Welcome….
[url]I would like to begin by stating some conclusions about Joseph Campbell that you may or may not know but should begin to shed light on who he was.[/url]
His ancestry was Irish and he loved Joyce and Yeats because of the symbolism they brought to their literature.
He spoke at the Unitarian Church in Chicago on many occasions.
He was a romantic.
He was politically, a republican, and did not like social welfare. But he did not like the moral majority or the fundamentalist Christians involvement in the Republican Party and stopped supporting either party.
He was criticized because he did not have his doctorate and therefore was not scholarly.
He was criticized because he became a popular hero and therefore lost his credibility as being scholarly.
He was a Westernized individualist.
He believed that eastern religious thought and ideas were superior to western religious thoughts and ideas.
He did not believe anyone should follow a guru.
He preferred Carl Jung’s ideas to Sigmund Freud’s and met with the wizard (Jung) at his medieval home in Switzerland. He was criticized by some as being anti-Jewish because he liked Jung and not Freud.
He lived with his wife, Jean Erdman, in a two-bedroom apartment in N.Y.for 44 years and didn’t even have an air conditioner until he passed out one time and his wife insisted on getting a Fedder air conditioner.
He wrote the “Hero with a thousand faces” before he visited India and the “visit” changed his perspective.
Joseph Campbell’s brilliance and perspective speaks to all of us.
We all are greatly indebted to Campbell for the insight he has brought to each individual.
Joseph Campbell’s legacy is related to his mythology. Why? Because he made Mythology personal, reflecting, invigorating. You may not believe in any Myths but you can benefit from the ideas left by Joseph Campbell. He brings two basic but dynamic elements to us. 1. He was a rock solid Individualist which is often missed by the casual reader of his literature. While he had some deterministic aspects to his writings he promoted and encouraged self-reliance and determination. His life is a reflection of his strong will and determination. That is why in part he voted Republican. He did not believe in social welfare or social reform. However, he left all political parties when eh fundamentalist Christians attached themselves to the Republican Party.
I became fascinated with Joseph Campbell some time ago. At first, someone read some things from one of his books, Occidental Mythology, which initially gave me a bad taste of his works because as he was being quoted he appeared to be sarcastic towards certain biblical ideas and it appeared that he was trying to show that these ideas were universal. My first reaction was: I already knew that since it was taught when I was in Bible College in 1964. Little did I realize at the time but Joseph Campbell published Occidental Mythology about that time. Of course, in 1964 Biblical professors explanation for the similarities in myths around the world sound strange today. Their logic was that Satan knew what the truth was and, therefore, Satan planted similar ideas around the world to confuse people from knowing the real truth. I am sure that this is still widely taught in some Christian circles.
However, the speaker who quoted from Joseph Campbell’s book, Occidental Mythology, actually did him a disservice—at least from my perspective. He was made to sound trite in what appeared to be his effort to discredit Christianity by stating that similar myths existed elsewhere. Unfortunately, while he was probably trying to rock Christianity’s hard and fast mythology he was doing so for the purpose of showing Christians and others alike that myths are valuable but none should be held as factual. It is not an issue of whether a myth is factual. Mythology is personal and not factual. Religion from his perspective was pathological mythology. A misinterpretation of mythology’s intention. Thus, he was not merely trying to destroy individuals by telling them there was no Santa Claus but he wanted to awaken them to their inner being so it would have a resonance with their outer world and they could behold in wonderment the depths of themselves, their past, their future, their history of their life and it turn transform their lives to its wonderment. He wanted to take individuals to their highest pinnacle transcending their flawed and sometimes difficult life to see the absolute beauty within themselves and the world. He wanted to recognize their individual uniqueness and at the same time their connection with all life. This awareness permeates his literature and life.
From where did he develop his resources of thought? There are too many to enumerate upon this morning but I would like to touch on a few as I try to give you a glimpse of the man and mythologist, Joseph Campbell. His life will hopefully help us understand how and why he arrived at his mythological perspective but maybe also it will help us to reflect upon our own lives and our own development of ideas and thought.
Joseph Campbell was born in 1904 in New York. His father’s parents had immigrated to America from Ireland following the great…Potato famine. His mother’s father was from Ireland as well and his mother’s mother was from Scotland. His father worked as a salesman and took numerous trips overseas. He was Catholic and served as an altar boy.
Joseph Campbell started writing journals at a very young age when he was 12 in 1917, which included his feelings about finding himself third in his class, starting a secret society and describing a practical joke. Over the years he produced many diaries and personal journals. There are over 250, 000 pages of his written diaries, journals, notes, outlines etc which are currently being archived and maintained by the Joseph Campbell foundation. In 1910, when he was 6, his father took he and his brother to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show at Madison Square Garden. This began Campbell’s fascination with the American Indians, which would continue throughout his life.
In the summer of 1923 a woman gave him a book by Dmitri Merejowsky, “The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci” which he later said changed his life. He was intrigued by Leonardo’s conviction that by studying the natural world, one could understand the spiritual principles underlying its appearance.
In the summer of 1924, the whole family traveled to Europe, which would be the first of a number of such journeys. On the ship he met Jiddu Krishnamurti, the young “messiah-elect” of the international Theosophical movement. Krishnamurti would become one of the most admired spiritual teachers of the twentieth century. There is a website devoted to his teachings. On the ship he was given the book, “The Light of Asia” by Edwin Arnold, which included the enthralling story of the prince Siddhartha, who would become the historical Buddha. He later said that when he began to read this book the “fish was hooked”. On this trip they went to London, Paris, Switzerland by train, then Milan, Venice, Florence, Rome, Pompeii and to Naples. The art and culture of Europe fascinated Campbell. Also, while in Paris he purchased a book by Sigmund Freud called Totem or Taboo and it was the first time he had heard of Freud whose ideas were still controversial.
In Campbell’s senior year at Columbia, in 1925, he came across another life-changing books by Sir James Frazer, “Golden Bough”. The book’s central concern was the strange rite of the Year King and through the slaying of the King, the archaic mythical formula of renewal of the land was accomplished. Frazer showed that the theme was universal, and permeated world mythology.
He also encountered Fenwick Holmes, writer of the Faith that Heals. Holmes taught that concentration was the key to everything and Holmes instructions contained metaphoric images that became important for Campbell such as: “Plant the seed of an ideal, and it will grow to reality.” Campbell also learned a technique from Holmes, which he would use later to know that it was mythology that would be his subject. He was taught that to discover the plane of one’s consciousness one should jot down notes for a period of four or five weeks on the things that interests one and it would be found that all the interests tended to a certain direction.
In 1926 he visited England and a trip to Glastonbury with Arthurian connections and time-haunted ruins and he culminated his master’s thesis at Columbia with Arthurian studies and his hostility to priestly Christianity was apparent in the last 30 pages of his thesis.
1927-1928 he spent in Europe in France studying OLD French. Also, in the bookstores of Paris was displayed a large, a forbidden book-a scandalous book—with a blue cover and had been banned and even burned in England and America but in 1927 in Paris it was all the rage: James Joyce’s Ulysses and after having initial difficulty understanding the book, Campbell wrote, “No one in the world knew more than what James Joyce knew of what I was trying to find out! To translate knowledge and information into experience: that seems to me the function of literature and art.
He developed a system of note classification, which amounted to outlining everything in an effort to find his center of interest. In Paris he found a little book, which described the decimal system of classification, and he used it as the basis for his system. This system started out very strict in the beginning but was relaxed by 1942 but continued to help him indicated at a glance the misbalancing of his emphasis, the gaps and the over clutterings.
In Paris in 1927 he met up with an artist and his famous studio, Antionine Bourdellle, whose subtle, spiritually infused aesthetic would influence Joseph Campbell the rest of his life. And it was during that time Campbell asked the question, “What is the inner meaning of Art?”
1928-1929
p. 105
The discovery of German was a real event in his life with the whole poetic majesty of the language that caught him. He read Goethe, Thomas Mann, and Jung. He quoted, Goethe when he was showing the conflictual workings of the Faustian mythos in Western Culture, when he would say, “All that is transitory is only an appearance.”… And our life is lived among colored reflections.
p. 107
The first book of Jung’s that he read in German was Symbols of Transformation, which explores the archetypal roots of the fantasies of an American woman ultimately pronounced schizophrenic. Jung helped him to understand the ancient intercourse between psyche and mythos and the spiritual importance of “the second half of life”. He also encountered a lesser known psychologist named Eduard Spranger who was to illuminate an in-between zone in the journey of the becoming: the cognitive and perceptual changes through late childhood and adolescence which Jean Piaget also would be writing about in the 1920s and 1930s.
In 1929 he went overland to Greece into Istanbul. He wrote his friend in 1931, it is through having experienced all experience that the soul finally achieves perfect sympathy and understanding.
In December 1929 he took a cruise throughout the Caribbean with his brother and onboard he met a lady named Adelle Davis with whom he had his first intimate relationship.
He also became steeped in the writings of Sir James Jeans and Bertrand Russell.
1930-31
He went to Woodstock, N.Y. but before arriving there he read Frances and Mason Merrill’s , “Among the Nudists”, which was a review of the nudist movement in German and France with accounts of personal experiences. He wrote, “Why the devil didn’t I find out about this movement while I was in Munich two years ago!” He shared the book with his sister and they resolved to become nudists as soon as conditions would permit. He said that he never saw a naked woman until 1927 when he was 23 years old…and by this time nakedness had come to have a ridiculous sacred character. He told of a time in 1922 when he thought he was in love with a girl and in an embrace he let his arm slip down and touch her chubby buttocks and his hand bounced away terrified.”
In 1930 he read, “The Soviet Primer: Introduction to the Five Year Plan and like so many artist’s and intellectuals at the time was intrigued with Communism. This led him to study Russian and he eventually read books such as War and Peace, Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karennina in Russian.
In 1931 he had to make a decision as to how to spend the next period of his life. He met with numerous mentors but decided on a tried and true formula: think out loud in the presence of a creative or beautiful woman. He decided that he would not be taking a job to teach at Columbia nor would he enroll for his Ph.D. He would go “on the road” driving solo to the West Coast.
1931-32
In the fall of 1931 he traveled to the West by way of New Orleans. He ended up in Monterey Peninsula, which he called, “the Earthly Paradise”. Prior to that he visited his friend, Adelle Davis in Berkley and he said he learned two fundamental lessons from her, 1. Enjoy what you’ve got, while reaching out for more. 2. Be realistic and frank, never pretending to feel and unfelt emotion. She became kind of a teacher of existentialism for him. He went south of Berkley to meet a lady he had met in 1925 aboard a ship. She took him down to Monterey so they could see her sister Carol. Campbell writes, “So she brought me down and introduced me to Carol and John Steinbeck at their place in Pacific Grove.” Campbell stayed in the area with the Steinbecks and Steinbeck read him his novel one evening and Campbell wrote, “…I realized with a fresh vividness the power of his own symbolism… In symbolism… I have the catchword of my own major tendency.” Also Steinbeck received a nice contract for his novel with two additional contracts for his next two—sight unseen---and Campbell decided he better get back to his job.
1932
He began reading The Decline of the West by Spengler, introduced it to John Steinbeck and his other Monterey friends. He would read it 7 times over during the next decade in the original German.
In March 1932 he decided that his major emphasis should be on literature and history and of treating America from the point of view of its victims: Indians, Negroes, Polynesians…”
On May 10, 1932 he wrote, “In my enthusiasm for living as opposed to mere thinking, I have radically revised my attitude toward a great many matters. I have begun to react positively instead of negatively to the invitations of life, and as a result I find things wearing a warmer, friendlier light than they used to. It is Carlyle’s “Eternal Yea”, I imagine, which I have at last discovered. ---I have found “the other side of my soul” and I know the difference at last between Life and Truth.
1932-1934
It was during 1933, while the depression dragged on, that Joseph…would develop another important relationship with …sculptor Harfey Fite; Thomas and Eliazabeth Penning, he a sculptor and Bard professor, Henry Morton Robinson, who later Campbell would write ‘A Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake”, Carl Walters, the ceramicist, John Small, a sculptor and others.
Modern art, he thought, could “save the world” by opening the gateway to the soul’s still point. Art was better suited to this purpose than sociopolitical movements, since the latter so easily degenerated into mere force and reaction…. Art—“the mystery behind phenomena.”
Before September 1933, Campbell had turned out three short stories and worked on a fourth. He read at that time Jung, Spengler, Joyce and Mann…. and a new luminary was to be added to the list, who would play an important part in Campbell’s subsequent life and thought: Leo Frobenius.
Frobenius was regarded in the early part of the 20th Century as one of the world’s great authorities on the art of preliterate peoples. The German scholar’s youthful precocity had rivaled Campbell’s. In his theory of “Circles of Culture,” he proposed, as did Spengler, that civilization is not simply created by man, but is itself an organism.
He studied ecstatically some fifteen volumes of Frobenius’ writings, Campbell recorded, “ and emerged with a view of history very much more relaxed and continuous than the view emphasized in “Decline of the West.:” Frobenius dealt not only with high cultures but with human culture from the earliest signs of its emergence. Moreover, he included psychological insights in his overall developmental schema. His organically conceived theory was developed in his book “Paideuma(1921)”, a work from which Campbell would often later quote, and which had a major influence on his thinking. By “paideumatic”, Frobenius meant the tendency of cultures to be shaped—in their major symbolic inspirations and dominant forms-by their own geography, soil, and climate. An extensive discussion of this concept is found even in Campbell’s latest work, and he felt that an understanding of it was necessary in order to establish the conceptual framework for a science of mythology.
Frobenius founded his concept of “paideuma” on his own extensive African explorations and on the commonsense observations of those in intimate contact with the flora and fauna-the latter category including human beings-of their variegated environments.
Frobenius states, “To every game warden this tendency is familiar. By the distinctive form of a wild stag’s antlers, the river, indeed the very stream valley, of its habitat can be identified….But this, finally, is no more than a special instance of what is a common occurrence in the plant world. Dandelions grown on mountain heights of one to two thousand meters from seeds brought up from the valley acquire a form distinctly different in type from that of the plants below….Such paideumatic transformation, neither chemistry, physics, nor meteorology can explain.”
It was after reading most of Frobenius’ fifteen volumes that the whole idea fell in place for Campbell: “I learned that the essential form of the myth is a cycle, and that this cycle is a symbolic representation of the form of the soul, and that in the dreams and fancies of modern individuals(who have been brought up along the lines of a rational, practical education) these myth-symbols actually reappear—giving testimony of a persistence, even into modern times, of the myth power”.(from the “War Journal”)
(From War Journal) “With this the emphasis of my studies shifted from the historical to the mythological. I began to read, with fresh understanding, the novels of Thomas Mann and the Ulysses of James Joyce. The role of artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist in this work was the myth”.
Spengler was the master of styles, “but inflected through all these styles is he archetypal form of man: the myth is the symbolic statement of the grand lines of that archetype: the modern artist is in a position to lead the way back to an experience of the myth: this experience will re-introduce man to the grand lines of his own nature and will establish him in harmony with his own vast solemn depths: every trait, every problem, every form of his own life and of the life of his culture, and of the life of mankind itself, will be found soundly validated in this experience.(War Journal)
Looking back retrospectively about a decade later, Campbell wrote of this period,
“The whole range of my studies became now coordinated under the sign of an as yet only dimly foreseen meaning of the magic word: Mythos. ….style, stage, action and piety were but modifications of a single and constant human archetypology, which contained the clues to all meaning and the seeds of every value.”
His newfound vision seemed to transform whatever he beheld; that was why he referred to as the “fluorescent” eye, the eye of the Mythos.
March 1934…Sarah Lawrence, in Bronxville, New York, offered Joseph Campbell the faculty job that he would hold for the next 38 years.
His studies now would be harnessed to a life purpose. They would be organized around the material he would be teaching in college courses. “I can teach the way I want to. The fundamental principle of the college(so far as I can discover such a principle) seems to me to suggest that it was the pupil rather than the teacher who ought to determine the material, scope, depth and efforts of a course. “….”What does the pupil want to know? And how can the materials of geometry or literature be presented to such a pupil so as to give her what she is seeking? It is Tolstoy’s old idea, and it seems to be working out very well. Not discipline, but enthusiasm toward mythology and literature.”
“Always return to the grand lines of nature” for inspiration, Bourdelle had said. “Nature is the teacher”(paideuma) echoed his latest oracle, Frobenius.
…At Sarah Lawrence he would be teaching young women, in whose presence some of his best insights tended to emerge, and the second was that at Sarah Lawrence both student and teacher were encouraged to do something he would later call “following your bliss”. Not the discipline alone, but desire—curiosity—love, really—should empower the educational process. For himself, and for those he taught, if the experience of education were to be real, the heart should lead the mind to its zone of revelation.
Joseph Campbell, after reading “The interpretation of Dreams”, by Sigmund Freud, began his own journal of dreams in August 1936, which would continue intermittently until the mid-1940s. It was a bold, penetrating, trenchant and unsparing self-analysis.
His method of analysis was a marriage of Freud and Jung and he would let the dream itself lead him to the interpretation that finally felt best.
An article given to him by Mann led him to write, “…Art is the spirit in matter, the natural instinct toward humanization, that is, toward the spiritualization of life…Art[is] the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.”
After going back to teach at college while Jean Erdman, his wife to be, traveled around the world, he wrote a letter to her, “Dear Jean, I’ve just finished reading Doctor Freud’s analysis of what it means to be in love. It seems I’ve got you mixed up with my ego-ideal; and, consequently, my powers of criticism are paralyzed so far as you are concerned. It is, in fact, difficult to distinguish my condition from that of a person hypnotized. My conscience, even, is helpless before you; and in the blindness of my condition I would commit crime for you without regret. “
In a later letter he wrote to Jean, “ I note with satisfaction that about the time of the winter solstice you will be half-way around the world from me; whereas it was about the time of the summer solstice that you left me! I note furthermore—as I announced in my last letter—that our horoscopes almost complement each other. I note finally, that instead of fading from my memory, you are viciously biting yourself upon it. I’d like to know what was in that milk we drank at Chico’s! I can remember very definitely pressing my glass against yours and drinking a little more slowly than you, so that you might catch up to me: I knew then that it was a love potion; I know now that it was dynamic—It has knocked me positively silly.”
“…until natural objects have been related to the myth, our feelings do not know how to deal with them.”
…and it was their agreement from early on not to have earthly children, but only those spirit children—books and plays and creative fosterlings—
The only intentionally mythological aspect of the wedding had been the planning of the precise day and time—the fifth hour of the fifth day of the week on the fifth month of the year(Thursday May 5, 1938 at 5:00pm). Campbell always did have a penchant for the symbolism of numbers, and the fifth place in any cycle of time belonged to the god of thunder—Thor, “Thor’s Day.” Later that fall they located a two-and-a-half-room apartment in Greenwich Village, where they would live for the next forty-four years.
p. 275
In November 1939 Campbell began reading what he later remarked was the most memorable event of the year for him, “Mandukya Upanishad” which had been translated by Swami Nikhilandnanda. Campbell began reading it November 30, 1939 and finished February 17, 1940 and then he went and had a talk with the Swami who was stationed in New York. This friendship would last through 1954 when Joseph Campbell made a trip to India and traveled in the Swami’s company and until the Swami’s death. In 1940 the Swami translated into English and ready for publication not only a number of Sanskrit texts but also his definitive edition from Bengali, of “The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna”.
This new contact with the world of Vedic philosophy made a profound impression on Campbell and he began reading several Vedic books to include the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit and he was enlisted by the Swami to help him translate the Gospel of Sri Ramkrishna”. Even in Campbell’s very latest years, he would quote the insights of the Hindu saint, so direct and refreshing they seemed to him as comments on the ineffable. It was Ramakrishna to whom a Western theologue came, asking to talk about God. “Do you wish to talk about God with qualities or without qualities?” He asked this question for an answer, intended to bring the person to a flash to the brink of the abyss that lies beyond all human knowing. These insights permeated Campbell’s later definition of “bliss” and informed his ultimate theology: that the moment one began to “talk” about God, one was already in the realm of concepts and categories—a human knowledge, not divine. It was only in the wordless absorption that the human could unite with the transcendent Source. In effect, the experience could never be communicated….the Divine Source permeates all life.
CAMPBELL INSIGHTS---as a result of simultaneous Sanskrit studies and simultaneous meditation upon Finnegan’s Wake(A Skeleton Key to).
“If I should try to reduce to a minimal statement the significance of these studies, I should say: The “Mandukya Upanishad” linked up, book by book, with Schopenhauer’s “The World as Will and Idea” and supplied, with its interpretation of the Four States(Waking Consciousness, Dream Consciousness, Deep Sleep, and “the fourth”), a beautiful and organic synthesis of the psychological and metaphysical problems.
“The seed word Aum supplies a stunning symbol and key for the entire problem[A=waking state, U=dream, M=deep sleep, and the fourth that is beyond]. Nietzsche’s going forth into day and Schopenhauer’s return to the Home of Light through the Kingdom of Night became the complete cycle of the myth; and this complete cycle, with its two philosophies, rests on and brings into manifestation the otherwise unknown and unknowable transcendent…. the fourth.”
‘“The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna” showed a living man who actually and repeated experienced the non-dual. Furthermore, through his easy transitions from the formless to the forms, the most conflicting viewpoints became reconciled. Finally, his discussions included many expositions of mythological and devotional themes, so that from the forms of popular cult became richly illuminated in the light of supernatural experience. Sri Ramakrishna seems to me to have gone the step beyond Nietzsche, having resolved the oppositions which to Nietzsche were finally disastrous; he seems to me to represent the opposite pole to Darwin and Queen Victoria— and he was their slave.’
Campbell saw politics as the outer transformation of forces whose more essential locus was psychological and spiritual. Ramakrishna was for him “the folk-sage who refutes the philistines.”
There was another friendship that was helping Campbell establish the connections between Eastern philosophy and Western, the ecstasies of rapture with the aesthetics of art: the great Singhalese Indologist and art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy.
On December 10, 1940 Campbell gave the following four points at Sarah Lawrence College while America was an island in a world torn with war and rumors of war. It was entitled, “Permanent Human Values”.
“…critical objectivity of the student of society is likely to be forgotten”.
“…we are in danger of neglecting the apparently useless work of the disinterested scientist and historian.
“…the work of the literary man and the artist is in danger.” … the artist—in so far as he is an artist—looks at the world dispassionately: without thought of defending his ego or his friends; without thought of undoing any enemy; troubled neither with desire nor loathing. He is as dispassionate as the scientist, but he is looking not for the cause of effects; he is simply looking—sinking his eye into the object. To his eye this object permanently reveals the fascination of a hidden name or essential form….Now this perfectly well-known crisis, which transports a beholder beyond desire and loathing, is the first step not only to art, but to humanity. And it is the artist who is its hero.
the “preaching of religion is in danger. God is the first fortress that a warlike nation must capture, and the ministers of religion are always, always ready to deliver God into the hands of their king or their president….and how quick the ministers of religion are to judge the soul of the enemy;
education is going to suffer during the next few years…and the great danger is that you—unique you—may be tricked into missing your education.
1941-1942
Most of the days of his life Campbell would sit in a chair—outside if the weather were nice—reading, underlining sentences in books and making notes.
In 1941 Campbell began the early draft a book that would become “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”.
He always had many irons in the fire at the same time and he was working on his insights toward morphology of myth and aesthetics. Art, in order to touch the springs of the psyche, had to “hold a mirror up to nature”. The artist of whatever medium had to recognize consciously the flawed condition of the artist and integrate it into the work and Campbell’s major inspiration in this regard was Thomas Mann with his concept of “plastic irony.” Mann believed that was perfect was uninteresting. People are made humanly fascinating by their flaws. Therefore the focus of the artist is to explore the permutations and combinations of human fallibility. He states, “In the Mann works the ideal of plastic irony greatly fascinated my mind, and served to carry me through my own period of greatest tensions but as my German gave place to my Indian period, Joyce’s transcendental perspective took me over.” P. 295
Decision regarding being drafted to the army…
Bhagavad-Gita…in which Campbell had been steeped in just before this time…
Arjuna, a young warrior lord, stands in his chariot on the brink of a terrible battle, accompanied only by his charioteer, Krishna. On the other side he sees his won cousins. He must make the choice of whether to enter the battle, which is his duty as a member of he warrior caste, or, in modern terms, become a “conscientious objector.”
In the midst of this decision, a divine event happens which overwhelms all human moralizing and equivocation. Arjuna’s charioteer, Krishna, revels himself as an incarnation of the Cosmic Lord. He invites Arjuna to look in his mouth—wherein appears the starry vastness of the universe. In a vision Arjuna beholds worlds coming into being and being destroyed. He perceives his own choice embedded in the cosmic matrix of interconnections and causes. He realized that not only lives but also the destinies of empires rise and fall within the tremendous whirling phantasmagoria of the universe. All is impermanent, and in flux, yet follows immutable laws. Then Krishna speaks the immortal lines that bring Arjuna around to the correct way of thinking(according to the Gita): “Whence this ignoble cowardice?” Arjuna realizes that his duty is his dharma: as a warrior he must fight.
Campbell would often later tell the story of the Gita as a way of illustrating that we must accept reality, not as we would wish it to be, but as it actually is. The Gita does not bring a message congenial to a pacifist. Ultimately, it supports the role of duty, and participation—“joyful participation in the sorrows of the world,” was how Campbell would later put it. He quoted the Latin epigram in his journal, “Fate leads those who are willing. The unwilling it drags.”
1942-1945
Sue Davidson Lowe, became Joseph Campbell’s first research assistant, typist, and preliminary editor in February, 1945 describes his work habits:
He would settle down at the far end of the table’s opposite side, notes, references, foolscap, and sharpened pencils at the ready. At precisely nine o’clock, his pencil would start to race across the page. When it dulled, he exchanged it for another, but the writing did not halt until noon. The outpouring was incredibly consistent, interrupted only rarely for a glance at notes or sharing of an insight, a question, and a joke.
Heinrich Zimmer… p. 318
Bollingen p. 320
Back in the U.S. Paul and Mary Mellon(Paul Mellon, son of the Pittsburgh financier Andrew Mellon) founded the Bollingen Foundation…which was to “…develop scholarship and research in the liberal arts and sciences and other fields of cultural endeavor generally.” Heinrich Zimmer was on the board of directors and one of his first recommendations, and in fact the first Bollingen fellow, was to be Maud Oakes, a young woman who had grown up near Seattle “on an island” where there were many Indian mounds.” Oakes first project was to travel to the American Southwest to study and record the mystic diagrams of a Navajo sand painter and shaman named Jeff King. Zimmer recommended that Campbell write a scholarly commentary for her work. “Where the Two Came to Their Father”, aside from a couple of short stories, was to be Campbell’s first published work, at the age of 39. Campbell had found his domain, the elucidation of original mythological material. Campbell had found his “bliss”…the thing he did best. There were the inspired words of the third wizard of this period, the shaman-artist Jeff King:” I am EVERLASTING MAN! Around me everything is beautiful.
Campbell was deeply involved in the Bollingen Foundation, then, at its inception and would still be at its apotheosis (his was the capstone volume of the 100-volume series, Volume C, “The Mythic Image”, published in 1974.
In March 1943, Zimmer died at age 52 at the peak of his powers. Mary Mellon wanted Campbell to take responsibility for editing his books. …Campbell began to pay tribute to his mentor and friend—in a lasting way that is never easy for a creative and independent person. His creative work, just now coming so powerfully into its own, had to be put on a shelf.
Some of Zimmer’s notes were typed, in fairly peculiar fashion, in German, English, Sanskrit and other languages. Others were handwritten, or even scrawled in the margins of books. Campbell later said that when he was stumped or arrived at a place where he did not know quite what to write, he would relax and close his eyes for a moment, and it was as if Zimmer came and gave it dictation. So, where did Zimmer left off and Campbell begin. Thus were born, “Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization”, 1946, and “The King and the Corpse”, published on March 26, 1948, Campbell’s 44th birthday. Philosophies of India, 1951, followed this. The monumental two-volume “The Art of Indian Asia”, with its hundreds of photographs, would come out almost 13 years later after Campbell’ own journey to India.
p. 339… The “Hero with a Thousand Faces” after facing several rejections including “Simon and Schuster” was published by the Bollingen Foundation and is still in print.
He completed the final touches on his comprehensive and subtle filing system for notes on mythology, the one he would continue to use and evolve until the end of his life.
Campbell never did like social polemicists or people who assumed they knew his value stance on any particular issue.
During their early years of marriage Jean and Campbell would share the nights dreams at breakfast and able to address certain areas of incompatibility manifested in the dream imagery.
After the publication of the “Hero” and except for a travel journal that he kept through India and Japan of over a thousand pages and his extensive correspondence, Campbell’s writing would be almost entirely directed toward publication.
1949-1954
Alan Watts was a brilliant and unconventional thinker who was to become one of Joseph Campbell’s most influential friends in his middle years… After about a decade of Campbell’s friendship with Jiddu Krishnamurti, Watts encountered the Indian teacher, whose elegance, sophistication, and subtlety of thought touched profoundly. Krishnamurti introduced Watts to is “doctrine less doctrine”, the practical aspect of which was to live more fully in the present moment—without expectations and without fear.
Alan Watts describes Campbell’s attitude toward life as “tantric”: an almost fearsomely joyous acceptance of all the aspects of being, such that whenever I am with him his spirit spills over into me.”
It would be out of some inspiring discussions with Alan Watts and Joseph Campbell that Michael Murphy and Richard Price would develop the plans for the California institution that would set the standard for a new kind of learning, centered on the growth and development of the individual person: Esalen Institute, where Watts and Campbell would later become frequent lecturers. P. 359
Daisetz Suzuki, the Japanese expositor of Zen Buddhism and its culture, in considering the Judeo-Christian tradition, said something at an Eranos Conference in 1953 that Campbell would repeat the rest of his life. “Let’s see,” he said drolly, rubbing his sides in a peculiar fashion, “Nature against Man, Man against Nature; God against Man, Man against God; God against Nature, Nature against God; very funny religion!”
In 1953 Campbell met with the Wizard, Carl Jung at his medieval tower-retreat near the village of Bollingen in Switzerland. Jung asked Campbell, “Do you know the meaning of AUM? and just as Campbell was about to respond to one of his favorite subjects Jung waved his hand to stop and began, “My first experience was in Africa. A group of us got lost on a walk. All of a sudden we found ourselves surrounded by tall young warriors with spears, standing on one leg…. We couldn’t understand each other. Then we all sat down and looked at each other, and everything was all right. They were saying, Aum, aum, aum….
“Two years later I was in India with a group of scientists, near Darjeeling, and we went to Tiger Hill. You arrive before dawn, and are transported up the hill in the dark; then the sun comes up and infinitudes of snowcapped Himalayan peaks burst into rainbow colors. All conversation stopped. And what did I hear from the scientists? Aum, aum, aum…” Then Jung said, “AUM is the sound the universe makes when it is pleased with itself! P.263
1954-1955
Journey to East (Hindu India, 1954-1955)
In New Delhi, Campbell lectured to one of his larger audiences to date: 2000 people…the event was held in a great open-air meeting. His topic was “The Influence of Indian Thought upon the American Mind”.
“Nothing is quite as good as the India I invented in Waverly Place, New York,” he confessed to his wife, Jean.
He had decided that India was well grounded in the archetypes; the whole mode of life, with its caste system and its religious forms, was archetypal. But what India lacked was a sense of the evolving individual who charts her or his own course through life, rather than navigating only by cultural landmarks. In an odd way, Campbell’s heretofore-lax patriotism for America was receiving a stimulus by the constant invidious comparisons being urged on him by his Indian hosts. “We’re not so bad at all by comparison”, he found himself thinking over and over.
Japan’s Zen attitude, which he had often discussed with his friend Alan Watts, had perhaps helped to ready it for new forms. India, in contrast, had decided that “all life was sorrowful,” and then proceeded to prove the notion. Perhaps his most important insight was “a recognition of the flimsiness of my own earlier celebration of Indian superiority.”
In 1955, on the last Sunday of April, Campbell went to a Buddhist service at a temple complex. After the service a young monk with whom he had become acquainted introduced Campbell to a professor of comparative religion at one of the Japanese universities. The professor asked Campbell if “he had a religion”. Campbell replied “since I found that all the great religions were saying essentially the same thing in various ways, I was unable and unwilling to commit myself to one, but tried to teach and understand the ultimate tenor of their various yet homologous symbolic languages.
“The fundamental principle of Zen would seem to be”, he noted in his journal: “Do what you have to do, perfectly, and without reservations.”
“One cannot tell where the Buddhism ends and the Shinto begins,” wrote Campbell.
“Clearly Christianity is opposed fundamentally and intrinsically to everything that I am working and living for: and for the modern world, I believe, with all of its faiths and traditions, Krishna is a much better teacher and model than Christ.” P. 414.
“A myth is the imaging of a conception, or realization of truth.” P. 415.
Ainu culture---bear myth ????????? p. 419
When he came back from Asia and met with friends he became more aware of the unorthodoxy of some of his friend’s interpretations of Asian culture, on which he had heretofore relied to a certain extent. Alan Watts thought that “just sitting” in meditation did not really define the Zen tradition, and yet that was exactly what Campbell had been told time and again in the Zen temples---“sitting” was the heart of the Zen practice.
p. 501 --- One of Joseph and Jean’s “families” was that of the Armstrong’s, folksingers and musicians in Chicago. Campbell became a regular houseguest of the Armstrong’s at their home in Wilmette, Illinois, whenever he was lecturing in Chicago and vicinity. Gradually a whole circle of Chicagoan “friends of Campbell” began to form. They would attend Joseph’s lectures at the Jung Foundation or the Unitarian Church there, where he was recurrently booked, and generally socialize, tell stories, and make music during relaxing hours. To the tune of “Gimme That Ol’ Time Religion,” with verses like:
I will honor goddess Isis.
Of Egypt’s gods she’s nicest.
Her husband is in slices
But she’s good enough for me!
Campbell added his own line (the third) to one verse:
Let us worship Aphrodite,
She’s beautiful but flighty,
In her see-through sea-foam nightie,
She’s good enough for me!
Really? 
