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John Ebert's suggestions
John Ebert: Such a list here, as I'm sure you know, would be endless. Therefore, I will list what I consider to be the absolute basics without which a knowledge of mythology and its applications cannot be properly understood.
- Primary Works of World Literature:
(This list could be quite long, but here I have kept it to the most important works) - The Gilgamesh Epic
- Popular Stories of Ancient Egypt edited by Gaston Maspero
- The Rig Veda
- The Upanishads
- The Mahabharata
- The Ramayana
- The Journey to the West
- The Three Kingdoms
- The Nihongi
- The Kojiki
- The Kalevala
- The Nart Sagas
- The Russian byliny
- The Iliad
- The Odyssey
- Hesiod’s Theogony
- The plays of Aeschylus & Sophocles
- Plato’s Timaeus
- The Argonautica by Apollonius Rhodius
- Ovid’s Metamorphoses
- The Greek Alexander Romance
- The Old and New Testaments
- The Nag Hammadi Library
- The Mwindo Epic
- Sundiata
- The Arabian Nights
- The Shah-Namah
- The Conference of the Birds
- Layla & Majnun
- The Tain
- The Poetic Eddas
- History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth
- Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach
- Tristan & Isolde by Gottfried von Strassburg
- The Quest of the Holy Grail
- The Popol Vuh
- Watunna
- The Book of the Hopi
- Grimm’s Fairy Tales
- Fiction & Literature:
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- Classic:
- Faust I & II by Goethe (especially Part II, which is little read and is actually the more important)
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Moby Dick
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche
- Modernist:
- Ulysses
- Finnegans Wake
- The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
- Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann
- Post-Modern:
- V by Thomas Pynchon
- Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
- Shikasta by Doris Lessing
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Neuromancer by William Gibson
- The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie
- Film:
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Apocalypse Now
- Star Wars
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind
- Aguirre: the Wrath of God
- Solaris (Tarkovsky version)
- Just by studying these six films alone, the attentive student can find out almost anything about myth that he or she needs to know.
- Poetry:
- The narrative poems of Robinson Jeffers are absolutely essential.
- Also, the poetry of Heinrich Holderlin.
- “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot
- The “Duino Elegies” and “Sonnets to Orpheus” by Rilke
- Artists:
- Arnold Bocklin
- Franz Stuck
- Picasso
- Paul Klee
- Jackson Pollock (the early, pre-drip paintings)
- Odd Nerdrum
- Damien Hirst
- Bill Viola (video artist)
- Opera:
- Anything by Wagner
- Mozart’s Magic Flute
- Non-Fiction:
- Mother Right by J.J. Bachofen
- The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche
- The Golden Bough by James Frazer
- The Psychology of the Unconscious by Carl Jung
- Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud
- The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler
- The Ever Present Origin by Jean Gebser
- The King and the Corpse by Heinrich Zimmer
- Myths and Symbols in Indian Art & Civilization by Heinrich Zimmer
- The Hero With a Thousand Faces and The Masks of God by Joseph Campbell
- The White Goddess by Robert Graves
- A History of Religious Ideas Vols. I & II by Mircea Eliade
- Hamlet’s Mill by Hertha von Dechend
- Revisioning Psychology by James Hillman
- The Reflexive Universe by Arthur Young
- The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light and Coming into Being by William Irwin Thompson
- Plato Prehistorian by Mary Settegast
- Websites:
- Encyclopedia Mythica
- Cinemadiscourse.com (my own site)
- Sacred Texts (this site has lots of primary texts)
- Mythicjourneys.org (many of my essays have appeared on this site, but it also has lots of excellent myth studies essays which appear every month)
- Primary Works of World Literature: