The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Midrash Rabbah, commentary on Genesis (Midrash Rabbah, Genesis). Campbell’s source is uncertain. There is a recent translation by Jacob Neusner, Genesis Rabbah: The Judaic Commentary to the Book of Genesis (Atlanta: Scholar Press for Brown Judaic Studies, 1985).

Zohar. Quotations from C.G. Ginsburg, The Kabbalah: Its Doctrines, Development, and Literature (London, 1920); also from MacGregor Mathers, Kabbala Denudata, the Kabbalah Unveiled, which uses a different versification from the standard one. Christian

Bible. The King James version is quoted.

Catholic Daily Missal. Probably Saint Andrew Daily Missal, by Dom Gaspar Lefebvre O.S.B. of the Abbey of S. André (Bruges, Belgium: Abbey of St. André; Saint Paul, MN: E.M. Lohmann Co., [1943?]).

Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. Edition uncertain.

Roman Missal. Edition uncertain. Islamic

Koran. Quotations match the text of The Holy Qur-An: Text, Translation and Commentary. Translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali (New York, [1946?]). Works Cited Without Edition

Anthologia Graeca ad Fidem Codicis, vol. II.

Apollonios of Rhodes (Apollonius Rhodius). Argonautika.

Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History.

Epiphanius. Adversus Heareses (apocryphal Gospel of Eve quoted).

Euripides. The Bacchae (translated by Gilbert Murray).

Flaubert, Gustave. La tentation de Saint Antoine.

Gesta Romanorum.

Grimm’s Fairy Tales. “The Frog King.” [Campbell’s quotations from this story do not match the text of the 1944 Pantheon edition, nor the older text of the Hunt translation. It is possible that he was translating from a German edition. — R.B.]

Heraclitus (fragments).

Hesiod. Theogony.

Irving, Washington. “Rip van Winkle.” In The Sketch Book.

Jeffers, Robinson. Cawdor. Copyright 1928.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. The Song of Hiawatha.

Martial. Epigrams (Loeb Library edition).

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Plato. Symposium.

Plutarch. “Themistocles.”

Rumi. Mathnawi.

Shakespeare. Hamlet.

Sophocles. Oedipus Coloneus.

——— . Oedipus Tyrannus.

Thomas Aquinas. Summa Contra Gentiles.

Thompson, Francis. The Hound of Heaven.

Virgil. Aeneid.

Voragine, Jacobus de. The Golden Legend. No edition is given for this influential medieval compilation of the lives of saints. Campbell owned a 1925 French edition entitled La légende dorée, traduite du latin par Teodor de Wyzewa (Paris: Perrin, 1925).

About Joseph Campbell

Over one hundred years ago, on March 26th in 1904, Joseph John Campbell was born in White Plains, NY. Joe, as he came to be known, was the first child of a middle-class, Roman Catholic couple, Charles and Josephine Campbell.

Joe’s earliest years were largely unremarkable; but then, when he was seven years old, his father took him and his younger brother, Charlie, to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. The evening was a high-point in Joe’s life; for, although the cowboys were clearly the show’s stars, as Joe would later write, he “became fascinated, seized, obsessed, by the figure of a naked American Indian with his ear to the ground, a bow and arrow in his hand, and a look of special knowledge in his eyes.”

It was Arthur Schopenhauer, the philosopher whose writings would later greatly influence Campbell, who observed that

…the experiences and illuminations of childhood and early youth become in later life the types, standards and patterns of all subsequent knowledge and experience, or as it were, the categories according to which all later things are classified — not always consciously, however. And so it is that in our childhood years the foundation is laid of our later view of the world, and there with as well of its superficiality or depth: it will be in later years unfolded and fulfilled, not essentially changed.