Campbell clearly seized on this idea, to which his interest in myth, and his hardly less lively interest in art and literature, fitted so well. What was important was to look not so much at the dreary technical details of a story or sculpture as at the fascinating message encoded in its overall structures and leading archetypes. Who is on top?
Who is the rebellious hero? What is the dominant representation of the divine, the mother goddess or the patriarchal male or what? Campbell was also much impressed by Frobenius's notion of three stages of human development, a concept outlined twice, for example, in his 1972 Myths To Live By. 42
The first stage was that of primitive food gatherers, of nonliterate hunters, gatherers, planters. The second stage, commencing around 3500 B.C.E., was that of the
"Monumental" cultures: Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Greece, Rome, medieval Europe, modernity. All these civilizations were centered on a supposed divine cosmic order, often buttressed
Page 158
by a personal God, that gave the template for human achievement: cities were modeled on the those of heaven, empires were built in the name of God.
But today a new stage is emerging, a "global" culture based on realization that the sacred is within. Following Frobenius, Campbell also believed that we are now entering a new age, a third age of the spirit like that once prophesied by Joachim of Flora, a dawning "global age," an age of "boundless horizons" made up of the coming together of all the formerly separate cultural worlds of humanity. This idea seems to have especially crystallized for Campbell in interaction with the visionary sixties, despite his professed antagonism to some of its values. In this rising era, as in that esoteric decade, religion would move in a mystical direction. The laws and gods ruling Earth will be seen no longer as "out there," but within the hearts of humankind. In his most idealistic moods, Campbell no doubt viewed himself as a premier prophet of that new spiritual dispensation.
Campbell was clearly drawn to this modern version of the coming spiritual age. The first benighted stage had seen the sacred in the plant and the animal, the second projected it "aloft among the planets and beyond," but the third put it where it belonged, "in men, right here on earth." Its advent would be sung in modern myths, by men and women freed from the props of formal religion.
The last chapter of Creative Mythology, significantly called "The Death of 'God' and the Earthly Paradise," tells us that the "technological determinants" of the new age would be scientific method and powerdriven machine, even as writing and "coercive government" had been for the Monumental age. Furthermore: The distinguishing feature of the new mankind—as heralded in the lives and works of those through whom it was announced—has already been suggested in Wolfram's Parzivaclass="underline" that is to say, a mankind of individuals, selfmoved to ends proper to themselves, directed not by the constraint and noise of others, but each by his own inner voice. 43
Campbell then cited José Ortega y Gasset to the same effect, and also Joachim, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Mann, and Paul Tillich—a modern gnostic catalogue of saints.
The Leo Frobenius to whom Campbell owed this vision, incidentally, had an unusual career. Never an academic in the strict sense, he
Page 159
was an explorer and collector who spent much of his life in the African bush on expeditions sponsored by museums and universities. Singlemindedly preoccupied with African culture, he took no interest in the social and political aspects of that changing continent, and though not racist himself did not argue with Eurocentric assumptions characteristic of his time. Indeed, during the Weimar years Frobenius was a member of the "Doorn circle," which met regularly with the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II at his Dutch retreat for conversations on anthropology and archaeology, topics in which the former emperor had a lively interest. Although he may have had private reservations, Frobenius must also have listened courteously to the windy diatribes on religion, Jews, the superiority and inferiority of races, and the classical origins of German civilization, with which his imperial host, once described as a man of halfbaked ideas and fullyformed prejudices, was well known to afflict his guests. Later, during the Nazi regime, Frobenius served as director of the Frankfort enthographical museum until his death in 1938. 44
After reading Frobenius, Campbell wrote:
I learned that the essential form of the myth is a cycle, and that this cycle is a symbolic representation of the form of the soul, and that in the dreams and fancies of modern individuals (who have been brought up along the lines of a rational, practical education) these mythsymbols actually reappear—giving testimony of a persistence, even into modern times, of the myth power. 45
It was in the spirit of these words that Campbell was a student of modern mythology too. Always more of a literary scholar and critic at heart than a folklorist, much less an anthropologist, he always preferred to deal with myths as retailed by great writers and tellers from Homer and Hesiod through the medieval exponents of the Grail story to Joyce and Mann. In reviewing The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Stanley Edgar Hyman remarked that to Campbell folk literature is inferior,
"undeveloped or degenerate" in relation to the "great mythologies" of the higher civilizations, which of course usually had worthy renditions. 46 The relative distance of literary myth from "the people" was no great price to pay. For if, as Campbell believed, myths tell truly universal truth, that truth is as true for a poet or novelist of the first magnitude as for anyone else, and that writer can probably tell it better, in more truly universal language.
Page 160
In that light one may view Campbell's deep interest in two makers of contemporary mythologies, James Joyce and Thomas Mann, examples of consciousness shaped by the morphology of modernity. Campbell appreciated the Irish and the German novelists' ability to paint modern life as fractured and imperfect. Yet even the seemingly secular, unheroic, and comfortably middleclass lives of their characters come across as profoundly significant because the reader is also led to believe each contains an undying spark of the eternal flame. Campbell did not consider the shattering of heroic illusions in these modern literary myths as inconsistent with the archetypal thrust of mythology. To him the supreme modern meaning of myth was that all the imperfect persons we see around us, even the most vacant bourgeois, still have within them the same divine fire that animated the mythic hero. In Myths To Live By, Campbell points to Tonio Kröger in Mann's novel of the same name as such a hero, commenting:
Perfection in life does not exist; and if it did, it would be—not lovable but admirable, possibly even a bore. Perfection lacks personality. (All the Buddhas, they say, are perfect, perfect and therefore alike. Having gained release from the imperfections of this world, they have left it, never to return. But the Bodhisattvas, remaining, regard the lives and deeds of this imperfect world with eyes and tears of compassion.) For let us note well (and here is the high point of Mann's thinking on this subject): what is lovable about any human being is precisely his imperfections. The writer is to find the right words for these and to send them like arrows to their mark—but with a balm, the balm of love, on every point. For the mark, the imperfection, is exactly what is personal, human, natural, in the object, and the umbilical point of its life. 47