The Hero With A Thousand Faces

Some months ago I watched the documentary Zeitgiest. It is a film released for free online, and can be seen at Google Video. The author is kind of paranoid but nevertheless the documentary is interesting, artistic special and worth a look. It is split into three parts: Religion, 9/11 and The National Bank.

The 9/11 part is about how the author believes that George W. Bush and the government was behind the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon. He shows several "proves" of this and it does make you think. Back in 2001 George W. Bush had just won a controversial election (the missing ballots of Florida and the Supreme Court ruling stuff) and his popularity was decreasing. After the attack he got much more popular, or at least the people started to support their leader. Back then I did get the idea that maybe George W. Bush had been behind the attacks just to gain popularity, but I must say it seems very drastic and way to risky to do in the world we live in today - it might have worked some hundred years ago (of course if he was behind it, it did work and I got fooled :P ).

The National Bank part is about how the National Bank creates the money (the paper) and loan it to the state with interest. The state then needs money to pay the National Bank back which they get by loaning more money. This is the cause of inflation as the more money is created the less value they have. It is an endless spiral that only benefits the National Bank. The author attacks this pretty hard explaining how the system got into place and that it is created by big businessmen who only wants more money. It seems like a stupid system but so does many others.

Even though these two parts are interesting the first part is the most interesting. It basically explains how religion is used to control the masses. According to the author both the 9/11 attacks and the National Bank system are their to have the same purpose. He also explains how the character Jesus Christ is a big fat metaphor for the Sun which civilisations have worshipped for centuries. He explain the astrology behind it and how many other religions follow the exact same pattern. It also explains how much of the Christian religion is a copy of the Egyptian religion. I find this very interesting and I looked a bit more into it. One of the books used as a reference in the film, which is also mentioned several other places as an interesting book in this area, is The Hero With A Thousand Faces written by Joseph Campbell in 1949. This book explains how mythologies, religions, folk tales, etc. all follow the same pattern - the human life cycle. It focuses on the hero of the story and what he must go through. It has been used by many of today's authors for when they created their hero and his/her journey. One everybody know is George Lucas who have used the book when he created the Star Wars films. Several Disney films, and maybe even The Matrix, should also have been based on the book!

That was a long way just to tell you that I have bought a new book! :o

A third edition of "The Hero With A Thousand Faces" were released in 2008 and I started to search the web for places to buy it. First thing I noticed was that it seems to be only available in English, so guess I could go international when looking for it. I found it on Amazon for $14.93 (~75 dkr), but Amazon have a ridicules high shipping rate for books (~65 dkr) which almost doubles the price. Then I found it on the Danish site Saxo.com for 129 dkr, where I had ordered both Dan Brown's Angels and Daemons and the complete Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson. Together with the much lower shipping rate it was almost the same price as Amazon, so I rather buy it from a Danish company if anything should happen :P .

I received it last week, but so far I've only read two chapters - I have a shitload of other stuff to read, you know :P . It is not the easiest English I've read but it is still quite interesting. Looking forward to finish reading it and maybe learn something o.0 .

In the future I will try to add at least one image to my blog entries. Of course only if it is possible to find an image that fits the content. I have also changed it so that each line will try to fill the whole page by stretching, also known as justified margins or something like that.