Description
Review
“Campbell has become one of the rarest of intellectuals in American life: a serious thinker who has been embraced by the popular culture.” — Newsweek
“Campbell excels in telling the stories themselves — which feature brahmins and yogis, gods and monsters, as they disguise themselves as charioteers, eat themselves up and spy on mortals — and in his glancing descriptions of traditions foreign to us: Japanese ‘play language, ‘ an exceedingly polite mode of speech, for instance, or Jainism’s insistence on quenching ‘all desire for life.’…A solid primer.”
— Publishers Weekly
Editor’s foreword (an excerpt):
By the time Joseph Campbell returned from his yearlong journey to Asia in 1955, he had undergone a literally life-changing experience. Since his chance meeting with Jiddu Krishnamurti on a transatlantic liner in 1924, Campbell had been fascinated with the myths and religions of what was then universally known as the Orient. During his graduate studies in Europe, he had been introduced to the ideas of Western thinkers such as C. G. Jung, Adolph Bastian, and the Romantic philosophers of the nineteenth century, all of whom had been profoundly influenced by Oriental thought and imagery…
~ Campbell, Joseph. Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell Book 6) Joseph Campbell Foundation. Kindle Edition.
