Show Notes
In this episode, we present audio from two rare televised lectures from Joseph Campbell’s early public-broadcast career — Dead Sea Scrolls and No God but God — originally aired on WNDT in New York in the early 1960s.
In these archival recordings, Campbell traces humanity’s spiritual crossroads — from Paleolithic caves and Near Eastern temples to the Essene community at Qumran and the dawn of apocalyptic thought.
He examines the Dead Sea Scrolls as the voice of a community bracing for the end of days, and explores how Greek philosophy, Persian dualism, Hebrew prophecy, and emerging Christian teachings collided and transformed one another.
Broadcast decades before The Power of Myth, these talks capture Campbell in a more structured, scholarly television mode — yet still pulsing with the fire of myth, history, and spiritual imagination.
A window into the mythic ferment before the birth of Western religious consciousness — and a glimpse of Campbell before he became a household name.
Host Bradley Olson offers an introduction and commentary at the end of the lecture.
More from Pathways with Joseph Campbell
In this final installment of The Occidental Tradition, recorded during Joseph Campbell’s 1973 visit to the Blaisdell Institute, Campbell turns toward the role of myth, symbol, and ritual in modern Western life.
In Part Two of The Occidental Tradition, recorded at the Blaisdell Institute in 1973, this episode features Joseph Campbell leading an informal and wide-ranging discussion on education, mythology, and the Occidental tradition.
In this episode of Pathways with Joseph Campbell, we listen to a lecture Campbell gave at the Blaisdell Institute in Claremont, California, sometime in the mid-1970s. Speaking on what he calls “The Occidental Tradition,” Campbell explores the distinctly Western emphasis on the individual, the development of critical consciousness, and the courage required to follow one’s own path.
Welcome to Season 6 of Pathways with Joseph Campbell. Whether you’ve been listening from the very beginning or are just discovering the podcast, we’re glad you’re here. This new season continues our journey into the archived lectures and enduring insights of Joseph Campbell, exploring the ways myth continues to shape the human experience across time, culture, psychology, and spiritual life.
Recorded in 1966 at Sarah Lawrence College, this lecture follows Joseph Campbell through the symbolic ascent of Kundalini yoga - moving from instinct and desire at the base of the spine to the awakening of the heart, where the sacred syllable OM is heard as the vibration of being itself. The chakras become a psychological and spiritual map: religion begins, Campbell suggests, when fulfillment is no longer chased outward but discovered as a dimension within. Yet even heaven is not the end. The final barrier is the subtle illusion of “I” encountering God.