INTRODUCTION

I did the following interview with Joseph Campbell in 1975, just as he was emerging from the chrysalis of scholarship to popularity on the world stage. I transcribed the tapes immediately afterwards, thinking I would publish the interview. Then my life took a sharp turn away from journalism, and the interview sat in my files. As Campbell became more and more famous in the ensuing decades, especially through the PBS series about his work that became a classic, I began to feel nothing more needed to be said. Yet the important ideas he and I had discussed, particularly about mythology and the political process and mythology and the feminine archetype, remained in the back of my mind, and as the years rushed by I found myself returning to many of his writings. Almost imperceptibly, works like “The Hero’s Journey” seeped into the imagery of my subconscious.

Finally, in 2018, I realized that Campbell had been a major teacher for me. Out of curiosity, I went searching for the old interview in my files. I was instantly struck with the realization that what he was saying not only had relevance for my emotional experiences today but was perhaps even more significant politically in light of Trumpism and the kind of populism that is on the rise all over the world. As a civilization, we are facing the same challenge people faced in ancient times—the fight between democratic principles and authoritarianism. Campbell provides a timely warning that the mythological structures at the foundation of our democratic institutions can be used to imprison people just as easily as to free them. We neglect recognizing and understanding their power at our peril. As Campbell said to me, “Who is going to win? Will it be Rome or Carthage?”

Our interview took place in British Columbia at the Cortes Island campus of Cold Mountain Institute, a centre for humanistic studies established in the early seventies that was often called “the Esalen of the North.” Campbell was giving a week-long seminar there. At the time, I was the institute’s Director of Academic Programs, and in partnership with Antioch University, my job was to create and administer two accredited programs: an independent-study Bachelor of Arts, and a Master’s in Humanistic Psychology.

Joseph Campbell was on Cortes as part of the Master’s program. I was fortunate in being able to spend a great deal of time with him, and he graciously agreed to be interviewed for many hours over the course of the week. An accomplished professional photographer, Saralee James, was also enrolled in the seminar, and she took some wonderful casual photographs of the two of us together, along with capturing students in rapt attention as Campbell sat, even at the age of seventy-three, cross-legged on the floor. The photos create a visual record of his energy and dynamism.

I would be remiss if I did not say something about Campbell’s “politically incorrect” language at some points during our interview. For example, he talks about “primitive societies” and refers to India as a “worn-out culture” and a “broken mess.” His language may be outdated, and some of his views embarrassing, but I did not want to white-wash the nuances of the personality behind his brilliant and insightful writing. Human beings are complex, and Joseph Campbell was no exception.

I would be further remiss if I did not mention what a kind and generous man he was. When our interview took place, I was at a crossroads in my own life at the age of thirty-five—an age, as I was to learn from him, that is one of life’s major passageways in mythological structures. At the time, I felt overwhelmed, sometimes defeated, by the struggle I was engaged in as a woman trying to create a meaningful life, and by the conflict that struggle created for me with my own culture. Joseph Campbell offered me the great gift of his focussed attention, and his wisdom gave me the courage to continue along the path before me, even though the destination was unknown.

NVF: You have spent a lifetime involved in studying and explaining the meaning of myths in all of the world’s cultures. Why has it had so much meaning for you?

JC: Well, on the most superficial level—that of scholarly interest—it would be the discovery that it’s the same things that are occurring in myths in every culture. For example, it is particularly stunning when you find almost the same story of transformation all over the world, not just in developed cultures but in primitive cultures too. Trying to understand that puzzle has held my fascination all these years.

Of course, when I was a youngster, I first became fascinated with the American Indian world and then Polynesians myths. Then, when I was in graduate school, I became interested in all of the medieval material. By that time I was beginning to have problems with my own religious thinking, and suddenly to find mythological answers in the medieval material to many of the questions that were puzzling me was very helpful. And just at that time, I also became aware of Hindu mythology and that was that: I fell in love with it completely.

NVF: What made Hindu mythology so compelling for you?

JC: I found Catholic mythology and Hindu mythology to be very much alike. But the Hindu material helped me get out of the Catholic Church by substituting for me psychological relevancy for the dogmatic imagery of the church. It allowed me to let go of the Catholic Church’s form without losing the emotional content.

Also, when I was becoming aware of Hindu mythology, I was studying in Paris and Germany and discovering the writings of Freud, Jung, Thomas Mann and Joyce and the art of Picasso. They were all dealing with the same issues, and all of this intellectual ferment just blew open my mind. It was a very exciting moment for me; it was as though I could see a horizon of great majesty open up before my eyes. All I wanted to do was to pursue this material for the rest of my life.

NVF: But how were you able to live?

JC: I had saved a little money while I was in college by playing saxophone in a jazz band. It was quite the band. We could furnish 3 musicians or 12. It was really a good band, and in those days the money we got seemed rather good and I just stashed it away in the bank.

Well, when I came back to the United States in 1929, it was at the time of the Wall Street crash, so there wasn’t a job anywhere to be found. I helped my dad out by giving him some money to get along, which used up most of my savings. So I couldn’t go on to do a PhD for economic reasons. At the same time, I didn’t feel I could go back into that narrow little bottle of being a graduate student after I had this vision of the world opening up before me. Fortunately I sold a short story that I had written for $300, and I retired on that money to Woodstock, New York. I wasn’t married, had no responsibilities, and it wasn’t a problem. People would lend me their house to guard their dog, and I spent one winter with a dog named Fritz. It taught me an important lesson: I decided that you don’t need a lot of money to live, and that I would never work for just money if I didn’t like what I was doing. So I basically spent 5 years totally engrossed in all this amazing reading, which got more and more exciting as I went along.

It was a period when one great book of ideas just led to another. I remember when I was reading Spengler’s Decline of the West, and then I stumbled upon Jung, and I was reading both authors in German as most of their work had not been translated yet—and they both mentioned Leo Frobenius, the great African ethnologist and archaeologist. So I immediately got hold of Frobenius. I had learned French and German when I was a student in France and Germany, and had started my Sanskrit and Latin studies at the same time—so I was able to read all these books quite easily.

I was also really lucky at the time, as I knew about this big bookstore in New York that imported books. I had dealt with them a little bit when I was a graduate student—and I wrote to them with a list of books I needed. Some of them were $18, which was a great deal of money at the time—and I didn’t have any money. Well, they sent them to me, and trusted me for three years until I was able to pay them. It was a very different time then!

Finally, in 1934, I got an invitation to teach at Sarah Lawrence. The president at the time was a wonderful woman, Constance Warren, who said, “Well, Mr. Campbell, how much do you want?”

And I said, “Geez, I don’t know. Would $2,000 be okay?”

And she said, “No, it wouldn’t Mr. Campbell, we don’t pay that little.”

So they paid me $2,200. The college had just been founded three or four years earlier, and I could teach anything I wanted—or what the students wanted, actually—and they wanted to learn about mythology. So for the 38 years that I was there I gave a course in mythology, which the students found exciting and meaningful, and it was out of those courses that my books developed.

NVF: What was the significance of myths for you at that time, and what is the significance of them today—at this time? Has that changed at all over your 40 years of experience?

JC: Well, there are two big relevancies of myth: one is to the individual, and the other is to the society. Mythologically grounded societies grab and hold their members in a much deeper, stronger way than societies grounded on only a purely rational relationship, such as we have now.

NVF: Are these universal mythological structures the roots for people’s search for some form of meaning?

JC: Not exactly meaning. What people want is to have the sense of a deep, rich experience of life and what one’s relationship to it is—then the mind comes in, asking for the meaning of it all. But, you know, as soon as you start asking for meaning, you stop having the experience itself. For example, if you look at a sunset, if you ask for the meaning of it, well, it hasn’t delivered its impact. The same with love—if you’re in love with someone—bang, there it is. You may create some meaning for the experience later on if you like, but that’s not the experience of it.

What myth does is give a sense of the form of a life and where you are on the curve. What is the meaning of a ski jump? It doesn’t have any meaning at all, but it’s a damn exciting thing to experience. But you can’t do the jump unless you know when you are on the runway, when you’re at the top going off. A mythological understanding gives you a sense of the curve of the adventure, or the curve of the dissolution and recovery, and it helps you know where you are on the journey—it really does.

NVF: So are you saying that myths are like a chart of a pathway through the abyss of life?

JC: Yes, they are. And the fascinating thing is that these symbols aren’t the property of any one religion or any one culture. When I was a kid in the Catholic Church, the beauty of their mythic and ritual world meant a lot to me, and it is still deep inside me somewhere. But the church’s claim to be the sole vehicle of salvation was something I couldn’t accept. Now, what India taught me is that these symbols have nothing to do with the authorization of the Roman Catholic Church, but instead, they have to do with the discovery of powers within yourself. That is to say, I found that the Hindu material contains the same symbols as the Catholic Church, but what is so important is that they have a very different psychological relevance—those symbols point to you instead of to Rome, and in that sense it is a richer and stronger tradition because it is rooted inside yourself, not in a higher authority. The Hindu religion has analyzed and interpreted mythology in psychological terms ever since the earliest of the Upanishads in the 8th or 9th century BC.

NVF: Do you have any idea what influenced them as a culture to move in that direction rather than an authoritarian one?

JC: This we do not know. All we have are the texts. We really don’t even know what the culture was like in India at that time. We really don’t. But here it is, this rich, beautiful world, and it is certainly the richest mythologically as well as the richest in terms of mythic systems as a whole. Nothing else can touch it. Vishnu and Shiva and all the goddesses—the whole thing is all of a piece. It’s all wonderful, and now I’ve been absorbed in it for almost 50 years. I can turn my back on Christian tradition, but I can turn to any of the other traditions that have interested me and the Indian insights help me to read them. All the lectures I have been giving around the country at all of these new humanistic centres, those don’t come out of having read other scholars—they come out of what India has told me about mythology. That’s the wonderful thing about India.

But India is a worn-out culture. It shot its bolt long, long ago. When the Muslims came in 1000 AD they put an end to that earlier culture. It’s been a rubble heap ever since. The British came in trying to help put it back together again, but you can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again. India is a broken mess, and the sociology of India from that period on was a sociology of a Bronze Age type.

NVF: What does the sociology of a Bronze Age type mean?

JC: Despotism and institutions that are mythologically grounded and absolute in their demands on the individual. You obey the law. There is no freedom. This is a very different type of society than Europe—thank the Greeks—which has a totally different idea. The humanism of Europe is something that these archaic cultures just can’t take in and don’t want to—they don’t know how to handle it all. From Greece and Rome we’ve inherited an evolutionary institution—institutions of culture that evolve with human consciousness—but together with that comes the ultimate implication of the secularization of the state.

What that demands is the state, first of all, has to have a population that understands the value of the gift they have been given as a member of a free society and, secondly, is able to educate its people to be intelligent members of the state so that they are able to play a role in making decisions. But what we have happening now in the United States (I don’t know the situation in Canada) is that we have people pouring in from all over the planet who have no interest whatsoever in preserving this kind of culture. All they are interested in is making a buck—and that’s the danger we are facing—the dissolution of our institutions.

The only question—the big question—is can a culture without a mythological structure that integrates people on a very deep base level—can it survive?

NVF: Well, how does the individual today reconnect with those kinds of values?

JC: Well, I would say with the great writers that we have, the philosophers that we have, and the artists that we have. I also find these new growth centres that are springing up all over the country, like Esalen in California and Cold Mountain here in British Columbia, are good. They are really helping people reconnect to something deeper inside themselves. To my mind, they are completely comparable to the religious meditation groups that emerged during the Hellenistic period—the orphic and gnostic systems. It was a period very much like ours, of people who’d lost their social base and are heterogeneously mixing this and that aspect from different cultures all over the world—and all of that coming together in one place at the same time in history when most people are no longer controlled outside themselves by an authoritarian social structure—except legally of course—there are laws that everyone is subject to. So now, people are seeking to create new social structures, freely chosen or put together by themselves—whether that is in meditation centres or reading groups or university extension courses, or listening to different kinds of experiential teachers or experimenting with new religions. This is going on all over the place. New York is full of this. California is full of this. It isn’t all rubbish; people are finding these activities fulfilling.

NVF: So these new growth centres are where people go for lack of an institution that works for them.

JA: They are an institution, and the fact that they are useful institutions is proven by the way they are prospering. People are going to them, and many of their programs are sold out months in advance. I mean, there is a demand for a new connection to something, and this is the answer to that demand. I’m aware of this because I travel around, and I don’t meet baffled, confused people. I’m meeting people who are intelligently moving into a world that never existed before and deriving values from it and creating values for it. They haven’t got all the answers—nobody has ever had all the answers—and life keeps offering problems that are quite new and have to be solved, but people are living decent and often beautiful lives. Those are the people I’m meeting, anyhow.

NVF: Why is it that suddenly our western culture, starting in the late fifties and continuing today, has been completely inundated with Indian mythology and spiritual practices?

JA: Well, I remember when I was an athlete, I had the sense that here I am, a good athlete, but what does it connect with in my life? In my day, athletics was just athletics. It’s true that one of the most important things my college track experiences taught me was something about hanging on, and timing, and all of that, but it was not explicit in the training. Now, you turn to some of the spiritual practices of the East, like judo or karate. It is not just doing something athletic; it begins to be related to a lifestyle. There is an explicit philosophical relevancy that’s given to you. This is something that has been lacking in our system, and this supplies the lack.

With respect to the attractiveness of the eastern religious belief system, I’ve already talked a bit about that. In the West, all of our religious symbols and myths worked to support the religious institutions themselves—the Catholic or Protestant or Jewish churches and synagogues. The Hindu gurus come over and tell us, “No, that’s not correct, all these symbols are pointing to you.” Then we have to remember the aftermath of the Second World War. There were troops from our part of the world stationed in India and stationed in Japan, plus the American occupation of Japan was a very important event. Now, I was already an Oriental scholar before the war, and after the war I was invited by Columbia University to give them some advice about setting up a department in Oriental Studies for the first time. When the department was formed, practically all the members of the department (who are now quite formidable Oriental scholars) were men who were in Japan during the war. These were all young men who went over to these countries and suddenly were introduced to all of these answers that been cut out of our understanding by our institutionalized religions. They saw this wonderful phenomenon in the Orient where philosophy and religion was the same thing, where here they were split apart.

NVF: But how is it possible to transport a totally different way of looking at the world to a western culture without a massive social and psychological upheaval? Somehow I feel that we can never quite understand or take on such a different belief system. We will always be, underneath it all, just pretending.

JC: We don’t have to do that. We don’t have to take on their belief systems as our own. That’s the wrong way, from my point of view. I don’t see any point in putting on a turban or living in a cave for many years. The only thing that is important is that understanding these eastern mythic structure is awakening us to the possibilities of the depth and richness in our own tradition that we never truly understood. And that’s what is happening all over the place. What one learns from the Orient has to do with their development of one great aspect of the general human heritage, which we have in our tradition too but haven’t developed very much.

There’s a little Jewish story that Martin Buber gave in his Tales of the Hasidim. Isaac Bashevis Singer, the famous Yiddish writer, used it at the end of one of his lectures, and I used it in one of my books, which I did from his notes. It goes like this—there’s this little rabbi, Isaac Ben Yakov, who lived in Krakow and had a dream three times in which he heard a voice telling him he should go to Prague and dig under the pillar supporting a certain bridge. So when he had the same dream a fourth time, he said, “Well, I gotta go.” So he went. But when he came to the bridge he saw that it was being patrolled by troops, and all he could do was come and look at the bridge and nothing else. So he just came, day after day, and looked at the bridge, until one of the officers guarding the bridge said, “Hey, what are you doing here, you little Jew, coming to look at our bridge all the time? What’s on your mind?” The rabbi replied, “Please excuse me, but I had a dream that if I came here to Prague and dug under the pillar on the bridge I’d find my treasure. “Well,” said the officer, “don’t be a damn fool. I’ve had dreams too, and you don’t see me following them. I’ve had a dream that if I went to Krakow and looked behind the stove of rabbi Isaac Ben Yakov, I’d find a treasure. Imagine going to Krakow where every rabbi is named either Isaac Ben Yakov or Yakov Ben Isaac. I wouldn’t be able to get anywhere .” And the rabbi says, “thank you very much,” and goes back home to Krakow and finds his treasure behind his own stove.

Sometimes you have to go a long way to find what you’ve got, and I know about that, as it has been my own experience.

NVF: It does seem that you have been on a very long odyssey. Was it your visit to India that began turning you around?

JC: It turned me back. That was 20 years ago. It was actually 1954. And that was a topsy-turvy experience. It was absolutely a knockout. I had been planning to go on with my Indian studies, you know, and what I had wanted to do was something I could damn well have done, and done well: make a good, lively translation of the best parts of Mahabharata, one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India. That’s never been done, you know. All they have are clumsy, stiff translations. Yet it’s a work full of the most glorious storylines that could be told in a captivating way. But I found I was really wasting my time with India from the point of view that I had then reached. I was going in depth into Indian materials—I can hardly believe it now when I look at my notes, how far in I was in those Indian Sanskrit studies.

When I came back to the United States I thought, well, I’ve got to find my balance again. You see, I had been interested in mythology—in general, comparative mythology, it’s a prodigious field—and after many years of working on that I tried to decide where a pivot would be that would be a kind of midpoint for the whole thing—a demarcation point where I could go into depth—and I decided on India for very obvious reasons. In the first place, you have primitive material in India. In the second place, you have material from the very earliest Megalithic and Bronze Age, still there functioning. Then you have the Moguls come in, so you have material that links up with Greece and Rome and Germans and Celts and the Persians. Then you have Buddhism come in, which is the religion of the whole of the Orient. Then you have Islam coming in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and then Christianity coming in as well. And all the way through is this intellectual interpretation of the materials—consistently. So it was obvious to me that I was correct: India was the pivotal place to start going into the materials in depth, and it worked wonderfully.

But the trouble was I got seduced into wanting to stay with the Sanskrit studies—do you see? So when I came back to the United States after that period in India, I said to myself, “Well, I’ve got to go back to where I started in the comparative mythology, or I will be lost,” and it was then that I decided to do that four-volume work The Masks of God. I worked on that for 12 years, starting with the primitive, coming up through the Oriental, the Occidental and then the contemporary material. With that I found my own centre again, and, well, now it’s just fun.

NVF: What made you realize that you had gone too far into the Indian work?

JC: Well, I came to that point where I just said no. When you’re going into something you keep going in and you leave things behind because that’s what it asks of you. It’s like the gypsy who says, “Cross my palm with silver and I’ll tell you some more” and once you do that the gypsy says again, “Now give me some more” and on and on it goes like that. And there was a certain point where I wouldn’t give any more. I wouldn’t give up my respect for myself. I wasn’t willing to give up my self. It seemed the more I learned about this other culture, the more I realized what I already had in my own.

Also, actually being in India after all of these years of just studying about it was a shock. It broke a lot of strings of attachment I had to fantasies about it. I hadn’t been there ten minutes when I knew this was another world than the world I had been studying. I’d heard about poverty, I’d heard about destitution, but I’d never seen anything like that. Another thing was the malice and lack of any compassion. If someone is in a mess, that’s his own fault—you know, three lifetimes ago he killed a cow or something like that. And then, whether they know it or not, they’ve still got the caste system in full force. They interpret people in terms of rank. And then there was the squalour—not only of the society, but also of the thinking. They’re a bunch of fakers. I knew more about India—Indian thinking—than most of the people who pretended they did. And that began to get to me.

On top of all of that were the implications of the negation. The negativism of India became more and more apparent to me, and I think this is a contemporary phenomenon perhaps more than earlier, because they couldn’t have had such glorious art if they had been as they are now. The art of the Gupta period, I don’t think you see that anywhere else. And when I go back to the Upanishads, there’s no writing like that anywhere—it’s terrific. So that was my big bafflement. And then there were the people. They’re both awesome and absolutely delightful—their hospitality is way beyond anything you can conceive of, as is their generosity. At the same time, there are all those other things I’ve mentioned. You might say that all the things both good and bad about life are there in magnum—and that is the conundrum.

But the big thing that struck me was that the ideals for which the people are living today belong, as far as I’m concerned, to a distant past, not to the present. So I came back here and I realized, not only am I an American, but my problems are those of Americans, and America’s problems are my problems, and I decided to talk to those from now on. So that is what I’m doing—going around doing that. Even when I go to Europe I feel now that I’m in a foreign land, which I didn’t used to feel because of my years of being a student in Europe. But it is a very different place than it was before the Second World War. Having homes and lives smashed and destroyed has produced a different environment and a different experience than what we have here. I still find Europe exhilarating and exciting, but I’m a visitor there now. I realized that America is the place I’m made to serve, and so that’s what I’m doing. I’m giving people the myths that they seem to want.

NVF: And those problems that you speak to, do you see that as helping people to find significance or deeper meaning to their lives?

JD: Well, yes—feeling significance and learning how to balance your life. The only thing I can possibly do for people, it seems to me, that’s of any use is to alert them to the possibilities of what they already have, which they’re not using. The myths can be an entry to a deeper understanding of themselves—to examining what religious traditions and social values they were brought up in, for example. Myths can’t tell you what to do with your life. All that mythology can give you is a sense of the curve of your performance—where you are in the arc of living a life. For instance, you realize that you’re beginning the middle of life at age 35 or another stage at 55 and 75, and so there are certain things proper for you to be seeking and finding which are not the same as what were proper at an earlier time.

NVF: So much of mythology seems to point to the opening of our consciousness—to the development of a spiritual life. But that isn’t always possible for lots of ordinary people who are living ordinary lives. Sometimes I hear you paint such a beautiful picture of an inner spiritual life that it just creates another ambition for me to achieve. If you tell people there are these stages of enlightenment and that it is more pleasurable to bliss out than not to bliss out—aren’t you creating tremendous dissatisfaction and a kind of spiritual materialism that’s just as empty a pursuit as economic materialism?

JC: The average person doesn’t really pay much attention to this stuff--just doesn’t, believe me. The people for whom I feel pangs of compassion and sympathy are whose who, with shining eyes, have got a glimpse of what this is all about, and they come up and ask me for information on how to get there. Well, in the first place most of them don’t have the equipment. They don’t have the skill and background in reading so that they have some information and are not starting from scratch—for example, they at least know the difference between a Greek and a Roman.

I try to give them some suggestions of things to read, and of course, anybody can begin at any point, but the real question is will they continue—do they have the zeal and passion to keep going? Let’s say there are 50 lively, wonderful books that you read—and then what? Have you built this passion for learning into your life? Would you keep going past this point into what Carlyle calls “the dryasdust”? Would you sit at home reading the dry parts, or go out to a party? And if you aren’t willing to do that, then you can’t come through finally to the place where it all makes sense.

NVF: But that drive and passion is really beyond anyone’s will, isn’t it? You either have it or “catch” it, but you can’t actually learn it.

JC: I can only tell you that for me it’s been a long, long, joyful journey. And the evidence for it is right there in my room at home—the 12 or more filing cabinet drawers stuffed right up with fine handwritten notes have taken over a period of 34 years, when that’s all I was doing. And what is spilling out of me now, which looks and sounds so easy, is the results of this whole world of rich scholarship.

NVF: Of all the books you’ve written, do you have a favourite?

JC: Of the ones I’ve done, I think my favourite is a book that I did from the notes of Henirich Zimmer called The King and the Corpse. As for the books that were mine, I guess the best was the fourth volume of The Masks of God: Creative Mythology.

The easiest was Myths to Live By, which I think is pretty good. The Mythic Image just came out a year ago. It’s a great big book that’s selling like hotcakes at $45. The first edition of 10,000 copies all sold out. That’s the most beautiful book I’ve done, I mean physically beautiful. I never saw such a cheque that I got from my royalties.

NVF: But wasn’t The Hero with a Thousand Faces the book that catapulted you into the big time?

JC: Well, that’s the one that really broke the way. That was my first big book, and that was about 1949, so it’s been around a long time. It rolled along slowly for about 7 years and then Meridian published it in paperback. And then in 1964, when people started to explore LSD, this book suddenly became the TripTik for the whole journey. It started flying off the shelves.

NVF: What did you think about this whole drug culture happening?

JC: I can’t be angry about it because it’s brought me a lot of recognition and royalties.

But on a more serious note, I think it is what opens the door to this whole interest in the interior life, because what it showed was that these powers—these mythic figures—are not just figments of the imagination, they are residents within the psyche. Right on the heels of that discovery, along came the eastern practices—meditation and yoga and tai chi and Zen and all of that. And of course, I had been studying these areas for decades by that time, so I suddenly had a whole new career starting after I retired from teaching at Sarah Lawrence. It has been a very happy time for me, meeting all these wonderful new people and sharing what I know about these worlds.

NVF: Can the hero’s journey provide a TripTik for a woman’s life as well given that so many of the old institutions are changing and women are finding themselves having to take uncharted paths, where they don’t want to copy men and don’t have many women role models. The dominant mythology is masculine, and there really isn’t an appropriate feminine mythology yet that speaks to them.

JC: I think that’s true. There hasn’t been an appropriate female mythology available where the female personality and quality are what is expressed. But it’s the women who have to do it. I don’t think they have to use the masculine myths. Now, the myth of the heroic adventure—the hero’s journey—it’s practically the same for a woman. If she goes down into the unconscious, she will be meeting the same kind of problems. And very often when you show a woman the living symbols, it turns out that the male figure in the symbols was really her own active aspect that drove out the door and was ready to fly to the sun at the end. And that was her own activity, her own animus.

For many women—certainly in the past—their husbands or their sons play that role for them. I think the male body is a kind of spin-off from the female body, not the other way round as the Bible would have us believe. The female body is the basic body—there’s no doubt about it. It’s the one that gives birth and it gives nourishment. The male body is specialized for physical action, and its whole function is in relation to the female body, to protect it. So the male is in a way the agent of the feminine life. Spengler formulates that very clearly when he says woman is history, man makes history. A woman is—and this is one of the prongs of the woman—she is the object. Now, that is both her good fortune and her danger.

NVF: You are certainly right about the danger. What is happening now is that many women have begun moving away from being the “object” for the male, as it has produced a limiting and sometimes punishing experience in life for them. Instead, they are beginning the process of creating their own authority for themselves—outside the old tribal and institutional systems—and in that process they are moving out into unknown territory much like what happens in the hero’s journey.

JC: There has always been the situation of people who move up into that realization—of the need to be their own authority. When you become your own authority, then you are in a life-created situation, which means you are in a creative life. Most people are not in that role at all now, nor were they ever, but there’s always been a minority that has found itself in that role, and those are the creative people. I don’t think there are any more of them proportionately to the people that are around today than ever before. I don’t think the whole race has suddenly moved into anything of this kind of situation at all, so I don’t think I can answer what the implications of that might be. But yes, I think the hero’s journey can work for anyone who finds themselves in that situation, male or female.

NVF: Does every person have to seek their own individual path?

JC: Yes, I think so.

NVF: Then what is the relevance of teaching?

JC: Suppose you want to learn to drive, and you hire a teacher to give you instructions. The man or woman who is teaching you shows you how to drive the car but doesn’t tell you where to go. I think that’s what teaching does. It gives you tools for implementing a life.

I think colleges and universities are beginning to confront a real problem now as their function has changed. In my years, in the l920s, it was the time when everybody was beginning to go to college. Before that, nobody went except people who were going to have specific professions: training for the ministry, for law, engineering and specific scholarship. Suddenly, everybody begins to go, and it becomes four years either just bumping around having a good time or having a hard time—and then trying to find out what the value of it all was. And that situation has become more and more absurd, because people are going out to get a job serving at a ribbon counter in Macy’s or something like that.

I think what is probably going to happen is that the liberal arts education—which was just for people with a kind of leisure life, or like myself, who said to hell with earning a living, I’m going to enjoy these wonders—I think that sort of BA is finished. I think that universities are going to become more and more professional schools again, although the professions won’t necessarily be the old ones like law and engineering, but new ones in the field of technology—because so much now in the way of simple primary action requires a tremendous amount of technical skills. So people may still get a BA, but it will be on more specifically technical lines.

NVF: What about our western civilization and its entire cultural heritage? What is happening to it with the breakdown of all the institutions that held it together, like the Church and the universities and the old cultural belief systems?

JC: Well, I don’t know what to say about our civilization in that sense. If one takes Spengler’s view, you know, that we’re in the last stage—the Hellenistic Roman stage, with Rome coming on and Hellenism dying—the only question is: What is our part of the world going to be? Who is going to dominate? Is it going to be Rome, or is it going to be Carthage? And that’s not just a local question. It has to do with the whole race, with Russia rising as the next civilization next door and China in the wings. Right now, the individual within our western civilization has more possibilities for information, enjoyment, action and material wealth available to him than ever before in the history of mankind. And that’s here until they take it away from us, which they may do.

NVF: You have had a very unusual career, in the sense that you started a whole new career after you retired from being a university teacher. You’ve taken your scholarly studies of myths on the road, so to speak. What you have to say seems to be coming along exactly when all of these other eastern belief systems and different kinds of institutions have been opening up people’s minds in our western culture in Canada and the United States.

JC: That’s right, I have, and it feel just marvellous. It’s a very happy time for me, and I’m meeting wonderful young people everywhere who, when I stop to think about it, could all be my children. I’d say what’s proper for me now has to do much more with the inward than with an outward life journey. You know what I mean? And friendships are very important, because you have more and more appreciation of people and you’re aware of their qualities and their value to you.

NVF: Does that only come with age?

JC: Well, in my case it certainly did. And really quite latish, too, because I was always in the books and didn’t pay attention to anything like that. I paid no attention to people’s qualities, and now they mean an awful lot to me. And there are many other ranges of values I didn’t pay attention to as well.

I jumped into a way of thinking a few years back that’s a little bit like the Pollyanna idea. You know, wherever one is, there are negatives and positives to the situation, so if you just keep your mind on what the positives are, they become the dominant experience in life. I would think a person like myself—I will be 72 the day after tomorrow—with aches and pains coming along and all that kind of thing, would be feeling less and less exhilarated about life, and I’m feeling more and more all the time. It’s simply because I feel in my mind that the positive values are right now.

NVF: How have you come to terms with coming closer and closer to facing mortality?

JC: That I’m going to die? It’s not like I don’t think of death at this stage of my life, but my relationship to it is very different now. I guess that at one time I wouldn’t want to have died, because life’s been kind of good, but there comes a time, I think, when one will have assimilated the idea of death. I think I can say frankly that if I dropped dead when I walked out the door, it’s okay by me—it really is. I think I’ve had the fruit of my life, you know, and now it’s all just glorious—on and on fine. But it’s got to stop sometime, and the recognition that it has to stop gives, for me, more and more significance to the now.

There’s that wonderful saying of Pindar in one of his poems to a young athlete at one of the Pythian games. The young man had just won the wrestling, and Pindar said the kind of thing you get in Job—the idea that life is so momentary, and at the peak of your victories, you can suddenly get mowed down like an ant. That’s the truth of it, but there are moments of glory and wonder that shine through all of that, and that’s what it’s all about. That’s what endures forever. I think that’s what the artist realizes. That’s what tragedy is all about.

Life is tragic in that it breeds and broods its own death. You are incubating your own death right now, and that’s what your life is. There wouldn’t be any life without it, so taking that in is the mystery. Once you take that in, this awareness and acceptance of our own mortality is what makes us truly human, and it is the impetus for living our lives to the fullest. Now, I’ve said before, and I believe this, I feel it strongly: once you’ve made the shift of accent from the preservation of the body to identification with the consciousness of things, somehow the body can go. That doesn’t mean you’re throwing it away, but it’s the carriage that’s carrying your consciousness, and you can let it go when it is time.

NVF: Is the opening of consciousness only possible through the mind?

JC: No, I think opening of consciousness comes through life experience, really. It comes this way or that way or some other way, depending on the person’s experience. My way’s been the way of reading—just sheer reading. I’m not even much interested in going to the places I read about. I like to go, it’s great, there it is, but it’s the book that has been it for me.

NVF: Do you believe in an eternal consciousness?

JC: I don’t care how eternal it is, kiddo. It’s here now in me, and what I care about is the consciousness I have now, and how I can make it echo in other people’s consciousness.

NVF: That sounds like a good place to end.