The Ecstasy of Being: Mythology and Dance eBook

In this collection, Joseph Campbell explores the rise of modern art and dance in the twentieth century; delves into the work and philosophy of Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and others; and, as always, probes the idea of art as “the funnel through which spirit is poured into life.” This book offers the reader an accessible, yet profound and provocative, insight into Campbell’s lifelong fascination with the relationship of myth to aesthetic form and human psychology.

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"Mythology, in other words, is not an outmoded quaintness of the past, but a living complex of archetypal, dynamic images, native to, and eloquent of, some constant, fundamental stratum of the human psyche. And that stratum is the source of the vital energies of our being. Out of it proceed all the fate-creating drives and fears of our lives. While our educated, modern waking-consciousness has been going forward on the wheels and wings of progress, this recalcitrant, dream-creating, wish-creating, under-consciousness has been holding to its primeval companions all the time, the demons and the gods."