A review by gabrielrobartes
The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

3.0

I'm unimpressed by the whole, though I enjoyed many of the parts. It ends on a surprisingly pessimistic note. I find it odd that this book, which was written in 1949 using sources that were frequently 50 years old and revised for a second edition in 1968 with no substantial updates, seems to exist in a continuum where no anthropological responses to myth and culture ever took place outside of Joseph Campbell. I can see the attraction to pagans who sometimes have a bad habit reading (or writing) to confirm rather than to question or explore. It's a literary achievement and taken on those terms, still has much to appreciate. I wonder what Freud would have made of Campbell? To be fair, it's an early work and the Masks of God is far more integrative of work from a huge range of disciplines...