Joseph Campbell:1

テーマ:神話学・不思議学・フォークロアケルト


神話に関しては、私は、ジョーゼフ・キャンベルの圧倒的な影響の下にある。彼の神話学をユング心理学の適用と一般には考えられているが、彼の本を読めばわかるように、ユング心理学(元型心理学)の応用というよりは、比較神話学であり、普遍的神話学を構築していると見ることができる。
 彼の博覧強記の、しかも、整合性のある著書は、確実に視野が広くなるものである。とりわけ、女神中心主義は、私の神話観を変えてしまった。これは大変な驚きであり続けている。
 かなり翻訳も出たが、しかしながら、彼の主著の『神の仮面』(全四作)は、一巻しか翻訳されていない。それでも、山室静氏の翻訳があるのは、幸運である。
 そう、もう十年くらい前になるのか、彼の本を読んでいたときの至福感を思い出した。また、神話ブームになるかもしれない。何故なら、新太母文化が目前であるからである。というか、実質、もう入っていると言えよう。


追記:最近、私の勘は冴えている。ジョージ・ハリスンケルト系ではないかと感じたが、それが先日確認できた。そして、神話学者のジョーゼフ・キャンベルもケルト系ではないかと思い、検索したら、キャンベルは、スコットランドケルト文化圏)の部族の名前であった。端的に、見事に、ケルト系である。


参照1:
Clan Campbell and Clan MacDonald - The Great Feud

Memories run long in the highlands of Scotland and, we've heard tell, the bitterness between Clans Campbell and MacDonald continues to this day.

The clash between these two ancient Celtic houses, which has lasted for hundreds of years, is not just about lands, religion, Jacobitism, or even betrayal. Rather, it is about power.

・・・・・

Clan Campbell is as ancient a Celtic family as the MacDonalds, though their historical records are inaccessible before their rise to prominence. The Campbells trace their ancestry through Sir Colin Mor Campbell of Lochow, killed in 1294. In English, their name is Clan Dairmid. The surname Campbell is attributed to the gaelic nickname for one of their chiefs, cam-beul, meaning a wry or twisted mouth (perhaps called that by the MacDonalds!).

・・・・・

Some famous Campbells:

Sir Colin Campbell (1792-1863) - Commanded the Highland Brigade at Balaclava and was Commander-in-Chief during the Indian Mutiny (he took the Campbell name from his mother; he was born a MacLiver)
Joseph Campbell - Cofounder of Campbell Soup Company
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1836-1908) - British Prime Minister
Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) - world famous mythologist and author

http://www.heartoscotland.com/Categories/CampbellsandMacDonalds.htm

参照2:
ここに一つの言葉を引用しておきたい。
 これは、神話学者のジョセフ・キャンベルがグレイトフル・デッドのドラマーであるミッキー・ハートに語った言葉である。ジョセフ・キャンベルは、人類が自らの神話を再創造する時が近付いていると確信していた。 「もうすぐ新しい神話が現れる。それも地球規模のものだ、ミッキー。どのようなかたちで現れるのかはわからないが、これまでの神話の構造と関係があるということははっきりしている。神話の象徴的パターンというのは、結局は脳自身のエネルギーパターンの反映だからね」
                         (『ドラム・マジック リズム宇宙への旅』ミッキー・ハート著)
http://www.ame-ambient.com/Nagaya/innerworld/shinwa/part01.html
対談『新しい神話の創造に向けて』by 龍村仁氏、名嘉睦稔氏 and 長屋和哉 〜 はじめに
Joseph Campbell
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Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell circa 1984
Born March 26 , 1904 (1904-03-26)
White Plains, New York
Died October 30 , 1987 (aged 83)
Flag of Hawaii Honolulu , Hawaii
Occupation Scholar
Nationality American
Influences Friedrich Nietzsche , Oswald Spengler , Sigmund Freud , Carl Jung , Heinrich Zimmer , James Joyce , Thomas Mann , Arthur Schopenhauer , Leo Frobenius

Joseph John Campbell (March 26 , 1904 – October 30 , 1987 ) was an American mythology professor , writer , and orator best known for his work in the fields of comparative mythology and comparative religion .
Life

[edit ] Childhood and education

Joseph Campbell was born and raised in White Plains , New York [1] in an upper middle class Roman Catholic family. As a child, Campbell became fascinated with Native American culture after his father took him to see the American Museum of Natural History in New York where he saw on display featured collections of Native American artifacts. He soon became versed in numerous aspects of Native American society, primarily in Native American mythology . This led to Campbell's lifelong passion for myth and to his study of and mapping of the cohesive threads in mythology that appeared to exist among even disparate human cultures. He graduated from the Canterbury School (Connecticut) in 1921. While at Dartmouth College he studied biology and mathematics, but decided that he preferred the humanities. He transferred to Columbia University where he received his B.A. in English literature in 1925 and M.A. in Medieval literature in 1927. Campbell was also an accomplished athlete, receiving awards in track and field events.

[edit ] Europe

In 1927, Campbell received a fellowship provided by Columbia to study in Europe. Campbell studied Old French and Sanskrit at the University of Paris in France and the University of Munich in Germany . He quickly learned to read and speak both French and German , mastering them after only a few months of rigorous study. He remained fluent in both languages for the remainder of his life.

He was highly influenced while in Europe by the period of the Lost Generation , a time of enormous intellectual and artistic innovation. Campbell commented on this influence, particularly that of James Joyce , in The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work (1990, first edition:28):

CAMPBELL: And then the fact that James Joyce grabbed me. You know that wonderful living in a realm of significant fantasy, which is Irish, is there in the Arthurian romances; it's in Joyce; and it's in my life.
COUSINEAU: Did you find that you identified with Stephen Daedalus ...in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ?
CAMPBELL: His problem was my problem, exactly...Joyce helped release me into an understanding of the universal sense of these symbols...Joyce disengaged himself and left the labyrinth, you might say, of Irish politics and the church to go to London , where he became one of the very important members of this marvelous movement that Paris represented in the period when I was there, in the '20s.

It was in this climate that Campbell was also introduced to the work of Thomas Mann , who was to prove equally influential upon his life and ideas. Also while in Europe, Campbell was introduced to modern art, becoming particularly enthusiastic about the work of Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso . A new world of exciting ideas opened up to Campbell while studying in Europe. Here he also discovered the works and writings of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung . It was also during this time, as well, that he met and became friends with the young Jiddu Krishnamurti , a friendship which began his lifelong interest in Hindu philosophy and mythology. In addition, after the death of Indologist Heinrich Zimmer , Campbell was given the task to edit and posthumously publish Zimmer's papers.

[edit ] Return to the United States and the Great Depression

On his return from Europe in 1929, Campbell announced to his faculty at Columbia that his time in Europe had broadened his interests and that he wanted to study Sanskrit and Modern art in addition to Medieval literature . When his advisors did not support this, Campbell decided not to go forward with his plans to earn a doctorate and never returned to a conventional graduate program (The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work , 1990, first edition: 54).

A few weeks later, the Great Depression began. Campbell would spend the next five years (1929-1934) trying to figure out what to do with his life (Larsen and Larsen, 2002:160) and he engaged in a period of intensive and rigorous independent study. Campbell discussed this period in The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work (1990, first edition:52-3). Campbell states that he "would divide the day into four four-hour periods, of which I would be reading in three of the four hour periods, and free one of them...I would get nine hours of sheer reading done a day. And this went on for five years straight."

He also traveled to California for a year (1931-32), continuing his independent studies and becoming close friends with the budding writer John Steinbeck and his wife Carol (Larsen and Larsen, 2002, chapters 8 and 9). Campbell also maintained his independent reading while teaching for a year in 1933 at the Canterbury School during which time he also attempted to publish works of fiction (Larsen and Larsen, 2002:214) [2] .

Campbell's independent studies led to his greater exploration of the ideas of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung , a contemporary and estranged colleague of Sigmund Freud . Campbell edited the first Eranos conference papers and helped to found Princeton University Press ' Bollingen Press. Another dissident member of Freud's circle to influence Campbell was Wilhelm Stekel (1868 - 1939). Stekel pioneered the application of Freud's conceptions of dreams, fantasies of the human mind , and the unconscious to such fields as anthropology and literature .

[edit ] Sarah Lawrence College

In 1934, Campbell was offered a position as professor at Sarah Lawrence College (through the efforts of his former Columbia advisor W.W. Laurence). Campbell married one of his former students, dancer and dance instructor Jean Erdman , in 1938. He retired from Sarah Lawrence College in 1972, after having taught there for 38 years.

[edit ] Death

Joseph Campbell died at the age of 83 on October 30, 1987, at his home in Honolulu , Hawaii, from complications due to esophageal cancer [1] shortly after completing filming of The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers .

[edit ] Select works

[edit ] James Joyce and early works

As noted above, James Joyce was an important influence on Campbell. Campbell's first important book (with Henry Morton Robinson ), A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake [3] (1944), is a critical analysis of Joyce's final text Finnegans Wake . In addition, Campbell's seminal work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces , discusses what Campbell termed the monomyth -- the cycle of the journey of the hero , an idea which he directly attributes to Joyce's Finnegans Wake (Campbell, 1949:30).

[edit ] The Masks of God

His massive four-volume work The Masks of God covers mythology from around the world, from ancient to modern. Where The Hero with a Thousand Faces focused on the commonality of mythology (the “elementary ideas”), the Masks of God books focus upon historical and cultural variations the monomyth takes on (the “folk ideas”). In other words, where The Hero with a Thousand Faces draws perhaps more from psychology, the Masks of God books draw more from anthropology and history. The four volumes of Masks of God are as follows: Primitive Mythology, Oriental Mythology, Occidental Mythology, and Creative Mythology.

[edit ] The Historical Atlas of World Mythology

At the time of his death, Campbell was in the midst of working upon a large-format, lavishly illustrated series entitled The Historical Atlas of World Mythology. This series was to build on Campbell’s idea, first presented in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, that myth evolves over time through four stages:

• The Way of the Animal Powers -- the myths of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers which focus on shamanism and animal totems.

• The Way of the Seeded Earth -- the myths of Neolithic, agrarian cultures which focus upon a mother goddess and associated fertility rites.

• The Way of the Celestial Lights -- the myths of Bronze Age city-states with pantheons of gods up ruling from the heavens, led by a masculine god-king.

• The Way of Man -- religion and philosophy as it developed after the Axial Age (c. 6th century BCE), in which the mythic imagery of previous eras was made consciously metaphorical, reinterpreted as referring to psycho-spiritual, not literal-historical, matters. This transition is evidenced in the East by Buddhism , Vedanta , and philosophical Taoism ; and in the West by the Mystery Cults , Platonism and Gnosticism .

Only the first two volumes were completed at the time of Campbell's death. Both are now out-of-print.

[edit ] The Power of Myth

Campbell's widest popular recognition followed his collaboration with Bill Moyers on the PBS series The Power of Myth , which was first broadcast in 1988, the year following Campbell's death. The series exposed his ideas concerning mythological, religious, and psychological archetypes to a wide audience, and captured the imagination of millions of viewers. It remains a staple of PBS television membership drives to this day. A companion book, The Power of Myth, containing expanded transcripts of their conversations, was released shortly after the original broadcast, and became a best seller.

[edit ] Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

A recent compilation of many of his ideas is titled Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor. In it Campbell writes:"...Mythology is often thought of as other people's religions, and religion can be defined as mis-interpreted mythology." In other words, Campbell did not read religious symbols literally as historical facts, but instead he saw them as symbols or as metaphors for greater philosophical ideas.

Campbell had previously discussed this idea with Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth:

CAMPBELL: That would be a mistake in the reading of the symbol. That is reading the words in terms of prose instead of in terms of poetry, reading the metaphor in terms of the denotation instead of the connotation.

MOYERS: And poetry gets to the unseen reality.

CAMPBELL: That which is beyond even the concept of reality, that which transcends all thought. The myth puts you there all the time, gives you a line to connect with that mystery which you are (Campbell, 1988:57).