THE WORLD HAS JUST ONE STORY:

How myth became the legend of Joseph Campbell: He’s half-Scottish and his work was the force behind star wars. So why haven’t we heard of him? (Allan Burnett, 3/28/04, Sunday Herald)

[The late anthropologist Joseph] Campbell was born 100 years ago this month, and it is testament to [George] Lucas’s acknowledgement that this once-obscure, half-Scottish, quiet academic is the subject of a glitzy, sell-out centenary celebration in the US hosted by the educational foundation set up in his name. A friend to the Steinbecks, his past admirers also include Jackie Kennedy Onassis and John Lennon – a nod to the fact Campbell was a cult figure even before Star Wars made him a worldwide celebrity.

The first child of a middle-class Catholic couple in New York, the young Campbell became consumed by myth when he was taken to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Upon seeing the figure of a naked American Indian, “his ear to the ground, a bow and arrow in his hand, and a look of special knowledge in his eyes”, he began a lifelong obsession with ancient cultures.

Already immersed in the rituals, icons and traditions of his parents’ Catholic heritage, he read all he could on Native Americans and even started his own pretend tribe. Fascinated with totem poles and masks, he was hooked by the direct experience “primal” people seemed to have of myths.

Campbell went on to study at Columbia, and in Paris and Munich, becoming an expert in Arthurian studies. It was during his time in Europe in the 1920s that he was exposed to the ideas of people such as Picasso and Freud, whose work was to have a profound influence on him. Returning to the US in 1929, and with the onset of the Depression giving him little hope of finding a teaching job, he decided to hit the road in an effort to discover “the soul of America” and in the process, hopefully, discover his own purpose in life. He eventually reconnected with the academic world and made his reputation in 1949 by publishing The Hero With A Thousand Faces.

That book posited that the concept of the heroic journey occupies the heart of all the world’s cultures. Moreover, the stages of this journey, or mythic cycle, are essentially the same in every culture – whether it be the creation myths of Native Americans or the Book of Genesis. So what makes one culture different from another is not an exclusive set of mythical principles, but a distinctive inflection on the universal “monomyth” that moves us all. The wrappings are different, he explained, but underneath it is the same diamond.

When Lucas reread the book in 1975, after he had first come across it while studying anthropology at college, it gave him the focus he needed to turn his sprawling fantasy universe into one coherent, powerful story. Above all, a story that felt real.

Campbell had argued that the travails of Odysseus or the legends of King Arthur were not meant to be taken literally – you wouldn’t go into a restaurant, he famously explained, see “steak” on the menu and then eat the menu. Rather, their truthfulness emerges when they are understood as metaphors for human action that work in terms of deep psychological principles.

Lucas realised that if his space-age fantasy could pull the same psychological triggers, audiences would respond to the trials and tribulations faced by Luke Skywalker during his quest to defeat Darth Vader in much the same way as bygone generations had to the journey of awakening undertaken by Christ, the Buddha or Telemachus. Lucas followed Campbell’s blueprint for the hero’s journey of initiation, departure and return exactly – and the result was a sensation.

The durability and continued pertinence of the monomyth is nowhere better demonstrated than in how closely the life of Charles Darwin adheres to it.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 28, 2004 8:29 AM