INTRODUCTION

Joseph Campbell’s long odyssey through the seas of ancient mythology was as much a spiritual quest as it was a scholarly one. Through his prodigious readings, writings, and travels, as well as his crossroads meetings with many of the century’s most influential men and women, he discovered remarkable parallels in our world’s mythological heritage and reinforcement for the deep conviction he had held since he was a young student: that there is a fundamental unity at the heart of nature.

“Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names,” he often quoted the Vedas. To synthesize the constant truths of history became the burning point of his life; to bridge the abyss between science and religion, mind and body, East and West, with the timeless linkage of myths became his task of tasks.

“My hope,” he wrote in his preface toThe Hero with a Thousand Faces, “is that a comparative elucidation may contribute to the perhaps not-quite-desperate cause of those forces that are working in the present world for unification, not in the name of some ecclesiastical or political empire, but in the name of human mutual understanding.”

Campbell’s comparative historical approach to mythology, religion, and literature, in contrast to the conventional scholar’s emphasis on cultural differences, concentrated on similarities. He was convinced that the common themes or archetypes in our sacred stories and images transcended the variations or cultural manifestations. Moreover, he believed that a re-viewing of such primordial images in mythology as the hero, death and resurrection, the virgin birth, and the promised land—the universal aspects of the soul, the blood memories—could reveal our common psychological roots. They could even show us, as seen from below, how the soul views itself.

“Myths are the ‘masks of God,’” he wrote, “through which men everywhere have sought to relate themselves to the wonders of existence.” The shock of recognition we receive from the timelessness of these images, from primal cultures to the most contemporary, he believed, was an illumination not only of our inward life but of the same deep spiritual ground from which all human life springs.

So as Albert Einstein pursued a unified field theory for the energies of the outer realms, Joseph Campbell dedicated himself to forging a kind of unified field theory of the equally prodigious energies of the inner realms, the personifications of which we call “the gods.” And what physicists call the “fabric of reality” Campbell called “the net of gems,” a sparkling metaphor from Hindu cosmology that is also a keen image for his own unique weaving together of myth, religion, science, and art. His teachers in those disciplines, he concluded, were all saying essentially the same thing: that there is a system of archetypal impulses that have stirred the human spirit throughout history. It is, as he synthesized it, “one grandiose song.”

The iconoclastic road he took as scholar, teacher, and writer was not unlike the “left-hand paths” he discovered in myriad myths: what the Kena Upaniṣads call the crossing of “a bridge as sharp as the edge o