Canonical Works and Religious Scriptures
Hindu
[Campbell could not translate Sanskrit well, but he had worked closely with three scholars who did. At the time he was writing The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he was editing the unpublished works and lecture notes of the recently deceased Sanskrit scholar Heinrich Zimmer (died 1943), and he was also corresponding with Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, Curator of Asian Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Art. He was also helping with a translation of the Upaniṣads (including the commentary of the great Vedantist scholar Śaṅkaracharya, fl. c. a.d. 800) by Swami Nikhilananda of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center in New York (New York: Harper, 1949–1959; reprinted by Dover Publications, 2003).
Other translations of the Upaniṣads include Robert Hume’s Thirteen Principal Upanishads (revised edition 1931; reprinted 1983) and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s The Principal Upanisads (New York, 1953, reprinted Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1992) — R.B.]
Āranyakas
Aitareya Āranyaka (Aitareyāranyaka). The text quoted is found in a footnote attributed to Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy on page 48 of Heinrich Zimmer, The King and the Corpse.
Brāhmaṇas
Jaiminīya Upaniṣad Brāhmaṇa (Jaiminīyabrāhmana Upanisadbrāhmana). This Brāhmaṇa is related to the Jaiminīyabrāhmana. Quotation from an unknown source. [A text and translation with different wording by Hanns Örtel, “The Jāiminīya or Talavakāra Upaniṣad Brāhmaṇa” (Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 16, no. 1, 1894), is in Campbell’s book collection and was cited by Zimmer in a lecture delivered at the Eranos Conference of 1938. — R.B.]
Mahābhārata
Bhagavad Gītā (Bhagavadgītā). Quotations are from The Bhagavad Gita. Translated by Swami Nikhilananda (New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1944).
Purāṇa
Most quotations are from Heinrich Zimmer’s Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization.
Upaniṣads
Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad (Brhadaranyakopanisad). Quotations are from The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. Translated by Swami Madhavananda (Mayavati: Advaita Ashrama, [1934?]).
Chāndogya Upaniṣad (Chāndogyopanisad). Quotations are from Robert Ernest Hume (ed. and trans.), Thirteen Principal Upanishads (Oxford University Press, 1931).
Katha Upaniṣad (Kathopanisad). From Hume.
Kauṣītaki Upaniṣad (Kausītakibrāmanopanisad). From Hume. There are few other translations of this text.
Kena Upaniṣad (Kenopanisad). Quotations from Kena-Upanishad. Translated by Swami Sharvananda. Mylapore, Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1932.
Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad (Māndūkyopanisad), from Hume.
Mundaka Upaniṣad (Mundakopanisad), from Hume.
Taittirīya Upaniṣad (Taittirīyopanisad), from Hume.
Buddhist
Jātakas (Lives of the Buddha)
Quotations are from Henry Clarke Warren, ed., Buddhism in Translations; and Eugene Watson Burlingame, Buddhist Parables.
Sutras
[The Mahāyāna sūtras are translated from Sanskrit. Many translations are available, although most of these are translations from the Chinese versions, which often vary somewhat from the Sanskrit originals. The Dhammapada was translated from the Pāli language. — R.B.]
Amitāyur-dhyāna Sūtra (Amitāyurdhyānasūtra). In Max Müller, ed., Buddhist Mahāyāna Texts.
Dhammapada. In Max Müller, ed. and trans., The Dhammapada. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1881. Reprinted with revisions, Woodstock, VT, 2002.
Larger Sukhāvatī-vyūha (Sukhāvatīvyūha [Larger]). In Max Müller, ed., Buddhist Mahāyāna Texts.
Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya Sūtra (Hrdaya, or Heart Sutra). In Max Müller, ed., Buddhist Mahāyāna Texts.
Smaller Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya Sūtra (Hrdaya). In Max Müller, ed., Buddhist Mahāyāna Texts.
Vajracchedikā (“The Diamond Cutter”) (Vajracchedikā, also called the “Diamond Sūtra”). In Max Müller, ed., Buddhist Mahāyāna Texts. A more recent translation by Edward Conze was published in Buddhist Wisdom: Containing the Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra (New York, 2001).
Tantras
Cakrasamvāra Tantra (Cakrasamvāratantra). Quotations are from Shricha-krasambhara Tantra: A Buddhist Tantra, Edited Kazi Dawa-Samdup (London, 1919; reprinted New Delhi, 1987).
Taoist
Tao Teh Ching (Tao Te Ching, sometimes known as the Lao Tzu or [in the Pinyin Romanization] the Laozi, after its author). Quotations attributed to Laotzu’s Tao and Wu Wei. Translated by Dwight Goddard (New York, 1919).
Jewish
Midrash Rabbah, commentary on Genesis (Midrash Rabbah, Genesis). Campbell’s source is uncertain. There is a recent translation by Jacob Neusner, Genesis Rabbah: The Judaic Commentary to the Book of Genesis (Atlanta: Scholar Press for Brown Judaic Studies, 1985).
Zohar. Quotations from C.G. Ginsburg, The Kabbalah: Its Doctrines, Development, and Literature (London, 1920); also from MacGregor Mathers, Kabbala Denudata, the Kabbalah Unveiled, which uses a different versification from the standard one.
Christian
Bible. The King James version is quoted.
Catholic Daily Missal. Probably Saint Andrew Daily Missal, by Dom Gaspar Lefebvre O.S.B. of the Abbey of S. André (Bruges, Belgium: Abbey of St. André; Saint Paul, MN: E.M. Lohmann Co., [1943?]).
Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. Edition uncertain.
Roman Missal. Edition uncertain.
Islamic
Koran. Quotations match the text of The Holy Qur-An: Text, Translation and Commentary. Translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali (New York, [1946?]).
Works Cited Without Edition
Anthologia Graeca ad Fidem Codicis, vol. II.
Apollonios of Rhodes (Apollonius Rhodius). Argonautika.
Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History.
Epiphanius. Adversus Heareses (apocryphal Gospel of Eve quoted).
Euripides. The Bacchae (translated by Gilbert Murray).
Flaubert, Gustave. La tentation de Saint Antoine.
Gesta Romanorum.
Grimm’s Fairy Tales. “The Frog King.” [Campbell’s quotations from this story do not match the text of the 1944 Pantheon edition, nor the older text of the Hunt translation. It is possible that he was translating from a German edition. — R.B.]
Heraclitus (fragments).
Hesiod. Theogony.
Irving, Washington. “Rip van Winkle.” In The Sketch Book.
Jeffers, Robinson. Cawdor. Copyright 1928.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. The Song of Hiawatha.
Martial. Epigrams (Loeb Library edition).
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Plato. Symposium.
Plutarch. “Themistocles.”
Rumi. Mathnawi.
Shakespeare. Hamlet.
Sophocles. Oedipus Coloneus.
——— . Oedipus Tyrannus.
Thomas Aquinas. Summa Contra Gentiles.
Thompson, Francis. The Hound of Heaven.
Virgil. Aeneid.
Voragine, Jacobus de. The Golden Legend. No edition is given for this influential medieval compilation of the lives of saints. Campbell owned a 1925 French edition entitled La légende dorée, traduite du latin par Teodor de Wyzewa (Paris: Perrin, 1925).
About Joseph Campbell
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, h
e “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, "Prologue")
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).
It was during this period in Europe that Joe was first exposed to those modernist masters — notably, the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee, James Joyce and Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung — whose art and insights would greatly influence his own work. These encounters would eventually lead him to theorize that all myths are the creative products of the human psyche, that artists are a culture’s mythmakers, and that mythologies are creative manifestations of humankind’s universal need to explain psychological, social, cosmological, and spiritual realities.
When Joe returned from Europe late in August of 1929, he was at a crossroad, unable to decide what to do with his life. With the onset of the Great Depression, he found himself with no hope of obtaining a teaching job; and so he spent most of the next two years reconnecting with his family, reading, renewing old acquaintances, and writing copious entries in his journal. Then, late in 1931, after exploring and rejecting the possibility of a doctoral program or teaching job at Columbia, he decided, like countless young people before and since, to “hit the road,” to undertake a cross-country journey in which he hoped to experience “the soul of America” and, in the process, perhaps discover the purpose of his life. In January of 1932, when he was leaving Los Angeles, where he had been studying Russian in order to read War and Peace in the original, he pondered his future in this journal entry:
I begin to think that I have a genius for working like an ox over totally irrelevant subjects. … I am filled with an excruciating sense of never having gotten anywhere — but when I sit down and try to discover where it is I want to get, I’m at a loss. … The thought of growing into a professor gives me the creeps. A lifetime to be spent trying to kid myself and my pupils into believing that the thing that we are looking for is in books! I don’t know where it is — but I feel just now pretty sure that it isn’t in books. — It isn’t in travel. — It isn’t in California. — It isn’t in New York. … Where is it? And what is it, after all?
Thus one real result of my Los Angeles stay was the elimination of Anthropology from the running. I suddenly realized that all of my primitive and American Indian excitement might easily be incorporated in a literary career. — I am convinced now that no field but that of English literature would have permitted me the almost unlimited roaming about from this to that which I have been enjoying. A science would buckle me down — and would probably yield no more important fruit than literature may yield me! — If I want to justify my existence, and continue to be obsessed with the notion that I’ve got to do something for humanity — well, teaching ought to quell that obsession — and if I can ever get around to an intelligent view of matters, intelligent criticism of contemporary values ought to be useful to the world. This gets back again to Krishna’s dictum: “ The best way to help mankind is through the perfection of yourself.”
His travels next carried him north to San Francisco, then back south to Pacific Grove, where he spent the better part of a year in the company of Carol and John Steinbeck and marine biologist Ed Ricketts. During this time, he wrestled with his writing, discovered the poems of Robinson Jeffers, first read Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, and wrote to some seventy colleges and universities in an unsuccessful attempt to secure employment. Finally, he was offered a teaching position at the Canterbury School. He returned to the East Coast, where he endured an unhappy year as a Canterbury housemaster, the one bright moment being when he sold his first short story (“Strictly Platonic”) to Liberty magazine. Then, in 1933, he moved to a cottage without running water on Maverick Road in Woodstock NY, where he spent a year reading and writing. In 1934, he was offered and accepted a position in the literature department at Sarah Lawrence College, a post he would retain for thirty-eight years.
In 1938 he married one of his former students, Jean Erdman, who would become a major presence in the emerging field of modern dance, first as a star dancer in Martha Graham’s fledgling troupe, and later as dancer/choreographer of her own company.
Even as he continued his teaching career, Joe’s life continued to unfold serendipitously. In 1940, he was introduced to Swami Nikhilananda, who enlisted his help in producing a new translation of The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (published, 1942). Subsequently, Nikhilananda introduced Joe to the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer, who introduced him to a member of the editorial board at the Bollingen Foundation. Bollingen, which had been founded by Paul and Mary Mellon to “develop scholarship and research in the liberal arts and sciences and other fields of cultural endeavor generally,” was embarking upon an ambitious publishing project, the Bollingen Series.
Joe was invited to contribute an “Introduction and Commentary” to the first Bollingen publication, Where the Two Came to their Father: A Navaho War Ceremonial, text and paintings recorded by Maud Oakes, given by Jeff King (Bollingen Series, I: 1943).
When Zimmer died unexpectedly in 1943 at the age of fifty-two, his widow, Christiana, and Mary Mellon asked Joe to oversee the publication of his unfinished works. Joe would eventually edit and complete four volumes from Zimmer’s posthumous papers: Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization (Bollingen Series VI: 1946), The King and the Corpse (Bollingen Series XI: 1948), Philosophies of India (Bollingen Series XXVI: 1951), and a two-volume opus, The Art of Indian Asia (Bollingen Series XXXIX: 1955).
Joe, meanwhile, followed his initial Bollingen contribution with a “Folkloristic Commentary” to Grimm’s Fairy Tales (1944); he also co-authored (with Henry Morton Robinson) A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944), the first major study of James Joyce’s notoriously complex novel.
His first full-length, solo authorial endeavor, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Bollingen Series XVII: 1949), was published to acclaim and brought him the first of numerous awards and honors — the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Contributions to Creative Literature. In this study of the myth of the hero, Campbell posits the existence of a Monomyth (a word he borrowed from James Joyce), a universal pattern that is the essence of, and common to, heroic tales in every culture. While outlining the basic stages of this mythic cycle, he also explores common variations in the hero’s journey, which, he argues, is an operative metaphor, not only for an individual, but for a culture as well. The Hero would prove to have a major influence on generations of creative artists — from the Abstract Expressionists in the 1950s to contemporary film-makers today — and would, in time, come to be acclaimed as a classic.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces Page 43
