Mythic Worlds

In 1927, as a twenty-three-year-old postgraduate scholar in Paris, Joseph Campbell first encountered James Joyce’s Ulysses. Known for being praised and for kicking up controversy (including an obscenity trial in the United States in 1920), the novel left Campbell both intrigued and confused, as it had many others. Because he was in Paris, he was able to visit the Shakespeare & Company bookstore - the outpost of the original publisher of Ulysses, Sylvia Beach. She gave him “clues” for reading Ulysses, and that, Campbell attested, changed his career.

Before he was the engaging professor who brought mythology into people’s living rooms through his conversations with Bill Moyers, before he became known as the thinker whose ideas influenced Star Wars, and before his now-beloved phrase “follow your bliss” entered the popular lexicon, Joseph Campbell was a young man who tried his hand at writing fiction. After years of Depression-era unemployment, when he lived off money he had earned playing saxophone and read the world’s great literature in a syllabus of his own design, Campbell published his first short story.

Hades is as handsome as the devil and just as deceptive. A dark-haired, light-eyed arms dealer who steals my breath away. When he finds me after months of captivity, he sweeps me off my feet. With his rough Scottish burr, he tells me that I'm his. Hades swears that he never thought he would lay eyes on me again. I haltingly tell him that I'm carrying his child. Hades has claimed me as his queen. Together, we will face terrible challenges. And if we are to survive, we may have to make the ultimate sacrifice.