Follow your bliss.
Joseph Campbell
1904 - 1987
Campbell relied on the texts of Carl Jung as an explanation of psychological phenomena, as experienced through archetypes. But Campbell didn’t agree with Jung on every issue, and certainly had a very original voice of his own.
Joseph Campbell believed all the religions of the world, all the rituals and deities, to be “masks” of the same transcendent truth which is “unknowable.” He claims Christianity and Buddhism, whether the object is 'buddha-consciousness' or 'Christ-consciousness,' to be an elevated awareness above “pairs of opposites,” such as right and wrong. Indeed, he states in the preface of The Hero with a Thousand Faces: "Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names." which is a translation of the Rig Vedic saying "Ekam Sat Vipra Bahuda Vadanthi." Campbell was fascinated by what he viewed as universal sentiments and truths, disseminated through cultures which all featured different manifestations. In the preface of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he also indicates that his goal was to demonstrate the similarities between Eastern and Western religions.
In his four-volume series of books "The Masks of God", Campbell tried to summarize the main spiritual threads of the world, in support of his ideas on the "unity of the race of man"; tied in with this was the idea that most of the belief systems of the world had a common geographic ancestry, starting off on the fertile grasslands of Europe in the Bronze Age and moving to the Levant and the "Fertile Crescent" of Mesopotamia and back to Europe (and the Far East), where it was mixed with the newly emerging Indo-European (Aryan) culture.
He believed all spirituality is searching for the same unknown force (which he spoke of as both an immanent and a transcendent force, or that which is both within and without, as opposed to only without) from which everything came, in which everything currently exists, and into which everything will return. He referred to this force as the connotation of what he called "metaphors", the metaphors being the various deities and objects of spirituality in the world.
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George Lucas was the first Hollywood filmmaker to openly credit Campbell's influence. He stated during the release of the first Star Wars films during the late 1970s that they were based upon ideas found in The Hero With a Thousand Faces and other works of Campbell. Indeed, the 1988 documentary The Power of Myth, was filmed at Lucas' Skywalker Ranch. During these interviews with Bill Moyers, Campbell discusses the way in which Lucas used The Hero's Journey in the Star Wars films (IV, V, and VI) to re-invent the mythology for contemporary times. Moyers and Lucas filmed an interview 12 years later in 1999 called the Mythology of Star Wars with George Lucas & Bill Moyers, to further discuss the impact of Campbell's work on Lucas' films. In addition, the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution sponsored an exhibit during the late 1990s called Star Wars: The Magic of Myth which discussed the ways in which Campbell's work shaped the Star Wars films. A companion guide of the same name was published in 1997.
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Other members of the film industry were also inspired by Campbell. Christopher Vogler, a Hollywood screenwriter, created a now-legendary 7-page company memo, A Practical Guide to The Hero With a Thousand Faces, based on Campbell's work which led to the development of Disney's 1993 film, The Lion King. Vogler's memo was later developed into the late 1990's book, The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers , which would become the basis for a number of successful Hollywood films.
- excerpted from Wikipedia, 2006The Joseph Campbell Foundation: http://www.jcf.org
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