"The Hero with a Thousand Faces"

It's the most chewy book that has come my way lately. Joseph Campbell's deep voice entrances:

• Religions, philosophies, arts,... the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.
• The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.
  
• There is (nothing) to alleviate the bitter majesty, but utter darkness, the void of unfulfillment, to receive and eat back the lives that have been tossed forth from the womb only to fail.
  

The various strands of his theory:

• The doctor is the modern master of the mythological realm, the knower of all the secret ways and words of potency.
• It may well be that the very high incidence of neuroticism among ourselves follows from the decline among us of such effective spiritual aid. We remain fixated to the unexorcised images of our infancy... In the United States there is even a pathos of inverted emphasis: the goal is not to grow old, but to remain young.
  
• ... the giant of self-achieved independence is the world's messenger of disaster, even though, in his mind, he may entertain himself with humane intentions. ... The hero is the man of self-achieved submission.
  
• Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible.
  
• The World Navel is the symbol of the continuous creation: the mystery of the maintenance of the world through that continuous miracle of vivification which wells within all things.
  
• Virtue is but the pedagogical prelude to the culminating insight, which goes beyond all pairs of opposites.