Joseph Campbell

Johann Jakob Bachofen was a Swiss antiquarian, jurist and anthropologist, professor for Roman law at the University of Basel from 1841 to 1845. Bachofen is most often connected with his theories surrounding prehistoric matriarchy, or Mutterrecht, the title of his seminal 1861 book Mother Right: an... investigation of the religious and juridical character of matriarchy in the Ancient World. Bachofen assembled documentation demonstrating that motherhood is the source of human society, religion, morality, and decorum. He postulated an archaic "mother-right" within the context of a primeval Matriarchal religion or Urreligion. Bachofen became an important precursor of 20th century theories of matriarchy, such as the Old European culture postulated by Marija Gimbutas from the 1950s, and the field of feminist theology and "Matriarchal Studies" in 1970s feminism. Born into a wealthy Basel family active in the silk industry, Bachofen studied in Basel and in Berlin under August Boeckh, Karl Ferdinand Ranke and Friedrich Carl von Savigny, as well as in Göttingen. After promoting in Basel, he studied for another two years in Paris, London and Cambridge.
more

Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis... and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer. His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann, and three of his six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became important German writers. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he emigrated to the United States, from where he returned to Switzerland in 1952. Thomas Mann is one of the best-known exponents of the so-called Exilliteratur. Mann was born Paul Thomas Mann in Lübeck, Germany, and was the second son of Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann , and his wife Júlia da Silva Bruhns .
more

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses , a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of... contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominently the stream of consciousness technique he perfected. Other major works are the short-story collection Dubliners , and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Finnegans Wake . His complete oeuvre includes three books of poetry, a play, occasional journalism, and his published letters. Joyce was born to a middle class family in Dublin, where he excelled as a student at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, then at University College Dublin. In his early twenties he emigrated permanently to continental Europe, living in Trieste, Paris and Zurich.
more

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, known as Pablo Picasso , was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer. One of the greatest and most influential artists of the... 20th century, he is widely known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , and Guernica , a portrayal of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso, Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp are commonly regarded as the three artists who most defined the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting, sculpture, printmaking and ceramics. Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a realistic manner through his childhood and adolescence.
more