Book Ponder

The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell

• Published: June 1, 1988
• Pages: 293
• Read: July 14, 2022 – August 2, 2022
• Rating: 3 / 5 Stars

 

The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell originated from a television series with journalist Bill Moyers.  After the six-part documentary aired on PBS in 1988, it was turned into a book with additional material.  Campbell emphasizes how powerful myths are in our cultures and how they help people make sense of their lives.

Read Widely and Follow Your Intuition

If you constantly feel yourself resonating with a certain topic or type of book, I encourage you to follow your intuition.  Many times, we ignore some of our interests because someone tells us what we should be studying or what job we should be after.  The truth is, that nothing will bring you more fulfillment than having a job that doesn’t feel like work.  Having a job or researching something you enjoy will make it easier to put in the extra work to be great at it.  Nothing is ever fun the entire time and the struggle will always come, but if you love what you do, you will have no problem putting in the work required.  Campbell had a similar experience when his university adviser tried to limit his academic curriculum,

“Joseph Campbell affirmed life as adventure. “To hell with it,” he said, after his university adviser tried to hold him to a narrow academic curriculum. He gave up on the pursuit of a doctorate and went instead into the woods to read. He continued all his life to read books about the world: anthropology, biology, philosophy, art, history, religion. And he continued to remind others that one sure path into the world runs along the printed page.“

Joseph Campbell

Aside from encouraging us to pursue our interests, Campbell also emphasizes the point that you see with most great people in history, they knew the importance of books.

Marriage Is a Relationship

“There are two completely different stages of marriage. First is the youthful marriage following the wonderful impulse that nature has given us in the interplay of the sexes biologically in order to produce children. But there comes a time when the child graduates from the family and the couple is left. I’ve been amazed at the number of my friends who in their forties or fifties go apart. They have had a perfectly decent life together with the child, but they interpreted their union in terms of their relationship through the child. They did not interpret it in terms of their own personal relationship to each other. Marriage is a relationship. When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you’re sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship.“

Joseph Campbell

Many couples get so busy with life when they are working on their careers and raising children that they forget about their relationship.  Everything feels fine because you are starting a family together and building for your future but what you don’t realize is that you are no longer working on your relationship.  Then once the kids get older and don’t need you anymore you feel like you are living with a stranger.  The person you once knew better than anyone else, now isn’t the same because you haven’t put in the work to grow together in the past two decades.  Campbell teaches a great lesson that marriage is a relationship and it’s just as important as parenting or your career, you must continue to work at it. 

Create a Rite of Passage

Many rituals for rites of passage are long gone and children have a hard time transitioning into adulthood.   This is especially true for boys because we don’t have a single event like women do that differentiates them from being girls to young women.  In the past men would have rites of passage that would transition them from boys to men. 

“That’s the significance of the puberty rites. In primal societies, there are teeth knocked out, there are scarifications, there are circumcisions, there are all kinds of things done. So you don’t have your little baby body anymore, you’re something else entirely. When I was a kid, we wore short trousers, you know, knee pants. And then there was a great moment when you put on long pants. Boys now don’t get that. I see even five-year-olds walking around with long trousers. When are they going to know that they’re now men and must put aside childish things?”

Joseph Campbell

  We don’t need to have entire rituals like the old days, but we can plan activities or events to make our kids feel like they are entering a new stage of life.  Some examples would be to go on a wilderness retreat and camp out for a few days.  Whatever you decide to do make it clear that after it’s over they are a young man or woman now, a child no longer. 

Pay Attention to Your Dreams

There is an importance in what we dream about, but many times we give little importance to dreams.  There may be a reason you are dreaming the same thing multiple nights in a row or why the same person keeps coming back into your dream but most of the time we don’t think much of it and forget all about it in a few hours.  In the PBS interview, Moyers asks Campbell how to pay attention to your dreams.

“MOYERS: How do we pay attention to our dreams? CAMPBELL: All you have to do is remember your dream in the first place and write it down. Then take one little fraction of the dream, one or two images or ideas, and associate with them. Write down what comes to your mind, and again what comes to your mind, and again. You’ll find that the dream is based on a body of experiences that have some kind of significance in your life and that you didn’t know were influencing you. Soon the next dream will come along, and your interpretation will go further.”  I would recommend leaving pen and paper on your nightstand to write down what you remember from significant dreams before you forget.  Over time you can start making connections and perhaps pinpoint if something is going on in your life causing you to dream this.”

These are the main lessons I took away from The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell.  The book goes more in-depth into the importance of myths, and how it affects how what we believe in and what we value in life. While the book shows its age in some respects it is also timeless in others.  For the short length, it is worth checking out.

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