![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
campbell Concerns
May. 17th, 2005 12:12 pmI've been listening to several works on Myth and Legend by Joseph Campbell. Andthough his work seems to have some interesting insights, I'm finding some problems.
One of the things I expectfrom people who portray themselves as scholars is that they use good sources and research authenticity thuroughly. On two instances, I've seen some pretty big failings in this from him.
The first one was in his essay in Tarot Reflections. H3e uses the belief by some fringe Tarotologists that the Tarot has a thirteenth century origin. This is due to spurious dating from a very early set of cards. Even when it was suggested, it was looked upon with a lot of skepticism, mostly due to the rather tenuous link between the cards and the literary reference that was being used to indicate their age. For instance, the cards didn't match the ones referred to in the passage very closely. Using this earlier date, Campbell wrote an essay about the Tarot's influence on Dante. This is at best, highly speculative, and I can forgive this on the basis of Dr. Campbell's desire to explore a thought experiment.
But my concern grew substantially when I heard him, in his thirteen part PBS series, discuss the speech by "Chief Seattle, whom the city of SEattle is named." It amazes me that an academic would not research the material for something as widely distributed as a PBS series well enough to find the true nature and origin of that speech. (For those of you unfamiliar, check out snopes.com and search with "Chief Seattle" in the box to find the whole story.)
I'm not going to stop listening, but I definitely won't quote any of his facts before verifying them. Campbell is a great thinker, and he draws some nicely insightful conclusions. But it's becoming apparent that he's not a good source of detailed facts that have been verified.
One of the things I expectfrom people who portray themselves as scholars is that they use good sources and research authenticity thuroughly. On two instances, I've seen some pretty big failings in this from him.
The first one was in his essay in Tarot Reflections. H3e uses the belief by some fringe Tarotologists that the Tarot has a thirteenth century origin. This is due to spurious dating from a very early set of cards. Even when it was suggested, it was looked upon with a lot of skepticism, mostly due to the rather tenuous link between the cards and the literary reference that was being used to indicate their age. For instance, the cards didn't match the ones referred to in the passage very closely. Using this earlier date, Campbell wrote an essay about the Tarot's influence on Dante. This is at best, highly speculative, and I can forgive this on the basis of Dr. Campbell's desire to explore a thought experiment.
But my concern grew substantially when I heard him, in his thirteen part PBS series, discuss the speech by "Chief Seattle, whom the city of SEattle is named." It amazes me that an academic would not research the material for something as widely distributed as a PBS series well enough to find the true nature and origin of that speech. (For those of you unfamiliar, check out snopes.com and search with "Chief Seattle" in the box to find the whole story.)
I'm not going to stop listening, but I definitely won't quote any of his facts before verifying them. Campbell is a great thinker, and he draws some nicely insightful conclusions. But it's becoming apparent that he's not a good source of detailed facts that have been verified.
