I like how the ST we got downplayed the PT (the PT being one okay movie (TPM) and two shit ones (AOTC/ROTS). The PT’s version of the force is too sci-fi for me and the proposed ST seems to double-down on that. I don’t see any Joseph Campbell in “the microbial world.”
Quotes from Joseph Campbell:
“Between mythology and biology there is a very close association. I think of mythology as a function of biology; it’s a production of the human imagination, which is moved by the energies of the organs of the body operating against each other. These are the same in human beings all over the world and this is the basis for the archetypology of myth. So, I’ve thought of myself as a kind of marginal scientist studying the phenomenology of the human body, you might say.”
"I would say that all of our sciences are the material that has to be mythologized. A mythology gives the spiritual import – what one might call rather the psychological, inward import, of the world of nature round about, as understood today. There’s no real conflict between science and religion. Religion is the recognition of the deeper dimensions that the science reveals to us. What is in conflict is the science of 2000 B.C., which is what you have in the Bible, and the science of the twentieth century A.D. You have to disengage the messages of the Bible from its science. "
“What I’m trying to say is that the structuring of a mythology is conditioned by the science at that time. There’s no use constructing a mythology based on an archaic science. I wouldn’t know what to do with an atom, but I do recognize that when we had a Ptolemaic cosmology there was a whole interpretation of the relationship of the earth to the different planes of the universe that was mythologized. What happened to that was it was given an ethical and moral value, the stages of a ladder of the heavens represented the stages of the psyche.”
George also said:
“I read a lot of books about mythology and theories behind mythology; one of the books was The Hero of a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, but there were many others, maybe as many as fifty books. I basically worked out a general theory for the Force, and then played with it. The more detail I went into, the more it detracted from the concept I was trying to put forward.”
“Of course, I’m coming from the point of view that it was the bacteria that helped create the mitochondria and then the mitochondria that helped create multicelled animals.”
“And then the mitochondria, if they got enough energy, they could make two cells, and then once you make two cells, then you can make this whole world.”
“But it’s…about symbiotic relationships. I think, personally, one of the core values we should have in the world, and kids should be taught, is ecology, to understand that we all are connected. Forget the mystical whatever. It’s all just very plain. We’re all connected. What you do to somebody here, it affects somebody there, there, there, there. It comes back to you. You have understand that you’re part of a very big picture. You’re just one little part. You’re a gear. You’re just a little gear in this big picture.”
“The thing that I liked about the whole idea was that, yes, we are ruled, and the conquerors of the universe are these little one-celled animals. But they depend on us, we depend on them. And the idea was, the Force–we say it surrounds you, it control us, we control it–it’s a two-way street.”
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Midichlorians-Are-Not-The-Force/id/84084/page/1#1432204
It very much feels to me like George was exploring these concepts and discovering his own philosophy of how it all connects together into a greater whole.
I personally hate that the Sequels we got ignored the Prequels. It leaves such a large void to pretend like they never happened.