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I hate to go against the overwhelmingly positive reviews of this series; but if I am to speak my mind, I shall have to do just that. When the series first aired on PBS, I offered a college course on Campbell's work on mythology. We studied the books, especially The Hero With A Thousand Faces and The Masks of God. Campbell's scholarship has a chip on its shoulder. Joe had an ax to grind against western culture and western religions, especially against Judaism and Christianity. If you pay close attention, you will hear Joe making negative comments about Judaism and Christianity in the programs. Moyers tries to object but he is no match for this master of sophistry. He says he finds the western religions "too negative" because they recognize an irreducible dimension of evil which is introduced into the world by free will gone wrong. Campbell is a professed Gnostic, someone who thinks evil is just another dimension of reality and therefore necessary to reality. He refuses to distinguish pain and suffering which are natural from moral wrong doing which is not. Moreover Campbell is hostile to the western philosophical tradition and denigrates the Greek notion of nous or intelligence which ironically he himself seems unaware he is trying to display in his exuberant retelling and reinterpreting of traditional religious myths albeit for his own purposes. He puts himself in the odd position of being an anti-intellectual intellectual. This is not uncommon for Gnostics. If you want to see the difference between a Gnostic view of reality and the philosophical or Western religious view, then consider how different Spielberg's treatment of evil in Schlindler's List is from Lucas's treatment of it in the Star Wars series. In the former it cannot be tolerated and must be eliminated; in the latter it is just the "dark side" of reality. These views are incompatible. Either one or both are mistaken. I think the Gnostic view is mistaken because it by-passes responsibility and allows the perpetration of horrible crimes and even justifies the latter. Each interpreter must decide for themselves, but I believe Campbell is a very dangerous proponent of Gnostic views precisely because he is so rhetorically seductive. I am not surprised that many people today find his work and his views enlightening. But I could say what Leo Strauss, a cantankerous old scholar with impeccable credentials and a body of work more impressive than Campbell's by a long shot said about the European Enlightenment: Campbell's work represents a lucus a non lucendo.