Myths to Live By

It was ok but the author (Joseph Campbell) of this book was from the 1960s and I do have the DVD by the same author on the same subject.. I enjoy reading about Myths and the possible connection with some of its concepts with our Major Religions. My curiosity is because of my lifetime Christian experiences both in our Lutheran Church and in real life. The book then begs the question "Are religions (specific ones ) and Myths more or less one and the same and does that trump peoples faith....a question perhaps that cannot be answered with certainty....so that is the eternal question for our struggling humanity- it occurs at some many levels and perhaps the answers are found or looked for in books and in the general intelligence of each person....but we slog on and read and try to understand. Also, in closing, my reading of the book was on my Kindle and the book was quite long and having a hard copy may be easier to read slowly and think along the way. My faith is still strong but today is difficult to really belong to a church. Society changes-so should religion..I have read the biography of Thomas Jefferson and Jon Meachum (sp?) and found Jeffersons" thinking about Christianity similar to mine..Roy Uper

'Myths to Live By', aside from the book length transcript of the televised interviews he did with Bill Moyers, 'The Power of Myth', is the only one of Joseph Campbell's books that I have read, not only once, but twice now. I still intend someday to read 'The Hero of a Thousand Faces' and his magnum opus, the four-volumes of 'The Masks of God.' When I read it the first time in the early 80's at a very desperate time in my life, I saw the title and thought, 'Perhaps I can glean some kind of universal lesson or wisdom or learn of some myth that illustrates this mess I'm experiencing right now.' It didn't quite do that although it did open my mind to commonality between cultures and their religions. Now, over 30 years later, at a much different stage of my life, I have read it again and, although it is a cliché to say it, I am not the same person now than the one that read it 30 years ago and it has receded even further in time from the date of its publication; yet most of the things he says about what our world was becoming then seem very prophetic of what our world is becoming now.

'Myths to Live By' is also, coincidentally echoed in another extensive interview he made with Moyers earlier in the decade of the 80's and so many of the nuggets he utters in the interviews have equivalents in this book, a collection of talks he gave between 1958 and 1971 at the Cooper Union Forum, essentially a descendant of the Chautauqua series of the 19th century.

Among these nuggets are the following:

• Most of us are familiar with the Biblical Garden of Eden, the Tree of Knowledge whose fruit Adam and Eve were warned by God to not eat and the serpent from the Tree that tempted Eve and, in turn, Adam to eat that fruit. The serpent is a temptress (temptation is often feminized in Hebrew mythology) and the agent of Adam and Eve's exile and downfall into sin. In the Indian mythology, there is also a Tree, beneath which Siddhartha, later the Buddha, the Wakened One, sits. There is a serpent in this legend as well but it is not evil but, rather, 'symbolic of the immortal inhabiting energy of all life on Earth. For the Serpent shedding its skin, to be, as it were, born again, is likened in the Orient to the reincarnating spirit that assumes and throws off bodies as a man puts on and puts off clothes.' According to the Buddhist view, what is keeping us out of the garden is not the jealousy of an angry God but our attachment to our limited lives in space and time.

• Satan as the great lover of God – according to one Persian tradition, Satan was not cast out of Heaven because of his pride but because he loved God so intensely that he could not bring himself to bow before anything else. 'Now it has been said that of all the pains of Hell, the worst is neither fire nor stench but the deprivation forever of the beatific sight of God. How infinitely painful, then, must the exile of this great lover be, who could not bring himself, even on God's own word, to bow before any other being!' And so what sustains Satan—the memory of the sound of God's voice when he said, 'Be gone!' Campbell calls this an image of 'that exquisite spiritual agony which is at once the rapture and anguish of love!'

• In the same chapter on the mythology of Love, Campbell recounts an incident in which a woman, who had suffered great loss and grief, came to the Indian sage Ramakrishna and said, "I do not find that I love God." He asked, "Is there nothing that you love?" She answered, "My little nephew". To which he said to her, "There is your love and service to God, in your love and service to that child." This awareness of God as immanent in all things is echoed in a passage Campbell quotes from the Gospel of Thomas: "Cleave a piece of wood, I am there; lift up a stone, you will find me there."

• In his essay, "Schizophrenia: The Inward Journey," Campbell compares the intentional schizophrenia of shamans and mystics with the psychotic schizophrenia of many of those in mental hospitals (as well as many an LSD explorer). They both enter the same deep inward sea. The mystic dives in and can swim back out of the depths. The psychotic drowns in it.

• Campbell delivered his talk "The Moon Walk—The Outward Journey" the year after the first moon landing. He is understandably ecstatic and his professorial detachment abandons him as he waxes rhapsodically on the great milestone of this major accomplishment, after centuries of being bound to this small planet in a vast universe, in which man, propelled in a device and using principles developed in the minds of Kant and Newton, that the laws of time and space that govern humans on Earth can also apply when that human ventures to another location in the galaxy, provided humanity with a perspective that the inner space and the external universe have the same origin. "We know that the mathematics of those outermost spaces will have already been computed here on earth by human minds. There are no laws out there that are not right here; no gods out there that are not right here, and not only here, but within us, in our minds."

Campbell uses the exhilaration of his moon chapter to launch into his rhapsodic conclusion, in which he states that mythologies, as in religions, are great poems that point through events to the ubiquity of a presence or eternity that is whole and entire in each. Each of them has the capacity to place the person ingesting them into the "Mind at Large" as Huxley called it. We are animals and so we are driven by an instinct for survival but, whereas a dog can only be a dog and a cat can only be a cat, humans have imaginations that can enable us to be astronauts, physicists, artists or almost anything else. Myth is a tool for illumination of "the waking of individuals in the knowledge of themselves, not simply as egos fighting for place on the surface of this beautiful planet, but equally as centers of Mind at Large—each in his own way at one with all, and with no horizons."

Although the frontiers of space exploration were off limits due to economic and global constraints and have not, at least at this point in time, fulfilled the expectation that Campbell, like Kubrick and Clarke with their film '2001' hoped, most of what he said 40-50 years ago is as relevant now as it was then. Even as boundaries are maintained and humans are still following the impulses to make war that he delineated in his essay on the mythologies of war and peace, other boundaries have been broken. What Campbell did not foresee was the shrinkage of distance in communication that the Internet has brought and the globalization and interdependence of nations and economies that have developed, in part as a byproduct of technological innovation. What wonders he could see, what mythic potential he could envision if he saw the world of the 21st century! And so I, and the world, are different from the one in 1983 when I first read this book or the world of the 50's, 60's and 70's when these lectures were written. Finally, if one wants a relatively concise introduction to the range of Campbell's mythic concerns, aside from 'The Power of Myth', this volume is as good a place to start as any.

Astonishing, insightful, and life changing. Joseph Campbell, holds within his vast knowledge of the world's mythologies, the greatest of all great truths...that we are all, at the end of the day, in this life together. "And so, to return to our opening question: What is- or what is to be- the new mythology? It is- and will forever be, as long as our human race exists- the old, everlasting, perennial mythology, in its "subjective sense," poetically renewed in terms neither of a remembered past nor of a projected future, but of now: addressed, that is to say, not to the flattery of "peoples," but to the waking of individuals in the knowledge of themselves, not simply as egos fighting for place on the surface of this beautiful planet, but equally as centers of Mind at Large- each in his own way at one with all..."
-Joseph Campbell

MYTHS TO LIVE BY consists of a dozen essays/talks Joseph Campbell prepared between 1961 and 1971. He described the period as a "new age" where "..we are...participating in one of the very greatest leaps of the human spirit to a knowledge not only of outside nature but also of our own deep inward mystery."
At the time he wrote these essays, Campbell was a professor on a campus, surrounded by young people whom he found hard to understand at times. For example, in his essay "The Moon Walk--the Outward Journey" he relates his own feelings of awe on viewing the Apollo moon landing and contrasts them with the reaction of a student who wrote "So What" on a photo of the moon landing posted on a campus bulletin board. In another essay "Schizophrenia--the Inward Journey" he contrasts the use of mind-altering drugs by shamans and psychotics (including the LSD induced version) as the difference between divers and non-swimmers in "the waters of the unviersal archetypes of mythology."
I find Campbell's essays are very relevant, 30 years later. The most obvious example is "Mythologies of War and Peace" which addresses the underlying belief systems of participants in the Mideast crises. Campbell says the cruel fact is that "killing is the precondition of all living whatsoever: life lives on life, eats life, and would not otherwise exist...it is the nations, tribes, and peoples bred to mythologies of war that have survived to communicate their life-supporting mythic lore to descendents." He suggests that "we" in the West "have been bred to one of the most brutal war mythologies of all time." He then goes on to cite Deuteronomy and Isaiah and follows with excerpts from the Koran such as Sura 2, verse 216.."Fighting is prescribed for you."
Campbell does not condemn myths nor does he say myths are not literally true. He suggests creation myths and myths about love and war and peace contain the essence of the truth. Myths are to humans what kangaroo pouches are to baby kangaroos, they provide a "womb with a view." Being born simply isn't enough. We need myths to help us organize and guide our lives. However, our current myths arose in another era and were shaped by tribal mentalities that sustain the notion of GROUP differences. We need new myths for the journey of life.

This is often a required textbook for mythology. It is a compilation of lectures given by Campbell in the 1970's. First, the material is very dated, with examples of space exploration and then new psychedelic drugs. His conclusions cannot take into account the subsequent facts we know to be true.
Worse, I found Campbell's writing to be unnecessarily contorted in a pompous, egotistical style. It is not necessary for a writer to constantly attempt to "prove" he is more intelligent than the reader. It was annoying and pointless, since his grandly announced revelations were in fact simple repetitions of the then current psychological trends mixed with Eastern mysticism.

Joseph Campbell was among the sharpest of human minds in the 20th century, and his unique style and wisdom can be found throughout this magnificent book. In Myths to Live By, he concentrates on the myths of various global traditions which apply to our day to day life. The stories set forth in myth truly encapsulate the human experience; the way we both see the world as well as respond to it are all there in these ancient stories. Campbell explores Christianity, Buddhism, Sufism, and Zoroastrianism - all within the contents of this deceivingly thin book. This is a must have for any Joe Campbell fan, as well as anyone looking to unearth the rich meaning of this thing we call life. Get pleasure from this book, and have fun on your mythic journey!

Myths to Live By is, I believe, Joseph Campbell's finest single volume book for the lay public. Dr. Campbell's comparative study of mythologies/religions/cultures both of the east and west is revealing, instructive, compelling and ultimately devastating. Devastating because (almost forty years ago) I discovered in this little book the intellectual catapult I needed to liberate myself and forever abandon the trappings of Judeo/Christian/Islamic 'baggage' for the greener shores of Buddhism and zen. For me this book was pivotal as it clearly pointed me towards the works of D.T. Suzuki and subsequently to those of Paul Reps, Nyogen Senzaki, Nakagawa Soen, Thomas Cleary and R.H. Blyth. I am deeply grateful to all (deep gassho). Is it possible to reach enlightenment by reading the works of others? I have pointed you in the direction of these Buddhas. Now you add your forty years and let's see...

This book is a series of Lectures given by Professor Campbell.
Campbell's writing style is very accessible to scholars and non scholars alike tho. For anyone interested in not only research and theory on world mythology, but also human pyschology and any kind of insight into the human condition should read this book.
Although there is no clear thesis stated in the beginning the lectures/chapters have a very nice and logical flow to them. To conclude I can't say this book changed my life, but it made me think and as his writing/lectures progressed it became obvious he had clear objective in mind which he met an a concise and clear manner. An interesting read.

This anthology is a collection of lectures given by Campbell at Cooper Union from 1958 to 1971, and covers such topics as love, war and peace, zen, schizophrenia, and the differences between East and West. Anyone already familiar with Campbell's work won't find anything new here, but newbies may find this a good place to get started. Some of Campbell's books can be intimidating, but in his public lectures, Campbell was able to reduce even the most complex issues for general consumption. Hopefully this will encourage them to pursue his work in greater degree. So, definitely a book for a newbie interested in Campbell or mythology in general, but not particularly helpful for people already acquainted with his work.

How should myths be used in our personal lives? Are they important? What Campbell did for this book was to take a bunch of lectures he had given in the 60s and early 70s and collect them for this book. Therefore, to my mind, they seemed a bit disjointed. Some chapters were much more interesting and relevant than others (heck, some of them I didn't really feel even related to the theme of the book). But overall, there were a lot of good ideas and thoughts in this book, especially the chapter on schizophrenia.

How we re-create ancient legends in our daily lives to release human potential -- a brilliant, fascinating, and scholarly work! What is a properly functioning mythology and what are its functions? Can we "live by" myths today? Can they help relieve our modern anxiety, or do they help to foster it? Campbell explores the vital link of man to his myths and the way in which they can extend our human potential.

I was very disappointed in this book. I actually couldn't get past the first chapter. I was expecting a more enlightened point of view, but Prof. Campbell is like most other academic elitists. He sees only a two sided coin and comes across as narrow-minded. Okay, so the Biblical creation account is a myth. That doesn't make Darwinism true. And it doesn't mean there is no value to it...or to either for that matter. There was just too much prejudicial material to wade through to get to any gems of insight. I doubt I'll be picking up this book again.

I must admit...I only starting reading this book because Scott Stapp from Creed said he was reading this book and they are my favorite band, but when I starting reading it I couldn't stop. When you start to read the book you will quickly understand how it reflects in our everday lives. It is a collecection of powerful lectures that makes you continue and want to keep reading.
I will recommend this book to anyone.

Joseph Campbell left behind a collection of works that sometimes look like a diamond in the rough. Myths to Live By is no exception and represents a clear focus on how myths relate to not only our religious practices but also our daily lives. The book covers not just Western ideas of Christianity but also Eastern traditions as well.

This book, like other Campbell works really speaks to your soul to help you grasp the nature of our times. As one reviewer said, if you read it at the right time of your life, it can completely change you.
I highly reccomend this or any Campbell work.

The problem here is not with Campbell's writing but with the place from which his writing originates. It is a 1960's academia entrenched in a Western cannon, believing itself capable of interpreting the cultural relevance of myth to non-Western peoples through the same lens it uses to critique western, and specifically Biblical, myth. Repeated references to "primitive cultures," a complete dismissal of African myth tradition, and a clear implication of a Western superiority make the insightful commentary on myth a challenge to isolate.
If you are really interested in comparative study of myth, look at some original texts and avoid internalizing Campbell's bias; Campbell schematically interprets the Indian Vedas, Zen texts, Navajo stories, Norse mythology, the Bible, and works by Dante, Jung and Freud.
A discussion on the mythical implications of "last year's" moonwalk, or the Kennedy assassination, for instance, don't help much.

The problem here is not with Campbell's writing but with the place from which his writing originates. It is a 1960's academia entrenched in a Western cannon, believing itself capable of interpreting the cultural relevance of myth to non-Western peoples through the same lens it uses to critique western, and specifically Biblical, myth. Repeated references to "primitive cultures," a complete dismissal of African myth tradition, and a clear implication of a Western superiority make the insightful commentary on myth a challenge to isolate.
If you are really interested in comparative study of myth, look at some original texts and avoid internalizing Campbell's bias; Campbell schematically interprets the Indian Vedas, Zen texts, Navajo stories, Norse mythology, the Bible, and works by Dante, Jung and Freud.
A discussion on the mythical implications of "last year's" moonwalk, or the Kennedy assassination, for instance, don't help much.

This is a book or indeed a transcript wherein Campbell propounds his theories on the somewhat tenuous relationship between the concepts of myths, religion, psychology and reality and their development throughout human history.
He does not allude to a supernatural entity being the driving force behind this relationship however his attempts to link these differing concepts to an ongoing need for humanity to garner comfort from the exploits of heroes and such like, fails to convince.
Given that the majority of myths are from ancient or at best the medieval period then their decline in modern culture belies his thesis, unless of course you accept the plethora of conspiracy theories that abound or indeed the impact of modern literature and films.
Many of these myths were attempts by the ancients to understand the complexities of the world they found themselves living in however as science continues to explain our world, mythological stories lose their potency.
Campbell’s work albeit of some academic interest, now gives the appearance of being somewhat dated and superseded by others which display more veracity.