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lifelong interest in American Indian lore, recommended that the Sarah Lawrence professor write the scholarly commentary on that text. After 1943, Campbell continued to prepare Zimmer's works for posthumous publication in the Bollingen series, sometimes slipping in his own writing when the older scholar's notes were disconnected or incoherent. The results were such classics of Indology under Zimmer's name as Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization (1946), The King and the Corpse (1948), the magisterial Philosophies of India (1941), and the twovolume Art of Indian Asia (1955). Though it required putting aside his own work for a time, the Zimmer efforts undoubtedly laid a very solid foundation for a mythological career.
The Zimmer and Wolff connections enabled Campbell to become attached to the famous Eranos conferences held at the villa of Frau FroebeKaptayn in Ascona, Switzerland, overlooking the deep blue waters of Lake Maggiore. These more or less annual conferences brought together the cream of the world's mythology and history of religions scholars: persons of the rank of Eliade, Gershom Scholem who had revived the study of Jewish kabbalah, the student of Gnosticism Giles Quispel, Henri Corbin of Iranian mysticism, D. T. Suzuki the apostle of Zen, and many others, including he who was by now the grand old man of them all, Carl Jung.
Campbell had been set to work in 1946 by Pantheon preparing selections from seventeen previous Jahrbücher (Annuals) of the Eranos conferences for English publication in the Bollingen series. In 1953, 1957, and 1959 Campbell attended the legendary conclaves himself, presenting papers at the last two. After the 1953
event, he and his wife Jean had the rare privilege of an invitation from Jung to visit him at his medieval tower retreat, Bollingen, outside Zurich. The conversation moved over many topics; Jean noted that when speaking of psychology and mythology, the great man was brilliant and wide ranging, but on social or political issues, "he became more parochial, sort of like a smalltown Swiss." 12
In the meantime, Campbell's own writing was continuing apace. His first book, written with Henry Morton Robinson (later author of the bestselling novel, The Cardinal), was on James Joyce. A Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake (1944) consummated his daring discovery of Joyce in the Paris of the twenties.
The big event, however, which truly transformed Joseph Campbell into a major figure in the world of mythology and of midcentury
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culture generally, was the publication in 1949 of his own Bollingen series book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 13 This sweeping and engrossing study of the hero myth was Campbell's first singleauthored work. It had a definite influence on a generation of literary critics and historians of religion.
Campbell's twopage preface splendidly defined the context and mission of the book in short space. He began, significantly, with a few lines from Sigmund Freud's The Future of an Illusion: "The truth contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and systematically disguised, that the mass of mankind cannot recognize them as truth." Campbell wrote, of course, in the heyday of Freudian psychoanalysis as an intellectual vogue, and the Freudian Campbell behind the Jungian version must never be forgotten. Yet the lines bespeak Campbell even more than the Viennese doctor. They are Campbell's way of saying that the whole mythological enterprise must be understood not as mere antiquarianism, but an important intellectual venture conducted in the midst of the modern world, with full awareness of its thought currents and its needs. Campbell's mythology readily concedes all that modern skepticism claims, and still argues for the discipline's contemporary importance.
Campbell then proceeded to explain what he was doing in his own words: "It is the purpose of the present book to uncover some of the truths disguised for us under the figures of religion and mythology by bringing together a multitude of nottoodifficult examples and letting the ancient meaning become apparent of itself." When this is done, using psychoanalysis as a tool, "the parallels will be immediately apparent; and these will develop a vast and amazingly constant statement of the basic truths by which man has lived throughout the millenniums of his residence on the planet." This unified story he called, after James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake, the
"monomyth." That was the account of the hero's adventure from departure through initiation to return, where he underwent along the way such intriguingly named experiences as ''The Crossing of the First Threshold," "The Belly of the Whale," "The Meeting with the Goddess," and "Atonement with the Father," after which he becomes "Master of Two Worlds." A second part of the book, "The Cosmogonic Cycle," discusses such related themes as the Virgin Birth and various forms of the hero: warrior, lover, emperor, redeemer, saint. In all, the book has Campbell
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doing what he does best: he tells stories and tells them well, bringing them together with profoundseeming undergirdings of timeless meaning, and says it is all very important for our lives today.
The basic monomyth informs us that the mythological hero, setting out from an everyday home, is lured or is carried away or proceeds to the threshold of adventure.
He defeats a shadowy presence that guards the gateway, enters a dark passageway or even death, meets many unfamiliar forces, some of which give him threatening
"tests," some of which offer magical aid. At the climax of the quest he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward: sacred marriage or sexual union with the goddess of the world, reconciliation with the father, his own divinization, or a mighty gift to bring back to the world. He then undertakes the final work of return, in which, transformed, he reenters the place from whence he set out. 14
Hero resonated with its times. The Bollingen aura was in the air. In some circles, the midcentury intellectual mood was saturated with myths, dreams, mysticism, psychoanalysis, and archetypes. Stanley Edgar Hyman, reviewing Hero in the Kenyon Review, remarked that "Myth is the new intellectual fashion, apparently." He was not fully impressed, however. Agreeing that myths can tell "basic truths," he found Campbell a bit too general and "mystical." One can say "yes'' to the notion that myths have meaning, but still ask "when, and to whom?" "The study of myth continues to be the least rational of the humanities. Joseph Campbell . . . now comes forward with an amiably befuddled volume the purpose of which is to discover the 'secret' truths concealed in the myths and to apply these truths to our desperate modern situation." Hyman also pertinently noted that Campbell was still fundamentally literary; folk tales were to him inferior, "undeveloped or degenerate" in relation to the "great mythologies" of the higher civilizations. 15 The distinguished folklorist Richard Dorson also later observed that Campbell emphasized the universal, dreamlike quality of myth, calling attention to the fact that he was actually a "professor of literature." 16
Significantly, Hero, like most of Campbell's work, went down better with literary and drama critics, and the literate public, than with professional folklorists or anthropologists. Campbell, basking in his popular success, came to take this phenomenon in stride. The issues were larger, in his mind, than whether a particular volume was "amiably befuddled." They were no doubt also larger than the later com