Customer Reviews

The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959-1987 (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell)

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It is hard to find the scarce published of Campbell's essays and this book delivers. These selections are full of Campbell's brilliance but leave you wanting more. It is a good thing it is only PART of his collected works! There is more to come!

This book is an excellent introduction to the landscape of Campbell's ideas, rivalled perhaps only by "Myths to Live By." The essay entitled "Renewal Myths and Rites of the Primitive Hunters and Planters," for instance, is a test drive for "The Masks of God," and represents a miniaturized version of it. This one is worth the price of the book alone, for you can see him testing the waters for his coming epic, one of the greatest books on comparative mythology ever written.

This was the last book that the Joseph Campbell Foundation published with Harper Collins. It didn't make a dime, and neither did the ones before it, "Baksheesh and Brahman" and "Mythic Worlds, Modern Words," which is why Harper Collins dropped the "Collected Works of Joseph Campbell" project. Consumerism is the driving force of the publishing industry nowadays, and that is too bad because it is wrecking the industry. Intellectual books are no longer being published (since, it is thought, they don't make money) and so the needs of the marketplace now dictates what the world of the mind will be like for the rest of us. As Zygmunt Bauman has written in his wonderful book "Can Ethics Survive in a Consumer Society?" the answer is no, they can't, because money dictates everything. It is a wonder that the Joseph Campbell Foundation was actually able to find another publisher, New World Library, to salvage this "Collected Works" project, since Americans generally do not value their own writers enough to regularly produce "Collected Works" of them. In Europe, this is done all the time. Check out how many Gesammelte Werkes exist in German and you will see what I mean.

In short, this book, "Myths to Live By," and "The Flight of the Wild Gander" represent the three best introductory overviews of Campbell's intellectual ideas that are now available. This book has been largely neglected, but hopefully New World Library's reprinting of it will help redress that problem.

See also my You Tube lecture on Campbell.

--John David Ebert, author of "The New Media Invasion" and "Dead Celebrities, Living Icons."