DWill wrote:

geo wrote:I haven't actually started reading yet, but I do have a copy in hand. Who else is participating? DWill?

No, I'm on hiatus--trying, anyway. I might need to avoid the forum to keep from getting drawn in. It's sure to be interesting.

You can go on hiatus when you're dead, damn you!

(I say, selfishly)

Here's the link in case you change your mind:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/157731 ... 1577315936

geo wrote:

DWill wrote:

geo wrote:I haven't actually started reading yet, but I do have a copy in hand. Who else is participating? DWill?

No, I'm on hiatus--trying, anyway. I might need to avoid the forum to keep from getting drawn in. It's sure to be interesting.

You can go on hiatus when you're dead, damn you!

(I say, selfishly)

That goes double for me, damn you!

A lot of selfishness going on around here, eh? Dwill, you could at the very least buy a copy and tuck it under your pillow at night

I received my copy, so here goes:

I don't know what copies you all have, but mine sports a Blake etching on the cover. How appropriate!

For those who are not familiar with C G Jung, (and Campbell draws on him heavily; he was a student of his):
Jung was a Swiss psychoanalyst best known for his dream analysis. But that was only the tip of the iceberg. Jung's concept of archetypes is what will mainly be of relevance to us here. Jung and his students observed their patients and their dreams and came to the conclusion that certain traces of cultures and peoples were present with whom these patients had had no contact whatsoever. Jung proposed the idea that religious and cultural concepts, irregardless of time or place, all bear strong similarities, and the images, motives, etc repeat themselves. In other words, these images or symbols are always present and have not been influenced by culture. For Jung, of course, this new idea was important for the treatment of psychosis and neurosis. Campbell uses it as a tool and carries it into the dimension of mythology.

I just found a wonderful little introductory synopsis of "Hero" on http://www.skepticfiles.org/atheist2/hero.htm

In the long run, the most influential book of the 20th Century may
turn out to be Joseph Campbell's THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES.

It's certainly true that the book is having a major impact on
writing and story-telling, but above all on movie-making. Aware or
not, filmmakers like John Boorman, George Miller, Steven Spielberg,
George Lucas, and Francis Coppola owe their successes to the ageless
pattern that Joseph Campbell identifies in the book.

The ideas in the book are an excellent set of analytical tools.

With them you can compose a story to meet any situation, a story
that will be dramatic, entertaining, and psychologically true.

With them you can always determine what's wrong with a story that's
floundering, and you can find a better solution to almost any story
problem by examining the pattern laid out in the book.

There's nothing new in the book. The ideas in it are older than the
Pyramids, older than Stonehenge, older than the earliest cave
painting.

Campbell's contribution was to gather the ideas together, recognize
them, articulate them, name them. He exposed the pattern for the
first time, the pattern that lies behind every story ever told.

Campbell is a mythographer -- he writes about myths. What he
discovered in his study of world myths is that THEY ARE ALL
BASICALLY THE SAME STORY -- retold endlessly in infinite variation.

He discovered that all story-telling, consciously or not, follows
the ancient patterns of myth, and that all stories, from the crudest
jokes to the highest flights of literature, can be understood in
terms of the "HERO MYTH"; the "MONOMYTH" whose principles he lays
out in the book.

Campbell was a student of the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, and the
ideas in THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES are often described as
Jungian.

The book is based on Jung's idea of the "Archetypes" constantly
repeating characters who occur in the dreams of all people and the
myths of all cultures.

Jung believed that these archetypes are reflections of the human
mind -- that our minds divide themselves into these characters to
play out the drama of our lives.

The repeating characters of the hero myth, such as the young hero,
the wise old man, the shape-shifting woman, and the shadowy nemesis,
are identical with the archetypes of the human mind, as shown in
dreams. That's why myths, and stories constructed on the
mythological model, are always psychologically true.

Such stories are true models of the workings of the human mind, true
maps of the psyche. They are psychologically valid and realistic
even when they portray fantastic, impossible, unreal events.

This accounts for the universal power of such stories. Stories
built on the model of THE HERO OF A THOUSAND FACES have an appeal
that can be felt by everyone, because they spring from a universal
source in the collective unconscious, and because they reflect
universal concerns. They deal with universal questions like "Why was
I born?" "What happens when I die?" "How can I overcome my life
problems and be happy?"

The ideas in the book can be applied to understanding any human
problem. They are a great key to life as well as being a major tool
for dealing more effectively with a mass audience.

Christ, Hitler, Mohammed, and Buddha all understood the principles
in the book and applied them to influence millions.

If you want to understand the ideas behind the HERO MYTH, there's no
substitute for actually reading the book. It's an experience that
has a way of changing people. It's also a good idea to read a lot
of myths, but it amounts to the same thing since Campbell spends
most of the book illustrating his point by re-telling old myths.

oblivion wrote:I received my copy, so here goes:

I don't know what copies you all have, but mine sports a Blake etching on the cover. How appropriate!

For those who are not familiar with C G Jung, (and Campbell draws on him heavily; he was a student of his):
Jung was a Swiss psychoanalyst best known for his dream analysis. But that was only the tip of the iceberg. Jung's concept of archetypes is what will mainly be of relevance to us here. Jung and his students observed their patients and their dreams and came to the conclusion that certain traces of cultures and peoples were present with whom these patients had had no contact whatsoever. Jung proposed the idea that religious and cultural concepts, irregardless of time or place, all bear strong similarities, and the images, motives, etc repeat themselves. In other words, these images or symbols are always present and have not been influenced by culture. For Jung, of course, this new idea was important for the treatment of psychosis and neurosis. Campbell uses it as a tool and carries it into the dimension of mythology.

My copy of the book (Bollingen 3rd ed.) has the face of what looks like a Greek warrior (maybe Odysseus?) that is made up of a collage of smaller photographs of humans from many cultures. I am ignorant of this type of art and who the Greek face is. Maybe somebody can tell me. I see that a special edition of this book came out after the Star Wars movie with Luke Skywalker on the cover.

Here's mine:



I've always wanted to know more about Jungian archetypes, so I can't wait to dig into this. I'm just getting into the first chapter now where Campbell is discussing Freud's Oedipus complex.

While I must apologise for reading two books at once, I cannot help taking an interest in The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

What caught my eye in Campbell’s discussion of the monomyth was his explanation of the origin of the minotaur myth. King Minos, son of Europa, promised Poseidon, God of the Sea, that he would sacrifice a bull provided by the God, but in the event this bull was so beautiful that Minos sought to deceive the God by substituting another bull at the altar so he could retain possession of the divine animal. The eventual result of this impiety was that his wife Pasiphae grew a strange lust for the beautiful bull and conceived a monster to it, with the help of science.

I feel that Campbell implies this myth has lessons for the USA. The disregard for the message of nature – what Campbell describes as “the make believe about heaven, future bliss and compensation” – involves an impiety towards nature. At the archetypal level the male sense that nature can be disregarded somehow leads to a twisted female union with nature whose spiritual child is a minotaur, a destructive mixing of the natural and the human, that must continually be fed by sacrifice of what is most precious.

Very interesting then that Theseus the hero solves the problem with the assistance of Daedalus, the scientist who brokered the birth of the monster, with something as simple as a thread that connects him to his original point of safety as he seeks the beast. No one had previously thought to connect to the origin, but this simple measure is the source of salvation.

Hot Damn!! Joe Campbell?, i'm in like Flynn.... i'm there like a bear. (make that here like a beer)

and luckily stahrwe thinks Campbell is a hack so i wont have to worry about him showing up.

shall dust off my pdf reader and refresh my memory, there are some passages in this book that are simply sky splitting.

In a word: the first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside, and there to clarify the difficulties, eradicate them in his own case (i.e. , give battle to the nursery demons of his local culture) and break through to the undistorted, direct experience and assimilation of what C.G.Jung has called "the archetypal images." This is the process known to Hindu and Buddhist philosophy as viveka, "discrimination. "

brilliant stuff, succinctly put.

resonates amazingly well with this lyric

I know, I know
you'll probably scream n' cry
That your little world won't let you go
But who in your measly little world are you trying to prove to that
You're made out of gold and ah, can't be sold

So ah, Are You Experienced?
Ah! Have you ever been experienced?
Well, I have

the need to break through to direct experience, to transcend the metaphor.

Robert Tulip wrote:an impiety towards nature ....a destructive mixing of the natural and the human, that must continually be fed by sacrifice of what is most precious.

nice going Robert, we're surrounded by it aren't we, i often think how that rogue cells are cancer and we humans are like rogue cells, on a larger plane, growing what we ought not where we ought not just like cancer, instead of harmonising and beautifying we often just make ugly brown stains on the landscape, i mean what bird is dumb enough to crap in its own nest.

the transition from seeing only outer physical disconnectedness to inward integration and interconnectedness of all things, to see the outward as a reflection of the inward, seems a most pressing need if we are going to keep this show on the road,

i agree with Jung that the main threat we face as humans is our own undeveloped psyche.

on a positive note, i know from experience that an individual can make the transition from what might be metaphorically described as an age of pisces to an age of aquarius so i hope that mankind as a whole will do and is doing just the same, as below so above style.