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Posts Tagged ‘Hero With a Thousand Faces’

Name: Joseph Campbell

Birth Date: March 1904 – October 1987

Job Functions: Essayist, Mythologist, Author and Professor

Fields: Mythology and Education

Known For: The Hero with a Thousand Faces

A leading exponent of the idea of “myth”’ as an inherent characteristic of humanity, Joseph Campbell was born in New York City in the early twentieth century. His lifelong fascination can be traced back to Campbell’s visits to the local library where he immersed himself in reading Arthurian legends and Native American mythology. Campbell’s visits to the American Museum of Natural History where he encountered Indian religious art and ethnographic literature being collected by anthropologists stirred his imagination and deepened his interest.

Campbell attended Dartmouth College 1921 – 1922 then transferred to Columbia University where he attained his Bachelor of Art and Masters of Art in 1925 and 1927 respectively. For his Master’s degree, Campbell compared the Arthurian legends with Native American myths. In 1927, he traveled to Europe to prepare for his dissertation work. Campbell studied medieval French literature at the University of Paris in 1927 – 1928, and Sanskrit and Indo-European philosophy at the University of Munich in 1928 – 1929.

In Europe, Campbell also discovered modern art, literature (Campbell was intrigued by the fictional heroes of novelists, James Joyce and Thomas Mann) and psychology (Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung). For Campbell, Freud and Jung opened up questions about the “unconscious structure and the quest for a meaningful life.” Jung’s theory of collective archetypes and their role in self-integration impacted Campbell’s thinking. He was also influenced by cultural mythologist Adolpf Bastian’s notion of elementary ideas and ethnologist Leo Frobenius’s idea of culture circle.

Campbell’s experience in Europe changed the focus of his doctoral work and when he returned to New York in 1929, he proposed to Columbia that he study mythical themes in literature, which they resisted. He abandoned his doctoral work. During the Great Depression, Campbell moved to Woodstock, New York. For the next five years, living on the funds he earned as a jazz band musician while in college, Campbell read widely and traveled from Woodstock to Carmel, California and sailed up the Alaskan coast. While in California, Campbell met John Steinbeck (Won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Grapes of Wrath) and biologist Edward Ricketts.

Campbell taught for a year at Canterbury School, New Milford, Connecticut, before joining the faculty of literature at Sarah Lawrence College in 1934, where he stayed for 38 years. He liked the tutorial-seminar system practiced at Sarah Lawrence College because it allowed him to develop his interpretive style in the classroom.

In 1943, Campbell provided commentary on the first volume of the Bollingen Series, Where the Two Came to Their Father: A Navaho War Ceremonial, and with Henry Robinson, Campbell co-authored A Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake (1944), an interpretive James Joyce’s novel. These two works, showed brilliance in his ability to use disparate works of literature to study mythic analysis of themes. While working on A Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake, Campbell heard lectures by the German refugee Indologist Heinrich Zimmer, which deeply moved him.

Campbell began his literary work as editor of the writings of Heinrich Zimmer, after his sudden death in 1943. Campbell dedicated 12 years to turning Zimmer’s lecture notes into four volumes: Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization; The King and the Corpse, Philosophies of India, and The Art of Indian Asia, which were published from 1946 to 1955. Before Zimmer died he had introduced Campbell to editors of the planned Bollingen Series, which resulted in his eventual editing of Jungian Conference’s Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks (1954–68). Campbell was a skilled editor, which allowed him to work on projects such as The Portable Arabian Nights (1952), The Masks of God (1959–68), and The Portable Jung (1971).

Campbell’s first solo work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces was first published in 1949. Campbell drew on Freudian and Jungian psychology to argue that hero myths worldwide use a universal narrative formula to describe rites of passage. In the book, he “examines a number of ‘hero’ tales from around the world in which Campbell discerns the same basic outline. He offers a thesis that myths provide instruction on how we should live, and says that the common themes of mythology throughout the world show these ideas are inherent in human biology. He also launches his search for what he terms the ‘mono-myth,’ the single underlying story all the myths tell.”  Still immensely popular today, Campbell was awarded the National Arts and Literature grant because of the success of The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

YouTube Video

The Hero’s Journey/Monomyth as Defined by Dr. Joseph Campbell/Star Wars

If you cannot view this YouTube video please click here.

Campbell followed The Hero with a Thousand Faces with the four-volume The Masks of God (1959–68), which traces the development of ancient mythology and argues for the need of a new worldwide mythology adaptable to the emerging worldwide culture. He started the six-volume Historical Atlas of World Mythology, of which only two volumes were completed – the editors completed the other volumes and published them posthumously in 1988, the year following Campbell’s death. Campbell also did a series of interviews with Bill Moyers, which was broadcast posthumously over the Public Broadcasting Service as The Power of Myth, and later published as a book with the same name.

His library and papers have been deposited at the Pacifica Institute in Santa Barbara, California. Though several people criticized Campbell for his work, many people have stated that The Hero with a Thousand Faces profoundly impacted their lived. The book inspired George Lucas who made the Star Wars movies.

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Sources of Works Cited/Referenced

Encyclopedia of World Biography

New Catholic Encyclopedia

Encyclopedia of Religion

Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology

Contemporary American Religion

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• Movie Of The Week: Joseph Campbell Inspired Film ‘Finding Joe’ (psfk.com)

The book list is comprised of books that profoundly influenced interviewees, desert island books as well as the books that I have reviewed. There is a lot of books on the list so I do not expect you to read them all.

Books That Influence

The Bible

The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell

Gone with the Wind,  Margaret Mitchell

Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig

Desert Island Books

Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth

Fall On Your Knees (Oprah’s Book Club), Ann-Marie MacDonald

The 1001 Arabian Nights

Don Quixote, Miguel  de Cervantes

Short stories by Alice Munroe

A Summons to Memphis, Peter Taylor

New Hart’s Rules

The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, edited by Charlotte Moseley

Books Reviewed

The Skinny on Time Management, Jim Randel

The Skinny on Success: Why not you? Jim Randel

If you have read any of the books on the list please let me know what you thought of them. Choose at least four books from the list. Find ways to connect them even if they appear to be unrelated. Remove all barriers and let your creativity flow. What are five takeaways, and five great ideas that you can immediately apply?

Keep the conversation flowing. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the left side) by email or RSS Feed. I created a Mini Learning Toolkit and you can grab a copy by clicking here.

For your research and writing needs, consider my firm Ambeck Enterprise for white papers, articles, fact sheets, anniversary booklets, you name it. Since I am the best kept secret you may not know this, but I have over 15 years research and writing experience. I KNOW content. And if you cannot figure out which books to read for professional development, I am your WOMAN, I can assist you with that too.

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Today we present part two of Ron LeBlanc’s interview. Ron loves the concept of the hero’s journey so it’s no surprise that the one book that profoundly impacted his life is Joseph Campbell‘s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. To generate great ideas, he immerses himself in art and hangs out with “great” people. This makes sense because a study by INSEAD business school revealed that networking is one of the five discovery skills for innovation.

Tell me a little bit about yourself.

I am a 58-year old Canadian and the Chairman of Madacana Holding Inc, a fairly major player in the gem business in Madagascar. I have a sapphire mine and land bank in Madagascar. We’ve been in Madagascar since 2004, and I took over operation and control of the mine in 2006, which is located in the south of Madagascar. Prior to 2006, I was a gem buyer.

Madagascar is a complex place, but I have experience doing business in Africa and I enjoy it. Madagascar is probably the best place in the world for gems so it was the right place and the right time. I am a low functioning polymath and I have done a lot of things: I’ve been in bars, restaurants and I have been in the aesthetics business for a long, long time. After two years of exploration, I am ready to go into serious mechanized mining in the gem business in Madagascar.

As an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

Follow your bliss, follow your passion and stay current at all times. You are always unfinished, you are always working on something you want to be and will be. Have a leading kind of curiosity that gets you access to all the information in your particular sector. You have to be passionate, and if you are not, the universe will conspire against you. You want the universe to support you. The intelligent universe will support someone who is operating within their passion and following it.

How do you integrate your personal and professional life?

It’s together and I think in some ways the guys who are surviving here do not separate their personal and professional life, it’s all integrated. But when I say that, there has to be sacrifices. But most powerful people don’t see it as a sacrifice.

What’s a major regret that you’ve had in life?

I don’t really have any regrets. I think I will have regrets when I finish having life. While you are in life you do not have regrets. Regret is the illumination you get by looking back when you have finished having life. I do not have regrets because I keep moving forward.

What are five life lessons that you have learned so far?

1. Follow your bliss, follow your passion: when you follow your passion you find that the universe conspires to help you along the way
2. Notwithstanding that passion, you need an honest assessment of the possibilities within the choice which you have taken. If your passion is to move piano you know there is a limitation there. If your passion is to be a head of a company you know that’s a different thing completely so you have to have a realistic view on your ambitions
3. Once your way has been chosen, the lesson in life is that you have to be the best. Every individual is unique in some way and has unique sets of talents of experiences and that uniqueness has to be shored up by all the information possible. You have to know what you are doing and be efficient in the career that you’ve chosen.
4. You cannot expand your business without co-operating. One of the imperatives is survival of the co-operatives. Every expanding business needs a level of faith and you need trusting people around you. You need to be able to give up some of the power and co-operate.
5. You can be wrong, and you have to be able to take a bullet, be candid about it and say that you are wrong. You have to be quick about it. That’s the best way forward. Meet those challenges, meet those failures with candor.

When you have some down time, how do you spend it?

I read at least 50 books each year. I am constantly reading and going to the theatre. I do this because I need the balm of escape so when I am in the theatre I just lose myself. I need that. The driving consciousness during wakefulness that I need for my business is nice, but the balm of escape allows me to get relief from that.

What process do you use to generate great ideas?

I hang out with great people, I read a lot, and I find that there is sympathy between what I’m reading and what I’m thinking, so the topics and the ambience is often found in the literature. I often go to the arts that I personally choose, or the friends that I hang around with, when I need to generate great ideas.

What’s your favourite quotation and why?

“Man plans, God laughs.” Yiddish proverb

It’s difficult to make a plan. You need a vision for it moving forward and you need to place milestones and you better be ready to adapt because making plans is like trying to predict the weather.

How do you define success?

I think success really is living with your passions. If you are a busker on the street and you’re playing music, or you’re trading on the floor or you’re being a mother, if you are doing what you want to do, that’s success. Living to your talents and your passions is really the measure of success.

In your opinion what’s the formula for success?

If you are blessed with a clearly defined and delineated passion, the formula for success is to be brave and to jump into that passion of interest.

What are the steps you took to succeed in your field?

Straight and unmitigated courage and confidence in my own talent and intelligence but also I have learned more and more that I need a supporting group of professionals as I move forward, education and professional support and a great deal of courage. Go for it!

What advice do you have for someone just starting out in your field?

Collect all the information possible about the field, look at it and really be mindful of how the field moves you, and make sure that it is field that you want to be in. Look at yourself and make sure that it is the place for you. You only have one life so you want to be sure.

If trusted friends could introduce you to five people that you’ve always wanted to meet, who would you choose? And what would you say to them?

Barack Obama: I think he is a fascinating and interesting character

Joseph Campbell: I would like to have met Joseph Campbell and talk to him about the mythological state of  man and the power of myth

Albert Einstein: I would have liked to meet Einstein because I am interested in science and math and would have liked to talk to him about gravity

Georgia O’Keefe: She is an interesting and fascinating painter and of course I’d like to talk to all the painters. I’d like to talk to Clinton, Van Gogh and a few of the other guys. I’m also interested in the impressionists.

Bill Gates: He has an interesting view on things. Steve Jobs would also be interesting too because he has an innovative and creative mind

And I would like to say to them, “What have you learned?” I think every character has a place of pure experience and I would love to learn what they have learned over and above everybody else.

Which one book had a profound impact on your life? What was it about this book that impacted you so deeply? Did you have an emotional or intellectual attachment to this book? Why?

The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. I see myself as being on a low grade journey and I’ve always been out in the world doing deeds,  and I guess this is a self mythology and Joseph Campbell without question has  gathered quite clearly all the pan-global myths and has articulated a pretty distinct underpinning of man’s journey, a kind of hero’s journey. He talks about Prometheus, Jason and so on. He talks about all these journeys and he really spoke to me. I have been out there on this mythological journey. I think it is very true and we are all mythological beasts and we follow the stages of mythology whether we know it or not.

If you were stranded on a deserted island, what are five books that you would like to have with you and why? Summarize the book in two sentences.

Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth

Fall On Your Knees

1001 Arabian Nights

Don Quixote, Miguel  de Cervantes

Short stories by Alice Munroe

Bill Moyer’s Interview with Joseph Campbell, Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth: He asks the pivotal questions and collates the information for us

Ann Michael’s Fall On Your Knees: I love poets who become writers. The story is about the Canadian experience, very richly articulated.

Short stories by Alice Munroe: I love Alice Munroe. She can make even the most mundane experience a kind of graceful experience. She is regarded as the best short story writer in the world.

What one music CD and movie would you like to have with you (on the deserted island) and why?

Movie: The 2001 Space Odyssey

Music: The Greatest Hits of Leonard Cohen

What excites you about life?

Beauty

How do you nurture your soul?

Beauty, I am in the gems business

If you had a personal genie and she gave you one wish, what would you wish for? Or, if I gave you a magic wand, what would you use it for?

I have got most of what I want so maybe I wish to be more tolerant, less hostile,  and to be more compassionate

Complete the following, I am happy when…..

I am beginning a project, the creative first few days of a project. And after a long night of dancing

What gems of wisdom can you glean from this interview? What aspects of the interview can you apply to your situation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please comment. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the left side) by email or RSS Feed. I created a Mini Learning Toolkit and you can grab a copy by clicking here.

For your research and writing needs, consider my firm Ambeck Enterprise. Since I am the best kept secret you may not know this, but I have over 15 years research and writing experience. I KNOW content.

Note: All book links are affiliate links