Arts and Letters

Joseph Campbell was an explorer of myths and religions, legends, fables, fairy tales—the stories man tells himself and his tribes, and has told himself, from the beginning to our new mythologies of space. Freud interpreted dreams and inferred from them the nature of the human unconscious. Campbell, following Freud, interpreted myths as metaphors of human existence. On completing his masterwork, the four volumes of The Masks of God, Campbell felt that he had been able to confirm "the unity of the race of man, not only in its biology but in its spiritual history." It had unfolded for him everywhere, he said, "in the manner of a single symphony."

This was his way of summing up his search for gods, heroes, demons, the motifs and themes which reveal the struggles and triumphs of men and women in their environment. Mythologists had long ago shown that the races independently spin similar stories in lands geographically far apart. For Campbell, this universality spelled the makings of a science of man.

Campbell reached this illumination during years of disciplined scholarship. He searched libraries, traveled to the outposts of the earth, learned languages, sat with the American Indians or the spiritual leaders of Hinduism, men like Swami Nikhilananda, or the great master of Zen, Dr. Suzuki. He bound himself to no religions in his desire to understand their universality. To him they were all one, a projection of the religious emotion and physical being that found expression in Christ or Buddha or Mahomet or tribal gods in remote places. "God is thought, God is a name, God is an idea," he told Bill Moyers in the television series he taped shortly before his death.

Campbell listened to the monks in Tibet and China and visited the later civilizations of Greece and Rome. Everywhere he found that the myths contained fundamental patterns, human feeling radiating from man's mental and spiritual being. He studied the petroglyphs carved in lava and scrutinized the paintings in the caves of Lascaux. In Kyoto, finding a group of Yamabushi priests who walked on hot coals at a ceremony of healing, Campbell watched them and performed the same walk in their presence. He told me of this once—it was one of his favorite tales about himself—how his curiosity was aroused and his feeling that he could emulate the priests even if he, a westerner, might suffer some burns in the process. By the time he stepped on the hissing saplings spread crosswise on the coals, the little flames that licked his feet seemed cool; and he was amazed and delighted when he found that the ankle he had sprained a few days earlier and kept tightly wrapped, emerged from the ordeal entirely healed.

His act, we may judge, was one of his ways of showing that western man can, at a given moment, be a part of ritual in another land and another religion. Had not mankind hunted and planted everywhere, deriving the same sustenance from the earth-mother? And built houses of god, altars and shrines, or created pyramids and other elaborate forms of burial? The patterns were universal: and so it has been since life on earth began.

I met Joseph Campbell some thirty or more years ago in New York, in a little group of perhaps a dozen men and women who used to dine periodically in a back room of the old Stanhope Hotel to compare notes on our diverse disciplines. We were interdisciplinary: writers, scholars, critics, psychoanalysts, drawn together in an effort to reach beyond the confines of our specialties. I remember the vividness of Joe Campbell's presence. He was tall and straight, with the frame of an athlete and strong open features: everything about him suggested a supreme vitality, and I realized early what his particular charm and force could do to the myths he described: here was a man who talked always with feeling; he felt those stories, he made us hear the splash of water, the sounds of animals, he gave us a sense of primordial fear and worship and he moved through vast landscapes of the past as if he were some ancient hero swinging a magic sword and performing superhuman deeds. There was something fresh and boyish in the way he touched myths, classic or new, and he spoke out of an extraordinary saturation, he seemed to have all the stories at his fingertips and he saw many inner resemblances because he knew them so intimately. He had the imagination of narrative, the poetic intensity of an individual in control of his material. In his low-keyed eloquence he told us the inventions of the races and he often used the word "rapture." I find it occurs with some frequency in his writings. I would learn that this was a recall from the Sanskrit and the Upanishads, the sachidananda—that fusion of Being and Intelligence and the resulting bliss or rapture that comes with a sense of ultimate reality—nirvana.

One got a certain amount of this in the posthumous series of talks with Bill Moyers—but in such tapings there are interruptions, questions, a two-dimensional quality. Campbell was devoted to the American Indians, whose tales he read when he was a small boy in the New Rochelle library, conveniently located next to his childhood home. Later he sought out the Indians themselves and the work of the father of modern anthropology, Franz Boas. Campbell spoke as one who listened closely. Myths, he used to say, are manifestations of the energies within us, and the human rituals such as hunting and planting are enactments of myth. He insisted that all religions were true. He spoke always out of the authority of his long quest, his complete grasp of his illustrative matter and his own inner illumination.

At a later time, when we compared notes, we discovered that in our youth we had both lived in Paris, in the late 1920s. Both of us had fallen under the influence of James Joyce and his bewildering and remarkable "work in progress" published in little magazines and later known as Finnegans Wake. Ulysses had shown us the mythic mind of Joyce and the way he made myths (as Campbell came to believe) transcend time, so that he could put the Odyssey into Dublin and turn Ulysses, the wanderer, into the myth of the wandering Jew and make the poet Dedalus, his son, Telemachus. In Finnegans Wake Joyce used place names and river names and a great deal of jabberwocky to show the accretions of folktales and legends—repeating in many forms the cyclical history of mankind.—Teems of times and happy returns. The seim anew…. Northmen's thing made southfolks place but howmulty plurators made eachone in person ? Latin me that, my trinity scholard, out ef eure sanscreed into oure eryan. In the fullness of time, Campbell, with a colleague, Henry Morton Robinson, gave us a much-needed Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, and shortly after this his celebrated work, The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

From France, Campbell had gone to Munich to study the German myth-scholars, and after further studies he started teaching comparative mythology at Sarah Lawrence College, where he remained for the next forty years, while his reputation as a master of his field grew around the world.

Our friendship was renewed when, on his retirement, Joseph Campbell moved to Honolulu. His wife, the dancer and choreographer Jean Erdman, originally a pupil of Martha Graham, had married him when she was a student at Sarah Lawrence. She came from Hawaii and she entered into his work with the same fascination that he showed in hers. She had, at one time, created a choreographed play out of elements of Finnegans Wake which proved a success in America and abroad. During the last three years of Campbell's life I saw him frequently and discovered that he treated his life in the kingdom of Octogenaria with all his old ardor and unflagging spirit. He was almost eighty when he began to produce his Historical Atlas of World Mythology. The first volume was The Way of the Animal Powers, published in 1983. He was putting finishing touches to the second volume, "The Way of the Seeded Earth," and there remained plans for "The Way of the Celestial Lights" and "The Way of Man." There was a kind of parallel between these proposed volumes and his Masks of Gods, whose four volumes had dealt with primitive, oriental, occidental, and creative mythology. From his base in Hawaii, he often journeyed to lecture abroad, to prepare tapings, to receive honors, and deliver the papers that composed his ultimate book, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, which might be regarded as his supreme summary of his work. His local activities included his assuming the presidency of the cooperative apartment house in which he lived on the edge of the sea. He found time for everything. During his last months he journeyed to Greece with his wife's dance company. To the end he proclaimed "the wonder of this whole world and oneself within it." He had had his vision and the poetry of his searches. Clearly this was nirvana.