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JOSEPH CAMPBELL THE MASKS OF GOD: PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY LONDON : SECKER & WARBURG : 1960 OCR by Angel (Christian Library) realnost-2005@yandex.ru Version 1.0 COPYRIGHT © 1959 BY JOSEPH CAMPBELL The author wishes to acknowledge with gratitude the generous support of his researches by the Bollingen Foundation Printed in England by The Pitman Press Ltd., Bath and first published 1960 by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd. 7 John Street, London W.C.I CONTENTS Prologue: Toward a Natural History of the Gods and Heroes 3 I. The Lineaments of a New Science 3 II. The Well of the Past 5 III. The Dialogue of Scholarship and Romance 8 PART ONE: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MYTH Introduction: The Lesson of the Mask 21 Chapter I. The Enigma of the Inherited Image 30 I. The Innate Releasing Mechanism 30 II. The Supernormal Sign Stimulus 38 Chapter 2. The Imprints of Experience 50 I. Suffering and Rapture 50 II. The Structuring Force of Life on Earth 57 III. The Imprints of Early Infancy 61 IV. The Spontaneous Animism of Childhood 78 V. The System of Sentiments of the Local Group 88 VI. The Impact of Old Age 118 PART TWO: THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE PRIMITIVE PLANTERS Chapter 3. The Culture Province of the High Civilizations 135 I. The Proto-Neolithic: c. 7500-5500 B.C. 136 vi CONTENTS II. The Basal Neolithic: c. 5500-4500 B.c. 138 III. The High Neolithic: c. 4500-3500 B.c. 140 IV. The Hieratic City-State: c. 3500-2500 B.C. 144 Chapter 4. The Province of the Immolated Kings 151 I. The Legend of the Destruction of Kash 151 II. A Night of Shehrzad 161 III. The King, and the Virgin of the Vestal Fire 165 Chapter 5. The Ritual Love-Death 170 I. The Descent and Return of the Maiden 170 II. The Mythological Event 176 III. Persephone 183 IV. The Monster Eel 190 V. Parallelism or Diffusion? 202 VI. The Ritual Love-Death in Pre-Columbian America 216 PART THREE: THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE PRIMITIVE HUNTERS Chapter 6. Shamanism 229 I. The Shaman and the Priest 229 II. Shamanistic Magic 242 III. The Shamanistic Vision 251 IV. The Fire-Bringer 267 Chapter 7. The Animal Master 282 I. The Legend of the Buffalo Dance 282 II. Paleolithic Mythology 286 III. The Ritual of the Returned Blood 295 Chapter 8. The Paleolithic Caves 299 I. The Shamans of the Great Hunt 299 II. Our Lady of the Mammoths 313 CONTENTS vii III. The Master Bear 334 IV. The Mythologies of the Two Worlds 347 PART FOUR: THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF MYTH Chapter 9. Mythological Thresholds of the Paleolithic 357 I. The Stage of Plesianthropus (< 600,000 B.c >) 357 II. The Stage of Pithecanthropus (< 400,000 B.C >) 360 III. The Stage of Neanderthal Man (c. 200,000- 75,000/25,000 B.c.) 365 IV. The Stage of Crô-Magnon Man (c. 30,000- 10,000 B.C.) 374 V. The Capsian-Microlithic Style (c. 30,000/10,000- 4000 B.C.) 379 Chapter 10. Mythological Thresholds of the Neolithic 384 I. The Great Serpent of the Earliest Planters (c. 7500 B.C.?) 384 II. The Birth of Civilization in the Near East (c. 7500- 2500 B.C.) 391 III. The Great Diffusion 418 Conclusion: The Functioning of Myth 461 I. The Local Images and the Universal Way 461 II. The Bondages of Love, Power, and Virtue 464 III. The Release from Bondage 469 Reference Notes 473 Index 489 ILLUSTRATIONS Sign stimuli releasing parental reactions in man 47 A child's drawing of his dream of the devil 79 Pottery designs, c. 4000 B.C. 142 Prevalence of ritual regicide (map) 167 Designs from shell gorgets, Spiro Mound, Oklahoma 233 Figures in the sanctuary of Trois Frères 287 The Venus of Laussel 288 The wizard-beast of Lascaux 300 Figures in the crypt of Lascaux 301 Ceremonial mask with horns (pointing sticks) 302 Australians with pointing-stick horns 303 The "Sorcerer of Trois Frères" 309 The Venus of Lespugue 326 The bear cult (map) 340 Capsian hunting scene, Castellón 380 Three women, Castellón 380 Man with a dart, Castellón 381 The "White Lady," Rhodesia 382 Sketches for illustrations on pages 288, 300, 301, 302, 303, 309, 326, 382 are by John L. Mackey. viii THE MASKS OF GOD: PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY TOWARD A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE GODS AND HEROES I. The Lineaments of a New Science The comparative study of the mythologies of the world compels us to view the cultural history of mankind as a unit; for we find that such themes as the fire- theft, deluge, land of the dead, virgin birth, and resurrected hero have a worldwide distribution—appearing everywhere in new combinations while remaining, like the elements of a kaleidoscope, only a few and always the same. Furthermore, whereas in tales told for entertainment such mythical themes are taken lightly— in a spirit, obviously, of play—they appear also in religious con- texts, where they are accepted not only as factually true but even as revelations of the verities to which the whole culture is a living witness and from which it derives both its spiritual authority and its temporal power. No human society has yet been found in which such mythological motifs have not been rehearsed in liturgies; in- terpreted by seers, poets, theologians, or philosophers; presented in art; magnified in song; and ecstatically experienced in life- empowering visions. Indeed, the chronicle of our species, from its earliest page, has been not simply an account of the progress of man the tool-maker, but—more tragically—a history of the pour- ing of blazing visions into the minds of seers and the efforts of earthly communities to incarnate unearthly covenants. Every peo- ple has received its own seal and sign of supernatural designation, communicated to its heroes and daily proved in the lives and ex- 3 4 PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY perience of its folk. And though many who bow with closed eyes in the sanctuaries of their own tradition rationally scrutinize and disqualify the sacraments of others, an honest comparison imme- diately reveals that all have been built from one fund of mytho- logical motifs—variously selected, organized, interpreted, and ritu- alized, according to local need, but revered by every people on earth. A fascinating psychological, as well as historical, problem is thus presented. Man, apparently, cannot maintain himself in the universe without belief in some arrangement of the general in- heritance of myth. In fact, the fullness of his life would even seem to stand in a direct ratio to the depth and range not of his rational thought but of his local mythology. Whence the force of these unsubstantial themes, by which they are empowered to galvanize populations, creating of them civilizations, each with a beauty and self-compelling destiny of its own? And why should it be that whenever men have looked for something solid on which to found their lives, they have chosen not the facts in which the world abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination—preferring even to make life a hell for themselves and their neighbors, in the name of some violent god, to accepting gracefully the bounty the world affords? Are the modem civilizations to remain spiritually locked from each other in their local notions of the sense of the general tradi- tion; or can we not now break through to some more profoundly based point and counterpoint of human understanding? For it is a fact that the myths of our several cultures work upon us, whether consciously or unconsciously, as energy-releasing, life-motivating and -directing agents; so that even though our rational minds may be in agreement, the myths by which we are living—or by which our fathers lived—can be driving us, at that very moment, dia- metrically apart. No one, as far as I know, has yet tried to compose into a single picture the new perspectives that have been opened in the fields of comparative symbolism, religion, mythology, and philosophy by the scholarship of recent years. The richly rewarded archaeological researches of the past few decades; astonishing clarifications, sim- [...]... (pītha) of a divinity from whose vision our usual state of consciousness ex cludes us But in the playing of the game of the gods we take a step toward that reality—which is ultimately the reality of our- 26 PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY selves 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. .. 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" become the very present —we must 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... the individual Fathoming the grottoes of the Crô-Magnon artist-wizards of the Great Hunt; deeper still, the dens of the crouching cannibals of the glacial ages, lapping the brains of their neighbors, raw, from cracked skulls; and still beyond, examining the enigmatic chalky, skeletal remains of what now would seem to have been chimpanzee-like hunter-pygmies on the open plains of the early Transvaal, we... prepared the way, but the full-scale application of the laws and hypotheses of the science of the unconscious to the fields of religion, prehistory, mythology and folklore, literature and the history of art, which has been one of the outstanding factors in the development of twentieth-century thought, we find only suggested as a richly promising possibility in the science of their day TOWARD A NATURAL... lengths we let out our line they still withdraw, again and further into the depths." For beneath the first depth, namely that of the earliest civilizations—which are but the foreground of the long backward reach of the prehistory of our race—there rest the centuries, millenniums, indeed the centuries of millenniums of primitive man, the mighty hunter, the more primitive root-and-bug collector, back for... N OF THE M A S K 25 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. .. as in the visible world of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, so also in the visionary world of the gods: there has been a history, an evolution, a series of mutations, governed by laws; and to show forth such laws is the proper aim of science II The Well of the Past Very deep," wrote Thomas Mann at the opening of his mythologically conceived tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers, "is the well of the past... desired of spontaneity and the quest for the not-yet-seen There is no question here of learning, trial-and-error; nor are the tiny things afraid of the great waves They know that they must hurry, know how to do it, and know precisely where they are going And finally, when they enter the sea, they know immediately both how to swim and that swim they must Students of animal behavior have coined the term... continuity, uniting that humanism, on the one hand, with the profound, non-theological religiosity of the Indian Upanishads and Buddhist Sutras, and on the other hand, with the primitive vitality of the pagan Germans, who had shattered Christianized Rome only to be subdued and Christianized themselves in turn, the cause of the pagan against the Judeo-Christian portion of the European cultural inheritance... to that of sensual consciousness (sinnliches Bewusstsein) 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 . sensationally—within the individual. Fathoming the grottoes of the Crô-Magnon artist-wizards of the Great Hunt; deeper still, the dens of the crouching cannibals of the glacial ages, lapping the brains of their. mag- nified the frame of the prehistory of civilization that the old prob- lems, prides, and prejudices were rendered out of date. A sense of the import of these new discoveries for the nine- teenth-century. not simply an account of the progress of man the tool-maker, but—more tragically—a history of the pour- ing of blazing visions into the minds of seers and the efforts of earthly communities