ABSTRACT
Joseph Campbell saw the comparative method as a very important part of the contemporary study of mythology, as an approach allowing individuals to avoid some of the projection of what Jung calls “the shadow” onto others in a political or a social sense. With the discovery of the New World and the subsequent settlement of the area now known as the United States of America a process began of adapting myths—or aspects of myths—which had much earlier come to birth in traditional settings. In general skeptical of exclusive reliance on rationality, Campbell is attracted to the aspects of democracy which favor the internal development of the individual, whom he sees as the present and future residence of living myth. Campbell saw the central living mythic element of America as the theme of the hero-as-individual. Campbell values the continuation of “creative mythology” in general into the nineteenth century and into the period of literary modernism.
