Product Details

• Actors: Joseph Campbell
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Mystic Fire Video
• VHS Release Date: September 1, 1998
• Run Time: 58 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• ASIN: 630350342X
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #290,609 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars To find a spirituality of life? Or of cannibalism?, May 29, 2000

By 

Jake Sapiens - See all my reviews

This review is from: Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth, Volume 4: Sacrifice and Bliss [VHS] (VHS Tape)

In this video Campbell focusses more directly on issues of life and death and how they play out in primitive mythologies. Once again he displays a well honed and educated intuition in doing this. One thing that really came to the forefront for me in this video, is an issue that has disturbed me through all of the previous videos. Campbell seems to have a lot of respect for the primitive cultures that he studies. This probably helps to drive his interest and thoroughness in studying these cultures, but at the same time I think he lacks spiritual respect for modern culture. This becomes obvious to me at the beginning of this video when he talks about how primitive cultures viewed the whole world as sacred, and that modern civilization has reduced this sacredness to effectively almost nothing.

He especially brings this out in his concept of sacrifice. In these older societies, death seemed a much more present issue as people tended to live short fast lives and cultures tended to endure relatively unchanged from generation to generation. We see somewhat of a reversal of this situation today, where in the developed world, people live longer lives and culture tends to change quickly within a single person's life. The question becomes much less an issue of "what are you willing to die for?", and more a question of "what are you willing to live for and supplementary, without which you are unwilling to live?" (much thanks to Mark Lewis {one of my Amazon favorites} for this wording). Bill Moyers at one moment seems to point to a similar more contemporary sense of sacrifice when he draws the illustration of the man who goes to work on a daily basis for the good of his family and the ones he loves. But as usual Moyers seems a little too much in awe of Campbell to really press this good point.

I also wonder at Campbell's thoughts on the distinctly cannibalistic sense of sacrifice that he so aptly draws to our attention, in metaphorical terms in regard to Christianity, and in more literal terms in regard to the New Guinea tribes (that I assume still practiced this at the time that Campbell described their activities, at least he seems to imply that they did). Did he really expect us to accept this picture of sacrifice as one appropriate for modern society? He doesn't make this clear, and I would think that he would expect us to find mythology more appropriate for our times and circumstances as he has admonished us earlier in this series. I don't know that Campbell himself has actually done this for himself, however, as he seems to continually bemoan what he sees as our current lack of spirituality and sacredness.

These criticisms aside, however, Campbell's knowledge and intuition prove exceptionally instructive in understanding these primitive and even not-so-primitive societies' mythological understandings of sacrifice and bliss, life and death. This video proved a turning point for me in this series, where I finally felt ready articulate my differences with Campbell, and at the same time and therefore perhaps more effectively get a lot out of what he has to offer. I find it particularly fortuitous that I happened to watch this particular video right after watching a rather culturally intelligent gothic horror movie about cannibalism (see my movie review for "Ravenous"). With the right frame of mind, I think you can get a lot out of this video, though I don't know that Campbell does a lot for the viewer to develop this frame of mind here. But considering Campbell's willingness to so directly address cultural issues that others might rather avoid or deny, I found this a valuable learning experience.