Mythic Worlds

In 1927, as a twenty-three-year-old postgraduate scholar in Paris, Joseph Campbell first encountered James Joyce’s Ulysses. Known for being praised and for kicking up controversy (including an obscenity trial in the United States in 1920), the novel left Campbell both intrigued and confused, as it had many others. Because he was in Paris, he was able to visit the Shakespeare & Company bookstore - the outpost of the original publisher of Ulysses, Sylvia Beach. She gave him “clues” for reading Ulysses, and that, Campbell attested, changed his career.

This work presents twelve eclectic, far-ranging, and brilliant essays exploring myth in all its dimensions: its history; its influence on art, literature, and culture; and its role in everyday life. This second volume of Campbell’s essays (following The Flight of the Wild Gander) brings together his uncollected writings from 1959 to 1987. Written at the height of Campbell’s career - and showcasing the lively intelligence that made him the twentieth century’s premier writer on mythology - these essays investigate links between myth, the individual, and societies ancient and contemporary.

Before he was the engaging professor who brought mythology into people’s living rooms through his conversations with Bill Moyers, before he became known as the thinker whose ideas influenced Star Wars, and before his now-beloved phrase “follow your bliss” entered the popular lexicon, Joseph Campbell was a young man who tried his hand at writing fiction. After years of Depression-era unemployment, when he lived off money he had earned playing saxophone and read the world’s great literature in a syllabus of his own design, Campbell published his first short story.

Sam Keen, best-selling author of Fire in the Belly, and Anne Valley-Fox combine their talents to help today's men and women rediscover the mythic dimension in their own daily lives.

Before Rome. Before Persia. Before Egypt's pyramids were old. One man invented empire. Around 2334 BCE, a cupbearer of mysterious origins seized the throne of Kish and built something the world had never seen: a single state governing multiple peoples, languages, and gods across thousands of miles of Mesopotamian heartland. His name was Sargon. His dynasty would last five generations. His experiment would shape every empire that followed.

The Origins of Shintoism is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history and culture of Japan, as well as for those interested in the development and evolution of religions around the world.