The Hero with a Thousand Faces

This seminal work has influenced millions of readers since it was originally published in 1949, bringing the insights of modern psychology together with Campbell's revolutionary understanding of comparative mythology. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell formulated the dual schemas of the Hero's Journey, a universal motif of adventure and transformation that runs through all of humanity's mythic traditions, and of the Cosmogonic Cycle, the stories of world-creation and -dissolution that have marked cultures around the world and across the centuries.
Translated into over twenty languages, The Hero with a Thousand Faces has sold well over a million copies and continues to find new audiences among professors and students in fields ranging from the history of religion and anthropology to literature and film studies; among creative artists including authors, filmmakers, game designers and song writers; and among all of those interested in the basic human impulse to tell stories.

Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation

One of the basic functions of myth, contends Joseph Campbell, is to help each individual through the journey of life, providing a travel guide to reach fulfillment — a map to discover bliss.
In Pathways to Bliss, Campbell once again draws on his masterly gift of storytelling to apply the larger themes of world mythology to personal growth and transformation. Looking at the more personal, psychological side of myth, he begins to dwell on life's more important questions —those that are often submerged beneath the frantic activity of our daily life. With characteristic wit and insight, he draws connections between ancient symbols and modern art, schizophrenia and the hero's journey, revealing the way myth helps identify one's heroic path.

Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

Thou Art That is a compilation of previously uncollected essays and lectures by Joseph Campbell that focus on the Judeo-Christian tradition. Here Campbell explores common religious symbols, reexamining and reinterpreting them in the context of his remarkable knowledge of world mythology. According to Campbell, society often confuses the literal and metaphorical interpretations of religious stories and symbols.
In this collection, he eloquently reestablishes these metaphors as a means to enhance spiritual understanding and mystical revelation. With characteristic verve, he ranges from rich storytelling to insightful comparative scholarship. Included is editor Eugene Kennedy's classic interview with Campbell in The New York Times Magazine, which brought the scholar to the public's attention for the first time.

Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal

This previously unpublished title brings the focus of Campbell's remarkable knowledge and intellect to one of his favorite topics, the myths and metaphors of the Asian religions. By his own account, Joseph Campbell began his comparative study of the world's religions with a chance meeting with the renowned Indian Theosophist Jeddu Krishnamurti on a trans-Atlantic steamer.
Though he was deeply fascinated by mythologies and religions from every continent, Asia's potent mix of theologies captured his imagination more than any other, and offered him paths to understanding the essence of myth. Readers who have been waiting for an accessible summation of Campbell's insights into the great Asian traditions will have it in this compact volume.
Myths of Light collects previously unpublished lectures and articles on the mythologies and religions of Asia, from the ancient Hindu Vedas to Zen koans, Tantric yoga, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. As in his other popular works, Campbell conveys complex insights with warm, accessible storytelling, a hallmark of his public lectures, here revealing the intricacies and secrets of Asian religion and philosophy with his usual enthusiasm.

The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Mythology As Metaphor and As Religion

Developed from a memorable series of lectures delivered in San Francisco, which included a legendary symposium at the Palace of Fine Arts with astronaut Rusty Schweickart, this book--the last Campbell completed in his lifetime--explores the space age. Campbell posits that the newly discovered laws of outer space are actually at work within human beings as well and that a new mythology is implicit in this realization. He examines the new mythology and other questions in these essays.

The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work

Joseph Campbell, arguably the greatest mythologist of our time, was certainly one of our greatest storytellers. This new cloth edition of The Hero's Journey, published to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Campbell's birth, recounts his own quest and conveys the excitement of his life-long exploration of our mythic traditions, what he called "the one great story of mankind."
This masterfully crafted book interweaves conversations with Campbell and some of the people he inspired, including poet Robert Bly, anthropologist Angeles Arrien, filmmaker David Kennard, Doors' drummer John Densmore, psychiatric pioneer Stanislov Grof, Nobel laureate Roger Guillemen, and others. Behind the man who spent his life journeying through the mythologies of the world was someone whose life was a deep personal quest for his own immortal hero. Through a series of interviews The Hero's Journey follows the footsteps of Joseph Campbell as he tells stories of his life, his love, and his passion. Following Campbell's own themes from The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Phil Cousineau, as editor, lets that story unfold.

Baksheesh & Brahman: Asian Journals—India

Joseph Campbell was one of the foremost interpreters of myth in our time. Yet when he traveled to Asia for the first time he was nearly fifty and at a crossroads in his life and career. This journal of those transformative six months in India is as close as Campbell ever came to writing an autobiography. After ten years' intense study of Indian art and philosophy, Campbell embarked on this long-postponed journey. Searching for the transcendent (Brahman)—the exotic mysteries of the India in his books—he found instead stark realities: growing nationalism, cultural and religious rivalry, poverty, the impact of foreign aid, and a culture of what he called "baksheesh;" or alms.
This carefully kept journal chronicles the disillusionment and revelation that would change the course of his life and studies. It is at once a diary of his adventures—including his personal photos—a forum in which he develops, his revolutionary ideas and clarifies his future pursuits, and a record of his insightful discussions of art, philosophy, and transcendent realities with Indians from every level of society. Baksheesh and Brahman superbly illustrates Campbell's working method and grants a look at the thoughts and experience of an incredible mind.

Sake & Satori: Asian Journals—Japan

This is Joseph Campbell's account of a journey that led him to be an icon in the field of comparitive mythology and religion. Sake and Satori covers his travels through through the second half of his year-long journey through Asia. Written from the unjaded perspective of a remarkably erudite teacher on his first trip to the Asia he had studied for most of his life, this book is a unique snapshot of 1950s Asia and its rapidly changing post-colonial and Cold War tensions. In 1954 and 1955, the famed mythologist traveled to Asia for the first time, at age fifty.
In this second volume of his Asian journals, he continues east after nearly seven months in India, moving through Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, Burma, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and finally coming to rest, for a full five months, in Japan. The narrative is fueled by Campbell's knack for cultural and mythological comparison. With characteristic wit and compassion, Campbell relates his experiences with a culturally intact Japan, where Noh drama, Kabuki theater, and Geisha houses are still common.
He grapples with his self-discovered prejudices and opinions about how Asia is absorbing and resisting Western notions of gender, pluralism, and wealth. He relates revealing conversations with other travelers, as well as with Japanese from all walks of life, from geishas to scholars. Along the way, he allows passing asides to develop into wide-ranging philosophical explorations, augmented with his photos and specially commissioned drawings. Campbell's life was at a turning point during his travels and many of the seeds of his transition from professor to cultural icon were planted during this Asian journey.
These journals of Japan, along with its companion volume of Indian journals, Baksheesh and Brahman, impart unique and entertaining insights into both the man who wrote them and the cultures he described. It also reveals Campbell's mind, just as he was about to embark on the career of public education and popular writing that was to bring him to the notice of a broader audience. This title is now available, along with its companion volume, Baksheesh & Brahman: Asian Journals India.

The Flight of the Wild Gander: Select Essays

In these essays - contemporary with his years at Sarah Lawerence and with his legendary Cooper Union lectures - Campbell explores the origins of myth, from the Grimms' fairy tales to Native American legends. He explains how the symbolic content of myth is linked to universal human experience and how the myths and experiences change over time.
Included is the famed essay "Mythogenesis," which traces the rise and decline of a Native American legend.

The Mythologic Dimension: Select Essays

These twelve wide-ranging essays explore myth and its fascinating context in the human imagination — in the arts, literature, and culture, as well as in everyday life. This attractive cloth edition features pieces that exhibit Campbell’s trademark thoughtfulness and intelligence.
These essays explore the topic for which Campbell was best known: the many connections between myth and history, psychology, and the daily world. Drawing from such varied sources as Thomas Mann, the occult, Jungian and Freudian theory, and the Grateful Dead, these dynamic writings elucidate the many ways in which myth touches our lives, our psyches, and our relationship to the world.

Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: Joseph Campbell on the Novels of James Joyce

This volume, drawn together by Joyce scholar Edmund L. Epstein from forty years of Campbell's lectures, articles and unpublished writings on the novels of James Joyce, serves as a lens to examine both the nature of myth in art, and the myriad-minded work of the man whom many have called the greatest literary artist of the modern era. Campbell examines in detail Joyce's trio of brilliant novels, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and the labyrinthine Finnegans Wake.
An appendix includes both question and answer sessions from Campbell's lectures, and a series of articles penned by Campbell and his colleague, Henry Morton Robinson, unveiling the Wake-like themes that suffused Thorton Wilder's Broadway hit, The Skin of Our Teeth.

A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake

Since its publication in 1939, countless would-be readers of Finnegans Wake—James Joyce's masterwork that consumed a third of his life—have given up after a few pages and dismissed it as a "perverse triumph of the unintelligible." In 1944, a young professor of mythology and literature named Joseph Campbell, working with poet Henry Morton Robinson, wrote the first key or guide to entering the fascinating, disturbing, marvelously rich world of Finnegans Wake. The authors break down Joyce's abstruse book page by page, stripping the text of much of its obscurity and serving up thoughtful interpretations via footnotes and bracketed commentary. A Skeleton Key was Campbell's first book, published five years before he wrote his breakthrough The Hero with a Thousand Faces.