Myth and Structure (original) (raw)
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Revisiting Joseph Campbell's "The Power of Myth"
2014
This paper considers the relevance of The Power of Myth to the secular study of religion. First, I identify the scholars from whom Campbell borrows concepts. I organize these scholars into three groups – the qualitative religious scholars, the quantitative religious scholars, and those who draw from both approaches. Next, I identify Joseph Campbell’s key ideas (the monomyth, the hero’s journey, the existence of a higher power or energy, the lack of myth in the modern world, and the notion that religion possesses given qualities). I then analyze the contradictions inherent within Campbell’s argument, for Campbell fails to synthesize three scholarly traditions into one coherent theory of religion. Additionally, I discuss Campbell’s descriptive reductionism, his reactionary views regarding secularization, and the political conservatism found within the book. I conclude that Power is not an authoritative work of secular religious scholarship, but rather one man’s subjective blend of research and personal beliefs.
The Power of Myth Joseph Campell
1991
The Power of Myth launched an extraordinary resurgence of interest in Joseph Campbell and his work. A preeminent scholar, writer, and teacher, he has had a profound influence on millions of people--including Star Wars creator George Lucas. To Campbell, mythology was the "song of the universe, the music of the spheres." With Bill Moyers, one of America's most prominent journalists, as his thoughtful and engaging interviewer, The Power of Myth touches on subjects from modern marriage to virgin births, from Jesus to John Lennon, offering a brilliant combination of intelligence and wit. This extraordinary book reveals how the themes and symbols of ancient narratives continue to bring meaning to birth, death, love, and war. From stories of the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome to traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity, a broad array of themes are considered that together identify the universality of human experience across time and culture. An impeccable match of interviewer and subject, a timeless distillation of Campbell's work, The Power of Myth continues to exert a profound influence on our culture.
An Inquest into Common Humanity through Myths and Mythologies: Joseph Campbell’s Paradigm
The disintegration of the social order which has resulted in shredding humanity into ethnic grouping, racial categories, religious schisms, class stratifications etc, also introduced competitions into the socio-political system. The end point of the panorama is that wars, persecutions, humiliations and subjugations of those considered inferior in the social scheme became a benchmark for human relationship. The quest for survival in this hostile world became ingrained in our psycho-social wits and became our organizing principle, thus the win/loss relationship that has characterized human interactions in the modern world. Therefore mankind considers himself an atom within the universe of other atoms. Consequently, humanity lost the sense of his common origin. It was the pre-scientific age, structured around religious and cultural traditions that gave humanity this sense of common origin. This argument is sustained by diverse myths and mythologies found in different world cultures. The myths and mythologies range from the creation, the incarnation of Gods, the salvific death of a messiah, the hope of new world and new life etc. With these myths, our ancestors convinced themselves of their common origin and worked towards the unification of mankind separated by geographical distance. However, the birth of modern science made such a unification quest a lost dream and as such humanity is heading heedlessly towards self obliteration. Joseph Campbell made serious attempt to give a rebirth to the primeval sciences in the form of social anthropology. He organized his new anthropology around myths and mythology. Campbell surveyed various cultures as he studied their social thoughts as embedded in myths and discovered that there is common denominator in myths of all cultures. By this, Campbell came to conclusion that the modern idea of man and society is based on a faulty design and as such to see man with Kierkegaard"s ideality lens as an individual is a mere illusion. This paper therefore is designed to reconsider the proto-science of Campbell couched in monomyths to find how his ideality of common humanity could be reinterpreted and applied to end crisis/ and humiliation of mankind in the modern world. .
Narrative Form and the Structure of Myth
Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore, 2006
At each stage in transmission of a tale from generation to generation, modifications take place but something remains. Thus there is a potential for material to be retained from a time in the distant past when the narrative was embedded in a total oral worldview or cosmology. This article introduces the analogical discovery method and uses it to build up a structure based on a group of tales from Greece, Ireland and Wales. It draws the conclusion that the structure of myth that is indirectly discernible through them deals with four generations, both of gods and of humans, the last of which contains the king. It agrees with the view proposed by Georges Dumézil that myth reflects human social organisation and argues in addition that matrilineal succession to kingship provides a good fit with the tales. The suggestion is put forward that there was a total, quite complex, cosmological code of which narratives retain traces and that scholars today have the opportunity of deciphering it.
Joseph Campbell's 'New Mythology' and the Rise of Mythopoeic Fantasy
The AnaChronisT, 2008
If the twentieth century witnessed a "rehabilitation of myth" in literary studies, the upsurge of interest in mythic systems with their ideologies, worldviews, and functional modes is rightly attributed to the work of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, Northrop Frye, and Joseph Campbell. Behind their thousand faces, those thinkers argued, myths carry one message, which reflects the psychic unity of humankind. And because we are becoming more conscious of this unity, we face the need to "tell ourselves" anew and imagine a new mythology apposite to the modern situation. In The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Joseph Campbell presents this new mythology as one of the whole human race; saying it is relevant to our present knowledge, already implicit among humans as intuitive knowledge, and will be realized in and through art. These postulates are met in and chronologically overlap with the emergence of modern mythopoeic fantasy in Tolkien, Lewis, L'Engle, Le Guin, Alexander...
Thoughts on the Legacy of Joseph Campbell, Feminist Reaction, and the Study of Myth
This paper discusses the impact of the "monomyth" paradigm of Joseph Campbell, especially as it is presented in "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" (1949), and reviews a variety of reactions to it, including that of feminist critics. Lastly, it applies the most promising feminist critiques to an analysis of contemporary novels by women, most prominently Margaret Atwood.'s "Surfacing" (1973).
Studia Religiologica, 2016
Many specialists in Manichaeism wrote after World War II about the religious Manichaean narrative as a myth or a mythology. In this paper I examine whether the Manichaean narrative actually meets the criteria of definition of myth. This question is also worth asking because some scholars emphasise the monosemic character of the mentioned narrative. The definition of myth which I use is that of Andrzej Wierciński (1930-2003), a Polish anthropologist of religion. Among my reasons for choosing this is because it includes as many as nine features of myth and also refers to scientific narrative, which by its nature has one level of meaning. I refer this definition, above all, to Manichaean evidence in the Coptic language, but when the need arises I also invoke other sources, both polemical and apologetic.
Joseph Campbell Rounds Up Things
Medium.com, 2019
Anthropology cannot work like comparative literature. The meaning of anthropology, of history, of archaeology, is in the differences between things and not the similitudes. By reducing all myths, mythologies, folkloric or fairy tales to all common points he gets a skeleton and yet this skeleton does not consider many things that do not go the way Campbell wants things to go. His monomyth is just what it says it is, a myth, meaning it does not exist because it negates differences. It sounds to me like a "Black Face" that is denying each individual teh right and duty to be different from all others.
Review of Michael Fishbane, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking.
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