The meeting would in fact be the opposite of Master Yoda and young Luke Skywalker’s. 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. It was an apt setting for Campbell to lead discussions on the inner reaches of outer space. 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. 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. It is what Campbell calls the “inner reaches of outer space.” “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. 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. And within our “mythic imagination,” as Joseph Campbell described it, we begin to tell stories. Light from infinite directions and distances meets our gaze. The two didn't meet face to face until after Lucas had already finished his original trilogy of films… George Lucas was an avid admirer of Campbell’s writings, and used them as a direct reference in his creation of Star Wars. 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. He studied and identified the universal themes and archetypes that are present in mythical storytelling across history and across the world. 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. A much friendlier meet-up than Obi-Wan and Vader.
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