Reflections on Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey

"The conquest of fear yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure—fearlessness and achievement." —Joseph Campbell

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This month marks what would have been Joseph Campbell’s 116th birthday. A revered mythologist who spent many of his birthdays teaching at Esalen, he once said, “A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.”

For many people, that was Joe. His fervent quest to understand and embody the courageous hero’s journey found in ancient myths—and to share how deeply embedded those tales were in the stories of our own lives—influenced millions of people.

His seminal book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and 1988’s Power of Myth television series with Bill Moyers, offered a road map to connect the mythic and modern-day worlds—a courageous act in that it allows individuals to explore and engage with archetypal patterns within themselves.

“Joe was a master teacher, a mentor to me and a colleague—my dancing partner in mind, body and spirit,” says Chungliang "Al" Huang, longtime Esalen faculty, Tai Ji teacher and founder of the Living Tao Foundation. “Our 10 consecutive years of teaching together during his birthday week [March 26] at Esalen had been the most treasured times in my lifelong learning. Joe helped us open our minds to world culture through teaching world mythology, which is applicable in everyday living.”

Born in White Plains, New York, Joe became consumed with Native American culture at a young age and it shaped his worldview. As an adult, he was greatly influenced by philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and when he spent nearly a year living in Pacific Grove, Calif., he found himself in great company with John and Carol Steinbeck, and marine biologist Ed Ricketts. The success of The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949 fueled his future works, The Hero’s Journey and Myths to Live By among them.

Joe had been a professor at Sarah Lawrence College when he began teaching at Esalen in 1965. Author and former Esalen faculty Lynne Kaufman recalls how inspired she was by Joe’s very first Esalen lecture that year, calling his mind “encyclopedic.”

“He never used a note,” Lynne says. “One of the stories he shared about the underworld was about Orpheus and Eurydice and he went on to introduce an important idea he had about how mythology, great literature and great art made you transparent to the transcendent. That speaks to what the entire experience was like that first time. Joe was masterful. The material moved through him. He was like this magnet for meaningful metaphors.”

When asked why she feels so many people were interested in Joe’s work, Lynne says that it brought people together and into the “one”—our commonality.
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“One of his great gifts was the story of the hero’s journey or the monomyth; that this human adventure was cross-cultural and applied to everyone’s life and that it wasn’t just for the Star Wars hero, although certainly George Lucas understood that and was a big fan of Joe’s work,” Lynne says.

“When Joe talked about ‘following your bliss,’ what he was talking about was following your path, something that was authentic and meaningful to you and disconnected to the wider community. The point of the hero’s journey is that after discovering the obstacles and discovering who you are, you bring that boom or gift back to the community. It was a sense of blending your individual passion with the wider, deeper good. He lived that life.”

A Hero For Our Times

When Joe died in 1987, Newsweek wrote, “Campbell has become one of the rarest of intellectuals in American life: a serious thinker who has been embraced by the popular culture.”

Today, Joe’s work continues to have tremendous influence. Even for Bill Moyers, who retired in 2017 from overseeing the website, BillMoyers.com. In February of this year, the website’s editor asked Bill a compelling question about society’s current state of affairs: What would Joseph Campbell think?

“I don’t know what in particular Joseph Campbell would say about our situation today,” Moyers wrote. “But I can imagine him lamenting, as he did when we talked some 30 years ago, our failure ‘to admit within ourselves the carnivorous, lecherous fever that is endemic to human nature.’ Malevolent greed was on the loose then—it was the mid-1980s as Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko popularized the mantra that “greed is good”—and the disease was infectious.

“So I am sure he would not be inclined to place all the blame for the vulgarity and decadence of today on a single individual, no matter how venal, but would say that one conspicuous culprit is the symptom, not the cause, of our discontent.”

Al believe that Joe’s wisdom can be used as a vital tool for society in 2020 and beyond.

“More than ever, Joe’s work will help heal our current divisive society to transcend nationalistic boundaries and find peace and harmony in the ‘oneness’ in the world,” he shares. “I believe Joe’s work can help all people on this planet become fully human again.”