Author: Joseph Campbell
Narrator: Joseph Campbell
Unabridged: 5 hr 13 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Hay House LLC
Published: 05/10/2005
Categories: Nonfiction, Body, Mind, & Spirit
Joseph Campbell was an American author best known for his work in the field of comparative mythology. He was born New York City in 1904, and from early childhood he became interested in mythology. He loved to read books about American Indian cultures, and frequently visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York where he was fascinated by the museum's collection of totem poles. Campbell was educated at Columbia University, where he specialized in medieval literature and, after earning a master's degree, continued his studies at universities in Paris and Munich. While abroad he was influenced by the art of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, the novels of James Joyce and Thomas Mann, and the psychological studies of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. These encounters led to Campbell's theory that all myths and epics are linked in the human psyche, and that they are cultural manifestations of the universal need to explain social, cosmological, and spiritual realities.
This is an absolutely wonderful set of interviews with Joseph Campbell recorded in the last years of his life. Because these are taken toward the end of his career, he's able to look back over 60 years of his life's studies and pare them down to the essentials. One reviewer claimed it was repetitive......more
If you are dogmatic conservative Christian you will not like this book. However, if you can see the Bible as a book of myths which contain invaluable moral lessons and that those lessons are true, then you will enjoy this book. Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of t......more
After all the books by and about Campbell, including his own audio lectures, this is the finest exposure to his ideas I’ve encountered so far. Credit for that goes to the late Michael Toms. With broad understanding of his own, Toms was immersed in Campbell’s ideas. Given their close friendship, Camp......more
This collection is not nearly as polished as the Power of Myth lectures which Campbell is known for, but I love it all the more for that reason. Here, he seems at home, more keen to jokes and voicing frustrations; here, he is much more human, and human to a fault — that’s important, I think, if one......more
I first began listening to and reading Campbell during my college years. Decades later, I still find him to be brilliant, wise, inspiring & necessary. This interview series is a good survey of his teaching. He did not like the idea of following gurus, so I’ll just call him a wise teacher of how to l......more