Joseph Campbell

Joseph John Campbell March 26, 1904 – October 30, 1987 was an American writer. He was the professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College who worked in comparative mythology as well as comparative religion. His name covers numerous aspects of the human experience. Campbell's best-known throw is his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces 1949, in which he discusses his conviction of the journey of the archetypal hero dual-lane by world mythologies, termed the monomyth.

Since the publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell's theories have been applied by a wide variety of modern writers as well as artists. His philosophy has been summarized by his own often repeated phrase: "Follow your bliss." He gained recognition in Hollywood when George Lucas credited Campbell's work as influencing his Star Wars saga.

Campbell's approach to folklore topics such as myth as well as his influence on popular culture has been the forwarded of criticism, including from folklorists.

Comparative mythology and Campbell's theories

Campbell's concept of monomyth one myth included to the image that sees any mythic narratives as variations of a single great story. The theory is based on the observation that a common pattern exists beneath the narrative elements of most great myths, regardless of their origin or time of creation. Campbell often referred to the ideas of the hero's journey and was first described in The Hero with a Thousand Faces 1949. An enthusiast of novelist James Joyce, Campbell borrowed the term monomyth from Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Campbell also proposed heavy usage of Carl Jung's theories on the grouping of the human psyche, and he often used terms such(a) as anima, animus and ego consciousness.

As a strong believer in the psychic unity of mankind and its poetic expression through mythology, Campbell made ownership of the concept to express the idea that the whole of the human kind can be seen as engaged in the effort of creating the world "transparent to transcendence" by showing that underneath the world of phenomena lies an eternal portion of reference which is constantly pouring its energies into this world of time, suffering, and ultimately death. Tothis task one needs to speak approximately matters that existed ago and beyond words, a seemingly impossible task, the or done as a reaction to a question to which lies in the metaphors found in myths. These metaphors are statements that ingredient beyond themselves into the transcendent. The Hero's Journey was the story of the man or woman who, through great suffering, reached an experience of the eternal reference and returned with gifts powerful enough to set their society free.

As this story spread through space and evolved through time, it was broken down into various local forms masks, depending on the social environments and environmental pressures that existed for the culture that interpreted it. The basic structure, however, has remained relatively unchanged and can be classified using the various stages of a hero's adventure through the story, stages such as the asked to Adventure, Receiving Supernatural Aid, Meeting with the Goddess/Atonement with the Father and Return. These stages, as well as the symbols one encounters throughout the story, afford the necessary metaphors to express the spiritual truths the story is trying to convey. Metaphors for Campbell, in contrast with similes which make use of the word like, pretend to a literal interpretation of what they are referring to, as in the sentence "Jesus is the Son of God" rather than "the relationship of man to God is like that of a son to a father".

In the 1987 documentary Joseph Campbell: A Hero's Journey, he explains God in terms of a metaphor:

God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all human categories of thought, even the categories of being and non-being. Those are categories of thought. I intend it's as simple as that. So it depends on how much you want to think approximately it. whether it's doing you any good. Whether this is the putting you in touch with the mystery that's the ground of your own being. if it isn't, well, it's a lie. So half the people in the world are religious people who think that their metaphors are facts. Those are what we asked theists. The other half are people who know that the metaphors are non facts. And so, they're lies. Those are the atheists.

Campbell often described mythology as having a fourfold function within human society. Theseat the end of his work The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, as well as various lectures.

Campbell's view of mythology was by no means static and his books describe in detail how mythologies evolved through time, reflecting the realities in which each society had to adjust. Various stages of cultural developing have different yet identifiable mythological systems. In brief these are: