Joseph Campbell: A Monotheistic Deconstructionist

What I offer in the following text is a brief overview of Joseph Campbell’s thinking on Judaism and Christianity, which I sometimes refer to as biblical tradition. In examining Campbell’s work I have not tried to pick out his potentially inflammatory remarks about Jewish people or about Judaism, for that was not my focus or concentration when reading him. My focus was on trees and transformation while reading Campbell, the dissertation direction, and so most of the religious quotes pertaining to his work center on that theme or general mythological concepts, and sometimes alchemical ideas. The Campbellian quotes I resonated with fill over fifty pages of text, and it is from within that material that the following quotes were pulled. I leave the unveiling of allegedly anti-Semitic quotes to others such as Robert Segal who seem to be motivated to do so.

I am certain that this is the quote that Segal or whomsoever it was, refers to, when flagrantly and inflammatorily claiming that Joseph Campbell classified the Kabbalah as medieval. What actually occurs, is that Campbell is referring to a specific historical time period, writing in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, and in doing so, speaks of the Kabbalah in an approving not disproving or ignorant fashion as the writer claims. Campbell writes: “The cabalistic teachings of the medieval Jews, as well as the Gnostic Christian writings of the second century, represent the Word Made Flesh as androgynous—which was indeed the state of Adam as he was created, before the female aspect, Eve, was removed into another form” (153). Campbell refers to the Kabbalah in approving, if not glowing, terms, seeming to praise it while describing its mysticism. He writes again: “The Hebrew cabala represents the process of creation as a series of emanations out of the I AM of the Great Face. […] The emanations are represented also as the branches of a cosmic tree, which is upside down, rooted in “the inscrutable height.” The world that we see is the reverse image of that tree” (271). This does not sound like someone who is trying to present the Kabbalah as a medieval Jewish mystical religion alone, but one that he is aware continues today and for which he has respect.

Campbell’s description, in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, of the shift from the Mesopotamian Mythological mindset to that of the Jewish/Christian one is compelling and descriptive, not derogatory. He writes:

“Thus a completely new mythology arose, and instead of the ancient Sumero-Babylonian contemplation of the disappearances and reappearances of planets as revelatory of an order of nature with which society was to be held in accord, an idea of good and evil, light and dark, even of life and death as separable took hold, and the prophecy was announced of a progressive restoration to righteousness of the order of nature. Where formerly there had been the planetary cycles, marking days and nights, the months, years, and eons of unending time, there was now to be a straight line of progressive world history with a beginning, a middle, and a prophesied end—Gayomart, Zarathustra, and Soshyant: Adam, Jesus, and the Second Coming. Where formerly there had been, as the ideal, harmony with the whole, there was now discrimination, a decision to be made, “not peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34), effort, struggle, and zeal, in the name of a universal reform” (16).

However, if one clings, even unconsciously, to the truth-, validity- and historicity-claims of Christianity or Judaism, then this statement, opinion and observation would be offensive. The next quote of Campbell’s might also offend staunch fundamentalists: “The founding myth has been, of course, that of Man’s Fall by the Tree in the Garden (Genesis 3) and Salvation by virtue of the sacrifice of the God-Man Christ Jesus on the Tree of the Cross (Matthew 27:33-54; Mark 15:22-39; Luke 23:33-49; John 19:17-30), whereby a mythological Fall has become historicized as a prehistoric fact of c. 4004 or 3760 B.C., and a historical crucifixion, c. A.D. 30, mythologized as reparation for that Fall” (The Inner Reaches of Outer Space 33). Yet, if we read this passage for what it says, it is merely descriptive, not derisive.

Campbell challenges the current biblical tradition in its dualistic thinking. He writes:

“The axial tree of the universe, around which all revolves, that is to say, it’s still cut in two, as it was in Yahweh’s Eden of the two trees, one, of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the other, of the Knowledge of Eternal Life. Whereas in the unreformed, primeval archetype of the World Tree, such as appears in the Old Norse Yggdrasil and in the Navaho Blue Corn Stalk, the life-giving roots and the pollen-bearing flowerings, or tassels, are of a single, organically intact, mythological image” (The Inner Reaches of Outer Space 76).

In comparing the biblical tradition to Nordic and Navaho Mythologies, Campbell shows his preference for biological imagery, and offers a psychological insight made by Jung before him, among others.

Campbell’s approach to religion is best exemplified by the following: “The first step to mystical realization is the leaving of such a defined god for an experience of transcendence, disengaging the ethnic from the elementary idea, for any god who is not transparent to transcendence is an idol, and its worship is idolatry” (The Inner Reaches of Outer Space 18). His concept of how to best engage the mystical is a timeless one and wholly non-reflective of 19th or 20th century mythologists. His call to remember the mystical and metaphorical is oft-repeated and made in many ways. In The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, he writes: “Yet all religions, mythologies, and “proper” works of art both derive from and refer to it [Kant’s the causality of the highest cause = x], and so must remain, for all those inaccessible to the experience, mere shells to be applied to other use […]” (353). And, in Transformations of Myth Through Time, he writes: “The god within us is the one that gives the laws and can change the laws. And it is within us” (247). Campbell’s view of God and religion is a decidedly eastern one, but, it is not wholly eastern and seems not to conform exactly to any one tradition, which is fitting for a comparativist mythologist.

Seeing the utter destruction wrought by biblical tradition upon culture and society takes nothing more than dropping blinders and reading verifiable and accurate historical accounts. I think that Campbell saw this more clearly than many of his time, and as such, felt it a personal mission to deconstruct the biblical tradition through exposing many of its problems. He states:

“The common tendency today to read the word “myth” as meaning “untruth” is almost certainly a symptom of the incredibility and consequent inefficacy of our own outdated mythic teachings, both of the Old Testament and of the New: the Fall of Adam and Eve, Tablets of the Law, Fires of Hell, Second Coming of the Savior, etc.; and not only of those archaic religious Testaments, but also of the various, more modern, secular “Utopiates” (let us call them) that are being offered today in their place. Living myths are not mistaken notions, and they do not spring from books” (Flight of the Wild Gander xiii-xiv).

There is even a point in the book when he states that he is intentionally trying to offer a way to escape biblical tradition. I leave it for another to fish for the quote.

In writing about the psychological nature of myths, Campbell seeks to open myths up to all of humanity, and this is perhaps where some see him as the guru, which label and iconization others detest. He writes:

“Like dreams, myths are productions of the human imagination. Their images, consequently—though derived from the material world and its supposed history—are, like dreams, revelations of the deepest hopes, desires and fears, potentialities and conflicts, of the human will—which in turn is moved by the energies of the organs of the body operating variously against each other and in concert. Every myth, that is to say, whether or not by intention, is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors” (The Inner Reaches of Outer Space 28).

His concept of myth, as stated here, derives from a firm rootedness in comprehension of the world through a biological lens informed by Darwinism as seen in the Historical Atlas of World Mythology series.

Campbell’s four functions of myth as described in The Hero’s Journey and Thou Art That, include the mystical, cosmological, sociological and pedagogical. He stressed the metaphorical nature of myth over and against the literal and saw a religious function of myth that involved the mystical. He writes: “This I would regard as the essentially religious function of mythology—that is, the mystical function, which represents the discovery and recognition of the dimension of the mystery of being” (Thou Art That 3). Campbell continues in Thou Art That:

“The metaphors perform their function of speaking to these deep levels of human beings when they arise freshly from the contemporary context of experience. And a new mythology is rapidly becoming a necessity both socially and spiritually as the metaphors of the past, such as the Virgin Birth and the Promised Land, misread consequently as facts, lose their vitality and become concretized” (6).

Once again, his observations about the biblical myths could seem antagonizing if one was emotionally or psychologically attached to or invested in them, but, in reality, Jung and a host of others have made similar observations.

Campbell saw that the tradition out of which we had come had grown tired and nonapplicable, as did many others, however, he was staunch in his insistence on explaining this in as many different ways as he could, which is why I see him as the most vocal deconstructionist of biblical tradition that I have come across in reading. He writes:

“If, as has happened in the contemporary world, all of the backgrounds of the images of our religious heritage have been transformed, as occurs when we find ourselves in a world of machines rather than in a world of pastoral life, these changed images really cannot and do not communicate the feelings, the sentiments, and the meanings that they did to the people in the world in which these images were developed” (Thou Art That 8).

Although he did see biblical mythology as being outdated in its cultural context, Campbell also enjoyed the mysteries behind those myths. In Thou Art That, he writes:

“Paul also grasped that the Fall at the Tree of the Garden and the Redemption at Calvary on the Tree of Redemption are the two aspects of the two Trees in the Garden of Eden. The first, the Tree of the Fall, represents passage from the eternal into the realm of time. The second is the Tree of the return from the realm of time to the spiritual. So that Tree is the threshold tree, the laurel tree, which may be seen in its two aspects, going from the sacred to the profane and from the profane back into the sacred” (15).

And continues to explain one of the maladies of the culture that bases its existence on the biblical tradition of the Fall. “When Man ate of the fruit of the Tree, he discovered himself in the field of duality instead of the field of unity. As a result, he finds himself out, in exile” (15). Here, Campbell makes an obvious reference to Descartes whose dualistic notions were certainly informed by biblical tradition. The exilic mindset of the Jewish people could be said to have instigated numerous atrocities both done to others and to themselves by others, and continues unto today.

The idea of the biblical tradition causing dualism is not one that Campbell thought independently, but was shared by a great deal of writers. However, he wrote about it in a searching manner that seems to have raised the hair of many people, and perhaps that is owing to his comparing and contrasting biblical tradition with the yin-yang as below.

“There are two orders of religious perspective. One is ethical, pitting good against evil. In the biblically grounded Christian West, the accent is on ethics, on good against evil. We are thus bound by our religion itself to the field of duality. The mystical perspective, however, views good and evil as aspects of one process. One finds this in the Chinese yin-yang sign, the dai-chi” (Thou Art That 16).

Campbell continues with a brief exploration of how the biblical tradition informs an understanding of the natural world. He writes:

“We have, then, these two totally different religious perspectives. The idea of good and evil absolutes in the world after the fall is biblical and as a result you do not rest on corrupted nature. Instead, you correct nature and align yourself with the good against evil. Eastern cults, on the other hand, put you in touch with nature, where what Westerners call good and evil interlock. But by what right, this Eastern tradition asks, do we call these things evil when they are of the process of nature?” (Thou Art That 16).

Posing Judaism and Christianity side by side with Eastern traditions exposes the incredible dangers inherent in dogmatic interpretations of mythology. The Bible, especially the first eleven chapters of Genesis, as is well known amongst biblical scholars, represents an erudite collection of mythologies from cultures in the Mesopotamian, Mediterranean and Egyptian regions. The Egyptian mythologies were the underlying strata, as explained in convincing detail in Gary Greenberg’s 101 Myths of the Bible, upon which Sumerian, Babylonian, Akkadian, Hittite, Canaanite, Greek and Jewish (not in order of importance or affect) mythologies, as shown in S.H. Hooke’s Middle Eastern Mythology, were interwoven, combined, recombined and edited throughout history. Campbell’s following admonishment will prove true in any historical period to come; “One must search out one’s own values and assume responsibility for one’s own order of action and not simply follow orders handed down from some period past. Moreover, we are intensely aware of ourselves as individuals, each responsible in his or her own way, to themselves and to their world” (Thou Art That 30). He obviously is referring to biblical tradition, but, also to any culture or person that maintains a ‘faith’ or ‘belief’ in an ancient tradition, without exploring its mysteries themselves.

I think the main objection Campbell had to biblical tradition was that its dogma and doctrines put blinders on people so that they could not see much of the rest of humanity as viable. He also deeply disliked the biblical tradition’s disavowal of nature and stated ‘dominion over’ nature as seen in the Creation myth in Genesis. Campbell writes: “I deem this distinction of mythologies very important. We have the nature mythologies, which put us in touch with our own nature. But there also exist, one must note, antinature mythologies. These are the mythologies of the nomadic people” (Thou Art That 47). The Hebrew were a nomadic tribe, which Campbell was well aware of, and so, yes, he includes them in this observation. But, it is hardly an anti-Semitic statement of which others seem to see so much of in his work.

Campbell discusses his lack of comprehension of what the rabbis thought the tree of life was, writing; “What is that tree of immortal life? Even after examining in depth the rabbinical discussions of the two trees in the Garden, it remains something of an enigma” (Thou Art That 50-1). This statement shows that he read rabbinical discussions, Midrash, I will assume, and such reading would not be likely for an anti-Semite. His take on the Paradise myth, a psychological understanding of its application to his day, demonstrates that he does not despise the myth in biblical tradition. He writes: “That is what the story about the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is all about. It is not about an historical incident but about a psychological, spiritual experience, a metaphor for what is happening to us right now” (Thou Art That 51). This understanding is one that others would do well to see, especially those Christians, Jews and Muslims in conflict with one another.

The Devil had a hold of man, as Campbell puts it.

“How is God going to get Man back? The theological notion is that God offered his own son in exchange for Man’s soul. That is the Redemption. Through it God redeems a bet, as one would say about something that was lost, “I’m going to redeem it.” God bought Man’s soul by giving the Devil Christ instead, but the Devil could not hold Christ because Christ is incorruptible and so the Devil was cheated” (Thou Art That 76).

Since God offered Christ to the Devil in exchange for humanity, knowing the Devil could not hold Christ, as pointed out by Campbell, then God knowingly setting up the Devil for a fall, also invites the Devil to plague humanity thereafter. He continues: “Thus, the first Redemption theory: Christ as the bait, the cross as the hook, and the Devil cheated” (76). Such a simplification of the biblical and Christian tradition is sure to offend, but, it also serves the purpose of deconstructing Christianity so that Christians can then reconstruct it if so desired. Jung’s notion of reconstructing Christianity, as outlaid in Stein’s Jung on Christianity and in Psychology and Western Religion, by transforming the Trinity into a Quaternity and reintroducing the feminine into the godhood is the best I have seen yet.

Campbell goes on to synthesize the entire Christian Mythology; one of his strongpoints in mythographical work was synthesis. He writes:

“There is a great mythology associated with this particular crucifixion, namely, that of the redemption of mankind from the mortal effects of a calamitous event that occurred, according to report, long ago in a very distant period, when a serpent talked. The first man—the first example of the species Homo sapiens—had been forbidden by his creator to eat the fruit of a certain tree. Satan in the form of a snake tempted him—or rather his wife, who had been lately fashioned from one of his ribs—to eat of this forbidden tree. The couple ate, and thereupon both they and their progeny, the whole of the human race, were taken by the Devil in pawn. They could gain redemption only by the miracle of God himself in the person of his Eternal Son, Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, becoming incarnate in the person of that earthly Jesus who was crucified, not really for blasphemy but in order to redeem mankind from the Devil. According to this reading, the purpose was to palliate the Creator’s wrath by atoning through death for the heinous offense of that primal human act of disobedience” (Thou Art That 77).

Although one could say that this interpretation is ‘tongue-in-cheek’ in many spots, it is also fairly true to the biblical story. Over and over, Campbell writes about biblical tradition, and one could say scathingly at certain points, but, this resistance he has to the biblical tradition is more than validated by historical evidence on a nearly global scale.

Arguments about Campbell’s shadow being evidenced by his alleged anti-Semitism stem from knowledge of his Catholic upbringing and his early enthusiasm for the mythologically-loaded Nazi party. However, I do not think that the shadow was operating on Campbell when he made anti-monotheistic claims, for I see him as intentionally deconstructing Christianity, and the fact that he detested the Nazi party after he discovered their horrors is not a secret. Campbell was a literature scholar and was fluent in many languages, one of which happened to be German. The fact that some of the greatest philosophers have come out of Germany (or written in German) was not lost on Campbell either; so that what I am saying here is that of course he was attracted to a mythologically-laden political movement, but, additionally, that all political parties have shadows. The American government bombed over 52 foreign countries from WWII through 1996 (China twice) and that number has since increased dramatically. From some global perspectives, to align oneself with the American government now is akin to Campbell being attracted to the Nazi party in its beginnings.

Campbell found a way, as a comparativist will, to demonstrate similarities in many global myths to that of the biblical tradition. Whether one predates the other or not is not part of his discussion, although the idea of temporality is hinted at, it does not receive undue consideration. He writes:

“Those familiar with Germanic myth and folklore will recall that in the Icelandic Edda (specifically, in Havamal, verses 139-140 and 142) it is told that All-Father Othin, to acquire the Wisdom of the Runes, hung himself for nine days on the world tree, Yggdrasil.
I ween that I hung of the windy tree,
Hung there for nights full nine;
With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was,
To Othin, myself to myself,
On the tree that none may ever know
what root beneath it runs.
None made me happy with loaf or horn,
And there below I looked;
I took up the runes, shrieking I took them,
And forthwith back I fell.
Then began I to thrive, and wisdom to get,
I grew and well I was;
Each word led me to another word,
Each deed to another deed.
No one can miss the parallels here to the Gospel themes of Jesus’ three hours on the Cross (3 x 3 = 9), the spear in his side, his death and resurrection, and the boon of redemption thereby obtained. The phrase “and offered I was/To Othin, myself to myself” is interesting in the light of the Christian dogma of Christ and the Father as One” (Thou Art That 79).
What Campbell offers in such explorations is the opportunity for others to examine connections more deeply, to uncover historical proof of them or to refute his parallels if so desired. He is not condemning the mythologies he presents, and certainly drawing comparisons is not debasing unless one has too much emotionality tied up in their reading.

In a few instances, though, Campbell does provide some of the underlying mythological strata of the Bible. He writes:

“[serpent Madonna from Babylon] But there’s a very different spirit here. This is the cosmic tree, the axial tree. Here is the goddess of the tree, and here is the serpent who sheds its skin to be born again. The association of goddess, serpent, and tree recalls the Garden of Eden, Eve, and the serpent. And here comes the male moon figure for refreshment. He comes here to receive the fruit of eternal life for refreshment. This is not a fall. There’s no idea of a fall in these traditions” (Transformations of Myth through Time 63-4).

In this way, readers can see that the biblical interpretation of the Mesopotamian myths the Hebrews borrowed becomes negativized, and as biblical scholars have discussed, may have been due to patriarchal desires. Campbell merely points to this idea, and does not state that the biblical tradition was wrong for their interpretation.

Campbell also dares to compare and contrast biblical tradition with the Mayan and Aztec myth of the “Feathered Serpent,” in Thou Art That, which is sure to raise eyebrows amongst Church leaders. He writes:

“Clearly, the historical reading of the emblem has here become anomalous, not to say even bizarre, what with a talking serpent, a devil, and an incarnate god entering into the action. Such are not the characters of a readily credible history. The question becomes further complicated once we notice, and take into account, the fact that in the jungles of Guatemala there stands at Palenque a Mayan temple known as the “Temple of the Cross,” where there is a shrine exhibiting for worship a cross that is mythologically associated with a savior figure, named by the Mayans Kukulcan, and by the Aztecs Quetzalcoatl. That name is translated “Feathered Serpent,” suggesting the mystery of a personage uniting in himself the opposed principles represented in the earthbound serpent and the released flight of a bird” (77).

The concept of how these two crosses came to be in such separate cultures is not addressed in any detail by Campbell, because he was more interested in whats and whys than hows. He continues:

“Moreover, as the scriptures related to this figure tell us, he was born of a virgin, died and was resurrected, and is revered as some sort of savior who will return as in a Second Coming. All this mythos adds another, very troublesome, dimension to our problem of interpreting the symbolic form of the cross, since it must now be recognized, not simply or singly as a reference within one tradition to one historical event, but as a sign symbolically recognized in other traditions as well, and in significant association, moreover, with a number of related symbolic themes” (77-8).

Furthermore, Campbell explores the symbolism in these myths. He writes:

“The figure of the Feathered Serpent linked with the Cross, for example, immediately suggests our own biblical Eden/Calvary continuity. Furthermore, on top of the Mayan cross there is a bird sitting, the quetzal bird, and at the base there is a curious mask, a kind of death mask. A number of paintings of the Crucifixion from late medieval times and the early Renaissance period show the Holy Spirit above, in the form of a dove, and beneath the foot of the cross, a skull. The name of the hill of the Crucifixion, as we all know, was, in Aramic, Golgotha, and in Latin, Calvary, both of which words mean “skull.” We do not know what interpretation the Mayans gave to their death mask; but in the medieval Christian legend, the skull out of which the cross appeared to have grown, as a tree from its seed, was said to be Adam’s. When the blood of the crucified Savior fell upon it from His pierced hands and feet, the First Man was, so to say, retroactively baptized, and with him the whole human race. Had there been no Tree of the Fall, there would have been no Tree of Redemption, no Holy Rood, as the Cross was called in the Middle Ages” (78).

Campbell explains the biblical tradition’s problem in insisting on the factuality and historicity of its myths, especially crucifixion. He states:

“The answer, therefore, to our question as to why the crucifixion of Jesus holds such importance for Christians implies a complex of essential associations that are not historical at all, but are rather mythological. For, in fact, there never was any Garden of Eden or serpent who could talk, nor solitary pre-pithecanthropoid “First Man” or dream like “Mother Eve” conjured from his rib. Mythology is not history, although myths like that of Eden have been frequently misread as such and although mythological interpretations have been joined to events that may well have been factual, such as the crucifixion of Jesus” (Campbell 78).

Thus the idea of history as not being mythology is raised, and although there are some who would debate that, stating that historical events lead to myths, that myths are not exactly historically accurate is not debated any longer. Only stubborn fundamentalists persist in their views that the bible is accurate and completely historically true, in complete contradiction of the latest archeological evidence, particularly in Finkelstein and Silberman’s The Bible Unearthed, and the biblical scholars’ finds relating to the continual editing as shown by the distinct styles of writing in different chapters and verses of the same books. Yet, in the following treatment of the symbolic cross, Campbell illuminates the mystical nature of Judaism and Christianity.

“Another aspect of Orpheus is that he was torn apart, as Jesus was torn apart in the scourging and crucifixion. What does this represent in the older, let’s say, Corpus hermeticum way of reading it? First, that eternity is in love with the forms of time, but to come into those forms it has to be dismembered, and then, that you, as a separate entity in the forms of time, in order to lose your commitment to this little instance, you must be dismembered and opened to the transcendent. So the cross, in this tradition, represents the threshold from eternity to time and from time back to eternity. And that’s also the symbology of the two trees in the Garden of Eden. The tree of knowledge of good and evil is the tree of going from unity into multiplicity, and the tree of eternal life is that of going from multiplicity to unity. It’s the same tree in two directions” (Transformations of Myth through Time 206-7).

There is no hint of anti-biblical tradition in the above quote because he is engaged in the ideas the metaphors of that tradition point toward. Whether or not one agrees with his interpretation matters little, what it provides is a starting point for others to see what an engagement with the mysteries contained in the mythologies embedded in biblical tradition looks like—a valuable boon indeed! As Campbell states: “The characteristic of medieval storytelling is that you don’t invent the story, you develop it. You take a traditional story and interpret it—give it new depth and meaning in terms of the conditions of your particular day” (Transformations of Myth through Time 237). This interpretation tradition borrows from the wonderful example the Israelites offered with the Torah and Midrash, and is something Campbell himself engages in in his reinterpretation of biblical myth.

Campbell also studied the Middle Ages through the lens of much of its literature, and in doing so, made many observations of the problems inherent in Christianity. The following two quotes from Creative Mythology demonstrate this particularly well.

“The life-desolating effects of this separation of the reigns of nature (the Earthly Paradise) and the spirit (the Castle of the Grail) in such a way that neither touches the other but destructively, remains to this day an essential psychological problem of the Christianized Western world; and since it is at the root a consequence of the basic biblical doctrine of an ontological distinction between God and his universe, creator and creature, spirit and matter, it is a problem that has hardly altered since it first became intolerably evident at the climax of the Middle Ages. In briefest restatement: The Christian is taught that divinity is transcendent: not within himself and his world, but “out there.” I call this mythic dissociation” (393).

“[…] what is now known, […] of the universe and evolution of species, a suspicion has been confirmed that was already dawning in the Middle Ages; namely that the biblical myth of Creation, Fall, and Redemption is historically untrue. Hence, there has now spread throughout the Christian world a desolating sense not only of no divinity within (mythic dissociation), but also of no participation in divinity without (social identification dissolved): and that, in short, is the mythological base of the Waste Land of the modern soul, or, as it is being called these days, our “alienation” (394).

If Christians take offense to this and react, perhaps they would be better off thinking about how such statements are true, and what parts of them demand further exploration.

Although Campbell continually discusses the negative aspects of Judaism, Christianity and biblical tradition in general: “And we’re in trouble on it because we have a sacred text that was composed somewhere else by another people a long time ago and has nothing to do with the experience of our lives. And so there’s a fundamental disengagement” (Transformations of Myth through Time 46), and: “One of our main problems—and these are the two great sources, now, of the problem here in Western interpretation of these matters—is the Aristotelian accent on rational thinking and the biblical focus on the ethnic reference of the mythic symbol” (Transformations of Myth through Time 96), he also provides affirmations of them. He writes: “First, we must move socially into a new system of symbols, because the old ones do not work. Second, the symbols, as they exist, when they are interpreted spiritually rather than concretely, yield the revelation” (Thou Art That 107). He also shows a keen understanding of the politics behind the symbolism of the crucifixion; “If you want to resurrect, you must have crucifixion. Too many interpretations of the Crucifixion have failed to emphasize that. They emphasize the calamity of the event. And if you emphasize the calamity, then you look for someone to blame” (Thou Art That 112). Mel Gibson’s movie on the Passion was especially telling in its emphasis on blame, however, since Gibson consulted with various Jewish biblical authorities, I think any claims of his anti-Semitism are as ridiculous as those levied against Campbell.

Campbell found a personal creative myth and in so doing, a voice to communicate it with that many benefited from and within his oeuvre continue to find boons. He writes: “However, it has nothing to do with creative life and less than nothing with what I am here calling creative myth, which springs from the unpredictable, unprecedented experience-in-illumination of an object by a subject, and the labor, then, of achieving communication of the effect”(Creative Mythology 40). Campbell, may as well be referred to as Campwell, as he, through his opus, sought to make others well, but in truth, did so himself become well, more importantly, finding the effect within the illuminations seen in his experiences, speaking them to those who would listen.

His obvious disdain for dogma and doctrine over and against metaphor and mystery, as clearly represented by the biblical tradition, is something I share, and hope more would. That disdain does not translate into the dictionary definition of anti-Semitism, and is best re-termed as anti-monotheism, which trait I share as well. If others have more than anecdotal evidence of Campbell’s alleged anti-Semitism that involves quotes or papers that are of more substance than the ‘revelation’ that he supported Nazism in its infancy (which mythologist would not have?), as did a host of thinkers until they realized the myth was a monster, and ridiculous charges based on heresy, I welcome them and will read them with great interest. However, Campbell’s post at Sarah Lawrence College and his continuance there even after gaining some degree of notoriety, his marriage to Jean Erdman (a Jewish artist), and what I have read of him, do not point me in the direction that seems to be the latest fad.


Works Cited

Campbell, Joseph. Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension; Selected Essays 1944-1968. 1969. Novato, California: New World Library, 2002.

--. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. 1949. Bollingen Series 17. 3rd Printing. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973.

--. The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion. 1986. Novato, California: New World Library, 2002.

--. The Masks of God: Creative Mythology. 1968. New York: Arkana, 1991.

--. Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor. Novato, California: New World Library, 2001.

--. Transformations of Myth through Time. New York: Harper and Row, 1990.