Originally published in 1986, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space was the last book Joseph Campbell worked on before his death in 1987. He developed the book from a series of lectures he delivered in San Francisco, which included a legendary symposium at the Palace of Fine Arts with astronaut Rusty Schweickart from which the book draws its title. Here he explores the Space Age, and posits that the newly discovered laws of outer space are actually within us as well, and that a new mythology is implicit in that realization. But what is this new mythology? How can we recognize it? Campbell explores these questions in the concluding essay, "The Way of Art," where he demonstrates that metaphor is the language of art and argues that within the psyches of today's artists are the seeds of tomorrow's mythologies.
Also included in this wide-ranging yet compact collection are Campbell's thoughts on mythology as a function of biology in "Myth and the Body" and his series of essays "Metaphor as Myth and as Religion," where he presented for the first time a fundamental précis or summary of his pioneering work in mythology and comparative religion. As Campbell writes in his introduction: "My desire and great pleasure in the preparation of this little volume has been as rendering a return gift to the Graces for the transforming insights of these recent years, which…we have been testing out in a broadly shared spiritual adventure."
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