Joseph Campbell

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), The Masks of God and The Power of Myth.

The monomyth

Joseph Campbell teaches that the hero's adventure, told everywhere, follows one pattern, which he calls the monomyth: separation, initiation and return. A hero ventures out of the world of every day into a region of wonder, meets fabulous forces there and wins a decisive victory, and comes back with the power to give a boon to those left behind. Prometheus steals fire from the gods and brings it down; Jason sails for the fleece and returns with it; the Buddha leaves his palace, wins awakening and comes back to teach. He sets out the journey in seventeen stages, and few stories use all of them.

Departure

The adventure begins with the call: often a blunder, a chance meeting or a herald, as when the princess of the fairy tale drops her golden ball into the spring and a frog rises to bring it back. The call can be refused, and then the adventure turns to its negative: Daphne, fleeing the god, becomes a laurel, rooted and closed. To the one who answers comes supernatural aid, a protecting figure, often an old woman or an old man, such as Spider Woman, who gives the Navaho twins the charms for their journey to their father the Sun. Then the hero crosses the first threshold, past its guardian, into the unknown, and passes into the belly of the whale, swallowed as Jonah was: the hero dies to the old self in order to go on.

Initiation

Next comes the road of trials, the tasks that test and teach, as Psyche must sort a heap of seeds and fetch water from a guarded spring to win back Love. At the centre of the adventure stand the deepest meetings. The meeting with the goddess is the hero's union with the mother of the world, who is all that can be known. Woman as the temptress stands for the revulsion against life and the flesh that the hero must pass beyond. In the atonement with the father the hero faces the ogre who is also mercy, and finds that the two are one.

Apotheosis lifts the hero beyond the pairs of opposites, like the bodhisattva who waits at the threshold of release for the sake of all beings. Last comes the ultimate boon, the elixir or the fire, as Gilgamesh dives for the plant that restores youth, only for a serpent to steal it on his way home.

Return

The return has its own perils. The hero may refuse it, as the Buddha, after his awakening, doubted that what he had found could be told. The return may be a magic flight, the hero chased by the powers whose treasure he carries and throwing obstacles down behind him; or the hero may need rescue from without, as the sun goddess Amaterasu, hidden in her cave, is drawn out by the laughter of the gods and a mirror. Then the return threshold is crossed and the world of every day must be met again, which can undo the hero, as Oisin, home from the Land of Youth, touches the earth and becomes an old man. At the end the hero is master of the two worlds, able to pass between the everyday and the deep, and free to live without anxiety in the passing moment.

Elementary ideas and folk ideas

The likeness of myths across the world he explains with a pair of terms from the German ethnologist Adolf Bastian. The elementary ideas are the same everywhere, because they come from the one human psyche, its dreams and its stages of life; the folk ideas are the local dress they wear, shaped by land, history and custom. The elementary idea of the hero's death and rebirth wears one dress in Siberia, another in Polynesia and another in Galilee. With Jung he held that the images rise from depths that all people share.

The four functions of myth

A living mythology, he teaches, does four things. Its first function is mystical: to waken and keep alive a sense of awe before the mystery of being. Its second is cosmological: to give a picture of the universe that agrees with the knowledge of its time. Its third is sociological: to support and validate a social order. Its fourth is psychological: to carry each person through the stages of life, from birth through youth, adulthood and age to death, in harmony with themselves, their society and the universe. When a mythology's picture of the world no longer agrees with what is known, its other functions weaken with it.

Metaphor, not fact

The images of myth are metaphors, and the great error, he holds, is to read them as facts. Read as history or biology, the virgin birth, the promised land and the ascension become bad history and bad science; read as metaphor, they speak of the birth of the spiritual life within a person, of a country of the spirit, of a passage beyond the visible. A god should be, in a phrase he took from Karlfried Graf Dürckheim, transparent to transcendence: an image through which the mystery shows, not a fact that hides it. Myths are public dreams, he says, and dreams are private myths.

The forest where it is darkest

In the modern world, where no single mythology holds a whole society together, each person must find the way alone, and the artist becomes the maker of myth. Campbell finds the pattern in the romance of the Grail: the knights of the Round Table, setting out on the quest, each entered the forest at the point where it was darkest and there was no path, since to follow another's path is to live another's life. The quest of each is to find the way that is their own.

Follow your bliss

His best known counsel joins this to India. The Sanskrit names for the final reality are three, sat, chit and ananda, being, consciousness and bliss. He said he could not be sure of his being or of his consciousness, but he knew where his rapture was, and he would hold to that. To follow one's bliss is to follow the deep sense of what makes one fully alive, rather than what others require, and he held that a person who does so meets help from places they did not expect.