The Hero with a Thousand Faces (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) Hardcover – July 28, 2008

This is a book I will keep in my collection forever. I have recommended it to a lot of other people. It is a bit difficult at first to get into but by Chapter Two, I have not wanted to put it down. “It’s for thinkers”

One of the best

All the way back in 1949, Joseph Campbell wrote a book titled The Hero With a Thousand Faces. The book contains hundreds of examples of stories from a wide range of mythology, including those from Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Native American, and Greek (and countless other) canons.Campbell identifies similarities in style as well as structure between the great adventure stories/mythologies throughout human history. Famously, he determines specific characteristics about the hero and his or her journey, hence the term (coined by Campbell) familiar to readers and writers alike, The Hero’s Journey. In effect, there is a very specific set of rules governing what makes a great story. And just in case I wasn’t certain of the extent of Campbell’s research, the book contains over forty pages of endnotes and other references. The man put in the research time.Reading The Hero With a Thousand Faces came at the perfect time for me. I’d heard of it and seen it recommended to me on Amazon for quite some time, but I never took the time to actually read it. Actually, I “Wikipedia’d” it a few times, but that was the extent of that. But in finally reading the book, Campbell has helped me understand much better some of the ideas that I’ve been working out in my weekly “Books of the Bible” review posts. If you’ve read any of my recent Bible book reviews, you’ll immediately recognize that Campbell has already clearly written what I’m still trying to figure out for myself. For example:“For the symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche…”Powerful stuff.Here are the rules governing the first great stage of the adventure story (some of it is paraphrased in my own words):The Call to AdventureInitial Refusal to Heed the CallSupernatural Aid/Mentor/“Old Man” (Old man is a direct quote from Campbell.)Crossing the First ThresholdBelly of the Whale (The Point When the Hero’s Death/Ultimate Failure seems Certain)Truly, Exodus would have been the perfect story to compare with Campbell’s ruleset, but I just wrote a review of Exodus last week, so I wanted to do something different. The Karate Kid might just might be the most perfect modern example of them all (and one of my favorite movies). So I thought it might be interesting to see just how closely the writers of this movie follow Campbell’s rules.Young New Jersey native Daniel is called to the great land of adventure (California) by his mother. He hates it there (his initial macro-reluctance to heed the call) and would like nothing more than to move back home. The only saving grace (besides a pretty girl) is a mentor (Mr. Myagi) that he meets when he arrives. After getting into some trouble with the local bullies, Daniel’s mentor signs him up for a karate tournament. Daniel is mortified and has no faith in his ability to survive a karate tournament like that (Micro-reluctance to Heed the Call), “I cannot believe… what you got me into back there!”But Daniel does as his mentor says and enters the tournament anyway (Crossing the First Threshold), where he manages to make it to the semifinals, further than he ever dreamed, before even hitting a snag. When he gets there, young bully Bobby cheats in a most despicable manner, kicking Daniel directly in the knee, damaging Daniel’s body seemingly beyond repair (into the Belly of the Whale, i.e., Daniel’s ultimate defeat seems certain). But just as soon as all hope is lost, Daniel’s mentor heals his leg through supernatural methods and Daniel comes back to win the tournament, his dignity, and the girl. Indeed, it’s a Hero’s Journey almost worthy of Moses.Note: There are other rules and further stages to the story that I haven’t included in this short review, but it seems to me that these are certainly the essential components to the modern story. Maybe some other time, I can write about the further stages and which stories they apply to (Lord of the Rings comes to mind).My final say on this book is as follows: If you’re a student of religion, mythology or philosophy, or if you are a writer (whether of music, poetry, or fiction), read this book. It contains a lot of good information.

“Why is mythology everywhere the same, beneath its varieties of costume? And what does it teach?”In this seminal work of comparative mythology, renowned author and professor of literature Joseph Campbell points to the universal motifs pervading myths, folk tales, religion, arts, ancient rites, and dreams across the globe and throughout history. The primary motif explored is the monomyth of the hero’s journey: such a compelling outline of popular tales throughout the ages that it has inspired modern stories such as Star Wars, The Lion King, Watership Down, and the Robert Langdon book series (which includes The Da Vinci Code). More importantly, however, Campbell reveals with profound depth of insight why these diverse stories can be so convincingly compounded. They ”are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization.””The gods as icons are not ends in themselves. Their entertaining myths transport the mind and spirit, not up to, but past them, into the yonder void; from which perspective the more heavily freighted theological dogmas then appear to have been only pedagogical lures: their function, to cart the unadroit intellect away from its concrete clutter of facts and events to a comparatively rarefied zone, where, as a final boon, all existence - whether heavenly, earthly, or infernal - may at last be seen transmuted into the semblance of a lightly passing, recurrent, mere childhood dream of bliss and fright.”I found this book difficult to read, as exemplified by the passage above, and I found the recitation of outlandish tales provided as examples to be exhausting (and not particularly illustrative). Reading this cover to cover was a bit of a slog, but it pays off.Campbell draws from world mythology a message that echoes the teachings of eastern Advaita Vedanta and western monistic idealism: All is one. The journey of the hero is away from the world of forms, on a path that leads to the conjunction of paradox at the great at-one-ment. But this road to enlightenment is not the greatest challenge. That distinction belongs to the hero’s return to a world where “men who are fractions imagine themselves to be complete.””The boon brought from the transcendent deep becomes quickly rationalized into nonentity, and the need becomes great for another hero to refresh the world. How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand times, throughout the millennia of mankind’s prudent folly? That is the hero’s ultimate difficult task. How render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark?”We are, all of us, the hero. Our task is to heed the call to adventure, facing fears and abandoning desires as we fight our psychic dragons until we finally achieve apotheosis, realizing the unlimited potentiality of our nature, and return to the world of the everyday with the boon of truth, careful to keep it aflame. It is a daunting task, but it is also full of hope, and wonder:”Protective power is always and ever present within the sanctuary of the heart and even immanent within, or just behind, the unfamiliar features of the world. One has only to know and trust, and the ageless guardians will appear. Having responded to his own call, and continuing to follow courageously as the consequences unfold, the hero finds all the forces of the unconscious at his side.”