Transformations of Myth Through Time: The Western Way

by Joseph Campbell

Three cassette tapes

Audio Cassette

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Joseph Campbell was an American author and teacher best known for his work in the field of comparative mythology. He was born in New York City in 1904, and from early childhood he became interested in mythology. He loved to read books about American Indian cultures, and frequently visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he was fascinated by the museum's collection of totem poles.

Campbell was educated at Columbia University, where he specialized in medieval literature, and continued his studies at universities in Paris and Munich. While abroad he was influenced by the art of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, the novels of James Joyce and Thomas Mann, and the psychological studies of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. These encounters led to Campbell's theory that all myths and epics are linked in the human psyche, and that they are cultural manifestations of the universal need to explain social, cosmological, and spiritual realities. 


After a period in California, where he encountered John Steinbeck and the biologist Ed Ricketts, he taught at the Canterbury School, and then, in 1934, joined the literature department at Sarah Lawrence College, a post he retained for many years. During the 40s and '50s, he helped Swami Nikhilananda to translate the Upanishads and The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. He also edited works by the German scholar Heinrich Zimmer on Indian art, myths, and philosophy. In 1944, with Henry Morton Robinson, Campbell published A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. His first original work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, came out in 1949 and was immediately well received; in time, it became acclaimed as a classic. In this study of the "myth of the hero," Campbell asserted that there is a single pattern of heroic journey and that all cultures share this essential pattern in their various heroic myths. In his book he also outlined the basic conditions, stages, and results of the archetypal hero's journey.


Throughout his life, he traveled extensively and wrote prolifically, authoring many books, including the four-volume series The Masks of God, Myths to Live By, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space and The Historical Atlas of World Mythology. Joseph Campbell died in 1987. In 1988, a series of television interviews with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, introduced Campbell's views to millions of people.


Reviews

[Brett Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

I never imagined I could develop an interest in Arthurian stories from those dull and dreary Middle Ages, but once again, Campbell enlightened my ignorance and sent me off on new avenues of study. In this series, we get some broad historical background: the nature people first evidenced by Europe’s 30,000 B.C. cave paintings and goddess figurines get invaded by Indo-Europeans ca. 2000 B.C. with their tribal war gods as a good deal of myth-mixing commences; the Eastern Christian church condemned mythological/mystical readings of scripture, dictating a factual/historical interpretation of miracles; and individual rights are first uttered for the people, not the king, in the 13th century A.D. But mostly, this is an analysis of the evolution of Western individualism as expressed through mythological aspects of the 1150 – 1250 A.D. Arthurian stories and their successive authors, notably Wolfram von Eschenbach’s German epic, Parzival. In the brew, one can anticipate Luther’s 95 Theses well over the horizon in 1517. In our all-rights-no-responsibilities, hyper-individualist present, it also serves as a comparison to another set of problems, those of forced conformity from the top-down as an impersonation of thick communities, be that force from the church or any other authoritarian power. These lectures are late in Campbell’s career. He is relaxed and humorous, with a lifetime of perspective.