Vanessa Y Rogers: Welcome, welcome, folksy folks. This is Fabric of Folklore podcast. I'm your hostess, Vanessa Y. Rogers, and this is a podcast where we unravel the mysteries of folklore. This podcast is a celebration of culture, stories, and the human experience. We pull on the threads that make up our identity as a people, the fabric of our humanity. And when I say people, I mean from as small as a family or as large of a group of people encompassing an entire hemisphere. If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that folklore isn't just folktale. It's so much more. It's the jokes we tell each other. It's the traditions we participate in at holidays, such as in the why Christmas episode?
Vanessa Y Rogers: Episode number 37 with James Cooper, where we discuss how it became a tradition to put a tree in our house to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Those two don't seem to go together, but somehow it has become one of our traditions. So what sets our podcast apart is that we don't just tell the stories. We get to the heart of folklore. We dive into the history, the context, and the deeper meaning. I am of the belief that we, as a people of the human race, should celebrate our similarities and our differences. I think understanding the history behind our folklore helps us to understand where we came from, and in turn, it will help to guide us to better humans in the future.
Vanessa Y Rogers: So if that sounds like a podcast that you are interested in following, make sure you're hitting that subscribe button whether you're on YouTube or you're listening to on your favorite podcasting platform so that you get our notifications weekly. When our podcast drops, we have an amazing episode for you today. We'll be talking about Joseph Campbell, who is an incredibly influential american writer of mythology. He is most well known for the hero with a thousand faces, and we will be discussing the hero's journey, as well as the masks of God, which looks at world religion. And our guest is. You know, I forgot to ask you how you pronounce your last name. Is it Boise?
Bruce Boyce: Boyce.
Vanessa Y Rogers: Boyce. Okay. Bruce Boyce is the creator of I take history with my coffee. It's a blog and a podcast. He created both to be a place where people can turn to for well researched, evidence based history because he believes history matters. He is also an interpretive guide at Talisman west, the winter studio and home of american architect Frank Lloyd Wright in Scottsdale, Arizona. So welcome so much, Bruce. I am so glad that you're joining us today.
Bruce Boyce: Well, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for asking. Me.
Vanessa Y Rogers: And did I pronounce that right? Talisman west. Is that where you're working?
Bruce Boyce: It's Taliesin.
Vanessa Y Rogers: Taliesin. Okay. Taliesin.
Bruce Boyce: And just to kind of jump in there, because it relates to mythology, Frank Lloyd Wright chose Taliessen. Taliesin was the main character in a medieval welsh epic poem.
Vanessa Y Rogers: Oh, how cool.
Bruce Boyce: Yeah. And it means shining brow, because Mr. Wright didn't believe you built at top of a landscape, or at the bottom, you found the brow of the landscape. So that's why he chose that name. Taliesin.
Vanessa Y Rogers: Maybe I needed some. Have someone come on and talk about that mythology. That's so interesting.
Bruce Boyce: Yeah.
Vanessa Y Rogers: So tell me how. When did you start your blog and why? What was the impetus?
Bruce Boyce: I started the blog back in 2020, right after everything shut down with COVID I had been working as an educational specialist at a local Titanic exhibit. It was traveling. They asked me to come in and to be a educational coordinator. And I was doing a weekly program for the Titanic highlighting a passenger or a crew member talking about their lives, their experiences. And when everything shut down, I had realized I was having so much fun doing that. And that was something I had always wanted to be doing. So I had this thought, now's the time to do this, to take this chance of just putting myself out there, write this blog. And that was really the seed, I guess, of the idea of doing the blog. And like you said, I wanted it to be a place where people could learn about history.
Bruce Boyce: But history as it is, there was at the time, so much junk, history and memes and all different sorts of things, misconceptions, myths. And so this was going to be a space where people can go and really get to see real history, the good, the bad, the ugly, however you want to phrase it.
Vanessa Y Rogers: Yeah.
Bruce Boyce: But also see history as being relevant to our lives that people in the past struggled with. Many of the same things that we struggle with today, the same big overarching conflicts of things, what to do with public health at the time, with the pandemic, the role of government in society, things like this. So that was what I was aiming for, at least with the blog.
Vanessa Y Rogers: Yeah. As a historian, as an observer, it must have been really interesting to see there was a lot of mirroring of what happened in the 1918 flu epidemic, as in our COVID epidemic. Did you see that as a historian? Like, seeing it happen over again?
Bruce Boyce: Oh, almost immediately. And you can even go back further to some of the yellow fever epidemics at the end of the 18th and at the beginning of their early 19th century, say, in Philadelphia, the 1793 yellow fever epidemic. Some of the same questions, what are we supposed to do? What's the government's role in protecting government health? And what can we do to prevent this from happening? And then, of course, trying to convince people to take the proper steps. They struggled with that back then, too, as well.
Vanessa Y Rogers: Yeah, every single time. And then the podcast came later.
Bruce Boyce: The podcast came in 2022. I had been doing the blog for a while, and I had been reading some stuff about the difference between short format and long format, as far as building a brand and an identity on social media and so forth. And so I decided I'd been toying around with the pot. Thinking about the podcast hadn't really come up with how I wanted to approach it until about the spring of 2022. And after doing some research about podcasting and how to start one, I made that leap into doing the podcast.
Vanessa Y Rogers: And is it mostly you talking about different historical events, or do you interview people? How does your podcast work?
Bruce Boyce: It's just me for right now, talking about different, like you said, different historical events. I've tried to break down big key events and then break them down into what led up to those key events with the meaning behind those key events. So right now, I'm tying up a whole series of episodes on the Florentine Renaissance in the 15th century, which was bookmarked by two significant happenings in particular. At the end, the french invasion of Italy, which was just the recent podcast episode I did, had a significant impact on the history of Italy and the course of european history in general. And what I did was I stepped back and I went through different aspects of the 15th century, the rise of the Medici in Florence, their impact on the art and culture.
Bruce Boyce: I talked about Donatello and Brunelleski, and so I brought in all these different elements leading up to this singular event, and why that singular event was important, what happened before and what's going to happen afterwards. But that was the great thing about the podcast, as opposed to the blog. The podcast allows me to dig a little bit deeper into some of these subjects than the blog. The blog was starting to feel a little limited in scope. There's only so much you can write to keep people's attention. So I was limiting it to what would be considered like a six minute read, five minute read. But you really can't get into the background and the deeper meaning of why this was important and why am I writing about this?
Bruce Boyce: But with the podcast, it allows me to do that and take several episodes to really get into that.
Vanessa Y Rogers: And personally, for me, I like audio versions of books and podcasts, in part because I'm a busy mom and it's really hard for me to sit down and read something for a long time. But I can listen while I'm doing dishes or laundry, and it takes my mind off of mundane tasks. And I'm being educated at the same time. So I really like that format as well, obviously, which is why I'm doing a podcast. But I agree, I would much rather listen to someone tell me about history than sit down and read about it. Very cool. Would you say you were always interested in history?
Bruce Boyce: I would say going back to an early age, I had an interest in history. I always relate a story. One of the first trips I grew up in New York, and one of the first trips I remember as a family was traveling to Gettysburg National Military park in Pennsylvania. I remember going there and I remember seeing a man on a horseback dressed in a union uniform. And I looked at that and I said, wow, isn't that neat? Isn't that cool? That's something I want to do.
Vanessa Y Rogers: Yeah.
Bruce Boyce: It took me almost 60 years to get to that point, but that's why I'm working at Tallyess and West now. But I always use that story as a defining moment for me when I realized, wow, I really love history. And of course, growing up, everybody would tell me, what are you going to do with history? What are you going to do with that? You have to be practical and think about that. So there was a time when, yeah, history was a passion, but it was more a passion, but it wasn't a realistic thing that I should go into. But then I'd have to say, in high school, I had three influences on me in high school as far as my decision to go into history.
Bruce Boyce: One, I read Barbara Tuckman's book the guns of August, which is a phenomenal book if you've never read it. Talk about human hubris. That's it right there in a nutshell. But what struck me about Barbara's book is the way she wrote it and how she wrote about history. And then it began to realize, and I was envisioning myself as a writer, too. I was trying to write short stories and had this vision of being maybe a historical fiction novelist at some point. But what really struck me with her was the way she wrote about history. And I feel like I try to model myself and how I talk about History channeling her. The other influence was will Durant's monumental set about the history of civilization. My dad got that for my birthday one year. And I've made it through up to the reformation.
Bruce Boyce: I haven't gotten much. I mean, it's like eight volumes of books. But what influenced me with that is it showed me the scope of history. Huge scope of history, because he covers everything, but he doesn't cover it in depth. It's more the surface level stuff. But it impressed upon me that scope of history. And there was a lot more to history than what I was learning in school, certainly. And I've always been one to look for the unusual things. I never tended to want to be the person who did what everybody else wanted to do. I always try to find the most off the wall stuff to look at and learn about the other influence. That third influence was an english teacher that we had in high school. Everybody liked this english teacher. He always tried to get into his class.
Bruce Boyce: One of the things he always had his class do was learn the first paragraph of the Canterbury Tales prologue, Chaucer's prologue. But in middle English.
Vanessa Y Rogers: Oh, wow.
Bruce Boyce: I mean, just the fact that I got a chance to learn Middle English was just worth the class in itself. But he was the type of teacher. People talk about teachers who are big influences and by who they are and how they teach. He really was the type of teacher that got us all thinking about different things in different ways, to really challenge the way we viewed things. And that is probably what I would say is the start of where I started to consider what we take for granted and what we've been taught and what we know. Maybe there's more to it, there's another side to it, and start challenging that thinking and really making it personal. And I started seeing history as kind of a personal narrative as well, a person narrative. By the time. Yeah, go ahead.
Vanessa Y Rogers: Oh, I was just going to say I recognized that when I was in high school, and it was not reading, but we watched all quiet on the western front. And I think most people are familiar with the movie, but it's about World War I, german boys being shipped off into war, and they're all excited, and then they go to war and they realize it's horrendous. I think it was the first time I realized that history had multiple sides. Because from that point in my life, I had only ever heard the american history or Texas history standpoint. And I don't remember ever hearing history from a completely different perspective. Anyway, so I like what you were saying, that history can be very personal history.
Bruce Boyce: Yeah. And when I got into college at Michigan, that is where I was introduced to the school of thought in history from the bottom up, being introduced to those voices in history that aren't normally recognized. Women and slaves and just the common worker. So all these different people who don't get it into the historical record per se, because they're just ordinary people, they didn't do anything famous, they didn't do anything nowhere. They didn't sign the Declaration of Independence. They were just living their lives. And that's when that was, for me, a very transformative moment. We'll be talking about going into the belly of the whale. That, for me, was my personal belly of the whale. Seeing that realization that all these people that are not acknowledged but had an impact on history in their own silent way.
Bruce Boyce: And from that point onward, I've always tried to focus a lot on not only the great people, but the ordinary people and their lives and their common lives and how they lived and how they really were much like ourselves in many ways.
Vanessa Y Rogers: Yeah. So when you were learning about these bottom up histories, one of the struggles is that a lot of times their history isn't recorded or is much more difficult to find. How do people learn about those people who are not well represented?
Bruce Boyce: It takes some research. You have to know where to look, but you find it in documents, as mundane documents, deeds, records. Look at tax records. In the 15th century, Florence, the city, started a tax record. So every year, people had to pay taxes. They had to record in a book how much they had to pay, what their occupation was, almost like a census type of deal. But you could look at that, and then you can start seeing, oh, you have this many people working as goldsmiths, this many people doing this, and this was the average wealth. And you start piecing all this stuff together and you start getting a picture of what it was like. So things like a census, tax records. Here in the United States. I did a lot in college with the.
Bruce Boyce: And I do family history, genealogy as well, for my own family. Using documents like military records, the pension records here in the United States is a great way to look at the social structure, say, of the american revolution, the people who fought in the American Revolution. And you see, these were just common farmers that they worked a farm, and then they went off the fight, and then they had these descriptions of the battles they fought in, and then they go back and they're living their lives again. So it's records like that you look for to really see those types of people.
Vanessa Y Rogers: Yeah. So you're not the first historian that has come on my show. I've had multiple historians. My question is, how would you say that folklore and mythology and history are all interlinked?
Bruce Boyce: I would say folklore, mythology. You can see those things in a literary aspect of those part of the literary culture of a society, just like looking at DIckEns or ROusseau or Voltaire. Just all pieces of trying to get a sense of who these people were that lived in this society in the past. And for some societies, the only thing we have is the folklore, the mythology, and that's what you look at. But I also think that it gives you a good clue as to humans in general. And I've always been fascinated with Humanity in the general sense. And like you said, the shared Humanity that we've splintered off into all these groups, but we're really the same species. And when you look at it from a biological aspect, in that sense, it's like, wow.
Bruce Boyce: And then you start to understand each group does the same thing that other groups do. And you see that in history. I've tried to look at history of China and Japan and these other civilizations, and you see them going through the same things that the Europeans went through. I mean, it may not look the same on the surface, but the same struggles. So that shared humanity is what I see in it.
Vanessa Y Rogers: Okay, so let's talk about Joseph Campbell. How did you get introduced to him?
Bruce Boyce: I got introduced to Joseph Campbell's work back in college. I had taken a comparative mythology class at Michigan, and were reading Homer. We were reading the ring cycle, the German, the norse Edas. We were reading all these stories and myths and folktales and comparing them. And that is when I was beginning to see, wow, there are some shared similarities to these stories. And I really didn't think much deeper than that. Oh, other than wow, that's kind of neat. There's a lot of cultures that have creation myths and a lot of cultures that have flood didn't, we didn't read Joseph Campbell in that class, but I happened to be in this university bookstore one day, and that's where I saw a set of Joseph Campbell's the Masks of God.
Bruce Boyce: It's a four volume set where he covers all the world belief systems through history, compares them, highlights the similarities, differences. And since I had taken this class, I was curious, so I bought the whole set and read through them. And let me tell you, it changed my perspective on things entirely after reading those four books in that set, just the deeper meaning of everything. And again, that shared humanity, that we humans were the same and we think the same, and we want to have the same answers. To things, and our answers just happen to be different. And so whether you call it Zeus or you call it Thor, whatever you want to call it's all trying to reach that same answer in that sense. So that is really what struck me with Joseph Campbell's masks of God, in fact.
Bruce Boyce: And then later on, as a writer, I became introduced to the hero with a thousand faces and the whole idea of the heroic cycle, the heroic journey. And I really began seeing that in everything. Once you learn about it, then you start looking, oh, my goodness, that's that part. And that's that part. But the greatest thing about that is that you look at your own life and you start thinking about your own trajectory through life, and you start thinking, oh, yeah, that's my trial. That's my belly of the whale, and that's my hero's journey in a very personal and real sense. And for me, that was probably the most important takeaway that I got from the hero of a thousand faces. That turning and looking at yourself and saying, oh, yeah, that's how I could look at my life.
Bruce Boyce: And you can actually do something about.
Vanessa Y Rogers: It, like when you're in the weeds, recognizing that you were just in one part of the hero's journey. And the next part might get worse, but it will hopefully eventually get better. And for anyone who is not familiar with Joseph Campbell's work, would you say that his work is relatable? Is it easy to read, or is it primarily readable for academics?
Bruce Boyce: Well, he did. I wouldn't say he wrote it for academics. He was a college professor. He was a professor of comparative literature at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. But I would say what's difficult about reading him is just the time period at which he wrote was the 1950s, the early 1960s, that kind of, to us, it seems like awkward constructed sentences and things like that. I would say the most accessible part of his work is the hero with a thousand faces. I think a lot of people can read that very easily. The masks of God tends to be wordy, and he gets into a lot of details because he's covering a lot of different stuff and a lot of different cultures and things that are familiar with us to familiar with a reader.
Bruce Boyce: So I would say that work is probably a little bit more difficult, but it's worth the effort to get through it.
Vanessa Y Rogers: Yeah. What would you say he is most famous for?
Bruce Boyce: Probably the hero with a thousand faces. This whole idea of the mythic journey, I've seen that as his greatest influence, especially on art and artists and writers. Filmmakers. I mean, George Lucas said Star wars. Yeah. I was influenced by Joseph Campbell right there.
Vanessa Y Rogers: I thought I remembered them actually being friends. Do you know if that was true?
Bruce Boyce: Yes. The story, if I remember correctly, is that after the first three Star wars movies came out and George Lucas learned about Joseph Campbell, he invited him to the George Lucas'ranch or whatever he had. Filmmaking ranch that he had, and actually invited him to do some lectures there as part of a filmmaking symposium or something like that. So I believe that is how they got to know each other in person.
Vanessa Y Rogers: Okay.
Bruce Boyce: And then, of course, that was the scene of a famous interview that Bill Moyers did with Joseph Campbell right before Campbell's death in 88. The power of myth. And if you want a good introduction to Joseph Campbell, that's probably a good place to start if you didn't want to dive directly into either the hero of the thousand faces or the masks of God. That series, it's a series of six episodes. It's an interview by Bill Moyers, who's a fantastic interviewer himself, talking with Joseph Campbell. And they go through some of themes of Campbell's work. So it's a good introduction if you want to get to know a little bit more about Joseph Campbell.
Vanessa Y Rogers: And that's the only one I've actually read because they also put it into audiobook form. And so I didn't realize that it was an actual video series until I started listening to it and realized that it was through PBS, I believe. Right?
Bruce Boyce: Yes.
Vanessa Y Rogers: But, yes, I agree. If anyone is interested in reading Joseph Campbell, that is a really good starting point. I found it incredibly fascinating, and I found Joseph Campbell to be very down to earth. Would you say that is true?
Bruce Boyce: Yeah. In watching that and listening to him speak, he tries to put it into ordinary language that people can relate to. And of course, he has so much knowledge about the different myths and folklores that he pulls these stories in, and he uses those as a way to get you to understand. He uses storytelling pretty much. And as humans, that's how we've learned throughout time, is through storytelling. I mean, that's basically what history is. It's storytelling. He was a master, I think, at doing that, especially in those interviews, just pulling in those stories and telling those different stories and how they relate to what he was talking about.
Vanessa Y Rogers: Yeah, absolutely. And what would you say his impact was on? I don't want to impact on the world or on academia. Who did he impact the most?
Bruce Boyce: I think he impacted people outside of academia, from what I understand and from what I've read there were many in academic circles that really did not like him, didn't like his views, didn't agree with his views. So I think a lot of his influence lay outside of the academic world. I think a lot of that influence, as I mentioned, in the art world and in filmmaking and storytelling, there is a gentleman, Christopher Volger, who was a screenwriter for Disney, who helped do the screenwriting for the Lion King for Disney. And in the mid 2000s, about 2007, 2008, he came out with his own version of the hero's journey for writers and filmmakers, and breaking it down a little bit more simply.
Bruce Boyce: That was very influenced because he knew people, and a lot of people looked at that and have tried to model how they write and how they create stories using that framework in that. But I also think Campbell had an influence on people themselves and how people saw, like with myself, seeing our own lives in terms of that heroic journey and understanding, at least for me, it was understanding, yeah, there's these trials and tribulations, and I'm going through this and I recognize this, but I also recognize what my dragons were. He talks about slaying the dragons as part of this mythic journey. And so I took that, and I think a lot of people take that as, what are the demons that we have to slay? What do we have to kill off in order to grow personally and to move forward?
Bruce Boyce: What baggage do we have to let go and say, that's it, leave that behind. We need to move forward and get on with living. And I think that's where his influence really mattered at that personal level. I know it certainly did for me because my whole perspective of how I viewed my life just was different in that way.
Vanessa Y Rogers: What do you think it was about his work that rubbed academics the wrong way?
Bruce Boyce: I think it was mainly that they didn't really agree with his methods. They thought he oversimplified things, that he pick and choose things, and things were over generalized, that the stories and the myths didn't really fit into this pattern, that he was talking about, this hero's journey. A lot of social scientists said that he was too. Ethnic bias, I guess, put into it. I know there are some feminists who believe that his views were too centered on the masculine rather than the feminine, and that the feminine journey is much different than the masculine journey. In fact, there's a book by Maureen Murdoch, the heroine's journey. And so she says a woman's journey is much different than a man's journey. And Campbell didn't really account for that. So they had these different criticisms of know.
Bruce Boyce: I'm not an expert in any of those fields, to say the least, but I know from a historical point of view, when people have those types of criticisms, sometimes you have to look at the time and place in which this person was writing and working and his views. And when you think about when Campbell was at his most formative forty s, the fifty s, yeah, it's going to have a heavily masculine bent to it and so forth. It's going to have these certain biases already bred in, because that was the time period. So whether these criticisms are valid or not, like I said, I'm not an expert in any of those fields. I'll leave that up to them. But from my point of view, you just have to look at the time period.
Bruce Boyce: I don't think any of it takes away the impact of how Campbell presented and his thoughts and that influence. I think that's still there, regardless of the.
Vanessa Y Rogers: How did he. Did he do a lot of traveling? I assume that he did a lot of reading of mythology. But did he travel around like anthropologist would?
Bruce Boyce: He did not travel a whole lot. Like you said, he did a lot of reading. I know during the Great Depression, he blocked out time, his day. He would divide his day into three or four blocks of 3 hours each, and he would spend three of those blocks just reading. So that's three quarters of your day is spent reading. And he just read and read. The only extensive travel that I know that he took, and he may have taken more, but he did take a trip right after the second world war, early 40s, early fifty s, I think, to Asia. And he went to India and Japan in particular. And he had already had a growing interest in the Far east and the mythologies of Asia. And that trip is what sparked him to come back to the United States.
Bruce Boyce: And when he joined the staff at Cerrill Lawrence, he decided to teach a class in comparative literature. Being influenced by that, it was like a year long trip. I think that was the most extensive travel, other than going to symposiums and seminars and things like that.
Vanessa Y Rogers: And I was also struck that I did read about him reading in the Great Depression. He must have come from a wealthy family, because so many other people were scraping and trying to find work the entire time. And if he's spending most of his time reading, he's not having to work for his living.
Bruce Boyce: Yeah, I don't remember what the background of his parents were or what that background. I do know that he did become friends with John Steinbeck. He did go out to California, and he spent time with John Steinbeck out there in California. But as far as his background as his parents, I don't remember. I don't recall exactly what that was.
Vanessa Y Rogers: So going back to his impact, one of the things that I found was it says the comparative study of mythologies of the world compels us to view the cultural history of mankind as a unit. And that was one of his main sticking points that he started writing about, I think, in the masks of God. Would you say that really is, like, the crux of what he was talking about?
Bruce Boyce: I would say, and that's the thing that really struck out with me. That notion right there, that we have a shared humanity, and humanity is just one, and we have these shared beliefs. We just call them different things in different cultures. So that statement right there, I would say, would sum up everything that he talks about in the masks of God. And that's the thing that I took away from that work, is that, yeah, we're one, basically.
Vanessa Y Rogers: And was that part of what rubbed people the wrong way? Did people latch on to that, or. I assume that the academic world and the outer world would have different reactions to that stance. Is that true?
Bruce Boyce: I think the criticism from the academic world was, yeah, he oversimplified that statement, that he generalized too much and made too much of these similarities, and there were probably more differences to highlight than similarities, and he just chose the things that he chose to help support his argument. I guess they would accuse him of cherry picking, I guess, nowadays cherry picking the data.
Vanessa Y Rogers: But it's funny that they say that. And maybe that is true to an extent, but he was prolific in his writing, so it was to say that he cherry picked, but there was a lot of writing for cherry picking, it seems.
Bruce Boyce: Yeah. And I think some of it comes from the fact that he was not trained in. He wasn't a trained anthropologist, he wasn't a trained social scientist. He wasn't a trained psychologist. He was a literary man. And he had approached these stories from a literary perspective initially. And as he dug into it more and more, he began to pull in, I think, some of these other things, but I think they viewed him not as somebody who was trained in those specialties. So he didn't utilize their methods the way they did, saw things. So I think there's a little bit of that going on, too, as well.
Vanessa Y Rogers: And do you feel like in his work, was he trying to relay a message? Do you feel like it was important that people understand that there was more similarities to humanity than there were differences. Do you feel like it was important for people to understand that?
Bruce Boyce: I think SO. I think he wanted people to understand that as human beings, we're going through the same thing either on a personal level or on a more larger scale, this societal level, and that this understanding, by having this understanding between each other, then that would be a positive thing, because then you understand, well, you're not right. I'm not right, but neither of us are wrong either. So it's just that we're looking for the same THIng, the same CONCEpT. We're just approaching it from different ways. And so in that way, and seeing that shared understanding, I think, for him was a way to transcend. And he talks a lot about transcendence and transformation in the mask of gods because that is essentially what we're looking for. We're looking for transcendence from this reality to some other reality.
Bruce Boyce: And I think for him, he wanted us to transcend the differences as humans. And maybe in this way, we can settle conflicts. Why are we fighting over these concepts? They're just different ways of expressing the same concept, so why are we fighting about it?
Vanessa Y Rogers: How interesting. Do you have a favorite mythology story that he tells?
Bruce Boyce: I think my favorite one of the, I've always been fascinated with the different creation myths. So he tells a lot of myths from the native AMerican cultures. And for me, those were always interesting because a lot of people don't know a lot of the Native American myths in general, but that these Native American myths, here they are, they're isolated on this continent pretty much. And yet many of the same themes and characters show up in these stories, as in, say, norse mythology. And I love NORSe mythology. That's my favorite norse mythology right there. But the whole idea of the trickster character, like in the Navajo culture, the trickster. And thinking about the trickster, coyote versus Loki, the trickster in Norse mythology, I mean, wow, that is the same character, right. Know ONE's played by ROBERT de NIRO and one's AL PACIno.
Vanessa Y Rogers: Or what about Anansi, the trickster fighter from Ghana? Yeah. All right, so let's see. Can you talk us through. So we've talked generally about the Hero's journey. Can you walk us through the Archetypes and the journal cycle? The Journey?
Bruce Boyce: Yeah. So the whole basic idea behind the hero's journey are these Archetypes, what Campbell describes as archetypes. And he actually borrows that from Carl Jung, psychoanalyst. And basically what an archetype is. It's a universal constant. It's the universal structure. And then everything else is just different expressions of this archetype. And so the hero's journey does comprise a number of different archetypes. You've the hero, of course, and then you have someone who is the Guardian or the wise mentor supporter. And the way to think about this, you think Frodo in Lord of the RIngs and Gandalf, that relationship, that type of relationship. And then you have the supporting cast of characters, helpers that travel along and help in various Ways, different Ways. And, of course, you've got all the different villains that can occur in those.
Bruce Boyce: But the structure of the journey itself, he outlines, and I'm not going to go through each little Thing, but the basic format of the Journey is it begins with the call where the Hero, you're introduced to the HeRo in his normal state, his normal World. And then he gets this call to Adventure by Something or somehow. And at first, he is reluctant. He doesn't want to step out of the comforts of his Comfort zone. He doesn't want to stretch. So he's reluctant to take that journey at first. But through the help, say, of a wise mentor, he does take that initial step and begins that journey. There gets to be a point where he gets up to the boundary of what he feels is the Normal World, the border of the Shire, for instance. And then you have to step across that threshold.
Bruce Boyce: And so that's another important part of the journey, is crossing over that threshold.
Vanessa Y Rogers: That part in Lord of the Rings is, like, highlighted, right? Sam Bilbo says, he stops and he says, I've never gone this far in my life. And it's like a very poignant part of the story.
Bruce Boyce: Yes. They're stepping into a world they do not know. They don't know what to expect, what it's filled with and how to deal with that world. So crossing over that threshold and then there comes a part where it's almost like the Nader. You get to a point where, wow, you've sunk so low. You're in desperate straits, you're trapped. This is the belly of the whale, Jonah inside the whale, things can't get any worse. The trash camp actor in Star wars, things just can't get any worse. But somehow you manage to find something about yourself at that point and you find some important trait or realization, and then you overcome that obstacle, you come out of the belly, and that is where the hero starts to change from what he was to what he's going to be after this.
Bruce Boyce: You go through a set of trials and tribulations. And in many myths, it's set up in triads and sets of three. But these are all sorts of trials and temptations. One of the archetypes is the Temptress Circe. For Odysseus in the Odyssey, the person who's going to pull the hero off the path that they're on and end the journey right there. And so the hero has to overcome these again with support of various characters and the wise mentor. And then you get to a point which Joseph Campbell calls the atonement with the father. So in Star wars, this is where Luke Skywalker realizes or is told, Luke, I am your father. And he has to grapple with this notion, oh, my goodness, my father is the evil villain that I'm supposed to be fighting.
Bruce Boyce: And in psychological terms, your ego is what you're grappling with. So this atonement with the father or the slaying of the dragon, this is where you slay the dragons, slay the beast. This is where you leave your old self behind. You reconcile the fact, yes, you have this ego, but I also have this side as well. And you reconcile the two things in some cases. Campbell, I think, describes it as your masculine side and your feminine side and the Yin and the Yang type of thing. That is where you're finally integrating yourself into that. So the hero does this, and because he's able to slay the dragon, then he is transformed into something better. Campbell calls it deification. You become the God or the godhead of some sort, the Buddha, achieving enlightenment right there.
Bruce Boyce: And then you get the reward, whatever the reward was, whatever the goal of the adventure was. Prometheus with Fire. You bring that back and you make that journey back. And again, the journey back is almost a reverse of the journey going. There are trials. You're reluctant to go back. You don't want to go back again. You have to be pushed forward and challenged, and then you cross back over that first threshold, back from this other world that you've been in, back to the world that you had once lived in. But of course, you're a changed person. You're the hero, and you've gotten something for it. Fire. And now you're going to bestow it upon your people, your society, and they're going to thank you for it. And so you get that reward.
Bruce Boyce: So that is kind of, in a nutshell, exactly what the Hero Journey is. Campbell outlined 17 different stages of this Journey. Others condense it. Christopher Volgar, who I mentioned earlier, he condenses it down to twelve stages.
Vanessa Y Rogers: Okay.
Bruce Boyce: In it but they're all pretty much basically that story of going out, crossing that threshold, learning something about yourself, overcoming an obstacle, slaying the dragon, and then coming back a changed or a different person. And for Campbell, all this was this idea of transcendence, of realizing that there is something else beyond our own reality that we need to strive for. And one of his things was about follow your bliss. And I know a lot of people take that as just follow whatever makes you happy. But for him, it was more than just that. The bliss was this transcendence of being, to really fully understand what it meant to be human and what it meant to be human in this universe.
Vanessa Y Rogers: Yeah. So I think one thing that we haven't defined. Thank you for that, by the way. That was a really eloquent way of laying out the hero's journey. And it is a very complicated. It is very complicated. I think I've seen it in nine steps as well. Maybe for storytellers, they've condensed it even more. But yes, taking it from 17 to shorter is much easier nuggets to actually digest. And actually, before I go on, what I was saying is, when I was reading about the hero's journey, one of the comments that I read was that Neil Gaiman, the author, he's written stardust and ocean at the end of the know, several very famous works. He said he started reading it in stop, midway through, and it was like, I can't finish this because I don't want to just follow this structure.
Vanessa Y Rogers: He didn't want to be influenced too strongly to have to follow this. So I thought that was a really interesting reaction, whereas I, as a storyteller was like, oh, this is what I need to be doing. This is how stories are best told. But anyways, I thought that was an interesting reaction to reading his work.
Bruce Boyce: Yeah.
Vanessa Y Rogers: So let's go back. We haven't even defined mythology, so can we go back and just define what that is and how it's different than a religion or how they interlap?
Bruce Boyce: Well, in today's sense, I think a lot of people see mythology as simply just stories. Stories people would tell and stories to explain things because they didn't have any understanding of how the world worked, like what causes earthquakes, so they had to come up with or what causes thunderstorms. So they came up with these beings and these mythologies to explain those. But mythology is really more than just the stories. And mythology serves multiple purposes within a society. And from a historical point of view, that's kind of what attracts me a lot about mythology is. It does tell you a lot about the people and who they were. And mythology was also a way of transmitting knowledge of all kinds.
Bruce Boyce: Not only knowledge of, say, how the world worked, but knowledge of where the best hunting grounds were or why you went from this place to this place after each season. Knowledge of social order, why we do the things. So the whole notion of taboo to create that social order. So mythology is really more than just the stories. It functions on these different levels. And I think Campbell talks about these different stages of mythology, from hunter gatherers to the early farmers to the advent of civilization, and talks about these different stages of mythology and the rOlE mythology plAys in that. And coming from a historian, so that's one of the fascinating things, is how those mythologies changed in some respects, but again, remain the same from civilizations and society to society. The goal of mythology varies.
Bruce Boyce: It's there to illuminate the mystery of the universe, the mystery of being, what it means to be human. I was having a conversation the other day with somebody. We were talking about religion, talking about the intersection of mythology and religion. And my personal belief is that religion, there's really no difference between religion and mythology, just the intensity of how far you believe it. Today, mythology, a lot of people don't believe. But back in ancient Greece, people actually believe those myths. For them, that was their religion. And so whether we talk about Christianity or Buddhism, Hinduism, it's mythology, religion. I see those two as being the same. But I was talking to somebody the other day about this subject, about religion, and were asking about, well, what if one day science comes up with the evidence that God doesn't exist?
Bruce Boyce: Say were having this intellectual conversation, and I said, I don't think it would matter. I think humans would create a God of some kind. Whatever God that they wanted to come up with, they were going to constantly come up with something to believe, because humans, they want to believe that there is something more than this existence. And there's something comforting in the knowledge that there is something more in that existence. We found burials of Neanderthals. That's the earliest societies that we know for sure actually buried their dead. Now there's some debate whether it was ritual or what really the meaning behind that was. But in my view, it's like, why spend the time digging a hole and putting a dead person in there?
Bruce Boyce: When you see in your experience, the animals just out there being scavenged and rotting away and the nature cycle of life and everything, but now you're taking the time to actually take a person that you knew. And burying them, protecting them. For me, that is the beginning of some kind of sense that I want something more. I want to understand that this person, maybe he's gone from this plane of existence, but I want to have the comfort of knowing that he's transcended to some other plane and he's happy. And I think that's the role myth and religion plays in the human psyche. That's what I told my friend, is that science can come up with some evidence saying, yeah, God doesn't exist, but that won't matter because humans with that need will create something to replace it.
Bruce Boyce: They will create a God of some form to replace that.
Vanessa Y Rogers: Yeah. What an interesting conversation. I would have liked to be a fly in the wall for that conversation. So we're getting to the end of our time, but is there anyone who has continued his work that is notable? I know you mentioned a few. Someone who wrote the, I missed the first name, something Murdoch of the Feminine.
Bruce Boyce: Maureen Murdoch.
Vanessa Y Rogers: Yeah.
Bruce Boyce: She wrote kind of a counter thing called the HeRoines Journey. And her take is that The Women's, the feminine side is differEnt. That journey is different than the masculine and has different stages and things like that. So she takes a different approach. I know there is the Joseph Campbell foundation, which is continuing to not only curate his work, his published work, and letters and things like that, but also advancing his studies as well. In THat REgard, those are the only. And then Christopher Vogler, with his take on the hero's journey, there are others who have taken up looking at comparative mythology a little bit more closely and seeing and coming at some different conclusions than Campbell. I can't recall exactly specific names, but I know there are people out there who are continuing that work of his.
Bruce Boyce: And like any academic study, any research study, the more you dig into it evolves, it changes over time.
Vanessa Y Rogers: And what would you like to see in terms of further study? Is there anything that you feel like he didn't get to?
Bruce Boyce: That he didn't get to. Oh, wow. Yeah. The one section of the mask of God that I was fascinated about more than any of the others was the first one. He talks about primitive mythology, really, the basics of mythology. I was fascinated because this is where he gets into some of the psychological aspects of mythology and the reasons why we do the things we do. And he utilizes what we would consider more primitive cultures. It's fascinating. You read that and you realize that's like the Greeks calling everybody barbarians. It's such a subjective term, primitive. What it, what? It's just because they don't have cell phones, we're going to call them, or they don't have roads and transport doesn't really make them primitive, but that's what we call them.
Bruce Boyce: But it was fascinating to see these cultures, and it would be nice to see more studies on those cultures and more to preserve those cultures as well. And we are seeing a lot of those cultures disappear from a historian's viewpoint, which is a shame. But trying to preserve the record of those cultures, and many of those cultures, unfortunately, are oral based cultures. Those stories are passed on. So I always like to see when people go out and try to record elders and people within those societies talking about these stories, talking about these traditions and preserving those. So that's where I would like to see much more work done before they're all gone.
Vanessa Y Rogers: Absolutely. Well, what have we missed? Have we missed anything?
Bruce Boyce: Oh, my goodness. You could talk about a lot of this stuff for days on end and really scratch the surface. But, yeah, I think we covered a wide amount of territory right there today.
Vanessa Y Rogers: Well, I definitely appreciate you coming on today. This is just a fascinating conversation. And I was introduced to Joseph Campbell right at the start of my starting this podcast, and I just found his work so fascinating. And one of my first notes for the podcast was find someone to talk about Joseph Campbell. So I'm glad I finally found you.
Bruce Boyce: There you go.
Vanessa Y Rogers: Well, thank you so much, and thank you, folksy folks, for joining us today on this mythological journey. Had you heard of Joseph Campbell before? What did you take away from his work? Comment down below. If you're watching on YouTube or if you're listening on the podcast, find our Facebook group. This is where we continue the conversation. We want to hear from you. We want to hear the questions that came up for you. We want to hear your thoughts about his work today, or if someone has continued on his work and that you really enjoy, let us know. We want to hear from you. We're on most of the social media platforms. Twitter X is. Sometimes I call it Twitter X because no one just calls it X. Instagram, Facebook, and a little bit of LinkedIn. So find us wherever you are.
Vanessa Y Rogers: And until next time, keep the folk alive. I don't.