Customer Reviews

The Seven Story Tower: A Mythic Journey Through Space and Time

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4 star:		(1)
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if you are familiar with Jung and Campbell on mythology, this book contains great examples of the "Collective Unconsciousness" (which is often given a New-Age-y spin but it's just about human psychology and creating stories as we create selves). if not, the book offers themes and from cultures around the world, throughout time so you can draw parallels.


his material is great, but his conclusions are dubious. the author definitely use examples that could be interpreted a thousand way, to "prove" his point. he cites freud a lot, which reveals how little he actually knows about the mind and how much he gets from theoretical academia. it reads as if it was funded by some sort of feminist fruedian revisionist group? (and not neuro or even psych researchers).

the link between dreams and mythology is not reliable at all. even if freud got it right (which he almost never did, unlike his contemporary James), it has nothing to do with conscious story telling. the common misconception is that members of primitive societies are somehow less conscious than post-industrial, first-world denizens. it also assumes dreams directly parallel the unconscious, and are not just a result that and several other processes, including random electrical noise in the brain.


nonetheless, if you can contentedly discard the tenuous lines of reasoning, the bursts of in-arduously proven enthusiasm, theory over the messy real world, the myths and background info is fantastic.

The myths were great. It was hard to get past 'X is CLEARLY a metaphor for Y' over and over again. Not only do people often disagree with the chosen metaphor, but if it was that clear, it probably wouldn't have to be said. I bumped it up to 4 stars because page numbers were added yesterday (kindle edition), which makes my life WAY easier. My teacher assigns everything by page numbers, and it wasn't easy to figure out what I was supposed to read until this was added.