The Power of Myth

squeen

8, 8, I forget what is for
I just started re-watching Bill Moyer's interviews with Joseph Campbell, "The Power of Myth". It's currently streaming on Netflix.

I know this is old-news and in many ways so over-referenced by modern cinema (after the success of Star Wars) that you might feel that the well has been tapped dry.

Personally, in the context of D&D content creation, I would beg to differ. It's been a couple decades since I first saw it, and I am really digging it now---just as much as viewing it on bootlegged VHS-tape back in college

I'll try to summarize my thoughts after I finish it, but here's a teaser: with respect to the notion of portals into "the Mythic Underworld" that has come up repeatedly in the OSR blogosphere---Campbell makes the point (with regards to the reoccurring Jonah-and-the-Whale myths) that the portal takes the form of the water's surface. Neat, huh?
 
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Ice

*eyeroll*
I just started re-watching Bill Moyer's interviews with Joseph Campbell, "The Power of Myth". It's currently streaming on Netflix.

I know this is old-news and in many ways so over-referenced by modern cinema (after the success of Star Wars) that you might feel that the well has been tapped dry.

Personally, in the context of D&D content creation, I would beg to differ. It's been a couple decades since I first saw it, and I am really digging it now---just as much as viewing it on bootlegged VHS-tape back in college

I'll try to summarize my thoughts after I finish it, but here's a teaser: with respect to the notion of portals into "the Mythic Underworld" that has come up repeatedly in the OSR blogosphere---Campbell makes the point (with regards to the reoccurring Jonah-and-the-Whale myths) that the portal takes the form of the water's surface. Neat, huh?
That's what it is in Beowulf, too. Interesting.


I've been reading The Hero with A Thousand Faces again recently. It's great. It's my favorite modern philosophy, even considering that Joseph Campbell references Freud a lot and I have a serious axe to grind with Freud.

Have you read any of his books?
 

squeen

8, 8, I forget what is for
No. I had a copy of Hero but lost it before I got a chance to read it. I think I'll hit library.

Got busy at work and stopped half-way through re-watching the series too (was just collapsing into bed at the end of the day--getting up at 4am)...I need to finish it.

I think Freud was seriously en vogue in the 1950's but has fallen out of favor pretty much across the board in the subsequent decades.
 

squeen

8, 8, I forget what is for
From "Fairy Tales" by G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936):


The Frog Prince illustrated by Walter Crane"If you really read the fairy-tales you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other -- the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales. The whole happiness of fairyland hangs upon a thread, upon one thread. Cinderella may have a dress woven on supernatural looms and blazing with unearthly brilliance; but she must be back when the clock strikes twelve. The king may invite fairies to the christening, but he must invite all the fairies or frightful results will follow. Bluebeard's wife may open all doors but one. A promise is broken to a cat, and the whole world goes wrong. A promise is broken to a yellow dwarf, and the whole world goes wrong. A girl may be the bride of the God of Love himself if she never tries to see him; she sees him, and he vanishes away. A girl is given a box on condition she does not open it; she opens it, and all the evils of this world rush out at her. A man and woman are put in a garden on condition that they do not eat one fruit: they eat it, and lose their joy in all the fruits of the earth.
 

squeen

8, 8, I forget what is for
Wikipedia said:
Celtic mythology

The Fisher King appears first in Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval, the Story of the Grail in the late 12th century, but the character's roots may lie in Celtic mythology.[1] He may be derived more or less directly from the figure of Brân the Blessed in the Mabinogion.[2] In the Second Branch, Bran has a cauldron that can resurrect the dead (albeit imperfectly; those thus revived cannot speak) which he gives to the king of Ireland as a wedding gift for him and Bran's sister Branwen. Later, Bran wages war on the Irish and is wounded in the foot or leg, and the cauldron is destroyed. He asks his followers to sever his head and take it back to Britain, and his head continues talking and keeps them company on their trip. The group lands on the island of Gwales, where they spend 80 years in a castle of joy and abundance, but finally they leave and bury Bran's head in London.
I'm using that cauldron somewhere...
 

Maynard

*eyeroll*
I wrote a paper on the movement from Cu Chulain myth ---> Tristan ----> El Cid. Same story moving around the British isles for hundreds of years and being retold almost beat for beat in Spain 1100. Most of these stories focus on the hero's journey as a reflection on a mans place in society. Childhood ---> Proving yourself as a warrior ----> society likes warriors, they enjoy the benefit of a "battle rage" ----> warrior comes home and society needs to control their rage and put it to use for nonviolent ends. Most of the control implements are women and marriage institutions.
 

The1True

My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
I thought it was Finn McCool who had his much younger wife stolen a-la Tristan e Isolde/Arthur and Guinevere etc?

Cu Chulain is more a Hercules/Arthur parallel im(not so)ho right down to the tragic ascension. El Cid gets that immortal send off as well.

Bran's Cauldron is the Cauldron of The Dagda. It gets around a LOT in ancient myth and folklore!
 

squeen

8, 8, I forget what is for
The Un-dry Cauldron!

"In a poem about Mag Muirthemne, the Dagda banishes an octopus with his "mace of wrath"...", which I read as "brandishes", setting my mind a-whirl.

Gonna get me an Octopus Mace.:cool:
 

grodog

*eyeroll*
I've been reading The Hero with A Thousand Faces again recently. It's great. It's my favorite modern philosophy, even considering that Joseph Campbell references Freud a lot and I have a serious axe to grind with Freud.

Have you read any of his books?
FWIW, Campbell's work had, I thought, largely been discredited except for its inspirational value to enterprising DMs ;) See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell#Academic_reception_and_criticism for a very high-level summary, if you're interested in the creditibility of his works (vs. their inspirational value, for which they still remain useful).

If you do like Campbell's approach, and are interested in folklore research that you can also leverage, check out Vladimir Propp's _Morphology of the Folktale_. Quite good. Quick summary at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp#Narrative_structure

Allan.
 

squeen

8, 8, I forget what is for
FWIW, Campbell's work had, I thought, largely been discredited except for its inspirational value to enterprising DMs ;) See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell#Academic_reception_and_criticism for a very high-level summary, if you're interested in the creditibility of his works (vs. their inspirational value, for which they still remain useful).

Allan.
From the Wikipedia page
Wiki said:
"...It seems that the world is full of self-proclaimed experts in folklore, and a few, such as Campbell, have been accepted as such by the general public (and public television, in the case of Campbell)".
Says self-proclaimed folklore expert Alan Dundes. Irony, apparently, lost on the speaker.

I have grown tired of "expert opinions" to be sure. There is a difference between the hard sciences where things can be dis-proven (only the negative) by a careful, independently verified, scientific experiment, and the soft-science opinion parade. And yet, opinionated and controversial stances (and sloppy research) are paraded as "fact" because the source is cited to be an "expert's".

It would take a whole lot more than peer-rivalry protests in the squishy subject of folklore to convince me Campbell was completely off base. As we now know from the internet, everyone has an opinion---including "experts".
 

Beoric

8, 8, I forget what is for
I have grown tired of "expert opinions" to be sure. There is a difference between the hard sciences where things can be dis-proven (only the negative) by a careful, independently verified, scientific experiment, and the soft-science opinion parade. And yet, opinionated and controversial stances (and sloppy research) are paraded as "fact" because the source is cited to be an "expert's".

It would take a whole lot more than peer-rivalry protests in the squishy subject of folklore to convince me Campbell was completely off base. As we now know from the internet, everyone has an opinion---including "experts".
Every academic discipline has its own standards and methods of analysis which; the fact they they may be opaque to outsiders does not, in and of itself, make them illegitimate. Nor does the fact that they are not hard science.

This is why I think the death of the liberal arts education has had such a detrimental effect on society globally. Classics profs have a different perspective on events than history profs, the history profs different from the political science profs, the poli sci profs than the economics profs, the economics profs than the business profs, the physics profs than my chem profs, sociology, psychology and anthropology than biology. All have something useful to say in context, and you are richer for being exposed to so many different ways of approaching a problem as possible. This avoids the problem of being a person with a hammer who sees everything as a nail.

When evaluating academic work it is one's peers, even the biased ones, who can access the best tools to do the evaluation. I have been hearing academic concerns about Campbell's academic work for decades. I understand the concern to be that his assertions of the universality of certain elements of myths is simply not supported by an analysis of the existing myths; that is, people in the biz read the myths, counted the elements occurring in each culture, and found the correlation to be wanting. That's math and statistics; one can have arguments about methodology, but it is not a fair assessment to dismiss it as "squishy" social science and therefore meaningless.

Reading the Wiki, I see that another criticism appears to be that Campbell, a non-psychologist and non-anthropologist (folklore studies is a branch of anthropology), based a lot of his work on analyses by psychologists who were not anthropologists. That is the problem I am speaking of above where people do not understand each other's disciplines - in this case, mainly the psychs not understanding that myths often have a number of variations, and erroneously basing their conclusions on a single point in the data set, and Campbell not having a solid enough grounding in anthropology to recognize the deficiency. Campbell's own academic background was in literature; his study of folklore appears to have been informal, so it does not appear to be unfair to describe him as an amateur.

I also note that it is Wikipedia, and if there were qualified academic supporters of his work, it would be easy enough for someone to add the references. Given the number of his supporters, the absence may be telling.

This is not to say that Campbell's work is valueless. It does resonate with many people, including me, on a psychological or spiritual level. It is only its value as academic work that is disputed. Marketing it as an academic work has the potential to devalue the work of other academics by conflating their rigorous work with Campbell's squishyness, and academics are right to call it out for that reason.
 

squeen

8, 8, I forget what is for
It was fairly clear from the Wiki blurb that he was getting "cancelled". This is not how serious academics address concerns, just the loudmouths. Primate politics at work again.

I was once at JSC working on a mission, and our group kept pitching it in different ways. At one point we started listing organization experts who supported it, ticking off a list. The panel from the astronaut corp sat stone-faced and unaccepting until we final got to a name that was "one of their guys", then it was all smiles. If you don't believe that's how many people function in this world, then you are ignorantly sticking your head in the sand. The anti-Campbell sentiments in the Wiki article reeked of that non-sense.

There's a reason the soft sciences have "trends" in their thinking whereas the hard sciences generally do not. Ignore that at your own peril too.
 
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Beoric

8, 8, I forget what is for
I'm not entirely working from the Wiki blurb. As I stated, I was initially working from memory, from about 15-20 years ago. And not everything in that blurb was personal, some of it was well reasoned.

The panel from the astronaut corp sat stone-faced and unaccepting until we final got to a name that was "one of their guys", then it was all smiles. If you don't believe that's how many people function in this world, then you are ignorantly sticking your head in the sand.
Truth. This is because nobody can be an expert on everything; outside of your field you usually have to rely on authority. Again, having a broad liberal arts education helps to recognize when an "authority" is full of shit. If you don't have that ability, then you are stuck relying on authorities you already know and trust (rightly or wrongly). Or dismissing things when you have not heard of the authorities.

There's a reason the soft sciences have "trends" in their thinking whereas the hard sciences generally do not. Ignore that at your own peril too.
As a rule it is talking heads and celebrity "experts" have "trends". The people doing actual work, who you never hear about, do not. Note I am distinguishing "trends" from "testable hypotheses that people are actually trying to authenticate".

The same is true in chem and bio sciences, frankly. See "Goop", or wellness "experts" in general. And I live in Alberta where there are plenty of "engineers" (read: energy industry people, many of whom are not actually engineers, or are engineers by training but not by practice) grifting on climate science "trends" - I won't say which side they are grifting on so as not to incur the wrath of PoN. I think the only reason it hasn't occurred in physics is nobody has figured out a grift for that.
 

squeen

8, 8, I forget what is for
I think the only reason it hasn't occurred in physics is nobody has figured out a grift for that.
:D:D:D

There have been trends in psychology and sociology too, without a doubt.
 
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