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The Power of Myth Paperback – June 1, 1991
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The Power of Myth launched an extraordinary resurgence of interest in Joseph Campbell and his work. A preeminent scholar, writer, and teacher, he has had a profound influence on millions of people—including Star Wars creator George Lucas. To Campbell, mythology was the “song of the universe, the music of the spheres.” With Bill Moyers, one of America’s most prominent journalists, as his thoughtful and engaging interviewer, The Power of Myth touches on subjects from modern marriage to virgin births, from Jesus to John Lennon, offering a brilliant combination of intelligence and wit.
From stories of the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome to traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity, a broad array of themes are considered that together identify the universality of human experience across time and culture. An impeccable match of interviewer and subject, a timeless distillation of Campbell’s work, The Power of Myth continues to exert a profound influence on our culture.
- Print length293 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAnchor
- Publication dateJune 1, 1991
- Dimensions5.14 x 0.7 x 7.98 inches
- ISBN-100385418868
- ISBN-13978-0385418867
- Lexile measureNP
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"The symbols of mythology and legend are all around us, embedded in the fabric of our daily lives, and the Moyers-Campbell dialogues are a welcome guide to recognizing and understanding their meanings." —Cincinnati Post
From the Publisher
From the Inside Flap
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Bill Moyers is an acclaimed journalist, widely respected for his work both at CBS News and at PBS. One of his primary efforts has been to bring to television outstanding thinkers of our time, most recently in the immensely popular and highly celebrated PBS series and bestselling book A World of Ideas. His conversations with Joseph Campbell were one of the highlights of television programming in the 1980s.
Betty Sue Flowers teaches poetry and myth at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author and coauthor of several books, including Browning and the Modern Tradition, Four Shields of Power, and Daughters and Fathers.
Product details
- Publisher : Anchor (June 1, 1991)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 293 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0385418868
- ISBN-13 : 978-0385418867
- Lexile measure : NP
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.14 x 0.7 x 7.98 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #8,667 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #13 in Folklore & Mythology Studies
- #26 in Cultural Anthropology (Books)
- #32 in Mythology (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) was an American author and teacher best known for his work in the field of comparative mythology. He was born in New York City in 1904, and from early childhood he became interested in mythology. He loved to read books about American Indian cultures, and frequently visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he was fascinated by the museum's collection of totem poles. Campbell was educated at Columbia University, where he specialized in medieval literature, and continued his studies at universities in Paris and Munich. While abroad he was influenced by the art of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, the novels of James Joyce and Thomas Mann, and the psychological studies of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. These encounters led to Campbell's theory that all myths and epics are linked in the human psyche, and that they are cultural manifestations of the universal need to explain social, cosmological, and spiritual realities.
After a period in California, where he encountered John Steinbeck and the biologist Ed Ricketts, he taught at the Canterbury School, and then, in 1934, joined the literature department at Sarah Lawrence College, a post he retained for many years. During the 40s and '50s, he helped Swami Nikhilananda to translate the Upanishads and The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. He also edited works by the German scholar Heinrich Zimmer on Indian art, myths, and philosophy. In 1944, with Henry Morton Robinson, Campbell published A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. His first original work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, came out in 1949 and was immediately well received; in time, it became acclaimed as a classic. In this study of the "myth of the hero," Campbell asserted that there is a single pattern of heroic journey and that all cultures share this essential pattern in their various heroic myths. In his book he also outlined the basic conditions, stages, and results of the archetypal hero's journey.
Throughout his life, he traveled extensively and wrote prolifically, authoring many books, including the four-volume series The Masks of God, Myths to Live By, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space and The Historical Atlas of World Mythology. Joseph Campbell died in 1987. In 1988, a series of television interviews with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, introduced Campbell's views to millions of people.
For more on Joseph Campbell and his work, visit the web site of Joseph Campbell Foundation at JCF.org.
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Bill Moyers was a founding organizer of the Peace Corps, a senior White House assistant(and press secretary) to President Lyndon Johnson from 1963 until 1967, the publisher of Newsday, a senior news analyst for CBS News, and the producer of groundbreaking series for public television. He is the winner of more than thirty Emmy awards and nine Peabody awards. Among his bestselling books are Listening to America; A World of Ideas; The Power of Myth (with Joseph Campbell); and Moyers on America. His latest book is Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues. He lives in New York City.
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Customers find the content thought-provoking and insightful. They also appreciate Bill Moyers' smooth voice and ability to explain things so. Opinions are mixed on the entertainment value, readability, and topic. Some find it easy to read and a perfect beginners introduction, while others say it's boring and difficult to comprehend.
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Customers find the book very thought-provoking, insightful, and love the info in it. They say the interview format lends itself to inductive reasoning, allowing the reader to reach their own conclusions. Readers also say the book has set them free and changed their paradigm on countless things. They appreciate the compassionate collection of stories and explanations of cultural. They describe the author as one of the great American scholars of all time.
"...Life is wonderful and it does hurt...." Read more
"Thought provoking in expression...." Read more
"...Joseph Campbell helps you to look past the obvious and see the metaphors all around us. To see that which connects all of us...." Read more
"...By reading this book, it helps you understand (or reaffirm) beliefs like viewing comparative mythology as a road to uniting tales and legends common..." Read more
Customers find the writing style beautiful and thoughtful. They also mention that the paper has a glossy finish.
"...The illustrations are also interesting and relate to the narrative well. Great work!" Read more
"...It's also valuable because in the videos Campbell is so charismatic, so charming, so entertaining, and so articulate, that it's easy to miss the..." Read more
"...Still, reading his work has been a wonderful experience; insightful, thoughtful, rarely (if ever) pedantic...." Read more
"...Also appealing is the tongue-cheek style in some of the passages." Read more
Customers find the book very easy to read and visualize, with clear writing. They also say it's an accessible work. However, some customers find sections difficult to comprehend, tiresome, and lazy. They mention that the Q&A format is tiresome and longwinded.
"...I felt that Joseph Campbell is very clear (and not to mention original!)..." Read more
"...(other than his marvelous smooth voice and ability to explain things so clearly) is his worldview...." Read more
"...On the down side this book seemed hard for me to follow at times because of the question and answer format...." Read more
"...discuss are often multi-faceted with complicated intricacies, it's an easy read...." Read more
Customers are mixed about the entertainment value of the book. Some mention that they enjoy it and learn, while others say that it's boring and a less complete book.
"...Read, enjoy, learn." Read more
"...As such it is a more readable, but perhaps a less complete book than Campbell's "Hero with A Thousand Faces."..." Read more
"...because in the videos Campbell is so charismatic, so charming, so entertaining, and so articulate, that it's easy to miss the fact that while he..." Read more
"...It's an obnoxious and lazy way to write a book...." Read more
Customers are mixed about the ideas in the book. Some mention that Campbell had an excellent mind and a strong sense of humor, while others say that the ideas repeat themselves all along.
"...I find that the ideas repeat themselves all along which makes it messy to my mind...." Read more
"...available, it was a recorded series some years ago-Campbell had an excellent mind and a strong sense of spirituality, encompassing all faiths, and..." Read more
"Great book! However, it can go on a bit repetitive at points but Campbell helps you see myths in a different light...." Read more
"He was a true genius with an excellent memory...." Read more
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I love this particular book because it's an interview between to really gifted men who respect each other, and seem to have a wonderful time just talking about what they love. It's much easier to grasp some of Campbell's concepts because frankly, he can make your head spin with his theories and concepts. This book is like being a fly on the wall while two men talk over dinner. Most of it I can understand, but I have to admit, sometimes things get a little over my head.
They were talking about life in general and Campbell says this: "I will participate in the game. It is a wonderful, wonderful opera--except that it hurts". page 81 I don't know how you can sum up life any better than that. Life is wonderful and it does hurt.
Then Campbell talks about the 'hero' which everyone one of us is. "The hero is the one who comes to participate in life courageously and decently, in the way of nature, not in the way of personal rancor, disappointment, or revenge." page 82. There you have it. To do life right, you need to be the hero and you need to be courageous and decent. Campbell wrote the book Hero With A Thousand Faces, a compilation of the mythology of the world and this is what he came up with. Screen writers use Campbell's work to outline movies because it's journey we all recognize either on the surface or down in our subconscious, and we know that we are the hero of our own journey.
"So Jesus says, Judge not that you may not be judged. That is to say, put yourself back in the position of Paradise before you thought in terms of good and evil. You don't hear this much from the pulpits. But one of the great challenges of life is to say "yea" that that person or that act or that condition which in your mind is most abominable." page 32. What I grasp from this statement is that Campbell is trying to say that we need to look at things from a higher level. A poisonous snake is not evil it just is. When you kill it to save someone, you're saying no to the situation, you're not saying that the snake is evil.
I love the genius of Joseph Campbell and this is an easy(comparatively) book to understand him and what he's trying to say without your head exploding. His opening up the world of myth makes him a hero in my book.
It is pointless to go into the content of the book because that is what reading it is for. By reading this book, it helps you understand (or reaffirm) beliefs like viewing comparative mythology as a road to uniting tales and legends common to many cultures into a theoretical framework. Incredibly, you can find that most narratives created by human cultures have very common underlying themes: the most prevalent example is the idea of the 'hero', an ordinary person who lives in confusion, is met with an opportunity where he is forced to go on a journey that ultimately results in an inner reawakening leading him to return to his previous tribe and change it - a common theme in historical epics and religious texts. He mentions different conceptions of the hero, but this interview is a repetition of his ideas written with more detail in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) '.
Campbell mentions instances from a large range of traditions, not only the large dominant ones but the smaller ones including those found in tribes isolated from civilization. For someone like me who is not well versed at all in this subject, the book's accessibility came to me as a great relief. He mentions great points about how the decline of classical education leads to a lack of spiritual reference point to self-reflect in the western world. Some ideas made me understand a few religious concepts far more clearly, such as the idea that people associate Jesus with love because he is more relatable as a human and not a perfect and overbearing figure like God.
However, the brilliance of his work is how doesn't dwell excessively on the grandiose and transcendent and instead focuses on the day-to-day challenges faced by us. He talks wonderfully about marriage and the importance of rituals. This same importance is why despite not being a particularly religious person, I keep all my fasts during the month of Ramadan - purely due to the experience itself and not due to the perceived validity of it. Campbell brilliantly expresses how a lack of myth results in spiritual bankruptcy as all cultures (including the scientific worldview that trace our descent from Darwinian forces) use narratives to create moral justifications: A Muslim would say that incest is wrong because it is prohibited by scripture, a person who holds a Darwinian view would say that our repulsion towards incest comes from cultural programming that survived because rules that prohibited inbreeding allowed for a reduction in the possibility of hereditary problems - allowing those subscribers to survive and carry on the tradition through a memetic process.
After all, myths are something that we live and die for regardless of our philosophical inclinations. An interesting comparison is how myths drive people towards the idea of sacrifice - letting go of the ego and possessions to integrate into the larger community, the family, then the tribe, country and against all possible odds, perhaps into humanity itself (e.g. Mandela, Abraham when ordered to sacrifice his son). Some of his ideas bare great resemblance to recent history, such as the anarchy created when modernity is imposed at a rapid pace on primitive (or rather less developed countries) by colonial powers - threatening people's myths and by extension their very identities. I think this book is a treasure and it is a good defense against the Dawkins-like Atheists who reject religion altogether by focusing on religions lack of epistemological basis while ignoring the fact that religion has survived for so long because it is an integral part of the human experience and carries useful heuristics ("don't take on debts") . Furthermore, the ideas in this book by extension challenge the view that the modern secular worldview relies on pure objective analysis of morality and social relations - after all, even modern cultures have a belief in some myth, be it progress, liberalism, futurism or the ability for economics to secure human happiness. I am not disregarding the validity of any of this philosophical viewpoints - simply that no culture can exist with the complete absence of a narrative that drives the community. It unveils the irony of atheist groups that reject mythology and group into their own cults, giving credence to the very ideas they claim to reject.
Campbell deals with a couple of other interesting ideas including the understanding that "the myth is a public dream and the dream is the private myth". For him, when the union of these two ideas is disturbed when one's private myth is not compatible with the larger mythology of a culture - it results in the birth of a 'hero' that reawakens a culture by molding his culture in accordance to his newfound personal convictions. This is the dramatic explanation of how cultural innovation is thought to take place and why tracing a tradition's history of itself, its birth comes from the journey of a hero. (Muhammad meditating in his cave, Moses seeing God in a tree in the Sinai desert during his exile).
Campbell also tackles a central tenet of mythology, the use of language to express the transcendental. He talks about how language stimulates the imagination despite its limitations of being reductive, powerfully reducing incredible inexpressible experiences into short tales and stories. However, the ambiguity of language could mean that it captures the metaphysical with astounding beauty by virtue of the use of abstract words, or not meaning anything at all in the first place. Someone with an analytical background might say that mythology has no epistemological bases and while mythologists might say that science itself doesn't have the power to determine morality and meaning. Both sides have their virtues and it wouldn't be wise to disregard either view without first pondering on both sides of the arguments.
Finally, let me start with my criticisms of the book or rather mythology in general. I don't like how Campbell always talks about dreams as meaningful experiences, not emphasizing the possibility that they don't mean anything at all. Yes, dreams are very important to fables, tales, stories and legends but while scientific method is testable through experiment, mythological explanations can be attributed in hindsight to nearly any narrative. Despite this, I firmly believe that the knowledge of common narratives and patterns can be used as an important mental tool. Again, the use of vague and overbearing language and terms often means that anything and nothing can be interpreted in mythological terms - hence making it unfalsifiable. However, giving credit to Campbell - he doesn't seem to believe in hippy or new age mish-mash and simply gives metaphor the importance it deserves. Lastly, I feel that Campbell should have openly taken the stance that while people may use experiences like drugs to journey into consciousness, these attempts are rather futile because self-knowledge arises from years and years of challenges and by immersing into knowledge and not through the hedonistic urge to consume a substance.
However, altogether I loved this book and it was a great read.
Kudo's to anyone who understands rather than rejects!
_____
PS: As a childhood Star Wars fan, I was intrigued to see that George Lucas actually took advice from Campbell while filming the movie, that not too surprising as I could not help but notice that mythological elements in the character of Anakin Skywalker myself.
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This is a great book to read.
And the author is a genius and full of wisdom.
But book print quality could have been better.
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The interviews spanned, what seemed to be, all of human experience and belief and I suddenly felt connected to something fundamental and true, explained by someone with compassion and intelligence. Reading it is certainly an experience of standing on the shoulders of giants and Campbell is a colossus. I remember being left with this sense after the programmes had finished being aired but, due to my circumstances, I couldn’t find out any more about them or the man who had been at the centre of them. Then, to my relief, a friend found this book which is the transcripts of those conversations. I have had a copy of the book since then, read it regularly and have given it to friends. As an artefact, it is a good book to hold and look at as there are illustrations carefully chosen to support the important points.
I recently bought a copy for my son who was born 10 years later after I first came across it. He will no doubt find his own message within it and is already talking about the chapter about the hero’s adventure. When I talk with him about it and listen to the thoughts he has, I remember that all of us should be supported and encouraged to ‘follow our bliss’. Thank you, Joseph Campbell.