Through Thomas Mann he met Indologist Heinrich Zimmer in 1941 and through Zimmer met Swami Nikhil Ananda of the Vedanta Society. When Zimmer died in 1943, Campbell inherited the responsibility for editing Zimmer's manuscripts. The Zimmer connection enabled Campbell to become attached to the famous Eranos conferences, which included Eliade; Gershom Scholem who had revived the study of Jewish Qabalah; Henri Corbin who was interested in Iranian mysticism; as well as Jung. Campbell became a major figure in the world of mythology with the publication in 1949 of his great book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Campbell got to know Alan Watts but was never quite sure how much he liked the East. A trip to India left Campbell shaken with culture shock: heat, poverty, dirt, beggars, and the caste system. Also, at that time India was enamored with socialist visions and the prospect of friendship with the Soviet Union. By now, Campbell was on his way to being an anti-communist. Campbell turned Westward, towards the paganism from the Odyssey to the Holy Grail. Between 1959 to 1968, he wrote his great four-volume book on world mythology. For Campbell, the four functions of myth were:
- Produce a mystical experience to awaken and maintain a sense of awe and gratitude
- Create an image of the universe in accord with the scientific knowledge of the time
- Implant a moral order
- Give an account stage by stage through life
Twentieth-century myths: individualism in space: Star Wars
In the application of myths to today, Campbell was no reactionary. He did not yearn for a yesterday in pristine animated nature where myths were enacted. He proposed the place for myths to play themselves out in the United States were in outer space. Outer space contains the location for enacting the heroes called to adventure comparable to the role of Arthurian fantasy or Wagner's heroes in Germany. George Lucas had admired Campbell and so Campbell indirectly became associated with Star Wars. Six years later he became friends with Lucas and they were friends until Campbell died three years later.
Robert Ellwood makes a very interesting comparison between Star Trek and Star Wars as a way to demonstrate Campbell's individualistic roots. Star Trek was about cooperation between the crew, not the individual. It isn't even about the patriotism of say, the United States. The crew members included people of many ethnicities. The series was about humanity in space. In these episodes, there was a direct struggle for power between humanity and extra-terrestrial civilizations. In the case of Star Wars, the theme was about the individual heroism of Luke Skywalker. He is a hero but doesn't know it. The intelligent robots are a kind of companion animal like Don Quixote's Sancho Panza. In Star Wars, Arthurian Legend and Wagnerian cycles of myths all show the ultimate futility of grasping for political power. How convenient for the conservative ruling classes of the United States to encourage people to withdraw from political-power engagements into the private world of individualistic mythological journeys.
What kind of society would a Campbell view of myth construct? A society of heroes like Luke Skywalker of Star Wars would follow their own myths. Ellwood says there would be a ground crew of non-heroes who sing the praise of heroes as they provide for the heroes' material needs. In other words, social organization remains the same and is unimportant, unlike for the crew of Star Trek.
Scholarship
Campbell was not really a folklorist. Folk tales were to him inferior, undeveloped, or degenerate in relation to the great mythologies of higher civilizations. He started his scholarly career in literature and cultural studies and approached myth though the eyes of a cultural critic. Let's hear directly from Ellwood:
Though remarkably widely read in mythology, Campbell exhibited limited interest of the usual academic sort in his subject matter. He evinced little concern about mythic variants or philological issues. (130)
In his methods he used the traditional equipment of a literary critic - comparison and analogy.
Campbell was fundamentally literary. Most of Campbell's work got a favorable hearing with literary and drama critics and the literate public than with professional folklorists or anthropologists. An American anthropologist said Campbell did not adequately distinguish between the Great and the Little traditions. Like Jung and Eliade, he picks and chooses mythological symbols from different times and places and universalizes them, leaving behind the political, economic, and technological conditions in which they are rooted.
Right-wing politics
As stated earlier, the German writers he read were anti-modernists and against the liberal Weimar Republic. Even by 1940-1941 he failed to grasp the threat posed by Hitler. By the early 1950s he saw liberty far more threatened by communism than by McCarthyism. Campbell was not supportive of the movements of the 1960s. He was reportedly anti-Jewish, but Larson's biography states that Campbell was anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic. I doubt that Campbell had the political interest enough to understand the difference between the two. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, we might say that he disliked the Jewish religion because of its early history battling paganism and its hostility to mythology in favor of its championing of history.
In spite of this conservative orientation, he was extremely popular at ultra-liberal Esalen and on the Bill Moyers show. Why was this? Ellwood suggests it was because the audience thought he was liberal because they were liberal and they thought any intellectual writing about comparative mythology would also be liberal. To be fair to Campbell, he did change. Thanks to the feminist exploration of the existence of matriarchies, he became more sympathetic to the place of goddesses in myth. Campbell spoke of ancient Hebrew conquest of Canaan as an example of pastoral fighting and promoting war against feminist goddesses.
Conclusions: Similarities and Differences
Let's begin with the similarities:
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