Janet's Reviews > The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Campbell began life as a James Joyce scholar, and his book on Joyce is absolutely required reading. I have read the Hero with a Thousand faces, at least the first few chapters, on a number of different occasions. Inevitably, I lost interest as we began to move up into godhead, chapters entitled 'Apotheosis,' 'the Ultimate Boon.' THey're my Moby Dick whaling paraphernalia chapters. But this time I'm trying to stay with it all the way through.

My difficulty with it is that as a writer, as a reader, I'm looking for something, a deeper connection to the great narratives, and Heroes as World Saviors doesn't speaking to me, to my interest in human psychology and drama, as do the great quarrelsome Greeks with their personified gods, Odysseus on his journey, Theseus and the fearsome, guilty house of Minos. For that reason, the first chapters are thrilling, initiation rites and subterranean terrors. Campbell has much to say about the Theseus myth that I found particularly inspiring and thought-provoking, the nature of the curse of the house of Minos.

His take on the story of Diana and Actaeon, the hunter who stumbled across her in her bath, is fascinating, a part of his overall view that a refusal to engage with the sexy earthy part of life is the downfall of many a mythological figure--and that Diana is no one to emulate. I found his take on the Psyche/ Cupid story interesting too, as he dwells not so much on the rebellion of Psyche, but the way in which Venus tries to keep these lovers apart. I'm interested in the symbolic capacity of these stories to hold our own psychic material, so this is the material which speaks much more strongly to me.

I'm giving this a few more chapters to come back to ground and if it doesn't I'm moving over to The White Goddess by Robert Graves, and or the Golden Bough.