Campbell, Joseph. The Hero’s Journey. Harper & Row, New York 1990 (original publication). NF; 11/23.

This is a compendium of quotes and interviews with Campbell, preceded by several exordia and apparently edited by a Dr. Stuart Brown, a psychiatrist with an interest in human play. I’m not sure what prompted me to put this book on my reading list. I’ll try to remember to keep track of that because sometimes I download something I’m not interested in at all. That didn’t happen here, exactly, but I had mixed feelings about the author and his… style, I guess.

Mr. Campbell was born in 1904 and attended private school in the northeast United States. He studied biology and math in university but later was more interested in eastern religion. He received a MA from Columbia in literature but dropped out of a PhD program, and then studied languages and religion in Europe for several years. During the 1930s depression Campbell spent five years “reading” in a small shack in upstate New York, which he credits with his broad understanding of mythology, religion, and foreign languages. He landed a job teaching at Sarah Lawrence girls’ College in New York (“… when I saw all the pretty girls I said yes, I want a job.”) and taught there for almost four decades, marrying one of his students Jean Erdman, a professional dancer.

Over the years he was associated with the Esalen Institute, a holistic educational Centre in California, and developed a wide following writing books and giving inspirational presentations on his views on religion and mythology. He was influenced by dozens of eastern religious leaders, writers, and academic experts, including Carl Jung and especially James Joyce. Joseph Campbell died in 1987.

Let me try to summarize my understanding of Campbell’s views as laid out in this book. There are in the world of literature and religion recurring themes or myths. Although these are various, they all point via metaphor to something spiritual which exists in humans, often unrecognized. Through learning and self-exploration, people can achieve a more or less deep and persisting awareness of this something. It is the pursuit and realizing of this that gives life meaning.

Simple, isn’t it? I think it may be one of Joseph Campbell’s strengths that he presents a world of complexity in mythology, literary criticism, religious studies, and language in a way ordinary people can grasp. And understandably for all his popular success he had language and mythology academics carping at him all through his career and beyond. He doesn’t really know any Sanskrit, they say. Experts claim his knowledge of (whichever particular) mythology is spotty and inaccurate. Where’s his PhD? And he certainly would never capture young female imaginations today the way he did for 38 years at Sarah Lawrence (INTERVIEWER: “ You’re saying that achievement is more male— CAMPBELL: Absolutely. Right from the very beginning.”).

Making transcendentalism accessible Campbell emerges in this book as a kind of massively popular pentecostal preacher like Billy Graham, but for a different kind of conversion:

…denotations just don’t work, that’s all. And I think religious people know that they don’t work and that’s why they’re so damned deliberate and dogmatic about you having to believe what I believe because if you don’t then perhaps I’m wrong.

… nobody can tell me anything differently—that there’s one mythology in the world. It has been inflected in various cultures in terms of their historical and social circumstances and needs and particular local ethic systems, but it’s one mythology.

… the source of the gods is in your own heart. Follow the footsteps to that center and know that you are that which the gods are born on.

And the basic idea of the philosophy is that deities are symbolic personifications of the very images that are of yourself. And these energies that are of yourself are the energies of the universe. And so the god is out there and the god is in here. The kingdom of heaven is within you, yes, but it’s also everywhere.

Okay. What are we supposed to think of Mr. Campbell and what he was on about? I hear and see from my own perspective in what he has to say messages of a Billy Graham type, a bunch of eastern-religious gurus, and the people behind the Esalen Institute. But I also remember JL Borges quoting a fictional Paracelsus in a short story: “Every step you take is the goal you seek.” There is in Campbell’s message a strong personal responsibility theme which reminds me of Jordan Peterson who tells us:

… the willingness to take on (personal) responsibility is identical to the decision to live a meaningful life.

Taking the easy way out or telling the truth – those are not merely two different choices. They are different pathways through life. They are utterly different ways of existing.

I’m reminded too of an even stronger and better-fit ideology that hails from Northrop Frye (who was an approximate contemporary of Campbell):

No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us…. In ordinary experience we’re all in the position of a dog in a library, surrounded by a world of meaning in plain sight that we don’t even know is there.

…the imaginative world and the world around us are different worlds, and… the imaginative world is more important… this ideal world that our imaginations develop inside us looks like a dream that came out of nowhere, and has no reality except what we put into it. But it isn’t. It’s the real world, the real form of human society hidden behind the one we see.

Borges’s fiction fascinates with its mystery and ambiguity about ordinary reality. Peterson the psychologist is a strong advocate for the self as hero in a wee-bit awkward mythical way. Frye was a Christian clergyman and at the same time a believer in myths and the imagination as more real than objectivity. I guess it’s inevitable that the modern version of these ideas have now been around long enough that (like pretty well anything else that has significance and value) they have popularly been drained of their impact, turned upside down, and paraded around as cartoonlike spiritualism.

But still for what it’s worth I think Joseph Campbell was right in focusing on each of us as potentially in touch with an insubstantial reality beyond Walt Disney, and in helping a lot of people to examine what’s going on in their inner lives and at least to speculate about what it could mean.

Having said that I’d also say the contents of this book are dated. It’s a longish celebration of Campbell’s life and beliefs and might not be worth the time and trouble for everyone.

9+ for content but you could have had the same in a very much abbreviated form, probably about 7.5 for the style which is a mélange.