Audio Series I Lectures

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From the Star Wars trilogy to the Grateful Dead, Joseph Campbell has had a profound impact on our culture, our beliefs, and the way we view ourselves and the world. Provocative and exhilarating, the approx. 90 titles that will ultimately comprise The Collected Lectures of Joseph Campbell offer a glimpse into one of the great minds of our time, drawing together his most wide-ranging and insightful talks.

Always at his best as an impromptu speaker, Campbell shines in these recordings, both as a scholar and as a master storyteller. These lectures are from early in his career, including recordings of his famous lectures at the Cooper Union.



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Lecture I.6.5 - The Forest Adventurous [New!]

Lecture I.6.5 - The Forest Adventurous [New!]

We left our two heroes, Percival and Gawain, on their quest, and we now come to the story of the resolutions…. Percival has been wandering for some five years on his steed through this area where he found the Grail castle [but is] now unable to find...
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Lecture I.6.4 - The Grail Legend [New!]

Lecture I.6.4 - The Grail Legend [New!]

Galahad is a word from the Old Testament that means Mountain of Testimony; [Sir Galahad] is a mountain of testimony to Christ. The whole tradition of the virgin knight as the Grail knight belongs to a Cistercian monastic line. Whereas the line of...
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Lecture I.6.3 - The Arthurian Tradition [New!]

Lecture I.6.3 - The Arthurian Tradition [New!]

Europe had perfectly good religions and mythologies going fine and then [Christianity] is brought in on top of it. And what you get then… is an attempt on the part of the European mind to assimilate this and translate it into something like European...
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Lecture I.6.2 - The Mythology of Love [New!]

Lecture I.6.2 - The Mythology of Love [New!]

The Persian poets asked, “What is it that sustains Satan in his eternal, infinitely painful exile?” Because the deepest pain of Hell is not the fire or the stench but the depravation of the true love of the soul—namely God. And the answer with...
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Lecture I.6.1 - Origins of Western Mythology [New!]

Lecture I.6.1 - Origins of Western Mythology [New!]

As I say, the function finally of myths is to introduce you by way of the mārga, of the [universal] path, to the deep psychological and mystical the two being ultimately one. The mystery of your psyche and the mystery of the universe is one....
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Lecture I.5.5 - The Religious Impulse [New!]

Lecture I.5.5 - The Religious Impulse [New!]

We have a highly differentiated society able to absorb people of many, many different faiths, but that means that the society itself cannot be governed by a single faith. Even that phrase that we have on our coins, ‘In God We Trust,’ does not evoke...
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Lecture I.5.4 - History of the Gods [New!]

Lecture I.5.4 - History of the Gods [New!]

A myth is a poetic image that points past itself to an ineffable truth and so it can’t be called a concept…. But a myth, a mythology is a total image of the universe which operates in a social context to shape the society and it operates in a...
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Lecture I.5.3 - Experiencing the Divine [New!]

Lecture I.5.3 - Experiencing the Divine [New!]

When our guiding mythology corresponds to that of our culture, our dreams will be regarded, so to say, as visions. We will be experiencing the divine in the form in which our society regards and cherishes it. But if we are dislocated a little bit,...
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Lecture I.5.2 - Mythic Vision [New!]

Lecture I.5.2 - Mythic Vision [New!]

The mythological realm is the realm that supports our realm. In philosophical language it could be compared to the realm of Platonic ideas. It is that realm of eternal principals, eternal forms which bring forth the passing mortal forms of the...
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Lecture I.5.1 - Interpreting Symbolic Forms [New!]

Lecture I.5.1 - Interpreting Symbolic Forms [New!]

One way… to destroy the value and spiritual effect of a symbol of this spiritual kind is to say that it refers to a historical event. A spiritual symbol, a religious symbol, a mythic symbol is valid and true here, now and for always. It is not a...
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Lecture I.4.5 - Personal Myth [New!]

Lecture I.4.5 - Personal Myth [New!]

Now what do you have in your life for which you would sacrifice your life…? What is the great thing? What makes you do what you do, what is the call of your life to you? Do you have it? In the old traditions this was given to people and it held...
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Lecture I.4.4 - The Necessity of Rites [New!]

Lecture I.4.4 - The Necessity of Rites [New!]

Life is a monstrous, horrendous presence and you live on it. You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for that. The first function of a mythological order has been to reconcile consciousness to this fact. —Joseph Campbell Joseph Campbell begins this talk...
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Lecture I.4.3 - Society and Symbol [New!]

Lecture I.4.3 - Society and Symbol [New!]

I think one could define a symbol as an energy-releasing and -directing image, and since the symbolic systems of the world include many symbols that are practically universal, the questions comes up as to the universality of symbol, and then how the...
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Lecture I.4.2 - Mythic Living [New!]

Lecture I.4.2 - Mythic Living [New!]

Jung began reading ravenously the works that had already been published on mythology, and this thought came to him—what it means live by and with a myth and what it means to live without one. And he asked himself on this occasion by what myth he was...
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Lecture I.4.1 - Man and Myth [New!]

Lecture I.4.1 - Man and Myth [New!]

There are two orders of dream. There is the simple personal dream, where you get tangled up in your own personal twists and resistances to your life and so forth…. But then there is another level of dream which we call vision where one has gone past...
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Lecture I.3.5 - Creativity in Oriental Mythology [New!]

Lecture I.3.5 - Creativity in Oriental Mythology [New!]

When one looks at the glorious panorama of Indian art one sees a repetition of themes; beautiful themes, dependable themes, motifs that recur time and time again. And if you compare that galaxy of forms with their counterDisks in post renaissance...
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Lecture I.3.4 - Buddhism

Lecture I.3.4 - Buddhism

No experience can be taught; all that can be taught is the way to an experience. Hence Buddhism is something that is implicit in ourselves and is to be achieved through experience but cannot be delivered to us like a package. No sooner did [the...
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Lecture I.3.3 - Hinduisim

Lecture I.3.3 - Hinduisim

In traditional Hinduism, each caste has its own laws, its own morality, its own place in the society, and the individual is given so many laws to attend to that his whole life is spent doing what he aught do and he never has a moment to think, What...
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Lecture I.3.2 - The Mystical Traditions of India

Lecture I.3.2 - The Mystical Traditions of India

Yoga is the intentional stopping of the spontaneous activity of the mind substance. Now the notion is that within what is called the gross matter of the mind… there functions what we now call electricity. This is called subtle matter in the Indian...
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Lecture I.3.1 - Interpreting Oriental Myth

Lecture I.3.1 - Interpreting Oriental Myth

The whole point of the Oriental wisdom and mythic themes is that we are not in exile, but that the god is within you. You can’t be exiled from it. All that can happen is that you don’t know it—that you don’t realize it, that you haven’t found a way...
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Lecture I.2.5 - The World Soul

Lecture I.2.5 - The World Soul

In the ultimate illumination, all pairs of opposites are transcended, are left behind. And this world as we know and experience it is the perfect lotus world -- this is nirvana, as it looks.... The whole world as it lives is a manifestation of this...
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Lecture I.2.4 - Imagery of Rebirth Yoga

Lecture I.2.4 - Imagery of Rebirth Yoga

The realms of the gods and demons -- heaven, purgatory, hell -- are of the substance of dreams.... The mythology is the dream of the world. And if taken objectively as though there were gods, well then they are the counterpart of your dream -- this...
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Lecture I.2.3 - Confrontation of East and West in Religion

Lecture I.2.3 - Confrontation of East and West in Religion

Just as for the American Indian the buffalo dropped away, and with it their public social mythology, so for us: the world has moved past, and our mythology has dropped off, and we are turned inward, and [the gurus and zen masters] are the ones who...
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Lecture I.2.2 - The Inward Journey

Lecture I.2.2 - The Inward Journey

When one studies primitive mythologies, the imagery of the mythological world derives from the psychological experiences of the shamans. The source of the imagery of primitive myths is the shaman's psychological crisis. The shaman is a person who in...
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Lecture I.2.1 - The Thresholds of Mythology

Lecture I.2.1 - The Thresholds of Mythology

The first function [of mythology] is to reconcile consciousness to existence or to reject existence. The second function is to present an image of the universe through which the sensed meaning, or power, or nature of life will be rendered. The third...
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