Reads like an Arithmetic Proof of Jung's theory of the | The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Bollingen Series)...

Still influential | The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Bollingen Series) | Joseph Campbell

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	• The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Bollingen Series) Joseph Campbell New World Library, 2008 - 440 pages average customer review:based on 109 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Impressive display of insight into myth and human experience

Campbell's vast breadth of knowledge of world myths, religions, literature and history is impressively conveyed in this book. He seems to be an expert in several arenas that combine to offer the reader a panorama of insights in humanity's and individuals' journeys.

He adroitly relates many mythological or true stories and uses them as examples to discuss points about the human experience similar to how Jung would use archetypes to describe a person's psychological profile.

This is a helpful and interesting book. A couple of times I became weary of the details of some obscure myths and sped along to the next point of Campbell. It offers a plethora of information.

Any interest in myth, religions, philosphy, psychology or human development will be rewarded here.

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Reads like an Arithmetic Proof of Jung's theory of the

Collective Unconscious:

Having commited a new age sacrilege by giving this book only 4 stars, I will go one step further: the best thing about this book is the title. If you or I had thought of this title back in 1949, when the ideas of Jung were "circulating round" as David Bowie later put it on the album "Ziggie Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" on the song "It Ain't Easy," we could have sold 1,000,000 copies too. But we didn't, and Joseph Campbell did, and even if we had thought of it, we could never be the most intelligent and learned professor who has ever lived, as Campbell was. (How do we measure something like who is the smartest professor? Doesn't matter, because it was Campbell by a mile.) Einstein may have been the most brilliant, but Campbell was just plain the smartest - smartest being a term for most knowledgeable about every possible academic subject.

Well, if you were the smartest, most knowledgeable professor who had ever lived, you'd probably want to write a book too, a magnum opus. This is Campbell's Magnum Opus. But don't expect a new age equivalent of Thomas Aquinas's "Summa Theologica." Rather this work reads more like a arithmetic proof of Carl Jung's theory of the collective unconcious.

"The Hero with a Thousand Faces," is written in a very straightforward and scholarly style. There are really two fundamental ideas in this work, 1) the same mythological motifs occur throughout the world; 2) the hero's journey follows the same basic, carefully delineated sequence in all the different myths. This sequence, as you can see in the index, breaks down to departure, initiation, and return.

The beauty of this book is that it will give you a vision for the universality of mythological images. This is a huge achievement; but what it will not do is give you a feeling for the beauty of myth. The retellings of the various myths tend to be perfunctory, dry and abbreviated, with only a few exceptions. To me, a disappointment, especially when compared to Campbell's oral recountings available elsewhere.

To get an experience of the pathos of mythology, I think you should turn to Campbell's college lectures series, now available on CD. His enthusiasm for his favorite "stories" will come out in these lectures in spades as he tells them out loud to his enraptured students.

Therefore, for a more academic, less emotional, look at the universal images, read "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," or at least an online summary. If you do delve into this book, be sure to watch for the Pueblo indian myth of "Water Jar Boy," worth the price of the book and the time all on its own!

Finally, Campbell's introductory chapter is beautifully written and poetic, as he describes how these myths can illuminate and illustrate our own lives. Overall, a necessary if ultimately emotionally uninspiring read.

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Still influential

Joseph Campbell's writings have had more influence on late 20th century culture than you might expect: The Hero with a Thousand Faces resonates obviously through Star Wars, The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings and indeed almost any other contemporary Science Fiction work you could mention, and more subtly in any one of hundreds of films and novels of the last half century. Many indeed are the fruit of Campbell's tree.

In The Hero With A Thousand Faces Campbell sets out his stall early: his "monomyth" which is explained in fairly short order, and supported in more depth over the rest of the book by Campbell's account of hundreds instantiations of it embodied in myths from the Judaeo-Christian, Classical, Native American, Indian, African, Asian and Polynesian traditions. It is even illustrated, rather pointlessly, with sculptures and depictions of these various myths.

This means it's a fairly quick read: it is Campbell's argument that is interesting, not his field research in support of it, and his stentorian and humourless tone in recounting the legends is no incentive to dwell on them.

Campbell's main claim - to have extracted a solitary narrative essence common to all mythology - is unsustainable: even if you do allow the tortured interpretations Campbell makes of the myths he cites, the best that can be said is that any one of the dozen or more common features of the "monomyth" tend to show up in his examples (who knows whether they do in the myths he *doesn't* cite?); to say that they all do is false, even on the evidence Campbell presents in his book. And many of his examples don't fit comfortably into the roles which Campbell assigns them.

So in that regard, Campbell's thesis needs to be watered down to have any real value. As do the courage of his convictions in the validity of psychoanalysis: treating Freud and Jung as gospel in this day and age seems more than a little quaint.

But that's not to say there isn't something to be said for the importance of the subconscious in what makes a good story, nor that the elements of the "monomyth" do appear in mythology, nor that they don't make a great foundation for a mythology. Cogent evidence or that last point is provided by Messrs Wachowski and Lucas, who have openly used Campbell's template to create latter day myths of their - and, like it or not, our - own.

Where Campbell is persuasive is that myth a metaphor on which we can examine ourselves, and that as soon as we mistake metaphor for a genuine explanatory hypothesis, its very usefulness evaporates. In the current political climate, this is a point which can't be stressed enough.

In summary, this ought to be compulsory reading for any aspiring screenplay writer or novelist, and will be food for thought for anyone else interested in the structure of fiction. The Hero With A Thousand Faces may be the wrong side of fifty now, but it is no relic: as long as the likes of Luke Skywalker and Neo are part of the zeitgeist, Joseph Campbell's theories will have some significance in our culture, for better or for worse, for some time to come.

Olly Buxton

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Great book!

Excellent presentation of the hero's myth and its universality. I initially found the audio tape version and later bought the text because of how it impressed me.

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