Guest Blog: Joseph Campbell

[alanajoli]

I'll admit right here, I never did manage to take a course on Campbell when I was in college. I suspect this has been a great loss on my part, as Campbell has quite a number of books that all look like they merit college-level study, rather than my typical browse, peruse, and borrow technique. But peruse and borrow is the theme of the day, because when I opened Masks of God: Creative Mythology, I found a delightful excerpt from Campbell on his overview of the project after finishing it.

That said, having looked at Masks of God and realized that not only did I pick up the fourth volume in the series, but that the series should probably follow a reading of The Here with a Thousand Faces, I believe I'll put it back and start over once again.

--

Looking back over the twelve delightful years that I spent on this richly rewarding enterprise, I find that its main result for me has been its confirmation of a thought I have long and faithfully entertained: of the unity of the race of man, not only in its biology but also in its spiritual history, which has everywhere unfolded in the manner of a single symphony, with its themes announced, developed, amplified and turned about, distorted, reasserted, and, today, in a grand fortissimo of all sections sounding together, irresistibly advancing to some kind of mighty climax, out of which the next great movement will emerge. And I can see no reason why anyone should suppose that in the future the same motifs already heard will not be sounding still--in new relationships indeed, but ever the same motifs. They are all given here, in these volumes, with many clues, besides, suggesting ways in which they might be put to use by reasonable men to reasonable ends--or by poets to poetic ends--or by madmen to nonsense and disaster. For, as in the words of James Joyce in Finnegans Wake: "utterly impossible as are all these events they are probably as like those which may have taken place as any others which never took person at all are ever likely to be."

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I abandoned reading Campbell when it appeared to me that he took his best ideas from Merseia Eliade.

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

I understand he draws heavily on Graves as well. It looks like he drew on Levy-Bruhl also (who I've not read, only seen referenced) based on his Sarah Lawrence list. I suspect Campbell is found largely more readable than Graves or Eliade (or, at least, more mainstream), which is why he appears in a lot of curriculums. (That said, if I find myself already knowing everything he's writing about from other sources, I'll be tickled. *g*)