Joseph Campbell. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Third ed. Novato CA: New World Library, 2008. Print. [First ed. published in 1949]

Joseph Campbell is known for his interpretation of myth following in the footsteps of James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough. And, I would add, with a dose of Freud, Buddha, and early postmodernism thrown in.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces does one thing very well. Like Frazer, Campbell brings in folk tales, legends, and histories from around the world to analyze the pattern of heroic tales. He has broken down such stories—whether brief fairy tales or epics—into three parts: the departure, the initiation, and the return. Anyone interested in storytelling or myth would find his organization and recounting of tales or parts of tales engaging. He goes from the Greek epics and Grimm fairy tales to folk tales of the Andaman pygmies (now off-limits to outsiders) and initiation rites of native Australians. It is a true cultural panorama.

This edition has a cover quotation from George Lucas, and I had read elsewhere that Lucas was inspired by Campbell. Indeed, anyone putting together a mythic story like the Star Wars saga could do much worse than learn from Campbell. One can see a lot of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Darth Vader in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

And “the Force” is there, too. When Star Wars came out, Lucas called himself a Buddhist in an interview. So the Jedi Knights are like “enlightened” Buddhist monks that have “the force” within. Instead of Kung Fu or Karate, they have light sabers. Similarly, Campbell seems to equate a Buddhist understanding of things with Freud and a more contemporary outlook. (The book first came out in 1949 and was heavily revised in 1968. This 2008 third edition is distinguished by new appendices added by editors of the Joseph Campbell Foundation.)

All these visualized deities [of Buddhism] are but symbols representing the various things that occur on the path…

as well as being

…a doctrine of the contemporary psychoanalytical schools. (155)

So Campbell expresses a belief in an oriental Nirvana, justifying it with appeals to Freudian psychology:

Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization transcending all experience of form—all symbolizations, all divinities: a realization of the ineluctable void. (163)

Campbell is not just interested in telling cool stories or showing what makes a story appealing. This book is an attempt to understand the meaning of life (or lack of meaning) by finding common elements in these stories and then, using Freud and esoteric religious teaching, to find what scientists like to call a TOE, a theory of everything.

The theory, to Campbell, is that it is all in your head. This is what oriental mystics have been saying for centuries, and this is what Freud, Jung, and others were saying in the last century. It is no coincidence that the edition of The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation that I read in college had an introduction by Jung. History, myth, fiction, nonfiction, what difference does it make?

Their stories are what concern us: and these stories are so widely distributed over the world—attached to various heroes in various lands—that the question of whether this or that local carrier of the universal theme may or may not have been a historical living man can be of only secondary moment. The stressing of this historical element will lead to confusion, it will simply obfuscate the picture message. (197, 198)

The TOE part of The Hero of a Thousand Faces is harder to swallow than the analysis of the tales. But even Campbell realizes that something is missing. Instead of the focus on historic or legendary heroes and what constitutes noble character, nowadays the focus is merely on the self.

The descent of the Occidental sciences from the heavens to the earth (from seventeenth-century astronomy to nineteenth-century biology), and their concentration today, at last, on man himself (in twentieth-century anthropology and psychology), mark the path of a prodigious transfer of the focal point of human wonder. Not the animal world, not the plant world, not the miracle of the spheres, but man himself is now the crucial mystery. (336, 337)

And so, “Today all these mysteries have lost their force…” (336)

As Bob Dylan once sang, “I’ve got nothing, Ma, to live up to.”

Today:

It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal—carries the cross of the redeemer—not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair. (337)

We can argue that this is nothing new. The heroic age is in the past. So to us Americans in the early twenty-first century, World War II was the greatest generation. Why? Those soldiers and sailors saved our country, united against foreign invaders and their skeptical ideologies. To the classical Athenians, the heroic age of the Iliad was before the Dorians brought on the Dark Age. To the medieval French and English, the age of chivalry was the sixth century Britain of King Arthur before it fell to the Saxons. Even Star Wars was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Or as François Villon (1431-1489) said probably more succinctly than anyone in “The Ballad of the Dead Ladies”:

Où sont les neiges d’antan?
[Where are the snows of yesteryear?]

• N.B. If you ever get the desire to tackle James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, you pretty much have to also have in your other hand Joseph Campbell’s Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake. Because Campbell was so widely read in the heroic stories and folk tales from around the world, and through them picked up at least a smattering of many languages, Campbell may have been one of the few people on earth to pick out such allusions on page after page in Joyce’s opus.