Category: Joseph Campbell

Campbell posited that one religion is ALL religions, as indicated by his famous book The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Science does not preclude religion, but religion rejected science.

Posted on by hopperguy

Joseph Campbell from the lecture Mythology and the Individual: Volume 1 (Joseph Campbell Audio Collection) [edited; any transcription errors are mine].

            “The image of the cosmos must change with the development of the mind or else man becomes dissociated. All of the great traditions and little traditions in their own time were scientifically correct . . . for that age. There must be a scientifically validated image [in religion]. It was actually the religious community that rejected the scientific community–in the 17th century. This divorce is a fatal thing and a most unfortunate thing and totally unnecessary thing. There is no reason whatsoever for clinging to the literal reading of a scientific statement that is 4000 years old. It must be read another way. There is something else being said there which is lost if you either hang on to the old science or reject it.”

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Who was Joseph Campbell?

Posted on by hopperguy

            Joseph Campbell was born in 1903, a year after Jung graduated and published his thesis. Campbell got a Master’s from Columbia University in literature in 1927. During his time there, he had the chance to study in Europe. When he came back, the depression had hit. With no job prospects, he rented a cheap house in Woodstock, New York and began reading for nine hours a day. In his reading, he noticed the recurrence of similar patterns in stories, in images, in religions, etc. This closely paralleled Jung’s ideas of archetypes. The title of one book by Campbell is The Hero with a Thousand Faces, showing how there is an archetype of the hero’s story, be it Scheherazade, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Beowulf, The Three Musketeers, or Luke Skywalker. By relating archetypes to common stories, images, and religions, Campbell brought Jung’s ideas to a broader audience. Bill Moyers’s interviews with Campbell on PBS in the late 1980s became one of the most viewed series at that time.

            Campbell also argued that many mythological stories were like guides, prescriptions for living. Similarly, archetypes help you when needed or activated as “systems of readiness for action, and at the same time images and emotions.” Campbell described religious fundamentalists as getting caught in the prose and not the poetry of religious writings. To believe that Jesus rose from the dead, Mary had a virgin birth, etc., is to ask the impossible in a scientific era. Instead, one should focus on the metaphor involved with such stories.

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