The point of this blog is not to attack or criticize the work of other authors, and I want to (despite my naturally cynical disposition) maintain a mostly positive tone. However, there were some parts of The Hero with a Thousand Faces that were so absurd, so irritating and offensive to rationality that I can’t overlook them.
The core of Campbell’s argument goes something like this: there are elements of the human psyche that run so deep humans unconsciously express them through symbolism in our mythology. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces he applies his two favorite modes of thought – Freudian psychoanalysis and transcendental buddhism – to uncovering these primordial archetypes.
But Campbell’s original sin is this – before beginning his investigation, he had already decided what he was trying to discover. Even a casual reading of The Hero with a Thousand Faces makes it clear he did not approach his source material as an investigator. He already knew that the Freudian and transcendental buddhist interpretations were correct and was willing to shamelessly twist or omit evidence to make the mythology conform to that viewpoint.
If you decide to pick up the book I recommend reading it with this in mind: Campbell is not an impartial academic. He’s a lawyer making the best case for his client.
But even lawyers tell the truth sometimes, and there are element’s of Campbell’s case where he does seem to give the best explanation for the evidence. I have been grudgingly forced to admit that there are parts of a story which operate outside of plain view. But we cannot accept this too naively or we’ll leave ourselves open to any bizarre or outright manipulative interpretation that Campbell or others care to suggest.
So how do we cut Campbell’s genuine scholarship free from his ideology? After wrestling with the question for a few months I think I’ve found the right tool: the trusty razor of William of Occam.
Freud:
Campbell believed that Freud, Jung, and the other psychoanalysts had basically nailed human nature. To some extent he can be forgiven for this. As I’ve mentioned before, Campbell wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949, and was using the best information he had available at the time.
But the reason forgiveness can only be partial is this: when confronted with evidence that did not fit into a Freudian explanation, Campbell either ignored or downplayed the contradicting facts. One could fill a small book with examples, but two in particular stand out. First, his section on the Atonement with the Father, and second, his descriptions of The Ultimate Boon.
The Atonement with the Father is one of the longest sections in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Campbell crams in every example he can think of where the villain or antagonist is a father figure. One can detect a tinge of desperation as Campbell tries to find links between everything from Greek myths and the vengeful aspect of the Judeo-Christian God to the circumcision rites of aboriginal tribes. After several rereadings, I can’t help but conclude Campbell was trying to make up for his lack of good examples by simply giving more of them.
After attempting to demonstrate that the villains in mythology are really Freudian tyrannical fathers in disguise, Campbell then claims that the moral of all these stories is coming of age. By defeating the malevolent father figure the hero undergoes a spiritual transformation where “-the male phallus, instead of the female breast, is made the central point (axis mundi) of the imagination,” (Campbell 138). Campbell goes on to say:
“The problem of the hero going to meet the father is to open is soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe for understanding how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated by the majesty of Being. The hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands – and the two are atoned.” (Campbell 147)
These assertions do not hold up to scrutiny. To start with, Campbell had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find his examples and in doing so cites myths that do not follow the earlier steps of the hero’s journey. He cannot have this both ways. If he wants to claim that the climactic conflict of a hero’s journey is a clash with a father figure, his examples must be taken from stories that fit the model he is proposing. Every example he cites save one fails this test, which leads me to propose that a simpler explanation is likely the correct one: a conflict with a father figure is a compelling and enduring archetype, but there are far more villains a hero can defeat than this one alone
Campbell also carefully ignores stories that clearly are hero’s journeys, but where the final conflict does not involve a father figure. Theseus’s defeat of the Minotaur is often cited as a classic example of Campbell’s monomyth, but his battle with the monster has none of the Freudian symbolism Campbell was so desperate to find. Since he was advocating for a particular worldview, Campbell shrewdly leaves this story out of his analysis.
As for the spiritual transformation Campbell sought to insert, he made a critical error in conflating the stories of a Hero’s Journey and Coming of Age. While there can be significant overlap, the difference between these two archetypes is narrow but deep. It’s entirely possible for mature adults to set out on a hero’s journey, such as Indiana Jones and Odysseus, both of whom had grand adventures without facing any of the angst of a young person trying to discover themselves and their role in society. One of the best ways for a young person to come of age is by undertaking a hero’s journey, but it is not the only method, and once we distinguish between these two types of narratives the spiritual growth Campbell claims is central to a hero’s journey falls apart.
Moving on to the Ultimate Boon, Campbell claims that the prevalence of food and drink as divine reward – a la the peaches of immortality and the never-ending feasts that feature in so many afterlives – symbolizes humanity’s deep-seated and infantile desire to return to the comfort of our mother’s breast. He says:
“The supreme boon desired for the Indestructible Body is uninterrupted residence in the Paradise of the milk that Never Fails . . . Soul and body food, heart’s ease, is the gift of the ‘All Heal,’ the nipple inexhaustible.” (Campbell 176)
Our borrowed razor makes short work of this. Which do you think is more likely, dear reader? That the commonality of food and drink as vessels of divine favor symbolizes our subconscious craving for breastfeeding? Or simply that food is vital to human survival and quality of life, and would have been the subject of great fantasies in ancient times when it was scarce? It is perhaps revealing that the trope of divine feasts doesn’t seem to have continued in modern stories unless the author is deliberately referencing older myths. If you crave a return to your mother’s breast then, well, I guess that’s between you and her, but in this case I’ll stick with the simpler explanation.
To be fair to Campbell, he admits that the above ‘divine food’ imagery cannot be interpreted as purely psychological. However, that doesn’t stop him from trying to cite Freud to add some substance to his theory, only to back out when he realizes how weak his proposed connection is. I found this to be an excellent demonstration of Campbell’s thought process; he does his best to apply his preferred theories to his source material, and if they don’t seem to take he walks back just enough to avoid rank absurdity but never stops to wonder if he may need to reevaluate his approach. Well if he won’t, I’ll do it for him: the majority of the Freudian connections he wants to draw are ridiculous and we’ll understand both the mythology and hero’s journey better if we start by assuming they’re incorrect until proven otherwise.
Religion:
The following quote is perhaps my favorite in all of The Hero with a Thousand Faces because it so clearly illustrates the author’s mindset as he wrote the book. Watch with amazement as Campbell begins by stating a fairly reasonable literary interpretation, shifts to some dodgy philosophy, and finally pivots to a declaration that anyone save the most fervent religious believer would blush to repeat in public.
“The battlefield is symbolic of the field of life, where every creature lives on the death of another. A realization of the inevitable guilt of life may so sicken the heart that, like Hamlet or like Arjuna, one may refuse to go on with it. On the other hand, like most of the rest of us, one may invent a false, finally unjustified, image of oneself as an exceptional phenomenon in the world, not guilty as others are, but justified in one’s inevitable sinning because one represents the good. Such self-righteousness leads to a misunderstanding, not only of oneself but of the nature of both man and the cosmos. The goal of myth is to dispel the need for such life ignorance by effecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will. And this is effected through a realization of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time with the imperishable life that lives and dies in all.” (Campbell 238)
While listening to this passage in the audiobook, I suddenly heard myself mutter aloud, “Oh, you’re going to explain the nature of time to me, motherfucker?”
Perhaps this reveals a bit more about myself than Campbell, but by that point I was fed up with Campbell’s love affair with transcendental Buddhism. It’s influence on his work was omnipresent and corrosive, causing Campbell to not just say, but write down and publish the most impressively stupid things.
Campbell believed that there was a universal consciousness – or ‘source,’ as he sometimes referred to it – that all our individual minds spring from. Mythology is an attempt to pierce the veil of the everyday and reach this transcendent ideal. There’s no room for cultural nuance here – according to Campbell all of mythology is a part of this noble endeavor, whether its creators were aware of it or not.
Even if we leave aside the metaphysical proof Campbell would need for these claims – which, you should know, he does not even attempt to provide – his central assertion is easily cut down by our dear friend Occam. I invite you to choose the simpler explanation: that the rich mythology of the Vikings, Greeks, Native Americans, and countless other peoples were all unconscious attempts to reach the ego-destroying bliss of nirvana, or that the author we’re examining imposed his own beliefs on the stories he examined.
I’ll happily grant that trying to understand transcendence can be a motivation for some myths, but it is not the only motivation. The nature of time, the roles of men and women, and what it means to be a conscious being are similarly hard problems that myth can attempt to address. But by claiming that all myths are unconsciously seeking Buddhist spirituality, Campbell makes a fool of himself and attempts to make a fool of us.
Finally, there’s one last bit of religious nonsense from Campbell that needs a direct response:
“Briefly formulated, the universal doctrine teaches that all the visible structures of the world – all things and beings – are the effects of a ubiquitous power out of which they rise, which supports and fills them during the period of their manifestation, and back into which they must ultimately dissolve. This is the power known to science as energy, to the Melanesians as mana, to the Sioux Indians as wakonda, the Hindus as shakti, and the Christians as the power of God.” (Campbell 257)
This is not the first time or the last that, like a poorly educated new-ager or a cleric flailing in the face of incisive questioning, Campbell attempts to meld science and religion. It’s a trick, one that counts on the audience being too credulous or stupid to notice that a thief has nicked a respectable man’s clothes. There is an unsubtle difference between spiritualism and science, and that is the ability to make testable predictions. Campbell would prefer that you forget this distinction in favor of superficial similarities, and I can only hope he felt a pang of conscience each time he tried to support his theories by drawing a patently false equivalence.
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This is a truncated version of my objections to Campbell, but it’s representative of the overall book. I’d say to think of it as, ‘including, but not limited to.’
Now that it’s finished, we’ll move on to my final post on Joseph Campbell, where I’ll take the best parts of his work and use them to start constructing my own model for the Hero’s Journey.
Thank you for reading.