Anyone trying – as the current fashion prefers – to reduce Joseph Campbell to Monomyth and the Hero’s Journey finds himself in danger of seriously misinterpreting both. The Hero’s Journey all too easily becomes a New Age therapeutic self-discovery trip, and Star Wars which were inspired by it a pretty, pleasing affair: pulp legitimised by its Campbellian credentials as acceptable viewing for middle-aged intellectuals and very small children.

The Monomyth, however, is a superstructure resting on a little discussed foundation: the rather alarming natural history of gods proposed by Campbell in The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology. The set of ideas insinuated therein was frighteningly radical and opened new and vast horizons beyond which it was, perhaps, not wise to venture if one was not prepared to sacrifice or at least fundamentally question many cherished concepts. Campbell himself swiftly stepped over the crevasse which had opened under his feet at the very inception of his Masks of God series and proceeded as if nothing had happened, but the chasm remained open and a cold wind emanating from its depths affected all his subsequent writing as well as changing perspective in which his previous work should be viewed. Towards the end of his life, however, his sojourn in Japan brought Campbell face to face with what he had been carefully avoiding all his life in spite of his relentless ideological championing of immediacy: a bona fide sensible experience of the miraculous. He had walked barefoot on hot coals and did not get a single blister. The fire had felt cool to the skin and his fresh ankle injury had been healed. Campbell was profoundly shaken and would have without doubt, after many years of evasion, returned to finally look into the chasm had he had the time. Unfortunately, his time had run out.

This book, among other things, represents an attempt to look into that deep, uncomfortably cold chasm where concepts shatter once they fall in. We cannot tell the whole story on this website: whoever wishes to know more will have to read the book. We can, however, afford to make a few general observations about the nature of the cat (perhaps even Schrödinger’s cat) that Campbell had let out of the bag but declined to watch it run.

Up to the hot coals walk, Campbell had, no matter how far about he cast in his speculations, never abandoned the axiomatic assumption that an objective reality existed independently of man who at some point entered its continued existence and became its constituent part as well as its observer. Most thinkers labour under the same assumption, hardly aware that they do. We all do the same. No matter in what way we strive to make sense of the phenomenal world, we are not prepared, largely because the possibility never occurs to us, to question the fact that the Moon was high in the night sky as the dinosaurs grazed the Jurassic pastures, or that the Earth was a planet circling the Sun long before man’s appearance on the stage. We are of course right. The evidence in our favour is overwhelming – it is faultless. But has it always been thus?

This may sound as a contradiction: we are saying here in the same breath that the Earth and the stars always existed (as they do now) independently of man and his doings, and asking ourselves if it has always been so. The contradiction, however, only exists if we place a supposed alternative reality (in which, for example, the stars would be fixed on the firmament) and “our reality” into a historic sequence instead of seeing each proposal as a complete, independent timeline relating to other such timelines much as 100.6 MHz relates to 101.3 MHz on the dial of a radio tuner: the indicator needle can come to rest at either position, and the radio will receive the selected station.

There would be no reason for us to indulge in such wild speculations were it not for the miraculous, the same miraculous Campbell experienced in Japan. The miraculous cannot be denied, although it must be personally experienced before its undeniability can be fully established. Such experiences cannot be had on demand, and, as in Campbell’s case, may be a lifetime coming.

What is the miraculous? A miracle is a perceptible phenomenon which violates laws of nature. That, of course, is an impossibility. There either are no miracles, or the laws of nature do not exist. Ouspensky, a pupil of Gurdjieff and an esoteric thinker who, like Campbell, felt that miracles existed but was not prepared to renounce all objectivity for their sake, tried to bridge the rift by stating that miracles were manifestations of natural laws (as yet) unknown to man. This, however, did not preclude the violation of the known ones, meaning that the known laws of nature, if they were laws, did not define all nature but were, like Euclidean geometry, operational only within a particular set of circumstances.

Campbell’s instincts were that of a scientist, his inclinations that of a comparative mythologist. As such, he knew that, as a system of cognition, mythology postulated the miraculous. Just like Ouspensky, he was thus compelled to bring science and the miraculous under one hat. Nothing if not original, he put forth that gods and other mythologems were natural phenomena belonging to mythosphere (in analogy with biosphere, for example) and that comparative mythology was a science investigating its governing natural laws. He therefore had to find evidence of their perceptible and thus measurable trace in some real environment, namely, man and his central nervous system.

Utilising the theory of innate releasing mechanisms from psychosomatic medicine, he showed how man could have yearned towards supernormal, not yet existent key stimuli just like a male butterfly of the eumenis semele species prefers a darker model butterfly to a real, live female of a lighter hue. Man’s yearnings left permanent traces in his central nervous system; traces which could be and were inherited. The process has been outlined in detail in the book, but even without details we can already see that the supernormal key stimuli were gods and that man was, through his continued yearning and its inherited traces, shaping himself in their image. If one added, as Campbell did, that the stimuli connected to the response mechanism in a state of rapture in which syzygy – the cancellation of all opposites and consequently of the categories of time and space – took place, it was equally obvious that the question of who came first: man or his gods, had become completely redundant. Man called his gods forth, but he did so on their bidding since at the time he first yearned for them, they were already there, waiting.

If we don Campbell’s cloak and apply this mode of thinking to Star Wars – which, we claim, are an edifice of intent – we could say that, when George Lucas set out to make them, they were already there, waiting.