This book is brilliant yet flawed. I've also read some of the reviews of this book as inspiration, and it feels as if the positive and negative reviewers read two different books.

Positive reviews seem focused on the essays on the spiritual nature of man, on how myth effects us and on how the destruction of myth by science - so that we know myths aren't true - is eroding the human experience in a way that makes the modern man (or woman) feel empty. He writes about this very effectively in both the prologue and the epilogue, and it pushed me to think about myth and religion in a new light.

Negative reviews put more light on Part I: The Adventure of the Hero. This section, making up a little over half the book, is perhaps why the book is so well known, and it's where Campbell lays out his theory for all the things that occur in a prototypical "hero's journey."

Critics point out - rightly - that not all the steps of the Hero's journey exist in every myth or epic tale. To me this is disingenuous to the way Campbell presented his theory. He states very clearly that not every myth contains every element of the hero's journey. For example, some stories end in the very beginning, with the hero refusing to heed the call to adventure - and that's the end. He also states that not all stories follow the path in a strictly linear fashion; some repeat one or another set of steps multiple times (often in threes). Further, these steps are very abstract, so that "refusal of the call [to adventure]" may mean a refusal of either the hero or a refusal of others to allow the hero to proceed. The adventure itself may be a physical adventure, a spiritual one, or even a psychological adventure.

So I would ask, if you can skip any step, and the steps can be analyzed in such an abstract manner, and you can do the steps in virtually any order, and possibly even repeat some of them, how can you write a story that doesn't follow this pattern? So perhaps a more fitting criticism than "the Hero's journey doesn't apply to all stories" might be, "the Hero's journey is so vague as to be meaningless." And yet, Campbell lays out common archetypes for events that may pass in a story. Perhaps these events are not an exhaustive list, and perhaps Campbell was too confident that he had found the one and only "monomyth" shared by all stories, but it is nevertheless a valiant attempt to characterize the vast body of myth and legend.

During Part I, where Campbell runs into trouble is with his citations of dream analysis and other Freudian based psychological research. Science in this realm has been pretty thoroughly debunked, but I think I would still argue that the work is a product of its time, and Freudian psychology was very much in vogue when he wrote this piece. Campbell more than makes up for this issue with his fascinating inclusions of myths from all over the world - China, Europe, Africa, the Americas - everywhere. It was very interesting to be exposed to such a vast body of literature through Campbell's curation.

Where I got frustrated with this book was in Part II. It was, to put it mildly, a bit of a slog. In some sections there was so much quotation of other work and so little of Campbell's analysis that it was difficult to tell what point he was even trying to make. The titles of the sections seemed poorly matched to the contents, and it seemed sometimes as though Campbell wasn't even quite sure what topic he was trying to cover in a given section. So the organization of this work in Part II was horrendous. While there were some interesting tidbits interspersed, they were hard-won