Joseph Campbell: Myths Missing the Mark

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I. Background

Joseph John Campbell was born on March 26th, 1904, in White Plains, New York.

In 1921, he graduated from high school in Milford Connecticut and proceeded to

Columbia University to acquire his Bachelors degree in English Literature. In 1927, he

finished his formal education with a Masters degree in Medieval Literature from

Columbia University. When Campbell was very young, his father took a job at the

American Museum of Natural History in New York. As a result, Campbell became

fascinated with Native American mythology. This fascination with mythology would

continue for the rest of his life.

In 1927, Campbell received a fellowship from Columbia University to study in

Europe. The time that he spent in Europe formed his worldviews and ignited a search to

rationalize religion and understand spirituality. Campbell was influenced by the works

and ideas of Jiddu Krishnamurti, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung. He was

also in Europe during a time of immense disillusionment, particularly among the

American writers and novelists of the time - a phenomenon writer Gertrude Stein would

label ‘The Lost Generation’.

After returning from Europe, he held a number of teaching positions, finally

settling in at Sarah Lawrence College where he met his wife, Jean Erdman, and where he

would continue to teach until 1972. After traveling to South East Asia in 1956, Campbell

decided that the American public was ignorant of the world’s myths and cultures. And so

Campbell embarked on a public outreach mission through books, lectures, and interviews

to bring his knowledge and opinions about mythology to America. This effort produced

his finest and most renowned work The Masks of God.

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Joseph Campbell’s work includes over a dozen books and the Joseph Campbell

Foundation, established after his death in 1987, which continues to promote his ideas.

Campbell’s work has had the most notable affect on Hollywood writers and directors,

including George Lucas, who credits him for the mythology behind Star Wars.

II. Exposition

Campbell rejects God as the divine creator of the universe. Instead his philosophy

teaches that myth is man’s religion. There is one god, but he cannot be defined in words,

he can only be interpreted by myth. The force behind all living things came before time

and language, thus language cannot define this being. Something more comprehensive

than definitions must be employed to understand this force. Word pictures, symbols,

caricatures, stories, and patterns weave together to form myths. And these myths are the

keys to truly fulfilled human lives. As Campbell put it in the book The Power of Myth,

which was a transcript of an interview between Billy Moyers and Campbell, “Myths are

clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.”1 Let us delve into myths, as

Campbell perceives them, and how he describes the religions and great stories of human

history as testaments not of Jehovah God, but of the unknown being.

Myths reveal truths about the unspoken order of the world. Cultures, like people,

have an ethos. This ethos has its foundation in traditions and history. Different people

groups mold their ethos until it is unique and personalized. The religion of a people will

spring up from its ethos and consequently will bear the trademarks of that culture.

Stories will be written, heroes will become legends, and the culture will develop layers.

But beneath all of these layers lies myth, the original inspiration of all things. Campbell

1 Joseph Campbell and Bill D. Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday,

1988), 5.

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opens his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces by describing it this way, “Religions,

philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in

science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic

ring of myth.”2 There are recurring patterns in these things. Common symbols, common

ideas, commonalities that defy chance and must validate myths. “These are the

everlastingly recurrent themes of the wonderful song of the soul’s high adventure,” writes

Campbell.3

Psychoanalysis of history thus becomes a religion to itself. The idiosyncrasies of

every people group can be paralleled to the practices of another. These common

practices thus validate each other and testify to some truth. Campbell purports that myths

teach us of rights of passage and rituals that feed our souls.4 In fact any religion can be

studied because all religion spawns from the same myths.5 In his book The Masks of

God, Campbell asserts an “organizing theological concept”6 that highlights the patterns in

the religions of the world. Campbell proposes that similarities between religions indicate

a common origin. Campbell points to themes like “creation, death and resurrection,

ascension to heaven, and virgin births.”7 These common elements exist because long ago

2 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Novato: New World Library,

2008), 1.

3 Ibid., 16.

4 Ibid., 17.

5 Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology (New York: Viking Press,

1968), 9.

6 Ibid., 10.

7 Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, 10.

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prophets and witch doctors communicated these symbols, which survive only in myth.8 It

is now the mission of the psychoanalyst to revive and communicate these myths.

An important aspect of myths is the archetypal hero. Heroes should all bear

certain trademarks that become evident after studying the great heroes of history. And

we are designed to emulate heroes; we are to be hero-like. “We have not even to risk the

adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is

thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path.”9 Campbell

makes heroes into role models for us to aspire to. These heroes’ actions make them

timeless, not constricted to the present eroding time. They “come pristine from the

primary springs of human life and thought.”10 Campbell spends a good deal of time

describing the hero’s journey, or the “monomyth”, where the hero goes through

seventeen distinct stages of development. These stages, he asserts, can be derived from

studying the patterns of epic tales and folklore. The stages are roughly divided into three

parts: departure, initiation and return.11 To achieve a greater awareness of your being,

Campbell would recommend imitating the hero’s journey.

What is the end goal of Campbell’s philosophy? What does life become after

accepting his theories? The end of Christianity is Christ and living for His glory. What

is the chief end of the world as Campbell sees it? Campbell says to turn within. The

meaning of everything can be found within your very own skin. “Your own meaning is

8 Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 6.

9 Ibid., 18.

10 Ibid., 14.

11 Ibid., 23.

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that you’re there . . . the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all

about.”12 Some might consider this conclusion to be anti-climactic. But Campbell insists

that there is no lasting, resonating meaning in anything. “What’s the meaning of the

universe?” he asks. “What’s the meaning of a flea? It’s just there. That’s it . . . there’s

no meaning.”13 Life is an existential search to find meaning. There are optional methods

that you can employ, but ultimately it is up to you to embrace yourself and the rapture of

being alive.

The world has no meaning, man should follow the example of mythic heroes, and

somehow your self worth is somewhere inside of you. Campbell asserts that a careful

study of myths teaches one how to tap into this inner self. “They teach you that you can

turn inward, and you begin to get the message of the symbols.”14 “They’re stories about

the wisdom of life.”15 And this is Campbell’s philosophy: study the symbols, embark on

the monomyth, and turn inward.

III. Criticism

A. Pantheism

Joseph Campbell’s philosophy is a form of pantheism. No single religion is

condemned; rather all religions are credited as different interpretations of the same god.

In this way, the follower of Campbell can worship any god, follow any moral code, and

live a fulfilled life. The monomyth might be a new philosophy, but pantheism is not a

12 Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, 6.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., 9.

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new concept. C.S. Lewis contends that it might be the oldest religious form.16 In fact,

Lewis argues that, “if religion means simply what man says about God, and not what God

says about man, then Pantheism almost is religion.”17 Further, Pantheism is a poorly

conceived concept from the start in that its credibility relies on a shoddy study of history

and religion.18 Campbell is especially guilty of this fault. In his quest to create an

‘organizing theological concept’, or more realistically a justified Pantheistic system,

Campbell is compelled to stretch history to fit his theory. Consider his concept of the

belly of the whale as being symbolic of the rebirth of the hero. “The idea that the passage

of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth is symbolized in the

worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale,” writes Campbell.19 To come to this

conclusion he has to pull from the Biblical story of Jonah, the Eskimo folk tale of a whale

hunter, and the story of Hiawatha. The similarities of these stories surely point to some

conclusion; perhaps an innate curiosity placed in man by God or perhaps the American

tales of Hiawatha and the Eskimo are distant descendants of the Jonah story. But the firm

conclusion that Campbell asserts, that these stories indicate a stage in the hero’s

monomyth, is based on inductive logic, and weak logic at that. What his arguments all

suffer from is the fallacy of reduction. He glosses over important differences in stories

and various religions, or simplifies them so far that they seem to be related, but ultimately

16 C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco,

2001), 130.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 74.

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he is merely manipulating the facts to fit his theory. This is a trademark of all Pantheistic

systems.

B. Myth

The mythology that Campbell teaches claims that the patterns and similarities

between world religions indicate the ‘original myth’. This argument makes the fallacy of

assuming that because many things are similar all things are the same.20 And from this

fallacy, Campbell concludes that: all things being the same, all things had similar origin.

The fact remains that his premise is flawed.

First, consider that all religions do not have elements similar to each other, but

similar to Christianity. Milton Scarborough summarizes an argument by C.S. Lewis this

way, “The stories of dying and rising vegetation gods, found everywhere in the world,

were not plagiarized from Christianity but, in what might be understood as a modern

twist on the condescension theory, are anticipations of Christ.”21 The patterns that

Campbell finds, “creation, death and resurrection, ascension to heaven, and virgin

births,”22 are all found in Christianity. In fact all of the patterns that Campbell highlights:

the hero’s journey through the seventeen stages, the rituals and rights of passage, can all

be found in the Christian faith. The question is not “are all religions similar,” it is rather,

“are all religions similar to Christianity?” As Dr. John Warwick Montgomery noted in

the book Myth, Allegory, and Gospel, “Those images are in civilized and uncivilized

20 Burton Feldman and Robert D. Richardson, The Rise of Modern Mythology, 1680-1860

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 352.

21 Milton Scarborough, Myth and Modernity: Postcritical Reflections. (Albany, N.Y.:

State University of New York Press, 1994), 19.

22 Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, 10.

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because the true Light lights every man coming into the world.”23 Man is marked upon

his entry into the world with a seemingly inexplicable magnetism to certain themes and

symbols. Sacrificial hanging,24 the belly of the whale, virgin birth, going to hell and

returning, and walking on water are all symbols that evoke interest and understanding

from all men, saved or unsaved. This is because we are created in the likeness of God,

designed to understand and appreciate the signs that he leaves for us in creation. Myths

do not point to some original being that spawned many sorted religions, myths point to

Jehovah God. Campbell’s Original Thing is nameless, formless, nature-less, and

unknown. All of his myths point to some cohesiveness that draws a lineage from

nowhere.

Carl Jung, whom Campbell studied, found that myths also present themselves in

the human subconscious. Dreams that revolve around ancient symbols of various

religions prove that the subconscious is somehow connected to myth.25 Alan Watts

makes the simple observation that the subconscious is subject to the Holy Spirit. “It

would not be stretching things too far to equate the “wisdom” of the Unconscious with

the inspiration of the Holy Spirit,” notes Watts.26 What Dr. Montgomery asserts about

the imprint of God in man, Watts extends to say that the Holy Spirit continually works on

the human soul, or the subconscious. Thus, myths constructed from history and myths

23 Edmond Fuller, Myth, Allegory, and Gospel: An Interpretation of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S.

Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Charles Williams (Edmonton: Canadian Institute for Law,

Theology, and Public Policy Inc, 2000), 123.

24 Ibid.

25 Alan Watts, Myth and Ritual in Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 13.

26 Alan Watts, Myth and Ritual In Christianity, 13.

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formulated in the subconscious are all best justified through a Biblical understanding of

the universe. We are truly made in the image of God.

Second, the Original Thing must have a concrete character, not an abstract nature.

Why? Campbell would agree that things exist: animals, plants, and substances. These

things are constrained by the laws of nature. Science and math can describe nature but

they cannot justify or explain why the universe exists. Laws only give us a universe of

“ifs and ands.” 27 What we know from studying laws and principles is that there are

connections and themes between them. This indicates what Lewis would call the “torrent

of opaque actualities” that form these connections.28 Something non-scientific fills in the

cracks and justifies the universe. The Creator of the universe must be the source of these

torrents thus making the Creator the source of all things that are concrete. Therefore,

God must have a concrete nature in order to be the source of concreteness. Campbell’s

Original Thing, the source of all of the myths that he professes can be found in fairy tales

and folk lore and religions all the way back to the beginning of time, is not concrete. As

Lewis noted, “If anything is to exist at all, then the Original Thing must be, not a

principle nor a generality, much less an ‘ideal’ or a ‘value’, but an utterly concrete fact.”29

The effect of the Campbell myth is the degradation of reality. Robert Alan Segal

suggests that reducing the world to a compilation of myths “turns history into essence,

culture into Nature, and obscures the role of human beings in producing the structures

they inhabit and thus their capacity to change them.”30

IV. Conclusion

27 C.S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, 138.

28 Ibid.

29 C.S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, 138.

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Do myths exist? Yes, myths exist. And they are capable of transporting us past

the confines of reality to understanding greater truths about the universe we live in and

the laws that rule it. But myths are not in and of themselves an end. They are just one

useful tool in pursuing a much greater end. We ought to focus on the greatest myth of all,

the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Christ more than any other legendary hero should

captivate our interest and instill meaning in our immortal souls.

30 Robert Alan Segal, Structuralism in Myth: Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Dumézil, and Propp.

(New York: Garland Pub, 1996), 212.