The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor As Myth and As Religion (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell)

Joseph Campbell's Final Completed Book

Developed from a memorable series of lectures delivered in San Francisco, which included a legendary symposium at the Palace of Fine Arts with astronaut Rusty Schweickart, Joseph Campbell's last book explores the space age. Campbell posits that the newly discovered laws of outer space are actually at work within human beings as well and that a new mythology is implicit in this realization. He examines the new mythology and other questions in these essays which he described as "a broadly shared spiritual adventure."

In this work, beloved mythologist Joseph Campbell explores the Space Age. He posits that the laws of outer space are actually within us as well, and that a new mythology is implicit in that realization. But what is this new mythology? How can we recognize it? Campbell explores these questions in the concluding essay, "The Way of Art," in which he demonstrates that metaphor is the language of art and argues that within the psyches of today's artists are the seeds of tomorrow's mythologies.

Campbell writes in his introduction: "My desire and great pleasure in the preparation of this little volume has been as rendering a return gift to the Graces for the transforming insights of these recent years, which…we have been testing out in a broadly shared spiritual