Joseph Campbell

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Joseph Campbell at Maverick to study "mythology" - The Pocket Guide to Woodstock, pp. 182

In the early 1930s Joseph Campbell spent several years at the Maverick, consumed by reading while developing his ideas about myths. He collaborated on A Skeleton key to Finnegans Wake with Henry Morton Robinson, a longtime Maverick resident who later wrote the bestselling novel of 1950, The Cardinal, which was filmed by Otto Preminger.

"We would encounter each other, Campbell and I, at monthly meetings of the Century Club, in New York City. Handsome in black tie, he would be standing near one or another of the bars that were set up.
<a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1989/09/28/the-faces-of-joseph-campbell/">http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1989/09/28/the-faces-of-joseph-campbell/</a>

<a href="http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/paint-it-black-6404002">http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/paint-it-black-6404002</a>
<a href="http://articles.philly.com/1991-12-09/news/25811845_1_resident-theaters-regional-stages-jerry-sterner">http://articles.philly.com/1991-12-09/news/25811845_1_resident-theaters-regional-stages-jerry-sterner</a>

Old posters and fliers hang on the wall announcing shows by his performance-art group called Elbows Akimbo; one, titled "The Assassination and Discreditation of John Fitzgerald Kennedy as Performed by the Members of the Millionaires Club at Bohemian Grove under the Direction of Joseph Campbell," actually caused a minor stir in the Bay Area arts scene, but the critics panned it anyway.

<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell</a>

Born in White Plains NY and grew up in Rochelle - these are towns right outside of the city, near Newark. . AND: 

With the arrival of the <a title="Great Depression" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression">Great Depression</a> a few weeks later, Campbell spent the next five years (1929–34) living in a rented shack on some land in <a title="Woodstock, New York" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodstock,_New_York">Woodstock, New York</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell#cite_note-8">[8]</a> There, he contemplated the next course of his life<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell#cite_note-9">[9]</a> while engaged in intensive and rigorous independent study. He later said that he "would divide the day into four four-hour periods, of which I would be reading in three of the four-hour periods, and free one of them... I would get nine hours of sheer reading done a day. And this went on for five years straight."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell#cite_note-10">[10]</a>

The Sociological Function
Validate and support the existing social order
Ancient societies had to conform to an existing social order if they were to survive at all. This is because they evolved under "pressure" from necessities much more intense than the ones encountered in our modern world. Mythology confirmed that order and enforced it by reflecting it into the stories themselves, often describing how the order arrived from divine intervention. Campbell often referred to these "conformity" myths as the "Right Hand Path" to reflect the brain's left hemisphere's abilities for logic, order and linearity. Together with these myths however, he observed the existence of the "Left Hand Path", mythic patterns like the "Hero's Journey" which are revolutionary in character in that they demand from the individual a surpassing of social norms and sometimes even of morality.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell#cite_note-32">[32]</a>

Joseph Campbell

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