The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Two things about his study of myth are worth noting. First, where many of his colleagues focused on the specifics of a particular culture’s myths, exploring what made that society’s foundational stories unique, Campbell was fascinated with the ways in which all myths told what he called “the one great story of mankind.”

The other interesting thing about Campbell’s approach to mythology was that he was very focused on the humanist part of the religious equation, rather than the theological. While he studied, wrote, and lectured on humanity’s metaphysical traditions for over sixty years, Campbell’s focus was not on the question “What is out there?” but rather on the question, “Why do we tell the stories that we do about whatever it is that is out there?”

As a young man, he studied for a doctorate in medieval literature at New York’s prestigious Columbia University. His studies focused on the tales of England’s King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, which were largely written in Old French and Old German, and so he applied to study at the University of Paris-Sorbonne in France, where he arrived in 1927.

Paris at that time was a center of Modernist culture and new ideas. While studying there (as well as at the University of Munich in Germany), Campbell was exposed not only to the great, groundbreaking novels of James Joyce and Thomas Mann and the radical art of Pablo Picasso, Antoine Bourdelle, and Paul Klee, all of whom integrated mythic motifs into their very modern work, but also to the revolutionary psychological teachings of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. These last two brought young Joseph Campbell to the epiphany that, as he would later put it, “Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths.”^[1] Campbell was also exposed to the great mythic traditions of India and East Asia. To him, it seemed clear: everything that he was studying, from contemporary artists (“the modern mythmakers”^[2]), to modern scientists, to ancient texts, to the legends of Arthur and his knights all seemed to be speaking in the same language — the language of myth. Campbell was so excited by what he was learning that he went back to New York in October, 1929 to tell his doctoral advisers about what he had learned:

I came back to the United States about two weekends before the Wall Street Crash. And there wasn’t a job in the world. I went back up to Columbia to go on with my work on the Ph.D. and told them, “This whole thing has opened out.”

“Oh, no,” they said. “You don’t follow that. You stay where you were before you went to Europe.”

Well, I just said, “To hell with it.”^[3]

He quit the doctoral program.

The global economic disaster that is called in the United States the Great Depression continued through the 1930s, and like many other people, Campbell was unemployed for five years. And so he read. All of the things that the doctoral committee had wanted him to forget about, he now studied at his leisure: modern literature, history, philosophy, Asian religion, psychology, Celtic legends, Native American legends, African legends — anything he could find.

In 1934, he got a job teaching at Sarah Lawrence College, a new liberal arts college for women. He would teach there until his retirement in 1972.

He was hired as a literature professor, but his classes were all informed by his mythological studies. Soon, his Introduction to Mythology class became one of the most popular at the college.

A decade later, a major New York publisher approached Campbell and asked him to write a collection of myths — “a modern Bullfinch.”^[4]

I said, “I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.”

They said, “What would you like to do?”

I said, “I’d like to write a book on how to read a myth.”^[5]

He would work on that book over the next five years, incorporating everything that he had learned, both from the various mythological traditions around the world and from modern psychology. As he worked, he began to focus on the single hero story that seemed to be repeating itself everywhere — in the oldest Sumerian epics, in folktales from the Pacific Islands and the Siberian forests and the African savannah, in the lives of great religious heroes like Gautama Śakyamūni and Jesus, in the case notes of psychiatric patients, and in the modern novels of authors like Joyce and Mann. Campbell described that universal story as follows:

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.^[6]

Because the hero that he was describing was every hero, and, looked at psychologically, was every individual, Campbell chose to title his work The Hero with a Thousand Faces.