The Hero with 1000 Faces

I like Joseph Campbell. I think sometimes he prooftexts, and other times just makes things up, but I still think he lived and breathed mythology purely and completely, and that's not a bad thing. He was also probably the closest thing to Yoda this world has seen, except for maybe Cheng Man Ch'ing.

I've been reading the occidental volume of The Masks of God in my (!) spare time, and I was happy when Campbell offered that Thor is older than the rest of the Norse pantheon, and probably goes back to the Paleolithic. Not the Bronze Age. Not the late Neolithic. The Paleolithic.

Says the guru "...amulet miniatures of his hammer have for centuries been worn to afford protection. At Stockholm, the museum holds one of amber from a late paleolithic date, and from the early metal ages fifty or more tiny T-shaped hammers of silver and gold have been collected. In fact, even to the present - or, at least, to the first years of the present century - Manx fishermen have been accustomed to wear the T-shaped bone from the tongue of a sheep (Yeri's note: Thor's rams, Tangnr and Tangnost) to protect them from the sea; and in German slaughterhouses workers have been seen with the same bone suspended from their necks."

Cool. Now what about this guy?