Myths to Live By by Joseph Campbell
If one is familiar with Joseph Campbell at all, it is likely that they would recognize his work related to The Hero’s Journey or maybe they have seen a meme on social media encouraging one to “follow your bliss.” But there is a lot more to Joseph Campbell than just heroes, bliss and a PBS television series from the 1980s.
The essays in this collection were drawn from a series of twenty-five talks that Campbell gave in The Great Hall of The Cooper union between 1958 and 1971. Although the most recent essay was written over fifty years ago, the messages and insights contained here feel very contemporary and resonate with historical, political and religious issues faced around the world today.
In these pages, Campbell asks us to examine the impact of science on myth, the separation of East and West, and the mythology of love and to contemplate whether or not our old mythologies are sufficient to carry us into the future. — MJD
Excerpt:
For it is simply a fact — as I believe we all have now got to concede — that mythologies and their dieties are productions and projections of the psyche. What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man’s imagination? We know their histories; we know by what stages they developed. Not only Freud and Jung, but all serious students of psychology and of comparative religions today, have recognized and hold that th forms of myths and the figures of myth are of the nature essentially of dream. Dr. Geza Roheim used to say, just as there are no two ways of sleeping, there are no two ways of dreaming. Essentially the same mythological motifs are to be found throughout the world. There are myths and legends of the virgin birth, of incarnations, deaths, resurrections, second comings, judgements and the rest, in all great traditions. And since such images stem from the psyche, they refer to the psyche. They tell us of its structure, its order and its forces, in symbolic terms. p. 253.
Summary:
What is a properly functioning mythology and what are its functions? Can we use myths to help relieve our modern anxiety, or do they help foster it? In Myths to Live By, Joseph Campbell explores the enduring power of the universal myths that influence our lives daily and examines the myth-making process from the primitive past to the immediate present, retuning always to the source from which all mythology springs: the creative imagination.
Campbell stresses that the borders dividing the Earth have been shattered; that myths and religions have always followed the certain basic archetypes and are no longer exclusive to a single people, region, or religion. He shows how we must recognize their common denominators and allow this knowledge to be of use in fulfilling human potential everywhere.
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