From Back Cover: Joseph Cambell's multivolume Historical Atals of World Mythology, his magnum opus, marks the culmination of his brilliant career as scholar, writer, teacher, and one of the foremost interreters of our sacred traditions. Campbell describe his work as an attempt to tell humankind's "One Great Story"--Our saga of spiritual awakening and the subsequent development of the many different mythological perspectives that have shaped us throughtout time. His central theme is that our seemingly disparate spiritual traditions are neither discrete nor unique, but rather each is simply an "ethnic manifestation" of one or another of those "elemental ideals" that have forever transfixed the human psyche