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Summary: A Mythological Imagination of the Hero Unleashed
Comment: A hero is, "someone who has found or achieved or done something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience." Campbell goes on to illuminate the hero sequence, loosely explained here as: departure (from the comfortable range of experience); trials (transformation of consciousness and revelation); fulfillment (enlightenment); and return. For the western intellectual, Joseph Campbell can seem disturbingly unsettling.One cannot deny the breadth of his cultural connection to mythologies of many different human traditions. He can carry on in a very intense almost hypnotic associational mode of dialogue switching from one mythological system to another making striking and compelling analogies between them. It makes taking notes from him quite a challenge, and listening in rapture quite easy. He describes mythology as an interface with the source of life. Campbell seems to have mastered this interface quite well. He sees himself as a maverick in intellectual terms, and this maverick nature seems to even manifest in subtly anti-intellectual terms.
In this video, Star Wars presents the recurrent western example that Moyers and Campbell both return to, though he also connects into Christianity and other western pagan mythologies. At one point Campbell analogizes Darth Vader and the "dark side" to the intellectual side of humanity. I must admit, that this still disturbs me, though I can honestly say that this disturbs me as much for state of western intellectual traditions as it does for Joseph Campbell's attitude toward the state of this tradition. I wish that Campbell could appreciate some of the cognitive breakthroughs that have occurred since his death within western intellectualism in the works of Lakoff and Johnson, hinted at in "Metaphors we Live By" and partially fulfilled in "Philosophy in the Flesh", and independently through the theology of Don Cupitt laid out in "After God: The Future of Religion" (all three also reviewed by me).
This video represents my first firsthand encounter with Joseph Campbell, though I have encountered overwhelming references to him before. Though I felt disturbed, challenged, and enlightened, I felt no disappointment in it. Throughout the video, I felt as though I had listened to a child prodigy caught in the body of an older man, with a vitality and imagination that defies rational criticism. He endures as a fascinating storyteller with a great intuition in finding the power in those stories. In this, I think any intellectual can envy him in his broad expertise in this fading spontaneous art form.
"We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; and where we had thought to slay another we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; and where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world."
Such passages weave seamlessly into the visual accompaniment to Joseph Campbell's words, and the work truly transports us into the soul of the hero to gather strength for our own lives.
