Is Joseph Campbell new age crap?
I’m going out on a limb here and guessing that you’re asking about Joseph Campbell’s interests and theories as opposed to the man himself (he always seemed pretty nice whenever I heard him speak, nothing particularly “crappy” about him). As to what I think your question is - no, I don’t think of him as “new age.” He had an interest in, and theories on, world mythologies and how many of the world’s religions, myths, and efforts to explain the unexplainable had a certain commonality, but I never got too much more from his than that. Like Jung, he believed that certain archetypes exist and have a universal meaning, but he never claimed that this was the result of anything “new agey.”
He also had great taste in music - I saw him at a few Grateful Dead shows.
Joseph Campbell had been writing since the 1940s, so if your definition of “New Age” requires that it be recent, the answer would be “no” – His book The Hero with a Thousand Faces came out in 1948, and his series The Masks of God was completed before 1970.
Campbell’s work was certainly embraced by “New Age” types. The four-cassette audio edition of Hero with a Thousand Faces that I own is put out by Audio Renaissance, which has a rep for New Age stuff. It’s great listening. He got a big posthumous boost when Bill Moyers aired his interviews with Campbell on PBS and on tape (the interviews were recorded at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch. Lucas acknowledged his debt to Campbell in creating “Star Wars”, and that didn’t hurt, either).
I have listened to tapes of Campbell over and over in my car, and it has certainly helped me in writing my book. I learned of the legend of kirtimukkha from THWATF. But I have to note that I don’t agree with Campbell at many points. Campbell was a Jungian and a Freudian, and I’m not. I don’t hold with his theory of the Monomyth, which seems to reduce most myths to a single form. My own interpretation of the myth of Medusa is significantly different from his.
There is a Joseph Campbell Foundation, and they have a pretty glitzy website on-line. Look it up for further information.
As for his personal beliefs and personality, he sounds genial enough, but I don’t know any more than that. The first time I heard his voice on tape it reminded me of Ed Wynn. But he might have appreciated that – he certainly tried to deflate the pomposity associated with the study of myth, while not degrading it.
On the flip side, Martin Gardner wrote a brief piece about him in The Skeptical Inquirer within the past year that allegedly shows his darker side.