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The comparative study of the mythologies of the world compels us to view the cultural history of mankind as a unit; for we see that such themes as the Firetheft, Deluge, Land of the Dead, Virgin Birth and Resurrected Hero have a worldwide distribution ... No human society has yet been found in which such mythological motifs have not been rehearsed in liturgies; interpreted by seers, poets, theologians, or philosophers; presented in art; magnified in song; and ecstatically experienced in life-empowering visions.
Joseph Campbell (1997:10)
The Mythic Dimension
1. Introduction
Of all the many products created and consumed by a culture, perhaps none is more central to its sense of identity than mythology. Consumer researchers have made sporadic inquiries regarding mythology over the past several years (see e.g., Levy 1981; Hirschman 1987; Stern 1995) arguing that we may come to better understand behavior by examining the stories people both consume and construct. What I wish to do in the present inquiry is investigate more directly the roles which cultural myths play in consumers' lives. To assist this effort, I draw upon the large body of work conducted by the late Joseph Campbell. Over the course of his extremely fertile career, Campbell produced voluminous studies of comparative mythology, examining the mythic products of cultures ranging from ancient Sumerian and Akkadian narratives to contemporary American motion pictures (see e.g., Campbell, 1968, 1973, 1974, 1988).
Along this journey, Campbell noted not only the similarity of mythic structures across time and locale, but also the consistency with which myths served four valuable functions in each culture: metaphysical, cosmological, sociological and psychological. Each of these functions will be described in depth and applied to consumers' stories about their favorite motion pictures and television shows-the two primary means of transmitting mythic stories in present day American culture (see O'Guinn and Shrum 1997; SiIverstone 1991).
As I shall show, mythic narratives are often retold by their consumers in allegorical form (see e.g., Huizinga 1924; Stern 1989; Lewis 1959), using specific characters as examples of personification, i.e., the embodiment of cultural concepts, such as virgin and whore. This approach seeks to advance empirically recent projects suggesting that much consumer "thought" is, in fact, image-based (see Zaltman 1997), and that these images are woven...