Synopses & Reviews
Joseph Campbell famously defined myth as other people's religion.” But he also said that one of the basic functions of myth is to help each individual through the journey of life, providing a sort of travel guide or map to reach fulfillment or, as he called it, bliss. For Campbell, many of the world's most powerful myths support the individual's heroic path toward bliss.
In Pathways to Bliss, Campbell examines this personal, psychological side of myth. Like his classic best-selling books Myths to Live By and The Power of Myth, Pathways to Bliss draws from Campbell's popular lectures and dialogues, which highlight his remarkable storytelling and ability to apply the larger themes of world mythology to personal growth and the quest for transformation. Here he anchors mythology's symbolic wisdom to the individual, applying the most poetic mythical metaphors to the challenges of our daily lives.
Campbell dwells on life's important questions. Combining cross-cultural stories with the teachings of modern psychology, he examines the ways in which our myths shape and enrich our lives and shows how myth can help each of us truly identify and follow our bliss.
Review
No one in our century not Freud, not Thomas Mann, not Lévi-Strauss has so brought the mythical sense of the world and its eternal figures back into our everyday consciousness.”
James Hillman
Campbell has become the rarest of intellectuals in American life: a serious thinker who has been embraced by the popular culture.”
Newsweek
In our generation the mythographer who has had the fullest command of the huge scholarly literature, the analytic ability, the lucid prose, and the needed staying power has been Joseph Campbell.”
Commentary
Synopsis
Joseph Campbell on the psychological wisdom of mythology.
Synopsis
Joseph Campbell is one of this century's great disseminators of the psychological wisdom of mythology. One of the basic functions of myth, he contends, 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 masterful 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 ones heroic path.