NobleSavage
Veteran Member
Joseph Campbell's monomyth, or the hero's journey, is a basic pattern that its proponents argue is found in many narratives from around the world. This widely distributed pattern was described by Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949).[1] Campbell, an enthusiast of novelist James Joyce, borrowed the term monomyth from Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth
When I first started to lose my religion I came across a series on PBS with Bill Moyers interviewing Joseph Campbell. I was completely captivated and enchanted by Campbell. I went out and bought all his books. I found his books to be very tedious and plodding. I put them on the shelf and then slowly became an atheist. Now, looking back, I'm convinced that Campbell was spewing a bunch of discredited Freudian and Jungian psychology and he worked hard to make various mythologies fit whatever pattern he wanted.
Am I being too harsh? Is there anything redeeming about his ideas?