Campbell / Couvering The Mythic Dimension

Selected Essays 1959-1987
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61178-020-8
Verlag: Joseph Campbell Foundation
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 360 Seiten

Reihe: The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell

In these pages, the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell presents twelve eclectic, far-ranging, and brilliant essays gathered together for the first time. The essays explore myth in all its dimensions: its history; its influence on art, literature, and culture; and its role in everyday life.

This second volume of Campbell's essays (following The Flight of the Wild Gander) brings together his uncollected writings from 1959 to 1987. Written at the height of Campbell's career-and showcasing the lively intelligence that made him the twentieth century's premier writer on mythology-these essays investigate the profound links between myth, the individual, and societies ancient and contemporary. Covering diverse terrain ranging from psychology to the occult, from Thomas Mann to the Grateful Dead, from Goddess spirituality to Freud and Jung, these playful and erudite writings reveal the threads of myth woven deeply into the fabric of our culture and our lives.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Campbell, Joseph

Couvering, Antony van

Leseproben

COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY AS AN INTRODUCTION TO CROSS-CULTURAL STUDIES

In teaching women one is confronted with different sets of academic demands from those of men. Whereas men generally are preparing for specialized careers, the demands of which determine the order and organization of their studies, women are comparatively free to follow the lead of their own interests. In a women’s college (at least, of the kind in which I have been teaching), there is, so to say, an open-field situation. We do not have required courses; nor do we have examinations. On the other hand, we do have a strict and very demanding system of education by dialogue and discussion. I see every one of my students individually, in conferences, for at least one half-hour every fortnight. This makes it possible to follow the growth, direction, and dynamics of each student’s individual development.

The instructor in such a situation has to be willing not only to give generously of his time but also to participate in the student’s discovery of interests—even to the point, on occasion, of abandoning his own academic plans and point of view. It was in such a fluid environment as this, then, that the course which I am going to describe came into being—in relation to a context of interests not primarily academic but experimental.

During my first two or three years, I taught a survey course in comparative literature, but at the close of the second year, three students came to me, separately, to ask for a course in mythology. Apparently my interest in this subject had become more evident in my teaching than I had supposed. I was excited by the idea and decided to give three separate courses—one to each—the following year, based on three quite different reading lists from three different approaches.

At the end of that year, four students came to me for such a course. I brought them together in one classroom, basing the readings and approach that year on what I had learned the year before. Then the year following, there were seven; and from that time on, this course has been both an established part of our curriculum and one of the great joys of my life. I have given up teaching anything else, and since about 1939, have been busily trimming it here, expanding it there, and keeping it up to date.

The departmental organization of Sarah Lawrence College is somewhat atypical. We do not have strictly separated departments. There is a literature and language faculty, which is the group with which I am officially associated. Since Sarah Lawrence students have generally professed great interest in the arts, we have strong departments in the fields of dance, theater, music, painting, and sculpture. There is, of course, a large and rather aggressive department in social science, which includes, for some reason or other, philosophy. Psychology is strong and important at Sarah Lawrence—particularly in relation to a greatly appreciated nursery school. And finally, there is a faculty of mathematics and natural science.

In describing this course, I shall be dealing with something out of an age that is long past. My observations about this course—antecedent and indifferent as it is to all academic departmentalization—may be of some use after all even to those faced with the problems of an elaborately structured university.

The course is conducted in lectures. About 50 per cent of each student’s reading is directly related to the topics of the lectures. Each, however, meets me in conference at least once a fortnight, and for these meetings she reads according to her own special interest in whatever direction she has chosen to go. During the first month or so, about half the class will be at a loss. The other 50 per cent, however, will know very well what they want to do and will be off with the gun. As the year proceeds, the others gradually find their bearings.

The individual projects often are developed in relation to some aspect or other of another course, for the material can be approached from many points of view—literary, anthropological, psychological, religious. The course has served, in fact, as an effective coordinating aid for many students. And on the other hand, for those already strongly directed, there is plenty of occasion for more specialized study. I can report that a good many really impressive productions have come onto my desk. One of the most recent is now at the Viking Press and will appear as a book next year.

The readings for the class begin with Ovid’s Metamorphoses.1 Most students think of mythology as classical mythology, and so it has seemed to me that the logical field for a beginning would be here. Besides, Ovid’s style is fluent and delightful—not a boring line in the book. The index to the volume, furthermore, provides as good a guide to classical myths as a beginner could require. But the main value of the work, from my point of view, derives from the fact that Ovid grouped his tales in clusters according to theme, so that the student sees immediately how one essential plot can be told and retold with a variety of turns and ascribed to many different heroes. Certain patterns, certain principles, a morphology, can be recognized—the kind of situation that I have expounded in my Hero with a Thousand Faces. There is a general pattern to the hero journey—the quest of the hero into unknown realms, the powers that he meets there and overcomes, the stages of his crises of victory, and his return then, with some boon that he has gained, for the founding of a city, religion, dynasty, or whatnot; or, on the other hand, his failure and destruction. Also in Ovid right at the beginning, parallels with the Book of Genesis are evident with the cosmogonic cycle, the formation of the world, creation of man, the flood, the restoration of the earth, and so on.

Next, after Ovid has set us right in the middle of our subject, we go back to the Odyssey, as a great example and test case of what we have learned about the archetypal hero journey. And we are now being introduced, as well, to the historical backgrounds of the classical tradition. After that, we go back one great step further, with Frazer’s Golden Bough, to pre-Hellenic times.

Frazer is considered by some to be a bit old-fashioned today. At the same time, I do not know of a better way to introduce a completely unprepared student to the whole range of this immense field—its relation to the folk as well as high traditions, the Orient and the Occident, Africa and the Arctic, the great and the little rituals, fairy tales, and all. The same motifs that have already been recognized in the classical field are here revealed as spread throughout the world, the motifs and themes of quest and return, death and rebirth, creation of the world and dissolution. Frazer deals with these in terms largely of their relationship to fertility cults, but he also gives enough material to show their relationship both to cosmological imagery and to the spiritual themes of inward quest, interior sacrifice, and the fertilization of the spirit.

Following Frazer, I used to embark on a review and discussion of theories—Tylor, Müller, Durkheim, Radcliffe-Brown, and others. After a number of years of this, however, I gave up stressing theory and began to concentrate upon direct presentations of the various mythological traditions themselves, starting with a brief review of some primitive cultures.2

Experience shows that it serves well, as an introduction, to classify primitive mythologies in two great categories. In the first are the mythologies of peoples who live and hunt on the great animal plains, where the basic food supply is animal meat and the chief suppliers of the food are men. Most of the hunting tribes inhabit (or more inhabited) the North and South temperate zones. The second category, in direct contrast, comprises the mythologies of peoples of the tropical equatorial belt, whose environment is a steaming jungle and where the chief food supply is vegetable, the women do nearly all the work, and the men devote themselves mainly to their leisure. I think it was Pater Wilhelm Schmidt who, in his Ursprung der Gottesidee, first brought out this contrast of the roles of the male in societies, respectively, of the hunt and of the plant world. In the latter, as he says, the primary work is accomplished by the women, who bring forth the children, tend the little gardens, build the houses, and take care of them—a fine situation for establishing a profound sense of inferiority in the male.

But the masculine ego, pushed back on itself, responds with that wonderful invention, the men’s secret society, where no women are allowed. And there very important things are done.3 In Melanesia, for example, the major occupation is the raising of pigs—male pigs, of course. Their upper canine teeth are knocked out so that the lower tusks can flourish, and they do grow in a beautiful curve, outward and downward and around back through the jaw. The owner of the pig celebrates certain stages of this progress by sacrificing hundreds of other porkers. And if he can get his main pig’s tusks to loop around through the jaw and out again, three times, he enjoys all the prestige of a thirty-second degree Mason, entitled to such names as “He who walks above the clouds.” This is a matter of great psychic importance, because when the man who has raised such a pig dies, he can present it as an offering, instead of himself, to be consumed by Sev Sev, the female guardian of the fiery way to the labyrinth of the underworld and immortality.

The survey of these primitive provinces actually starts with examples of mythology from the northern hunting...