| Ageeth Sluis |
I remember that it was shortly after I had moved to the US in 1989 that I saw the now iconic Bill Moyer interview series with Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, which showed an aged but nonetheless beaming and brimming Campbell as he took viewers, and most certainly me, into the fascinating and mysterious world of ancient myths, connecting symbols and archetypes to everyday lives and the world of now, my world of now.
Campbell was inspiring, especially to someone having come to the US to study. His way of being an academic was refreshing. A renowned expert on Comparative Religion, Campbell nonetheless took an “iconoclastic road” as a scholar, teacher and writer. He was, in the words of one biographer “an ecstatic scholar,” who, rather than adhering to the scientific rationalism that characterized the academy during the post-World War II era in which he found himself, recognized that “Life was not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.” His “Tao of Scholarship” took him “beyond the hallowed halls of traditional academia and into a spiritual and psychological view of mythology, which embraces the transcendent Reality referred to by the saints and shamans that can be directly experienced.” [1]
It was this enthusiasm, irreverence and lived knowledge (as well as the fact that Campbell seemingly could care less about religious dogma and doctrine and that for him all religions and spiritualities were equal, similar in their messages and mythical archetypes) that grabbed me....
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