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Once upon a time…
Long, long ago there lived a…
In the days when…
You’ll never believe what happened…
Someone says, “You’ll never believe what happened to me the other day,” and strangers’ ears perk up within hearing distance. We reflexively focus our attention on some random storyteller because we are hardwired to do so. We want to listen. We want to know how it begins and ends. Just watch a small child’s face in front of a skilled storyteller to see how powerful a story can be.
Why is this?
Joseph Campbell: the storyteller
Joseph Campbell was a master, indeed epic, storyteller—epic in that he attempted to tell the human story: from the Paleolithic Great Hunt and animal deities adorning the walls and ceilings of deep, blacker than midnight caves to the shift in stories; to the heavens and the movement of the Sun, Moon, planets and stars. These are stories that continue to influence our contemporary mythic and secular traditions. He cross-referenced stories from around the globe, finding similar patterns and symbology from culture to culture and along that timeline from the First Storytellers to today. He saw the problem we’re still experiencing as these different story traditions—with no new horizons beyond which to populate with our enemies and monsters—crash and grind against each other in their insistence that our cultural stories, our myths, are inherently different instead of differently dressed.
Campbell’s work found an audience with the publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949 and his revision of that work in 1968, but it wasn’t until the release of Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers in June of 1988, eight months after Campbell died, that his name and work gained popular attention.
I remember first seeing the advertisement for The Power of Myth on PBS. I had always been interested in mythology, but that promo hit me with the force of a “Once upon a time,” to a child. From there he charmed me, and countless others, with the story he had to tell: a story in which Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed—traditions still at odds with each other and within themselves—all play a similar role in relaying from the deepest wisdom of our shared humanity a similar message.
A story for the world
His storytelling resonated then and continues to resonate today. As the Rights and Permissions Manager of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, I negotiate and curate contracts for translations of Campbell’s print works and am in the unique position of seeing that resonance in action around the world. When I first began my tenure in rights and permissions in 2016, I oversaw forty-three contracts of published translations covering sixteen languages. Today, JCF has ninety-four contracts of published translations in twenty-four languages with twenty-nine more translations in production, including five additional languages.
I should note here that Campbell’s premier title, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, alone has been translated into twenty-seven languages.
No country sells more of Campbell’s work than Mainland China, followed by the multi-country Spanish market and the Russian Federation. Other languages added in the past eight years include Arabic, Japanese, German, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Vietnamese, Serbian, and more.
These impressive and growing numbers are not the result of any particular effort on the part of JCF.
Publishers, whose mission, of course, is to sell books and make money, come to us to ask if the rights to this or that title are available. Joseph Campbell’s work sells itself, and one can only imagine that the reason for this is his primary message of the unity of humankind in the intersections and similarities of our cultural stories. People the world over are saying “Yes!” to a message which continues to be shared thirty-six years after Campbell died.
People the world over are saying “Yes!” to a message which continues to be shared thirty-six years after Campbell died.
A story for the future
Campbell did not live to see the conclusion of his epic “Once upon a time,” and neither, in all probability, will we. But he did foretell where this story, our story, needs to go:
The only myth that’s going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that’s talking about the planet … and everybody on it. That’s my main thought for what the future myth is going to be … the society of the planet … You don’t see any divisions there of nations or states or anything of the kind. This might be the symbol for the new mythology to come. That is the country that we are going to be celebrating, and those are the people we are one with. (The Power of Myth 41)
I can’t think of a more important conclusion to this story: E pluribus unum—Out of many, one. Though the motto of the United States, this phrase embodies the democratic ideal which Campbell expresses so well in Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume 4:
There are today no horizons, no mythogenetic zones. Or rather, the mythogenetic zone is the individual heart. Individualism and spontaneous pluralism—the free association of men and women of like spirit, under protection of a secular, rational state with no pretensions to divinity—are in the modern world the only honest possibilities: each the creative center of authority for himself, in Cusanus’s circle without circumference whose center is everywhere, and where each is the focus of God’s gaze. (645)
Joseph Campbell would be pleased that his work, his epic story, played a role in guiding us toward such an outcome.
MythBlast authored by:
Michael Lambert has worked with Joseph Campbell Foundation since 2002, first as a moderator of the Conversations of a Higher Order forums (where he was known as Clemsy), and more recently managing the foundation's rights and permissions program, protecting and licensing Campbell and JCF's copyright and trademark material. From 1989 until 2016, he taught in the Gloversville, New York public schools, including using the Hero's Journey® as a central theme of a college preparation English course for high school seniors. He can be reached regarding licensing of rights and permissions at rights@jcf.org
This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 3, and Romance of the Grail
Latest Podcast
In Episode 34, "Primitive Rites & Traditions", Joseph Campbell speaks at the Esalen Institute in 1971. During the lecture, he interacts with participants about the importance and significance of rites and traditions in early mythologies. Host, Bradley Olson introduces the lecture, and offers commentary at the end.
This Week's Highlights
"There are today no horizons, no mythogenetic zones. Or rather, the mythogenetic zone is the individual heart. Individualism and spontaneous pluralism—the free association of men and women of like spirit, under protection of a secular, rational state with no pretensions to divinity—are in the modern world the only honest possibilities: each the creative center of authority for himself, in Cusanus’s circle without circumference whose center is everywhere, and where each is the focus of God’s gaze."
-- Joseph Campbell
Creative Mythology, 645