Joseph Campbell was a professor of mythology, speaker and prolific writer, whose influence was so far-reaching that Newsweek, upon his death in 1987, called him “one of the rarest of intellectuals in American life: a serious thinker who has been embraced by the popular culture.”
Campbell applied Jungian theory to his study of mythology and added his own perspective in the realm of spirituality and human potential.
He believed that all religions, at their core, sought the same elemental life force from which everything came, within which everything currently exists, and into which everything will return. Although this cannot be expressed in words, spiritual rituals and stories refer to the force through the use of “metaphors”—these metaphors being the various stories, deities, and objects of spirituality we see in the world. For example, the Genesis myth in the Bible ought not be taken as a literal description of actual events, but rather its poetic, metaphorical meaning should be examined for clues concerning the fundamental truths of the world and our existence.
Accordingly, Campbell believed the religions of the world to be the various, culturally influenced “masks” of the same fundamental, transcendent truths.
In his own words: “People feel panicky at the thought that we might all have something in common, that they are giving up some exclusive hold on the truth. It is something like discovering that you are a Frenchman and a human being at the same time. That is exactly the challenge that the great religions face in the Space Age.”
Campbell was fascinated with what he viewed as basic, universal truths, expressed in different manifestations across different cultures. For example, in the preface to his book: “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, he said a goal of his was to demonstrate 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 common throughout the world while examining their local manifestations.
Note – excerpts above taken from The Joseph Campbell Foundation site and Wikipedia
From “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” by Joseph Campbell:
“We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us — the labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”
