The Flight of the Wild Gander

The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension

File:TheFlightOfTheWildGander.jpg Cover of the first edition
Author	Joseph Campbell
Country	United States
Language	English
Series	Collected Works of Joseph Campbell
Subject	Anthropology/Comparative Mythology
Publisher	New World Library
Publication date	First published in 1969. Second edition, 1990. Third edition 2002.
Media type	Print
Pages	192
ISBN	1-57731-210-4
OCLC	49249456
Dewey Decimal	291.1/3 21
LC Class	BL304 .C35 2002

The Flight of the Wild Gander is a 1969 book by mythologist Joseph Campbell, in which he collects a number of his early essays and forwards. Essays include "Bios and Mythos" (on the psycho-biological sources of mythic forms and symbols), "Mythogenesis" (on the rise and fall of a single Native American legend) and "The Symbol without Meaning" (about the secularization of myths in the modern age).

The wild gander of the title is a reference to the Hindu concept of the paramahamsa, a great spiritual teacher of exalted illumination, able to transcend the mundane, just as the hamsa is able to fly above the sky-scraping Himalayas.

Published originally in 1969 by Viking Press, the book was rereleased by Harper and Row in 1990. The third edition was published by New World Library in 2002, making The Flight of the Wild Gander the third title in the Joseph Campbell Foundation's Collected Works of Joseph Campbell series.

External links

• Flight of the Wild Gander page on the JCF site