Like most of Campbell's work the Masks series impressed literate laity more than specialists. Writing from the latter side about Occidental Mythology, Stephen P.
Dunn vividly declared in the American Anthropologist that
Campbell's book is in a sense a throwback to an earlier heroic age of anthropology, when the air was dark with flying hypotheses and comparisons rained down like acorns in autumn. Reading it, the casehardened social scientist derives the same sort of nostalgic halfshamefaced pleasure as the ordinary adult would from reading G. A. Henty or Robin Hood to his children. Campbell uses the traditional equipment and methods of the literary critic, for whom comparison and analogy are tantamount to proof and fact. He writes in a curiously archaic style—full of rhetorical questions, exclamations of wonder and delight, and expostulations directed at the reader, or perhaps at the author's other self—which is charming about a third of the time and rather annoying the rest. 27
Like Eliade, Campbell was not really a social scientist, and those in the latter camp could tell. Dunn felt that Campbell did not distinguish sufficiently between great and little traditions of religion; none of the latter, so far as he was aware, really embraced the mysticism or pantheism that he saw behind all myth. Nor were his views on Hebrew or Greek religion particularly novel. But a poet, as Campbell was at heart, can see what he wants in the lives and beliefs of nonpoetic folk, and in so doing make their lives sing.
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An interesting document of Campbell's EastWest wobbling is a 1967 paper, "The Secularization of the Sacred." 28 This curious essay has the feel of something transitional. It commenced with rather standard remonstrances against the "anthropomorphic" God of the West, at first exalting Eastern religions over the Western for their ability to see the divine in everything rather than in a particular place, and because the East seems to point beyond the image rather than limiting God to the literal and the particular.
But then Campbell came to the theology of love and the transformation of human to divine love, of eros to agape, kama to prema. (His study of this process is one of his more significant contributions to comparative religion.) He saw this exchange as an important sector of several spiritual traditions. In bhakti, love for the particular form becomes love for the universal divine. In Christianity it becomes a relationship in which love for the human beloved is more and more replaced by the love of God for divine lovers like Saint Francis and Saint Bonaventure. But, in a move Campbell loudly applauded, in the West pagan love was then surreptitiously revived in stories like Tristan and Isolde or Parsifal, in which the heroes and heroines remain separate and earthly in all their glory.
In making this point, "The Secularization of the Sacred" became an affirmation of something early in CeltoGermanic and GrecoRoman culture, which was subsequently weakened by Christianity with its "Semitic" absolutizing of the particular sacred. "It is my thought, that the wealth and glory of the western world, and of the modern world as well (insofar as it is still in spirit, western) is a function of this respect for the individual, not as a member of some sanctified consensus through which he is given worth." 29
Those words were written at about the same time as turmoil over the great trauma of the late sixties, Vietnam, raged through the United States. Regarding the war, Campbell's contrarian instincts were to rile up. In fact, as Campbell's biographers, Stephen and Robin Larsen, point out, his position in 1967 had similarities as well as differences with that taken in the 1940 "Permanent Human Values" speech. During World War II he favored nonintervention. But in the sixties, while he continued to loathe war, he seemed to believe that communism represented such a mindenslaving system that violent opposition to it was justified. However his main concern at Sarah Lawrence was, as in 1940, that students should be students, concerned with more permanent values
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than those of daytoday politics, or the activism associated with the decade. With perhaps a touch of selfdeception, he saw himself as a nonpolitical classroom professor, and insisted he was there to teach, and students on campus there to learn what he had to teach and for no other reason.
The Larsens state that, contrary to what was sometimes alleged, Campbell did not actually fail students for political activism as such, but did hold them responsible for material presented in class even during strikes and demonstrations. They describe the late sixties atmosphere at Sarah Lawrence vividly, evoking the highly visible posters of Mao, the Vietcong flags, and the student strikes, which so inflamed the conservative mythologist, though he himself had been infatuated with communism in the early thirties. 30 The Larsens were friends of Campbell and their biography is generally sympathetic, though they acknowledge that in the Vietnam era they "leaned to the left" and often disputed Campbell's prowar Republicanism with him, trying to get him to see such sixties dramas as the march on the Pentagon sympathetically as contemporary events of mythic dimension. They attribute his thenunpopular (at least in the circles in which he and they generally moved) stance to his visceral anticommunism, his idealization of American individualism, and his stubborn independence. They point out that later he also had problems with the Republicanism of the eighties on three important points: its alliance with Christian fundamentalism (he believed strongly in separation of church and state, and did not care for either Catholic or Protestant authoritarianism), its opposition to abortion (perhaps because of his radical individualism, he believed in a woman's right to choice), and the GOP's inadequate stand on ecology (a great lover of nature, Campbell supported strong measures for its protection). As the decade advanced, he claimed he was so disillusioned with all parties that he might not vote at all.
It might also be added that Campbell enjoyed friendship with, and influenced, a number of prominent figures of the sixties and seventies who did not necessarily share his political views but appreciated his creative intellect and who applied his mythic vision to their art or social role. In addition to the filmmaker George Lucas, these included Bob Dylan, The Grateful Dead, the psychologist Joan Halifax, and California governor Jerry Brown.
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How did Campbell come by the conservatism that set him apart from what otherwise ought to have been a very congenial decade for one of his vision? One view is presented in Toby Johnson's The Myth of the Great Secret, an interesting account of the author's personal movement away from conventional Roman Catholicism under the aegis of Campbell's perception of myth. Johnson, who did not and does not share Campbell's politics, reports he was quite taken aback when, unaware of Campbell's views, he first met him in 1971, during the years of upheaval over Vietnam, and found that his mentor identified himself as a Republican and a supporter of Nixon and the war. (Johnson had, in fact, steeled himself to oppose the war through the power of certain lines about the hero's resolve in Campbell's 1949 classic, The Hero With a Thousand Faces.) He found also that Campbell was opposed to sixtiesstyle sexual and psychedelic drug experimentation, and "sounded like he'd been listening to too much Art Linkletter." 31