Myths to Live By | Themes

Myths to Live By Themes

The Imprint of Mythology on the Human Mind

Campbell deals compassionately even with cultures who performed ritual sacrifice of people living in villages surrounding their own, and burn the wives of dead husbands on the funeral pyre because he understands that man is designed to identify and worship a divine mind, and without formal education available about what the mind our minds long to connect with is, humanity will make something up to fill in the gap. He reaches this conclusion about the human mind after having spent the greater part of his life studying mythologies and finding among them a common mythological structure, and then having the idea presented to him that the very structure he was finding in common between religious mythologies could be present in human dreams and psychoses as well.

He also points to mythological stories such as the Garden of Eden in the Bible and the Buddhist story of the...
(read more)