New York, March 26, 1904: Josephine E. (Lynch) Campbell and Charles W. Campbell receive into the world their first of three children, Joseph John Campbell. Joseph Campbell’s life here would last 83 years and the artists and creatives of our time would be immeasurably influenced by his genius for identifying the unifying elements in apparently distinct cultures and traditions …for locating the intersecting points of humanity’s collective wisdom …for seeking answers to the question: What do ALL our wisdom traditions agree upon regarding the true nature of our experience as humans?
Campbell’s path as a student and teacher of life and art commenced very early on, just a century ago as he was entering elementary school, with his burgeoning interest in Native American cultures while simultaneously being very connected to his own Roman Catholic heritage as an Irish American. Even in those early years he began noticing similar themes between the two mythological traditions; themes such as virgin births, sons/daughters of “gods”, and deaths and resurrections. Before he was even in high school, he had read all of the Native American material in the adult section of the library and admitted later to knowing that culture as much perhaps as most anthropologists of the time.
As a high school student studying the sciences, including biology and Darwin’s theory of evolution, Campbell experienced his first crisis of faith as he began to understand that much of what he had been instructed to believe literally by his Catholic Christian faith was not supported by the cosmological image of the universe being painted by the science of the day. This crisis of faith eventually found a tenuous balance as he came to understand the many levels at which myths could be interpreted depending on the cultural predispositions and comfort levels of each individual adherent.
On a family voyage to Europe during his undergraduate studies, Joseph Campbell experienced a serendipitous meeting aboard the ship with the Indian philosopher, Jiddu Krishnamurti, with whom he continued to share a friendship for years after. One of Krishnamurti’s traveling companions gave Campbell a book on the life of the Buddha and, again, he noticed the many similarities between that tradition and Christianity.
It was on his second trip to Europe during his graduate studies at Columbia University in the late 1920’s that he began to make the connection between the role of the “modern” artists he encountered in Paris and their shamanic/priestly counterparts in cultures around the world. He saw the mythic themes with which he’d been enthralled since childhood re-emerging in the new forms being created by individuals like James Joyce, Picasso, Matisse, and the many other artists who were active in the avant-garde world of Paris at that time. It was this period that truly fueled the rest of his life as a scholar of comparative mythology and religion and which supported one of my favorite quotes of his where he states: “In my writing and my thinking and my work, I’ve thought of myself as addressing artists and poets and writers. The rest of the world can take it or leave it as far as I’m concerned.”
In conclusion, here is an excerpt from Campbell’s acceptance speech when being awarded the Medal of Honor for Literature from the New York Arts Club in 1985 for the impact of his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces:
Now there’s a beautiful phrase that I ran into in Novalis: “The seat of the soul is where the inner and the outer worlds meet.” The outer world is what you get in scholarship, the inner world is your response to it. And it is where these two come together that we have the myths. The outer world changes with historical time, the inner world is the world of anthropos. The mythological systems are a constant, and what you are recognizing is your own inward life, and at the same time the inflection to history. The problem of making the inner meet the outer of today is, of course, the function of the artist. To think that my work has had some influence on people who are doing this is why I feel so proud, so proud of this moment…
Be well,
m
P.S. If you would like to learn more about Joseph Campbell’s ideas and work, please visit the links below...
Joseph Campbell on Netflix.com:
- The Hero’s Journey (biography)
- The Power of Myth (interviews)
- Sukhavati (art film)
- Mythos, Vol. I
- Mythos, Vol. II
–
Manny Otto
There is an almost sensual longing for communion with others who have a larger vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendships between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality almost impossible to describe.
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
> check out…
mythosforcreatives.com
awakeningtheartist.com