a man in whom, for all his celebratory status and accomplishment, some levels of promise remained unfulfilled. In place of ongoing growth in wisdom and understanding, there is a life too soon foreclosed around views that seem more firmly rooted in quirks of temperament than intellectual analysis. He seems one of those golden youths to whom too much came too soon and too easily, and who thereafter does little but repeat the homilies that first won him the laurels of popular acclaim.

Yet there is another Campbell, a counterpart to the charismatic public figure, a Campbell who was almost bafflingly inward. This mysterious persona surfaced in one of his most remarkable books, one that only he could have written, The Mythic Image (1974).

Perhaps that is the work with which to best end this narrative. The Mythic Image is a stunningly illustrated gift book and the quintessential Campbell, notable for its rich association, always important to Campbell, of myth and art, and of both to the reveries of dream. The first section is entitled “The World As Dream,” and of course suggests that myths are the key to the interpretation of the oneiric fantasy we see all around us and take for real. The book received virtually awestruck notices in such media as the New Yorker and Newsweek, but the historian of religion Charles H. Long, in the Religious Studies Review, perhaps had the best take on it as he noticed that the organization of the work itself is dream-like. It wanders like a dream from one image to another: from rock paintings to “wild and erotic” Tantric art to gruesome sacrifices to the monumental buildings of lost civilizations, and on and on. By now Campbell is entirely uninhibited in his free association of symbols across space and time. The sleeping Kundalini serpent of Tantric yoga reminds him of something in Rembrandt's painting of Faust, and in one of the cave temples of Aurangabad the Buddha holds a “lotus ladder” reminiscent of both the Norse Yggdrasil and Jacob's ladder. There is no necessary cultural connection in these things, but there is a sort of dream melding of one image into another, an “oneiric logic,” evocative of what here is Campbell's central concern, the relation of dream to myth. The book, Long concludes, reads as though it had been written in a dream, while asleep. It is passive, ambiguous, haunting.³⁸

BASIC IDEAS

What is mythology supposed to do? Here, from Myths To Live By, are four functions of myth. All four of these clearly have direct or indirect political ramifications, either in the way myths give spiritual power and identity to an individual—notice the primary emphasis on the individual in these lines—and so strengthens one's functioning within the political order, or by validating that order directly.

The first [function] is what I have called the mystical function, to waken and maintain in the individual a sense of awe and gratitude in relation to the mystery dimension of the universe, not so that he lives in fear of it, but so that he recognizes that he participates in it, since the mystery of being is the mystery of his own being as well.

The second function of the living mythology is to offer an image of the universe that will be in accord with the knowledge of the time, the sciences and the fields of action of the folk to whom the mythology is addressed.

The third function of the living mythology is to validate, support, and imprint the norms of a given specific moral order—that, namely, of the society in which the individual is to live.

And the fourth is to guide him, stage by stage, in health, strength, and harmony of spirit, through the whole foreseeable course of a useful life.³⁹

Such fundamental notions as these remained constant throughout Campbell's career. They included also the idea of the unity of myth, that is, that myths throughout the world give an essentially identical message (with the exception, perhaps, of the “Near Eastern”). We have seen how the idea was expressed in quasi-Freudian terms in the preface to Hero. Also at the beginning of his career, he wrote in his preface to Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen:

All mythology, whether of the folk or of the literati, preserves the iconography of a spiritual adventure that men have been accomplishing repeatedly for millennia, and which, whenever it occurs, reveals such constant features that the innumerable mythologies of the world resemble each other as dialects of a single language.⁴⁰

No less important themes were the relation of myth to dreams and the unconscious; and, on the other hand, to the explication of comparable motifs in great literature. Insofar as there were differences in the apparent values of myths, that was attributable to the workings of the “cultural morphology” he had learned from Oswald Spengler and Leo Frobenius. For morphological changes in myth as culture changed was possible; the geographical universality of myth was not necessarily also a temporal sameness age after age. The exact level of mythic universality versus cultural specificity or of timeless versus temporally conditioned truth in myth, however, was not examined in depth by Campbell.

Both Spengler and Frobenius were among those who not only were immensely popular writers in the Weimar period, but also perpetuated a highly sophisticated version of the volkish mood: anti-democratic, pessimistic about the modern world. It is clear that, more than most Americans of his generation, Campbell was nurtured by the milk of that particular strand of Weimar intellectualism, and always maintained a soft place in his heart for the glories of German thought.

It may be recalled that Spengler also enjoyed a vogue in the early and mid fifties in America. Many intellectuals, including the Beats, took up with the pessimistic, antimodern mood of thinkers like Aldous Huxley, C. G. Jung, and the rediscovered Spengler, in opposition to the brave new world of television, fishtail cars, and Cold War capitalism appearing outside their study windows. In the days of Hero and the Eranos conferences, Campbell was far from alone in publicly bemoaning (and maybe covertly applauding) the decline of the West, but he clung to the ghosts of Weimar intellectual life longer than virtually anyone else.

What impressed Campbell about Spengler and Frobenius was not so much their explicit political views as their concept of the morphology of culture, the view that cultures have definite shapes in space and time, in which all features of a particular cultural era interlock to form a definite style that is as much a form of consciousness and character as of art and architecture.

For example, according to Spengler the Russians have a “flat plane” culture expressed in low buildings and an ethics of egalitarian fellowship; western Europe is “Faustian,” with its soaring gothic spires, its distance perspective in art, its world exploration and world conquest, its long-distance weapons. Moreover, cultures pass through distinct stages of growth and decline, and it is here that Spengler's one celebrated book, The Decline of the West, expressed its prophetic judgment on a civilization that had already passed midlife. Campbell first read that book during the author's moment of post-World War I fame but he never forgot it, returning to its main themes again up to the end of his life.

Thus fundamental to Campbell's position all the way through were two ideas taken from Frobenius and Spengler about the myths of particular cultures. First was the concept of the spiritual unity of a culture. That unified essence is expressed through the myths of the culture but is also found in visual art and even in individual personality styles. The unity is further expressed in the culture's particular forms of the Jungian archetypes and in its great literature. Joyce and Thomas Mann were supreme examples, for Campbell, of modernity's particular cultural circle.

Second, Campbell affirmed, with Frobenius and Spengler, that cultural circles can evolve. The medieval Western style was not the same as the modern Western. Spengler, as is well known, and as is suggested in the very title of The Decline of the West, believed that cultural circles, like human beings and all organic life, pass through seasons of youth, maturity, and senescence, finally to die. But here Campbell preferred the more optimistic vision of his other German mentor, Frobenius.

He was struck by Frobenius's comparable concept that every race has its own paideuma or soul, its own way of feeling and its own spectrum of significant knowledge. This spirit is expressed in its art and its mythology, and may also evolve over time, so that the paideuma of a Neolithic agricultural people may be different from what it was when they were hunters and gatherers, or that of Renaissance Europe different from that of medieval Europe.⁴¹

Campbell clearly seized on this idea, to which his interest in myth, and his hardly less lively interest in art and literature, fitted so well. What was important was to look not so much at the dreary technical details of a story or sculpture as at the fascinating message encoded in its overall structures and leading archetypes. Who is on top? Who is the rebellious hero? What is the dominant representation of the divine, the mother goddess or the patriarchal male or what? Campbell was also much impressed by Frobenius's notion of three stages of human development, a concept outlined twice, for example, in his 1972 Myths To Live By.⁴²

The first stage was that of primitive food gatherers, of nonliterate hunters, gatherers, planters. The second stage, commencing around 3500 B.C.E., was that of the “Monumental” cultures: Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Greece, Rome, medieval Europe, modernity. All these civilizations were centered on a supposed divine cosmic order, often buttressed by a personal God, that gave the template for human achievement: cities were modeled on the those of heaven, empires were built in the name of God.

But today a new stage is emerging, a “global” culture based on realization that the sacred is within. Following Frobenius, Campbell also believed that we are now entering a new age, a third age of the spirit like that once prophesied by Joachim of Flora, a dawning “global age,” an age of “boundless horizons” made up of the coming together of all the formerly separate cultural worlds of humanity. This idea seems to have especially crystallized for Campbell in interaction with the visionary sixties, despite his professed antagonism to some of its values. In this rising era, as in that esoteric decade, religion would move in a mystical direction. The laws and gods ruling Earth will be seen no longer as “out there,” but within the hearts of humankind. In his most idealistic moods, Campbell no doubt viewed himself as a premier prophet of that new spiritual dispensation.

Campbell was clearly drawn to this modern version of the coming spiritual age. The first benighted stage had seen the sacred in the plant and the animal, the second projected it “aloft among the planets and beyond,” but the third put it where it belonged, “in men, right here on earth.” Its advent would be sung in modern myths, by men and women freed from the props of formal religion.

The last chapter of Creative Mythology, significantly called “The Death of ‘God’ and the Earthly Paradise,” tells us that the “technological determinants” of the new age would be scientific method and power-driven machine, even as writing and “coercive government” had been for the Monumental age. Furthermore:

The distinguishing feature of the new mankind—as heralded in the lives and works of those through whom it was announced—has already been suggested in Wolfram's Parzival: that is to say, a mankind of individuals, self-moved to ends proper to themselves, directed not by the constraint and noise of others, but each by his own inner voice.⁴³

Campbell then cited José Ortega y Gasset to the same effect, and also Joachim, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Mann, and Paul Tillich—a modern gnostic catalogue of saints.

The Leo Frobenius to whom Campbell owed this vision, incidentally, had an unusual career. Never an academic in the strict sense, he was an explorer and collector who spent much of his life in the African bush on expeditions sponsored by museums and universities. Singlemindedly preoccupied with African culture, he took no interest in the social and political aspects of that changing continent, and though not racist himself did not argue with Eurocentric assumptions characteristic of his time. Indeed, during the Weimar years Frobenius was a member of the “Doorn circle,” which met regularly with the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II at his Dutch retreat for conversations on anthropology and archaeology, topics in which the former emperor had a lively interest. Although he may have had private reservations, Frobenius must also have listened courteously to the windy diatribes on religion, Jews, the superiority and inferiority of races, and the classical origins of German civilization, with which his imperial host, once described as a man of half-baked ideas and fully-formed prejudices, was well known to afflict his guests. Later, during the Nazi regime, Frobenius served as director of the Frankfort enthographical museum until his death in 1938.⁴⁴

After reading Frobenius, Campbell wrote:

I learned that the essential form of the myth is a cycle, and that this cycle is a symbolic representation of the form of the soul, and that in the dreams and fancies of modern individuals (who have been brought up along the lines of a rational, practical education) these myth-symbols actually reappear—giving testimony of a persistence, even into modern times, of the myth power.⁴⁵

It was in the spirit of these words that Campbell was a student of modern mythology too. Always more of a literary scholar and critic at heart than a folklorist, much less an anthropologist, he always preferred to deal with myths as retailed by great writers and tellers from Homer and Hesiod through the medieval exponents of the Grail story to Joyce and Mann. In reviewing The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Stanley Edgar Hyman remarked that to Campbell folk literature is inferior, “undeveloped or degenerate” in relation to the “great mythologies” of the higher civilizations, which of course usually had worthy renditions.⁴⁶ The relative distance of literary myth from “the people” was no great price to pay. For if, as Campbell believed, myths tell truly universal truth, that truth is as true for a poet or novelist of the first magnitude as for anyone else, and that writer can probably tell it better, in more truly universal language.

In that light one may view Campbell's deep interest in two makers of contemporary mythologies, James Joyce and Thomas Mann, examples of consciousness shaped by the morphology of modernity. Campbell appreciated the Irish and the German novelists' ability to paint modern life as fractured and imperfect. Yet even the seemingly secular, unheroic, and comfortably middle-class lives of their characters come across as profoundly significant because the reader is also led to believe each contains an undying spark of the eternal flame. Campbell did not consider the shattering of heroic illusions in these modern literary myths as inconsistent with the archetypal thrust of mythology. To him the supreme modern meaning of myth was that all the imperfect persons we see around us, even the most vacant bourgeois, still have within them the same divine fire that animated the mythic hero. In Myths To Live By, Campbell points to Tonio Kröger in Mann's novel of the same name as such a hero, commenting:

Perfection in life does not exist; and if it did, it would be—not lovable but admirable, possibly even a bore. Perfection lacks personality. (All the Buddhas, they say, are perfect, perfect and therefore alike. Having gained release from the imperfections of this world, they have left it, never to return. But the Bodhisattvas, remaining, regard the lives and deeds of this imperfect world with eyes and tears of compassion.) For let us note well (and here is the high point of Mann's thinking on this subject): what is lovable about any human being is precisely his imperfections. The writer is to find the right words for these and to send them like arrows to their mark—but with a balm, the balm of love, on every point. For the mark, the imperfection, is exactly what is personal, human, natural, in the object, and the umbilical point of its life.⁴⁷

At the same time, Campbell followed Mann's political (or “unpolitical”) thinking up to a point, for he believed it was precisely Mann's unpolitical nature that made possible the deep humanism, the universal understanding behind these remarkable words. It was that transcendent care for the lovable uniqueness in every imperfect human that Campbell persuaded himself Mann had abandoned as he took a “partisan” antinazi stand in the thirties. In the twenties Campbell, as we have seen, had been deeply influenced by Mann's Reflections of an Unpolitical Man (1918), a pessimistic end-of-the-war piece that defended the traditional state against democracy, and creative irrationalism against “flat” reason. Mann then called for moderns to develop personal internal culture despite the shallow values of civilization. In his journals Campbell wrote of that work:

Mann spoke … however, against the one-sidedness of every political achievement, and celebrated the two-eyed, ironic powers of the artist. The strictly balanced deed of the artist's pen or brush represented a heroic clear-sightedness, and a salubrious affirmation of the balanced truth against every possible tendentious politicization.⁴⁸

However, as Mann changed his ideas on politics and society in opposition to Nazism, Campbell withdrew into a moral equivocalism that tended to say only that faults obtain on both sides in the great ideological battles of the day. The true artist ought to observe the human scene from a transcendent perspective rather than choose sides. This view was expressed, of course, in the 1940 talk “Permanent Human Values.” As time went on, Campbell became only more contrarian about the matter. He refused to let it die even in the different world of the decades after the war, except when he took sides against communism.

In The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, at the end of his life, he defiantly went out of his way to cite Mann's Reflections once again, long after the tract's author had himself left its stance far behind. This time the World War I essay was quoted to the effect that economic and military imperialism, conjoined with “hypocritical democracy,” were more the legacy of Great Britain and the United States than of Germany. One can sense Campbell's Irish blood rising as he records Mann saying in 1918 that “To my soul's satisfaction, I find nothing in German history to compare with England's treatment of Ireland.” It is with obvious disappointment that the American must also note that during World War II, as England stood almost alone against the Nazi menace, Mann had considerably changed his tune, now going so far as to say, “Can it be denied, that the world, in so far as it is English, finds itself in right good hands?”

Campbell then cites two other writers in support of Mann's 1918 views, men who remained faithful to the spirit of those views even amid the flames of World War II: the American expatriate poet and admirer of Mussolini Ezra Pound, who “was at that time in Italy, broadcasting condemnations of the Western Alliance that were very much like those of Mann's World War I Betrachtungen,” and the also controversial T. S. Eliot. Campbell then returns to the question of eyes, quoting Strindberg to the effect that “politicians are one-eyed cats.” But according to the mythologist, the artist sees with two eyes, “and alone to him is the center revealed: that still point, as Eliot saw, where the dance is. ‘And there is only the dance.’”⁴⁹

On the same theme, in Creative Mythology Campbell had cited a radio address Mann had addressed to the German people in December of 1941, on the eve of Pearl Harbor as it turned out. Campbell reproduced intact the lengthy catalogue of Nazi atrocities to date about which the novelist had informed any of his countrymen courageous enough to listen to him. Then, explaining his own role, Mann had remarked that the artist lives and works not for the glory of his country but out of individual “immanent need.” Those last words Campbell italicized.

Campbell then went on to comment that Hitler's “monstrous empire” had now been replaced by “Stalin's no less monstrous slave state,” to which was added “another Asian monster,” the Chinese, and with it “a scientifically enforced Asiatization of world affairs.” What does that mean? “This is the old Bronze age world image of an absolutely inexorable, mathematical cosmology of which the social order is but an aspect … both Indian and Chinese.” To this is now added the “equally inexorable Marxian notion of the logic of history.” The leading challenge to these monstrous but outdated social machines was, not unexpectedly, “the politics of the free individual.”⁵⁰ One thinks of the small but heroic and individualist rebel alliance in Star Wars confronting the vast machines and faceless storm troopers of the evil empire.

Now we must confront directly the issue of anti-Semitism in Campbell's life and work. Robert A. Segal, in an article “Joseph Campbell on Jews and Judaism,” has assembled a full collection of evidence to the effect that Campbell disliked both Jews and Judaism.⁵¹ There are accounts of verbal diatribes on the subject from students and colleagues at Sarah Lawrence, and many illustrations from his books of the roundhouse condemnations of ancient Israel's violence and exclusivity of which Campbell was capable. “Campbell's would-be scholarly characterizations of Judaism evince all the stock anti-Semitic epithets.” Judaism is said to be chauvinistic, fossilized, nationalistic, sexist, patriarchal, and antimystical. Even primal peoples, such as Campbell's beloved Native Americans, are said to “possess a broader vision than Jews.” And these attitudes, Segal noted, became only more pronounced in the author's latest books.

As he became more interested in, and positive toward, feminine values in myth, Campbell spoke of the ancient Hebrew conquest of Canaan as a truly egregious example of pastoral fighting people subjugating the feminine and promoting warlike attitudes. In The Power of Myth, explaining the origins of the dolorous patriarchal monotheism that has long afflicted Western culture, Campbell declared that “The Yahweh cult was a specific movement in the Hebrew community, which finally won. This was a pushing through of a certain temple-bound god against the nature cult, which was celebrated all over the place. And this imperialistic thrust of a certain in-group culture is continued in the West.”⁵² In the “Secularization of the Sacred” essay, as we have seen, modern secularization is presented as an affirmation of values found in early Celtic-Germanic and Greco-Roman culture, which were later weakened by Christianity with its “Semitic” absolutizing of the particular sacred and its subsequent dualism.⁵³ In a significant article, Maurice Friedman touched on some of the same material as Segal, including Campbell's notorious encounter with Martin Buber, and also noted the mythologist's lack of attention to the Jewish holocaust—surely a deed whose blackness was of mythological dimensions, and which has shaped subsequent consciousness as certainly as has the bright mythologies of heroes and outer space.⁵⁴

Yet there are other perspectives in Campbell's work. In the introduction to The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, Campbell had referred to the destructive power of mythological racism and Aryanism in such writers of the nineteenth and twentieth century as Gobineau and Chamberlain, and he drew from them the moral that “mythology is no toy for children,” but can have explosive power in our own as well as any other age.⁵⁵ On the same page he wrote: “And the world is now far too small, and men's stake in sanity too great, for any more of those old games of Chosen Folk (whether of Jehovah, Allah, Wotan, Manu, or the Devil) by which tribesmen were sustained against their enemies in the days when the serpent could still talk.”

The major biography of Campbell to date, Stephen and Robin Larsen's A Fire in the Mind, states that Campbell was anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic.⁵⁶ One relevant issue about which some misunderstanding seems to have arisen is that of Freud versus Jung in Campbell's work. Brendan Gill, in the New York Review article, claimed that Campbell liked Jung but disliked Freud, and thought this had to do with anti-Jewish prejudice; but it seems to me that even the original premise here can be questioned. One of Campbell's most powerful pieces of writing is a long section on “The Psychology of Myth” in Primitive Mythology, a real tour de force interpretation of myth in highly Freudian terms, from birth trauma to breast to discovery of genital sexuality. The most direct influence there was that very orthodox Freudian anthropologist Géza Róheim, to whose festschrift Campbell also made a significant contribution.⁵⁷ Róheim, and behind him Freud, is also prominent in The Hero with a Thousand Faces; we have noted the quote from Freud in the prologue to that work. But Campbell always seemed to accept the common wisdom that Freud is the best guide to the first half of life, Jung for the second. While Campbell appears to have become more Jungian and less Freudian as the years advanced, there is certainly no evidence of nonacademic bias. At the same time, his bias against the Hebrew God, and that deity's manifestations in three religions, is evident repeatedly. In the last year of his life, when he finally got a computer for writing, he named it Jahweh. “A lot of rules and no mercy,” he explained.⁵⁸

Yet it is not quite true that Judaism was always portrayed negatively. In Hero there are a few neutral or even positive citations. A “tender lyric from the miserable east-European ghettos” is compared favorably to Jonathan Edwards's portrayal of an angry God, at the end of the chapter on atonement.⁵⁹ We must also not forget Campbell's close and highly fruitful relations with Heinrich Zimmer and Kurt Wolff, both exiles from Hitler's Germany because of Jewish connections. Anti-Semitism was not his only prejudice: his Anglophobia was hardly less entrenched; England, English culture, and English persons also receive little if any favorable notice in Campbell's corpus. (Even his beloved Arthur and the Grail stories are cited mostly in German versions.) At the same time it cannot be denied that Campbell had some sort of recurrent emotional problem with both Jews and Judaism. Like the disturbing inability as late as the 1980s to forgive Thomas Mann for turning antinazi a half-century earlier, issues involving Jews were returned to and gnawed on over and over, more and more bitingly as time advanced. One is left with an unpleasant feeling of something very narrow lurking within the broad mind of the world-scanning mythologist.

A similar narrowness of focus is apparent as Campbell turned his capacity for creative mythology to the America he idealized. The mythic model American is clearly the free-enterprise “rugged individualist” of a romanticized past, one continuous with the earlier Grail quest, or with Tristan and Isolde's quest for authentic human love. What Campbell admired was somehow not the type of heroic individualism represented in his own day by, say, a Rosa Parks or a draft resister. How Campbell's political worldview was reconciled with his disdain for the Judeo-Christian tradition, out of which at least some of Western individualism derives, is not explained.

In the Moyers interviews, reproduced in The Power of Myth, Campbell talked at some length about the American “myth,” or rather myths, for he held that the United States in its pluralism has never had a single, unified mythology. The classic American goals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, he said, are for the individual—but are buttressed by the cosmic orientation of the Great Seal, reproduced on the dollar bill. Its four-sided pyramid represents the earth, and the descending eagle, the bird of Zeus, indicates the “downcoming of the god into the field of time.”⁶⁰ By now Campbell was clearly well beyond any serious scholarly study of the background of particular myths. He was concerned only to preach his sermon to the world.⁶¹

In the end, Joseph Campbell's political thought can only be considered a collection of unassimilated fragments, some brilliant, some not thoroughly thought through, some frankly based on prejudice. Toward the close of his life he seemed to realize that he was politically out of step with both left and right, and—like, eventually, Jung and Eliade as well—ready to give up on the whole political world. In a late interview he said:

I don't know what politics can do. I think it's fair to say that I'm a little bit discouraged by the people who are involved in the political life of this country. I begin to feel it has been betrayed. Its potentialities have been sold for values that are inscrutable to me.⁶²

This is not the place to psychoanalyze Joseph Campbell, but two features of his character may be noted. First, from childhood, he was possessed by a dream or fantasy of idealized, and individualized, Native American life. Together with this, he had, like some irrepressible young brave, an incorrigibly rebellious side, well articulated in his saying that he was Western in India and Eastern in New York.

Second, one notes his revulsion against the filth of the world, countered by a Germanic passion for order and personal cleanliness. This trait was early registered on his college-age trip to Mexico and Central America, and presumably was expressed also in the long-lasting sexual inhibition his biographers mention. The syndrome was recovered on his later trip to India, where his interest in its ancient culture combined with deep distaste for the subcontinent's dirt, beggary, and inefficiency. It all ran together in his mind and left him feeling polluted. Whatever he took from India, or from other cultures, had to be on his own terms and leave him personally unstained. Individualism, standing apart from tribe and sect as an observer of the collective myths of others, and a preacher of those myths in forms that exalted the individual, was what was left.

POLITICS TO LIVE BY

Campbell discussed politics overtly less than did Jung or Eliade in published writings. But he let broadly political views, together with his rebellious individualism and various social and quasi-political prejudices, permeate his general writing more than did the other two. It was clear he thought societies should have common myths, but they ought primarily to facilitate the self-realization of the individual, especially in the role of hero. Myth was therefore the wellspring of individual enterprise more than of collectivism. It was clear also that he increasingly thought even accessible collective myths ought not to be those of established religious institutions. Undoubtedly just for that reason, unlike a thousand institutional preachers, he apparently saw little individualist inspiration in the stories of David or Jesus. He looked instead, no doubt quite intentionally, to such half-underground alternatives as tales of Camelot and the Grail, stories powerful just because they were unblessed by scripture or pulpit, or the medieval ecclesiastical establishment.

Where did this leave Campbell politically? Maybe with Libertarianism, although participation in a small and disputatious political sect would not have been his style. He even had problems with Republicanism, although he considered himself a “classic” conservative.

But two kinds of conservatives are to be found in modern society. It is a matter of what past one wants to conserve. Tory conservatives yearn primarily for the traditionalist “organic” society, hierarchical, largely rural, religion based, and in many ways quite authoritarian, which they imagine to have obtained in the Middle Ages. This is the conservatism of Burke and in certain respects of Jung and Eliade. Then there is the Whig sort of conservative, far more common in the United States than the Tory. These conservatives are fundamentally more concerned with economic than social values; they idealize not the Middle Ages but the free enterprise, laissez-faire economics of the early industrial revolution. Whig conservatives like to think of themselves as rugged individualists, and insofar as they are social conservatives it is because they value the work ethic and productive stability they associate with traditional propriety.

Campbell was really mostly the latter, the Whiggish sort of conservative. Although he dealt with what, to the Tory or Germanic volkish mind, was the archaic and medieval raw material of the other conservatism, he managed—apparently hardly realizing he was doing so—to follow Jung by individualizing that material into models for personal inner realization and success.

What kind of society would Campbell's view of myth construct? Not Jung's Burkeanism of tradition and reasonable democracy, or Eliade's newfound American utopia of level pluralism. Rather, it would be a society of heroes like the principals of Star Wars who follow their own myths, and a ground crew of those who are not heroes but who sing about heroes, and the songs keep the social order together. For while Campbell might have liked a Jeffersonian utopia free of government coercion and egalitarian, he would probably have realized that, in a truly unconstrained social order, elites, by birth or talent or more likely both, will like himself rise naturally to positions of greater wealth and influence than the ordinary. But all of that will be according to myth. Whatever one does in this society, one identifies with the mythic archetype of that role: the soldier or policeman with the primal swordsman, the scientist with the white-coated heroes of his kind, the mother with the Great Mother one with the earth, lovers with Tristan and Isolde.

It would be a society like that of the tribes of Native America: the lone warrior and vision quester, the sacred dance complete with ritual clowns around the fire. A century or two in the future, it might be set in outer space, an epic of brave explorers of strange planets and staunch settlers conquering new worlds. In the process, they would be defying and defeating the armadas of collectivists who, like the Anglo whites, sought to reduce their lives to bureaucratic forms and their songs to paper music.

This is a fantasy, and an unlikely one at that. Star Wars notwithstanding, the brave new world of the conquest of outer space, or of any reasonable future for our overpopulated planet, will require cooperation and organization on a scale that would need to be managed by a powerful government, not by individual heroics. If a speculative book like Freeman Dyson's Imagined Worlds is on the mark, the technological creation of collective human minds through “radio telepathy,” group minds and personalities that would prevail because they would be far more powerful than any individual could be, may be possible in as little as a thousand years—and their coming would mean the ultimate defeat of the individualist creed.⁶³ Indeed, Campbell himself was increasingly aware that he represented social values with more past than future, however much he argued otherwise.

There is, however, more to Campbell and politics than individualism. One must also look at the concept of myth as a political reality and political force. This is important, and is on a different level of discourse than the supposed message of the particular myths one favors. Three points may be made about political myth as Campbell presented it. First, societies need a cohesive story about who a people are, what they can accomplish, and what their deep-level values are. Second, the social myth can only be received and employed by individuals through individual choice. Third, dominant myths and symbols can change, and must as one order gives place to another, especially the coming third age of the Spirit.

Campbell would doubtless argue that the spiritual age will actually require the midwifery of apparently conservative politics, since the requisite emergence of the sacred within, rather than in the plant or animal or in the sky, calls for that near-total freedom for individual creativity and enterprise that Campbell considered the core value of conservatism. This, he considered, is the political position that fits better than any other the nonpartisan, antiideology, neutral-observer posture of the early Mann or the two-eyed artist. He may never have fully confronted the contradiction this stance presented in respect to the totalitarian regime Mann had fled, though he made up for that in his opposition to Stalin and Mao. At the end of his life he had only begun to face a similar contradiction in U.S. conservatism, in respect to such issues as its alliance with fundamentalist Christianity and the exploitation of nature.

But, however laden with contraries in the real world, Campbell's politics will have an impact in proportion to the extent his stories shape the fantasies and dreams of men and women, which they will then enact in their own ways in the twenty-first century. In a world of stories past, present, and to come, these will be dreams reminding us that our psychic origins are buried deep in a fabulous past, that in the present one can follow one's own bliss and become whatever one really is within, and that the unimaginable future of spaceships and heroes will be made for people who can follow inner joy wherever it leads.

Notes

1. Mary R. Lefkowitz, “The Myth of Joseph Campbell,” The American Scholar, 59-3 (summer 1990), p. 429.

2. Stephen and Robin Larsen, A Fire in the Mind: The Life of Joseph Campbell. New York: Doubleday, 1991, pp. 540-43.

3. Joseph Campbell, with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth. New York: Doubleday, 1985, p. 5.

4. Karen L. King, “Social Factors in Mythic Knowledge: Joseph Campbell and Christian Gnosis,” in Daniel C. Noel, ed., Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion. New York: Crossroad, 1990, p. 69.

5. Robert A. Segal, “The Romantic Appeal of Joseph Campbell,” Christian Century, April 4, 1990, pp. 332-35.

6. Robert A. Segal, Joseph Campbell: An Introduction. New York: Garland Publishing, 1987, p. 137.

7. Brendan Gill, “The Faces of Joseph Campbell,” New York Review of Books, Sept. 28, 1989, pp. 16-19.

8. Larsen and Larsen, A Fire in the Mind, pp. 32-35.

9. The talk is published in its entirety in ibid., pp. 287-90.

10. Ibid., p. 298.

11. Ibid., p. 297.

12. Ibid., p. 363.

13. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Bollingen series 17. New York: Pantheon, 1949. 2d ed., Princeton University Press, 1968.

14. See the summary of this scenario in ibid., pp. 245-46.

15. Stanley Edgar Hyman, “Myth, Ritual, and Nonsense,” Kenyon Review 11 (summer 1949), pp. 455-75.

16. Richard M. Dorson, “Mythology and Folklore,” Annual Review of Anthropology 2 (1973), pp. 107-26, citation pp. 107-108.

17. J. Zemljanova, “The Struggle between the Reactionary and the Progressive Forces in Contemporary American Folkloristics,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 1 (1964), pp. 130-44; citation p. 132.

18. Cited in Larsen and Larsen, A Fire in the Mind, p. 357.

19. Alan Watts, In My Own Way: An Autobiography 1915-1965. New York: Pantheon, 1972, p. 229.

20. Joseph Campbell, Baksheesh and Brahman: Indian Journal 1954-1955. Ed. Robin Larsen, Stephen Larsen, and Antony Van Couvering. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995.

21. Larsen and Larsen, A Fire in the Mind, p. 373.

22. Campbell, Baksheesh and Brahman, p. 76.

23. Ibid., p. 65.

24. Ibid., p. 203.

25. Ibid., p. 157.

26. Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God. Vol. 1, Primitive Mythology. New York: Viking, 1959; vol. 2, Oriental Mythology, New York: Viking, 1962; vol. 3, Occidental Mythology. New York: Viking, 1964; vol. 4, Creative Mythology. New York: Viking, 1968.

27. Stephen P. Dunn, review of The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology, in American Anthropologist 67 (February 1965), p. 140.

28. Joseph Campbell, “The Secularization of the Sacred,” in Donald L. Cutler, The Religious Situation, 1. Boston: Beacon, 1968, ch. 17.

29. Ibid., p. 629.

30. Larsen and Larsen, A Fire in the Mind, pp. 465-66.

31. Toby Johnson, The Myth of the Great Secret. Berkeley, Calif.: Celestial Arts, 1992, pp. 48-49.

32. Joseph Campbell, Myths To Live By. New York: Viking, 1972.

33. Emmett Wilson, Jr., Saturday Review 55 (June 24, 1972), p. 68.

34. Campbell, Masks of God: Creative Mythology, p. 5.

35. J. A. Appleyard, Commonweal 96 (September 29, 1972), p. 530; Peden Creighton, Journal of Religious Thought 30 (1973), pp. 64-68.

36. Joseph Campbell, The Flight of the Wilder Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension. New York: Viking, 1969; Historical Atlas of World Mythology: vol. 1: The Way of the Animal Powers. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983; vol. 2: The Way of the Seeded Earth. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983. The Inner Reaches of Outer Space. New York: A. van der Marck Editions, 1986. Published journals have commenced with Baksheesh and Brahman, op. cit.

37. Joseph Campbell, Transformations of Myth through Time. New York: Harper and Row, 1990.

38. Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image. Bollingen Series; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974. Reviews: Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek 85 (March 31, 1975), pp. 75-76; Winthrop Sargeant, New Yorker 51 (July 21, 1975), pp. 86-88; Charles H. Long. “The Dreams of Professor Campbell: Joseph Campbell's The Mythic Image,” Religious Studies Review 6 (October 1980), pp. 261-71.

39. Campbell, Myths To Live By, pp. 214-15.

40. Joseph Campbell, foreword to Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1953, p. 1.

41. See Léopold Sédar Senghor, foreword to Eike Haberland, ed., Leo Frobenius 1873-1973: An Anthology. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1973, p. vii.

42. Campbell, Myths to Live By, pp. 85-867, 244-45.

43. Campbell, Creative Mythology, p. 575.

44. Lamar Cecil, Wilhelm II, vol. 2. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996, pp. 317-21.

45. From the “War Journal,” a journal Campbell kept during World War II. Cited in Larsen and Larsen, Fire in the Mind, p. 226.

46. Stanley Edgar Hyman, “Myth, Ritual, and Nonsense,” Kenyon Review 11 (summer 1949), p. 474.

47. Campbell, Myths To Live By, p. 167.

48. Cited in Larsen and Larsen, A Fire in the Mind, p. 325. From Campbell's Journals.

49. Campbell, Inner Reaches of Outer Space, pp. 147-48.

50. Campbell, Creative Mythology, p. 321.

51. Robert A. Segal, “Joseph Campbell on Jews and Judaism,” Religion 22 (1992), pp. 151-70.

52. Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth. New York: Doubleday, 1988, p. 21. From the Public Broadcasting System series.

53. Campbell, “The Secularization of the Sacred,” in Donald R. Cutler, ed., The Religious Situation 1968. Boston: Beacon, 1968, pp. 601-37, and in Joseph Campbell, The Flight of the Wild Gander. New York: Viking, 1969. Quote from Cutler, ed., p. 629.

54. Maurice Friendman, “Why Joseph Campbell's Psychologizing of Myth Precludes the Holocaust as Touchstone of Reality,” Journal of the American Acadmey of Religion 66/2 (summer 1998), pp. 385-401.

55. Campbell, The Masks of God, p. 12.

56. Larsen and Larsen, A Fire in the Mind, pp. 510-11.

57. “Bios and Mythos: Prolegomena to a Science of Mythology,” in Psychoanalysis and Culture: Essays in Honor of Géza Róheim, ed. George B. Wilbur and Warner Muensterberger. New York: International Universities Press, 1951.

58. Larsen and Larsen, A Fire in the Mind, p. 539.

59. Campbell, Hero, p. 149.

60. Campbell, The Power of Myth, p. 27. See also Dabney Gray, “Campbell, America, and the Individual as New Hero,” in Kenneth L. Golden, ed., Uses of Comparative Mythology: Essays on the Work of Joseph Campbell. New York: Garland, 1992, pp. 235-48.

61. Joseph Campbell, Transformations of Myth through Time. New York: Harper and Row, 1990.

62. John M. Maher and Dennis Briggs, eds., An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms. New York: Harper and Row, 1989, p. 101. The interviews in this book are undated but took place over a ten-year period beginning in 1975.

63. Freeman Dyson, Imagined Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.