A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) (31 page)

The Joseph Campbell Foundation (JCF)—founded in 1990 to preserve, protect, and perpetuate Campbell's work—has undertaken to create a digital archive of his papers and recordings and to publish
The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell
.

Robert Walter,
Executive Editor
David Kudler,
Managing Editor

The JCF has undertaken to make Mr. Campbell's unreleased and no-longer-available work—uncollected essays, journals, interviews, lectures, article fragments, etc—available through this thought-provoking series. The works in the on-going series are:

 
Print:

• Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor
  —An exploration of the myths and symbols of the Judeo-Christian tradition
  
• The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Myth As Metaphor and As Religion
  —The last book that Campbell completed in his lifetime explores the nascent mythology of the modern age.
  
• The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension
  —A collection of some of Campbell's most far-reaching essays
  
• Baksheesh and Brahman: Asian Journals—India
  —The thoughtful diary of Campbell's life-changing trip to India
  
• Sake and Satori: Asian Journals—Japan
  —The continuation of Campbell's 1955 trip, including his eye-opening experiences in Japan
  
• Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal
  —An exploration of the central myths and symbols of the great Asian religions
  
• The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work
  —A wonderful series of conversations between Campbell and many of his associates and friends
  
• Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: Joseph Campbell on the Art of James Joyce
  —An exploration of the mythic impact of the twentieth century's greatest novelist
  
• A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake
  —co-written with Henry Morton Robinson and newly edited by Joyce scholar Edmond Epstein, this remains the seminal analysis of Joyce's masterpiece
  
• Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation
  —In this work, Campbell explores myth as it pertains to the individual
  
• The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959-1987
  —A new volume of Campbell's far-ranging, thought-provoking essays
  
• The Hero with a Thousand Faces
  —A new edition of Campbell's classic exploration of the universal monomyth of the Hero Journey, and of its cosmic mirror, the Cosmogonic Cycle
  
• Myths to Live By
   
  (ebook)
  —A newly illustrated and annotated electronic edition of this classic exploration of the philosophical, social and psychological affects of living myth
  
• A Joseph Campbell Companion
   
  (ebook)
  —A new digital edition of one of Joseph Campbell's most popular and most quotable works
  

 
Video:

• The Hero's Journey: A Biographical Portrait
  —This film, made shortly before his death in 1987, follows Campbell's personal quest—a pathless journey of questioning, discovery, and ultimately of delight and joy in a life to which he said, "Yes"
  
• Sukhavati: A Mythic Journey
  —This hypnotic and mesmerizing film is a deeply personal, almost spiritual, portrait of Campbell
  
• Mythos
  —This series is made up of talks that Campbell himself believed summed up his views on "the one great story of mankind"
  

 
Audio:

• The Joseph Campbell Audio Collection
  , Series I—A newly digitized and remastered release of these classic recordings, covering Campbell's early years as a public speaker and including some of his most inspiring and beloved talks.
  
• The Joseph Campbell Audio Collection
  , Series II
  
• The Joseph Campbell Audio Collection
  , Series III—The JCF is preparing for the orderly release of sixty previously unavailable recordings of Campbell at his finest, exploring myth, religion, history, literature and personal growth as only he could.
  

Over one hundred years ago,
on March 26th in 1904, Joseph John Campbell was born in White Plains, NY. Joe, as he came to be known, was the first child of a middle-class, Roman Catholic couple, Charles and Josephine Campbell.

Joe's earliest years were largely unremarkable; but then, when he was seven years old, his father took him and his younger brother, Charlie, to see Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. The evening was a high-point in Joe's life; for, although the cowboys were clearly the show's stars, as Joe would later write, he "became fascinated, seized, obsessed, by the figure of a naked American Indian with his ear to the ground, a bow and arrow in his hand, and a look of special knowledge in his eyes.”

It was Arthur Schopenhauer, the philosopher whose writings would later greatly influence Campbell, who observed that

…the experiences and illuminations of childhood and early youth become in later life the types, standards and patterns of all subsequent knowledge and experience, or as it were, the categories according to which all later things are classified—not always consciously, however. And so it is that in our childhood years the foundation is laid of our later view of the world, and there with as well of its superficiality or depth: it will be in later years unfolded and fulfilled, not essentially changed.

And so it was with young Joseph Campbell. Even as he actively practiced (until well into his twenties) the faith of his forbears, he became consumed with Native American culture; and his worldview was arguably shaped by the dynamic tension between these two mythological perspectives. On the one hand, he was immersed in the rituals, symbols, and rich traditions of his Irish Catholic heritage; on the other, he was obsessed with primitive (or, as he later preferred, "primal") people's direct experience of what he came to describe as "the continuously created dynamic display of an absolutely transcendent, yet universally immanent,
mysterium tremendum et fascinans
, which is the ground at once of the whole spectacle and of oneself." (
Historical Atlas of World Mythology
, I.1, p. 8)

By the age of ten, Joe had read every book on American Indians in the children's section of his local library and was admitted to the adult stacks, where he eventually read the entire multi-volume
Reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology
. He worked on wampum belts, started his own "tribe" (named the "Lenni-Lenape" after the Delaware tribe who had originally inhabited the New York metropolitan area), and frequented the American Museum of Natural History, where he became fascinated with totem poles and masks, thus beginning a lifelong exploration of that museum's vast collection.

After spending much of his thirteenth year recuperating from a respiratory illness, Joe briefly attended Iona, a private school in Westchester NY, before his mother enrolled him at Canterbury, a Catholic residential school in New Milford CT. His high school years were rich and rewarding, though marked by a major tragedy: in 1919, the Campbell home was consumed by a fire that killed his grandmother and destroyed all of the family's possessions.

Joe graduated from Canterbury in 1921, and the following September, entered Dartmouth College; but he was soon disillusioned with the social scene and disappointed by a lack of academic rigor, so he transferred to Columbia University, where he excelled: while specializing in medieval literature, he played in a jazz band, and became a star runner. In 1924, while on a steamship journey to Europe with his family, Joe met and befriended Jiddu Krishnamurti, the young messiah-elect of the Theosophical Society, thus beginning a friendship that would be renewed intermittently over the next five years.

After earning a B.A. from Columbia (1925), and receiving an M.A. (1927) for his work in Arthurian Studies, Joe was awarded a Proudfit Traveling Fellowship to continue his studies at the University of Paris (1927-28). Then, after he had received and rejected an offer to teach at his high school alma mater, his Fellowship was renewed, and he traveled to Germany to resume his studies at the University of Munich (1928-29).