Campbell, Joseph
1968
The Hero With a Thousand Faces

Very wise: he doesn’t even get into a religious discussion. He says straight away, that what he writes about is true for all religions and myths at the same time.

Numbers in brackets: pages in pdf.

xxi
“It is the purpose of the present book to uncover some of the truths disguised for us under the figures of religion and mythol­ogy by bringing together a multitude of not-too-difficult exam­ples and letting the ancient meaning become apparent of itself. The old teachers knew what they were saying. Once we have learned to read again their symbolic language, it requires no more than the talent of an anthologist to let their teaching be heard. But first we must learn the grammar of the symbols, and as a key to this mystery I know of no better modern tool than psychoanalysis.”

3
“It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.”

13f
“He had converted a public event to personal gain, whereas the whole sense of his investi­ture as king had been that he was no longer a mere private person.”

14
“By the sacri­lege of the refusal of the rite, however, the individual [e.g. King Minos] cut himself as a unit off from the larger unit of the whole community: and so the One was broken into the many, and these then battled each other—each out for himself—and could be governed only by force.”

15
“The hero is the man of self-achieved submission.” -> See On The Waterfront, maybe it wasn’t religious after all?

“As Professor Arnold J. Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of the laws of the rise and disintegration of civilizations, schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorat­ing elements. Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.”
-> He talks about Nietzsche’s and Schumpeter’s creative destruction!

16
“In a word: the first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside”

18
“Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problems and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind.”

“The [Australian Aranda] word altjira means: (a) a dream, (b) ancestor, beings who appear in the dream, (c) a story (Rôheim, The Eternal Ones of the Dream, pp. 210-211).”

30 (28)
“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

35 (33)
“As we soon shall see, whether presented in the vast, almost oceanic images of the Orient, in the vigorous narratives of the Greeks, or in the majestic legends of the Bible, the adventure of the hero normally follows the pattern of the nuclear unit above de­ scribed: a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return.”

37f (35)
“The composite hero of the monomyth is a personage of exceptional gifts. Frequently he is honored by his society, frequently unrecognized or disdained. He and/or the world in which he finds himself suffers from a symbolical deficiency. In fairy tales this may be as slight as the lack of a certain golden ring, whereas in apocalyptic vision the physical and spiritual life of the whole earth can be represented as fallen, or on the point of falling, into ruin.
Typically, the hero of the fairy tale achieves a domestic, microcosmic triumph, and the hero of myth a world-historical, macrocosmic triumph. Whereas the former—the youngest or despised child who becomes the master of extraordinary powers—prevails over his personal oppressors, the latter brings back from his ad­ venture the means for the regeneration of his society as a whole.”
-> He distinguished two essential stories: fairytale and myth.

39
“The cosmogonic cycle is presented with astonishing consistency in the sacred writings of all the continents, and it gives to the adventure of the hero a new and interesting turn; for now it appears that the perilous journey was a labor not of attainment but of reattainment, not discovery but rediscovery. The godly powers sought and dangerously won are revealed to have been within the heart of the hero all the time. He is “the king’s son” who has come to know who he is and therewith has entered into the exercise of his proper power – “God’s son,” who has learned to know how much that title means. From this point of view the hero is symbolical of that divine creative and redemptive image which is hidden within us all, only waiting to be known and rendered into life.”

40 (37)
“The effect of the successful adventure of the hero is the unlocking and release again of the flow of life into the body of the world. The miracle of this flow may be represented in physical terms as a circulation of food substance, dynamically as a streaming of energy, or spiritually as a manifestation of grace.”

44 (41)
“The World Navel, then, is ubiquitous. And since it is the source of all existence, it yields the world’s plenitude of both good and evil.”
-> God is in everything, in every blade of grass.