Printable Tire's Reviews > The Hero With a Thousand Faces

I enjoyed this book... mostly. I have a few qualms with it, however.
-I found Campbell's attempts to relate myth archetypes to the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams to be outdated and more than a bit of a stretch. Dreams more often than not do not include characters like the Snake or the River; more often than not, dreams are silly and pointless. This aspect of dreams is never considered.
-Campbell's constant digs at Christianity and Western religion in general were appropriate, I suppose, but seemed derivative to me, and very distracting. I found myself making a mental tally of them all and it ruined some of my enjoyment of the book.
-This book, on one hand, is full of happy horseshit. If someone were to ask me what it was about, I would probably spout some metaphysical nonsense off the top of my head, something about the One being in the Self, and the Navel of the World culminating in the Death of the Self... and it would probably be right. But I guess that's the fault of most religious texts (which The Hero... undoubtedly is).
-Too often this book falls back on the retelling of intriguing (though often monotonous in their similar absurdity) myth-stories, to wit Campbell will add a paragraph, or sometimes only a sentence, of psychobabble explanation. There wasn't much analysis besides this. He lets the myth more or less speak for itself, and supposes we will be satisfied with this one example of a familiar archetype. We are left, I suppose, to draw our own conclusions to the universality of Jar Boy? Perhaps this is the only way such a book could be written....
-For better of for worse, the reader can't help associating and taking on the role of the Hero in this book, and the book then becomes more a self-help experience of the early 70's TM school than a meaningful work of scholarship. This is fine, and obviously Campbell's intention. But it does make me nervous...
-By calling forth the significance of myth in general, Campbell decreases the importance of a myth in particular. Campbell wants us (and I believe he is right here) to see myths as something outside of science or history, and to show the universality of many myths; but other than a half-hearted conclusion, it is not clear how one is supposed to believe in and take heart in, say, the myth of Jesus or Kali, if there is also known a more vague and peripheral truth to all things besides it. In other words, why should I specialize in eating bread when I know meat tastes good too? Yet one must specialize in something, or everything becomes trivialized by its universality... at least that's my opinion.
-This book can be very meandering, and often the sections and subjects in the sections don't line up. The second half seemed fairly excessive and unnecessary to me. I believe Campbell should have stuck to the Hero in particular and at times given more familiar examples of the Hero from myth.
-All that being said, I did enjoy this book 80-90% of the time. In writing my own myth-like-story I was surprised to see I was using some very particular and weird images that already existed in mythology, subconsciously or supraconsciously drawn on before by me without my knowledge. And there are plenty of myths and anecdotes in here I will consciously steal and use for my own purposes. And as far as a "self-help" book where one is the hero, it gets the job done.
"It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal- carries the cross of the redeemer- not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silence of his personal despair."