The hero with a thousand faces
Ratings42
Average rating4
I think the book does a good job relaying the universality of stories. A closer reading tethers its contents to a psychoanalytical framework that can feel a bit too individualistic.
I've read and listened to this book so often in the past fifteen years that I can no longer think about it objectively or critically. It's a comfort blanket in times of stress or grief, and in that capacity it functions perfectly, and I love it dearly.
As the name suggests, this book is a synopsis of the basic personality of a hero (and the myth revolving around him) who can be identified across various cultures and mythologies with astonishing similarities. This is also a book of the idea of mythology how Joseph Campbell has seen.
Now, though Campbell himself is a believer, he can't help but notice that the old world of gods and demons, magic and might is falling and a new era of science and technology has emerged. But as he justifiably lamented in power of myth, this new age had no powerful myth to support human through the generic darkness and existential crisis that almost everyone goes through. Nevertheless, this is not an apologist book to justify religion or faith, but a scholarly and pleasing journey through the world of myth.
In this book, Campbell used ideas from psychoanalysis heavily to predict the possible origin of myths. The uncanny similarities between many neurotics' dreams have compelled him to conclude that:
Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream.
Mythology, in other words, is psychology misread as biography; history, and cosmology.
Symbols are only the vehicles of communication; they must not be mistaken for the final term, the tenor , of their reference. No matter how attractive or impressive they may seem, they remain but convenient means, accommodated to the understanding.
...
Mistaking a vehicle for its tenor may lead to the spilling not only of valueless ink, but of valuable blood.
And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal—carries the cross of the redeemer—not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.
I listened to this as an audiobook, and while it was fascinating listening, I didn't quite get how this became such a seminal and influential work. Perhaps it's that I've heard so much about it (the hero's journey, the “monomyth”) from literally everyone who talks about modern storytelling, that the contents are too familiar to seem innovative. Perhaps I just missed too much and I need to re-read it as a physical book.