simazhi 's review for:

The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

5.0

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I thought this book was going to be "here's the monomyth and it's present in everything", but it's more, "a monomyth emerges from all these different stories, but not all of them display it equally", which is a much more valuable persepctive. I learned a lot, both from the myths I knew from before, and from the ones that were novel to me. If anything, this book will inspire you to seek out more mythologies.

Mythology has been interpreted by the modern intellect as a primitive, fumbling effort to explain the world of nature (Frazer); as a production of poetical fantasy from prehistoric times, misunderstood by succeeding age (Müller); as a repository of allegorical instruction, to shape the individual to his group (Durkheim); as a group dream, symptomatic of archetypal urges within the depths of the human psyche (Jung); as the traditional vehicle of man’s profoundest metaphysical insights (Coomaraswamy); and as God’s Revelation to His children (the Church). Mythology is all of these.