When I was reviewing Forgotten Yorkshire Folk and Fairytales, I wondered about how myths and other tales travel across countries. As a respond, Warren suggested that I read The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. Unfortunately, only four libraries in Singapore have the book, so I decided to read The Power of Myth first, since that’s available as an ebook and was in my TBR list anyway.

The Power of Myth is a pretty long book, but the gist of it goes like this: Myths have traditionally been used to help its listeners grow up and adjust to society. As Campbell defines it, myths are “stories about the wisdom of life” and without a powerful mythology, “society has provided them [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community”, resulting in a violent society where people don’t know how to grow up and behave as adults. This theme is pretty much repeated in various forms for different topics.

I thought that the book brought up lots of good points about the power of myths in regulating society, how myths have lots of similarities, and how it can be important to us, but I don’t know if I agree with it all. There are lots of eloquently written reviews about the great parts of the book, so I think I’ll focus on the two issues that I don’t quite agree on (or rather, that I’m still thinking over):

First, the idea of all rituals being equally valid. There’s a pretty horrific (at least to me) ritual described in a book, where part of the ritual to adulthood consists of the boys raping one girl, and one of the boys and the girl being killed during intercourse. After that, the “little couple is pulled out and roasted and eaten that very evening”. It may be my modern sensibilities talking, but that is a terrible ritual – to have a girl sacrificed just so that these boys can become ‘men’. To me, it doesn’t seem necessary at all for women to be sacrificed just for this. And a lot of the examples he cites seem very sexist – most of them are for males, and when Moyers asked about the female version, Campbell basically says that a woman’s initiation to adulthood is through her first period and the typical female rite of passage is to “sit in a little hut for a certain number of days and realise what she is” (aka “the vehicle of life”), without mentioning what happens to women who accidentally learn about the male rites (apart from that sacrificial girl). I have actually just read an article which details how these male rituals are normally kept secret and women who stumble across them (accidentally or not) end up getting raped and/or killed. Are these societies really what we want to take reference from? I understand the impulse not to look down on other societies because they are different, but surely we can at least be able to recognise sexist and dangerous patterns of behaviour to women when they are present and reject them.

Second, Campbell’s interpretation of Christianity is pretty far from the mainstream. I wouldn’t really mind if it’s just an interpretation, but some of what he says goes beyond being a minority position to not-true. The most glaring one is the statement that “The virgin birth comes into Christianity by the way of the Greek tradition. When you read the four gospels, for example, the only one in which the virgin birth appears is the Gospel According to Luke and Luke was a Greek.” To say this, you have to ignore Matthew 1:18 – “This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about: his mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit.” (NIV) which pretty clearly states that Mary was a virgin (verse 25 of the same chapter also states that Mary and Joseph didn’t consummate their relationship until after she gave birth). There’s also other evidence like Isaiah’s prophecy and how Mark and Paul write about Jesus’s parentage, but people do try to argue from evidence against that.

As for minority positions in Christianity, examples include the claim of the gospels being written much later than they are and being extremely contradictory, without any mention that these are minority positions in Christian scholarship. I expect this from Dan Brown but not here – I would have thought that there would at least be a mention of how the issue isn’t as settled as he makes it seem. While I don’t think there will ever be a consensus because people can be very firm in their desired interpretation of the evidence, but I find the evidence for late-date gospels and contradictory gospels to be completely unconvincing and I would expect scholars to at least acknowledge that the issue isn’t ‘resolved. Campbell also talks about the December 25 celebration of Jesus’s birth being taken from Mithras as fact, when the issue of whether it’s so isn’t settled; I have read theories that this could be taken from a more general Winter Solstice celebration rather than a specific Mithras-related date, or that it’s because of a commonly-held idea that prophets live exact lives and backwards calculation results in a December 25 date.

While I am not familiar with the other myths and religions mentioned in the book, the fact that the things he says about Christianity are not mainstream or as one-sided/settled as he makes it sound makes me wonder if the things he says about other religions is a common interpretation or something or opposite.

Overall, I think that this book is interesting. The interview format was pretty easy to read and there were a lot of myths that I haven’t heard before. That said, I don’t agree with some of what he says and I’m not sure how much of the things he mentions are standard interpretation and how much are things that do not have broad support. I am still going to read The Hero With A Thousand Faces, but I’ll probably be a lot more careful about believing everything he says.