Joseph Campbell's
The Masks of God
Probably the great mythologist's greatest work was his four-volume examination of the vast history of his subject. The first volume, published in 1959, was subtitled Primitive Mythology: an in-depth examination of the mythological structures of both primitive societies and of the pre-historical rise of mythological themes stemming from the earliest homonids and culminating with the rise of the first great civilizations some 5,000 years ago. It also enters into detailed speculation about the psychological basis of mythology and its function within the realm of human culture. Along with the three volumes that follow: Oriental Mythology, Occidental Mythology, and Creative Mythology, The Masks of God stands as one of the greatest achievements in the attempt to unravel the vast history and meaning of mythology and religion ever attempted.I propose to, beginning with this first volume, to undertake a review of this entire series of books for the purpose of summary, interpretation and understanding. Throughout, I shall provide my own commentary, while at other times I will publish large excerpts from the text, in order to allow Campbell's brilliant prose to speak for itself. We shall also take many detours along the way in order to examine certain subjects that the author brings up in more detail.
Why have I chosen this particular tetralogy for such scrupulous study? I should rather say that it has chosen me, as its contents range through virtually every range of subject matter that I find interesting, compelling and essential for understanding on a personal level. But it is more than that: I believe that within the pages of these books lies a potential beginning for a new and visionary foundation for a universal mythology for a consciously united world of humankind that can function and serve our children and grandchildren in the 21st century and beyond.
I realize that this is a powerful and presumptuous statement, and of course, I could well be overstating its true potential. As a matter of fact, it well may be truly delusional on my part to believe that such an historical shift of perspective is possible, let alone likely, for the human species. But as I look around me, every day, in the news, I see all the ongoing intolerance and violence in the name of parochial mythological beliefs that we, as a species, should have long outgrown and replaced with greater, more universal concepts that are conducive not only to our happiness, but to our very survival. I cannot help but think and hope that, after reviewing the many richly creative and adaptive revolutions that Campbell enumerates in our rich, yet brief history as a race, that we may (and must) be able to evolve once more into some higher universal perspective that will allow us to progress to yet a greater level of understanding, tolerance and inclusiveness.
What I am convinced of is that if we do not develop some method of greater adaptability and compatibility with one another, this particular project called the human experiment is ultimately doomed to an ugly and untimely failure. Let us hope and pray that this is not the case.
Now, as much as I am an admirer, and to a large degree, a follower, of the vast syncretic vision of Joseph Campbell, I must admit that, of course, he does not have all the answers - nor do I always agree with him. Let no one think that I am blindly asserting that by adapting ourselves to his positions we can somehow magically transform the world. Campbell was not a savior - he was a scholar and a visionary. But when someone of his quick sensitivity and dazzling acumen comes along and devotes a lifetime of work that may help serve as a bridge to original ideas that provide a framework through which we might actually be able to profitably unite all our old ones to build a greater and brighter future, then I believe that we should be intelligent enough to pay attention and at least give it some thought.
Ultimately, I suppose, that is the chief purpose of this enterprise that I am initiating today. If one person is able to take away a valuable new insight from anything that I may be able to uncover from these pages, well that is one victory worth achieving. Great ideas can well spring from the slightest initiatives. And while I am under no delusion that my efforts can help "save the world," so to speak, I also tend to believe that every positive little gesture has the potential to contribute, to some unknowable degree, some sort of charge for the greater good. So the real question, it seems to me, is "why the hell not do this?"
And so help me, I can't think of a good reason.
Prologue: Toward a Natural History of the Gods and Heroes
Joseph Campbell begins his four-volume enterprise with a brief overview of what he intends to accomplish with his series. His project is nothing less that to provide a comprehensive overview of the history and forms of the mythology of humankind and its function for humankind, from the beginning of time to the present day. In a short preamble, he demonstrates the difficulty - or rather the impossibility - of producing such an overview up until his own time - that of the last century - by enumerating all the various advances in different branches of scholarship in the preceding century. It is a fascinating excursion into the recent past to reveal how much necessary (and new) information came to light over the period of that hundred years.I will not detail everything that he lists, but let us take note that before the 19th century, nothing was known of the history of human evolution, the gradual development of early humans, the Neolithic revolution, the rise of the first civilizations, the enormously spread diffusion of language and customs before the written word, the enormous wealth of archaeological exploration or anthropological observation. Nor had any real investigative work been given into the exploration of the human psyche itself.
In short, before the 19th century, we were isolated in our own cultural spheres, in total ignorance of our common origins and the shared customs of our inheritance. We could not have conceived of such a project, nor had our scientific revolution reached such a point where even a minority of the best-informed minds could have been capable of grappling with the basic information necessary to conduct such an endeavor.
His basic contention is, simply, now that we are able to begin such a universal study, we simply ought to do it.
Campbell notes that no one has attempted such wide-ranging comparative mythological study before, and he recognizes he is a trailblazer. Nowhere does he suggest that he will have the last word on the subject - he realizes that he is initiating a new sort of comprehensive enterprise, and he hopefully believes that others will follow his lead.
Part One: The Psychology of Myth
This tells us the point at which Campbell will begin his study, the central locus of where the playing field of his subject matter takes place. This is a purely logical beginning, and it will take us into fascinating realms of speculative study that can in no way be exhausted by his text.But before the embarkation, he lays down an Introduction, which I would like to reproduce here in its entirety. Because there is nowhere that I have found such a compelling and thoroughly original perspective brought to this subject matter, and his examples and strength of one are such that I could in no way adequately summarize it. There are many great, brilliant, and beautiful ideas here expressed in a prose that is both elegant and enchanting.
It is my hope is that some interested souls will actually take the time to peruse - more than once, optimally - what is contained within and give it some deep and thoughtful consideration. On an even more ambitious level, I would be enormously gratified if anyone that is truly touched, inspired, confused, confounded, or even downright irritated by what they read here, that they would venture forth a comment or two of their own. I am coming to realize that a dialectic is a difficult thing to engage, and this is only natural given the busy circumstances of peoples' lives and the already full scope of their cognitive agendas. Being aware of all this, any response whatsoever would cause my heart to soar like an eagle's.
But whether there is any commentary forthcoming from the outside or not, I plan to return with some remarks of my own in due time. Whether they are read or given any consideration or not is a situation over which I have no control, and I do not plan to anguish over it one way or another.
Introduction - The Lesson of the Mask
The artist eye, as Thomas Mann has said, has a mythical slant upon life; therefore, the mythological realm - the world of the gods and demons, the carnival of their masks and the curious game of "as if" in which the festival of the lived myth abrogates all the laws of time, letting the dead swim back to life, and the "once upon a time" becomes the very present - we must first approach and first regard with the artist’s eye. For, indeed, in the primitive world, where most of the clues to the origin of mythology must be sought, the gods and demons are not conceived in the way of hard and fast, positive realities. A god can be simultaneously in two or more places - like a melody, or like the form of a traditional mask. And wherever he comes, the impact of his presence is the same: it is not reduced through multiplication. Moreover, the mask in a primitive festival is revered and experienced as a veritable apparition of the mythical being that it represents - even though everyone knows that a man made the mask and that a man is wearing it. The one wearing it, furthermore, is identified with the god during the time of the ritual of which the mask is a part. He does not merely represent the god; he is the god.The literal fact that the apparition is composed of A, a mask, B, its reference to a mythical being, and C, a man, is dismissed from the mind, and the presentation is allowed to work without correction upon the sentiments of both the beholder and the actor. In other words, there has been a shift of view from the logic of the normal secular sphere, where things are understood to be distinct from one another, to a theatrical play sphere, where they are accepted for what they are experienced as being and the logic is that of "make believe" - "as if."
We all know the convention, surely! It is a primary, spontaneous device of childhood, a magical device, by which the world can be transformed from banality to magic in a trice. And its inevitability in childhood is one of those universal characteristics of man that unite us in one family. It is a primary datum, consequently, of the science of myth, which is concerned precisely with the phenomenon of self-induced belief.
"A professor," wrote Leo Frobenius in a celebrated paper on the force of the daemonic world of childhood, "is writing at his desk and his four-year-old little daughter is running about the room. She has nothing to do and is disturbing him. So he gives her three burnt matches, saying, ‘Here! Play!’ and, sitting on the rug, she begins to play with the matches, Hansel, Gretel, and the witch. A considerable time elapses, during which the professor concentrates upon his task, undisturbed. But then, suddenly, the child shrieks in terror. The father jumps. ‘What is it? What has happened?’ The little girl comes running to him, showing every sign of great fright. ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ she cries, ‘take the witch away! I can’t touch the witch any more!’"
"An eruption of emotions," Frobenius observes,
is characteristic of the spontaneous shift of an idea from the level of the sentiments (Gemut) to that of sensual consciousness (sinnliches Bewusstein). Furthermore, the appearance of such an eruption obviously means that a certain spiritual process has reached a conclusion. The match is not a witch; nor was it a witch for the child at the beginning of the game. The process, therefore, rests on the fact that the match has become a witch on the level of the sentiments and the conclusion of the process coincides of the transfer of this idea to the plain of consciousness. The observation of the process escapes the test of conscious thought, since it enters consciously only after or at the moment of completion. However, insamuch as the idea is, it must have become. The process is creative, in the highest sense of the word; for, as we have seen, in a little girl a match can become a witch. Briefly stated, then: the phase of becoming takes place on the level of the sentiments, whilst that of being is on the conscious plane.
This vivid, convincing example of a child’s seizure by a which while in the act of play may be taken to represent an intense degree of the daemonic mythological experience. However, the attitude of mind represented by the game itself, before the seizure supervened, also belongs within the sphere of our subject. For as J. Huizinga has pointed out in his brilliant study of the play element in culture, the whole point, at the beginning, is the fun of play, not the rapture of seizure. "In all the wild imaginings of mythology a fanciful spirit of playing," he writes, on the border-line between jest and earnest." "As far as I know, ethnologists and anthropologists concur in the opinion that the mental attitude in which the great religious feasts of savages are celebrated and witnessed is not one of complete illusion. There is an underlying consciousness of things ‘not being real.’" And he quotes, among others, R.R. Marett, who, in his chapter on "Primitive Credulity" in The Threshold of Religion, develops the idea that a certain element of "make-believe" is operative in all primitive religions. "The savage," wrote Marett, "is a good actor who can be quite absorbed in his role, like a child at play; and also, like a child, a good spectator who can be frightened to death by the roaring of something he knows perfectly well to be no ‘real’ lion."
"By considering the whole sphere of so-called primitive culture as a play-sphere," Huizinga then suggests in conclusion, "we pave the way to a more direct and more general understanding of its peculiarities than any meticulous psychological or sociological analysis would allow." And I would concur wholeheartedly with this judgment, only adding that we should extend the consideration to the entire field of our present subject.
In the Roman Catholic mass, for example, when the priest, quoting the words of Christ at the Last Supper, pronounces the formula of consecration - with utmost solemnity - first over the wafer of the host (Hoc est enim Corpus meum: "for this is My Body"), then over the chalice of the wine (Hic est enim Calix Saguinis mei, novi at aeterni Testamenti: Mysterium fidei; qui pro vobis et pro multis effundetur in remissionem peccatorum: "For this is the Chalice of My Blood, of the new and eternal testament: the mystery of faith: which shall be shed for you and for many unto the remission of sins"), it is to be supposed that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, that every fragment of the host and that every drop of the wine is the actual living Savior of the world. The sacrament, that is to say, is not conceived to be a reference, a mere sign or symbol to arouse in us a train of thought, but is God himself, the Creator, Judge, and Savior of the Universe, here come to work upon us directly, to free our souls (created in His image) from the effects of the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (which we are to suppose existed as a geographical fact).
Comparably, in India it is believed that, in response to consecrating formulae, deities will descend graciously to infuse their divine substance into the temple images, which are then called their throne or seat (pitha). It is also possible - and in some Indian sects even expected - that the individual himself should become a seat of study. In the Gandharva Tantra it is written, for example, "No one who is not himself divine can successfully worship a divinity"; and again, "Having become the divinity, one should offer it sacrifice."
Furthermore, it is even possible for a really gifted player to discover that everything - absolutely everything - has become the body of a god, or reveals the omnipresence of God as the ground of all being. There is a passage, for example, among the conversations of the nineteenth-century Bengalese spiritual master Ramakrishna, in which he described such an experience. "One day," he is said to have reported, "it was suddenly revealed to me that everything is Pure Spirit. The utensils of worship, the altar, the door frame - all Pure Spirit. Men, animals and other living beings - all Pure Spirit. Then like a madman I began to shower flowers in all directions. Whatever I saw I worshipped."
Belief - or at least a game of belief - is the first step toward such a divine seizure. The chronicles of the saints abound in accounts of their long ordeals of difficult practice, which preceded their moments of being carried away; and we have also the more spontaneous religious games and exercises of the folk (the amateurs) to illustrate for us the principle involved. The spirit of the festival, the holiday, the holy day of the religious ceremonial, requires that the normal attitude toward the cares of the world should have been temporarily set aside in favor of a particular mood of dressing up. The world is hung with banners. Or in the permanent religious sanctuaries - the temples and cathedrals, where an atmosphere of holiness hangs permanently in the air - the logic of cold, hard fact must not be allowed to intrude and spoil the spell. The gentile, the "spoil sport," the positivist, who cannot or will not play, must be kept aloof. Hence the guardian figures that stand at either side of the entrances to holy places: lions, bulls, or fearsome warriors with uplifted weapons. They are there to keep out the "spoil sports," the advocates of Aristotelian logic, for whom A can never be B; for whom the actor is never to be lost in the part; for whom the mask, the image, the consecrated host, tree, or animal, cannot become God, but only a reference. Such heavy thinkers are to remain without. For the whole purpose of entering a sanctuary or participating in a festival is that one should be overtaken by the state known in India as "the other mind" (Sanskrit, anya-manas: absent-mindedness, possession by a spirit), where one is "beside oneself," spellbound, set apart from one’s logic of self-possession and overpowered by the force of a logic of "indissociation: - wherein A is B, and C is also B.
"One day," said Ramakrishna, "while worshipping Shiva, I was about to offer a bel-leaf on the head of the image, when it was revealed to me that this universe itself is Shiva. Another day, I had been plucking flowers when it was revealed to me that each plant was a bouquet adorning the universal form of God. That was the end of my plucking flowers. I look on man in just the same way. When I see a man, I see that it is God Himself, who walks on earth, rocking to and fro, as it were, like a pillow floating on the waves."
From such a point of view the universe is the seat (pitha) of a divinity from whose vision our usual state of consciousness excludes us. But in the playing in the game of the gods we take a step toward that reality - which is ultimately the reality of ourselves. Hence the rapture, the feelings of delight, and the sense of refreshment, harmony, and re-creation! In the case of a saint, the game leads to seizure - as in the case of the little girl, to whom the match revealed itself to be a witch. Contact with the orientation of the world may then be lost, the mind remaining rapt in the other state. For such it is impossible to return to this other game, the game of life in the world. They are possessed of God; that is all they know on earth and all they need to know. And they can even infect whole societies, so that these, inspired by their seizures, may likewise break contact with the world and spurn it as delusory, or as evil. Secular life then may be read as a fall - a fall from Grace, Grace being the rapture of the festival of God.
But there is another attitude, more comprehensive, which has given beauty and love to the two worlds: that, namely, of the lila, "the play," as it has been termed in the Orient. The world is not condemned and shunned as a fall, but voluntarily entered as a game or dance, wherein the spirit plays.
Ramakrishna closed his eyes. "Is it only this?" he said. "Does God exist only when the eyes are closed, and disappear when the eyes are opened?" He opened his eyes. "The Play belongs to Him to whom Eternity belongs, and Eternity to Him to whom the Play belongs . . . Some people climb the seven floors of a building and cannot get down; but some climb up and then, at will, visit the lower floors."
The question then becomes only: How far down or up the ladder can one go without losing the sense of a game? Professor Huizinga, in his work already referred to, points out that in Japanese the verb asobu, which refers to play in general - relaxation, recreation, amusement, trip or jaunt, dissipation, gambling, lying idle, or being unemployed - also means to study at a university or under a teacher; likewise, to engage in a sham fight; and finally, to participate in the very strict formalities of the tea ceremony. He continues:
The extraordinary earnestness and profound gravity of the Japanese ideal of life is masked by the fashionable fiction that everything is only play. Like the chevalerie of the Christian Middle Ages, Japanese bushido took shape almost entirely in the play-sphere and was enacted in play-forms. The language still preserves this conception in the asobase-kotoba (literally play-language) or polite speech, the mode of address used in conversation with persons of higher rank. The convention is that the higher classes are merely playing at all they do. The polite form for "you arrive in Tokyo" is, literally, "you play arrival in Tokyo"; and for "I hear that your father is dead," "I hear that your father has played dying." In other words, the revered person is imagined as living in an elevated sphere where only pleasure or condescension moves to action.
From this supremely aristocratic point of view, any state of seizure, whether by life or by the gods, must represent a fall or drop of spiritual niveau, a vulgarization of the play. Nobility of spirit is the grace - or ability - to play, whether in heaven or on earth. And this, I take it, this noblesse oblige, which has always been the quality of aristocracy, was precisely the virtue (arete) of the Greek poets, artists, and philosophers, for whom the gods were true as poetry is true. We may take it also to be the primitive (and proper) mythological point of view, as contrasted with the heavier positivistic; which latter is represented, on the one hand, by religious experiences of the literal sort, where the impact of a daemon, rising to the plane of consciousness from its place of birth on the level of the sentiments, is taken to be objectively real, and, on the other, by science and political economy, for which only measurable facts are objectively real. For if it is true, as the Greek philosopher Antisthenes (born c. 444 B.C.) has said, that "God is not like anything: hence no one can understand him by means of an image," or, as we read in the Indian Upanishad,
It is other, indeed, than the known
And, moreover, above the unknown!
then it must be conceded, as a basic principle of our natural history of the gods and heroes, that whenever a myth has been taken literally its sense has been perverted; but also, reciprocally, that whenever it has been dismissed as a mere priestly fraud or sign of inferior intelligence, truth has slipped out the other door.
And so what, then, is the sense that we are to seek, if it be neither here nor there?
Kant, in his Prolegomena to Every Future System of Metaphysics, states very carefully that all our thinking about final things can only be by way of analogy. "The proper expression for our fallible mode of conception," he declares, "would be: that we imagine the world as if its being and inner character were derived from a supreme mind" (italics mine).
Such a highly played game of "as if" frees our mind and spirit, on the one hand, from the presumption of theology, which pretends to know the laws of God, and, on the other, from the bondage of reason, whose laws do not apply beyond the horizon of human experience.
I am willing to accept the word of Kant, as representing the view of a considerable metaphysician. And applying it to the range of festival games and attitudes just reviewed - from the mask to the consecrated host and temple image, transubstantiated worshipper and transubstantiated world - I can see, or believe I can see, that a principle of release operates throughout the series by way of the alchemy of an "as if"; and that, through this, the impact of all so-called "reality" upon the psyche is transubstantiated. The play state and the rapturous seizures sometimes deriving from it represent, therefore, a step rather toward than away from the ineluctable truth; and belief - acquiescence in a belief that is not quite belief - is the first step toward the deepened participation that the festival affords in the general will to life which, in its metaphysical aspect, is antecedent to, and the creator of, all life’s laws.
The opaque weight of the world - both of life on earth and of death, heaven, and hell - is dissolved, and the spirit freed, not from anything, for there was nothing from which to be freed except a myth too solidly believed, but for something, something fresh and new, a spontaneous act.
From the position of secular man (Homo sapiens), that is to say, we are to enter the play sphere of the festival, acquiescing to a game of belief, where fun, joy, and rapture rule in ascending series. The laws of life in time and space - economics, politics, and even morality - will thereupon dissolve. Whereafter, re-created by that return to paradise before the Fall, before the knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong, true and false, belief and disbelief, we are to carry the point of view and spirit of man the player (Homo ludens) back into life; as in the play of children, where, undaunted by the banal actualities of life’s meagre possibilities, the spontaneous impulse of the spirit to identify itself with something other than itself for the sheer delight of play, transubstantiates the world - in which, actually, after all, things are not quite as real or permanent, terrible, important, or logical as they seem.
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