APPENDIX F: Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth

THE LATE GREAT mythologist, Joseph Campbell, labored valiantly to present an intelligible overview - an aerial perspective, almost - of the world’s myths. His seminal work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and his four-volume treatise, The Masks of God, come close to being definitive textbooks on comparative mythology. Joe Campbell catalyzed a popular resurgence of interest in mythology. Indeed, George Lucas acknowledged his inspirational debt to Campbell by inviting him to a special preview of his Star Wars epic.

As a spokesman for the importance of the bardic tradition, Campbell picked up the torch of Walt Whitman’s illuminating, neo-mythic poetry, resurrecting the ideal of the scholar-poet as the true social visionary - one who points the way to a reconciliation between notions of good and evil, and acts as a bridge between mundane and transcendental realities.

Here are three cogent quotes from Joseph Campbell, extracted from his 1988 televised conversation with Bill Moyers of PBS (Public Broadcasting Service):

“We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea. To say that the divinity informs the world and all things is condemned as pantheism. But pantheism is a misleading word. It suggests that a personal god is supposed to inhabit the world, but that is not the idea at all. The idea is trans-theological. It is of an undefinable, inconceivable mystery, thought of as a power, that is the source and end and supporting ground of all life and being.”

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“You can’t predict what a myth is going to be any more than you can predict what you’re going to dream tonight. Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that have then to find expression in symbolic form. And the only myth that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet, not the city, not these people, but the planet, and everybody on it.”

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“When you see the earth from the moon, you don’t see any divisions there of nations or states. This might be the symbol, really, for the new mythology to come.”