SOURCE: Doty, William G. “Joseph Campbell's Myth and/Versus Religion.” Soundings 79, nos. 3-4 (fall-winter 1996): 421-45.

[In the following essay, Doty discusses “some of the religious aspects of Campbell's myth-work, and his way of talking about myths as potent cultural forces.”]

Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.

—J. Campbell (1988b, 5)¹

The logic of myth claims that there is always, no matter how it is disguised, qualified, or suppressed, a “hidden connection” or “inner law” linking chaos and cosmos, nature and culture.

Religion exists as a kind of sum of all other cultural systems to say that [the] ambiguities, the felt chaos of life, has meaning because it is interpretable. It is part of the larger fictional story—the myth—or the permanent cosmological structures of reality.

—N. J. Girardot (1983, 3, 7)²

What Norman Girardot calls the mythic logic undergirding the hidden connection of things is for Joseph Campbell the essential role of myth: it discloses symbolic inner/mystical meanings not apparent to the casual glance, and it protects such meanings from the historicist or literalist pathology which claims that particular religious interpretations represent the single, historical, factual truth. Religious myth is not just entertaining literature but an all-informing perspective on life that often gets scripturalized in sacred canons. It shapes the worldview and hence the orientation to the respective values of nature and culture, and it guides our socio-emotional interactions with others by providing models and templates of behaviors.

Joseph Campbell's “take” on myth was so persuasive that, as Greg Salyer suggests, “Campbell, especially since his death, has himself become a myth” (1992, 67). He situated himself at the intersection between our common humanity and the rich, polyvalent resources of the world's great expanse of mythic information. “For a significant number of Americans,” says Walt Gulick, “Joseph Campbell has become a modern religious hero” (1990, 31). In two recent volumes (Noel 1990a and Golden 1992), twenty-nine contemporary scholars found the implications of Campbell's work significant enough for the study of religions and mythologies to praise as well as criticize him, starting already within three years of his death in 1987.

This essay will explore some of the religious aspects of Campbell's myth-work, and his way of talking about myths as potent cultural forces. Campbell often conflates metaphysics and psychology when he charts human responses to the transcendent, and his symbolico-experiential mysticism has affinities with classical intellectual gnosticism, as when he emphasizes “the experience of eternity right here and now, in all things whether thought of as good or as evil” (1988b, 67).³

I will look at Campbell in his role of religious “maverick,” and attempt to correct misleading views of what Campbell refers to with the Hindu concept of ananda, or bliss. And I will conclude with Campbell's evolutionary proposition that after we support what Daniel Noel calls “his blending of Western psychological individualism with esoteric Asian mysticism” (1990b, 52), we can anticipate a planetary culture in a new synthesis of humane values, unfortunately nowhere spelled out by Campbell.

An oeuvre spanning so many books over so many years can only be very partially documented here, and I have not sought to portray the degree to which Campbell might be said to have remained a loyal son of the Catholic Church, or to have “developed” his thought in his later works. Campbell's later publications recycle motifs, themes, ideas, analyses, and interpretations that recurred from the times of his earliest publications: even the graphic images in the illustrated works to which his last years were devoted are repeated from volume to volume. There is a continued spiraling back around to some of the original benchmark philosophers cited in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1968b)—Spengler, Schopenhauer, and Schlegel, and early specialists in the anthropology of religion such as Leo Frobenius and Adolf Bastian, or the modernist writers who according to Campbell “said it all,” namely James Joyce and Thomas Mann.

Although he had an intellectual allergy to formal dogmatic theology, Campbell certainly treated religious topics throughout his career. Ignored by professional academics in Religious Studies who presumably would have been his peers in studying religious myths, he ignored them equally, almost never citing contemporary professional journals or specialists.⁴ I often find students puzzled about an approach in Campbell's work that Religious Studies instructors discarded long ago, and his reports of the findings of the natural and social sciences were frequently out of date. In a critical review of An Open Life, Daniel Noel concludes that “there is … little evidence … that Campbell cared about any ‘advances’ other than his own shifting predilections.” In Noel's view, this book underscores how, “notwithstanding his own evolving interpretive skills, something other than cutting-edge scholarship was central” (1990b, 55).

While many contemporary academics pursue matters of meaning such as those raised by Campbell's writings, they often find Campbell's answers incomplete, inconsistent, or insufficiently developed, as they do the thought of many other writers whose primary contributions were made several decades ago. Certainly there are few college texts in religion or mythology which have not been through several revisions since the period (1959-68) in which the four volumes of The Masks of God were published. But Campbell was never one to revise his works, and he repeated the same arguments tirelessly. Campbell's erudition was not favorable toward the manifold articles of formal theology. His was not the tiny finish brush of portraiture but the broad sweep of landscape.

Most other specialists in myth have kept up with the ethnographic details developed in the disciplines of the anthropology and history of religions, as well as the methodological shifts in the literary study of myth in classics and literature studies, so that reading Campbell now feels almost like reading Frazer's Golden Bough. There are important comprehensions and insights, but the reader wonders just how Campbell would deal with the great mass of contemporary aporia and postmodernist materials that are seldom engaged in his works, beyond a passing reference to computers and Star Wars. (Somewhat ironically, one activity of the Joseph Campbell Foundation is digitalizing all of Campbell's writings.)

As a popularizer, Campbell was concerned that our public religious symbols are dying or lost, and that much of the population merely delves within rather than emulates now-moribund religious models (1972, 90). Our scientific, and generally our public language is no longer filled with poetic metaphors and symbols, but with discrete bits of information, such as the “sound bite” of a politician. To speak in such a context of a yoga or yoking, i. e., a religious tying-together of values and interpretations of experience, is to speak against the grain of our newspapers or laboratory documents. We have Campbell (and producers Stuart Brown and Bill Moyers) to thank for the attractive discussions that public television disseminated across the country, wherein many such deep-cultural issues were discussed effectively once again.

Campbell speaks about the significance of the idea of deity, about the range of ways of facing death, about how societies treat human maturation and growth, about how representatives of the common lot—heroines and heroes—act initially against, then on behalf of the commonwealth. In short, there are deeply moral concerns being studied and voiced in Campbell's lectures, interviews, and writings, and even when I sometimes tire of hearing the same answers repeated, I appreciate that at least here someone is raising important religious issues. Gulick regards Campbell as a contemporary religious hero precisely because “he consistently attends to issues of existential meaning without bringing the nature of this meaning to thematic focus” (1990, 34). Gulick notes as well that Campbell's approach to myth “is largely devoid of either ethical or religious elements. Yet because [Campbell] involves his readers in concerns commonly dealt with by the world's religions, it is useful to speak of [his] impact as religious in character” (1990, 37), an observation totally opposed to the opinion of two readers of this essay who felt it completely inappropriate to speak of Campbell as a religious figure.

Surely Campbell may be called a modernist in Milton Scarborough's sense of substituting one set of things (moral values, preachments) for another (the images/figures of a myth) (1994, 22), but Gulick would have him opening a new branch of religious/Christian existentialism. I suspect that Scarborough could be pressed to include Campbell within his own grouping of poststructuralist, postphenomenological mythographers who speak, in the fashion of Polanyi and Merleau-Ponty, of tacit knowing on the one hand, and of the “presumptively universal” quality of myth: “It is an existential condition arising in actual experience” (1994, 94). That “actual experience” of the phenomenologists' life-world is part of the “body” of the myth: Scarborough reclaims the affective nature of mythology precisely in its existential conditionedness; myth is not empty type or archetype, but is always realized.

The issues Campbell engaged may have not seemed like religious issues to many persons accustomed only to the hegemonic Western religiosity that is reported on the simplistic news reports of television, or that is heard from electronic pulpits. But again and again when I lead discussion of these materials, I note the strongly religious concerns of the persons asking questions. Conservatives and liberals alike have trouble with some of the ways in which Campbell forces them to challenge their own tradition, and even the most liberal wonder if the East can really deepen or thicken Western religion as Campbell promises.

Nor are his claims timid. Campbell makes Kundalini Yoga the most important religious focus of several of his works, including The Mythic Image (1974, chap. 4), The Inner Reaches of Outer Space (1986, 63-105), and Transformations of Myths Through Time (1990c, chaps. 7-9). Kundalini Yoga is also crucial with respect to Goddess religion in The Power of Myth (1988b), and it is used allegorically and comparatively in Transformations of Myths Through Time “to link into our Western philosophies” (1990c 134). In The Mythic Image, Campbell notes that “it is becoming increasingly apparent as we advance in our knowledge of Asia that in the yogic lore of India and Tibet, China, and Japan, we may have a master key to the inward dimensions of all symbolic forms” (1974, 278). Harold Coward observes that Campbell used Kundalini Yoga as “a template to organize his understanding of other Eastern and Western myths” (1990, 57).⁵

Campbell did not spend his eighty-three years exploring mythologies and the cultures that produced them merely for the purpose of entertainment. He believed that myths could give conscious access into the underlying and transcending cosmic powers: “Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation” (1968b, 3). Mythic/mystic symbols are for Campbell the bearers of this great energic, spiritual source, and he considers them not dismissively as mere images, but as important entities that release energies otherwise not accessible:

The images of myth are reflections of the spiritual potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating these we evoke their powers in our own lives.

(1988b, 217-18)

Now the first and most important effect of a living mythological symbol is to waken and give guidance to the energies of Life. It is an energy-releasing and energy-directing sign, which not only “turns you on,” … but turns you on in a certain direction, making you function a certain way—which will be one conducive to your participation in the life and purposes of a functioning social group. However, when the symbols provided by the social group no longer work, and the symbols that do work are no longer of the group, the individual cracks away, becomes dissociated and disoriented, and we are confronted with what can only be named a pathology of the symbol.

(1972, 88)

Another pathology that evoked Campbell's Irish-American ire repeatedly was the claim by any religious group to be The Chosen People of a particular god (1990b, 167). Asserting that “A god is a personification of an energy, a natural energy, which comes either through the external natural world or from the world of inner nature” (1989, 25), Campbell treats claims to be the only people for whom the energy represented by deity is available as representing essentially claims that block that god from access by others.

Of course the underlying idea that gods or God are a sort of natural energy rather than events of history-intrusive revelation is itself enough to cause traditional religious folks to stumble a good bit. But Campbell the post-Freudian goes even further in arguing that, in fact, “deities are personifications, not facts, they are metaphors. They're not references to anything that you can put your finger on, or your eye on. They are metaphors transparent to transcendence” (1989, 28; cf. 1988a, 87; 1989, 51). And the Hindu-inspired leap Campbell usually took at this point goes even further: “We're in trouble because we don't recognize that the god's energies are our own energies” (1989, 29, my emphasis). Campbell's assertions are typical of Western religious mystics, who usually have been made to feel unwelcome in the family of Western religions because of their claim to intimacy with the divine, but they are commonplace in the East.⁶

Two primary problems typify these religions, toward which Campbell experiences the son's mixed love and rejection: (1) taking the mythic symbols and the deities literally or historically rather than metaphorically, and (2) the dogmatic claim that theological tenets have priority over personal religious experience. With respect to his own Roman Catholic rearing, Campbell noted that all the old Christian stories are meaningless “unless those can be read as metaphorical of what ought to happen to me, that I ought to die and resurrect, die to my ego and resurrect to my divinity” (1990b, 139). He paraphrases “the Oriental gurus,” approvingly, as asking “What does it matter if someone rose from the dead 2,000 years ago? Are you rising from the dead today?” (1988a, 31).

Likewise hell, reinterpreted metaphorically, must surely be the abode of people who could never relinquish their personal egos in order to allow a transpersonal power to become the center of their lives (1988a, 67), and the God image itself “is a metaphor for a spiritual experience. But you don't have to get it through that particular metaphor” (1988a, 87)—the sentiment is that of the earlier demythologization movement in Christianity, wherein eventually the particular historical Jesus is no more important than any other epiphany such as Buddha or Gongfutzu). Indeed, religious mythology works primarily at the level of the metaphoric imagination and the mystical experience of transcendence (1990b, 159, 162), and it is no good pretending to have the one without the other.

That experiencing of the divine energies within one's own biography is precisely what religions refer to in terms of mysticism, and mystical branches of religions are almost universally considered suspect by theological authorities charged with correct teaching, because mystical experience falls beyond the control of the religious institution. Campbell suggests that religion is mostly “a misinterpretation of mythology” when it fails to understand the spiritual, metaphoric nature of mythic symbolism and hence substitutes for it a specific historical or local form (1988a, 78-79); it may substitute the tenor or final reference of the symbol for its vehicle, the image for the reality (1968b, 236, 270). The traditional theological term for such a situation is “idolatry” (1990c, 132), and Campbell never hesitates to apply it when the transcendence of the symbol is reduced or set aside: “Any god who is not transparent to transcendence is an idol, and its worship is idolatry” (1986, 44).⁷

A similar problem faces our own day when we are so far from a sense of the poetic that we can equate metaphor only with falsehood, lies, and unreality, a situation Campbell refers to as mistaking “tribal literalism” and “sentimentalized significance” for transcendence. Just such improper interpretation of religious myth leads, he suggests, directly to the complicated religio-political situation of modern Beirut, wherein “the contending zealots of three different inflections even of the same idea of a single paternal ‘God’ are unloading bombs on each other” (1986, 58).

Campbell also refers to his confrontation with a talkshow host who stubbornly equated lie and metaphor, even though he could not give even a simple definition of the latter (1990b, 134-36). Hence it is not just theology that gets tarred with the “idolatry” brush (1988b, 141; 1990b, 191), but our contemporary inability to appreciate the cultural heritage that precedes and now accompanies positivistic scientism and the predominant mercantile worldview. Scarborough finds that worldview founded already in Platonic dualism, or at least in the Cartesian dualism that gave birth to modernism. Salyer notes (1990, 54, 56) how reductionistic Robert Segal's approach to Campbell is, precisely when it concerns Campbell's own concept of the “duality of the world”—so that Segal's “introduction” becomes “an attack on Campbell's oeuvre instead of an interpretation of it” (54). Sexson shows just the opposite, how Campbell emphasizes the mysterious, providing readers with a rich tolerance for ambiguity and a technique for mediating and balancing, living within the perceived dualities (1990, 140).

To read the stories about Jesus' ascension (his bodily elevation to the skies) metaphorically is to allow them to live anew (1988b, 56); but to literalize them is essentially to deny them any spiritual reference, and hence to destroy them (1959, 27, 42). There may be a middle way, and I think it surprising that the mythophile in Campbell didn't emphasize it more: one can emphasize the essentially paradoxical manner of so much of what gives life its meaning. I mean the double focus that can accept the thorough going duality of being/non-being, good/evil, male/female, indeed “the basic paradox of myth: the paradox of the dual focus” (1968b, 288). That paradox is what is learned by the heroine or hero whose exploits have led to life-changing confrontation with the depth/ground/fundament, and who returns to the everyday world with innocence lost, but with the inner spiritual eye that sees beyond the limitations of the present time purified. It is also what is disclosed by the mythic trickster, who causes one to double-sight even the most elevated notions of a god: “The trickster represents the deity coming through as the destroyer, the disrupter of programs” (1989, 89); but while the trickster is the dissolver, he is also a creator/shaper figure who knows how to make the most of the primeval mud/chaos (see Doty 1992, Hynes and Doty 1993).

The paradoxically-clarified vision arises from recognizing the essential equality of inside and outside, human and deity, good and evil—they form “a single, self-mirrored mystery, which is identical with the mystery of the manifest world” (1968b, 40). Self and World, the immediate experiential and the atemporal transcendent, are seen through mystically as two sides of the same coin, as two phases of appearing and existing. We situate ourselves now in the mesocosmic position between macrocosm and microcosm, the mythological (most “normal” religiosities substitute at this point “the religious” or “the ritual”), in-between locus wherein one can sanctify the everyday, give its banalities a transcendental significance, yet at the same time realize that the archetypal transcendent is only available through the local manifestation.

Campbell returned to the theme of the universal in tension with the local throughout his career: the danger always is that the local (the “my people,” the specific localizations of tradition, the folk inflections that have contributed such a wide range of shapings of various religions, what the Greeks would refer to as the epichoric as opposed to the national, the oikotypical vs. the archetypical) overwhelms the universal. It substitutes limited belief in one particularized historical tradition for trans-historical and universal truth. Here Campbell becomes moralist and preacher for his own understanding of the true mythology:

Inevitably, in the popular mind, where … metaphors of transcendence become known only as represented in the rituals and legends of the local, mythologically inspired control system, the whole sense of the symbology remains locked to local practical aims and ethnical ideals, in the function chiefly of controlling, socializing, and harmonizing in strictly local terms the primitive bioenergies of the human animal, to the popular ends of health, progeny, and prosperity as the proper aims of a human life. Whereas, in fundamental contrast, the way of the mystic and of proper art (and we might also add, religion) is of recognizing through the metaphors an epiphany beyond words.

(1986, 21; italics different in original)⁸

Such epiphany or manifestation of deity beyond words is sought in the vision quest, as “the essence of mythology” (1988a, 23), and it is the ultimate experience that leads to the realization that all the world's mythologies, seen mystically, tell parts of the same story. Such experience leads also to the understanding that the blissful sense of being properly situated where one ought to be comes from one's own sat, chit, and ananda. Those Sanskrit terms are religious shorthand for the Hindu recognition that one has first the proper sense of one's being and place in the universe; second the consciousness appropriate to the various inherited-classes and stages of life (varna and ashrama); and third the “rapture” of atunement to the transcosmic, whose “bliss” is more and yet less than perfect personal fulfillment (1988b, 120).

Since the reiterated “follow your bliss” admonition has been one of the points at which the filmed interviews and associated publications have provoked the most questions,⁹ we ought to see what Campbell means by this term, which is contrasted with its opposite, namely work, which “begins when you don't like what you're doing” (1988a, 107). Bliss is the highest value not of traditional, orthodox, religious teaching but of the left-hand, unorthodox path; it is the Hindu term for the attainment of insight into one's proper place in the universe, one's appropriate relationship to the divine energies (the enlightened person may have the suffix -ananda added to her/his personal name). Not surprisingly, ananda is what Campbell considers the correct outcome of the “mythologically inspired life” (1990b, 64).

In opposition to the pop religious offer of easy grace, it is not cheap, easy, or attained as a gift, but something gained by experience and discipline, by a lifetime devoted to finding one's appropriate position between the paradoxical polarities mentioned earlier:

the real power of the lefthand path [is] following your bliss instead of instructions. You're following the lead of your emotion and of your vitality; but the head has to be there all the time because you're on a narrow ridge [referring to a Buddhist story Campbell has just told] and in danger of falling off. That is to say, letting too much of the torrent of energy come through will blow it.

(1988a, 31)

The bliss-full life is full of spontaneity, one of Campbell's hallmarks of human authenticity.¹⁰

The lefthand path of bliss is also the path of the individual in contrast to the righthand conditioning and constraining of “the context of the ideology … of one's local village compound” (1990c, 26). It is the path that recognizes fully the paradoxicality of life and can absorb the horror of the Fall, that is, the message that “Life's a killer”—a “terrible message and yet it's the bliss message. Bliss absorbs pain. But it's certainly not happiness” (1989, 105), nor is it merely unthinking pleasure: “If your bliss is just your fun and your excitement, you're on the wrong track” (1990b, 214).

Bliss is educed from the deepest place within oneself that harbors one's sense of personal mission, comparable to what led Jesus to the cross and crucifixion (1990b, 154-55). In response to a question from the audience at one of his lectures, Campbell first responded that “an individual has to find what electrifies and enlivens his own heart, and wakes him” (1990b, 134), and then went on, just at the point where he might have said “and have a good time!” to point to “the world of the arts and literature, what we call the liberal arts [as] the world in which to find all this” (ibid.). Learning to be ready to experience it can be compared to a college education or to training for a career (1990b, 100). It should be obvious that isolating Campbell's “bliss message” misreads it simplistically about as much as to state that Jesus “is all about love.”

Following his lefthand path with respect to traditional Western religions, Campbell crafted a personal career that was uniquely his own, following, as Phil Cousineau, editor of The Hero's Journey, puts it, “his Tao of Scholarship beyond the hallowed halls of traditional academia and into a spiritual and psychological view of mythology, which embraces the transcendent Reality referred to by saints and shamans that can be directly experienced” (Campbell, 1990b, xii). Campbell, in accepting the Medal of Honor for Literature from the National Arts Club, referred to having felt very successful “in spite of my nonacademic career, you might say” (1990b, 177). Such a maverick position can be sustained only by someone deeply grounded psychospiritually, who needs little external approbation.

Campbell's typical exposition of the twofold paths of mythologies and world religions portrays the one type as being represented by the law, history, and sociology, and the other by feeling, nature, and spontaneity (cf. 1990b, 222; 1990a). The latter is the lefthand path of the iconoclast or revisionist, and in Campbell's case that meant especially taking positions that often clashed with institutional Western religiosity.

Campbell's position revives an issue faced in early Christianity when it responded to very popular Gnostic interpretations (at one point early on, over half of all Christians were Marcionites). Subsequent Church historians wrote the story as if the Gnostics were “outside agitators” detracting from the “true faith,” but it is clear now that the Gnostic Christianities were simply epichoric (localized, regional) forms that finally did not have enough political clout to survive when dominated by the patriarchal, obsessively-institutional Western (particularly Antiochean and Roman) forms.¹¹

We are speaking, then, about experiential, mystical religiosity as opposed to institutional, dogmatic, canonical religion. Campbell continually worried that awkward tension between the numinous epiphany (the immediate experiencing of the divine) and the canonical institution, although it is striking that he never engaged the extensive academic discussion of those differences during his own career, in the several disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and psychology of religion. In fact, the social function of myth is repeatedly ignored, as evidenced by the fact that Campbell never explored the contexts of mythic stories in terms of their origins and subsequent sites of transmission. Various analysts speak of Campbell's American Romantic individualism, in which the social functioning is ignored no less than in traditional religious gnosticisms.¹²

Campbell could be vituperative when it came to the institutional forms of Western religion that he saw beginning already in the Israelite scriptures.¹³ Some have claimed that Campbell was anti-Semitic, relying almost entirely on posthumous and ad hominem attacks, and citing personal incidents that we can only stack up against all the pro-Campbell voices whose evidence runs in totally opposite directions (such as the thirteen devoted years editing the posthuma of Heinrich Zimmer, whose family had fled the Holocaust). Any casual reader will find throughout Campbell's writings criticisms of Christian, Islamic, and Hindu fundamentalisms that are every bit as powerful as those against ancient Israel. “All religions have a point of absurdity in them,” he laments (1990c, 109).

What especially bothered him about organized religions was that they threatened the development of the individualism that “Republican” Campbell considered to be unique to modern Western history. Again and again he attacks constraints upon individual belief—an emphasis that seems to me to have been based in the 1950-60s reaction against “mass human” values that had become evident in education so well as in business and politics during that Cold War period. It was likewise a sort of neo-Stoic escapism or displacement: during the social unrest of the late Hellenistic period in Greece and Rome, Stoicism offered a retreat to the internal Self that could “live hidden” no matter what the outside political world is doing, a position echoed famously in the twentieth century by Dag Hammarskjöld (see espec. 1964).

With the end of the dominance of the Church and many classical habits of the Western humanities in the modern world, when the individual rather than the societas became culturally dominant, when it became more and more acceptable to define the individual within a “natural” opposition to the social, we face a breakdown of traditional Western mythology.¹⁴ Ours is not a time of “no mythology,” but of competing mythologies, a time of a sort of ultimate-choice cable-TV of religious options, in which it becomes harder and harder for individuals to make intelligent selections and choices such as were made on their behalf earlier, and then conveyed through initiation and other communal rites.

Fortunately Campbell, whose personal crotchets included conservative attitudes about gender roles and other sensitive issues, did not call for reinstatement of hegemonic control by a single mythology. Traditional societies in which there is a single dominant mythology tend to be intolerant, repressive, and imperialistic, and Campbell would hardly advocate reinstating their strictures against the freedoms of the Republican individual. I suspect that he would be more interested in what ethicists today refer to as “middle axioms,” benchmarks that are not thought of as absolute or final, but as having provisional validity within particular interpretive communities such as religious denominations; or he might have agreed with contemporary critical theorists who stress not correct/incorrect readings but interpretations appropriate to particular hermeneutical communities.

The precise nature of those communities seemed not to concern Campbell, who had little positive to say about collectivities.¹⁵ Perhaps overreacting to the early-twentieth-century and subsequent Stalinist periods in which American entrepreneurial individualism seemed threatened, Campbell emphasizes repeatedly that “the place to find is within yourself” (1988b, 161).¹⁶ But simultaneously, Campbell saw his role as prophetic, as vitally challenging the dominant community values, although not as calling for an end to their status as traditions. The archetypal power source available to the individual comes not as an isolated bolt out of the blue, but it is conditioned by the traditions in which one is reared. Ultimately being a hero means moving beyond one's own ego toward the human collectivity: “you must live not in terms of your own ego system, your own desires, but in terms of what you might call the sense of mankind—the Christ—in you” (1988b, 210).

A certain Christian bias remains, even in this religious maverick who so often challenged particularistic interpretations of the Christian preachings. And a bias toward the Republican ideals so intimately tied up with American identity among the well-to-do. Getting us into the next phase of transglobal identity, namely planetary consciousness, will be extremely difficult, yet Campbell did little more than mention its growing necessity and importance: “The old gods are dead or dying and people everywhere are searching, asking: What is the new mythology to be, the mythology of this unified earth as of one harmonious being?” (1986, 17); “I do think we're at the beginning of a global age … All horizons are broken” (1990b, 209); “the walls are down” and “we need a global mythology” (1989, 124, 46).

Already in 1949, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell spoke of the need for a planetary community to replace the bounded consciousness of the nationalisms to which we have become so accustomed (1968, 388), but he provides few hints other than the need to coordinate the scientific cosmology of our culture with its religious worldview. One wishes he had been as skilled at developing sufficient coordinations of such perspectives as he was at indicating how greatly modern religion fails to accommodate its teachings to scientific findings. Precisely as we now appreciate the complexities of a fully multicultural society, we would like to know more about what Campbell might have said about the mutual and respectful coexistence of all the various religious traditions that he studied. Did he see an interplanetary mythosphere beyond the realms of science/speculative fiction and conservative Christianity? Did he even read science fiction?

Nonetheless, a fully planetary consciousness will presumably build upon something like Campbell's notion that there is one transcending mythological base variously inflected: “The universally distinguishing characteristic of mythological thought and communication is an implicit connotation through all its metaphorical imagery of a sense of identity of some kind, transcendent of appearances, which unites behind the scenes the opposed actors on the world stage” (1986, 110).¹⁷ Or such consciousness will disagree: let others deal with differences, Campbell chose to emphasize similarities. As Phil Cousineau suggests, Campbell's was the search for a unified field theory equivalent to Einstein's in the physical sciences (1990b, xi-xii).

That sort of theory requires a universal essentializing to be contrasted sharply with the emphasis in traditional Western religions upon their unique historical experience and religious revelations,¹⁸ and again we are at a point where traditional Western religions would have grave difficulties in following Campbell's design. Each of the patriarchal, history-stressing religions now dominant claims that its own revelation is unique and its own relationship to a god particular—quite in contrast to a suggestion that we might each learn to worship the god-ness of each other, a concept familiar in the East, but already for the Greeks a position of divine-human fusion that was hybris, problematic; the oracular “Know yourself!” meant something like “Recognize the proper limits of human claims to autonomy!”

Nor can the claim that Campbell makes about the relatively minor value of social historicity fail to ruffle the feathers of the pious: already in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he had argued that if a particular hero-figure lacked elements appropriate to the innate scheme of the hero-pattern, followers would fabricate such elements: “If the deeds of an actual historical figure proclaim him to have been a hero, the builders of his legend will invent for him appropriate adventures in depth” (1968, 321). Here again the lefthand perspective leads beyond the problem posed by recognizing the imaginal character of most of the sacred-hero accounts; and perhaps the new planetary consciousness will bring replacements for the standard macho hero model as well.

Campbell notes that the traditional hero path that he charts with such verve and insight is a model for the adolescent (1988b, 124). Jungian interpreters such as Joseph Henderson (1964) stipulate that the hero motif arises in personal psychological materials precisely when the individual ego needs to be strengthened. One wonders then if the traditional hero model celebrated in America is still appropriate for adults. How can it be that so much of our mass entertainment (with its Cowboy or Vice Squad or John Rambo) is fixated at a teenage level of development? Campbell proposes that the hero “evolves as the culture evolves” (1988b, 135), but unfortunately he did not show us what he meant by that remark, nor did he develop adequately a monomyth of the heroine such as Maureen Murdock has proposed, focused not upon conquest but upon human interrelationships (1990).

One sort of 21st-century evolution would be a revisioning of the hero toward more psychological and mystical directions. Perhaps something like the various metaphysical levels (padmas or chakras) studied in Kundalini Yoga might help us rise beyond the needs and concerns of the adolescent-hero. Campbell observes that only the first three of the seven chakras have to do with the development of hero strengths, and that in order to reach more adult stages of development, the higher chakras require in fact the sacrifice of the hero-form itself (1974, 490). The goal of every yoga/religion is to go into the ultimate zones of the Mother Light, the mystical experience (1974, 362), not merely as part of the bliss of the individual, but as participation in the ultimate (collective?). A new heroicism would strengthen the planetary, not the individual ego; it would involve not merely fighting the demons of constricting institutionalism, but those of the egoic denial of others that often characterizes precisely some of the popular-religion/psychology groups who tout the universalism of Joseph Campbell.

Where we need most help today is in finding heroines whose self-consciously-held ideals unfold from the supportive community, not from solar heroes who strike out against the community as their first and primary proof of manhood.¹⁹ Campbell understands the dangers of falling into an undisciplined, consciousness destroying psychosis.²⁰ He defines as neurotic the person who does not manage the “second birth” of becoming adult and thereby of becoming an integral member of the social unit within which identity should be based.

Ultimately Campbell idealizes religion as a mode of personal psychology—“in the final analysis, religion is psychological and in the deepest sense spontaneous” (1959, 263)—and much of what Campbell addresses we hear now in the context of what has come to be called humanistic psychology or even New Age thought. Sometimes the self-help, positive-thinking orientation of such a movement seems irresponsibly up-beat and Pollyanna-like in the face of something like the Holocaust, or the realia of Beirut, or the Persian Gulf invasions. It seldom addresses directly contemporary psychological theory or research, or specific social, ethical, and political problems.

But Campbell's “psychology” is closer to what we usually term metaphysics or theosophy rather than psychology—“the figurations of myth are metaphorical … in two senses simultaneously, as bearing (1) psychological, but at the same time (2) metaphysical, connotations” (1986, 56)—and he can slip directly from the language of psychology into that of metaphysics: “there is a basic psychological law that any living god unrecognized becomes a demon” (1988c, 2.1: 46). Of course, from the point of view of contemporary academic psychology, this is a curious sort of psychology, and in fact the sort of social science mentioned earlier in this essay turns today even less than Campbell does to such figures as Jung and Freud, concerned as both those figures were with the classical “care of souls.”²¹

Campbell's “psychology” may have closer analogies to developmental psychology or the recent emphasis in education and ethics upon the progressive stages of moral development, as when Campbell notes the usefulness of mythological images and models to provide projections of psychic possibilities:

The myth is the mirror from which the ego can see itself reflected. It's a mirror with a schedule on it, a patterned mirror, and the ego sees itself in that reflex and knows where it is on the scoreboard. … The myth lets you know where you are. It knows what the patterns of life have been through centuries and what position you now are entering or holding.

(1989, 94)

In this sense, myth is conservative like the ashramic system of India or the etiquette manuals of the American upper-class: it conveys the approved manifest of ways of being in the world religiously.

Likewise for the culture: even a socio-historical recollection can be mythologically or psychologically interpreted—we begin to circle back to where we began; we may now say that they are “metaphorically” interpreted here. I've never forgotten the metaphorical insight that Campbell develops in Occidental Mythology (1964) when he treats the Israelite Exodus as a mytho-cultural cycle of descent into the underworld and resurrection rather than as a possibly-historical record.

Campbell did not endear himself to religious orthodoxies when he equated the significance of the Christ and the Buddha, or when, in responding to Robert Cockrell's question about what he considered “the best window to an experience of the transcendent,” he indicated “either an Upanashadic text or one or another of the Buddhist sutras” (Campbell, 1990b 166).²² Or when he said that James Joyce rather than Holy Scripture provides the sacred text for the modern period, or when he repeatedly emphasized the Dionysiac liberation of the nature religions against which all three Western monotheisms have inveighed—in these instances he made evident his own religious iconoclasm.

Furthermore, Campbell was doubtless suspect even in religious circles that were appreciative of the information conveyed through his comparativist approach when he set out in one of his first volumes to write a “natural history of the gods” (1959, 5), and when he continued throughout his life to reflect upon the biological factors that might influence religions (fortunately he never stumbled onto sociobiology!) Better terms than “biological” today would be psychobiological, psychosomatic, psychophysiological, or bioenergetic (1986, 20), since Campbell was primarily concerned with the cultural results of particular biological patterns.²³ He wondered about the possibility of physiological-genetic bases of the religious or mythical archetypes, anticipating a recent suggestion by Norman Austin that the information in archetypes is comparable to what we now know about DNA (Austin 1990).²⁴

Curiously the biological was for Campbell as much as any other category “the cultural,” since the life-cycle determinants deriving from biological development that he treated in Primitive Mythology (1959) transform into other biocultural factors in other writings. They are the three fundamental factors that lead to the development of a mythology: (1) the “recognition of mortality and the requirement to transcend it”; (2) the relative insignificance of the individual in contrast to the long-lasting endurance of the social group; and (3) the spectacle of the universe, and of the human relationship to the natural world (1972, 22-23).

In the portion of the Historical Atlas of World Mythology entitled The Sacrifice (1988c, 2.1), such factors have become the four paideumatic or pedagogical models underlying the historical progression from the sacrificial world of the hunter through the recognition of the mathematical regularities of the heavenly bodies and finally, the turn, in India, to the recognition that the world-founding and world-sustaining power of the world-external Source is “the same will or power that can be experienced within as the very life, finally, of oneself” (84).

At the end of a career in which Campbell's disciplined following of his bliss (he notes repeatedly that his religion was his scholarship, his yoga or meditation studying and underlining books) gave him a surety of approach, a self-confidence in what he was about, that has left us an inheritance useful for years to come. That the oeuvre has been so appealing for so many decades reflects the non- or anti-institutional fundaments of many of American religious and intellectual readers. Campbell repeatedly engaged issues that theologians were engaging; and he graphed the religions of the world in the ways history of religion specialists were only learning to do.²⁵

Remarkably, he never engaged in the sort of backbiting among the denominations and faiths that still characterizes those books on “non-Western religions” that treat everything from the magisterial or triumphialist perspectives of the dominant Western religious development (“almost Christian in its sophistication, the Hindu idea of …”). That ordinary lay persons could wrestle with gripping issues about the meaning of the universe, the nature of goddesses and gods, how to face death, where to turn to find a moral community, and how to pursue religious interests in a context free of denominational cant or privilege—we all have Campbell to thank for his impetus in this regard.

His prophetic critique, namely that the progressive development of Western religions has led merely to a sort of legalistic hardening of the spiritual arteries, and must be revivified by a massive infusion of Eastern religious thought, seems ultimately to reflect nonetheless a sort of devolutionary bias that finds all religions moving from a primal theophany (manifestation of the divine) to dogmatic legalisms. Campbell was good at critique, but not blessed as a system-builder, and the questions that recall us repeatedly to the study of any non-modern, non-Western religious mythology remain to be answered by others.

Are there ways to retain the experiential power of the encounter with the originary numinosity within the institutions that are necessary for their survival as human social entities? Can the new planetary consciousness and its resulting common mythology provide the sort of successful resolution to the question of the spiritual experience and the institutional law with which each religion has to wrestle? And: Will such a perspective keep us from wiping from the face of our planet the meager bounds of civilization that we have been able to cultivate?

If we manage it, it will doubtless be with a much larger sense of who and what “belongs” to civilization. Such a perspective will honor beings and powers such as we have only begun to recognize within Western evolutionary and dualistic perspectives: “the whole context of world history, in fact, is of destinies unfolding through time as a vast net of reciprocal influences … which not only are of people upon people, but involve also the natural world with its creatures and accidents of all kinds” (Campbell, 1986, 110).

The “new mythology” to come? Well, for all of its echoes of religious systems that we now recognize, it too will be different from any of those popular systems:

It is—and will forever be, as long as our human race exists—the old, everlasting, perennial mythology, in its “subjective sense,” poetically renewed in terms neither of a remembered past nor of a projected future, but of now: addressed, that is to say, not to the flattery of “peoples,” but to the waking of individuals in the knowledge of themselves, not simply as egos fighting for place on the surface of this beautiful planet, but equally as centers of Mind at Large—each in his own way at one with all, and with no horizons.

(1972, 266—the concluding paragraph)

Joseph Campbell respected absolutely the independence of the mythic voices, even to the point of disembodied recitals that now strike us as insufficient or strained. But precisely as the archcritic and the proponent of “individualism,” Campbell would want us to look into and behind and through his own representations of myths as metaphors open to transcendence. Was, one is tempted to ask, Joseph Campbell an “elemental idea”?

Notes

1. Cf. 11 and 217-18.

2. Scarborough (1994) pays little attention to Campbell, but does provide useful reflection upon the more philosophical dimensions of myth, such as those “cosmological structures” named by Girardot.

3. Karen King observes that Campbell's use of gnostic materials is haphazard and never grounded in “sustained analysis of particular Gnostic myths at all, even those easily available in the fifties and sixties” (1992, 79).

4. I discuss that issue in Doty (1990). One often has the impression that Campbell's approach to religion and mythology was one that let him favor either entity when it was most useful for his argument cf. the opening of the second chapter in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space. “From the point of view of any orthodoxy, myth might be defined simply as ‘other people's religion,’ to which an equivalent definition of religion would be ‘misunderstood mythology,’ the misunderstanding consisting in the interpretation of mythic metaphors as references to hard fact” (1986, 55).

   Walter Gulick (1990) treats Campbell intriguingly as “a modern religious hero” in his careful expansion of Campbell's four functions of mythology into a modernist existentialist paradigm. Spivey observes that one reason that Campbell was ignored by much of the academic world was that he “uses words rejected by the reigning modern authorities on literature and the other arts—‘bliss,’ ‘eternal values,’ the ‘inner life,’ the ‘spirit’” (1992, 79).

   I have not found it useful to apply the term Perennial Philosophy to Campbell's work because it is a term that has many historical referents, although it is used by Segal (1990) and Sexson (1990). Campbell himself uses it in its Eastern multiform in Transformations of Myth Through Time (Campbell 1990c, chap. 5); as a more neutral omnibus term in the study guide for his PBS series with Bill Moyers (Lord, et al., 1990, 68-70, 74; and in The Hero's Journey: The World of Joseph Campbell (Campbell 1990b, xv and 127).

5. Coward criticizes Campbell's confusions of the various yogic schools (1990, 57, 64). I expressed my reservations about the finding of a single keystone in a review essay on the book (Doty 1976).

6. On the importance for Campbell of India and Eastern religions generally, see Coward, who notes, “To a great extent Campbell's ‘mono’ or ‘master’ myth is the myth of India” (1990, 67).

7. Several critics in Noel pinpoint the de-emphasis upon the sociological function of myth (1990a, 69, 107, 142), but perhaps most telling is Sexson's observation that Campbell almost never pursued the sociopolitical/gender ramifications: “Campbell seldom examines the ideo-story of any of the narratives that he tells so well” (1990, 142).

8. The closeness of art and religion for Campbell is evident in his last writing, “Art as a Revelation” (in 1988c, 1.2: viii-xxiii).

9. Not to mention the self-aggrandizing commercial advertisement headed “Follow your Bliss in 1989” in the New York Times Book Review, 4 February 1989, 8, or the disagreements about the significance of the term following Brendan Gill's article on Campbell in The New York Review of Books (1989).

10. 1990a, 161; 1990b, 222; cf. on the Hindu anandamaya, The Hero's Journey: The World of Joseph Campbell (1990b, 210-11).

11. Frankiel (1989) raises from a Jewish perspective the typological problem now represented by the way we regard the historical problem of early Christian Gnosticism: it is the problem of the social institution per se, whose structures both protect the experiential and suppress it because it is so unmanageable. The problem already faced the early-Christian Paul, who was not too helpful on the institutional issues, and subsequently was of little direct relevance in the catholicizing developments represented in the later writings of the New Testament. The enthusiastic spiritualism of Gnostic Christians who took Paul's thought as paradigmatic certainly horrified the increasingly-institutionalized church Fathers.

12. See, for example, King (1990, 69, 79), Sexson (1990, 141), and Lefkowitz (1990).

13. See citations in Doty (1990, 188 n. 12).

14. Creative Mythology (1968a), the fourth of Campbell's Masks of God volumes, treats the gradual dissolution of the Christian mythic system dominant in the Middle Ages, and the subsequent problem of finding a satisfactory place for the individual in European, and subsequently American culture. The theme recurs throughout Campbell's works, even in The Power of Myth (1988b, chap. 7), although it derives ultimately from his early work toward a Ph.D. in French literature.

15. An instructive contrast will be found in Rue (1989), a work that documents our “a-mythic” state, yet argues that there is hope in returning to the church on the corner in order to work out a renewal of the Judaeo-Christian concept of Covenant.

16. Cf. Sexson: “Campbell's notion of the hero is bound up in a notion of soul that may be a masquerade of ego” (1990, 144).

17. See also 1990b, 127, and 1986, 99.

18. Frankiel is correct in seeing that this involves a collapsing of divine transcendence into a metaphysics of life energy (1989, 119). Campbell's reaction to Martin Buber, repeated several times (e. g., 1972, 90), conveys his amazement that even such a noted religious philosopher could not shed the religious particularism that Campbell considers such a block to a new religious consciousness.

19. Sexson laments the excessively egoic aspects of Campbell's hero paradigm (1990, 144). See also Lauter (1984); Pearson (1989); and especially Murdock (1990).

20. See chapter 10 of Myths to Live By (Campbell 1972) on schizophrenia.

21. Campbell notes the fairly equal reliance upon Freud and Jung in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1968b), and his increasing respect for Jung's scholarship and ideas, in An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms (1988a, 50, 121-22). Myths to Live By (1972) has several discussions of his relationships with the two. Curiously he never mentions the wide range of subsequent schools of twentieth century psychology and psychoanalysis, let alone neo-Freudian or neo-Jungian schools of thought. Larsen (1992, 27) indicates that “Campbell was not really interested in taking sides [between Freud and Jung], but rather in effectively integrating the contributions of both men under his own conceptual umbrella”; he also notes that in his elder years Campbell remarks that while he found nothing bad about Freud, he found Jung's work “full of a secret potency—a creative imagination, a mythic imagination—of inexhaustible possibility to contemplate and to pursue” (33).

22. His Esalen lectures on Buddhism emphasized this point repeatedly, and as I note in the text, Coward suggests that “To a great extent Campbell's ‘mono’ or ‘master’ myth is the myth of India” (1990, 166).

23. Salyer notes that Campbell's work was resisted by many modernists because of the domination of evolutionary thought across the board, whereas Campbell distrusted the claim that the sciences were leading humankind to ultimate truth (1992, 62).

24. One wishes Campbell had responded to some of the new scientific models of the 1970s and 1980s, such as the “biogenetic structuralism” that I discuss in Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals (Doty 1986, 212-13), or the strong argument that “a religious (mythic) system is a stage in the evolution of the biologically necessary adaptation of man to his environment” (Gallus 1972).

25. Salyer notes that Campbell's position on the question as to whether the religious studies specialist or the mythologist ought “to believe” in the recipients of their attention was crystal clear: the reductionist position that in order to study myths or religions, one cannot believe in any is “completely antithetical to Campbell's” (1992, 62). The oppositional positions continue to be held, as canvassed in Allen (1996).

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