Finished The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Found the early chapters, focused on the universal journey of the soul, fascinating, found the second half of the book less so, though as a historian, I find it interesting as a part of the picture of the attitudes of the late forties of the Twentieth Century. Campbell's wide ranging finding of patterns in common from hundreds of myths, legends, folktales and psychiatric writings is in tune with the work of many other scholars of his time. the works of Mircea Eliade, Arnold Toynbee, James Frazer, and our own Hugh Nibley were influenced by the same intellectual climate. Campbell's optimistic acceptance of Jung and Freud as harbingers of a new dawn of psychic progress is also a product of his particular time and place.
Campbell's last section, The Hero Today, is his summary of what he expects us to take away from the journey through world mythology he has lead us on. He sees our civilization as founded on a modern myth ("the hero-cycle of the Modern Age") of the emergence of Modernity from the darkness of the past --
"The spell of the past, the bondage of tradition, were shattered with sure and mighty strokes. The dream web of myth fell away; the mind opened to full waking consciousness; and modern man emerged from ancient ignorance, like a butterfly from its cocoon, or like the sun at dawn from the womb of mother night."
For those who (like the New Atheists) have adopted this myth this "wonder-story of mankind's coming to maturity," Science, Technology and the individual self determination of the new democratic man has swept away the old world of religion, something Campbell doesn't necessarily see as bad. His worry is that the society that religion once created has been swept away as well, and the old symbolic methods of guiding and nurturing human development have gone. The triumph of economics and politics has left religion in a secondary position in a church goer's life, a "religious pantomime...hardly more...than a sanctimonious exercise for Sunday morning, whereas business ethics and patriotism stand for the remainder of the week."
Man, Campbell believed, needed to turn back to the unconscious and find the symbols that would surface to "render the modern world spiritually significant" and to allow "men and women to come to full human maturity," and society to become something more than "an economic political organization...in hard unremitting competition for supremacy and material resources."
Although he found the psychological models of his time easy to integrate into his own model of the mythic unity within our psyche, here at the end of the book he does not even hold them up as the way forward for man's spiritual progress. Indeed, he finds no more hope in the conscious ideologies of his day than he does in the remnants of the great world religions. He is waiting for something truly universal and global --
"The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of the presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice and sanctified misunderstanding....It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse."
It's been sixty years since the book was published, and the triumph of economics and politics, on both left and right, over spirituality and religion has become more pronounced not less. The great world religions have stubbornly refused to fade away, however, and still offer the strongest shelters available to those who prioritize spiritual goals over materialistic concerns.
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