On Rossi’s Goddesses (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell)

On Rossi's Goddesses (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine. In the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell, edited by Safron Elsabeth Rossi. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2013. 304 pp. ISBN: 1608681823. Cloth $24.05.The Eternal feminine is what draws us on.-GoetheOne of a number of critiques that continues to swirl around Joseph Campbell's massive library of books he has published (and now available on DVD) is that he appears to leave the feminine out of the Hero's Journey. Some of his readers have gone so far as to suggest that he leaves the feminine out of the mythic pantheon that he constructed over a lifetime of exploring world mythologies.In this new book, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, much of such criticism might be muted or modulated or, at the very least, revisited and revised. The editor, Dr. Safron Rossi, a former mythological studies student at Pacifica Graduate Institute and now curator of the OPUS Archives and associate core faculty member at the institute, has performed a magnificent service in both idea and execution by gathering Campbell's lectures, essays, and informal talks into one volume. In its 300 pages, the volume celebrates Campbell's abiding and enduring interest in and fascination with the Goddess tradition, its mythohistorical legacy, and its voice in literary classics of the Middle Ages.The eight substantial and often beautifully illustrated chapters, with artworks that include ceramics, paintings, sculptures, reliefs, engravings, and sketches from around the globe, gather a range of feminine divine presences across time and space. For example, consider the following: "Chapter 1. Myth and the Feminine Divine"; "Chapter 2. Goddess-Mother Creator: Neolithic and Early Bronze Age"; "Chapter 4. Sumerian and Egyptian Goddesses"; "Chapter 6. Iliad and Odyssey: Return to the Goddess"; "Chapter 8. Amor: The Feminine in European Romance." The brief appendix contains Campbell's foreword to Marija Gimbutas's Language of the Goddess as well as a list of "Essential Reading" on the Goddess's presence in a variety of disciplines.As many readers of Campbell's ample corpus know, he is a comparative mythologist who works best within what I would call the "analogical imagination." He seeks similarities within forests of difference; words that I have found to describe his "mythodology" include "in accord with," " similar to," "like," and "corresponds to," to name a few. His method calls to mind C. G. Jung's provocative insight that "analogy formation is a law which to a large extent governs the psyche" (par. 414). Campbell generally adheres to this principle as a guide through the whirling motions of world mythologies over time. The other staple to his method is his understanding of myths as energy fields, even transport vehicles, that allow the individual and culture to move to a place where one or both may become transparent to transcendence. His move is always toward the invisible but palpable presences that undergird and give shape and form to the time-bound phenomenal world. In his imagination, the images of the Goddess have served humankind in just that way for millennia, however much they seem to have been lost, deconstructed, or decentered from the individual or collective psyche: "The object venerated," he asserts, "is a personification of an energy that dwells within the individual, and the reference of mythology has two modes-that of consciousness and that of the spiritual potentials within the individual" (14).Furthermore, as we track his phenomenological exploration of Goddess imagery, we recognize him working the image as one would the imagery of a poem. In fact, it is well to recall his fundamental belief of the Goddess's presence: "People often think of the Goddess as a fertility deity only. Not at all-she's the muse. She's the inspirer of poetry. She's the inspirer of the spirit" (37). Most always, what myths lead Campbell to repeatedly proclaim is that they are manifestations in time and space of the timeless realm of spirit. …