Comment Well, not quite (Score 3, Insightful) 560
Campbell never advocated any 'world myth,' certainly never any primal myth which supercedes more concrete folk wisdom/religion. I fail to understand where you intuit Campbell's "Judeo-Christian beliefs."
_Hero w/ 1000 Faces_ shows up on a lot of creative writing syllabi, but Campbell's real masterwork is the 4-vol. _Masks of God_, an extensive survey of mythology from cave paintings to James Joyce. His point, made there and elsewhere, isn't that there's one myth--a misunderstanding perpetuated by lazy readers of _1000 Faces_--but *patterns* in the way people come to grips with the world. Jung called them *archetypes* and believed they were hardwired into the brain; Campbell is less certain. Common ground is equally found outside the gray matter: every creature has seen the sun rise in the east and set in the west, seen the moon go through its cycles, the stars glide through predictable paths. That the patterns of life are reflected in the patterns of myth is not due to the superimposition of any "uber-myth," but instead to the commonalities of life on this planet.
It takes Campbell two volumes to get to "Occidental Mythology" because that's where it comes in the timeline. By the time you get there with him, you be hard-pressed to extract any sense of a "Western, Judeo-Christian" view. Quite the opposite. The advent of Zoroastrianism and Christianity are something of disappointment to the writer, a time when the forgiving cycles of the regenerative world circle were forsaken for a doomed and transitory world which must be redeemed by the righteous. And here you do get some sermonizing, the same Campbell offers whenever discussing the west: don't take yourself so seriously.
He's also wont to stress that mythmaking isn't a conscious process; nobody sits down and dreams up a religion--and that's my personal beef about this whole Campbell/Lucas 69. Lucas treats Campbell's scholarship like a paint-by-numbers kit, or a cake mix: a dash of virgin-birth, splash of transformation, et voila. It happens all the time in those creative writing classes, but only Lucas had the press agents to make it stick. You always hurt the ones you love.
But that's an old old story, now in'nit.
_Hero w/ 1000 Faces_ shows up on a lot of creative writing syllabi, but Campbell's real masterwork is the 4-vol. _Masks of God_, an extensive survey of mythology from cave paintings to James Joyce. His point, made there and elsewhere, isn't that there's one myth--a misunderstanding perpetuated by lazy readers of _1000 Faces_--but *patterns* in the way people come to grips with the world. Jung called them *archetypes* and believed they were hardwired into the brain; Campbell is less certain. Common ground is equally found outside the gray matter: every creature has seen the sun rise in the east and set in the west, seen the moon go through its cycles, the stars glide through predictable paths. That the patterns of life are reflected in the patterns of myth is not due to the superimposition of any "uber-myth," but instead to the commonalities of life on this planet.
It takes Campbell two volumes to get to "Occidental Mythology" because that's where it comes in the timeline. By the time you get there with him, you be hard-pressed to extract any sense of a "Western, Judeo-Christian" view. Quite the opposite. The advent of Zoroastrianism and Christianity are something of disappointment to the writer, a time when the forgiving cycles of the regenerative world circle were forsaken for a doomed and transitory world which must be redeemed by the righteous. And here you do get some sermonizing, the same Campbell offers whenever discussing the west: don't take yourself so seriously.
He's also wont to stress that mythmaking isn't a conscious process; nobody sits down and dreams up a religion--and that's my personal beef about this whole Campbell/Lucas 69. Lucas treats Campbell's scholarship like a paint-by-numbers kit, or a cake mix: a dash of virgin-birth, splash of transformation, et voila. It happens all the time in those creative writing classes, but only Lucas had the press agents to make it stick. You always hurt the ones you love.
But that's an old old story, now in'nit.
