[In the following essay, Segal contrasts the work and ideology of Campbell and James Frazer.]

No two writers on myth have been more popular than James Frazer and Joseph Campbell. Yet few others have had more mixed professional receptions. Frazer sought acclaim among anthropologists but became outdated within his lifetime. While Campbell was never taken seriously by folklorists, he cultivated a popular rather than academic following.

Both figures have nevertheless thrived as authorities elsewhere in the intellectual world—in literary circles above all. As John Vickery, Stanley Edgar Hyman, and others have shown, Frazer influenced not only leading modernist poets and novelists—notably, Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence, and Joyce—but also many leading scholars of literature: for example, Jessie Weston on the Grail legend, E. M. Butler on the Faust legend, C. L. Barber and Herbert Weisinger on Shakespeare, Jane Harrison on Greek religion and art, F. M. Cornford on Greek philosophy and comedy, Gilbert Murray on Greek epic and tragedy, Francis Fergusson on tragedy, Northrop Frye on all literature, and Lord Raglan on hero myths. All these studies trace literature back to myths that, following Frazer, were originally the scripts of the key primitive ritual of regularly killing and replacing the king, in whom the god of vegetation resided, in order to ensure good crops for the community. “The king must die” is the familiar summary line.

To be sure, Frazer's disciples often alter or extend his theory. Some connect myth and ritual differently from him, reconstruct the ritual differently, make the king an actor in the ritual rather than a god himself, equate the king with the hero, ignore the king altogether, or make the aim of the ritual salvation rather than food. Still, the influence of Frazer, who himself does not apply his theory of myth to literature, has been inestimable.

Campbell's impact on literary scholars has likewise been vast, though far more confined. Most of his followers apply to novels and movies the hero myth pattern of his Hero with a Thousand Faces. But they typically adopt only the pattern itself and disregard Campbell's psychological and metaphysical interpretation of it.

Frazer and Campbell share various fundamental convictions. Both despise religion: Frazer, all religions; Campbell, at first just Western ones but later Eastern ones, too. Where Frazer berates Christianity above all, Campbell even more narrowly condemns Roman Catholicism. Robert Ackerman, Frazer's biographer, denies that his subject's lifelong animus toward Christianity was a reaction to an overbearing childhood religiosity. Rather, religion in Frazer just did not “take.” Campbell's hatred of Catholicism was conspicuously a reaction to his upbringing. But until a biographer uncovers a more visceral source of this hostility, the explanation must remain Campbell's own: that Catholicism, like other Western religions, misconstrues its own myths and thereby robs adherents of their benefits. Campbell feels personally betrayed by Catholicism.

Frazer damns religion by demoting it to a primitive phenomenon—more advanced than magic but still prescientific. He damns Christianity in particular by relegating it to just another vegetation cult—for Frazer the core of all religion. Says Ackerman: “Jesus was really (and therefore, in Frazer's reductionist analysis, only) a member of the group of dying and reviving gods that included … Attis, Adonis, and Osiris.” Similarly, Campbell damns Western religion by demoting it to a prescientific enterprise and damns Catholicism in particular by transforming its would-be distinctive, historical claims into mere instances of universal archetypes.

The differences between Frazer and Campbell are, however, even keener than the similarities. Frazer damns myth as well as religion by subsuming myth under religion. Like the rest of religion, myth is a wholly primitive phenomenon. Frazer's triple assumption—that religion serves the same explanatory function as science, that the religious explanation is incompatible with the scientific one, and that the scientific explanation is true—renders religion and so myth not only superfluous but also impossible for moderns, who by definition have science. For Frazer, modern believers are remnants of a fading religious age.

Campbell saves myth by severing it from religion, which itself he views no differently than Frazer. Unlike religion, which at least in the West is dying, myth is perennial. Campbell's own triple assumption—that myth does not serve to explain the world, that the functions myth does serve are indispensable, and that myth is indispensable to serving them—makes myth not merely open to moderns but even mandatory for them. Frazer's view of myth as not just unnecessary but also impossible for moderns constitutes a quintessentially nineteenth-century stance. Campbell's view of myth as not only possible but outright indispensable for moderns epitomizes a twentieth-century one.

Frazer reads myths literally: as descriptions of the activities of gods of nature. While for him gods originate as metaphors for natural phenomena, myths about gods are meant literally. Campbell, by contrast, reads myths symbolically: as descriptions of the contents of at once the human mind and the cosmos. For him, only obtuse Westerners, not primitives, take myths literally.

Until now there has been no biography of Frazer—perhaps because, as Ackerman acknowledges, Frazer's life largely was his work. There have been only the hagiographical memoirs of Frazer's secretary, R. Angus Downie, entitled James George Frazer: The Portrait of a Scholar and Frazer and the Golden Bough, plus Bronislaw Malinowski's ambivalent sketch in his A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays. Ackerman brilliantly melds Frazer's life with his work.

Correcting caricatures of Frazer as unworldly, Ackerman shows that, contrary to Downie and Malinowski, Frazer, if never quite gregarious, became withdrawn only in middle age—the result of both the death of William Robertson Smith, his mentor and best friend, and the overprotectiveness of his wife, whom he married shortly afterwards at age forty-two. While incontestably bookish and diffident, Frazer was not beyond ambition and even controversy. Nor, contrary to Downie and Malinowski, was he unable to stomach criticism. Most surprisingly, Frazer, the prototypical armchair anthropologist, actually considered joining an anthropological expedition to New Guinea—of which Downie notes merely the invitation.

Ackerman corrects caricatures of not only Frazer's life but also his ideas. On the one hand, he observes that many of the views for which Frazer has long been castigated—most of all his hopeless ethnocentrism and relentless rationalism—were commonplaces of his time. On the other hand, Ackerman reveals how much more mixed Frazer's views really were. Frazer, it turns out, was at times skeptical of progress: the masses would always remain benighted, and only an elite were capable of enlightenment. In singling out individual geniuses as the carriers of civilization, Frazer was more romantic than rationalist. Frazer even stressed the similarities as well as the differences between primitives and moderns: the West arose out of its primitive foil.

Perhaps the most egregious assumption punctured is that Frazer never changed his mind. Ackerman meticulously traces the changes in Frazer's views, especially from the first edition of The Golden Bough (1890) to the third (1911-15). For example, the very distinction between magic and religion arises only in the second edition and then gets tempered in the third. In the third edition Frazer unexpectedly entertains diffusion as a source of cultural similarities. The explicitness with which he mockingly parallels Christianity and primitive religion varies. Even the importance of the case of the priest of Nemi, the formal spur to the whole opus, changes with the editions.

Ackerman never contests many standard criticisms of Frazer. For example, he grants that Frazer was an inconsistent theorist, that Frazer's theories are often derivative, that Frazer overintellectualizes both primitive peoples and religion, that Frazer overliteralizes both, that the rigid division into magic and religion does not hold, that primitive cultures include protoscience alongside magic and religion, and that Frazer's version of comparativism severs phenomena from their contexts. Nevertheless, Ackerman respects Frazer's achievements: not just Frazer's influence, which Vickery and Hyman emphasize, but his works themselves.

As exact as Ackerman's mastery of his subject is, he does, I think, confuse William Robertson Smith's form of myth-ritualism with Frazer's. For Smith, myth is inferior to ritual: it arises as an explanation of ritual only once the magical meaning of a ritual has been forgotten. While Ackerman, following Hyman and others, documents assiduously how far from a uniform myth-ritualist Frazer is, insofar as Frazer is a myth-ritualist, myth for him is the equal of ritual: it is the script for ritual. Assuming that the script provides only “a description of what the performers or dancers were doing as they imitated the gods” rather than “stories of the gods' actions themselves—myths,” Ackerman thereby restricts myth-ritualism to Smith's version. But for Frazer the script is the story, which is thus inextricably linked to ritual from the start. Because the heart of especially the second and third editions of The Golden Bough is, as Ackerman himself emphasizes, the ritualistic enactment of the myths of dying and rising gods, Frazer necessarily remains a full-fledged myth-ritualist par excellence—even in the face of such contrary theoretical statements as his denunciation of myth-ritualism in his Loeb Library translation of Apollodorus.

An authorized biography of Campbell is being written. So far, the sole book on his theory is my own, Joseph Campbell: An Introduction. The Power of Myth, an edited transcript of the PBS interviews with Bill Moyers, sums up Campbell's lifelong views. While continuing to grant differences among myths, Campbell still stresses the similarities: “That is one of the amazing things about these myths. I have been dealing with this stuff all my life, and I am still stunned by the accuracies of the repetitions. It is almost like a reflex in another medium of the same thing, the same story.” Though he divides the earlier Masks of God into primitive, Eastern, Western, and modern mythologies, even there he concludes that all mythologies are finally one.

Campbell assumes that the moment one discovers that every people has its own myths of creation, paradise, the flood, and ancestral heroes, one can no longer take one's own myths literally. Yet instead of abandoning one's myths, as Frazer would urge, one should reread them symbolically: “Read other peoples' myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of [literal] facts—but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the [symbolic] message.”

A myth of paradise that literally describes a place on earth initially occupied by the first humans symbolically describes both the unconscious, out of which consciousness arose, and invisible, immaterial reality, out of which the created, material world emerged: “The Garden of Eden is a metaphor for that innocence that is innocent of time, innocent of opposites, and that is the prime center out of which consciousness then becomes aware of the changes.”

As the quotation evinces, the symbolic meaning of myths is mystical. Myths proclaim all oppositions and all distinctions illusory: “But mythology suggests that behind that duality there is a singularity over which this plays like a shadow game.” Psychologically, myths say not only that there exists an unconscious as well as conscious mind but also that those two minds are one. Metaphysically, myths say not only that there exists an immaterial world beyond the material one but also that those two worlds are one. For Frazer, by contrast, myths refer to the material world alone.

The mysticism that, according to Campbell, all myths espouse is the most radical variety of monism. Myths preach not that everything is immateriality rather than matter but that everything is a single, indissoluble substance combining immateriality with matter. Myths preach not that there is heaven rather than earth, soul rather than body, or god rather than humanity but that heaven and earth are identical, soul and body identical, god and humanity identical. Just as Campbell's hero returns to the everyday world to find within it the strange new world he assumed he had left behind, so all who heed the message of myth find the strange new world within, not beyond, the everyday one. As Campbell puts it, “Divinity informs the world.” The Bible, taken literally, wrongly teaches that “God is separate from nature”: “[O]ur [literal] story of the Fall in the Garden sees nature as corrupt; and that myth corrupts the whole world for us.” The brand of mysticism that Campbell detects everywhere is the world-affirming nature mysticism of Emerson and Thoreau.

Campbell's interpretation of myths worldwide scarcely tallies with conventional interpretations of the myths of Western religions. Mainstream Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and ancient Greek and Roman religions do not teach that heaven and earth or soul and body, let alone god and humans, are one. Indeed, the worst sin in the West is the attempted effacement of the division between god and humanity. Mysticism is a minor strain in the West and typically takes world-rejecting form. Campbell's unruffled response is that Western religions misconstrue their own myths, which get reduced from pristine expressions of universal, symbolic, mystical truths to degenerate pronouncements of local, literal, nonmystical pseudofacts: “Mythology is very fluid. … You may even find four or five myths in a given culture, all giving different [symbolic] versions of the same mystery. Then theology comes along and says it has got to be just this [literal] way. Mythology is poetry, and the poetic language is very flexible. Religion turns poetry into prose.”

For Campbell, as for Frazer, myth taken literally conflicts with science. But for Campbell myth taken symbolically does not even directly refer to the material world and so runs askew of science. In fact, science for Campbell is itself mythic—for Frazer an unimaginable possibility. Says Campbell: “No, they [myth and science] don't conflict. Science is breaking through now into the mystery dimensions. It's pushed itself into the sphere that myth is talking about.”

Campbell assumes that the true, mystical meaning of myth is itself true: “No, mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth—penultimate [only] because the ultimate cannot be put into words.” Endorsing the mysticism he says all myths preach, Campbell is thus a mystic himself. Where for Frazer myth is congenitally false, for Campbell myth ineluctably harbors the deepest truths.

Campbell sometimes bemoans and sometimes denies the absence of modern myths. Like Frazer, he takes for granted that traditional Western myths, by which he means Biblical rather than classical ones, no longer work because moderns take them literally. At times he says that, in the wake of the demise of Biblical mythology, “What we have today is a demythologized world.” He even ascribes social problems like crime to the paucity of myths.

Other times Campbell says that moderns are continuously creating myths:

MOYERS:
Where do the kids growing up in the city—on 125th and Broadway, for example—where do these kids get their myths today?
CAMPBELL:
They make them up themselves. This is why we have graffiti all over the city. These kids have their own gangs and their own initiations and their own morality, and they're doing the best they can.

Campbell predicts that new myths, typified by the “Star Wars” saga, will focus on outer space. Whatever their literal subject, not theologians but artists will be inventing those “secular myths”—for Frazer a contradiction in terms.

Because I am comparing a book by Campbell with one on Frazer, my criticisms of the Campbell book are necessarily of Campbell's theory itself rather than of someone else's presentation of it. Like Frazer's theory, Campbell's is weak less because it is wrong than because it is inconsistent. While the interpretations both give of the meaning of myth are unwavering, their explanations of the origin and function of it fluctuate wildly. Just as Frazer, as Ackerman shows, is alternatively and even simultaneously a myth-ritualist, an intellectualist, and a euhemerist, so Campbell is alternatively and even simultaneously a Freudian, a Jungian, an ethologist, and a diffusionist.

Where, however, Frazer, a consummate scholar, adduces inexhaustible evidence to bolster his claims, Campbell, a guru, appeals instead to some unshakable intuition. For example, Frazer painstakingly tries to justify his radical interpretation of Judaism and Christianity as primitive religions. Campbell just blithely interprets them equally wildly as mystical religions.

Frazer will never cease to be of interest to poets and critics because he never turns away from the plot of myth. Campbell does. Only in Hero [Hero with a Thousand Faces] does he, like Frazer, focus on the plot. Elsewhere he concentrates instead on either the beliefs underlying the plot or specific archetypes within the plot. For all Campbell's deserved fame as a masterly storyteller, he is, as a theorist, surprisingly uninterested in myths as stories.