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kevinpearce's review
2.0
I read this because I found the first episode of "The Power of Myth" mind-blowing when it first showed up on Netflix. Much like the show, I felt like the book was illuminating at first, but became rather repetitive and meandering as it went on. The second half was more interesting than the first, however. Campbell's description of the rituals of non-Western cultures also reads as very dated, but it is understandable given its two publishing dates of 1949 and 1968.
nebuthegreat's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
3.25
Cet ouvrage n’est pas ce qu’il semble être au premier regard, c’est-à-dire une mythologie comparative du héros. Joseph Campbell va beaucoup dans la spiritualité et dans la psychanalyse, qui est une approche un peu trop limitative aux mythes.
L’organisation est parfois un peu confuse. On voit plusieurs exemples se suivre pour appuyer un argument comme dans un essai très scolaire sans suite logique. Néanmoins, plusieurs de ces arguements sont intéressants à prendre en compte.
De plus, l’auteur a un certain talent de narrateur. Plusieurs citations directes se trouvent dans ce livre, mais Campbell prend la peine de narrer certains mythes dans sa prose qui est plaisante. Grâce à cela, j’ai appris beaucoup sur certaines mythologies orientales ou non-occidentales qui m’étaient moins familières.
L’organisation est parfois un peu confuse. On voit plusieurs exemples se suivre pour appuyer un argument comme dans un essai très scolaire sans suite logique. Néanmoins, plusieurs de ces arguements sont intéressants à prendre en compte.
De plus, l’auteur a un certain talent de narrateur. Plusieurs citations directes se trouvent dans ce livre, mais Campbell prend la peine de narrer certains mythes dans sa prose qui est plaisante. Grâce à cela, j’ai appris beaucoup sur certaines mythologies orientales ou non-occidentales qui m’étaient moins familières.
bnj_otb's review
4.0
Just finished this book after a 2 month-long, intense and intriguing odyssey through Campbell's ideas and knowledge on mythology, comparative mythology and what it means to be human and look for meaning. This is far from being an easy read. It was captivating throughout, even though I had to do a lot of secondary reading on the different myths and their interpretation (not finished with that part yet), as this book seems like an inextinguishable source or well full of different paths of exploration.
Something I struggled with was the portrayed role of women, not only in his depictions of the myths, but also when Campbell addressed non-mythologial, social questions. Obviosuly we cannot take this work out of its context, but I am very curious and keen to explore feminist critiques of this work. The journey has just started
Something I struggled with was the portrayed role of women, not only in his depictions of the myths, but also when Campbell addressed non-mythologial, social questions. Obviosuly we cannot take this work out of its context, but I am very curious and keen to explore feminist critiques of this work. The journey has just started
orsuros's review
4.0
I've heard so many authors mention this book. It was interesting and sometimes strange. I can see why authors love it, but I also feel like it was hard not have really high expectations after hearing so many people talk about it.
i_have_no_process's review
adventurous
challenging
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
As life-changing for me as was heralded. A monumental achievement in comparative mythology. A book I had been told countless times to read -- and long ignored. O, how I was wrong!
virtualmima's review
2.25
What the Freudians and their students never seem to understand is that it's not the myths that are being influenced by psychology, it's people's psychology being influenced by myths. All of these symbols and stuff that they found in their patients that just happened to be similar to popular myths exist in certain people (but not everyone) because our culture brings them up on these myths, or on ideas that are based on these myths. Notice how they're always studying Western people and Western myths, and when they study religion from other places it's through a westernized lens. When our entire society is built around Judeo-Christianity and Greco-Roman ideology/symbolism, with some influence from Islamic and Eastern myth, it's no surprise that psychologists have recognized a lot of this stuff during analysis. That doesn't mean there's some kind of universal symbolism in our biology that made the creation of these myths inevitable. Now that Western culture has imposed itself on the rest of the world, these symbols are likely to be in the psyche of a lot of people around the world, but that doesn't give them any validity. If these myths weren't created as they were, there would be other stories and other symbols that psychoanalysts would be focusing on instead. Similarities between myths don't imply a connection of any sort.
The fallacy is in the refusal to question the assumption that myths just might not come from the deep unconscious. There's a lot of different places that myths come from, and you can even see myths develop on a small scale, with experiments like the telephone game. Or give any group of ignorant individuals an experience that they cannot understand, and they will invent their own wrong interpretation of it. You could also observe how entirely fictional Hollywood movies influence a lot of people to believe in sci-fi pseudo-ideologies. It doesn't matter where the myths originate because they will always change over time. But to assume that all of them come from well-documented dreams, and that these dreams have anything to do with the deep unconscious, are two insanely unlikely assumptions to make. Myths, which tend to be transmitted orally for many generations before finally being written down, come from a large number of sources, occasionally some of which may be dreams, but most of which are probably allegories, made-up stories, and true stories that are distorted over time because they rely on one of the most unreliable things around: human memory. Even with photo/video documentation and writing, we still forget a lot of stuff and memories get distorted. A lot of myth also comes from ignorant people trying to figure things out. Without the scientific method, we get stuff like alchemy and the occult, because people want to figure out how to do what they can do with science without understanding how science works. At some point, there are people (usually leaders of a nation) who try to organize the mess of everything; all of the poorly remembered stories, laws, methods, art, fashion, and protoscientific nonsense get pulled together under one umbrella, religion. When religion is officialized by the state, or by a cult, the state or cult decides what stays and what goes. As time goes on, religions combine with other religions, particularly with trade networks and conquest, and new cult leaders often arise in times of religious or political turmoil, usually drawing influence from the various mythologies around them. By the time anything is written down, everything already is pretty much untraceable to their original sources. So anyone who thinks they can find a direct link between modern religions and psychology is severely mistaken. Consequently, all branches of psychology that have their roots in mythological studies, which is pretty much all psychology, are nothing more than mythologies themselves.
When crafting a story, there are some easy ways to move the story along and compose transitions. Especially for popular fiction, authors often rely on stock characters who have worked in the past, with the hopes that it would work with them as well. But usually it doesn't, and the more these stock ideas are used, the less effective it becomes. So when you see psychoanalysts referring exclusively to these mediocre children's stories and pretending they're profound just because they appeal to children who haven't yet heard the same story told in a million different ways, it's hard to take them seriously. The myths and fairytales are composed as they are because they're made by people who care more about the act of storytelling itself than the art of writing a good, original story. Until recently, very little attention was paid to style, so it's unsurprising that most ancient myths are very straightforward and composed of lifeless stock characters. Most of the complexity of the more complicated ones comes from a failure to preserve the original tales through oral transmission or lost writings, and combining them with other tales. Much like fantasy stories of today, stories in ancient times provided people with an escape from the boredom or suffering of their everyday lives by entering a realm of fantasy completely different from their normal reality. Most people were aware that some of these stories were made up fairytales with no function other than to entertain. They didn't always have allegories either. From the beginning of human language, people have always known the capacity for stories to entertain. The way that religious historians often make the assumption that everyone always believed in every story they were ever told is condescending and ignorant. Even when there's a clear division between story and myth, we still can't know how far back people believed in them. Sometimes a story becomes a myth when a storyteller presents it as fact and people believe them. Even today it's not difficult to start a rumor and get everyone to believe in it, even if they initially think that you're making things up. It may also be that a certain storyteller, possibly a senile elder responsible for telling stories around the campfire, remembers a story they were told as a child and mistakenly thinks that it happened to them. And if we were to suppose that the myth was something that was believed as it is written from the first time it was ever told, and that even the storyteller believed in it, we could never possibly know whether or not the storyteller misremembered it, was insane, misinterpreted an event, told it well, exaggerated to keep people's attention, or had someone write it down for them who didn't transmit it exactly as they were told. If you want to study how myths are created, try creating some yourself and study those. Ancient myths won't help you much, unless you're trying to figure out to what extent mythology has infiltrated into our present-day culture and contemporary science.
I don't deny that Joseph Campbell is well-informed, but he should have been a religious historian instead of a psychoanalyst.
The fallacy is in the refusal to question the assumption that myths just might not come from the deep unconscious. There's a lot of different places that myths come from, and you can even see myths develop on a small scale, with experiments like the telephone game. Or give any group of ignorant individuals an experience that they cannot understand, and they will invent their own wrong interpretation of it. You could also observe how entirely fictional Hollywood movies influence a lot of people to believe in sci-fi pseudo-ideologies. It doesn't matter where the myths originate because they will always change over time. But to assume that all of them come from well-documented dreams, and that these dreams have anything to do with the deep unconscious, are two insanely unlikely assumptions to make. Myths, which tend to be transmitted orally for many generations before finally being written down, come from a large number of sources, occasionally some of which may be dreams, but most of which are probably allegories, made-up stories, and true stories that are distorted over time because they rely on one of the most unreliable things around: human memory. Even with photo/video documentation and writing, we still forget a lot of stuff and memories get distorted. A lot of myth also comes from ignorant people trying to figure things out. Without the scientific method, we get stuff like alchemy and the occult, because people want to figure out how to do what they can do with science without understanding how science works. At some point, there are people (usually leaders of a nation) who try to organize the mess of everything; all of the poorly remembered stories, laws, methods, art, fashion, and protoscientific nonsense get pulled together under one umbrella, religion. When religion is officialized by the state, or by a cult, the state or cult decides what stays and what goes. As time goes on, religions combine with other religions, particularly with trade networks and conquest, and new cult leaders often arise in times of religious or political turmoil, usually drawing influence from the various mythologies around them. By the time anything is written down, everything already is pretty much untraceable to their original sources. So anyone who thinks they can find a direct link between modern religions and psychology is severely mistaken. Consequently, all branches of psychology that have their roots in mythological studies, which is pretty much all psychology, are nothing more than mythologies themselves.
When crafting a story, there are some easy ways to move the story along and compose transitions. Especially for popular fiction, authors often rely on stock characters who have worked in the past, with the hopes that it would work with them as well. But usually it doesn't, and the more these stock ideas are used, the less effective it becomes. So when you see psychoanalysts referring exclusively to these mediocre children's stories and pretending they're profound just because they appeal to children who haven't yet heard the same story told in a million different ways, it's hard to take them seriously. The myths and fairytales are composed as they are because they're made by people who care more about the act of storytelling itself than the art of writing a good, original story. Until recently, very little attention was paid to style, so it's unsurprising that most ancient myths are very straightforward and composed of lifeless stock characters. Most of the complexity of the more complicated ones comes from a failure to preserve the original tales through oral transmission or lost writings, and combining them with other tales. Much like fantasy stories of today, stories in ancient times provided people with an escape from the boredom or suffering of their everyday lives by entering a realm of fantasy completely different from their normal reality. Most people were aware that some of these stories were made up fairytales with no function other than to entertain. They didn't always have allegories either. From the beginning of human language, people have always known the capacity for stories to entertain. The way that religious historians often make the assumption that everyone always believed in every story they were ever told is condescending and ignorant. Even when there's a clear division between story and myth, we still can't know how far back people believed in them. Sometimes a story becomes a myth when a storyteller presents it as fact and people believe them. Even today it's not difficult to start a rumor and get everyone to believe in it, even if they initially think that you're making things up. It may also be that a certain storyteller, possibly a senile elder responsible for telling stories around the campfire, remembers a story they were told as a child and mistakenly thinks that it happened to them. And if we were to suppose that the myth was something that was believed as it is written from the first time it was ever told, and that even the storyteller believed in it, we could never possibly know whether or not the storyteller misremembered it, was insane, misinterpreted an event, told it well, exaggerated to keep people's attention, or had someone write it down for them who didn't transmit it exactly as they were told. If you want to study how myths are created, try creating some yourself and study those. Ancient myths won't help you much, unless you're trying to figure out to what extent mythology has infiltrated into our present-day culture and contemporary science.
I don't deny that Joseph Campbell is well-informed, but he should have been a religious historian instead of a psychoanalyst.