Joseph Campbell: Still an Author of Mythic Proportions

His 40-year-old book has reached the best-seller list. Conferences and discussion groups are springing up to talk about his ideas. His name is revered by screenwriters and psychologists.

A year and a half after his death, mythologist Joseph Campbell is more popular than ever.

Since last spring’s broadcast of “The Power of Myth,” a six-part PBS series of conversations with journalist Bill Moyers, and the publication of a companion book, Campbell has been reaching an ever-widening audience.

“I had Joseph Campbell as a teacher and knew him for 25 years,” said Lynne Kaufman, programmer for UC Berkeley Extension. “Since the Moyers series, everyone in the world has been coming over and saying, ‘Why didn’t you tell me how wonderful he was?’ ”

Cult Following

Campbell, an anthropologist and authority on mythology, died of a heart attack at age 83 in October, 1987. As the author, co-author and editor of dozens of books on mythology in art and religion and for four decades an instructor of mythology at Sarah Lawrence College, he’d become something of a cult figure before the Moyers series. Yet for those exposed to Campbell, his work often served as a profound experience.

Campbell’s book, “The Hero With a Thousand Faces,” first published in 1949, helped director George Lucas envision the Luke Skywalker character on which he based his “Star Wars” trilogy. It was at Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch in Marin County that parts of the PBS series were filmed. Another Campbell fan was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who championed publication of “The Power of Myth” at Doubleday & Co.

But since the Moyers series, Campbell devotees are thirsting to get more information on his work. Betty Sue Flowers, who edited the PBS series into book form, said: “I give four to five speeches a week to many diverse groups--just because I had a remote connection to the project.” Flowers, who teaches poetry and mythology at the University of Texas, said: “Recently I was asked to speak at showings of the Campbell series at a church (in Austin). They set up chairs expecting 60 people to show up and nearly 500 turned out.”

Earlier this month, Moyers spoke in Austin, Tex., on the “Power of Myth in Everyday Life,” a celebration of Campbell that attracted 3,000 people. And a recent UCLA Extension program, “Heroes, Quests and Myths: The World of Joseph Campbell,” drew about 400 people to each session of the 9-week series.

Diverse Audience

The UCLA Extension series was a difficult program because “there were so many levels of seekers,” said Donald Cosentino, the UCLA associate professor of folklore and mythology who moderated it. “Some were seeking a basic understanding of mythology; some were seeking a religious experience; some just wanted to know more about Campbell.”

Cosentino believed its principal lure was the name Joseph Campbell. “If the series had been called ‘Mythology in Contemporary Life,’ it wouldn’t have drawn as many students.” How to account for Campbell’s extraordinary posthumous popularity? Said Cosentino: “He offers a religion that’s not in churches, which seems to me to be a very much desired thing these days by many.”

It didn’t hurt that PBS viewers were exposed to a spellbinding storyteller. Campbell could speak at length on topics as diverse as Sanskrit, the Bible, Jung, fairy tales, mythology in American Indian to Hindu cultures, death, virgin birth, man’s place in the universe and the eternal quest for what Campbell called “bliss.”

As he told Moyers, “Mythology teaches you what’s behind literature and the arts, it teaches you about your own life. It’s a great, exciting, life-nourishing subject. Mythology has a great deal to do with the stages of life, initiation ceremonies as you move from childhood to adult responsibilities, from the unmarried state into the married state. All of those rituals are mythological rites.”

The Universality of Myth

In his books, Campbell stressed the similarities and universality of myths, despite their origins in different cultures on different continents and in different eras. “A lot of us read these great stories when we’re going through school and think they’re just stories,” said Barry Bortnick, coordinator of special programs in the department of humanities, science and social sciences for UCLA Extension. “What Campbell has done, and others, too, has been to relate them to us today. And people are fascinated by that. We like to think that mythology isn’t over for our time.”

The appeal is evident in the popularity of “The Power of Myth,” which was published last May to coincide with the PBS series. Initially there were 30,000 copies of the book in paperback and 5,000 in hard-cover, now there are 570,000 copies in paperback and 35,000 in hard-cover, said Jacqueline Deval, Doubleday’s publicity director. “We were printing them as fast as we could ship them and wish we could have printed more. It’s been on the New York Times’ best-seller list since May,” Deval said.

Response was similar for Campbell’s 40-year-old “Hero of a Thousand Faces.” Since its initial publication in 1949, it has been published in several trade paperbacks before it came to Princeton University Press. “Since the (television) series in May, we’ve sold 180,000. Sales before averaged about 10,000 copies a year,” said Susan Sweet, sales assistant in marketing at Princeton University Press.

Deval believes “The Power of Myth” is so popular because the book “gives people a sense of their cultural history. The things that it covers in a very legitimate way--thoughts about philosophy, love and bliss--are often couched in a New Age way. . . . I think the perception was that this was more mainstream.”

Unconventional Life

Campbell’s life, however, was anything but mainstream. He referred to himself as a “an academic maverick.”

“You came to realize that his life was as adventurous as the heroes he talked about,” said Philip Cousineau, who served as co-producer on an hourlong documentary released in 1987 called the “Hero’s Journey: The World of Joseph Campbell.”

Campbell’s lifelong interest in myths began at age 6, or thereabouts, when he was enchanted by the spectacle of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show when it performed in New York City. His fascination and reading on Indian lore led the Irish Catholic boy into the wider world of mythology.

At Columbia University he studied literature and art, but he also found time to surf, become a world-class runner and play jazz saxophone in Greenwich Village. In the ‘20s, Campbell lived in Paris on a fellowship and worked on a literary Arthurian quest, but ultimately dropped his work on a doctorate.

He returned to the United States expecting to get a teaching job. That was two weeks before the 1929 stock market crash. “I thank God that I didn’t get the job at Columbia that was waiting for me,” he once recalled in an interview.

Important Detours

Instead, he remained happily unemployed for the next three years, using the money he had saved from playing music to live in Woodstock, N.Y., where he read voraciously. During this time he made the connection between the various myths of the world and embarked on his life’s work. He did take a few hiatuses, driving across country to California where he became friends with a young writer named John Steinbeck. Campbell also ventured up to Alaska by tramp steamer.

He finally took a teaching job in 1932, and two years later he joined the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, where he taught comparative mythology until his retirement in 1972. Later Campbell and his wife, Jean Erdman, an original member of the Martha Graham Dance Company, settled in Hawaii. Erdman still lives there.

For all Campbell’s writings, his work was not necessarily revered in academic circles. UCLA professor Cosentino noted that Campbell’s books are rarely used as university texts. He described Campbell’s central thesis as “describing a universal mythology and saying that all myths are really one myth and that one myth is really the story of the individual. The problem is that that is and isn’t true,” Cosentino said. “And even if it is (true), he’s not the first person to say that. It was a big theory in the 19th Century.”

“He accepted the fact that he was considered the popularizer. But the word popularizer suggests trivializing and he didn’t want to trivialize the subject,” film maker Cousineau said.

But the great fame that Campbell now enjoys was not what he was seeking. “Joe was of the Old World--not of the celebrity cult,” Cousineau said. “His life was the work. He always steered columnists and reporters--even film makers--away from his life.”

“He never wanted to be a guru,” UC Berkeley’s Kaufman said. “He was an artist. He had conviction and he had his own vision. He knew what his work was from his early 20s and he was just doing it. . . . He was a man who was following his bliss.”