A much friendlier meet-up than Obi-Wan and Vader.
Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) was a world-renowned mythologist who helped modern society understand the true power that storytelling has in our culture and within our personal lives. He studied and identified the universal themes and archetypes that are present in mythical storytelling across history and across the world. His seminal work, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, outlined what Campbell called the Hero’s Journey, a motif of adventure and personal transformation that is used in nearly every culture’s mythical framework. George Lucas was an avid admirer of Campbell’s writings, and used them as a direct reference in his creation of Star Wars. The two didn't meet face to face until after Lucas had already finished his original trilogy of films…
Part 1
We look to the stars and wonder. Light from infinite directions and distances meets our gaze. And within our “mythic imagination,” as Joseph Campbell described it, we begin to tell stories. As Campbell points out, the visual beauties that inspire a saga like Star Wars are derived as much from within us as it is outside. “The imagery is necessarily physical and thus apparently of outer space,” Campbell says, “The inherent connotation is always, however, psychological and metaphysical, which is to say, of inner space.” As we look to the stars, we are inherently reflected. It is what Campbell calls the “inner reaches of outer space.”
In 1984, Joseph Campbell came to the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, an architectural beauty rebuilt from the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, and near the current location of Lucasfilm’s headquarters. The iconic dome had been constructed to reflect the classical styles of ancient Rome and Greece, and evokes emotion as if it could be an archetype of myth itself. It was an apt setting for Campbell to lead discussions on the inner reaches of outer space.
George Lucas was in the audience. Though he had long admired and studied Campbell back to the time of his early drafts of Star Wars, he had yet to meet the man who he would call, “my Yoda.” San Francisco certainly wasn’t the swampy planet of Dagobah. The meeting would in fact be the opposite of Master Yoda and young Luke Skywalker’s. This time it was the master who was to learn just how pivotal his teachings could be for the apprentice.
The master and apprentice both learn from each other.
“[…] Outer space is within inasmuch as the laws of space are within us; outer and inner space are the same. We know, furthermore, that we have actually been born from space,” Campbell told audiences in San Francisco. He continued to describe the “wonderland of myth,” where an almost circular path of inspiration moves between that which we see and that which we imagine. “From the outer world the senses carry images to mind, which do not become myth, however, until they’re transformed by fusion with accordant insights, awakened as imagination from the inner world of the body.” As Yoda tells Luke in The Empire Strikes Back, “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.” The light of the stars is fully within us.
After the mesmerizing discussions, Lucas was introduced to Campbell via their mutual friend, scientist and Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock. Though they did not connect at first words, as McClintock would remember to Campbell’s biographer, “I got them sitting together, but Joe was holding court like he would…There was a young man there, David Abrams, the only true magician I’ve ever known in my life… I called David over and said, ‘See if you can get these two talking to each other.’ David went over and did a trick…it involved putting George’s hand on Joe’s hand and that was it.”
Fateful Meetings
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