BW13: Happy Birthday Joseph Cambell

Courtesy of the Joseph Campbell Foundation

Happy Sunday! Today marks the anniversary of the birth of Joseph Campbell who is best known for introducing the concept of the Hero's Journey in The Hero With a Thousand Faces.  Campbell has written numerous books on comparative mythology and his entire booklist can be found on the Joseph Campbell Foundation as well as the list of required reading for the mythology course taught at Sarah Lawrence college. 

"The basic story of the hero journey involves giving up where you are, going into the realm of adventure, coming to some kind of symbolically rendered realization, and then returning to the field of normal life."  Pathways to Bliss

"My feeling is that mythic forms reveal themselves gradually in the course of your life if you know what they are and how to pay attention to their emergence. My own initiation into the mythic depths of the unconscious has been through the mind, through the books that surround me in this library. I have recognized in my quest all the stages of the hero’s journey. I had my calls to adventure, my guides, demons, and illuminations."  Man and Myth

"It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religion, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth."   Hero with a Thousand Faces

"For the symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are the spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source."  Hero with a Thousand Faces

"Blunders are not the merest chance. They are the results of suppressed desires and conflicts. They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. And these may be very deep—as deep as the soul itself. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny."  Hero with a Thousand Faces

"I didn’t write my books for critics and scholars. I wrote them for students and artists. When I hear how much my work has meant to them––well, I can’t tell you how happy that makes me. That means that this great stuff of myth, which I have been so privileged to work with, will be kept alive for a whole new generation. That’s the function of the artists, you know, to reinterpret the old stories and make them come alive again, in poetry, painting, and now in movies."  Hero's Journey

"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived."  Hero's Journey

Have fun delving to the world of mythology with Joseph Campbell.

Our post is sponsored by the letter M which stands for myth, meaning, and man. 

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