the man with a thousand faces joseph campbell

Follow him on Twitter at on Facebook, or on Instagram. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Updating Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” to Cover Female Action Heroes–Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #33īased in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. How Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” Recreates the Epic Hero’s Journey Described by Joseph Campbell Hear 48 Hours of Lectures by Joseph Campbell on Comparative Mythology and the Hero’s Journey “People have the notion of saving the world by shifting it around and changing the rules and so forth.” But “the way to bring it to life is to find, in your own case, where your life is, and be alive yourself.” A hero’s journey awaits each of us, but never has there been so much to distract us from making it. Since the publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell's theory has been consciously applied. But the Campbell of The Power of Myth has much still-relevant wisdom to offer, even for those who feel plunged into a despair unique to our moment. The Hero with a Thousand Faces (first published in 1949) is a work of comparative mythology by Joseph Campbell, in which the author discusses his theory of the mythological structure of the journey of the archetypal hero found in world myths. “Follow your bliss,” he said, thinking of the Hindu Upanishads, and the New Age made into a cliché. Though formed by the Depression rather than the Age of Aquarius, he could adapt his teachings about ancient myth, as if by instinct, for listeners hoping to raise their consciousness.

In the mid-to-late twentieth century, this created the most opportune of conditions for Campbell’s rise as a public intellectual. The inability to trace a mythological arc in their own lives has driven people in various directions: toward cults, toward health fads, toward therapy, toward pop culture. At that time, Moyers says in an updated introduction, “when millions of people were yearning for a way of talking about religious experience without regard to a religious belief system, Campbell gave them the language for it.” For decades - for centuries, really - once-inviolable narratives of the world and man’s place in it had been breaking down.

The man with a thousand faces joseph campbell