"Power of Myth" Appreciation Thread

[JustPlainBryan]

*Originally posted by UnuMondo *
**Well, look at The Power of Myth. It’s organised as an interview with Campbell as if he was some sort of guru who has big answers for the world. Moyer is a yes-man who doesn’t inspire any critical thought about Campbell for the entire book.

**

I see it differently, but then, you already know that.

**Campbell is constantly talking about how people can feel better about themselves by applying mythic insight. How is this any better than nonsense like The Celestine Prophecy?

**

I’m still not understanding why Campbell deserves the vitriol you’re throwing at him. I haven’t read the Celestine Prophecy myself, so I can’t comment on it.

**Campbell needs to restrict what he’s saying to the material, and not how his field of study can empower power.

**

Sounds like you want to censor the poor guy. You know he’s been dead for 15 years, right? And frankly, I don’t see what is wrong with empowering people(I take it that’s what you were saying), either.

**
People may argue that he was just trying to present these concepts to the public in an accessible manner that avoids the dry boredom of academic writing, but this is IMHO the wrong way to go about it.

UnuMondo **

I do hold a dissenting opinion, of course, but I respect yours as well.

[rowrrbazzle]

I liked the series. My favorite parts were his retelling of “The Humbling of Indra” and his funny and apt put-down of PCs as containing “an Old Testament God with a lot of rules and no mercy!” I used it as a sig for a while. I wonder why the Mac community never picked up on that.

I didn’t find a recent article in Skeptical Inquirer. I think the article CalMeacham referred to is by Martin Gardner and it first appeared in the Washington Post’s Book World of 11/24/91 as a review of a Campbell biography. The article is reprinted in Gardner’s collection Weird Water and Fuzzy Logic. There it is titled, “Joseph Campbell, ‘Racist’”.

Gardner writes:

When Campbell said in a lecture it was natural for people to prey on “lower species of humans,” a woman recalled: “I rose shaking from my chair and shouted ‘What about the six million gassed in World War II?’…Mr. Campbell simply shrugged and said, ‘That’s your problem.’”

When Campbell’s student Eva Feldman told him she was Jewish, he became extremely agitated…“He began to spew out his garbage, about how the college was going Jewish and how he had moved to Bronxville to get away from the Jews and here they were taking over…He said that Jews had ruined 20th century culture and went through a list of Jewish artists.”

Among Gardners sources:[ul][]Amy Taubin, “Hit or Myth”, Village Voice, 12/12/89[]Brendan Gill, “The Faces of Joseph Campbell”, New York Review of Books, 9/28/89 and letters written in replySarah Churcher, “Moyer’s Myth-deeds”, Penthouse, 4/90[/ul]