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The Masks of God #4
The Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology
This volume explores the whole inner story of modern culture since the Dark Ages, treating modern man's unique position as the creator of his own mythology.
752 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1968
About the author
Joseph Campbell
361 books5,413 followersJoseph Campbell was an American author and teacher best known for his work in the field of comparative mythology. He was born in New York City in 1904, and from early childhood he became interested in mythology. He loved to read books about American Indian cultures, and frequently visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he was fascinated by the museum's collection of totem poles.
Campbell was educated at Columbia University, where he specialized in medieval literature, and continued his studies at universities in Paris and Munich. While abroad he was influenced by the art of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, the novels of James Joyce and Thomas Mann, and the psychological studies of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. These encounters led to Campbell's theory that all myths and epics are linked in the human psyche, and that they are cultural manifestations of the universal need to explain social, cosmological, and spiritual realities.
After a period in California, where he encountered John Steinbeck and the biologist Ed Ricketts, he taught at the Canterbury School, and then, in 1934, joined the literature department at Sarah Lawrence College, a post he retained for many years. During the 40s and '50s, he helped Swami Nikhilananda to translate the Upanishads and The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. He also edited works by the German scholar Heinrich Zimmer on Indian art, myths, and philosophy. In 1944, with Henry Morton Robinson, Campbell published A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. His first original work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, came out in 1949 and was immediately well received; in time, it became acclaimed as a classic. In this study of the "myth of the hero," Campbell asserted that there is a single pattern of heroic journey and that all cultures share this essential pattern in their various heroic myths. In his book he also outlined the basic conditions, stages, and results of the archetypal hero's journey.
Throughout his life, he traveled extensively and wrote prolifically, authoring many books, including the four-volume series The Masks of God, Myths to Live By, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space and The Historical Atlas of World Mythology. Joseph Campbell died in 1987. In 1988, a series of television interviews with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, introduced Campbell's views to millions of people.
Campbell was educated at Columbia University, where he specialized in medieval literature, and continued his studies at universities in Paris and Munich. While abroad he was influenced by the art of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, the novels of James Joyce and Thomas Mann, and the psychological studies of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. These encounters led to Campbell's theory that all myths and epics are linked in the human psyche, and that they are cultural manifestations of the universal need to explain social, cosmological, and spiritual realities.
After a period in California, where he encountered John Steinbeck and the biologist Ed Ricketts, he taught at the Canterbury School, and then, in 1934, joined the literature department at Sarah Lawrence College, a post he retained for many years. During the 40s and '50s, he helped Swami Nikhilananda to translate the Upanishads and The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. He also edited works by the German scholar Heinrich Zimmer on Indian art, myths, and philosophy. In 1944, with Henry Morton Robinson, Campbell published A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. His first original work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, came out in 1949 and was immediately well received; in time, it became acclaimed as a classic. In this study of the "myth of the hero," Campbell asserted that there is a single pattern of heroic journey and that all cultures share this essential pattern in their various heroic myths. In his book he also outlined the basic conditions, stages, and results of the archetypal hero's journey.
Throughout his life, he traveled extensively and wrote prolifically, authoring many books, including the four-volume series The Masks of God, Myths to Live By, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space and The Historical Atlas of World Mythology. Joseph Campbell died in 1987. In 1988, a series of television interviews with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, introduced Campbell's views to millions of people.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 59 reviews
March 10, 2019
OKAY. For as much as I generally love Campbell for his scholarship and his breadth and depth of knowledge on all things religious, mythical, and anthropological, I have to say he goes rather overboard in a DIFFERENT direction for this book.
What direction, you ask?
Living culture. And I'm not really talking about modern culture so much as I'm referring to the scope of the Dark Ages through Thomas Mann and James Joyce. He does the literary analysis thing. In spades. Want Beowulf? Check. Want tons of Parcival, Gawain, and even the tragic love story of Adelard and Heloise? Check. Want the erudite traditions, influences, mythological connections and cultural transformations laid out? You got it.
But wait, that's not all! We get some of the best and fully explained nastiness of the truth behind chastity in Christianity and the best visceral descriptions I've ever read that makes me UNDERSTAND why the whole Romantic Love thing took off so HARD back at the opening days of the Rennaisance. Grail Legend? Chivalry? The whole love thing was bucking the Church and Society HARD. Trubadors were the punk bands of the day. :)
We get the influence of Alchemy and Science in poetry, music, and opera. We get dozens of traditions, a great analysis that shows just how much Islamic thought is slathered throughout the Divine Comedy, and so much more.
So what's my problem?
It feels like half the book was devoted to fanboying over Thomas Mann and James Joyce.
I mean, sure, these guys were like a wet dream for mythographers and sociologists and Jungian analysts and they wrote some fine fiction, too, but I would have been JUST FINE with... a slightly abbreviated analysis.
Don't get me wrong! I'm now interested as hell in reading more of Thomas Mann and I may go ahead and revisit Joyce soon, but BY NO MEANS is this very good reading if you're not at least slightly interested in either author.
Of course, if you're prepping yourself in College for writing one hell of a great essay on Joyce (or 14 of them), then DO YOURSELF A BIG FAVOR and read this book or the relevant sections. Some of it rather blew me away. :)
Is this the best stuff Campbell ever wrote? Hell, no. It's very learned and I learned TONS, but it was almost nothing like what I had come to expect from him. More like he had been sitting around doing a lot of reading and his brilliant mind came up with fantastic random crap that sooner or later coalesced into a huge coherent literary epiphany. I think that's great and all but damn... I wanted the world, not fiction, THIS TIME. :)
What direction, you ask?
Living culture. And I'm not really talking about modern culture so much as I'm referring to the scope of the Dark Ages through Thomas Mann and James Joyce. He does the literary analysis thing. In spades. Want Beowulf? Check. Want tons of Parcival, Gawain, and even the tragic love story of Adelard and Heloise? Check. Want the erudite traditions, influences, mythological connections and cultural transformations laid out? You got it.
But wait, that's not all! We get some of the best and fully explained nastiness of the truth behind chastity in Christianity and the best visceral descriptions I've ever read that makes me UNDERSTAND why the whole Romantic Love thing took off so HARD back at the opening days of the Rennaisance. Grail Legend? Chivalry? The whole love thing was bucking the Church and Society HARD. Trubadors were the punk bands of the day. :)
We get the influence of Alchemy and Science in poetry, music, and opera. We get dozens of traditions, a great analysis that shows just how much Islamic thought is slathered throughout the Divine Comedy, and so much more.
So what's my problem?
It feels like half the book was devoted to fanboying over Thomas Mann and James Joyce.
I mean, sure, these guys were like a wet dream for mythographers and sociologists and Jungian analysts and they wrote some fine fiction, too, but I would have been JUST FINE with... a slightly abbreviated analysis.
Don't get me wrong! I'm now interested as hell in reading more of Thomas Mann and I may go ahead and revisit Joyce soon, but BY NO MEANS is this very good reading if you're not at least slightly interested in either author.
Of course, if you're prepping yourself in College for writing one hell of a great essay on Joyce (or 14 of them), then DO YOURSELF A BIG FAVOR and read this book or the relevant sections. Some of it rather blew me away. :)
Is this the best stuff Campbell ever wrote? Hell, no. It's very learned and I learned TONS, but it was almost nothing like what I had come to expect from him. More like he had been sitting around doing a lot of reading and his brilliant mind came up with fantastic random crap that sooner or later coalesced into a huge coherent literary epiphany. I think that's great and all but damn... I wanted the world, not fiction, THIS TIME. :)
June 12, 2012
I'm obsessed with Joseph Campbell, and his words of wisdom are like the ambrosia of the gods to my un-mythologized mind. I think just about everything he writes is amazing. But on the scale of "kinda amazing" to "really FREAKING amazing," this book falls more in the range of "kinda amazing." All of the other books in the series fell in the "really FREAKING amazing" range.
If you've read the other three books, no doubt you're going to read this one just to finish the series. So maybe my review is pointless. Maybe this will help you navigate the book before you read it, anyway. But nonetheless, as much as I still feel this book is necessary reading, I also feel that this is the worst of the Masks of God series. But worst in the Joseph Campbell sense really is still pretty amazing. Just certainly not as enjoyable as the other books. I was seriously quivering with anticipation to read this book -- I zipped through Occidental Mythology to get to this one, but quickly discovered that I should've taken my time on Occidental, instead, which was, in my opinion, much better, and probably the best in the series.
The problem with this book, in my mind, is that it doesn't cover nearly enough material as I've come to expect Campbell to cover. The book is pretty much 200 pages of Tristan and Isolde, 200 pages of Parzival, and 200 pages of fan-girling over Joyce and Mann, with some other fun bits thrown in here and there, like alchemy or the scientific revolution. As important as Tristan and Isolde and Parzival and Joyce and Mann are, reading about the same old ish for 200 pages at a time gets, um, how to put this lightly...EXCEEDINGLY TEDIOUS. He covered The Odyssey in about 20 pages in Occidental Mythology, and it was golden. I could've used a similar treatment for these myths, which gobbled up the entire book. It seemed that he was just repeating the same old analyses after a while.
What bothered me was that he had 1500 years of innovations to cover in this book, obviously with SO MANY examples he could've chosen, but instead, he focused merely on these three subjects. Granted, I don't want him to throw interpretations of every art or literary period ever in my face, but some variety would've been nice. The thing that always amazes me about Campbell is how he can draw these far-reaching, totally crazy comparisons between what seem to be completely different subjects, and MAKE IT WORK. And it's amazing. But in this book, there were hardly enough subjects there to even draw comparisons between.
Another issue for me was that the argumentation was kinda lacking in this one. I felt that a lot of time, he was just spinning his wheels, saying interesting things, but not with an end-point in mind. Obviously the book as a whole had an argumentative framework, but the subsections didn't really mesh well. I wasn't sure what exactly he was trying to build. But I kept on reading, trusting this amazing author to pull the rug out from under me at the last second and make an amazing web of intellectual interconnectedness. Alas, that never happened. And I often ended up finishing chapters and sections thinking, "Oh?"
Anyway. My recommendation for this book, if you're yet to proceed, is to NOT be afraid to skim this one when it seems to run off the tracks. While reading all of the other books, I scrutinized every word, because every word was damn important and loaded with wisdom. But this one sometimes rambles on with uninteresting and, to my eyes, anyway, insignificant information that I could really do without. For instance, I felt all the stuff with Joyce was interesting for about 10 pages, and then after that, was repetitive and didn't lead anywhere. And the alchemy section bored me to tears. It was a cool comparison, but didn't seem to make much of an impact at all on the argument. I know that some intellectual elitist out there is going to KILL me because I just said those things, but I'm just speaking from the point of view of someone who's too amateur to be intelligentsia.
Take what you can with this book and don't be precious about it. There are some amazing things that are to be learned from this book -- you just have to dig a little.
If you've read the other three books, no doubt you're going to read this one just to finish the series. So maybe my review is pointless. Maybe this will help you navigate the book before you read it, anyway. But nonetheless, as much as I still feel this book is necessary reading, I also feel that this is the worst of the Masks of God series. But worst in the Joseph Campbell sense really is still pretty amazing. Just certainly not as enjoyable as the other books. I was seriously quivering with anticipation to read this book -- I zipped through Occidental Mythology to get to this one, but quickly discovered that I should've taken my time on Occidental, instead, which was, in my opinion, much better, and probably the best in the series.
The problem with this book, in my mind, is that it doesn't cover nearly enough material as I've come to expect Campbell to cover. The book is pretty much 200 pages of Tristan and Isolde, 200 pages of Parzival, and 200 pages of fan-girling over Joyce and Mann, with some other fun bits thrown in here and there, like alchemy or the scientific revolution. As important as Tristan and Isolde and Parzival and Joyce and Mann are, reading about the same old ish for 200 pages at a time gets, um, how to put this lightly...EXCEEDINGLY TEDIOUS. He covered The Odyssey in about 20 pages in Occidental Mythology, and it was golden. I could've used a similar treatment for these myths, which gobbled up the entire book. It seemed that he was just repeating the same old analyses after a while.
What bothered me was that he had 1500 years of innovations to cover in this book, obviously with SO MANY examples he could've chosen, but instead, he focused merely on these three subjects. Granted, I don't want him to throw interpretations of every art or literary period ever in my face, but some variety would've been nice. The thing that always amazes me about Campbell is how he can draw these far-reaching, totally crazy comparisons between what seem to be completely different subjects, and MAKE IT WORK. And it's amazing. But in this book, there were hardly enough subjects there to even draw comparisons between.
Another issue for me was that the argumentation was kinda lacking in this one. I felt that a lot of time, he was just spinning his wheels, saying interesting things, but not with an end-point in mind. Obviously the book as a whole had an argumentative framework, but the subsections didn't really mesh well. I wasn't sure what exactly he was trying to build. But I kept on reading, trusting this amazing author to pull the rug out from under me at the last second and make an amazing web of intellectual interconnectedness. Alas, that never happened. And I often ended up finishing chapters and sections thinking, "Oh?"
Anyway. My recommendation for this book, if you're yet to proceed, is to NOT be afraid to skim this one when it seems to run off the tracks. While reading all of the other books, I scrutinized every word, because every word was damn important and loaded with wisdom. But this one sometimes rambles on with uninteresting and, to my eyes, anyway, insignificant information that I could really do without. For instance, I felt all the stuff with Joyce was interesting for about 10 pages, and then after that, was repetitive and didn't lead anywhere. And the alchemy section bored me to tears. It was a cool comparison, but didn't seem to make much of an impact at all on the argument. I know that some intellectual elitist out there is going to KILL me because I just said those things, but I'm just speaking from the point of view of someone who's too amateur to be intelligentsia.
Take what you can with this book and don't be precious about it. There are some amazing things that are to be learned from this book -- you just have to dig a little.
May 7, 2012
Creative Mythology is the fourth and last volume in Masks of God. Up to this book, I thought the work had become stronger with each volume. The first book, Primitive Mythology published in 1959 by and large dealt with the pre-historic era Campbell sees at the root of world culture, and so relied quite a bit on archeology and the speculations of such psychologists as Freud. It was very dry and I suspected, dated. The second volume, Oriental Mythology, primarily examined Egypt, India and China--and certainly made me want to read more--and reread Confucius and Lao Tzu in light of what I'd learned. In Occidental Mythology, Campbell examined the religious/mythological heritage of the West, both of the Greco-Roman classical world and the Levant as expressed in the scripture of Zoroasterism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Creative Mythology examines something quite different. Not the dogma found in scripture nor indigenous ritual and artifacts. Rather it examines the "living mythology" of literature, music and paintings. Campbell sees in the Renaissance the "dawning day and civilization of the individual" who seeks to be "not coercive, but evocative." Grounded in individualism, this new ethos is expressed both in the rise, or given classical culture, the return, of the idea of reason in the sciences but also in the ideal of romantic love found in the troubadours and Arthurian legends. Campbell also examines modern users and makers of mythos such as Wagner, Picasso, Thomas Mann--and giving in my opinion far too much space to James Joyce, but then I'm not a fan. I read Joyce's Ulysses only three months ago, so it, and how much I detested it, is fresh in my mind. With the previous volumes there was no doubt in my mind about the centrality and importance of the texts and artifacts Campbell was examining and he was at his fascinating best making connections between them. But in this volume where Campbell mostly plays literary critic, I found him at his most dull, tedious, repetitive and impenetrable. So though I gave the first volume 3 stars as worth reading, the next 4 stars as something I learned much from and the next one after that 5 stars for some amazing connections, insights and arguments, this last volume only gets two stars from me--and I'm being generous.
Creative Mythology examines something quite different. Not the dogma found in scripture nor indigenous ritual and artifacts. Rather it examines the "living mythology" of literature, music and paintings. Campbell sees in the Renaissance the "dawning day and civilization of the individual" who seeks to be "not coercive, but evocative." Grounded in individualism, this new ethos is expressed both in the rise, or given classical culture, the return, of the idea of reason in the sciences but also in the ideal of romantic love found in the troubadours and Arthurian legends. Campbell also examines modern users and makers of mythos such as Wagner, Picasso, Thomas Mann--and giving in my opinion far too much space to James Joyce, but then I'm not a fan. I read Joyce's Ulysses only three months ago, so it, and how much I detested it, is fresh in my mind. With the previous volumes there was no doubt in my mind about the centrality and importance of the texts and artifacts Campbell was examining and he was at his fascinating best making connections between them. But in this volume where Campbell mostly plays literary critic, I found him at his most dull, tedious, repetitive and impenetrable. So though I gave the first volume 3 stars as worth reading, the next 4 stars as something I learned much from and the next one after that 5 stars for some amazing connections, insights and arguments, this last volume only gets two stars from me--and I'm being generous.
June 17, 2022
Joseph Campbell, like Bach, was a man out of his time, coming at the end of a long, beautiful movement of human culture, and in many ways epitomizing and summarizing it. Just as Bach raised the art of counterpoint to a transcendent sphere even as the rest of the music world was abandoning it as an organizational device, so Campbell wrote penetrating and sweeping comparative works that provide a useful framework for understanding the major movements of mythology and a religion as a whole, even as the framework he was using was passing into obscurity.
I think this is why, every time I talk about Campbell, I always feel the need to start with a kind of apology or justification, as his thoughts are very much out of season. I see him as the final major figure in a line, primarily German, that began with Herder and peaked in the 19th century - in broad terms, beginning with Idealism, flourishing in Romanticism, and culminating in early depth psychology and literary modernism. It is a movement whose chief impulse can be read as Romantic in M. H. Abraham’s sense, which is to say, “naturalizing the supernatural,” or reinterpreting the essential content of religious and mythological art and literature in natural or scientific terms, without reference to the transcendent or divine.
In this, the fourth volume of Campbell’s magnum opus The Masks of God, it is the movement out of the literal interpretation of mythological belief that he identifies as one of the two paradigmatic characteristics of our present-day circumstance. In his reading, as the progress of the material sciences made it increasingly untenable to hold to a literal interpretation of traditional rites and beliefs, the “mythogenic zone,” or traditional field in which mythological forms were encountered moved from the exterior to the interior world, and have been increasingly interpreted in psychological terms, figurative expressions of the inner truths of the psyche. The Forest Adventurous no longer figures in our best and most serious literature as the field of transformation - the locus of the mythological has moved to the interior world of dream and the unconscious.
This shift has especially been the movement of European thought since the early modern period, as various precepts of Biblical cosmology were shown to be factually false in a progressive series of discoveries by Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, and so on. The modern has only a few available options - to deny the evidence of their senses and of reason and hold fast to a bronze age account of the world that contradicts in nearly every fundamental the scientific and technological world that surrounds them every day, to discard the whole of our mythological and religious inheritance as not literally true and therefore without value, or to reinterpret that inheritance in the light of our best understanding of how images function, based on a deep and comparative study of literature, art, and psychology.
Obviously Campbell takes up the last option, and rightfully so. One might be tempted to ignore the whole enterprise as a catalog of superstitions, but I think one would do so at their peril, in part because of the profound value these traditions have in providing orientation, support, and value in our experience of life, but also because humankind cannot be understood simply as animal rationale, and whether or not we like the irrational, it is an important part of what we are. Campbell himself expressed it best in volume one of Masks of God:
“Clearly mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible forms of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations. There is a real danger, therefore, in the incongruity of focus that has brought the latest findings of technological research into the foreground of modern life, joining the world a single community, while leaving the anthropological and psychological discoveries from which a commensurable moral system might have been developed in the learned publications where they first appeared. For surely it is folly to preach to children who will be riding rockets to the moon a morality and cosmology based on concepts of the Good Society and of man's place in nature that were coined before the harnessing of the horse! And the world is now too small, and men's stake in sanity too great, for any of those old games of Chosen Folk (whether of Jehovah, Allah, Wotan, Manu, or the Devil) by which tribesmen were sustained against their enemies in the days when the serpent still could talk.”
I think this is born out plainly enough in our daily headlines, as world leaders and crowds alike reenact myths of the former glory of their once-upon-a-time golden ages, with disastrous consequences. Fascism, for example, depends on the systematic failure to differentiate between history and myth.
We cannot, then, simply leave this whole matter alone, or else we cede one of the fundamental motivating powers of human history in its entirety to those who uncritically operate within it, out of their own irrationality or out of cynicism, and then we see masses galvanized by the old signs of the unconscious. For a case study of a society in the thrall of an unconscious dependence on a set of archaic archetypes, see Germany, circa 1938.
On the rather more positive side, people continue to respond deeply to myths, for the simple reason that myths are about the things that matter to people. Many of the greatest and noblest works of human creativity are saturated with mythological themes, and it can only be for our benefit to understand how they function and why they elicit such a compelling response - why people are still, for example, fascinated by Greek tragedy, why people speak of Goethe’s Faust in hushed tones of reverence to this day, or why we can still feel in the deep heart’s core a recognition of something deeply and profoundly true in one of the Upanishads or in one of Paul’s letters.
The ultimate reference of myth, Campbell tells us, is timeless, because myth speaks to the common part of our human heritage that is constant, at least from the perspective of historical time. But its forms are manifold, and each new age finds its own particular modes of expression for the old mythological themes and images, each reflecting the unique priorities and values of the society which gives them shape.
This brings us to the second paradigmatic feature of our current situation viz. mythology and religion, which is the importance of the individual. In Campbell’s telling, the unique stress of European culture on the value of the individual as such first arose during the High Middle Ages, and is most clearly seen in continental Arthurian romance, and especially in the Parzifal of Wolfram von Eschenbach, which is dated to around 1215. Campbell devotes enormous attention to explicating this work in this book - some might say too long. Well over a hundred pages are dedicated to simply retelling the story of Parzifal, wherefore I know not. I did find that this volume predates the standard Sutto English translation of Parzifal by some years, so it may be that when he was writing, there was no good English version of it that the reader could consult.
In any case, Campbell gives a very compelling reading of von Eschenbach’s poem, arguing that it lays out a framework for understanding the ultimate source of value as a light that shines out from within, not from some “otherworldly beyond,” as Hegel put it, issued by Blake’s “Nobodaddy.” He sees this as inaugurating the uniquely modern European stress put on the individual, which, he emphasizes, is not found in any other time or place.
In broad strokes I found Campbell’s argument persuasive, if sometimes open to challenge. I dimly recall reading his explanation at one point for why Ancient Greece and Rome do not qualify for esteeming the unique contents of the personality as a source and repository of value in itself, but I don’t recall it now. It also seems to me that certain traditions of Japan at least have a role for such values, even if they are not universalized.
Campbell makes it clear that in his view, this is the framework that holds the highest potential for individuals, at least within its horizon, and he takes certain artistic models as exemplifying what such a life looks like, particularly James Joyce and Thomas Mann. I share his enthusiasm for Joyce and am rather cooler on Mann, whose Magic Mountain was interesting to me, but which I hardly experienced as a breakthrough work, or even a novel of the first tier.
Campbell has his favorites, and often, I think, gives them attention far out of proportion to their overall significance. In arguing that von Eschenbach is the preeminent literary artist of his period, for example, who far outstrips Dante, will put him in a very small cohort, indeed. And how is it in characterizing the artistic and spiritual horizon in which we find ourselves could he spend perhaps a hundred pages on Gottfried von Straßburg, but hardly say a single paragraph on Shakespeare? The silence there is deafening, and I frankly don’t know what to make of it.
There is a paradoxical tension in Campbell’s work that he apparently didn’t recognize, but I think needs to be stated. Campbell polemicizes throughout the work for orthodoxies and normative religious and cultural systems for their coercion and constant distortion, and argues instead of an individualism in which people find their own ways, but he leaves absolutely no doubt that he has very clear ideas about which of these ways are right and which of them are wrong. It strikes me as deeply ironic for me to read about his profound admiration for the medieval author of a grail legend who writes of his heroes entering the dark wood at the place of his own choosing, where there is no path, and then to go on and criticize any number of social and spiritual movements. “Any way chosen by the individual’s own heart, so long as it’s my way,” he seems to say.
Campbell paints with a broad brush and there’s a lot in him that one can criticize. I particularly find his obvious hatred of social-critical readings of mythological literature as alienating, and perhaps his most objectionable trait as a scholar. And that does leave him vulnerable to accusations of a distasteful sort of essentialism in how he characterizes “peoples,” and, no less, women. I have heard him say ruefully in a recorded talk that these days (i.e., the 60s), young women are telling him they don’t want to “fulfill the traditional role of women in serving as the object and support of the hero quest, and instantiating life itself in their being rather than their activity” - that now, they want to be the hero, too. “Oh boy,” he said, “I think it’s good that I’m retiring now.”
One can make of this what one will, though I will say in the main line, my experience is that, at least in terms of what he argues for, if not in terms of his biography, Campbell was deeply humanist and always tried to meet people in their own terms with decency and respect, even if the frame he developed for doing so nearly a century ago differs from what I would prefer, or is susceptible to critique.
At the end of the day, Campbell has been of great importance to me as a guide, in part because our interests are uncannily similar, and in part because I am of a similar type. We are generalists, and it is often not recognized, especially by specialists, that being a good generalist is its own kind of expertise, which has its own limitations, sure, but its own value as well. For at essence, Campbell explores the highest reaches of human creative endeavor with an eye to understanding what these things mean, while many specialists wouldn’t even understand what that question means.
But people live in worlds of meanings prior to living in a world of facts, which is why Hero with a Thousand Faces has sold millions of copies - can you think of another work on comparative religions or folklore that can say the same? So I’ll end where I began, observing that Campbell is a figure out of time, but also that not all change is good, and the intellectual tradition he writes out of is one of the high watersheds of our collective endeavor to understand ourselves and our world, limitations and all.
I think this is why, every time I talk about Campbell, I always feel the need to start with a kind of apology or justification, as his thoughts are very much out of season. I see him as the final major figure in a line, primarily German, that began with Herder and peaked in the 19th century - in broad terms, beginning with Idealism, flourishing in Romanticism, and culminating in early depth psychology and literary modernism. It is a movement whose chief impulse can be read as Romantic in M. H. Abraham’s sense, which is to say, “naturalizing the supernatural,” or reinterpreting the essential content of religious and mythological art and literature in natural or scientific terms, without reference to the transcendent or divine.
In this, the fourth volume of Campbell’s magnum opus The Masks of God, it is the movement out of the literal interpretation of mythological belief that he identifies as one of the two paradigmatic characteristics of our present-day circumstance. In his reading, as the progress of the material sciences made it increasingly untenable to hold to a literal interpretation of traditional rites and beliefs, the “mythogenic zone,” or traditional field in which mythological forms were encountered moved from the exterior to the interior world, and have been increasingly interpreted in psychological terms, figurative expressions of the inner truths of the psyche. The Forest Adventurous no longer figures in our best and most serious literature as the field of transformation - the locus of the mythological has moved to the interior world of dream and the unconscious.
This shift has especially been the movement of European thought since the early modern period, as various precepts of Biblical cosmology were shown to be factually false in a progressive series of discoveries by Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, and so on. The modern has only a few available options - to deny the evidence of their senses and of reason and hold fast to a bronze age account of the world that contradicts in nearly every fundamental the scientific and technological world that surrounds them every day, to discard the whole of our mythological and religious inheritance as not literally true and therefore without value, or to reinterpret that inheritance in the light of our best understanding of how images function, based on a deep and comparative study of literature, art, and psychology.
Obviously Campbell takes up the last option, and rightfully so. One might be tempted to ignore the whole enterprise as a catalog of superstitions, but I think one would do so at their peril, in part because of the profound value these traditions have in providing orientation, support, and value in our experience of life, but also because humankind cannot be understood simply as animal rationale, and whether or not we like the irrational, it is an important part of what we are. Campbell himself expressed it best in volume one of Masks of God:
“Clearly mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible forms of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations. There is a real danger, therefore, in the incongruity of focus that has brought the latest findings of technological research into the foreground of modern life, joining the world a single community, while leaving the anthropological and psychological discoveries from which a commensurable moral system might have been developed in the learned publications where they first appeared. For surely it is folly to preach to children who will be riding rockets to the moon a morality and cosmology based on concepts of the Good Society and of man's place in nature that were coined before the harnessing of the horse! And the world is now too small, and men's stake in sanity too great, for any of those old games of Chosen Folk (whether of Jehovah, Allah, Wotan, Manu, or the Devil) by which tribesmen were sustained against their enemies in the days when the serpent still could talk.”
I think this is born out plainly enough in our daily headlines, as world leaders and crowds alike reenact myths of the former glory of their once-upon-a-time golden ages, with disastrous consequences. Fascism, for example, depends on the systematic failure to differentiate between history and myth.
We cannot, then, simply leave this whole matter alone, or else we cede one of the fundamental motivating powers of human history in its entirety to those who uncritically operate within it, out of their own irrationality or out of cynicism, and then we see masses galvanized by the old signs of the unconscious. For a case study of a society in the thrall of an unconscious dependence on a set of archaic archetypes, see Germany, circa 1938.
On the rather more positive side, people continue to respond deeply to myths, for the simple reason that myths are about the things that matter to people. Many of the greatest and noblest works of human creativity are saturated with mythological themes, and it can only be for our benefit to understand how they function and why they elicit such a compelling response - why people are still, for example, fascinated by Greek tragedy, why people speak of Goethe’s Faust in hushed tones of reverence to this day, or why we can still feel in the deep heart’s core a recognition of something deeply and profoundly true in one of the Upanishads or in one of Paul’s letters.
The ultimate reference of myth, Campbell tells us, is timeless, because myth speaks to the common part of our human heritage that is constant, at least from the perspective of historical time. But its forms are manifold, and each new age finds its own particular modes of expression for the old mythological themes and images, each reflecting the unique priorities and values of the society which gives them shape.
This brings us to the second paradigmatic feature of our current situation viz. mythology and religion, which is the importance of the individual. In Campbell’s telling, the unique stress of European culture on the value of the individual as such first arose during the High Middle Ages, and is most clearly seen in continental Arthurian romance, and especially in the Parzifal of Wolfram von Eschenbach, which is dated to around 1215. Campbell devotes enormous attention to explicating this work in this book - some might say too long. Well over a hundred pages are dedicated to simply retelling the story of Parzifal, wherefore I know not. I did find that this volume predates the standard Sutto English translation of Parzifal by some years, so it may be that when he was writing, there was no good English version of it that the reader could consult.
In any case, Campbell gives a very compelling reading of von Eschenbach’s poem, arguing that it lays out a framework for understanding the ultimate source of value as a light that shines out from within, not from some “otherworldly beyond,” as Hegel put it, issued by Blake’s “Nobodaddy.” He sees this as inaugurating the uniquely modern European stress put on the individual, which, he emphasizes, is not found in any other time or place.
In broad strokes I found Campbell’s argument persuasive, if sometimes open to challenge. I dimly recall reading his explanation at one point for why Ancient Greece and Rome do not qualify for esteeming the unique contents of the personality as a source and repository of value in itself, but I don’t recall it now. It also seems to me that certain traditions of Japan at least have a role for such values, even if they are not universalized.
Campbell makes it clear that in his view, this is the framework that holds the highest potential for individuals, at least within its horizon, and he takes certain artistic models as exemplifying what such a life looks like, particularly James Joyce and Thomas Mann. I share his enthusiasm for Joyce and am rather cooler on Mann, whose Magic Mountain was interesting to me, but which I hardly experienced as a breakthrough work, or even a novel of the first tier.
Campbell has his favorites, and often, I think, gives them attention far out of proportion to their overall significance. In arguing that von Eschenbach is the preeminent literary artist of his period, for example, who far outstrips Dante, will put him in a very small cohort, indeed. And how is it in characterizing the artistic and spiritual horizon in which we find ourselves could he spend perhaps a hundred pages on Gottfried von Straßburg, but hardly say a single paragraph on Shakespeare? The silence there is deafening, and I frankly don’t know what to make of it.
There is a paradoxical tension in Campbell’s work that he apparently didn’t recognize, but I think needs to be stated. Campbell polemicizes throughout the work for orthodoxies and normative religious and cultural systems for their coercion and constant distortion, and argues instead of an individualism in which people find their own ways, but he leaves absolutely no doubt that he has very clear ideas about which of these ways are right and which of them are wrong. It strikes me as deeply ironic for me to read about his profound admiration for the medieval author of a grail legend who writes of his heroes entering the dark wood at the place of his own choosing, where there is no path, and then to go on and criticize any number of social and spiritual movements. “Any way chosen by the individual’s own heart, so long as it’s my way,” he seems to say.
Campbell paints with a broad brush and there’s a lot in him that one can criticize. I particularly find his obvious hatred of social-critical readings of mythological literature as alienating, and perhaps his most objectionable trait as a scholar. And that does leave him vulnerable to accusations of a distasteful sort of essentialism in how he characterizes “peoples,” and, no less, women. I have heard him say ruefully in a recorded talk that these days (i.e., the 60s), young women are telling him they don’t want to “fulfill the traditional role of women in serving as the object and support of the hero quest, and instantiating life itself in their being rather than their activity” - that now, they want to be the hero, too. “Oh boy,” he said, “I think it’s good that I’m retiring now.”
One can make of this what one will, though I will say in the main line, my experience is that, at least in terms of what he argues for, if not in terms of his biography, Campbell was deeply humanist and always tried to meet people in their own terms with decency and respect, even if the frame he developed for doing so nearly a century ago differs from what I would prefer, or is susceptible to critique.
At the end of the day, Campbell has been of great importance to me as a guide, in part because our interests are uncannily similar, and in part because I am of a similar type. We are generalists, and it is often not recognized, especially by specialists, that being a good generalist is its own kind of expertise, which has its own limitations, sure, but its own value as well. For at essence, Campbell explores the highest reaches of human creative endeavor with an eye to understanding what these things mean, while many specialists wouldn’t even understand what that question means.
But people live in worlds of meanings prior to living in a world of facts, which is why Hero with a Thousand Faces has sold millions of copies - can you think of another work on comparative religions or folklore that can say the same? So I’ll end where I began, observing that Campbell is a figure out of time, but also that not all change is good, and the intellectual tradition he writes out of is one of the high watersheds of our collective endeavor to understand ourselves and our world, limitations and all.
June 25, 2014
“For it is simply a fact that poets and artists, who are dealing every day of their lives with the feeling- as well as thought-values of their own imageries of communication, are endowed with a developed organ for the understanding of myth that is too often lacking in the merely learned; so that when the artist or poet is also learned, he may be a more dependable guide to the nuclear themes of a given mythic complex, and a much more profound interpreter of their relevance to life, than even the most respected of its specialized academic elucidators.”
It occurs that Campbell, no matter how ubiquitous or popular he is, is a tragically underestimated source of human understanding. It seems his work, to some degree, suffers for its author’s visibility. As if scholars, each devoted to their field with accepted dogmatic myopia–whether their gaze is upon anthropology, psychology, theology, language, philosophy or literature–conjure up an image of an old man too congenial for genius, with the Gollum like presence of one Bill Moyers perpetually clung to his back, and can thus look past this man that ruthlessly cuts to the one and common quick, who pulls back the plural curtain dividing our learning to reveal how we draw our energy from the heart of the matter.
If Campbell suffers a somewhat polarized reception, the reason, I speculate, hinges on how he emphasizes eastern thought–a term I use here to mark a distinction between thought/theory and action/practice. The eastern philosophies are more advanced for nothing but their emphasis on pulling the philosopher out of his chair. And it is for this very same reason that the western mind will not admit this supremacy, and so too with Campbell, that there is a contingent that resists and objects to his thought.
But this reluctance, as Campbell will tell you, is fear. And only he who overcomes it becomes the hero of his own life and thus alive–which no mere thinker can ever be. As Nietzsche says, “whatever can be thought, cannot but be a fiction.” The mere thinker is a spectator, the crying critic.
Returning to Campbell after an inexcusable 10 year drought–or, as he might say, wasteland–I find myself singularly compelled to to this incredibly presumptuous declaration, that most of Campbell’s detractors are forming their opinions with a much inferior complement of understanding than he. I will go so far as to say that the wise reader, when coming upon something in Campbell that she finds disagreeable, will at least explore the possibility that she herself is wrong, before this man who has drank so deeply from so many primary springs. Here is a man that can give us more of Joyce than can Joyce himself–that is, than we ourselves can reap without his help. Without Campbell’s revelations of Joyce’s redeeming qualities and the absurd lengths one must go to reach them, the Joyce lover is an inadequate pretender. But if Campbell can unearth what content is so intently hidden in Joyce, how can he can he not accentuate the enormous content that is meant to be unhidden in Schopenhauer, in Nietzsche, in Christ, Blake, Buddha, Black Elk, Wordsworth, Ortega y Gasset, Eliot, Mann, Jung, Shakespeare, The Upanishads, etc.? Indeed, one might better ask, what canon, that some significant sum of people holds or has held as most holy, has Campbell not thoroughly apprised himself of before gifting the world his declarations?
For those who allow their orientation to drift to the east, it becomes more and more apparent that in order to understand, what one needs more than intellect is courage.
“Creative Mythology, in Shakespeare’s sense, of the mirror ‘to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time of his form and pressure,’ springs not, like theology, from the dicta of authority, but from the insights, sentiments, thought, and vision of an adequate individual, loyal to his own experience of value. Thus it corrects the authority holding to the shells of forms produced and left behind by lives once lived. Renewing the act of experience itself, it restores to existence the quality of adventure, at once shattering and reintegrating the fixed, already known, in the sacrificial creative fire of the becoming thing that is no thing at all but life, not as it will be or as it should be, as it was or as it never will be, but as it is, in depth, in process, here and now, inside and out.”
It occurs that Campbell, no matter how ubiquitous or popular he is, is a tragically underestimated source of human understanding. It seems his work, to some degree, suffers for its author’s visibility. As if scholars, each devoted to their field with accepted dogmatic myopia–whether their gaze is upon anthropology, psychology, theology, language, philosophy or literature–conjure up an image of an old man too congenial for genius, with the Gollum like presence of one Bill Moyers perpetually clung to his back, and can thus look past this man that ruthlessly cuts to the one and common quick, who pulls back the plural curtain dividing our learning to reveal how we draw our energy from the heart of the matter.
If Campbell suffers a somewhat polarized reception, the reason, I speculate, hinges on how he emphasizes eastern thought–a term I use here to mark a distinction between thought/theory and action/practice. The eastern philosophies are more advanced for nothing but their emphasis on pulling the philosopher out of his chair. And it is for this very same reason that the western mind will not admit this supremacy, and so too with Campbell, that there is a contingent that resists and objects to his thought.
But this reluctance, as Campbell will tell you, is fear. And only he who overcomes it becomes the hero of his own life and thus alive–which no mere thinker can ever be. As Nietzsche says, “whatever can be thought, cannot but be a fiction.” The mere thinker is a spectator, the crying critic.
Returning to Campbell after an inexcusable 10 year drought–or, as he might say, wasteland–I find myself singularly compelled to to this incredibly presumptuous declaration, that most of Campbell’s detractors are forming their opinions with a much inferior complement of understanding than he. I will go so far as to say that the wise reader, when coming upon something in Campbell that she finds disagreeable, will at least explore the possibility that she herself is wrong, before this man who has drank so deeply from so many primary springs. Here is a man that can give us more of Joyce than can Joyce himself–that is, than we ourselves can reap without his help. Without Campbell’s revelations of Joyce’s redeeming qualities and the absurd lengths one must go to reach them, the Joyce lover is an inadequate pretender. But if Campbell can unearth what content is so intently hidden in Joyce, how can he can he not accentuate the enormous content that is meant to be unhidden in Schopenhauer, in Nietzsche, in Christ, Blake, Buddha, Black Elk, Wordsworth, Ortega y Gasset, Eliot, Mann, Jung, Shakespeare, The Upanishads, etc.? Indeed, one might better ask, what canon, that some significant sum of people holds or has held as most holy, has Campbell not thoroughly apprised himself of before gifting the world his declarations?
For those who allow their orientation to drift to the east, it becomes more and more apparent that in order to understand, what one needs more than intellect is courage.
“Creative Mythology, in Shakespeare’s sense, of the mirror ‘to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time of his form and pressure,’ springs not, like theology, from the dicta of authority, but from the insights, sentiments, thought, and vision of an adequate individual, loyal to his own experience of value. Thus it corrects the authority holding to the shells of forms produced and left behind by lives once lived. Renewing the act of experience itself, it restores to existence the quality of adventure, at once shattering and reintegrating the fixed, already known, in the sacrificial creative fire of the becoming thing that is no thing at all but life, not as it will be or as it should be, as it was or as it never will be, but as it is, in depth, in process, here and now, inside and out.”
August 3, 2016
In graduate school, when I asked my beloved mentor, Freudian/Lacanian David Wagenknecht about Carl Jung, his response was, "I dunno: a little too Joseph Campbell for me." There is no better or smarter human on earth than David and so I didn't read either Jung (who I now worship) or Campbell (who I now really, really love) for many years. I think the wait was just fine for me (sorry Dave) but I know I will be reading at least Campbell's Masks of God for the rest of my life (and perhaps also his Skeleton's Key to Finnegans Wake at least twice more). Campbell is NOT a mere popularizer of Jung (more like a popularizer of Thomas Mann if you had choose) and not the hokey Ur-mythologist I was expecting -- but a rigorous academic and scholar, an inspiring thinker, a terrific organizer, and a fabulous bibliographer. Admittedly, in my middle-age, I find something very comforting about these books (which in fact make no truth-claims whatsoever regarding supernatural matrices) but am not entirely sure why. I love these four books.
July 29, 2008
This book demands multiple re-readings of the text. Campbell does what he does best - deconstruct mythology - and some of his ideas regarding creation and art are quite striking and fresh indeed.
While traditional mythologies are discussed here, (such as Le Morte d'Arthur) Campbell also likes to draw on distinctive and post-modern authors like Joyce and Mann when discussing novel mythological structures or narratives. This may be good or bad, depending on whether or not one likes these authors.
Ultimately, though, this book is meant to help one realize the varieties and depths of mythological experiences. And this book succeeds brilliantly in this.
While traditional mythologies are discussed here, (such as Le Morte d'Arthur) Campbell also likes to draw on distinctive and post-modern authors like Joyce and Mann when discussing novel mythological structures or narratives. This may be good or bad, depending on whether or not one likes these authors.
Ultimately, though, this book is meant to help one realize the varieties and depths of mythological experiences. And this book succeeds brilliantly in this.
August 27, 2020
It's still breathtaking after all these years. The weaving of history, myth, and art is done with such passion and and such sensitivity to influence across cultural worlds that to me it will always seem like the gold standard of historical writing.
November 16, 2016
Just started re-reading this one. I got about halfway through last time and found so much good stuff in it last time that I thought I'd see what I pick up this time through.
It's interesting that it starts with the time of the 'dark ages' since what I'm working on now, though set in modern day, has a kind of allegory of the idea of the dark ages.
I really would like to learn more about Joseph Campbell. I know some basics of his ideas, but he has written a lot. I'll probably also be watching the 'Mythos' series he did, on Netflix.
It's interesting that it starts with the time of the 'dark ages' since what I'm working on now, though set in modern day, has a kind of allegory of the idea of the dark ages.
I really would like to learn more about Joseph Campbell. I know some basics of his ideas, but he has written a lot. I'll probably also be watching the 'Mythos' series he did, on Netflix.
April 7, 2016
After exploring ancient, Eastern, and Western mythology and religion up until the approximate time of the Dark Ages, Joseph Campbell's final volume of his Masks of God series deals with the "modern" world. As societies became increasingly mobile and fluid, the social purpose of religion and myth (transmission of local cultural "rules" to each generation, and the acceptance of those rules) fades in importance. Now what?
Creative Mythology explores what happens as cultures begin to intermingle, how local symbols are repurposed for new reasons in new places. He uses the lens of epic poetry to show us the heretic Christian ideas of Tristan & Isolde, the heavily pagan roots of Beowulf, and the Islamic influence on Dante's Divine Comedy (which was super interesting to me, since I took a class on just this work in college, and to the best of my recollection, this never came up). He moves into the modern world by dissecting some of the works of Thomas Mann and James Joyce (Finnegan's Wake, Ulysses, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Portrait was something I read several years ago that I enjoyed not at all and remembered precious little of, and after reading about it here, I'm not sure I want to read Ulysses even though it's a "classic" because it sounds very tiresome. Campbell wraps up his review by discussing the Holy Grail mythologies in the Knights of the Round Table/Arthurian legends (this section is very very long), and then concludes by reflecting back on the functions of mythologies, and how they have and do work (or not, as the case may be).
I'm not going to lie...I'm very glad to be done with this series. It was very informative, but only sporadically interesting. Do I feel much better versed in world religion and mythology? Yes. Would my life have been just as lovely without it? Absolutely.
Creative Mythology explores what happens as cultures begin to intermingle, how local symbols are repurposed for new reasons in new places. He uses the lens of epic poetry to show us the heretic Christian ideas of Tristan & Isolde, the heavily pagan roots of Beowulf, and the Islamic influence on Dante's Divine Comedy (which was super interesting to me, since I took a class on just this work in college, and to the best of my recollection, this never came up). He moves into the modern world by dissecting some of the works of Thomas Mann and James Joyce (Finnegan's Wake, Ulysses, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Portrait was something I read several years ago that I enjoyed not at all and remembered precious little of, and after reading about it here, I'm not sure I want to read Ulysses even though it's a "classic" because it sounds very tiresome. Campbell wraps up his review by discussing the Holy Grail mythologies in the Knights of the Round Table/Arthurian legends (this section is very very long), and then concludes by reflecting back on the functions of mythologies, and how they have and do work (or not, as the case may be).
I'm not going to lie...I'm very glad to be done with this series. It was very informative, but only sporadically interesting. Do I feel much better versed in world religion and mythology? Yes. Would my life have been just as lovely without it? Absolutely.
March 3, 2009
All the major ways has been destroyed. We are in a desert and a dark forest now. And each of us should go alone...
Liked very much though I think in some parts Joseph has taken too long way to tell his story
Liked very much though I think in some parts Joseph has taken too long way to tell his story
December 20, 2010
analysis wrapped in mysteries tied with contradictions made out of the tinder and spark of campfire stories, brick kilns, and steel foundries. Materials, colors, designs, executed, shared, found, sifted, chosen, revealed. Shelved.
December 1, 2009
I did not read this. I really want to like Joseph Campbell but I just can not get into it. This was so wordy. I found myself wishing he would get to the point.
July 19, 2016
''As an artist, the writer must be cruel and merciless in observation, even with pain to himself, and yet as a human being may be gentle, cordial and unassuming; or, as we now have also learned, as an artist he must be all-loving (in his own way), all-understanding, and yet, as a mere man, may still be capable of righteousness and even the use of brute force--as we hear, indeed, of Christ himself in that instance of the money-changers in the temple...
''The artist lives thus in two worlds--as do we all; but he, in so far as he knows what he is doing, in a special state of consciousness of this micromacrocosmic crucifixion that is life on earth and is perhaps, also, the fire of the sun, stars, and galaxies beyond'' (p 332-333).
Creative Mythology, Volume IV of The Masks of God tetralogy, by Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) is much more than an historical analysis on mythology since the birth of Christ. What would best sum up this massive volume of a dense 678-page critical review and interpretation of the development of literary art in the past two thousand years is that Campbell takes a close look at understanding better the influences and patterns found in: (a) the quest for the Holy Grail; (b) Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939) by James Joyce compared to Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901) and The Magic Mountain (1924); (c) the legend of Tristan and Isolde; (d) and finally, the change from religious-centric literature around 1600 to a ''newer reality'' that helps to shape the gods within you. I cannot go into any great detail here and do Campbell justice, so I will mainly focus on (a) the idea of Quest in relation to the creative myth.
But Campbell, on page four, does explain what he means by ''Creative Mythology'' and it would be wise to let him explain himself:
''In what I'm calling 'creative' mythology, on the other hand, this is reversed: the individual has had an experience of his own--of order, horror, beauty, or even mere exhilaration--which he seeks to communicate through signs; and if his realization has been of a certain depth and import, his communication will have the value and force of living myth--for those, that is to say, who receive and respond to it of themselves, with recognition, uncoerced...
''For those, however, in whom the authorized signs no longer work--or, if working, produce deviant effects--there follows inevitably a sense both of dissociation from the local social nexus and of quest, within and without, for life, which the brain will take to be for 'meaning''' (p 4-5).
So let us begin with just such a quest.
The Quest for the Holy Grail
Campbell goes in search for the Holy Grail in a realistic effort to understand the archaeological aspect of this mythological fixture in Christian culture as well as the symbol it represents in the myth and story of Parzival, countless Arthurian romances, and the legends surrounding King Arthur, who Campbell explains did exist once:
''Arthur apparently was a native Briton who distinguished himself in a series of battles in the early sixth century and for a time represented the last hope of the Celtic Christian cause... Arthur [according to the text Historia Britonum] was not a king but a professional military man (dux bellorum), who 'fought in company with the kings of the Britons' in a series of twelve battles, in the eighth of which, at the castle Guinnon, he 'carried on his shoulders [possibly meaning 'on his shield'] the image of the Holy Virgin Mary''' (p 517).
It is clear that the question as to whether or not King Arthur was an actual, living-breathing man has been answered, even if his ego, image, identity, truth, story has been vastly exaggerated.
But Campbell asks many other, more interesting, questions. Did the Holy Grail once exist long ago? Why did so many knights and Popes seek to find the Holy Grail? And why were so many stories told, written, copied and continued to tell of the mystical object that once was used to hold Christ's blood and could grant men who looked upon the Grail eternal peace and life?
Campbell first goes into some depth about explaining how the Grail was not in the form of a cup or chalice, but instead in the shape of a bowl, as many drinking utensils were of ancient times.
Figure A: The Orphic Sacramental Bowl, Rumania 3rd or 4th Century A.D.
As you can see from the above Figure A, a bowl of gold that was unearthed in 1837 near Pietroasa of Rumania, was of an Hellenistic influence and describe as follows starting at one o'clock and moving clockwise:
Orpheus the Fisherman
A Naked Figure in Attendance at the Entrance
A Kilted Male, the Neophyte (Novice)
A Draped Female Figure, Portress of the Sanctuary
Demeter Enthroned
Her Daughter, Persephone
The Initiated Mystes
Tyche, the Goddess of Fortune
Agathodaemon, the god of Good Fortune
The Lord of the Abyss
The Mystes, fully initiate
and 13) Two Young Men Regarding Each Other
The Returning Mystes
A Draped Female Figure with Pail and Bowl
Hyperborean Apollo
And you may see the center of the bowl (below, Figure B) is a cupbearer (pages 9-27).
Figure B: Central Figure of the Orphic Bowl
Now compare with others:
Figure C: The Sanctum of the Winged Serpent; Orphic bowl, 2nd or 3rd Century A.D.
Figure D: Outside of the Serpent Bowl
And we can see an emerging theme building and transitioning among cultures in Figure E.
Figure E: The Serpent Lifted Up; golden Thaler, Germany, 16th Century A.D.
Figure F: Eucharistic Bowl; Mt. Athos, 13th Century A.D.
''One need not be amazed, then,'' writes Campbell of this cultural and historical pseudomorphosis, ''to learn that in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe the orgiastic as well as monastic forms of religious devotion flourished. The Albigensians were of the ascetic line; so also (at least officially) were the clergy of the Roman Church. However, as we know from many sources, wherever in the world the fostering powers of life are denied as gods, they reappear in malignant forms as devils'' (p 165).
As for the story of Parzival, who takes up much of the focus regarding the influence of the Grail, Campbell sums it up nicely:
''The knightly rules of Gurnemanz had prepared Parzival well for his ambition in the world, but left his own unfolding interior life, his 'intelligible character' (to use Schopenhauer's term), not only unguided but unrecognized and completely out of account. And when the old knight offered him his daughter, the youth discreetly departed, not because an inward knowledge already told him that a life--a life with substance--has to be earned and fashioned from within, not received from the world as a gift, as the Maimed Grail King had received his castle and throne'' (p 455).
What Campbell is hinting at, if you have not uncovered the truths yet, is that the Holy Grail could never be found if one went seeking it; instead, the Grail could only be found by one who did not seek the reward (i.e., the object of one's ambition) on purpose, but was found worthy through countless trials over time. The Grail, therefore, was meant to represent, even if it was/is a true artifact, a spiritual journey in this often meaningless world of trials and tribulations a Self that contains substance, of worth, of value, of merit, of true honor, and this is ''fashioned from within'' and can never be given by the world as a gift.
And now as I reread this and reflect on my own life, I somehow know what Campbell is referring to. I cannot begin to tell you of all the lonely nights I have spent writing stories and novels that continue to go unread and unnoticed. I cannot begin to describe to you of how I have made difficult choices, those sacrifices we know we must make but cannot name a price upon such loss, in my life. Those moments in your life, as Robert Frost so cleverly told in ''The Road Not Taken,'' that fork and diverge, often taking you far from loved ones, and you can only sigh ages and ages hence. It is these moments when I spend hours upon hours learning, memorizing, sweating over, reciting and imbibing into my soul the essence a poem in hopes of sharing it one day with the world, only for people to tell you to your face that they have always wanted to recite poems from the heart but never did, for these same people to go behind your back and speak of you as if you were putting on a show, being someone that you are not, and yet in your heart you know you are being exactly who are you, that what you did was not for external reward but for a greater intelligible character within. A life with substance is often ridiculed and rejected, and this is why it is so very rare.
''Man's genuine self,'' explains Campbell, ''is swallowed up by his cultured, conventional, social self. Every culture or every great phase of culture ends in man's socialization, and vice versa; socialization pulls man out of his life of solitude, which is his real and authentic life'' (p 390).
Campbell goes much deeper than I dare to go here into better understanding the Holy Grail as an historical actualization (a real and true authentic object) and its role in shaping Art through the Middle Ages and beyond.
I will, however, insert a remark Campbell has included in his own work. It comes from Tertullian who remarked once: ''Credo quia ineptum,'' [translation from the Latin: ''I believe because it is absurd.''] (p 396).
If you have always been interested in learning more about the Holy Grail, Arthurian Romances, the legends of King Arthur and his round table of valiant Knights, including Gawain and Parzival, then I recommend reading this book by Campbell. You just might find out a thing or two that may surprise you.
And the quest continues when Campbell begins to compare Joyce and Mann.
''Next, in Ulysses (1922) and The Magic Mountain (1924),'' writes Campbell, ''two accounts of quests through all the mixed conditions of a modern civilization for an informing principle substantial to existence, the episodes being rendered in the manner of the naturalistic novel, yet in both works opening backward to reveal mythological analogies: in Joyce's case, largely by way of Homer, Yeats, Blake, Vico, Dante, and the Roman Catholic Mass, with many echoes more; and in Mann's, by way of Goethe's Faust, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the Venus Mountain of Wagner, and hermetic alchemical lore'' (p 39).
You have an interest in any or all of these prominent figures in either literature or psychology, as I do, then I recommend reading this book because Campbell explores these key figures and their contributions to literature and culture in extreme depth.
But I shall give you a taste of Campbell's methodology and practice:
''The assurance can also be given that, according to the evidence of these pages, it appears that the soul's release from the matrix of inherited social bondages can actually be attained and, in fact, has already been attained many times: specifically, by those giants of creative thought who, though few in the world on any given day, are in the long course of the centuries of mankind as numerous as mountains on the whole earth, and are, in fact, the great company from whose grace the rest of men derive whatever spiritual strength or virtue we may claim.
''Societies throughout history have mistrusted and suppressed these towering spirits. Even the noble city of Athens condemned Socrates to death, and Aristotle, in the end, had to flee its indignation. As Nietzsche could say from experience: 'The aim of institutions--whether scientific, artistic, political, or religious--never is to produce and foster exceptional examples; institutions are concerned, rather, for the usual, the normal, the mediocre'' (p 41).
I'll give you some time to think about that last statement. [Pause...]
And Nietzsche continues to remark of the personal quest each man or woman strives to obtain:
''That the Great Man [/Woman] should be able to appear and dwell among you again, again, and again [he wrote], that is the sense of all your efforts here on earth. That there should ever and again be men among you able to elevate you to your heights: that is the prize for which you strive. For it is only through the occasional coming to light of such human beings that your own existence can be justified...And if you are not yourself a great exception, well then be a small one at least! and so you will foster on earth that holy fire from which genius may arise'' (p 41).
And the longer I live the more I see that are fewer and fewer examples of even small exceptions in the human race. Instead, social and cultural expectations are drowning out the genius found in every man, woman and child, and this oppression seeks to quash the great illumination found within. And one only needs to dig deeper into the meaning of 'genius' as I believe Campbell and Nietzsche could also have included in their understandings of the idea:
Genius: from the Latin root of 'gignere' meaning 'beget' and often translated as the 'spirit present from one's birth, innate ability or inclination' and could also have meant 'special guardian spirit'
So I must ask you now: where is your genius?
I shall end with Campbell's four major functions of myth. He states that the first function of myth is to waken in any individual an experience of 'awe, humility, and respect, in recognition of that ultimate mystery' [Why are we here? What is the purpose of life? What is the meaning of life? What is beyond death? What is before birth?]; the second function of myth is to render an abstract notion of a cosmology, the universe as a thing of wonder, 'whether regarded in its spatial or its temporal, physical, or biological aspect,' into concrete notions that may be better understood; the third function of mythology is to validate and maintain an established order; and the last function is the 'centering and harmonization of the individual, which in traditional systems was supposed to follow upon the giving of oneself, and even giving up of oneself altogether, to some one or another of Nietzsche's authorities,' referring to the two faces of Nihilism, which more can be read about this on pages 622-623 (pgs 609-624); and so to sum up, the functions of mythology and its symbols and meanings are four: ''mystic, cosmological, sociological, and psychological'' (p 630).
And what shall we do with all this knowledge once we have it? Campbell, as always, has an answer for that too:
''In this life-creative adventure the criterion of achievement will be, as in every one of the tales here reviewed, the courage to let go the past, with its truths, its goals, its dogmas of 'meaning,' and its gifts: to die to the world and to come to birth from within' (p 678).
--Joseph Campbell in The Masks of God, Vol. IV: Creative Mythology
October 25, 2020
Tristan ve Isolte (İrlanda efsanesi) çevresinde dönen dünya mitleri ve kültürlerinin sondajı sonuçları.
Batı kültürünün (mitoslari) büyük ölçüde doğudan geldiği örneklerle anlatılmış.
Lafontaine hikayeleri, bir Hint fabl'inin beşinci versiyonu imiş.
Vs vs
Batı kültürünün (mitoslari) büyük ölçüde doğudan geldiği örneklerle anlatılmış.
Lafontaine hikayeleri, bir Hint fabl'inin beşinci versiyonu imiş.
Vs vs
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 10, 2022
Not as fluent as occidental mythology but still a good read!
August 21, 2016
The change in history from classical times to the Renaissance: nude paintings to represent the character of "man" the species, to portraits showing the character of the individual person. This description of visual art corresponds to the description of myth and personal transformation in Creative Mythology. It is the description of the mythic journey of the modern person. The mythological inspiration of our time is the following of a trackless path to genius.
No longer do we receive guidance on the Great Road. Since the time of the troubadours, who began to sing odes to individuals rather than to an ideal God who would damn them to hell, we must make our own way, creating our own face for God. No longer can we be told the answer. Rather, we create it. Thus is individuation as we know it to be possible.
This work is written in an unimaginably large scope, gathering bits of mythology and philosophy from the Middle Ages and rolling them into mountainous ideas for our present times. From the troubadours, to 18th century philosophy, to Schopenhauer, to Jung, to Einsteins's relativity, the nature of our current mythology takes shape. So now, each person is his own source of mythological guidance, depending on the absolute singularity of the self. It wasn't always this way...
Campbell says: Break the shackles of your conditioning and AWAKEN! Throw out the norms of the State and become your own individual person. No longer do you rely on mythology given to you by someone else, on the conditioning of the Nobody (the "State in which you were born," whatever that might be). Use that which you have inherited to break free and create your own mythology by which to live. This is individuation.
Follow your heart, I say. Fall in Love and lose yourself in the beauty of Life. Whatever you do, create art with the materials at your disposal, and when you have finished, birth yourself awake once again for new adventures.
No longer do we receive guidance on the Great Road. Since the time of the troubadours, who began to sing odes to individuals rather than to an ideal God who would damn them to hell, we must make our own way, creating our own face for God. No longer can we be told the answer. Rather, we create it. Thus is individuation as we know it to be possible.
This work is written in an unimaginably large scope, gathering bits of mythology and philosophy from the Middle Ages and rolling them into mountainous ideas for our present times. From the troubadours, to 18th century philosophy, to Schopenhauer, to Jung, to Einsteins's relativity, the nature of our current mythology takes shape. So now, each person is his own source of mythological guidance, depending on the absolute singularity of the self. It wasn't always this way...
Campbell says: Break the shackles of your conditioning and AWAKEN! Throw out the norms of the State and become your own individual person. No longer do you rely on mythology given to you by someone else, on the conditioning of the Nobody (the "State in which you were born," whatever that might be). Use that which you have inherited to break free and create your own mythology by which to live. This is individuation.
Follow your heart, I say. Fall in Love and lose yourself in the beauty of Life. Whatever you do, create art with the materials at your disposal, and when you have finished, birth yourself awake once again for new adventures.
February 19, 2009
It's to give a rating for this book as I have not finished it yet. Unlike the previous volumes this takes a more focused look at the arts from the middle ages to the present. I'm only 150 pages or so into as of now.
Alright I finally finished the book. Yeah, it may sound like a bit of exasperation there and at some points it was. This volume was a bit more challenging to read I felt and did not flow as well as the first three volumes. I felt Campbell did a fantastic job reaching his point as "man as the author of his own destiney." He drew a lot from Nietzsche, Joyce, Mann, Dante, Goethe, and the Arthurian legends in this volume. There were points where he was long in the tooth but these were segmented by rapturous stories and references.
I'm really glad I took the time to read the entire series. I highly recommend them to everyone. Great stuff!
Alright I finally finished the book. Yeah, it may sound like a bit of exasperation there and at some points it was. This volume was a bit more challenging to read I felt and did not flow as well as the first three volumes. I felt Campbell did a fantastic job reaching his point as "man as the author of his own destiney." He drew a lot from Nietzsche, Joyce, Mann, Dante, Goethe, and the Arthurian legends in this volume. There were points where he was long in the tooth but these were segmented by rapturous stories and references.
I'm really glad I took the time to read the entire series. I highly recommend them to everyone. Great stuff!
March 26, 2008
Because I always do things bass-ackwards I read Vol. 4 "...Creative Mythology" first. Coming from a Fine-Arts and creative writing background this was perfect because the author highlights the common mythological threads throughout literature, poetry, visual arts, religion et. al. Joseph Campbell is the only man that I have ever come across that knows everything about all mythology. If you have ANY interest in why we as human beings create the stories that we do and generally try to relate the experiences that we have to one another then I would recomend trying to read any of the "Masks Of God..." series.
August 3, 2008
I loved the scholarship of this book...I learned that there was a christian sect that would eat the aborted fetuses of thier women, also, diana's priesthood and its bloody rights of passage, and many other things that have been believed by differant people at different times about god...joseph cambell a student of carl jungs wrote in four volumes a magnificient work...with implications on any creative persons ideas of myth and its role in life... deep book... mike seely and the acid tong
February 17, 2011
Like I'd say anything about my main man, Joseph Campbell? Always compelling, Always interesting, and what a wonderful storyteller. A man whose grace, kindness,and infinite intelligence, always shines through in his writing.
February 8, 2009
The last in the series. As this was written nearly 40 years ago, many of the ending spots for the series feel unfinished....as it would since so many cultural trends have gone on, changed, AND reached back to the past. Reading all 4 volumes can be a revelation.....
December 10, 2010
This is the book that contains Joe's 'Annotated Parzival,' as I call it, and a very sharp look at our modern tendency toward older myths.
Even as I write this, our nation toils on, waging war and ravaging the planet. But, I digress. . . --From A Reader's Journal, by d r melbie.
Even as I write this, our nation toils on, waging war and ravaging the planet. But, I digress. . . --From A Reader's Journal, by d r melbie.
Shelved as 'abandoned'
December 29, 2012Would like to get to this before reading Ulysses, since I've heard Campbell's take on Joyce totally transforms the way you see the work.
Want to read
April 5, 2016All the Joseph Campbell books scratch a really deep itch to understand your favorite stories in the grand context of the history of humanity. I haven't ventured past The Power of Myth, but I'm especially excited to challenge my preconceptions with some of the non western myths he discusses.
March 26, 2007
This is how it is done . pursuit of your happiness.
December 8, 2007
Campbell hits the nail on the head!
December 23, 2009
Of the 'Mythology' quartet, best.
November 7, 2015
this is the completion of a 30 year reading project, 4 volumes, thousands of pages.
June 19, 2012
Not an easy read but well worth it. As always I walked away seeing things just a bit diffferently.
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