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Features of The Hero with a Thousand Faces PDF
The Hero with a Thousand Faces PDF-Since its release in 1949, The Hero with a Thousand Faces has influenced millions of readers by combining the insights of modern psychology with Joseph Campbell’s revolutionary understanding of comparative mythology. In this book, Campbell outlines the Hero’s Journey, a universal motif of adventure and transformation that runs through virtually all of the world’s mythic traditions. He also explores the Cosmogonic Cycle, the mythic pattern of world creation and destruction.-The Hero with a Thousand Faces PDF
As relevant today as when it was first published, The Hero with a Thousand Faces continues to find new audiences in fields ranging from religion and anthropology to literature and film studies. The book has also profoundly influenced creative artists – including authors, songwriters, game designers, and filmmakers – and continues to inspire all those interested in the inherent human need to tell stories.-The Hero with a Thousand Faces PDF
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The Authors
Joseph John Campbell (March 26, 1904 – October 30, 1987) was an American writer. He was a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College who worked in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work covers many aspects of the human experience. Campbell’s best-known work is his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), in which he discusses his theory of the journey of the archetypal hero shared by world mythologies, termed the monomyth.-The Hero with a Thousand Faces PDF
Since the publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell’s theories have been applied by a wide variety of modern writers and artists. His philosophy has been summarized by his own often repeated phrase: “Follow your bliss.”[6] He gained recognition in Hollywood when George Lucas credited Campbell’s work as influencing his Star Wars saga.[7]
Campbell’s approach to folklore topics such as myth and his influence on popular culture has been the subject of criticism, including from folklorists, academics in folklore studies
Background
Joseph Campbell was born in White Plains, New York,[11] on March 26, 1904, the elder son of hosiery importer and wholesaler[12] Charles William Campbell, from Waltham, Massachusetts, and Josephine (née Lynch), from New York.[13][14] Campbell was raised in an upper-middle-class Irish Catholic family; he related that his paternal grandfather Charles had been “a peasant” who came to Boston from County Mayo in Ireland, and became the gardener and caretaker at the Lyman estate at Waltham, where his son Charles William Campbell grew up and became a successful salesman at a department store prior to establishing his hosiery business.[15][16] During his childhood, he moved with his family to nearby New Rochelle, New York. In 1919, a fire destroyed the family home in New Rochelle, killing his maternal grandmother and injuring his father, who tried to save her.[17][18]
In 1921, Campbell graduated from the Canterbury School in New Milford, Connecticut. While at Dartmouth College he studied biology and mathematics, but decided that he preferred the humanities. He transferred to Columbia University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature in 1925 and a Master of Arts degree in medieval literature in 1927. At Dartmouth he had joined Delta Tau Delta. An accomplished athlete, he received awards in track and field events, and, for a time, was among the fastest half-mile runners in the world.[19]
In 1924, Campbell traveled to Europe with his family. On the ship during his return trip he encountered the messiah elect of the Theosophical Society, Jiddu Krishnamurti; they discussed Indian philosophy, sparking in Campbell an interest in Hindu and Indian thought.[20][21] In 1927, he received a fellowship from Columbia University to study in Europe. Campbell studied Old French, Provençal, and Sanskrit at the University of Paris and the University of Munich. He learned to read and speak French and German.[22]
On his return to Columbia University in 1929, Campbell expressed a desire to pursue the study of Sanskrit and modern art in addition to medieval literature. Lacking faculty approval, Campbell withdrew from graduate studies. Later in life he jested that it is a sign of incompetence to have a PhD in the liberal arts, the discipline covering his work.-The Hero with a Thousand Faces PDF
The Great Depression
With the arrival of the Great Depression, Campbell spent the next five years (1929–1934) living in a rented shack in Woodstock, New York.[24] There, he contemplated the next course of his life[25] while engaged in intensive and rigorous independent study. He later said that he “would divide the day into four three-hour periods, of which I would be reading in three of the three-hour periods, and free one of them … I would get nine hours of sheer reading done a day. And this went on for five years straight.”[26]
Campbell traveled to California for a year (1931–1932), continuing his independent studies and becoming a close friend of the budding writer John Steinbeck and his wife Carol. Campbell had met Carol’s sister, Idell, on a Honolulu cruise and she introduced him to the Steinbecks. Campbell had an affair with Carol.[27][28] On the Monterey Peninsula, Campbell, like John Steinbeck, fell under the spell of the marine biologist Ed Ricketts (the model for “Doc” in Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row as well as central characters in several other novels).[29] Campbell lived for a while next door to Ricketts, participated in professional and social activities at his neighbor’s, and accompanied him, along with Xenia and Sasha Kashevaroff, on a 1932 journey to Juneau, Alaska on the Grampus.[30] Campbell began writing a novel centered on Ricketts as a hero but, unlike Steinbeck, did not complete his book.-The Hero with a Thousand Faces PDF
Bruce Robison writes that
Campbell would refer to those days as a time when everything in his life was taking shape. … Campbell, the great chronicler of the “hero’s journey” in mythology, recognized patterns that paralleled his own thinking in one of Ricketts’s unpublished philosophical essays. Echoes of Carl Jung, Robinson Jeffers and James Joyce can be found in the work of Steinbeck and Ricketts as well as Campbell.[32]
Campbell continued his independent reading while teaching for a year in 1933 at the Canterbury School, during which time he also attempted to publish works of fiction. While teaching at the Canterbury School, Campbell sold his first short story Strictly Platonic to Liberty magazine.[33][34]
Sarah Lawrence College
In 1934, Campbell accepted a position as Professor of Literature at Sarah Lawrence College. In 1938, he married one of his former students, the dancer-choreographer Jean Erdman. For most of their 49 years of marriage they shared a two-room apartment in Greenwich Village in New York City. In the 1980s they also purchased an apartment in Honolulu and divided their time between the two cities. They did not have any children.
Early in World War II, Campbell attended a lecture by the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer; the two men became good friends. After Zimmer’s death, Campbell was given the task of editing and posthumously publishing Zimmer’s papers, which he would do over the following decade.
In 1955–1956, as the last volume of Zimmer’s posthumous (The Art of Indian Asia, Its Mythology and Transformations) was finally about to be published, Campbell took a sabbatical from Sarah Lawrence College and traveled, for the first time, to Asia. He spent six months in southern Asia (mostly India) and another six in East Asia (mostly Japan). This year had a profound influence on his thinking about Asian religion and myth, and also on the necessity for teaching comparative mythology to a larger, non-academic audience.[35]
In 1972, Campbell retired from Sarah Lawrence College, after having taught there for 38 years.
Art, literature, philosophy
Campbell often referred to the work of modern writers James Joyce and Thomas Mann in his lectures and writings, as well as to the art of Pablo Picasso. He was introduced to their work during his stay as a graduate student in Paris. Campbell eventually corresponded with Mann.[39]
The works of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche had a profound effect on Campbell’s thinking; he quoted their writing frequently.[40]
The “follow your bliss” philosophy attributed to Campbell following the original broadcast of The Power of Myth (see below) derives from the Hindu Upanishads; however, Campbell was possibly also influenced by the 1922 Sinclair Lewis novel Babbitt. In The Power of Myth, Campbell quotes from the novel:
Campbell: Have you ever read Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt?
Moyers: Not in a long time.
Campbell: Remember the last line? “I’ve never done a thing I wanted to do in all my life.” That’s the man who never followed his bliss.[41]
Psychology and anthropology
The anthropologist Leo Frobenius and his disciple Adolf Ellegard Jensen were important to Campbell’s view of cultural history. Campbell was also influenced by the psychological work of Abraham Maslow and Stanislav Grof.
Campbell’s ideas regarding myth and its relation to the human psyche are dependent in part on the pioneering work of Sigmund Freud, but in particular on the work of Jung, whose studies of human psychology greatly influenced Campbell. Campbell’s conception of myth is closely related to the Jungian method of dream interpretation, which is heavily reliant on symbolic interpretation. Jung’s insights into archetypes were heavily influenced by the Bardo Thodol (also known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead). In his book The Mythic Image, Campbell quotes Jung’s statement about the Bardo Thodol, that it
belongs to that class of writings which not only are of interest to specialists in Mahayana Buddhism, but also, because of their deep humanity and still deeper insight into the secrets of the human psyche, make an especial appeal to the layman seeking to broaden his knowledge of life … For years, ever since it was first published, the Bardo Thodol has been my constant companion, and to it I owe not only many stimulating ideas and discoveries, but also many fundamental insights.[42]
Comparative mythology and Campbell’s theories
Monomyth
Main article: Monomyth
Campbell’s concept of monomyth (one myth) refers to the theory that sees all mythic narratives as variations of a single great story. The theory is based on the observation that a common pattern exists beneath the narrative elements of most great myths, regardless of their origin or time of creation. Campbell often referred to the ideas of Adolf Bastian and his distinction between what he called “folk” and “elementary” ideas, the latter referring to the prime matter of monomyth while the former to the multitude of local forms the myth takes in order to remain an up-to-date carrier of sacred meanings. The central pattern most studied by Campbell is often referred to as the hero’s journey and was first described in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949).[43] An enthusiast of novelist James Joyce,[44] Campbell borrowed the term monomyth from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.[45] Campbell also made heavy use of Carl Jung’s theories on the structure of the human psyche, and he often used terms such as anima/animus and ego consciousness.
As a strong believer in the psychic unity of mankind and its poetic expression through mythology, Campbell made use of the concept to express the idea that the whole of the human race can be seen as engaged in the effort of making the world “transparent to transcendence” by showing that underneath the world of phenomena lies an eternal source which is constantly pouring its energies into this world of time, suffering, and ultimately death. To achieve this task one needs to speak about things that existed before and beyond words, a seemingly impossible task, the solution to which lies in the metaphors found in myths. These metaphors are statements that point beyond themselves into the transcendent. The Hero’s Journey was the story of the man or woman who, through great suffering, reached an experience of the eternal source and returned with gifts powerful enough to set their society free.
Dimensions and Characteristics of The Hero with a Thousand Faces PDF
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Listening Length 14 hours and 37 minutes Author Joseph Campbell Narrator Arthur Morey, John Lee, Susan Denaker Audible.com Release Date February 03, 2016 Publisher Brilliance Audio Program Type Audiobook Version Unabridged Language English Identification Number B01BFBXOM8 - Book Name : The Hero with a Thousand Faces PDF
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Top reviews
Jeremy David Stevens “All the way back in 1949, Joseph Campbell wrote a book titled The Hero With a Thousand Faces. The book contains hundreds of examples of stories from a wide range of mythology, including those from Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Native American, and Greek (and countless other) canons.
Campbell identifies similarities in style as well as structure between the great adventure stories/mythologies throughout human history. Famously, he determines specific characteristics about the hero and his or her journey, hence the term (coined by Campbell) familiar to readers and writers alike, The Hero’s Journey. In effect, there is a very specific set of rules governing what makes a great story. And just in case I wasn’t certain of the extent of Campbell’s research, the book contains over forty pages of endnotes and other references. The man put in the research time.
Reading The Hero With a Thousand Faces came at the perfect time for me. I’d heard of it and seen it recommended to me on for quite some time, but I never took the time to actually read it. Actually, I “Wikipedia’d” it a few times, but that was the extent of that. But in finally reading the book, Campbell has helped me understand much better some of the ideas that I’ve been working out in my weekly “Books of the Bible” review posts. If you’ve read any of my recent Bible book reviews, you’ll immediately recognize that Campbell has already clearly written what I’m still trying to figure out for myself. For example:
“For the symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche…”
Powerful stuff.
Here are the rules governing the first great stage of the adventure story (some of it is paraphrased in my own words):
The Call to Adventure
Initial Refusal to Heed the Call
Supernatural Aid/Mentor/“Old Man” (Old man is a direct quote from Campbell.)
Crossing the First Threshold
Belly of the Whale (The Point When the Hero’s Death/Ultimate Failure seems Certain)
Truly, Exodus would have been the perfect story to compare with Campbell’s ruleset, but I just wrote a review of Exodus last week, so I wanted to do something different. The Karate Kid might just might be the most perfect modern example of them all (and one of my favorite movies). So I thought it might be interesting to see just how closely the writers of this movie follow Campbell’s rules.
Young New Jersey native Daniel is called to the great land of adventure (California) by his mother. He hates it there (his initial macro-reluctance to heed the call) and would like nothing more than to move back home. The only saving grace (besides a pretty girl) is a mentor (Mr. Myagi) that he meets when he arrives. After getting into some trouble with the local bullies, Daniel’s mentor signs him up for a karate tournament. Daniel is mortified and has no faith in his ability to survive a karate tournament like that (Micro-reluctance to Heed the Call), “I cannot believe… what you got me into back there!”
But Daniel does as his mentor says and enters the tournament anyway (Crossing the First Threshold), where he manages to make it to the semifinals, further than he ever dreamed, before even hitting a snag. When he gets there, young bully Bobby cheats in a most despicable manner, kicking Daniel directly in the knee, damaging Daniel’s body seemingly beyond repair (into the Belly of the Whale, i.e., Daniel’s ultimate defeat seems certain). But just as soon as all hope is lost, Daniel’s mentor heals his leg through supernatural methods and Daniel comes back to win the tournament, his dignity, and the girl. Indeed, it’s a Hero’s Journey almost worthy of Moses.
Note: There are other rules and further stages to the story that I haven’t included in this short review, but it seems to me that these are certainly the essential components to the modern story. Maybe some other time, I can write about the further stages and which stories they apply to (Lord of the Rings comes to mind).
My final say on this book is as follows: If you’re a student of religion, mythology or philosophy, or if you are a writer (whether of music, poetry, or fiction), read this book. It contains a lot of good information.”
Robert Wright, Jr., Ph.D., COFT “This book is for the serious reader who is looking to learn more about the origins and power of myths in their historical context and how timeless symbols including archetypes are being “rediscovered” from a psychological perspective. For the uninitiated, this is an eye opening book in that Joseph Campbell is able to demonstrate in a masterful way how many of “the patterns and logic of fairy tale and myth correspond to those of dream, [and how] the long discredited chimeras of archaic man have returned dramatically to the foreground of modern consciousness” [page 255].
If you are a curious individual or student of history, then you’ll find The Hero With A Thousand Faces to be a fascinating read as the author probes deeply into the origins and significance of mythology from epistemological, ontological, psychological, and teleological perspectives. Whether you are a student of the ancient Egyptians, ancient Greeks, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Karl Abraham or others, you’re sure to find a wealth of valuable information and “perspective” in this book.
A happy outcome is that by reading this book you may glean a glimpse of your own heroes journey. That fact is worth the price of the book alone. It also makes a great gift for anyone who enjoys being reflective and is not fearful of diving into their own psyche and what they might find.
Robert “Bob” Wright, Jr., Ph.D., COFT”
John “I picked this up off the back of a podcast I watched recently on the art of storytelling. For a long time, I’ve had a fascination with Joseph Campbell. Probably his known quote is “Follow your bliss” which has remained as the background on my phone ever since I heard it.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces is probably one of his most well-known works. In it he draws from myth and legend, the stories of the ancients, the Vedas, and verses from the bible and unpacks them in his unique way, showing us the underlying similarities each contains and uses them to describe the Hero’s Journey. A process in which an adventure is called to action, and goes through a series of challenges, and eventually returns home with his or her “treasure”. I can expand on this but its probably easier to watch a video on Youtube.
If I’m completely honest I really struggled to get through this. I do not doubt that this isn’t a brilliant book and Joseph’s concept has influenced all matter of individuals from songwriters, to movie producers to fellow authors. His work was truly groundbreaking for its time. But boy did I struggle, however I think that’s more on me, I’ve always struggled with maintaining interest in myth and legend, ironic considering I’m fascinated by ancient Egypt. It also probably doesn’t help that it was written 70+ years ago and how we speak has changed a lot since then. Then is no denying the importance of this book, and I’m glad I read it, but I for those interested it might be best to watch his Netflix series which was produced in the late 80s just before he passed away.
I mean no disrespect to Joseph Campbell, I’m most likely just not intellectual enough to understand where he is coming from. And infact I am going to read Joesph Campbell on his Life and Work, a spin off of the documentary on Nelflix, as it was written much later and I still wish to learn more about his ideas. Funnily enough I actually found that on the side of the road while reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and its an old library book from Austin, TX, complete with classroom purchase orders for pizza, airline tickets, and old car hire receipts which are almost 20 years old.
for more reviews please see my website everythingandnothing.co”
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