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What our customer's say!

"Hard Reading", This should be the most interesting book ever written - after all, it purports to summarize myths across cultures with a mononmyth theory as the unifying force. The problem is in the execution, and probably the underlying theory, which is certainly out-dated. Campbell writes poorly. He is hard NOT to put down. And so, alas, as with earlier editions, I could not even plod through this tome. It is useless to my understanding of the world.

"Very Helpful", This book was very helpful in my own spiritual journey. It's worth all the time you'll spend reading it.

"A journey blending modern psychology with comparative mythology", The Collector's Edition of this keepsake represents a fine presentation of a classic first released in 1949. THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES is a journey blending modern psychology with comparative mythology, and this edition offers new audiences a fine hardcover packed with black and white illustration and detail.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch


"The Hero with a Thousand Faces ", The Hero with a Thousand Faces is the work that first introduced me to Joseph Campbell. It was then and continues to be one of my favorite books of all time. Each time I read this valuable resource, I uncover another layer of usefulness. This time, I was specifically looking at how the cycle of the Hero's Journey directly related to the cycle of healing.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces presents Campbell's Hero's Journey. By looking at mythology worldwide, he noticed some very significant similarities in the journeys taken by the hero or heroine of these stories, hence the cycle. In this work, Campbell presents a number of snippets from different myths showing that indeed such a pattern exists. Indeed, it is a template still used by the best pieces of fiction and some of the most memorable movies.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a must have for anyone the least bit interested in mythology as well as every psychologist, writer, and healer on the planet. This is one of those books that quickly becomes dog-eared with consistent reuse.

"A must read for everyone", This book is one of the most important works of the 20th century. Inspiration to countless writers, it clearly illustrates the common narrative of the worlds mythology and religions; the common threads of the human unconcious.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"This book changed the way I view the World", Ok, this is the big one! Joseph Campbell's "The Hero With A Thousand Faces" is a revolution in the field of Anthropology of Religion. His lucid study of Mythology has literally changed the way the world views ITSELF. Ok I'm sorry I don't want to overstate things, but I don't think I am. If you read this book and actually understand what he is saying you wont be the same.

Campbell has found the creative archtypes found throughout history in the mythologies of all cultures. There is an excellent blend of classical psychology as well as Occidental and Oriental Mythology references.

If you have never read Joseph Campbell and you love Mythology BUY THIS BOOK! Buy the POWER OF MYTH and watch the video with Bill Moyers.

Joseph Campbell is the best.

"See Things Differently", All of life is a journey and we our the hero, so learn to see how you are creating the metaphors around you and how to interpret them through the concepts and work of Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell understood group consciousness before it became a religion - I appreciate his facts and knowledge behind his work.

"Star Wars connection", I first learned about this book, when I read that George Lucas used it as a template for creating his Star Wars movies. If you look closely at Star Wars having read this book, you can see how it does reflect the common patterns of the Hero's Story, as contained in mythology. You might find yourself seeing as I did how the hero character relates to the story of your own life, and your own decisions.

There is a call to adventure, the hero usually refuses the call, and then, may be forced by circumstances to take the call, meets the mentor, crosses thresholds,undergoes ordeals, and so on. This refusal of the call I have seen in many classic movies recently such as Casablanca, and To Have and Have Not, and Key Largo.

Another book, The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler takes this book, and shows how the elements have been used in different movies, and goes into the archetypes involved, and gives us a great summary in about 8 pages of the steps of the journey, giving a more comprehensive explanantion later, showing how this pattern is applied in diverse movies such as Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, Lion King, and many others. A common archetype you see in movies is the border guard, and the trickster.

I find the audio format helpful, as it is quicker to glean the information than from the book itself, and it does tell stories from all over the world. I particularly like the story of Cuchulainn, the Irish hero, having heard about this since I was a kid.

Another movie worth checking for comparison is Batman Begins.

I hope you find this review helpful, and, if you do, please click yes.

"Fear by a Thousand other Names",
This book, said to be Campbell's finest work, is dense in both its ideas and in its prose. At times, the density of the prose (actually a bit too syrupy for my taste) seems to overpower the ideas. However, despite this minor stylistic discomfort, this is clearly a classic that provides much of the raw materials only alluded to in so many of the other pieces covering the same substance. In this pantheon of myths, gods and heroes, spanning the universe of civilized man, we can see clearly the pattern that is the central entrée on Campbell's menu:

The theme of the book is that myths, those spontaneous productions "welling up" from the deepest recesses of the mind, are wellsprings of cultural development. The myths, gods, deeds, and especially the exploits of the heroes of man's myths, from time immemorial have been the leitmotif of civilized development. It is a theme that is ubiquitous in the psychological, philosophical, and the anthropological literature -- from Freud and his disciples (and especially Jung, Bettleheim, Becker and Otto Rank), to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and on to Clifford Geertz.

What Campbell has discovered is that myths are a grand psychological archetype and that the known psychological world is pretty much a familiar tableau, pretty much as Freud has described it in "Man and his Discontents": Myths, gods and tales, ultimately are about fears arising as they do out of our collective unconscious. They are designed to play an organizing and ordering role in shaping a safer reality, a safer civilization and most of all safer worldviews.

If we think about it, reality is just the palatable residue of our unconscious, which with great skill we have carefully reframed so that it is disguised as ego-relevance. We are all heavily invested in this global self-constructed piece of collective denial and self-deception. We proceed to "people" it with heroes in the guise of gods and other inhuman creatures. And we have learned to live through these props vicariously. We have learned to substitute their bravery and heroics and their exploits for our own lack of same. However, upon closer inspection, no one should be surprised to discover that there are uncanny recurring patterns that have not changed over the history of man's existence. The themes, the tales, and the forms that the heroes take, keep repeating themselves, perhaps because they all are part of the same schemata of cultural self-deception.

As we can infer by wading through Campbell's dense prose with some difficulty, the real power behind our existence are the unacknowledged thoughts that live within the far recesses of our unconscious, hidden and repressed beneath seemingly innocent everyday activities. Myths, legends and dramas of heroism, make up the basic freeway on the substrate to expressing and bringing into consciousness these frightening subterranean ideas. They allow us to do so in more or less acceptable and respectable ways. They save us from ourselves, by making the terror we refuse to face consciously, bearable and manageable. As Campbell puts it, they help us across the threshold of transformations that seek to change the patterns of our thought. In short, myths are part of the ritual for turning the scariness beneath consciousness, into something "artificially" heroic above it.

Since time immemorial, the forms such transformations have taken have been those of birth, overcoming adversity, death, and resurrection. In order to overcome the crisis of entering the state of higher spiritual dimension, to reach the ultimate state of renewal, the state of resurrection, we need a period of " detachment," and "transfiguration." This transfiguration is from the external to the internal, from the macro to the micro, in effect a retreat back to the womb, to the state and serenity of infantile unconsciousness. Bruno Bettleheim has referred to this process as "going from the tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb."

Thus Campbell tells us that we carry within us the solution to all our problems (to use Carl Rogers' term) of "lacking the courage to be." Bravery requires facing the world without the umbilical cord being a permanent lifetime tether. Yet, most of us prefer to hide in the warmth and the glow of tribal routines. Lacking the courage to see, or to be, has become a signature part of contemporary human expectations.

Myths and their self-reflective heroes are nothing but adult fairy tales designed to ward-off our fears. In symbolic form, they represent the psychological triumphs we lack the courage to claim in real life. All of our heroes, as is true of our gods, are woven from the fabric of human fears and virtues. They are in fact our attempts to use human fears and virtues as a way of transcending those very same fears and virtues. But clearly the logic of using our fears and virtues to transcend themselves, is closed, and circular, and it thus cannot be done. No matter how much we imbue our heroes and our gods with superhuman qualities, powers, bravery and virtues, in the end we know that they are only the products of our own myth-making abilities. That is to say, they are just the best reflections that we can imagine about ourselves.

One thing we can all be sure of is that they are our creations, and not the other way around.

What then is the Hero of a thousand faces really about?

I firmly believe, as Ernest Becker does, that our collective neuro-psychosis is about the "mother of all our fears." To use Richard Pryor's phrase: "It is about passing the ultimate test: Can you survive death? So far as we know, no one has yet passed the ultimate test. "

That's the ultimate test, and the ultimate fear. Campbell's book thus is about our never-ending quest to overcome the fear of death. Hero-creation, like hero-worship is another immortality project, another slick attempt to escape the clutches of the grim reaper, our fear of our own lack of immortality.

Deeply thought-provoking and thorough.

Five stars.

"Among Top 100 Most Important Books of the 20th Century", That's not just my personal opinion. This book was rated among the most important of the 20th century by a group of experts, and for good reason. It's hard to find a screenwriter or movie making company that does not follow Campbell's model for the hero's journey. Campbell took what had been also described as the monomyth-- the universal story, told with the same basic pattern, by every culture, about the journey of the hero.

This monomyth is a profoundly powerful description of the process of growth, of achieving a higher level of consciousness, of being reborn as a new, stronger person.

It is a natural for moviemaking and has had several books written specifically focusing on using the concept to craft powerful stories with characters with depth. It is also used to help people and therapists conceptualize the process of going into therapy and healing, finding a new job, new relationships, new activism.

Ultimately, the hero's journey is a call to wake up and become a new person-- by making a choice, then developing new skills and resources, using them to face inner and outer challenges, then bringing back the "magic elixir" the final change, to the ordinary world you came from, to heal that world.

You can also consider the hero's journey to be a roadmap that explains the stages in the process of-- the journey of-- personal change-- a map that gives insight and understanding that can be invaluable.

The hero's journey goes through stages, which I'm abbreviating. Some of the stages include, with my own interpretation:
-ordinary world
-call to adventure
-rejection of the call
-facing threshold guardians
-meeting the mentor
-crossing the threshold
-going underground or in the water-- symbolically
-starting on the road in the new world
-acquiring new skills and allies
-facing and battling antagonists
-meeting with the goddess
-at-one-ment with the father
-apotheosis
-journey to the inmost cave-- almost dying, fighting the greatest antagonist
-Final successful confrontation
-road home
-straddling both worlds successfully

At the end, the hero can successfully live in both worlds.

Whole books have been written on just one stage in hero's journey. One of the best is Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life by Greg LeVoy.

And George Lucas used the Hero's Journey in his Star Wars movies, even getting to know Campbell.

This is a concept that you can apply to your life, whenever you face or desire to make change. Or use it for your writing for your stories or even for organizational change.

I've given lectures on it for groups interested in writing, for doctors who use it to conceptualize the treatment of patients, I've used it with individual clients, and for groups who are interested in personal growth.

The book is not a quick, easy read. It's one of a very few that I've read more than once. Consider it like a favorite nature site you love to visit. Return to it and you will discover new visions and ideas you missed before and previously seen ideas that you will see with new eyes, new perspectives.

Reading the book can be, just by itself, a hero's journey, since it will wake you up. Of course, you can refuse the call. When you refuse the call, by the way, very often, the call comes back to get you, more persuasively. Remember Obie Wan Kenober? He asks Luks Skywalker nicely to join him to rescue princess Leah. Luke rejects the call. The next day, the aunt and uncle he lives with have been murdered by Darth Vader. Like I said, the "call" comes back to get you more persuasively.

If you want to get an easier read of the concepts in this book, try the The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 3rd Edition by Chris Vogler. Another excellent book that builds upon Campbell's concepts and Karl Jung's is James Bonnet's Stealing Fire from the Gods: The Complete Guide to Story for Writers and Filmmakers (2nd Edition).