The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work
This month, I was trying to take a look at what makes a good story arc and… I feel like I’m on the right track, but this weeks book, The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work by Joseph Campbell, was not quite what I was looking for on that. Oh well!
So, it didn’t take me too long to figure out that if I wanted to know more about The Hero’s Journey, I maybe should have started with Campbell’s OTHER work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. But, this is the book I had, so let’s talk about it.
This is, essentially, a very brief biography of Joseph Campbell, interspersed with outtakes from the interviews done while making the video version of The Hero’s Journey. And while the Hero’s Journey has been distilled to an image that looks like this:
The book has distilled even further to 8 chapters, The Call to Adventure, The Road of Trials, The Vision Quest, The Meeting with the Goddess, The Boon, The Magic Flight, The Return Threshold, The Master of Two Worlds, and an epilogue, The Tiger and the Goat.
So in brief, Campbell was born March 26, 1904 in New York City to Charles and Josephine Campbell. He became enthralled with mythology when he was taken to the Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and the Museum of Natural History but what shifted his interest full to the realm of myth was a biography of Leonardo da Vinci, The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci.
This shifted him from an interest in science to cultural history, at a pretty critical junction in his life, Summer of 1922, right before he began college courses at Columbia University. While enrolled in Columbia University, he was a student, an athlete, and a traveler, spending time in Europe in 1924 that resulted in a meeting with theosophical teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti, which sparked an interest in Oriental Studies. Oriental, in this case, broadly means east, which basically means anything east of Europe. For those of you who don’t know, there IS a broad term for west: Occidental. Joseph Campbell was lauded in his day as a visionary and someone with his finger on the pulse of what makes humanity tick. 30 almost 40 years posthumous, he would probably be as denigrated as J.K. Rowling by those who once worshipped him. We’ll come back to that.
He did receive an M.A. in 1927, and from there he received a fellowship, with an eye towards a doctorate, to travel to University of Paris where he was set to study Arthurian romances, which all have a strong basis in Celtic mythology. He spent a year in Paris before transferring to University of Munich in 1928 where he studied medieval literature in the original German, and at this point, his interest went FAR east, to India, and he became fascinated with Sanskrit, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as Freud, Jung, and Thomas Mann.
He returned to the United States in 1929 and two weeks after he returned, the stock market collapse. He was not sure he wanted to continue down the PhD course and he was not able to find work, so he holed up in a cabin for five years and lived the dream…the man spent five years doing nothing but reading.
It’s at this point, I realized Joseph Campbell, was my Spirit Animal and guiding light. I have never hated/envied someone so much in my life, as Joseph Campbell, able to spend five years, divorced from humanity….reading. Fuck Joseph Campbell.
He did spend a year teaching in 1933 at Canterbury Prep School, before returning to reading, then accepted a job in the Spring of 1934 to begin teaching next term at Sarah Lawrence College, which was an all women’s college, which he accepted and taught at for the next 38 years.
Now, it’s while teaching at Sarah Lawrence that he would meet dancer Jean Erdman. She would also be a student of his. She was 12 years younger than him, which is not all that unusual, and I get that people in the 21st century are complete morons about the birds and the bees, so let me just say, this was not abnormal. The 2-3 year age gap we currently view as normal, is a VERY recent development. Like…within the last 100 years new. Now…again, because people are complete morons, this is NOT to be an endorsement of pederasty. It is not. Erdman was born in 1916, which means by the time she met Campbell, she was 22, a full adult, fully capable of making her own decisions. And this was unquestionably a love match, and Campbell was inspired and awed by his wife, by her artistry and grace. And one of the things that made my heart go all smushy with romance is that in this biography of Campbell, the introduction of Erdman happened at the start of the chapter called The Meeting With the Goddess.
In 1943 he began writing, and his first book was Where the Two Came to Their Father: A Navaho War Ceremonial. And in case anyone thinks your electronics are not listening to your conversations, shortly after reading this, Netflix threw up Dark Winds, which is based on Tony Hillerman’s series featuring Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, based in the American Southwest and heavily featuring Navaho lore. So….yeah. Fuck you Google!
Campbell spent a couple of years in the mid-1950s teaching oriental philosophy to the State Department, and in 1968 he began teaching at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA, and he would teach there for 19 years, publishing The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1968. And this book has famously inspired George Lucas with the creation of Star Wars. Like, there is a very long quote from Lucas praising Campbell for his inspiration, and Campbell includes anecdotes of visiting Lucas Ranch where he binge watched the original trilogy with Lucas.
In his later years, Campbell became a traveling lecturer, and in addition to George Lucas, Campbell was invited backstage for a massive Grateful Dead concert, which Campbell compared to a modern day Bacchanal and the antithesis to the nuclear age.
As he retired from various speaking and teaching positions, he was talked into contributing to a video series on mythology, based on his Hero’s Journey archetype, and he was writing for publication up to the day he died, which was October 30, 1987.
So that’s the biographical portion of the book. And each chapter started with a bit of this biography, followed by extensive interview portions with Campbell.
So, what are some of the wisdom’s that came out of these interviews?
Well, Campbell was born and raised Catholic….specifically Irish Catholic. And while I don’t think he necessarily hated Christianity, I get the sense that he was genuinely baffled by how divorced Christians in general are from nature. One of the repeating comments is how Christianity harps on the fall, meaning the fall from grace and the removal from the Garden of Eden, and how this is a metaphorical separation from nature. And getting back to nature in any format is important to overall mental health.
Now, again…we are stupid in the 21st century. If you need help, please get it. But for the vast majority of peoples, touching grass will fix your woes. He believed that the first year of university should be spent studying myths and getting in touch with what archetype speaks to you. And then build on that archetype. Apparently, Carl Jung did exactly that, determining The Builder as his archetype, and he spent several years building by hand a castle in Austria, which Campbell was invited to visit.
But here is where Campbell would be canceled so fast by the Twitteraty….because what if the archetype that speaks to you comes from another culture? Well, in the 21st century, that’s completely fine…IF you are not a white, cis-hetero, man or woman. If you ARE a white cis-hetero man or woman? Well, you are a Christian and a racist. Sorry, those are the only two acceptable options. Apologize for your crime of having been born white, and acknowledge that you are privileged to be born white.
Campbell…I don’t think he would approve at all. If Campbell had been born in 2004, we would never have known his name. Because he’d have gone to college in a time when such intellectual curiosity about India, Japan, China, Middle Eastern, and Native American cultures was frowned on and seen as cultural appropriation. He’d have been smothered in his curiosity. And if he’d pushed the importance of the female and male archetypes, as he does in this book….well, he'd be in good company with J.K. Rowling and other warriors of female rights, aka TERFs.
Instead, as Campbell points out in interviews that occurred between 1982 and I think 1985, schools are not teaching kids how to think, they are thinking them what to think, and indoctrination is running rampant. Which he emphatically did NOT approve of. As he said several times in the interview contained herein, what inspired his own research and learning on heroic archetypes, was teaching the young women at Sarah Lawrence College. They wanted to understand what the hero was, and how they might contribute to that archetype as the mothers of hero’s. Unlike the modern feminist, who tortures their young sons into being women, the women who were taught by Campbell, knew they needed to raise men, and asked how to do so.
Now, before I sort of wrap this up, one thing I want to comment on is follow your bliss. This idea apparently originated with Campbell. Who knew?! Not me, I had no idea. And here’s where people have gotten it drastically, horribly, detrimentally, wrong. Follow your bliss does not mean just do what makes you happy. Campbell specifically says this. Direct quote: “If your bliss is just your fun and your excitement, you’re on the wrong track.” The passages preceding this include discussions of Native American manhood ceremonies, which in some cases can be tantamount to torture, which approaches bliss. Campbell clarifies: “When you follow your bliss, and by bliss I mean the deep sense of being in it, and doing what the push is out of your own existence—it may not be fun, but it’s your bliss and there’s bliss behind pain too.” So it’s not necessarily do what brings you joy, but do what brings your life meaning. And sometimes, that’s the hard thing. But if you find joy in doing the hard thing, you’re on the hero’s path.
