The Shaping of the Eastern Tradition. After Joseph Campbell, we never thought of myths as just "stories" again. He helped us understand that the tales we tell, our traditional narratives, are evidence of our own nature and can be used to discover our identity. Shortly before his death in 1987, Campbell delivered a series of lectures that marked the culmination of six decades of discovery and groundbreaking analysis. The result was nothing less than a new perspective on humanity.