2: 1962), Occidental Mythology (Vol. Jung regarded myth as a useful part of therapy because it was a way for the conscious mind to uncover unconscious meaning and apply it to everyday life. Because of the stock market crash in the United States and the start of the Great Depression, he found little opportunity for work. At the award ceremony, James Hillman remarked, “No one in our century—not Freud, not Thomas Mann, not Lévi-Strauss—has so brought the mythical sense of the world and its eternal figures back into our everyday consciousness.”, Joseph Campbell died unexpectedly in 1987 after a brief struggle with cancer. Joseph Campbell in his office at Sarah Lawrence College. He was also a prolific editor. Seen from outer space, the Earth seems one. The evening was a high point in Joe’s life; for, although the cowboys were clearly the show’s stars, as Joe would later write, he “became fascinated, seized, obsessed, by the figure of a naked American Indian with his ear to the ground, a bow and arrow in his hand, and a look of special knowledge in his eyes.”, Arthur Schopenhauer, the philosopher whose writings would later greatly influence Campbell, observed that. While working on his first book, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944; coauthored with Henry Morton Robinson), Campbell attended the lectures of Heinrich Zimmer (1890–1943), a German Indologist at Columbia who had been forced into exile by the Nazis. While formally only the editor of these works, Campbell was in fact almost a coauthor. In 1932–33 Campbell taught at the preparatory school he had attended as a boy, and in the next year he began teaching in New York City at the recently founded Sarah Lawrence College, where he eventually became a professor of literature. His high school years were rich and rewarding, though marked by a major tragedy: in 1919, the Campbell home was consumed by a fire that killed his grandmother and destroyed all the family’s possessions. Please consult your tax professional regarding deductibility. By the age of ten, Joe had read every book on American Indians in the children’s section of his local library and was admitted to the adult stacks, where he eventually read the entire multivolume Reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology. This gets back again to Krishna’s dictum: “The best way to help mankind is through the perfection of yourself.”. Joseph Campbell Foundation: a Network of Information – a Community of Individuals. He was a staunch supporter of the U.S. role in the Vietnam War and, ironically, an equally staunch opponent of the counterculture movement, which took his Hero as its inspiration. I am filled with an excruciating sense of never having gotten anywhere—but when I sit down and try to discover where it is I want to get, I’m at a loss. Sometimes he favoured the East over the West, primitives over moderns, and planters over hunters. In this study of the myth of the hero, Campbell posits the existence of a Monomyth (a word he borrowed from James Joyce), a universal pattern that is the essence of, and common to, heroic tales in every culture. Then, in 1933, he moved to a cottage without running water on Maverick Road in Woodstock, New York, where he spent a year reading and writing. While outlining the basic stages of this mythic cycle, he also explores common variations in the hero’s journey, which, he argues, is an operative metaphor, not only for an individual, but for a culture as well. Although regularly labeled a Jungian, Campbell differed from the Swiss psychologist and psychoanalyst in many ways. Author of The Allure of Gnosticism; editor of The Myth and Ritual Theory: An Anthology; and others. Even as he continued his teaching career, Joe’s life continued to unfold serendipitously. He no longer asserted the mystical oneness of all persons and peoples but instead advocated the triumph of individuals—and their triumph in the human, not the divine, world. Where is it? Joe first lectured at Esalen Institute in California in 1965. Upon his retirement from Sarah Lawrence in 1972, he and his wife, the respected choreographer Jean Erdman, moved to Honolulu. Raised as a Roman Catholic, he saw parallels between seemingly unique Christian beliefs, such as the Virgin Birth of Jesus, and the religious beliefs of Native Americans. His first full-length solo authorial endeavor, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Bollingen Series XVII: 1949), was published to acclaim and brought him the first of numerous awards and honors—the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Contributions to Creative Literature. After spending much of his thirteenth year recuperating from a respiratory illness, Joe briefly attended Iona, a private school in Westchester, New York, before his mother enrolled him at Canterbury, a Catholic residential school in New Milford, Connecticut. Author of. For Campbell, myth provides sufficient access to the unconscious, and to have a myth is to need no therapy. With the onset of the Great Depression, he found himself with no hope of obtaining a teaching job; and so he spent most of the next two years reconnecting with his family, reading, renewing old acquaintances, and writing copious entries in his journal. A lifetime to be spent trying to kid myself and my pupils into believing that the thing that we are looking for is in books! Joseph Campbell, (born March 26, 1904, New York, New York, U.S.—died October 30, 1987, Honolulu, Hawaii), prolific American author and editor whose works on comparative mythology examined the universal functions of myth in various human cultures and mythic figures in a wide range of … And what is it, after all? These encounters would eventually lead him to theorize that all myths are the creative products of the human psyche, that artists are a culture’s mythmakers, and that mythologies are creative manifestations of humankind’s universal need to explain psychological, social, cosmological, and spiritual realities. Joseph Campbell was a master of comparative mythology / religion. . When Joe returned from Europe late in August 1929, he was at a crossroads, unable to decide what to do with his life. Over the years, he edited The Portable Arabian Nights (1952) and was general editor of the series Man and Myth (1953–54), which included major works by Maya Deren ( Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, 1953), Carl Kerenyi ( The Gods of the Greeks, 1954), and Alan Watts ( … I don’t know where it is—but I feel just now pretty sure that it isn’t in books.—It isn’t in travel.—It isn’t in California.—It isn’t in New York. Joseph Campbell Foundation is a US registered 501c(3) not-for-profit corporation (Federal Tax I.D. It was from Zimmer, even more than from Jung—with whom Campbell is commonly linked—that Campbell took his comparative and symbolic approach to mythology. And so it is that in our childhood years the foundation is laid of our later view of the world, and there with as well of its superficiality or depth: it will be in later years unfolded and fulfilled, not essentially changed. I suddenly realized that all of my primitive and American Indian excitement might easily be incorporated in a literary career.—I am convinced now that no field but that of English literature would have permitted me the almost unlimited roaming about from this to that which I have been enjoying. The thought of growing into a professor gives me the creeps. During this time, he wrestled with his writing, discovered the poems of Robinson Jeffers, first read Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, and wrote to some seventy colleges and universities in an unsuccessful attempt to secure employment. Joe, meanwhile, followed his initial Bollingen contribution with a “Folkloristic Commentary” to The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales (1944); he also coauthored (with Henry Morton Robinson) A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944), the first major study of James Joyce’s notoriously complex novel. His travels next carried him north to San Francisco, then back south to Pacific Grove, where he spent the better part of a year in the company of Carol and John Steinbeck and marine biologist Ed Ricketts. Lamentably, Campbell died before the interview was first broadcast in 1988. from Columbia (1925) and receiving an M.A. In January of 1932, when he was leaving Los Angeles, where he had been studying Russian in order to read War and Peace in the vernacular, he pondered his future in this journal entry: I begin to think that I have a genius for working like an ox over totally irrelevant subjects.