In the latter half of the 20th century, mythologist Joseph Campbell's vast body of work -- from "The Hero With A Thousand Faces" in 1949 to the broadcast of "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers" just months after his passing -- resuscitated interest in comparative mythology, revitalizing the study of the field that Campbell called "the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation."
However, that interest hasn't necessarily translated into formal acceptance on college campuses. "Academia doesn't seem to know what to do with mythology," says Stephen Gerringer of the Joseph Campbell Foundation. Taught under the various umbrellas of history, anthropology, literature, philosophy, folklore, religion, psychology and other disciplines, mythology is rarely recognized as a separate field. To date, only one school -- Pacifica Graduate Institute -- offers a graduate program in Mythological Studies. As Gerringer points out, even Campbell taught mythology for decades at Sarah Lawrence as a member of the Literature Department.
With an eye to changing the status quo, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Joseph Campbell Foundation and OPUS Archives and Research Center (which houses the archives of Joseph Campbell, archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, psychologist James Hillman, and other scholars of note) are sponsoring the inaugural Symposium for the Study of Myth, over Labor Day Weekend (Aug. 31 - Sept. 2), on the Pacifica campus in Santa Barbara.
Entitled "Exploring Myth: Culture, Theory, Practice," the conference aims to encourage serious scholarship, but that's not its only purpose. Dr. Safron Rossi, who heads the OPUS Archives, pointed out, "Everyone with a passion and serious curiosity for myth is invited to participate in this fluid and dynamic event."
Scholarship will of course play a role -- but the symposium moves beyond traditional academic formats, with over 50 different presentations, from a demonstration of Chumash healing ceremonies or a discussion of video gaming as a storytelling medium, to workshops on percussion, rhythm and movement in myth, or a panel on teaching mythology in public schools.
Says Rossi, "We recognize that it is past time for the field of mythology to establish a "home" -- a community to which it returns to discuss new developments in the area of study, as well as charting future domains of exploration. In creating this event, we hope to encourage the establishment of just such a home." Students of mythology in attendance, both within and outside academia, will have the opportunity to participate in the birth of a collaborative community that takes an innovative, nontraditional approach to a nontraditional field.
"If all goes as planned," says Gerringer, "Pacifica can soon look forward to competition from other colleges and universities offering advanced degrees in the field of mythology."
Image by Henry Flower via commons.wikimedia.org; used under a Creative Commons license
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I still have it, inscribed inside by him... I went on to be a "Joe Campbell groupie" and professor of mythology, attending countless workshops with this amazing man who never stopped encouraging and inspiring me. In a way I'm glad he didn't live to witness the chaotic world today...but he probably would still have told us all to "Follow your bliss". I'm so happy that you also were rescued through his magical hand with mythology, what he referred to as "other people's religion"!!
I love to write and a study of myths can really give good images and ideas!
I love looking at things like the founding of the US or the Gold Rush as mythology--because that's what they've become for us.
Mythological studies--like a number of academic fields--sits between the sciences, the humanities, and the arts. I think one of the reasons for a conference like the one planned for Labor Day weekend is precisely to try to bridge those gaps.
Campbell's point--and he was not the only scholar to make it--was that myth was metaphoric rather than historical in its reference and that, therefore, myths and symbols pointed past themselves at things that it wasn't possible to express directly.
As such, the study of myth crosses a number of academic disciplines, from anthropology and comparative religion to psychology, art history, literature and linguistics.
So far as I know, there are no good or bad myths, or no right or wrong myths. There are only those that continue and those that expire. Science has its own myths, called "hypotheses," and they also either endure or get lost in history.
I admire Campbell's work and I am glad to learn it has promoted an academic discipline. Yet I cannot help wondering if its lack of a "home" is because it has relevance in a wide range of studies. It reminds me how Richard Rorty, after serving his term as head of one major branch of administrative philosophy, provoked his colleagues by announcing that he now called his field of study "literature." He did not change what he taught; he just saw philosophy now as literature.
I love your point about science-as-myth. I'd expand that by saying that the social sciences and the humanities too center around what I would certainly see as myths. When I was in grad school for English, little of the conversation centered around the literature itself, but rather on the heated debates over which school of literary criticism was most effective.
And I will grant that one possible reason the field of mythological studies hasn't gained traction may be that it is in fundamentally secondary, though I don't agree. One of the wonderful things about academia is its willingness, at least in theory, to reexamine its basic premises on a regular basis. One of its PROBLEMS, however, is that it almost always does so on a departmental basis. Anthropologists see myth differently than psychologists, literature professors, or religion scholars. Academia's structure encourages specialization; establishing an interdisciplinary field requires overcoming enormous institutional inertia.
It seems valid, since the subject bears significance in so many realms of study, to explore whether the value of addressing myth as a subject in its own right. The symposium organizers seem to wish to give scholars a venue to exchange ideas and (of greatest importance) to publish.
From there, it is up to the academic community and the intellectual marketplace to decide whether it's worth having some sort of professional association, journal, conferences, etc., which brings me back to that first, wonderful thing about academia!
At the moment I am struggling with Bataille's A THEORY OF RELIGION where he contrasts the "order of things" as the everyday world with the world of myth. He's attempting to understand the place of sacrifice in religtion and the place of religion in his Marxist worldview. He privileges animal sacrifice, and develops a theory that the sacrifice of animals is a substitutionary method for humans to reconnect with the immanent (unconscious) world. It all feels foreign to me but I admire his adventuresome thinking.,
The study of mythology can help us to understand all of the thoughts and stories that run in the background for us, shaping how we make meaning in the world. Please join us!
I think the organizers of the conference are trying to focus on mythology in and of itself; it will be interesting to see what kind of fruit it bears.
Kids love it and it is like literacy on steroids.
Ha! That's perfect!
I was editing books on myth when my kids were little and so they grew up listening to me tell stories, but also breaking them down, looking at the universal patterns and motifs, as well as the ways in which they differed.
'The Epic of Gilgamesh (Mythical???) supplies enough evidence to indicate that the Torah(myth) and Koran(myth) are secondary in importance as both have used as their base the writings from Sumerian and Babylonian literature.(myths). One can only wonder how we have managed to progress thus when we cannot differentiate myths from fact,The answer is with the Sumerians.
False: hundreds of schools offer a Master of Divinity degree.
The study of mythology, with a psychological lens, centers on how the stories we tell ourselves make meaning in our lives and in the world. It does not center on belief.
At the same time, it's also one way of looking at the religious impulse--the human end of the equation, as it were, rather than the metaphysical or theological. It seems a worthy field of study, to me at least.