Becca 's Reviews > The Hero With a Thousand Faces

This text is one of those often-quoted, seldom read old classics. It irks many, inspires some, and baffles most. I found myself irked, inspired and baffled on nearly every page. Still, I’m very glad I finally read it—-Campbell’s ideas have re-animated my reading and thinking. Problematic, definitely, but also illuminating.

The irksome and baffling bits first: Campbell cherrypicks what myths to include in his analysis. He chooses his evidence to create a really elegant Copernican universe, with his Monomyth theory unchallenged at the center. He doesn’t include what he calls “underdeveloped or degenerate” folk mythologies from “truly primitive” people (289) in his analysis—so that excuses him from ignoring all the myriad myths that would send the monomyth careening off of its strait and narrow path. And he preaches dependence on the iconography of the “inspired past” (249). So… universal truth that springs naturally from the collective unconscious of every human was only able to create meaning in the distant past? Silly. Also, this monomyth is by boys and for boys. “The woman is life, the hero its knower and master” (120). Campbell grudgingly says that the hero journey is a human journey, but relies on misogynistic Fruedian and Jungian descriptions of the male and female lifecycles to build his archetypes—-the steppingstones along the hero’s path. The “universal story” of the hero journey is a man’s journey.

Sometimes his evidence seems randomly generated-—myths and folktales and parables and—-strangest of all—-transcripts of modern dreams—thrown together in a stew, with a breathless Ta-DAA! As if their meaningful unity was obvious. (This habit reminded me of my mom’s parody of Marxist literary criticism—-she made a Dr. Suess-esque cartoon machine, that gobbled up any old story and spat out pat little Marxist formulas.) If you grind the carcass up enough, it all looks like hamburger in the end. Hero hamburger.

For much of this book my eyebrow was firmly up. Especially when the Christian myth became the dominant one in his evidence for a universal truth. I thought I had him pegged as a devout Christian, finding evidence in myth for The One True Religion. His Christian and Western reading of world myths continues right up to the apex of his Hero pattern, then he surprisingly announces that Christianity has forgotten the true end of the journey. Here he switches to Siddhartha as his hero. After the crisis, the quest, the redemption, the hero discovers that the face of God is his own—-beyond the light is the void, and God is not a destination but an indicator of a greater, wordless, and inner meaning.

And here we come to the inspiring bits. In spite of all the outdated, anti-female, Western myopic nonsense, Campbell is a natural dreamer. This book just isn’t an academic study. It’s a lambish meditation on the meaning of life in academic wolf clothing. Campbell has been inspired by the myths he’s read, and tries to illuminate the beauty and the Capital T Truth he’s encountered. I’ll let him speak for himself:

45—The hardness [of mythology:] is balanced by an assurance that all we see is but the reflex of a power than endures, untouched by the pain.

93—The hero whose attachment to ego is already annihilate passes back and forth across the horizons of the world, in and out of the dragon, as readily as a king through all the rooms of his house. And therein lies his power to save; for his passing and retuning demonstrate that through all the contraries of phenomenality the Uncreate-Imperishable remains, and there is nothing to fear.

121—The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero’s passage is that it shall serve as a general pattern for men and women, wherever they may stand along the scale. Therefore it is formulated in the broadest terms. The individual has only to discover his own position with reference to this general human formula, and let it then assist him past his restricting walls.

146—The living waters are the tears of God... In full awareness of the life anguish of the creatures in his hand, in full consciousness of the roaring wilderness of pains, the brains-splitting fires of the deluded, self-ravaging, lustful, angry universe of his creation, this divinity acquiesces in the deed of supplying life to life. To withhold the seminal waters would be to annihilate; yet to give them forth is to create this world that we know… In his mercy, in his love for the forms of time, this demiurgic man of men yields countenance to the sea of pangs; but in his full awareness of what he is doing, the seminal waters of the life that he gives are the tears of his eyes.

158-159—The good news, which the World Redeemer brings and which so many have been glad to hear, zealous to preach, but reluctant, apparently, to demonstrate, is that God is love, that He can be, and is to be, loved, and that all without exception are his children.

162—If the God is a tribal, racial, national, or sectarian archetype, we are the warriors of his cause; but if he is a lord of the universe itself, then we go forth as knowers to whom all men are brothers.

288—From the perspective of the source, the world is a majestic harmony of forms pouring into being, exploding, and dissolving. But what the swiftly passing creatures experience is a terrible cacophony of battle cries and pain. The myths do not deny this agony (the crucifixion); they reveal within, behind, and around it essential peace (the heavenly rose).