A wide-ranging conversation between mythologist Joseph Campbell and journalist Bill Moyers, recorded for the acclaimed PBS television series. Across eight thematic dialogues, Campbell draws on world mythology, religion, art, and literature to explore how myths give shape to human life, and how their recurring symbols and hero journeys still speak to the modern world.
Books mentioned in The Power of Myth (23)
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis: “Have you ever read Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt?”
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri: “That is the problem of Dante's Divine Comedy, too.”
Inferno by Dante Alighieri: “MOYERS: I remember in Dante's Inferno, as Dante is looking on the great lovers of history in hell, he sees Helen, and he sees Cleopatra, and he sees Tristan.”
The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: “Eliot's The Waste Land that you are describing, a sociological stagnation of inauthentic lives and living that has settled upon us.”
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “Yes, that's the figure that in Goethe's Faust is represented by Mephistopheles.”
Symposium by Plato: “The Greek legend that Aristophanes tells in Plato's Symposium is another of this kind.”
The Golden Ass by Apuleius: “That comes in Apuleius' Golden Ass, second century A.D.”
The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud: “CAMPBELL: Ever since Freud's Interpretation of Dreams was published, there has been a recognition of the importance of dreams.”
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake: “But then William Blake says in his wonderful series of aphorisms The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "As I was walking among the fires of hell..."”
Tonio Kröger by Thomas Mann: “Take, for example, the story of Tonio, in Thomas Mann's Tonio Kröger.”
The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell: “When I heard the news of his death, I tarried awhile in the copy he had given me of The Hero with a Thousand Faces.”
The Way of the Animal Powers by Joseph Campbell: “When I read your works—The Masks of God, or The Way of the Animal Powers, or The Mythic Image—I often come across images of the circle.”
The Masks of God by Joseph Campbell: “When I read your works—The Masks of God, or The Way of the Animal Powers, or The Mythic Image—I often come across images of the circle.”
The Mythic Image by Joseph Campbell: “MOYERS: You write in The Mythic Image about the center of transformation, the idea of a sacred place where the temporal walls may dissolve to reveal a wonder.”
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by Joseph Campbell: “When I was writing A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, I tried every way I knew to imagine, "What the dickens is this number 1132?"”
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce: “Paul's Epistle to the Romans and came across a curious sentence that seemed to epitomize everything Joyce had had in mind in Finnegans Wake.”
Ulysses by James Joyce: “Then I recalled that in Ulysses, while Bloom is wandering about the streets of Dublin, a ball drops...”
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes: “Don Quixote was the last hero of the Middle Ages.”
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: “CAMPBELL: That is a problem Tolstoy dealt with in War and Peace.”
The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats: “Grateful acknowledgment is made... for permission to quote from "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats.”
In a Dark Time by Theodore Roethke: “MOYERS: Like Roethke's poem, "In a Dark Time, the Eye Begins to See."”
Tao Te Ching by Laozi: “There is an often-quoted verse in Sanskrit, which appears in the Chinese Tao-te Ching as well: "He who thinks he knows, doesn't know."”