Mythos III.5 Into the Well of Myth

Summary

This program presents Joseph Campbell’s lecture on Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, framed by Susan Sarandon’s introduction from the National Arts Club in New York City. The discussion builds on the previous program’s treatment of Mann’s The Magic Mountain and expands into a broader comparison between Freud and Jung, myth, and the psychological foundations of art. A central theme is the distinction between Freud’s and Jung’s models of the unconscious. Campbell describes Freud’s unconscious as biographical and historical, rooted in traumatic personal experience and the individual life story. By contrast, Jung’s collective unconscious is presented as biologically grounded, arising from the energies of the body and nature itself. These energies appear in dreams, images, impulses, and mythic figures. Campbell emphasizes that deities are personifications of these energies, and that myth therefore has both a universal biological basis and a historically conditioned cultural expression. To clarify this distinction, Campbell invokes Adolf Bastian’s terms for universal and culture-specific imagery: elementary ideas and ethnic ideas. He explains that historians and ethnologists focus on the ethnic, local, and culturally particular forms of myth, while psychologists seek the elementary structures that recur across cultures. Jung’s archetypes are identified as the psychological equivalent of these elementary ideas. Campbell also notes the Indian distinction between deshi, the local or popular form, and marga, the path or way that leads inward to the soul. Myth, in this view, guides a person from cultural surface forms back to the deepest human source. Campbell then turns to Thomas Mann’s Joseph novels as a literary embodiment of these ideas. Mann is praised for reinterpreting the Biblical story of Joseph in a way that universalizes the Judeo-Christian heritage without erasing its value. Campbell argues that Mann, like Jung and Joyce, seeks to preserve the positive power of inherited tradition while opening it to a global human perspective. He traces Mann’s use of mythic layers, from Genesis back through Sumerian and Babylonian material, and even further into imagined primordial stages such as Atlantis, Lemuria, and Eden. These are treated not as literal history but as symbolic markers for the deep past of human consciousness. A major interpretive thread is the myth of descent and return. Campbell explains that in the mystery religions and Gnostic traditions, spirit descends into matter and later returns to its source. This can be understood either as a fall or as a voluntary descent out of love, and Campbell contrasts the Genesis fall with the Christian image of Christ’s voluntary self-emptying in the Epistle to the Philippians. He argues that Mann uses this same pattern in Joseph’s story: Joseph descends into the well, into Egypt, and later into prison, only to rise again into a position of power and reconciliation. The well becomes a recurring symbol of the underworld, the unconscious, and the necessary plunge into life’s depths. Campbell also highlights the psychological complexity of Joseph. Unlike Jacob, who is more spontaneous and mythically immersed, Joseph is portrayed as intentional, self-aware, and at times prideful. His descent into the well is linked to his youthful vanity, his coat of many colors, and his dreams of superiority over his brothers. Later, his encounter with Potiphar’s wife becomes another descent, this time involving erotic temptation, manipulation, and imprisonment. Campbell reads these episodes as moral and psychological disciplines that strip away Joseph’s pride and prepare him for transformation. The lecture further explores Mann’s treatment of religion, monotheism, and the relationship between spirit and matter. Campbell discusses the angels who refuse to bow to man, linking them to rigid righteousness and to the forces of evil when spirit becomes fixed and inert. He contrasts this with the dynamic soul, which mediates between spirit and matter. References to the Quran, Muslim mystics, and Persian traditions show Mann’s wide mythological range. Campbell also invokes Wolfram von Eschenbach and the Grail tradition to stress that good and evil are never pure absolutes; life is mixed, and wisdom lies in movement rather than rigidity. In the closing sections, Campbell returns to the broader significance of myth. He presents Mann’s Joseph novels as a profound modern retelling of an ancient story, one that reveals the hidden structure of human life and culture. Myth, he concludes, is the opening through which cosmic energies enter human expression. The program ends by reaffirming myth as a universal human inheritance and by inviting viewers to read Mann’s work as a rich poetic and psychological interpretation of the enduring story of humankind.