Myths to Live By

Campbell shows us essential elements for human psychological health found in ancient myths and explains what we should look towards if mythology is to be recreated in a modern setting for it to resonate and guide our secular lives.

Read the Joseph Campbell Primer years ago and found it fascinating. This book goes in to more details about various myths and it really makes you think when you see all the connections.

I haven't read any of Joseph Campbell for some time nevertheless his work ever present. His works and wisdom were a key to understanding the trap of religion, escaping it and embracing spirituality.Great through this work to get reaquainted and to hear Campbells voice once more

Libro culto meraviglioso da leggere nella vita! Per giovani filosofi !

An inspiring man! Campbell manages to combine science and storytelling all the while writing an entertaining and humorous book. Thumbs up!

A book of Joseph Campbell that one reads as if one were at a speech. Not always easy reading, but always rewarding.

I was lucky enough to meet Joseph Campbell in the 1980s when he lectured at Salve Regina in Newport, Rhode Island. Campbell, America's premier mythologist, spoke for just under an hour and just that short amount of time, he had me hooked. In the years that followed, I read many of his works and found that his writings have gradually shaped my own thoughts and greatly influenced my own career as a history teacher. He has opened my eyes to many of our common experiences as human beings and now I find that when I look at people and their cultures, I see more commonalities and fewer differences. Meaning no disrespect to those immersed in diversity, I prefer to see things that people have in common. Campbell did that.Myths to Live By is a great introduction to the works of a great writer. Read them, think about them, React to them. It's time well spent by anyone.

Opening a book by Joseph Campbell is like emerging from a cave and seeing the world for the first time. It is not a light read, but it is well worth the effort. Have you ever wondered why the tale of Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty resonates as deeply with your daughter as it did to children four centuries ago, or why Beowulf, The Illiad, and The Odessey, stories so old that they cannot be traced to their source, are reinterpreted generation after generation?Campbell's idea is simple. The stories that we love and that we tell are what define us. We must all, for example, come to terms with the fact that we kill plants and animals in order to live. We must all explain what lies beyond death, and why we have been given the gift of life. We need to know what is worth living for and what is worth dying for.This book is not for the devoutly religious. Campbell uses religion and myth as synonyms and gives equal credence to Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and plains Indian religious beliefs. The truth here was not written by an angry God on large stone tablets; it is found in the stories that we tell ourselves and our children.Campbell examines the way people around the world have dealt with these questions and what happens when the myths we live by are swept away and replaced by nothing.In many ways, this book is like a rich cheesecake. It cannot be consumed all at once. It needs to be savored a little at a time, and digested before moving on.

This book reads like an essential afterword to the great video series. The chapters on mythologies of love, and of war and peace are especially effective. Campbell's teaching is direct, and honed to a useful, beautiful glow. He's a courageous thinker, able to order considerable insights with impeccable ease. Leaves us the richer. He's hailed for the scope of his vision, yet it's the inevitable intimacy of Campbell's teaching genius that makes his books so effective. Read this book and find a realm vaster and more intimate than one that brung ya! --that's effective spiritual reading, the fruit of clearly intense scholarship, and Campbell makes it immediate and consoling. Delivers what it promises. It's difficult to be disappointed by stuff this fine.

"Myths to Live By" is one of those books which makes me wish I did not have to assign a star rating. For while it is, as the title of this review suggests, a very eloquent and powerful exposition of the Myth that forms the bones of our Psyche, Campbell clearly has some predjudices that make some of his points difficult to see. First, however, I shall focus on the positve aspects of the work. Campbell begins his book with a story about the conflict between a myth (in this case the story of Adam and Eve) and the facts discovered by science. The little anecdote serves to present the key thesis of the book: that our old religious idea that myths are literally true is no longer servicable, and that we must now, in an age where the world is coming together in ways unprecendented, seek the pattern that underlies all myths and discover our oneness as a species. Campbell explains why myth and ritual are neccesary in concrete, psycholgical terms. If there are no myths, individuals will become alienated from their society, since myths contain affect images that speak to not the rational mind, but the psyche. His argument is essensially Jungian in tone. Through a comparitive look at the worlds "major" religions, he shows how all myths are variations on the theme of self discovery and rebirth as a person engaged with the Universe and society. All that is wonderful. What is not wonderful, however, is the vaugley reactionary tone underlying some of the books passages. Campbell seems to share the imperialist view that all of human history naturally culminates in modern, technological, Western Civilization. He dismisses the youth movement of the time he wrote this book (the sixties to early seventies) as folly. The cultural contribution of "Beat" poets such as Ginsberg an Kerouak is completley ignored. In fact, the "Beats" are never even mentioned when Campbell throws out an all encompassing statement like "we have no artists...of such power today". Equally troubling is the statement that "all life is suffering, all societies are opressive, and we just have to learn to live with it". Now, while it may be true that life is sorrowful and that social orders have, throughout history, tended to be unjust, it does not follow that we have to accept the latter fact with the same passivity as the former. As Campbell points out, we make the choices that determine the direction of our society. If everyone, or a strong majority at least, were able to come to the understanding of universal Myth and Divinity, the opression that exists today would decrease, if not dissapear. The book comes to a climax with an expose of the mythic dimensions of the first moon walk. The chapter illustrates how we are indeed one planet and one species. Juxtoposed with "all societies are opressive, and we just have to live with it" however, the chapter's beauty becomes terror. In this light, the chapter is a prophecy of slavery, not oneness. Still, this is a very important book, marred as all great works are by the author's prejudices. When reading this book, remember Buddha's finger pointing at the moon, and which one was more important.