Leave it alone if it leaves you without any feeling of loss or regret.īut if it snags you, if it pulls you, if it beckons a little finger and says, “Check this out!” If you’re from the Show Me State and find yourself asking “showme” about myths, then what? What do you do when it yanks you around like a hook does a fish? Then we get into the “literature of the spirit” – or what he calls the search for an “experience of being alive.” As someone keen on practicing resurrection, I like that phrase more than I should (1-3). His thought is that if someone thinks a subject’s important, so what? If it doesn’t grab you, if it doesn’t just yank at your attention, then why worry about it in the first place? Took me awhile to come to terms with the fact that not everyone likes literature, but to those terms I’ve come. Campbell’s response was that we don’t need ’em. Chesterton illuminated Joseph Campbell’s religion. I’ll break it up by chapter and try my best to stay off soap boxes, unless he’s selling soap.įEATURED DOWNLOAD: G.K. Other people might refer to something untrue, like Bultman who believes parts of scripture to by “myth”, or Mythbusters, but I mean the previous definition, and everything that comes with it. one that is concerned with deities or demigods and explains some practice, rite, or phenomenon of nature” (see ). For the sake of discussion, I mean “myth” as in “a traditional or legendary story, usually concerning some being or hero or event, with or without a determinable basis of fact or a natural explanation, esp. It has been a whirlwind, and what follows overflows from a summer’s worth of mastications, musings, and marinades on myth and monomyth. It was then formatted, and expanded, into this book (Campbell, The Power of Myth, ix).

The material captivated audiences during twenty-four hours, total, of filming which they edited, and purified, into a six-hour series on PBS. Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell started talking in ’85 and ’86 at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch, and then again at the Museum of Natural History, NYC. Recently, thanks to a proper introduction via brother Doug Welch, I dove headfirst into The Power of Myth. Back a couple of decades, this dinosaur taught concepts from a lectern that would shape, and still shapes, the generations. Ever wonder why Star Wars did what it did? We have Joseph Campbell to thank.

The power of myth book