Has anyone on Veeky Forums read this book?
Do monomyths make sense?
Monomyths
Caleb Phillips
Christopher Stewart
No
But I'm guessing the idea of the monomyth is derived from comparing hero stories and finding similar elements that cross them and ignoring when some stories lack those elements
However I'm not sure I entirely agree since from what I know about mythological studies only a few ancient cultures are classified as actually having a heroic age and thus a massive wealth of heroes to draw on- most others only have a few heroes- such as Sumeria having Gilgamesh. The majority of these cultures are also Indo-European in origin, so being able to compare the similarities of Cuchulainn and Hercules and Beowulf and see that they have a lot of elements in common isn't really surprising.
Other ancient cultures like Egypt aren't really big on the "mortal goes around doing tons of heroic shit" type of myth but instead have a much stronger religious culture centered around their gods. I'm just speculating but this might be because it didn't really serve the purposes of the god-kings of Egypt to have random half-gods in myth running around doing stuff, since that would undermine the divinity of the pharoah.
Kayden Walker
Yeah it's an interesting theory and a good read. Best to take it with a pinch of salt, as anyone's ideas though.
Jordan Ward
>The title is some variation of "The [character] with/who/that ..."
That's a dead giveaway on how shit its going to be.
William Moore
Campbell based his ideas on Jung, so that does make me skeptical if all his ideas are valid. I was interested in it, but would rather just read a contemporary and plain anthropological textbook that deals with myth.
I am curious how new findings in psychology match with myths and myth making.
If anyone knows a good (text)book that deals with it, please let me know.
Brayden Adams
>I'm fucking retarded: The post
Dominic Barnes
This is incorrect. Campbell specifically focuses on Egyptian mythology to emphasize similarities with Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Ancient greek myths, such as the Journey to and back from the underworld by Osiris, the virgin birth and savior/messianic elements of Horus, the ancient cosmology of the sky deity coming down to embrace the earth and create from unity a universe of opposites, etc. He draws parallels between folk tales of African trickster gods and those of Ancient Greek and Roman mythology, finds through lines of the hero quest in tales from ancient American indians, east asian, and indo-european tribal groups that seem to convincingly enforce his thesis of the monomyth.
However, most of his thought is staunchly Freudian and Jungian, and if you don't agree with the notion of universal faculties of the human unconscious or the interpretive power of psychoanalysis, you may not find much here other than a survey of folk myths with some considerable similarities. It's also possible that he has ignored folk myths without these facets of the monomyth that he advocates in order to selectively bolster his thesis. I haven't read a ton of comparative anthropologists so I don't know what the pervading accepted academic theory is, but I've also read Levi-Strauss who advocates similar universality of the mythic structure
Isaac Ortiz
I can tell you that there is a theory that myths share common ancestory. Note nothing like the Jung or Freud stuff.
Jonathan Phillips
I believe that it's also not crazy to think that different people in different times had similar thoughts
Wyatt Richardson
Jungian pseudo mystic bullshit
I refer to any serious thinkers interested in the topic to pic related