Christopher Rush

Content Summary

Joseph Campbell’s classic work on mythology of various cultures, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, is an important work in the field, if not as extensive as his later four-volume The Masks of God.  The fundamental premise or thesis throughout The Hero with a Thousand Faces is that all cultures and religions create a basic story by which their heroes and origin myths operate, and that the similarity of all world-wide stories is not accidental: he calls it the “monomyth.”

Campbell divides his examination of the monomyth in two parts: first, the adventure of the hero; second, the cosmogonic cycle.  The adventure of the hero section is, perhaps, the more memorable (and useful) of the two.  By comparing diverse religious myths and hero stories from a variety of peoples, Campbell presents a fairly believable picture of the nature of the hero’s quest.  Obviously there are variations from culture to culture and quest to quest, but Campbell accounts for many of them.  The second section, the cosmogonic cycle, is related to the hero, but first begins with ideas about cosmos origins (at its name implies).  Campbell says that all life, like all cultures, is cyclical to a degree; all life has phases, like all heroes’ quests have phases.  Heroes come and go because eventually the people forget what kind of restoration the hero brought.  This section employs longer examples from cultures’ stories, while Campbell’s own critical commentary dwindles.

As hinted at above, Campbell draws on a variety of cultures’ myths and hero tales to generate and support his thesis.  Campbell does not cite any personal contact with these cultures other than their stories, so he has probably used historical research, i.e., reading myths and stories from around the world.

Author’s Perspective and Purpose

Joseph Campbell does not only place the stories of diverse heroes and myths in propinquity to demonstrate their similarities, though demonstrating their similarities is an important purpose for The Hero with a Thousand Faces.  To interpret the stories, Campbell overtly uses psychological analysis, referring to it explicitly in several passages.  Campbell draws connections between dreams and myths & heroes, though he does say that myths and dreams, while similar, are not the same.  The unconscious is important to both, but myths are more conscious expressions of universal ideas — the universality is found when these stories are examined next to each other.  Toward the beginning of the book, Campbell references several dreams cited in various Freudian and Jungian texts on dream analysis.  He extrapolates from those initial ideas on heroes, myths, and quests.  From there here creates his monomyth structure.

In addition to his psychological impetus behind his analyses of dreams and myths, Campbell also seems to favor Buddhist (and possible Hindu) religions and stories.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does at times, seem to taint his interpretations of other cultures and religious stories, especially Christian/Biblical stories.  Campbell often makes remarks about “Christian” believers and historical events that are, undoubtedly, terrible (like the Crusades), yet those are, to be fair, relative aberrations in a two-millennium belief system.  Campbell does not make any disparaging remarks about Buddhist stories, believers, or heroes/characters in myths; the most he says is that the story of the death of Buddha gets a bit comical.

Campbell’s purpose is obvious: he wants to demonstrate that the seemingly-disparate myths, heroes, and quests of stories from around the world are, in fact, similar.  All heroes have the same basic pattern, despite miniscule differences, and all quests can be mapped and diagramed, which Campbell does.  He does this well, providing almost a surfeit of examples to support his analyses.  His second section, the cosmogonic cycle, is weaker than the hero section, though it, too, is well-supported.

Critical Response and Evaluation

I must say that I do not find it intrinsically unfortunate that Campbell favors Eastern beliefs over Western (all authors believe and favor some worldview over every other system); but it does, as mentioned above, disappoint and taint his other interpretations.  It disappoints in that by obviously favoring one belief system over another, Campbell makes his comments on both systems somewhat suspect.  He takes Bible stories and verses out of context to make some of his points, which is academically unsound.  In other places, he enjoins the readers to compare various Bible stories to Hindu or other religions’ stories — which, is not necessary bad (as that is, in part, the entire purpose of the work) — but the stories are often too different, in either content or meaning.  At times it appears as if Campbell wants to level certain belief systems or stories to prove his points, instead of simply analyzing the stories as they are and making his conclusions from them.

Psychological analysis, too, despite a century of criticism and evaluation, is still, to me at least, a tenuous method to interpret not only dreams but also literature.  I do not want to press this point too firmly either, since I understand that literary analysis itself (as separate from particularly psychological analysis) can be a tenuous, subjective activity.  But declaring that an occurrence or character in a dream means something specific simply because the psychologist or interpreter says so doesn’t seem to be a very believable system by which to interpret and understand things.  Perhaps this is my ignorance of the field speaking, and I acknowledge readily my limitations in the psychological realm, but I did not find Campbell’s work and references to psychological interpretations very helpful or credible.

With that said, I found Campbell’s work overall quite helpful.  His analysis and structure of the hero’s quest and journey was the best portion of the work, and it was the most helpful analysis of the hero’s function I’ve read so far.  I had the suspicion when beginning Campbell’s work that that portion would be the most useful, and I was not disappointed in that regard.  At the beginning of part one, the adventure of the hero, I found Campbell’s diversity of examples from several countries interesting — at first.  Toward the end of the work, though, the examples became more tedious as the ratio of Campbell’s analysis to myths reversed.  At the close of the work, in the cosmogonic cycle discussion, Campbell’s own ideas and synthesis diminished to a few scant sentences in each subsection, while his examples increased to multi-page examples.  It seemed like Campbell had two different works in mind, but didn’t have enough ideas for “The Cosmogonic Cycle” so he tacked it on to the end of “The Adventure of the Hero” and padded it with too many examples and stories.  I found Campbell’s map of the hero’s journey through “departure,” “initiation,” and “return” very insightful and helpful.  If you are interested in myths, heroes, comparative literature, psychological analysis, or Star Wars (since George Lucas readily admits Campbell’s work was highly influential in helping him create his space opera), The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a worthwhile read.