Joseph Campbell
After Harrison but before Walker came another atheist, Joseph Campbell, (1904–1987), who built a large part of his thinking on the weak foundations laid out by Harrison. As an American author, editor, and teacher known primarily for his writings on myths, Campbell used his own unique forms of sophistry to undermine and deny the ancient evidence that points to the events recounted in the early chapters of Genesis. Bill Moyers (see below) made Campbell famous by promoting his work on a PBS series entitled Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth in 1988. An estimated thirty million people viewed the original presentation and it has been re-aired often as part of PBS fundraising efforts. In 1991, Dr Tom Snyder wrote:
Campbell has perhaps more influence on current American religious thought than any other contemporary writer. His books fill the religion sections of major bookstore chains; are required reading in most college and university religion, literature, and philosophy courses; and have become handbooks of spirituality to the New Agers, neo-pagans, Gaia environmentalists, and 1990s religious dabblers. 5
Campbell’s influence has only grown in the intervening fourteen years. More than twenty of his books (authored or co-authored) are still in print and offered in the major bookstores. His erroneous and sometimes downright ridiculous thinking on the subjects of mythology and anthropology continues to pass for wisdom in our high schools, colleges and universities. His books are replete with confusing passages meant to impress young minds with his own imagined profound intelligence. Here is a sample:
These mythic figurations are the "ancestral forms," the insubstantial archetypes, of all that is beheld by the eye as physically substantial, material things being understood as ephermeral concretions out of the energies of these noumena.6a
Passages such as this in Campbell's books are not meant to enlighten but rather to blunt critical thought. Let us here remind ourselves that ever since the Tower of Bable, fools have been posing as learned men.
A brief look at Campbell’s underlying assumptions will help us understand a revealing and fatal flaw at the very heart of his research and ideas.
Joseph Campbell maintained that myths are "cultural manifestations of the universal need of the human psyche to explain social, cosmological, and spiritual realities."6b This is really nothing more than a fancy way of saying that "myths are what they are." Contrary to Campbell’s disguised tautology, I maintain that myth is essentially history, and that many ancient myths and works of art tell the same story as the book of Genesis, but from the standpoint that the serpent is the enlightener of mankind rather than its deceiver, and that Eve did the right thing in taking the fruit. (In The Parthenon Code: Mankind's History in Marble, I show just how obvious this is from the abundant historical evidence in Greek myth/art. See my eight-page summary of the true meaning of Greek myth, Athena and Eve).
Campbell was blind to this simple truth as the following example of his errant thinking will show. On page 14 of his The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology, he features an illustration of a Sumerian seal (Figure 1). Here we have a man, a woman, a tree, and a serpent. We think immediately of Eden. But Campbell writes that this "cannot possibly be, as some scholars have supposed, the representation of a lost Sumerian version of the Fall of Adam and Eve."7 Why not? Because, he writes, there is no
… sign of divine wrath or danger to be found. There is no theme of guilt connected with the garden. The boon of the knowledge of life is there, in the sanctuary of the world, to be culled. And it is yielded willingly to any mortal, male or female, who reaches for it with the proper will and readiness to receive. 7
Figure 1. Sumerian seal resembling the account of
the Garden of Eden.
But this is exactly why it is Eden. This is the view of the events in the garden taken by Kain (Cain) and those who embraced his way. They defied and ultimately dispensed with the angry God, so He and His wrath are not going to show up here. There is no guilt because there is no sin; there is no sin, or falling short of the ideal, because, according to the line of Kain, Adam and Eve did the right thing in taking the fruit. In Genesis 3:14, Yahweh condemned the serpent to crawl on its torso and eat soil. On the Sumerian seal, the serpent rises to a height above the seated humans. Why? Those who hold to the belief system of Kain revere the wisdom of the friendly serpent who freely offers the fruit of the tree of knowledge, enlightening the two progenitors of all humanity so that they and their offspring might be as gods, knowing good and evil. One does not need an advanced degree in cultural anthropology to grasp this simple truth.
How do we explain the fact that Campbell misses something so obvious and so basic to the study of mythology? He must ignore evidence and insights which contradict his atheism or his whole system falls apart. Note that Campbell does not refer to the Eden connection as improbable or unlikely, but as impossible; i.e. as something that, in his words, "cannot possibly be." His atheistic standpoint demands that the book of Genesis be treated as a fable. Campbell wrote:
No one of adult mind today would turn to the Book of Genesis to learn of the origins of the earth, the plants, the beasts, and man. There was no flood, no tower of Babel, no first couple in paradise, and between the first known appearance of men on earth and the first building of cities, not one generation (Adam to Cain) but a good two million must have come into this world and passed along. Today we turn to science for our imagery of the past and of the structure of the world, and what the spinning demons of the atom and the galaxies of the telescope’s eye reveal is a wonder that makes the babel of the Bible seem a toyland dream of the dear childhood of our brain.8
These words belong at the beginning of Campbell’s book so that the reader might know his standpoint; but instead, they appear in the last chapter entitled "Conclusion," implying that all that went before somehow backs them up. Campbell’s paragraph, above, does not represent a validly deduced conclusion from the facts; on the contrary, it is his biased set of unchallengeable assumptions out of which his study of mythology originates and through which it proceeds. These assumptions color his choice of facts and the way in which he chooses to present them—thus, his irrational insistence that the Sumerian seal depicting the serpent’s side of Eden is no such thing. Campbell does not believe what the childish "babel" of Genesis says about anything, including Eden, and is therefore his reason why the Sumerian depiction could not possibly represent it. He writes that the male figure (Adam) on the Sumerian seal is "the ever-dying, ever-resurrected Sumerian god who is the archetype of incarnate being."7 Since Campbell is an evolutionist, shouldn’t his "archetype of incarnate being" look less like a human and more like a tadpole, a monkey, or a knuckle-dragging apeman?
When Campbell writes "we turn to science for our imagery of the past" he means " I turn to science for my imagery of the past." And his chief "scientists"turn out to be Freud, Darwin, and Nietzsche—men whom he idolized and whose theories and ideas are founded on their own atheism and contempt for Scripture.
Some observers think of Campbell as a pantheist, some think of him as a one-world Buddhist, and still others see him as a New Ager with a strong Hinduistic basis, but his work unmasks him as an atheist through and through. He concludes his The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology with the assertion that God did not create man, but rather man created God; and he gives the very last word in his book to Friedrich "God is dead" Nietzsche.8b Campbell's antipathy to God and Christ is what unifies his work. In one of the tapes of the PBS series, Campbell ridicules the Christian belief in resurrection calling it "a clown act, really."5 In the book, The Power of Myth, an outgrowth of the PBS series, he responds to Moyers with the following statements:
We know that Jesus could not have ascended to heaven because there is no physical heaven anywhere in the universe.9
Jesus on the cross, the Buddha under the tree—these are the same figures.10
Once you reject the idea of the Fall in the Garden, man is not cut off from his source.11
[The serpent] is the primary god, actually, in the Garden of Eden. Yahweh, the one who walks there in the cool of the evening, is just a visitor.12
One problem with Yahweh, as they used to say in the old Christian Gnostic texts is that he forgot he was a metaphor. He thought he was a fact.13
In The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Campbell predicts a new mythology for a new age wherein a "unified earth" will become "as of one harmonious being."14 The ancient and glorious matrifocal age (which never actually existed in the first place) is on the way back! At long last, humanity will be rid of God and His Christ, for the old
… Near Eastern desacralization of nature by way of a doctrine of the Fall will have been rejected; so that any such limiting sentiment as that expressed in II Kings 5:15, “there is no God in all the earth but in Israel,” will be (to use a biblical term) an abomination.15
While Campbell’s work teaches that Genesis and the rest of the Scriptures are basically irrelevant, the more important question remains, how do the Scriptures define his belief system? As Campbell is systematic in his opposition to the central tenet of Christianity—Christ’s resurrection from the dead—his teachings are those of an antichrist many of whom, according to I John 2:18, have come out into the world.
Some of his followers may reason that Campbell is not anti-Christ because he says that Christ’s most important teaching is "love your enemies," and then encourages his followers to do that by removing the motes in their eyes.16 But the original meaning of "anti" in Greek is not ‘against’ but rather "instead." Instead of Christ Himself, Campbell offers one of Christ’s sayings which he misappropriates into his own atheistic framework—almost anything instead of Christ will do, including some of Christ’s words taken out of context.
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