Campbell / Cousineau / Kudler The Hero's Journey

Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61178-034-5
Verlag: Joseph Campbell Foundation
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten

Reihe: The Collected Work of Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell, arguably the greatest mythologist of the twentieth century, was certainly one of our greatest storytellers. This masterfully crafted book interweaves conversations between Campbell and some of the people he inspired, including poet Robert Bly, anthropologist Angeles Arrien, filmmaker David Kennard, Doors drummer John Densmore, psychiatric pioneer Stanislov Grof, Nobel laureate Roger Guillemen, and others. Campbell reflects on subjects ranging from the origins and functions of myth, the role of the artist, and the need for ritual to the ordeals of love and romance. With poetry and humor, Campbell recounts his own quest and conveys the excitement of his lifelong exploration of our mythic traditions, what he called 'the one great story of mankind.'

Autoren/Hrsg.

Campbell, Joseph

Cousineau, Phil

Kudler, David

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

Joseph Campbell’s long odyssey through the seas of ancient mythology was as much a spiritual quest as it was a scholarly one. Through his prodigious readings, writings, and travels, as well as his crossroads meetings with many of the century’s most influential men and women, he discovered remarkable parallels in our world’s mythological heritage and reinforcement for the deep conviction he had held since he was a young student: that there is a fundamental unity at the heart of nature.

“Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names,” he often quoted the Vedas. To synthesize the constant truths of history became the burning point of his life; to bridge the abyss between science and religion, mind and body, East and West, with the timeless linkage of myths became his task of tasks.

“My hope,” he wrote in his preface to , “is that a comparative elucidation may contribute to the perhaps not-quite-desperate cause of those forces that are working in the present world for unification, not in the name of some ecclesiastical or political empire, but in the name of human mutual understanding.”

Campbell’s comparative historical approach to mythology, religion, and literature, in contrast to the conventional scholar’s emphasis on cultural differences, concentrated on similarities. He was convinced that the common themes or archetypes in our sacred stories and images transcended the variations or cultural manifestations. Moreover, he believed that a re-viewing of such primordial images in mythology as the hero, death and resurrection, the virgin birth, and the promised land—the universal aspects of the soul, the blood memories—could reveal our common psychological roots. They could even show us, as seen from below, how the soul views itself.

“Myths are the ‘masks of God,’” he wrote, “through which men everywhere have sought to relate themselves to the wonders of existence.” The shock of recognition we receive from the timelessness of these images, from primal cultures to the most contemporary, he believed, was an illumination not only of our inward life but of the same deep spiritual ground from which all human life springs.

So as Albert Einstein pursued a unified field theory for the energies of the outer realms, Joseph Campbell dedicated himself to forging a kind of unified field theory of the equally prodigious energies of the inner realms, the personifications of which we call “the gods.” And what physicists call the “fabric of reality” Campbell called “the net of gems,” a sparkling metaphor from Hindu cosmology that is also a keen image for his own unique weaving together of myth, religion, science, and art. His teachers in those disciplines, he concluded, were all saying essentially the same thing: that there is a system of archetypal impulses that have stirred the human spirit throughout history. It is, as he synthesized it, “one grandiose song.”

The iconoclastic road he took as scholar, teacher, and writer was not unlike the “left-hand paths” he discovered in myriad myths: what the Kena Upani?ads call the crossing of “a bridge as sharp as the edge of a razor”; the taking of the “middle way” of the Buddhists; or the entering of the dark forest of the Grail Quest “where there is no way or path.” Intuitively he followed his Tao of Scholarship beyond the hallowed halls of traditional academia and into a spiritual and psychological view of mythology, which embraces the transcendent Reality referred to by saints and shamans that can be directly . This form of direct perception of what the mystics called cosmic consciousness is nothing less than a personal encounter with the gods. It is the healing vision of order underlying apparent chaos, the seizure of life-affirming Beauty in the heart of darkness. If “snatching the eternal out of the ever fleeting is one of the great tricks of human existence,” as Tennessee Williams said, then those who can experience eternity now, from Campbell’s challenging perspective, become our tricksters, our spiritual guides.

Campbell’s decidedly unconventional career deprived him, he used to joke, of some prestige from his fellow scholars. But it was obvious to those of us who knew him that he took great pride in being the maverick and the “dilettante,” “the one who takes delight in,” as he once described his own mentor, the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer. He could afford to. His enthusiasm—literally his being full of the gods—had won him the hearts and minds of students early on in his career at Sarah Lawrence, and later, of scores of artists. His own fascination with the “great stuff of myth” turned thinking into an adventure, translated knowledge into wisdom, and revealed the personal relevance of mythology for those who heard or read him. To them he was far more than the popularizer who trivializes his subject; he was what the French elegantly call the “,” the charismatic teacher who not only animates complex material for the average audience, but evokes what Vladimir Nabokov called the , the telling shiver of truth about your own life. For that gift alone he became one of the most beloved teachers of our time.

Yet after more than fifty years of teaching and more than twenty books, Campbell felt that his contribution was simply that he gave people “the key to the realm of the muses,” that marvelous realm beyond the visible one from which imagination and inspiration could guide us in shaping our lives. In that role he was a modern , a guide through the often inscrutable mysteries of the ancient texts of Beowulf, Gilgamesh, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Egyptian mysteries, the and the , the Arthurian romances, the American Indian myths, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity, as well as such modern mythmakers as James Joyce, Thomas Mann, and Pablo Picasso. In his rendering of these majestic narratives and images, he taught us the poet’s way of “How to Read a Myth” (the original title for ): symbolically, metaphorically, soulfully.

But beyond his talent for “metaphorphosis,” that is, his ability to read into these transformative riddles of life and death, Campbell personalized the classics like few scholars before him. To complement the rigorous methods of scholarship, he revived the art of hermeneutics—inventive interpretations in the spirit of Hermes, the soul-guide—and fused them with the glint-in-the-eye regaling of a wise Irish storyteller. In so doing he breathed new life into the old myths, as Albert Camus said each generation must do. As he did with one of his favorite tales, the Parsifal legend, when he threw down the gauntlet at the end of his Arthurian romance seminars: So is it going to be the Grail Quest or is it going to be the Wasteland? he would ask. Are you going to go on the creative soul’s quest or are you going to pursue the life that only gives you security? Are you going to follow the star of the zeal of your own enthusiasm? Are you going to live the myth or is the myth going to live you?

And so reemerged the ecstatic scholar, a breed of thinker thought long extinct since the age of scientific rationalism. “It’s not the of the quest” he often reminded his audiences, “but the of the revelation,” giving new meaning to the old saw about “rapture of the deep.” Furthermore, he would add gnomishly, “Life is not a problem to be solved but a to be lived.”

But how is this possible? Can we do more than wait for the serendipitous encounter? How do we turn around the flight from mystery in this demythologized era with its overarching question: Is nothing sacred anymore? How do we separate the sham from the sublime?

Joseph Campbell’s patented response to the disenchantment of modern life was: find your life’s true passion and follow it, follow the path that is no path: “Follow your bliss.” When you have the unmistakable experience of the then you’ll know you’re riding on the mystery.

Campbell’s irrepressible urge to pursue his own bliss into the essential knowledge, the hidden harmonies within the dreamworld of myths, legends, fairy tales, folklore, poetry, literature, and art, is reminiscent of what John Keats described in Shakespeare as the “circumnavigation of the soul.” While Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung rescued the soul from the oblivion of the spiritual materialism of the nineteenth century with the study of depth psychology, Campbell’s cross-cultural explorations, and those of a host of other modern religious historians and anthropologists like Mircea Eliade and Claude Lévi-Strauss, revived our moribund myths in their ancestral home of the stories and images of the soul. Together and alone, they were “dreaming the myth onward,” as Jung advised, reweaving the ancient story-web.

Campbell’s sojourn inevitably took him to the Perennial Philosophy. The sublime theme he found in the ancient Hindu and Chinese pundits, Sufi and Christian mystics, poets and philosophers from Walt Whitman to Aldous Huxley, was that deep within the human soul is a mirror of divine Reality. As above, so below. : Thou art that. The Kingdom of God is within us, here and now. Awakening to that mystical dimension where the very essence of the self is suddenly perceived to be one with the ultimate forces of nature is at once the secret and the transforming journey of human life. “You are that mystery which you are seeking to know,” Campbell concluded.

This spiritual perspective, Campbell believed, is...