Reviews
I've read parts of just about all Joseph Campbell's works, and since I haven't read too much literature on comparative spirituality, I always learn really interesting facts I didn't know. Lots of these essays had fascinating topics, and I loved learning that decapitated heads are an important part of some people's wedding rituals. . . yum! But, instead of a real review, I'd much rather reflect on the interesting ways in which this book is dated. F'rinstance, one of these essays (originally lectures) is written shortly after the first moon walk. Campbell was very excited about this, and talked about how some children presently alive were likely to live on the moon, or even walk on Mars. One of the less humorous ways in which Campbell guessed wrong is that he seemed confident that the time of fundamental religions in the West was winding down. However, since the time of that lecture, there's actually been a marked increase in fundamentalist religious groups in the U.S. If only we were walking around on Mars and less dogmatic . . . Anyway, this is a good read, and much less of a time investment than the Masks of God series. The essays aren't really connected, other than the fact that they all make connections between mythologies and our way of relating to the world in modern times. I always find Joseph Campbell fascinating.
Highlights
If the first requirement of an adult is that he should take to himself responsibility for his failures, for his life, and for his doing, within the context of the actual conditions of the world in which he dwells, then it is simply an elementary psychological fact that no one will ever develop to this state who is continually thinking of what a great thing he would have been had only the conditions of his life been different: his parents less indifferent to his needs, society less oppressive, or the universe otherwise arranged. The first requirement of any society is that its adult membership should realize and represent the fact that it is they who constitute its life and being. We have problems in educating our young, of training them not simply to assume uncritically the patterns of the past, but to recognize and cultivate their own creative possibilities; not to remain on some proven level of earlier biology and sociology, but to represent a movement of the species forward.
Jung [believed] the imageries of mythology serve positive, life-furthering ends. Our outward-oriented consciousness, addressed to the demands of the day, might lose touch with our inward forces; and the myths, states Jung, when correctly read, are the means to bring us back in contact. They are telling us, in picture language, of powers of the psyche to be recognized and integrated in our lives, powers that have been common to the human spirit forever, and which represent that wisdom of the species by which man has weathered the millenniums. Through a dialogue conducted with these inward forces through our dreams and through a study of myths, we can learn to know and come to terms with the greater horizon of our own deeper and wiser, inward self. And analogously, the society that cherishes and keeps its myths alive will be nourished from the soundest, richest strata of the human spirit.
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