Product Description

Provocative and personal writings on mythology, culture, and modern life by our century's foremost interpreter and teacher of myth.

Gathered together here for the first time are twelve eclectic,far-ranging, and brilliant essays exploring myth in all its dimensions:its history; its influence on art, literature, and culture; and its role in everyday life. Written at the height of Joseph Campbell's career -- and showcasing the lively and learned intelligence that made him thepremier writer on mythology of our times -- these essays investigatethe profound links between myth and history, the arts, and modern life.From psychology to the occult, from Thomas Mann to the Grateful Dead, from Goddess spirituality to Freud and Jung, these playful anderudite writings reveal the threads of myth woven deeply into thefabric of our culture and our lives.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #136852 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

Review

About the Author
John Campbell (1904-1987) wrote, among other works, the classics The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Inner Reaches of Outer Space, and The Masks of God. A prolific writer, lecturer, and scholar of art, history, religion, and culture, he taught at Sarah Lawrence College.

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Customer Reviews

Wonderful essays finally available
It is hard to find the scarce published of Campbell's essays and this book delivers. These selections are full of Campbell's brilliance but leave you wanting more. It is a good thing it is only PART of his collected works! There is more to come!

The Mythic Dimension
If you have any sort of interest in mythology, then you have heard of Joseph Campbell. His works such as The Hero's Journey and Myths of Light are required reading for university studies. His presentation of the cycle of the hero is absolutely legendary. He is one of my absolute favorite authors.

When a copy of The Mythic Dimension arrived at my door for me to review, I was thrilled. This book reprints a variety of Campbell's essays and articles, originally published between 1959 and 1987. Amongst these pieces are solid foundational presentations that provide a really good overview of the study of mythology and the associated symbolism. I can see this book becoming a very popular text for university classes.

The Real Editor of The Mythic Dimension
I co-edited this book with Anthony Van Couvering, although my name does not appear on the title, only in the Acknowledgements. The Acknowledgements state that I "composed the initial versions of many of the footnotes," but in fact, every footnote in the book that is not Campbell's was written by me (these all appear in block parentheses as such: [For a discussion of this, see that. ] ). If the reader will check in the Endnotes, he or she will see that these block parenthetical notes are quite frequent. The reader who bothers to check these cross references while reading will realize that it was I and not Tony Van Couvering who was the real editor of this book. Tony Van Couvering had little to no interest in Campbell.

Why is any of this important? Because it's accurate. And because the current listing of "Edited by" is a fraud. The reader should know who the real commentator was here, and it should be a matter of public record.

It's also a darn good book and an excellent introduction to the landscape of Campbell's ideas, rivalled perhaps only by "Myths to Live By." The essay entitled "Renewal Myths and Rites of the Primitive Hunters and Planters," for instance, is a test drive for "The Masks of God," and represents a miniaturized version of it. This one is worth the price of the book alone, for you can see him testing the waters for his coming epic, one of the greatest books on comparative mythology ever written.

This was the last book that the Joseph Campbell Foundation published with Harper Collins. It didn't make a dime, and neither did the ones before it, "Baksheesh and Brahman" and "Mythic Worlds, Modern Words," which is why Harper Collins dropped the "Collected Works of Joseph Campbell" project. Consumerism is the driving force of the publishing industry nowadays, and that is too bad because it is wrecking the industry. Intellectual books are no longer being published (since, it is thought, they don't make money) and so the needs of the marketplace now dictates what the world of the mind will be like for the rest of us. As Zygmunt Bauman has written in his wonderful book "Can Ethics Survive in a Consumer Society?" the answer is no, they can't, because money dictates everything. It is a wonder that the Joseph Campbell Foundation was actually able to find another publisher, New World Library, to salvage this "Collected Works" project, since Americans generally do not value their own writers enough to regularly produce "Collected Works" of them. In Europe, this is done all the time. Check out how many Gesammelte Werkes exist in German and you will see what I mean.

In short, this book, "Myths to Live By," and "The Flight of the Wild Gander" represent the three best introductory overviews of Campbell's intellectual ideas that are now available. This book has been largely neglected, but hopefully New World Library's reprinting of it will help redress that problem.

See also my You Tube lecture on Campbell.

--John David Ebert, author of Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society