The Mythic Dimension

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In these pages, the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell presents twelve eclectic, far-ranging and brilliant essays exploring myth in all its dimensions: its history; its influence on art, literature, and culture; and its role in everyday life.This second volume of Campbell’s essays (following Flight of the Wild Gander) brings together uncollected writings from 1959 to 1987. Written at the height of Campbell’s career — and showcasing the lively intelligence that made him the twentieth century’s premier writer on mythology — these essays investigate the profound links among myth, the individual, and societies ancient and contemporary. Covering diverse terrain ranging from psychology to the occult, from Thomas Mann to the Grateful Dead, from Goddess spirituality to Freud and Jung, these playful and erudite writings reveal the threads of myth woven deeply into the fabric of our culture and our lives.

Transcript of The Mythic Dimension

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From until his death in , Joseph Campbell wrote three majorworks. The multi-volume works The Masks of God and the Historical Atlasof World Mythology, and the vast The Mythic Image are not books about justmythology, they are books about all mythology, large-scale attempts tocomprehend the religious expression of the human species. In them Camp-bell introduced many facts, stories, images, and ideas to serve his larger ar-gument, only to let them go after they had served his purpose, frequentlyto the secret disappointment of his newly intrigued reader. During thesemost productive years of his career, however, Campbell did write aboutmuch of the material that he only touched on in his major works. He lec-tured prodigiously and wrote numerous essays that were either early explo-rations of or mature reflections upon material that appeared in his largerventures. These essays were published in small-circulation magazines andjournals, or as introductions or chapters in others’ books. The best of themare collected here.

The essays themselves need little introduction. Written independentlyof each other, each can be read separately, in any order. The essays fall nat-urally, nonetheless, into two categories. In “Mythology and History,” Camp-bell writes about mythology from a historical perspective: its development,

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its uses in the past, and the mythological themes dating from early timesthat inform our lives today.

“Mythology and the Arts” collects the essays in which Campbell ad-dresses his lifelong interest in how mythology is used in art to address theuniversal concerns of human consciousness.

As the first essay in the book, I have also included “ComparativeMythology as an Introduction to Cross-Cultural Studies,” Campbell’s in-formal look at his teaching method for the hugely popular course onmythology he gave for thirty-five years at Sarah Lawrence College. Readerswho wish they had been present for those invigorating lectures can consult,as the next-best thing, the appendix that lists the books Campbell regularlyassigned to his class.

Notes on the Text

The essays are presented with a minimum of editorial change. I have notattempted to correct Joseph Campbell. He himself saw the essays presentedhere into print on the occasion of their initial publication, so except for thecorrection of infrequent spelling mistakes and other obvious errors, the es-says appear as they did upon their first printing. I have, however, addednotes where I felt an explanation would help. Notes that are not Camp-bell’s I have enclosed in square brackets. Since the notes added for this edi-tion make frequent reference to Campbell’s other works, I have included aselect bibliography of Campbell’s works as an appendix. References to thefirst appearance of the essays in this edition may be found here.

Acknowledgments

John David Ebert was an essential collaborator from the inception of theproject. He collected the originals of all the essays included here and assistedin verifying that the transcriptions were accurate. He composed the initialversions of many of the notes, and he read the manuscript and made sug-gestions and corrections at every step. Stacey Feldman did most of the tran-scribing and helped with the early stages of the page layout. Erik Rieselbachdid the bulk of the page layout and made sure that the images were prop-erly prepared for printing.

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• MYTHOLOGY AND HISTORY •

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In teaching women one is confronted with different sets of academic de-mands from those of men. Whereas men generally are preparing forspecialized careers, the demands of which determine the order and organi-zation of their studies, women are comparatively free to follow the leadof their own interests. In a women’s college (at least, of the kind in whichI have been teaching), there is, so to say, an open-field situation. We donot have required courses; nor do we have examinations. On the otherhand, we do have a strict and very demanding system of education by dia-logue and discussion. I see every one of my students individually, in con-ferences, for at least one half-hour every fortnight. This makes it possibleto follow the growth, direction, and dynamics of each student’s individualdevelopment.

The instructor in such a situation has to be willing not only to givegenerously of his time but also to participate in the student’s discovery ofinterests—even to the point, on occasion, of abandoning his own academicplans and point of view. It was in such a fluid environment as this, then,that the course which I am going to describe came into being—in relationto a context of interests not primarily academic but experimental.

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During my first two or three years, I taught a survey course in com-parative literature, but at the close of the second year, three students cameto me, separately, to ask for a course in mythology. Apparently my interestin this subject had become more evident in my teaching than I had sup-posed. I was excited by the idea and decided to give three separatecourses—one to each—the following year, based on three quite differentreading lists from three different approaches.

At the end of that year, four students came to me for such a course. Ibrought them together in one classroom, basing the readings and approachthat year on what I had learned the year before. Then the year following,there were seven; and from that time on, this course has been both an es-tablished part of our curriculum and one of the great joys of my life. I havegiven up teaching anything else, and since about , have been busilytrimming it here, expanding it there, and keeping it up to date.

The departmental organization of Sarah Lawrence College is somewhatatypical. We do not have strictly separated departments. There is a litera-ture and language faculty, which is the group with which I am officiallyassociated. Since Sarah Lawrence students have generally professed great in-terest in the arts, we have strong departments in the fields of dance, theater,music, painting, and sculpture. There is, of course, a large and rather ag-gressive department in social science, which includes, for some reason orother, philosophy. Psychology is strong and important at Sarah Lawrence—particularly in relation to a greatly appreciated nursery school. And fi-nally, there is a faculty of mathematics and natural science.

In describing this course, I shall be dealing with something out of anage that is long past. My observations about this course—antecedent andindifferent as it is to all academic departmentalization—may be of some useafter all even to those faced with the problems of an elaborately structureduniversity.

The course is conducted in lectures. About per cent of each stu-dent’s reading is directly related to the topics of the lectures. Each, how-ever, meets me in conference at least once a fortnight, and for thesemeetings she reads according to her own special interest in whatever direc-tion she has chosen to go. During the first month or so, about half the classwill be at a loss. The other per cent, however, will know very well what

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they want to do and will be off with the gun. As the year proceeds, the oth-ers gradually find their bearings.

The individual projects often are developed in relation to some aspector other of another course, for the material can be approached from manypoints of view—literary, anthropological, psychological, religious. Thecourse has served, in fact, as an effective coordinating aid for many stu-dents. And on the other hand, for those already strongly directed, there isplenty of occasion for more specialized study. I can report that a good manyreally impressive productions have come onto my desk. One of the most re-cent is now at the Viking Press and will appear as a book next year.

The readings for the class begin with Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Moststudents think of mythology as classical mythology, and so it has seemed tome that the logical field for a beginning would be here. Besides, Ovid’s styleis fluent and delightful—not a boring line in the book. The index to thevolume, furthermore, provides as good a guide to classical myths as a be-ginner could require. But the main value of the work, from my point ofview, derives from the fact that Ovid grouped his tales in clusters accord-ing to theme, so that the student sees immediately how one essential plotcan be told and retold with a variety of turns and ascribed to many differ-ent heroes. Certain patterns, certain principles, a morphology, can be rec-ognized—the kind of situation that I have expounded in my Hero with aThousand Faces. There is a general pattern to the hero journey—the questof the hero into unknown realms, the powers that he meets there and over-comes, the stages of his crises of victory, and his return then, with someboon that he has gained, for the founding of a city, religion, dynasty, orwhatnot; or, on the other hand, his failure and destruction. Also in Ovidright at the beginning, parallels with the Book of Genesis are evident withthe cosmogonic cycle, the formation of the world, creation of man, theflood, the restoration of the earth, and so on.

Next, after Ovid has set us right in the middle of our subject, we goback to theOdyssey, as a great example and test case of what we have learnedabout the archetypal hero journey. And we are now being introduced, aswell, to the historical backgrounds of the classical tradition. After that, wego back one great step further, with Frazer’s Golden Bough, to pre-Hellenictimes.

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Frazer is considered by some to be a bit old-fashioned today. At thesame time, I do not know of a better way to introduce a completely un-prepared student to the whole range of this immense field—its relation tothe folk as well as high traditions, the Orient and the Occident, Africa andthe Arctic, the great and the little rituals, fairy tales, and all. The same mo-tifs that have already been recognized in the classical field are here revealedas spread throughout the world, the motifs and themes of quest and return,death and rebirth, creation of the world and dissolution. Frazer deals withthese in terms largely of their relationship to fertility cults, but he also givesenough material to show their relationship both to cosmological imageryand to the spiritual themes of inward quest, interior sacrifice, and the fer-tilization of the spirit.

Following Frazer, I used to embark on a review and discussion of the-ories—Tylor, Müller, Durkheim, Radcliffe-Brown, and others. After anumber of years of this, however, I gave up stressing theory and began toconcentrate upon direct presentations of the various mythological tradi-tions themselves, starting with a brief review of some primitive cultures.

Experience shows that it serves well, as an introduction, to classifyprimitive mythologies in two great categories. In the first are the mytholo-gies of peoples who live and hunt on the great animal plains, where thebasic food supply is animal meat and the chief suppliers of the food aremen. Most of the hunting tribes inhabit (or more inhabited) the North andSouth temperate zones. The second category, in direct contrast, comprisesthe mythologies of peoples of the tropical equatorial belt, whose environ-ment is a steaming jungle and where the chief food supply is vegetable, thewomen do nearly all the work, and the men devote themselves mainly totheir leisure. I think it was Pater Wilhelm Schmidt who, in his Ursprungder Gottesidee, first brought out this contrast of the roles of the male in so-cieties, respectively, of the hunt and of the plant world. In the latter, as hesays, the primary work is accomplished by the women, who bring forth thechildren, tend the little gardens, build the houses, and take care of them—a fine situation for establishing a profound sense of inferiority in the male.

But the masculine ego, pushed back on itself, responds with that won-derful invention, the men’s secret society, where no women are allowed.And there very important things are done. In Melanesia, for example, the

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major occupation is the raising of pigs—male pigs, of course. Their uppercanine teeth are knocked out so that the lower tusks can flourish, and theydo grow in a beautiful curve, outward and downward and around backthrough the jaw. The owner of the pig celebrates certain stages of thisprogress by sacrificing hundreds of other porkers. And if he can get hismain pig’s tusks to loop around through the jaw and out again, three times,he enjoys all the prestige of a thirty-second degree Mason, entitled to suchnames as “He who walks above the clouds.’’ This is a matter of great psy-chic importance, because when the man who has raised such a pig dies, hecan present it as an offering, instead of himself, to be consumed by Sev Sev,the female guardian of the fiery way to the labyrinth of the underworld andimmortality.

The survey of these primitive provinces actually starts with examples ofmythology from the northern hunting peoples—North Siberian, Eskimo,and American Indian. Then, in America we confront the problem of thetropical planters and the interesting, sensitive question of a possible trans-Pacific influence. American anthropologists are not as touchy on thispoint now as they used to be. I used to regard them as afflicted with a kindof Oedipus complex—not wishing to believe that their motherland, Amer-ica, might have been fertilized by a foreign intrusion. The amount of pas-sion that this question can generate has always amazed me. I try to benoncommittal, but it is difficult not to draw conclusions from the fact thatone detail after another of the Middle American cultures has counterpartson the Asian side. After a skirmish with this problem, we return to the OldWorld by way of the Pacific (Polynesia, Melanesia, the Andamans, and onto Africa). And this concludes the introductory, first portion of the course,the principal aims of which have been to acquaint the student with themost common themes and patterns of the world mythology, the geographyof the subject, and the modes of inflection of the common themes on theprimitive, non-literate level of culture.

The next step is to examine more closely this universality of themes,first in psychological terms. Here we begin with Freud; and since Freud’santhropologist was Frazer, an easy connection can be made with points al-ready noted. To begin with, Frazer’s conception of sympathetic magic asbased on an association of ideas is not very different from Freud’s. Freud

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simply adds the dimension of associations that are unconscious, a depth ofunsuspected layers of association. The student here begins to acquire anew sense, at once of the multi-layered language of myth and of its psycho-logical force. Both Frazer and Freud offer a psychological answer to the prob-lem of the universality of mythic themes. The human psyche everywhere isessentially the same and, responding essentially to the same stimuli, renderspatterns of association in fantasy and act that are also essentially the same.

From Freud the course moves to Jung. Personally, I find Jung as an in-terpreter of myths far more impressive than Freud. Freud projects a Vien-nese family romance of Papa, Mamma, and their boy-child into everymythology on earth, regarding myths not as symbolic of adult insights, butas symptomatic of an infantile pathology; not as revelatory, but as conceal-ing; not as progressive, leading to maturity, but as regressive, pointing backto childhood. Jung’s view, on the other hand, is that the figurations ofmyth are to be read as the metaphors of a necessary, almost pedagogical dis-cipline, through which the powers of the psyche are led forward to maturerelationships, first to the responsibilities of adulthood and then to the wis-dom of age.

We spend something like six weeks on Freud and Jung and then moveon to the Orient, for which Jung’s psychology has already prepared the way.In his introductions to the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Chinese Secretof the Golden Flower, he discusses both the similarities and the differences be-tween a Western, psychological, scientific approach to mythology and theOriental, mystical, and devotional. When we have clarified these points, Ileave psychology behind and devote the next portion of our year’s work to adescriptive historical study of the mythologies of the higher cultures.

These are separated into two great groups with the dividing line atIran. Westward of this cultural watershed are the two provinces of Europeand the Levant; eastward, India and the Far East. In both of the Orientalprovinces the essential belief concerning the ultimate truth, the ultimatesubstance, the ultimate mystery of being, is that it transcends all descrip-tion, all naming, and all categories—which is a point not easy for our stu-dents to grasp and yet essential to an understanding of Oriental psychologyas well as religion.

It is not easy for students to realize that to ask, as they often do,

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whether God exists and is merciful, just, good, or wrathful, is simply toproject anthropomorphic concepts into a sphere to which they do not per-tain. As the Upanißads declare: “There, words do not reach.’’ Such queriesfall short of the question. And yet—as the student must also understand—although that mystery is regarded in the Orient as transcendent of allthought and naming, it is also to be recognized as the reality of one’s ownbeing and mystery. That which is transcendent is also immanent. And theultimate function of Oriental myths, philosophies, and social forms, there-fore, is to guide the individual to an actual experience of his identity withthat ; tat tvam asi (“Thou art that’’) is the ultimate word in this connection.

By contrast, in the Western sphere—in terms of the orthodox tradi-tions, at any rate, in which our students have been raised—God is a per-son, the person who has created this world. God and his creation are notof the same substance. Ontologically, they are separate and apart. We,therefore, do not find in the religions of the West, as we do in those of theEast, mythologies and cult disciplines devoted to the yielding of an experi-ence of one’s identity with divinity. That, in fact, is heresy. Our myths andreligions are concerned, rather, with establishing and maintaining an expe-rience of relationship—and this is quite a different affair. Hence it is, thatthough the same mythological images can appear in a Western context andan Eastern, it will always be with a totally different sense. This point I re-gard as fundamental.

In the Orient, the gods do not stand as ultimate terms, ultimate ends,substantial beings, to be sought and regarded in and for themselves. Theyare more like metaphors, to serve as guides, pointing beyond themselvesand leading one to an experience of one’s own identity with a mystery thattranscends them. I have found that the approach through Freud and Junggreatly helps to make this point clear to students brought up in the mythol-ogy of Yahweh—a jealous god, who would hold men to himself and whoturned mankind away from the Tree of Immortality, instead of leading usto it. Such a god in the Orient would be regarded as a deluding idol. Infact, heaven itself and our desire for its joys are regarded there as the lastbarrier, the last obstacle to release, to be transcended. And to escort my stu-dents beyond heaven and hell, I take them first to India and then Chinaand Japan.

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For India, I begin with a bit of Heinrich Zimmer and Ananda K.Coomaraswamy and go on to the Upanißads and the Gætå. We also read theShakuntalå and Pañchatantra. Buddhism I introduce through Coomara-swamy’s Buddha and the Gospel of Buddism and Alan Watts’s The Way ofZen, with readings in Waley’s Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China asmy introduction to the Far Eastern sphere. Readings are also assigned inLao-tzu, Confucius, Chuang-tzu, Mencius, and Mo Ti. And then, finally,for Japan, I use Lafcadio Hearn’s Japan, Okakura Kakuzo’s The Book ofTea, Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery, selections from the Kojiki, somebits of Noh and Haiku, and a lot of enthusiasm of my own.

The course now turns again to the West. We have already been intro-duced to the classical field through Ovid and the Odyssey; but I want nowto contrast the points of view of Europe and the Levant. It seems to methat where God and Man are viewed as opposed terms, one is inevitablyfaced with a final decision as to one’s ultimate loyalty. Is it to be to God,or is it to be to Man? As I see it, the ultimate loyalty in the Levant has al-ways been to God—in Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.In the West—whether Greeks or Romans, Celts or Germans—it has beento Man.

I see the Book of Job as the consummate expression of the Levantineorientation. There God behaves outrageously—unjustly, unmercifully,brutally, and irrationally—yet when Job is confronted with the power andboasting of his tormentor, who now adds insult to injury, he bows in ad-miration. “Behold,’’ he prays, “I am of small account. I had heard of theeby the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes see thee; therefore I despise my-self and repent in dust and ashes.’’

I contrast with this abdication of human judgment the posture ofPrometheus, who was also tortured by a god who could have filled Levia-than’s nose with harpoons; and yet, when offered respite if he would butapologize for his aid to man and give honor to that god, he retorted: “I careless than nothing for Zeus; let him do what he likes.’’ I point out to mystudents that as the ethical humanism of the Greeks developed, their oldgods lost stature and force. Their ultimate loyalty was to man. And yet theydid not forfeit their primal religious sense of awe before the mystery andwonder of creation. They did not personify that mystery in a being before

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whom the human spirit should abdicate but, on the contrary, recognizedthat the supreme manifestation on earth of that same mystery and wonderis the human mind itself, well housed in the beautiful human body.

That is the contrast that I seek to illustrate for my students through thematerials of Greece and Rome, the Celts and Germans, the Bible and Islam.And I find that it serves not only to make clear to them certain grand linesof historical stress and conflict but also to bring out some of the problems oftheir own lives and beliefs in this strange society of ours, where for six daysa week we honor the humanistic values of Greece and Rome and on theseventh for half an hour or so, confess guilt before a jealous Levantine god.Then we wonder why so many of us must repair to the psychoanalyst.

The course comes to a close with a program of medieval and modernreadings, dealing in the modern field with two or three authors who havemade significant use of mythological forms and themes such as JamesJoyce, Thomas Mann, and T.S. Eliot. Through these I can bring Freud,Jung, and the Orient back into our picture again for a culminating sum-mation.

And meanwhile, as already noted, the students have been developingtheir own projects. For some, the principal interest has been anthropolog-ical through studies of African, Polynesian, Melanesian, or American In-dian mythologies. A greatly favored field is Indian mythology andphilosophy; another, Buddhism; another, Far Eastern art. In fact, the artsin general are of enormous interest. My wife is a well-known moderndancer, and I always have at least one student who hopes that through mycourse she may learn to invoke my wife’s Muse, Terpsichore. Wagner andGermanic mythology go together as another favourite topic. Greek dramais still another. Celtic mythology, Arthurian romance, Yeats and the CelticTwilight authors are always popular; Dante, Goethe, and Blake, as well;and every year I have two or three who work through all of Joyce andThomas Mann. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Jung likewise draw theirdevotees.

Before the Second World War most of the students who came into thecourse were of the intellectual type that was generally accused in thosedays of “ivory tower retreatism.” These were young women interested inwhat I still believe college campuses were made for, namely, four years of

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absorption in science, the liberal arts, and philosophy. Then came the war,Pearl Harbor and all that, and since my course was the only one on thecampus at that time that paid any attention whatsoever to the Orient, Isuddenly found that my teaching had acquired political importance. Thishigh dignity did not long remain to me, for we now have no end of peoplewho know all about the Orient. And so the course is now again being pa-tronized largely by those interested in philosophy, religion, and the arts.They are so numerous, these days, I am pleased to say, however, that I havehad to confine my teaching to seniors, simply to cut down on the numberof applicants for admission.

The interest in Oriental art and thought is particularly strong. The in-terest in Jung is on the rise. For some reason that I have not been able todetermine, the psychologists on our campus have never dealt with Jung. Ithas always been with Freud, and if Jung’s name has been mentioned, it hasbeen only to be misinterpreted and disparaged. And so, it is to my coursethat students come to be introduced to Jung. The Bible also, has become,in late years, a subject of the greatest interest. Every year, I now have twoor three going through, from beginning to end, with the Dartmouth Bibleas guide.

About ten years ago, I was invited to lecture for the State Departmentat the Foreign Service Institute in Washington, where I was able to test outsome of the lessons that I have learned from my young women. What Ifound was that the same approach works with State Department officersand military men (through Freud and Jung to Oriental mythology, andthrough mythology to an understanding of the roots and commitments ofalien culture provinces).

And then again, at the Cooper Union in New York, I had the privilegeof presenting my entire course to people of still another type: for the mostpart, moderately educated people, simple and direct, who just wanted tolearn. They were not scholars—just curious. And here again, the approachsucceeded. Then, finally, three years ago, I was invited to deliver a seriesof lectures on educational television, and for that I simply converted thissame course into thirty-four half-hour television programs. Once more,the response was amazing. I would not pretend that there was anythingof academic worth about such teaching. It did, however, have the value of

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opening the minds of people who perhaps would never have thoughtof such things to the meanings of other cultures and to new possibilities ofthought and experience for themselves. The letters that came to the televisionstation originated with men and women of the simplest sort, as well as pro-fessionals in many fields of learning.

This experience understandably confirms my conviction that, if wecould in our academic world, get away from specialization and departmen-talization, at least in the introductory stages of our cross-cultural studies, agreat deal would be gained—not only in understanding, but also in the ra-pidity with which students would find their way into branches of learningof intimate, genuine interest to themselves. I sometimes think of this courseof mine, worked out in such close association with students over the pastthirty years, as a kind of pilot project. It is a preliminary sketch of some-thing that in a large university, with cooperating scholars from every one ofthe fields touched upon, might well take shape as a really important edu-cational project.

While the course is now confined to seniors, it could be addressed evenmore profitably, I believe, to freshmen. I recall that when I entered Dart-mouth there was an excellent freshmen course taught in biology. A requiredcourse, it opened up every aspect of the field. There is the need today forsomething comparable in relation to the rapidly increasing number of ap-proaches to culture and cross-cultural study. Comparative mythology, as Ihave found, supplies an amazingly serviceable vehicle of approach to everypossible aspect of this vast sphere.

Some such elementary course in comparative mythology as I have heresuggested—conducted, however, by a team of scholar-specialists lecturingin their special fields and separately directing individual student projects—could be put together readily in any one of the major universities. It wouldserve not only to open to students a view of the whole range of possibilitiesbefore them, when they enter as wide-eyed youngsters the enchanted woodof the world’s learning, but also to lead them along, through paths of theirown choosing, to explorations of its deep groves.

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From the book MYTHIC DIMENSION. Copyright © 1997, 2007 by the Joseph Campbell Foundation. Reprinted with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. www.newworldlibrary.com or 800/972-6657 ext. 52.