“How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind’s prudent folly? That is the hero’s ultimate difficult task. How render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? How represent on a two-dimensional surface a three-dimensional form, or in a three-dimensional image a multi-dimensional meaning?" /...\ "Many failures attest to the difficulties of this life-affirmative threshold.” ― Joseph Campbell (Sarah Lawrence College for women), The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 1949
Noteworthy: Joseph Campbell married one of his own students on May 5, 1938, Jean Erdman. This was 364 days before the May 4, 1939 final publication of Finnegans Wake. Both took a keen interest in James Joyce. Jean Erdman created the excellent Finnegans Wake Dance "The Coach with the Six Insides", a couple of Joyceans! Jean Erdman died May 4, 2020 at the age of 104. [email protected]
“Oswald Spengler, in The Decline Of The West, coined the term ‘historical pseudomorphosis’ to designate, as he explained, ‘those cases in which an older alien culture lies so massively over a land that a younger culture, born in this land, cannot get its breath and fails not only to achieve pure and specific forms, but even to develop fully it’s own self consciousness.'”—Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology, 1968, pg. 31
“…and in like manner the North European culture developed throughout its Gothic period under an overlay of both classical Greco-Roman and Levantine biblical forms, in each of which there was the idea of a single law for mankind, from which notion we are only now beginning to break free.” —Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology, 1968, pg. 32