Joseph Campbell
HEINRICH ZIMMER (1890·19 4 3)
The surprise was, to hear a man lecturing at Columbia
Uni–
versity for whom deities with many arms, and the radiant saviors of
India and Tibet, were clues to human and superhuman realizations
valid today and forever. H e seemed to know, furthermore, what the real–
izations were. His English, heavily pronounced and occasionally odd,
poured out with a sense of humor, an oracular force, and a range of
reference far beyond anything to which my many years on and around
that campus had inured
me.
There were five auditors and he was lec–
turing as though to a hundred. Eighteen months later a class of two
hundred mourned his sudden death.
He had been a big man, of great physical strength and spiritual
vitality, so that his unexpected passing had the effect on his friends
almost of a magical disappearance. Moreover, he had taken to America
with such a will that he seemed to be at the beginning, rather than
at the end, of a career-already signing himself Henry R. Zimmer
and in the process of rereading his Indian materials from an American
perspective. When asked whether his monumental exposition of Hindu
mythology,
Maya, der indische Mythus
(Stuttgart-Berlin, 1936) , should
be translated, he had replied with a smile and a lightly flouting ges–
ture, "That is Heidelberg romanticism," and the ext ent to which he
meant this whimsy was evident in the papers found in his desk when
he was gone. For he had been writing not in German but in English,
and with analogies drawn less from Germanic mythology than from
his brief yet vivid experience of the United States. The vast reaches
of America, the great mountains, deserts, and raw contrasts, seemed
to him to have more affinities with India than anything in Europe.
The American aboriginal civilizations had been an extension of the
Asiatic, and he had already begun searching them for new clues to
the mysteries of man's past, as he was searching Dreiser and Lewis
for clues to our present and the world's future . "When I saw the length
of those freight trains," he said, after a drive to New Mexico and
the Coast, "I realized the power and understood the independence of
this country."
It
was Thomas Mann, in 1941, who gave us our first hint of the
writings of this genial titan in his dedication of
The Transposed Heads:
