Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion

Campbell’s Power Derived from Occupying the Exact Blind Spot Between Religion and Religious Studies

The most revealing datum in this entire collection appears in William Doty’s opening essay: a computerized bibliographic search for “Joseph Campbell” + “Religious Studies” returned zero results. Campbell’s principal subject matter — myth, ritual, the sacred, transformation of consciousness — constitutes the core curriculum of the academic study of religion, yet the profession treated him as invisible. Doty’s careful accounting shows 108 reviews of Campbell in non-professional venues against only fourteen in Religious Studies journals. Noel’s volume does not merely note this gap; it demonstrates that the gap was productive. Campbell’s massive cultural influence — from Star Wars to the Moyers interviews — depended on his refusal to speak the language of the guild. His mythography operated as what Doty calls a “counter-demythologization”: where Bultmann and the mid-century theologians stripped ancient narratives of their mythic garments to extract existential kernels, Campbell re-clothed contemporary experience in archaic imagery. The latest incarnation of Oedipus stands on Forty-second Street. This reversal could not have occurred within the discipline. It required a figure who would treat theology as “time-hardened dogmatism” while performing, as Doty insists, a genuinely religious act — what the Shinto priest called dancing rather than theologizing. Compare this structural position to James Hillman’s in Re-Visioning Psychology: both Campbell and Hillman drew from the same Jungian well, both refused orthodox theological framing, and both generated enormous influence outside their nominal disciplines. But where Hillman turned toward the soul’s pathologizing as its own form of meaning-making, Campbell insisted on bliss. The difference matters enormously for understanding what this volume is actually adjudicating.

The Jung-Campbell Fracture Is Not a Footnote but the Central Theoretical Event of the Collection

Richard Underwood’s essay is the intellectual spine of the book, and its argument deserves far more attention than it has received. Underwood demonstrates that Campbell’s relationship to Jung was not one of discipleship but of strategic appropriation followed by decisive departure. The congruence is real: both men grounded their work in the psychology of the unconscious, both treated the hero-journey as the master narrative of psychic transformation, and both insisted that myth facilitates individuation — the emergence of authentic selfhood from collective identification. But Underwood locates the fracture point with precision. Jung remains, in his telling phrase, “a Gnostic Christian”: his myth of alchemy was “a disguised Christianity” and “a disguised-symbolic prefiguration of his own analytical psychology.” Jung’s journey circles the mandala — the quaternary image of psychic wholeness — and returns the individual to the symbol’s numinous center. Campbell, raised Catholic, breaks through the mandala entirely. Where Jung finds in the Roman Mass a living mystery and counsels real Catholics to “stick to it,” Campbell moves toward what Underwood calls a “Buddhist-like experience of the No-thing in the Every-thing.” The “follow your bliss” injunction, properly understood, presupposes completion of the adaptive-pedagogical stage — the painful dharmic discipline — before the shattering occurs. Without that prerequisite, as Underwood warns, it degenerates into “the most vacuous and hedonistic dimensions of the worst aspects of New Ageism.” This distinction maps directly onto Edward Edinger’s work in Ego and Archetype, where the ego-Self axis must be established before it can be relativized. Campbell’s Buddhist turn suggests that for him the axis is not a permanent structure but a scaffold to be dismantled. The kitchen boy in Campbell’s retelling of the Zen competition — “Since nothing at the root exists, on what should what dust alight?” — is the anti-Edinger: no axis, no archetype, no mirror to polish. Joyce, not Jung, was Campbell’s true initiator. Finnegans Wake was, as Underwood puts it, “the koan that opened up Campbell’s vision,” and the essay argues persuasively that most criticism of Campbell fails because it ignores the aesthetic-shamanic dimension that Joyce activated in him.

Universalism as Both Campbell’s Greatest Gift and His Most Dangerous Evasion

Robert Segal’s essay and Karen King’s feminist-gnostic critique together expose the structural problem in Campbell’s “perennial philosophy.” Segal demonstrates that Campbell is not merely noting cross-cultural similarities but making an ontological claim: all differences among myths are “trivial,” all local expressions are “masks” of elementary ideas. His strategy for handling Judaism — the tradition most resistant to his universalism — is simply to override Jewish self-interpretation, insisting that the “jealous God” of Exodus is really a locally contracted symbol of the same transcendent mystery found everywhere else. This is not scholarship; it is theological imperialism conducted in the register of tolerance. King sharpens the critique by showing that Campbell’s supposedly universal principles are “largely expressions of American individualism and democracy.” His celebration of the troubadours’ amor as superior to Indian agape, his disdain for institutions, his emphasis on personal experience over communal obligation — these are not discoveries extracted from the world’s myths but projections of a specific cultural moment onto them. Christine Downing’s feminist response, signaled in the table of contents, further pressures this framework: the hero with a thousand faces has remarkably few female ones. Harold Coward’s essay on Campbell and Eastern religions offers a partial defense, showing that Campbell’s embrace of Indian models — the four asramas, Kundalini Yoga, the Indra myth — went far beyond Jung’s cautious Orientalism. But even Coward acknowledges that Campbell’s use of Eastern traditions risks counseling “retreat from the clash of competing myths of the daily world into one’s own private spiritual garden.” The narcissistic potential is real, and this volume does not resolve it so much as map its coordinates.

Why This Collection Remains Indispensable for Anyone Working at the Intersection of Myth and Psyche

Walter Gulick’s contribution provides the volume’s most original conceptual tool: the threefold typology of religious meaning — originative, secondary, and tertiary. Campbell’s genius, Gulick argues, was his ability to take material functioning at the tertiary level (conventional, socialized, emotionally inert) and reanimate it so that it approached originative force. This is not a small achievement. It explains why audiences responded to the Moyers interviews with “classical theological and metaphysical questions” rather than mere entertainment — and why, as Doty reports, churches and synagogues had no idea what to do with him. For readers grounded in depth psychology through Jung, Hillman, or Edinger, Noel’s collection does something no single-author work can: it triangulates Campbell from ten disciplinary positions simultaneously, revealing both the power and the pathology of the monomyth. It is the only scholarly anthology that treats Campbell’s work with the seriousness it deserves while refusing the hagiographic tone of the Campbell industry. Anyone who has felt the pull of “follow your bliss” and sensed that something essential was being both offered and withheld will find here the precise articulation of what that something is.