June 19, 2017:
Joseph Campbell took it all back.
His famous early work The Hero With a Thousand Faces is Jungian. The Hero Myth is so similar around the world because it reflects and is a product of the collective unconscious.
His mature work The Masks of God is diffusionist. The Hero Myth and many others are similar around the world because they originate in historically definite cultural matrices then spread, and adapt, in contact with local conditions.
The immature problematic is ahistorical; the mature is evolutionary. The first is mystical, the second scientific.
It's remarkable that Campbell's radical rejection of his earlier work is so seldom acknowledged. It's disappointing that George Lucas, Richard Bartle and others accept the immature work while displaying no familiarity with the work which rightly supersedes it.