Help with a reference

Are you looking for a quotation that you can't quite place? Trying to track down a hard-to-find publication? Here, folks can help you find the answers, or discuss ways for you to discover them for yourself.

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Ellis
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Help with a reference

Post by Ellis »

Hello.

I read on Wikipedia about how Heinrich Zimmer taught Campbell that myth (rather than a guru or spiritual guide) could serve in the role of a personal mentor, in that its stories provide a psychological road map for the finding of oneself in the labyrinth of the complex modern world. Does anyone know of a source for this as I would like to use it for my dissertation.

Thanks

Cindy B.
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Post by Cindy B. »

Welcome, Ellis. :)

Clemsy, the board administrator, is our go-to guru for all things Campbell, so please check back. If he can't name the source, most likely he'll know who can and will look into it for you. I'm sorry that I can't help you with this one.

And best of luck with your dissertation!

Cindy
If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s. --Jung

Clemsy
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Re: Help with a reference

Post by Clemsy »

Ellis wrote:Hello.

I read on Wikipedia about how Heinrich Zimmer taught Campbell that myth (rather than a guru or spiritual guide) could serve in the role of a personal mentor, in that its stories provide a psychological road map for the finding of oneself in the labyrinth of the complex modern world. Does anyone know of a source for this as I would like to use it for my dissertation.

Thanks
Hi Ellis and welcome to the JCF forums!

I'll check my own references and send your query up the line if I can't find it. Also, I'm moving your post to The Wisdom Pool where it will fit nicely.

Cheers,
Clemsy
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Give me stories before I go mad! ~Andreas

Ellis
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Post by Ellis »

thank you.

Clemsy
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Post by Clemsy »

I heard from both David Kudler, our Managing Editor, and Stephen Gerringer, our Community Director. I think Stephen may have what you're looking for:
Michael & David,

Nothing quite like that in the Companion (other than a reference in passing to "my final guru"). But I believe the relevant passage is found in "Elders and Guides: A Conversation with Joseph Campbell," PARABOLA, Volume V, No.1, February 1980, beginning on p. 127 (I only have a transcript of the interview, so can't cite the exact page it appeared in that issue of Parabola):

"Zimmer was the first person I ever heard speak about myths who spoke about them the way I was thinking about them. That is to say, not as curiosities for a curiosity cabinet, but as guides. He was the first I ever heard speak that way! I had already discovered Coomarswamy's work for some four or five years before I met Zimmer. When I did meet him I had already started The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and was working on The Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, so I was way into that world.

"Hearing Zimmer's lectures and the way in which these myths came out, not as curiosities over there somewhere, but as models for understanding your own life – this is what I had felt myths to be all this time. Of course, Jung had it, but not the way Zimmer did. Zimmer was much more in myth than Jung was. Jung tends to put forms on the myths with those archetypes: the Jungians kin of cookie-molded the thing. None of that with Zimmer. I never knew anyone who had such a gift for interpreting a symbolic image. You'd sit down at the table with him and bring up something – he'd talk about the symbolism of onion soup. I heard him do it! I don't remember what it was, but he went off on onion soup – oh God! This was a genius!"

I believe the two paragraphs above is the passage in question. Several pages later, summing up what Zimmer had understood about myth, Campbell declares:

"If you live with the myths in your mind, you will find yourself always in mythological situtations. They cover everything that can happen to you. And that enables you to interpret the myth in relation to life, as well as life in relation to myth."

I hope that helps.
Give me stories before I go mad! ~Andreas

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Post by Cindy B. »

James recently shared this related Campbell quote elsewhere.
" You know, for some people, ( Jungian ) is a nasty word, and it has been flung at me by certain reviewers as though to say, ( Don't bother with Joe Campbell; he's a Jungian ). I'm not a Jungian! As far as interpreting myths, Jung gives me the best clues I've got. But I'm much more interested in diffusion and relationships historically than Jung was, so that the Jungians think of me as a kind of questionable person. I don't use those formula words very often in my interpretation of myths, but Jung gives me the background from which to let the myth talk to me.

If I do have a guru of that sort it would be ( Zimmer ) - the one who really gave me the courage to interpret myths out of what I knew of their common symbols. There's always a risk there, but it's a risk of your own personal adventure instead of just gluing yourself to what someone else has found. "

:)
If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s. --Jung

Ellis
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Post by Ellis »

Fantastic. That's pretty much what I needed although it's a shame that my uni library doesn't have access to that publication. Thanks.

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Post by Myrtle »

Hi Ellis,

The interview "Elders and Guides" is included in the book Leaning on the Moment: Interviews from PARABOLA (published in 1986). If this book is not available at your library perhaps another library can lend it to them.

Ellis
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Post by Ellis »

cool will look into that. thanks

Persephonespring
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Post by Persephonespring »

I recently had a dream about stones and a friend of mine who is a Jungian Analyst said she heard a Joseph Campbell quote about clashing stones that reminded her my dream.

Does anyone have an idea about this quote?

Thanks,

Jan
Might be a drop in a bucket, but, as I like to say, no drops, no ocean. :-) Clemsy

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Post by Andreas »

Meditation on a deity opens up in all directions to the various manifestations of the power that that deity personifies. In one of the little chapels devoted to this goddess in Çatal Hüyük are two leopards, the male and the female leopard facing each other. We would have to go between them to get to the Goddess, so they are the threshold guardians. What does this mean, this pair of opposites facing each other? They represent the threshold of passage from the field of secular thinking, where “I” and “you” are separate from each other in an Aristotelian sense—that is, "a" is not "not-a"—to a world transcendent of that kind of bipolar thinking, more in the way of a dream logic, where the dreamer and the dream, although they seem to be two, are actually one. These are the pairs of opposites between which you must pass when you pass through this active door, called in another context the clashing rocks, the Symplegades.

"The ultimate mystery of the universe is transcendence of the phenomenal world, which is made up of pairs of opposites, Kant’s "a priori" categories of thought. When Adam and Eve fell, the first thing they experienced was the knowledge of good and evil—that is to say, the knowledge of pairs of opposites. Before that they didn’t know any distinctions. We are kept out of the garden by our knowledge of the pairs of opposites. Leaving that behind, going back to the place of innocence—beyond the rational discrimination of this from that—going back to that transcendent realm is the passage past the clashing rocks, beyond the guardianship of the threshold guardians of the temple."

Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine
Is that what you are searching Jan?

I am pretty sure Campbell talked of clashing rocks in the pathways to bliss also but cant remember where exactly.

Anyway hope it helps. 8)

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Post by Cindy B. »

Persephonespring wrote:I recently had a dream about stones and a friend of mine who is a Jungian Analyst said she heard a Joseph Campbell quote about clashing stones that reminded her my dream.

Does anyone have an idea about this quote?

Thanks,

Jan
Hi, Jan. You and yours are doing well, I hope.

I checked the index of "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" and found this:

"...The 'Wall of Paradise,' which conceals God from human sight, is described by Nicholas of Cusa as constituted of the 'coincidence of opposites,' its gate being guarded by 'the highest spirit of reason, who bars the way until he has been overcome.' The pairs of opposites (being and not being, life and death, beauty and ugliness, good and evil, and all the other polarities that bind the faculties to hope and fear, and link the organs of action to deeds of defense and acquisition) are the clashing rocks (Symplegades) that crush the traveler, but between which the heroes always pass. This motif is known throughout the world. The Greeks associated it with two rocky islands of the Euxine Sea, which clashed together, driven by winds; but Jason, in the Argo, sailed between, and since that time they have stood apart..."


:)
If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s. --Jung

Persephonespring
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Post by Persephonespring »

Thank you both so much for your answers.

This feels like a big dream, and I was clueless. Everyone in the dream group had lots of ideas, but none fit my dream.

This really helps me a lot.

Jan
Might be a drop in a bucket, but, as I like to say, no drops, no ocean. :-) Clemsy

Cindy B.
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Post by Cindy B. »

:)
If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s. --Jung

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