The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959–1987 eBook

Joseph Campbell presents twelve eclectic, far-ranging, and brilliant essays gathered together for the first time. The essays explore myth in all its dimensions: its history; its influence on art, literature, and culture; and its role in everyday life.This second volume of Campbell’s essays (following The Flight of the Wild Gander) brings together his uncollected writings from 1959 to 1987.

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"I had my first rock and roll experience at a performance of the Grateful Dead. Rock music had always seemed a bore to me, but I can tell you, at that concert, I found eight thousand people standing in mild rapture for five hours. The place was just a mansion of dance. And I thought, 'Holy God! Everyone has just lost themselves in everybody else here!'"

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"The priest presents for consideration a compound of inherited forms with the expectation (or at times, even the requirement) that one should interpret and experience them in a certain authorized way, whereas the artist first has an experience of his own, which he then seeks to interpret and communicate through effective forms. Not the forms first and then the experience, but the experience first and then the forms."

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"We are now observing throughout our cultural world a resurgence of the cult of the immanence of the occult, within ourselves and within nature. The old Bronze Age realization of a micro-macrocosmic unity is returning, and everywhere all the old arts that were banished are coming back."