I had to change the title because that is what this thread is now about.....
MYTHS ARE CLUES
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by seemslikeadream » Sun Jun 23, 2013 12:05 pm
by Wombaticus Rex » Sun Jun 23, 2013 12:15 pm
by seemslikeadream » Sun Jun 23, 2013 12:20 pm
by brekin » Sun Jun 23, 2013 1:22 pm
Their age is not our age. As every past generation has had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truisms and stereotypes, so in our own time we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality.
For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
Mythology distracts us everywhere—in government as in business, in politics as in economics, in foreign affairs as in domestic affairs. But today I want to particularly consider the myth and reality in our national economy. In recent months many have come to feel, as I do, that the dialog between the parties—between business and government, between the government and the public—is clogged by illusion and platitude and fails to reflect the true realities of contemporary American society.
I speak of these matters here at Yale because of the self-evident truth that a great university is always enlisted against the spread of illusion and on the side of reality. No one has said it more clearly than your President Griswold: "Liberal learning is both a safeguard against false ideas of freedom and a source of true ones." Your role as university men, whatever your calling, will be to increase each new generation's grasp of its duties.
The Iron Dream is a metafictional 1972 alternate history novel by Norman Spinrad.
The book has a nested narrative that tells a story within a story. On the surface, the novel presents an unexceptional pulp, post-apocalypse science fiction action tale entitled Lord of the Swastika. However, this is a pro-fascist narrative written by an alternate-history Adolf Hitler, who in this timeline emigrated from Germany to America in 1919 after the Great War, and used his modest artistic skills to become first a pulp-science fiction illustrator and later a successful science fiction writer, telling lurid, purple-prosed adventure stories under a thin SF-veneer.
Spinrad was intent on demonstrating just how close Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces — and much science fiction and fantasy literature — can be to the racist fantasies of Nazi Germany.[1] The nested narrative is followed by a faux scholarly analysis by a fictional literary critic, Homer Whipple, of New York University, which it is said to have been written in 1959.
by seemslikeadream » Sun Jun 23, 2013 1:28 pm
by seemslikeadream » Sun Jun 23, 2013 1:40 pm
Moyers was so outraged by Gill's article that he agreed to a debate televised by the local PBS affiliate on Oct. 24. "Brendan is describing a man I didn't know," Moyers said at that time.
November 27, 1989 Vol. 32 No. 22 Bill Moyers Angrily Defends Joseph Campbell Against Charges That His Wisdom Was Only a Myth
By Andrea Chambers, Maria Speidel
To the estimated 30 million viewers mesmerized by Bill Moyers's 1988 PBS series Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, the star seemed a sage and charismatic figure. Campbell's handsome face belied his 80-plus years, and his gentle, scholarly demeanor and skillful storytelling gave him an aura of spirituality. "He was a person of magic," filmmaker George Lucas, a longtime fan, once said. Moyers certainly appeared to be under his spell as Campbell invoked folk heroes of various cultures to illuminate the universality of the human spirit. All of them, Campbell argued, from Christ to John Lennon, were pursuing the same essential quest for a purpose in life. Campbell even coined a catchy little phrase for it: "Follow your bliss."
The moment the show aired, a tie-in book, engineered by Doubleday editor Jacqueline Onassis, soared onto the paperback best-seller list and is still there. Some of Campbell's 14 other books, including his 1949 classic The Hero with a Thousand Faces, began selling briskly. Unfortunately, Campbell—who had taught in relative obscurity at Sarah Lawrence College for 38 years—did not live to enjoy his fame: He died at 83 of heart failure, seven months before the PBS series aired. But if death denied Campbell the unexpected pleasures of a place in the sun, it also spared him from a recent attack on his character that has shocked his fans and sparked a lively debate.
Campbell's attacker is Brendan Gill, the crusty, aristocratic New Yorker writer. In a September article in the New York Review of Books, Gill, 75, accused Campbell of being a racist and a reactionary and denounced Campbell's call to "follow your bliss" as a slogan "sanctioning selfishness on a colossal scale—a scale that has become deplorably familiar to us in the Reagan and post-Reagan years."
Why did Gill wait until a year after the PBS show to attack a man who cannot defend himself? He says he is writing a book about people he has known in New York City, including Mary McCarthy and Dorothy Parker. Gill decided to do a chapter on Campbell, whom he had often run into at the exclusive Century club, because "posthumously he has become famous, was wielding quite a lot of influence thanks to the power of television, and I just thought it would be an appropriate time to raise the question, 'What did we really get here?' " he says. "I thought Bill Moyers had been snookered into accepting the word of a man he thought was some superior guru when indeed he was not. He was giving a message that was pap in my mind and little better than the message of Norman Vincent Peale."
Moyers was so outraged by Gill's article that he agreed to a debate televised by the local PBS affiliate on Oct. 24. "Brendan is describing a man I didn't know," Moyers said at that time.
Gill himself will cite only two examples of Campbell's racial prejudice, both secondhand. "When the astronauts landed on the moon," Gill wrote in the Review, "Joe made the repellent jest to a member of my family, who was a student of his... that the moon would be a good place to put the Jews." Gill also said he had heard of a classroom incident in which Campbell was talking about man's predatory nature and a student brought up the Holocaust. Campbell reportedly replied, "That's your problem." Though both instances suggest anti-Semitism, Gill claims that, in his experience, Campbell's prejudices "were across the board."
Following Gill's attack, more than 100 letters poured into the Review. Most correspondents insisted they had never heard Campbell utter a bigoted word, but "a strong minority," says co-editor Robert Silvers, supported Gill's view. Carol Wallace Orr, director of the University of Tennessee Press, who once worked with Campbell, wrote, "In addition to anti-Semitism, I remember in particular his vexation over blacks being admitted to Sarah Lawrence. That Joe Campbell has become a public hero is astonishing."
Conversations with Campbell's former students and colleagues reveal a similar split. "I'm Jewish, and he told everyone I was his best student," says former student and close friend Madeline Nold, who is writing a book about Campbell. Yet Arnold Krupat, who teaches literature at Sarah Lawrence and is Jewish, recalls being offended when, at a faculty party 20 years ago, Campbell told him, "Oh, yeah, I can always spot a Jew." Other Sarah Lawrence alumni remember Campbell more for his general stiff-backed social conservatism than for his views on race. He barred from his classroom anyone who participated in a 1969 student protest, and when Allan Gurganus, author of the current best-seller Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, petitioned to get into one of his courses in 1970, Campbell said Gurganus would have to cut his shoulder-length hair. Appalled that Campbell would be so insensitive to the mythology of long hair at that time, Gurganus "just walked away," he says.
Whatever the merits of Gill's case, retired professor of philosophy and religion Huston Smith, 70, who once taught with Campbell, offers the most common response to its timing. Yes, says Huston, he believes Campbell harbored some racial prejudice. But he will not elaborate. "He's no longer living. I don't think we need to probe those closets anymore," Huston says. "Those things did not come out in the series, so why drag them out now?"
—Andrea Chambers, Maria Speidel in New York City
After Death, a Writer Is Accused of Anti-Semitism
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
Published: November 06, 1989
Like one of the mythical prototypes he spent his life studying, Joseph Campbell has twice had a kind of return from the beyond. First, a series of interviews with him by Bill Moyers that were broadcast after Campbell died two years ago transformed a man who had spent almost his entire life as an obscure teacher and writer on mythology into a cult figure.
And now comes a different kind of resurrection. In an article in The New York Review of Books on Sept. 28, the author and critic Brendan Gill counters the worshipful attitude toward Campbell by accusing him of being an anti-Semite, a racist and an example of a political type that Mr. Gill calls the savant as reactionary.
The debate continues in the Thursday issue of The New York Review of Books, which includes an exchange between Mr. Gill and a group of letter writers defending Campbell, arguing that Mr. Gill has misconstrued Campbell's beliefs and work. On Oct. 24, Channel 13 in New York broadcast a debate on Campbell between Mr. Moyers and Mr. Gill that often became heated. Role Could Be Compromised
by brekin » Sun Jun 23, 2013 1:45 pm
Just happened to be reading Robert Ellwood's <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>The Politics of Myth: A Study of C.G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->. It's a brief overview of the tendency of mythologists to have reactionary political views.
Carl Jung said some very iffy things about Jewish and Aryan Psychology, Mircea Eliade had been a member of the ultra fascist Rumanian Iron Guard and Joseph Campbell was an unrepentant admirer of Adolf Hitler (he once abused the German writer Thomas Mann for not supporting Hitler), who to the end of his days served on the editorial panel of the 'race science' journal Mankind Quarterly and allegedly abused Jewish students at his college."
This shows it is very dangerous to ignore history - we were taught that at Cornell in the 50's.
Campbell's darkest side was his antisemitism, forcefully detailed by
Brendan Gill in the New York Review of Books (Sept. 28, 1989). The Larsens
dismiss it with a brief reference to "so-called bigotry." Campbell once
said he moved to Bronxville to escape from Jews, and that the moon would be
a good place to send them. He objected to blacks entering Sarah Lawrence.
He threatened to flunk, and once did, any student who engaged in leftist
political action.
The Markmans state "unequivocally" that my charging Campbell with anti-Semitism is false. They complain that I provide no evidence of his tolerating "'the menace of Hitler and the Nazis' and ...the evils resulting in the holocaust," and that the reason I do not do so is because the evidence does not exist. But the evidence does indeed exist; there are scores of witnesses (for example, Ms. Orr, in the letter printed above) to the anti-Semitic dicta that Campbell was given to uttering. When the astronauts landed on the moon, Joe made the repellent jest to a member of my family, who was a student of his at the time, that the moon would be a good place to put the Jews. The latest addition to this evidence is at hand. A correspondent, Carol Luther of San Anselmo, California, writes to say that she once attended a lecture in which Campbell recounted what he called a popular Indian fable (a favorite of Campbell's in old age), the gist of which was that we are not all mere mild grass-eating goats but, instead, are blood-thirsty, carnivorous tigers, who do well to prey upon whatever lower species of animal makes up our natural diet. When she heard Campbell tell this story, my correspondent was so upset my its ethical implications that, she writes, "I rose shaking from my chair and shouted, 'What about the six million who were gassed during World War II?' In response, Mr. Campbell simply shrugged and said 'That's your problem.'"
by seemslikeadream » Sun Jun 23, 2013 1:50 pm
by seemslikeadream » Sun Jun 23, 2013 1:57 pm
by Wombaticus Rex » Sun Jun 23, 2013 2:00 pm
Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Gill attended the Kingswood-Oxford School before graduating in 1936 from Yale University, where he was a member of Skull and Bones.
by seemslikeadream » Sun Jun 23, 2013 2:07 pm
by Canadian_watcher » Sun Jun 23, 2013 2:17 pm
by seemslikeadream » Sun Jun 23, 2013 2:22 pm
Wombaticus Rex » Sun Jun 23, 2013 1:00 pm wrote:Campbell didn't write Star Wars, though.
THE EUROOPEAN GRADUATE SCHOOL
Joseph Campbell, was an American professor, writer, speaker, anthropologist, and mythologist. He was born on March 26, 1904 and died on October 30, 1987. Joseph (John) Campbell is most famous for his work in the fields of both comparative mythology and comparative religion, and especially for his theory of “monomyth”, a term he borrowed from the renown Irish writer James Joyce (1882 - 1941). This is central concept which Joseph Campbell would also refer to as the “hero’s journey”. Joseph Campbell’s philosophy is today typically abridged to by what would become a popular phrase of his: “Follow your bliss”. Joseph Campbell would become a professor at Sarah Lawrence University and would stay there most of his career from 1934 to 1972. He would marry in 1938 with his student there, Jean Erdman (1916 - ), a dancer and choreographer.
Joseph Campbell was born on March 26th 1904 in New York City, where he also grew up in a Catholic family of upper middle class. As a child he would become passionate for Native American culture as a result of his father taking him to visit the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Joseph Campbell would quickly become an expert in many aspects of American Indian culture, and specifically its mythology. This would fashion a passion for him in myths and related tales, folk stories, legends, fables etc. It is through such readings that Joseph Campbell would start to notice how they all seemingly have common traits and that regardless of the culture to which they belong.
Joseph Campbell would attend Dartmouth College where he would first study biology and mathematics before changing his focus and study humanities at Columbia University. Campbell would end up graduating with a BA in English literature (1925) and an MA in medieval literature (1927) respectively. As a side note, he would also be a very good athlete, winning for instance several races.
Joseph Campbell would eventually come to study both Old French and Sanskrit at the University of Paris and at the University of Munich. Indeed, he would learn other languages on top of his native English, which would includ French, German, Japanese and Sanskrit. In 1924 he would meet the religious philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti by chance on a steamboat from Europe to the US. Together they would talk about Asian philosophy. This impromptu encounter would kindle Joseph Campbell’s lifelong study of Eastern thought. Joseph Campbell would later recall that the experience of talking with Jiddu Krishnamurti would have changed his life. After the trip Joseph Campbell would decide to stop being a practicing Catholic.
Having put his formal academic studies in hiatus at the completion of his Master’s degree, he would decide on his return to the United States to abandon the idea of getting a doctoral degree. Instead he would prefer to isolate himself in the woods not too far from New York City, spending his time reading intensely for five years. According to his poet and writer friend Robert Bly (1926 - ), he would have developed at the time a systematic program allowing him to read for nine hours each day. Joseph Campbell would later feel that it was during that period that he received his real education. Furthermore, it is at that point that he began developing his unique vision on the nature of life.
Joseph Campbell would begin his literary career by editing posthumous articles of the Indian culture scholar Heinrich Zimmer (1890 - 1943). He would also co-write with Henry Morton Robinson (1898 - 1961) the literary criticism work A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944), for which generations of readers who had struggled with James Joyce’s last work would be forever grateful. The term “monomyth” came from that late book, which Joseph Campbell would in turn use and develop further as a concept in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). He would affirm there that all myths follow the same archetypal patterns. The idea of “monomyth” is described further in the book such as in the following passage:
“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
Joseph Campbell would also study the ideas of the Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung (1875 - 1961), who had been a disciple of Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939). Carl Jung had studied under Sigmund Freud and would collaborate closely for six years with him before diverging theoretically, culminating in Carl Jung’s resignation of the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1910. The research Joseph Campbell would do on mythology sought to link the seemingly disparate stances of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, including their pivotal debate over the notion of collective unconscious. Another dissident member of Freud’s circle who would influence Campbell was Wilhelm Stekel (1868 - 1939), who as it turned out would be the first to apply Freud’s ideas about dreams, fantasies of the human mind, and the unconscious, to many fields such as anthropology and literature.
In a similar way as his call to “follow your bliss”, Joseph Campbell himself would follow an original path. While he would agree with Carl Jung’s texts explaining psychological phenomena by using archetypes - which in Jungian psychology is a primitive mental image inherited from early human ancestors and supposed to be present in the collective unconscious - Joseph Campbell would not agree with him on everything. Joseph Campbell had his own original convictions. Unlike Carl Jung he did not believe in either astrology or synchronicity.
The originality of Joseph Campbell’s theory would lie in the fusion of received ideas and symbolism. His iconoclastic approach would be as innovative as it was radical. Joseph Campbell’s position with regards to religion would be compared to Albert Einstein’s scientific work: the search for a unifying theory. Joseph Campbell believed that all religions of the world, that all rituals and deities, were only “masks” of a single transcendent truth that is elusive and ultimately unknowable. In this way, he would describe together Christ’s consciousness as well as that of the Buddha's as being of a level of perception above the typical binary oppositions such as good and evil. Needless to say that many fundamentalists consider his ideas to be heretical.
One of Joseph Campbell’s favorite quotes was from the Veda, the most ancient Hindu scriptures: “Truth is one, though the Sages know it as many.” Joseph Campbell was fascinated by what he saw as universal truths expressed in different forms across cultures. He would seek to demonstrate that Eastern and Western religions are the same deep down, and that neither is absolutely right, but rather that they both are looking for the unknown answer, which appears to be elusive ultimately. He would become interested in the various moral codes out there, considering them as both incorrect and yet necessary. Arguably, in the same way as certain postmodern relativists, he would see the notions of good and evil as highly subjective concepts. Like postmodernists he would understand that a moral system is necessary for anyone studying in field like mythology or psychology. In this way, Joseph Campbell would manage to merge modernist and postmodernist concepts, even though some of his interpretations would be such that he would be considered more as a postmodernist in the end.
In his series of four books entitled The Masks of God (1962 - 1968), Joseph Campbell would attempt to summarize the world’s main spiritual stories in order to support his ideas on the unity of the human species. This theory includes the notion that most of the belief systems of the world have a common geographical ancestor.
Joseph Campbell believed that all forms of spirituality are the search for a single unknown force, which he would come to qualify more as eminent rather than transcendent and which, according to him, is simultaneously inner and outer, in contrast with being only external, and from which all comes from. This is for him where everything exists and in which everything eventually returns. Joseph Campbell would refer to this force as the connotation of what he called “metaphor” (as in his 1986 book The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor As Myth and As Religion). Metaphors is the term with which he would name the various deities and spiritual objects in the world.
In this way all mythical heroes begin their journey after a call to adventure, which always implies that the hero leaves the environment in which he or she grew up. The hero typically then faces a first obstacle in the journey, which once faced usually with the help of a mentor or spiritual guide, allows entry into a more spiritual world, generally represented by for example a dark forest, a desert, a cave or even a mysterious island etc. At this point the hero undergoes in this new environment a series of tests allowing one to surpass the mentor and finally reach the object of the quest, which often is a reconciliation of the father, a sacred union, or a grand finale, that symbolically represents a kind of liberation. The hero then returns home completely transformed by the experience of his initiatory journey.
Joseph Campbell would maintain that almost all mythical heroes, regardless of the time and culture in which they live, follow such path, containing at least one of the parts of this structure. In more contemporary works, for example the Star Wars trilogy (made by his friend George Lucas), but also The Matrix or The Lord of the Rings, all very closely stick to the archetypal pattern delineated by Joseph Campbell. Even the TV series Lost follows very similarly with the role of Jack. According to Joseph Campbell heroes have a very important function in society because they can convey universal means to liberate oneself and thrive.
Over the years Joseph Campbell would inspire and influence many. Some include the musician Tori Amos, the writer and producer Christopher Vogler, as well as George Lucas who would state having used the ideas of The Hero with a Thousand Faces as well as other Joseph Campbell works in order to write Star Wars. Joseph Campbell would die from esophageal cancer on October 30th 1987 in Honolulu, Hawaii, at the age of 83.
by seemslikeadream » Sun Jun 23, 2013 2:27 pm
Canadian_watcher » Sun Jun 23, 2013 1:17 pm wrote:this is so handy, though. I am going to throw up a couple of websites claiming that my 'enemies' used to hang with the white power crowd and are 'big fans' of Adolf Hitler and then any time anyone brings those people up I can direct them to my little online smear factory!
problems solved
by Wombaticus Rex » Sun Jun 23, 2013 2:28 pm
seemslikeadream » Sun Jun 23, 2013 1:22 pm wrote:and I didn't any mention of anti-semitism here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell
Posthumous allegations of anti-Semitism[edit]
In 1989, two years after Joseph Campbell's death, cultural critic Brendan Gill aroused considerable controversy when he published an article that contained claims that Joseph Campbell was "anti-Semitic" and jokingly accused Campbell of "Satanism" because he looked so healthy at the age of eighty.[55] The title of Gill's article, "The Faces of Joseph Campbell", references not only Gill's 1987 book Many Masks: A life of Frank Lloyd Wright (1987), but also is a play upon the title of Campbell's four volume work The Masks of God (1959–1968). Gill offered no evidence to support his accusation of anti-Semitism, but did say both he and Joseph Campbell attended monthly meetings at the Century Club in New York City.[55]
Other scholars, students and associates of Campbell disagreed with Gill's general critiques as well as the accusation of antisemitism. A few months after Gill's article appeared, the New York Review of Books published a series of letters: "Brendan Gill vs. Defenders of Joseph Campbell" (cover title), "Joseph Campbell: An Exchange" (article title).[56] A number of the letters from former students and colleagues argued against the accusations. In particular, Professors Roberta and Peter Markman state that "we were dismayed because this piece of character assassination was unsupported by any evidence." Conversely, a number of former students and peers supported Gill's assessment, which led to the cancellation of a videotape presentation at Sarah Lawrence College to honor Campbell, where he had taught for 38 years. [57]
Professor of religion Robert Segal explained Gill's accusation of antisemitism in his own article, "Joseph Campbell on Jews and Judaism."[58] Segal suggests that this view of Campbell stems, at least partly, from his tendency to be blunt at times in critiquing certain aspects of organized religions—which, Campbell stated in his valedictory lecture series Transformations of Myth Through Time, was his job.[59]
Stephen Larsen and Robin Larsen, authors of the biography Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind (1991) and members of the founding board of advisors of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, argued against what they referred to as "the so-called anti-Semitic charge". They state: "For the record, Campbell did not belong to any organization that condoned racial or social bias, nor do we know of any other way in which he endorsed such viewpoints. During his lifetime, there was no record of such accusations of public bigotry".[60]
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 165 guests