Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #762111 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 732 pages

Synopsis
In this climax to his great series of studies on world mythologies, Joseph Campbell examines a process which he sees as beginning in the mid-twelfth century in the West: an accelerating disintegration' of the orthodox tradition, which has resulted in release for the 'creative powers of a great company of towering individuals.' The natural context of traditional mythology is, he says, a stable society and accepted authority. Creative mythology, on the other hand, is the work of the rebellious, adventurous few, the 'challengers of hell'. It arises from individual experience, but if it has a certain depth and import, it can in communication reach the value and force of living myth'. Such is the function of the great creative thinkers and artists of the post-medieval period in Europe, from Galileo to Einstein, Shakespeare to Thomas Mann.

Customer Reviews

Eloquent exploration of the evolutions of symbols/gods
In these four volumes, Joseph Campbell gathers the scattered fragments of world myth and weaves a rich tapestry in which the intermingled threads help trace the evolution of consciousness from the paleolithic through to modern times.

It is a tapestry of gods,stories and symbols which shift,rearrange and change meaning around a core of ubiquitous motifs which persist across ages and civilisations.

While a great philosophical work in its own right the nature of the material means that rather than just been thought provoking, it engages you at gut level. Divesting the mind of some of its theatrical props you can be left with a sense of sublime awe, in the face of, for lack of a more poetic work, we call life.

Like all adventures its hard work in places and the intrepid reader might find 'The Hero of a Thousand Faces' a useful scouting foray into this terrain ( a bit like Bilbo Baggin's outing in advance of the Frodo Baggin's epic).

A Textbook in the Art of Collection
"The Masks of God, Vol 2" really is a book only for those with a hardcore interest in the subject. Campbell is both a prolific and well respected author in the field of mythology. "The Masks of God" is his triumph of four volumes, of which this - of Oriental mythology - is typical. The book is a dense fog of information - statistics, quotes, stories and anecdotes.

Once, however, you dip into the book you will invariably begin to find passages of with information so surreal and bizarre that it seems out of place in a book with the layout and style of a textbook. Campbell finds the most obscure and strange rituals and legends from long lost cultures and brings them back to life, not with creative flair but with the sheer impact of the content of his words.

Recommended especially is the final chapter, in which he describes an experience of a samurai warrior fulfilling his own death sentence through suicide by disembowelling himself with a dagger before he is beheaded his kaishaku.

It may not be compulsive reading, but the information contained within this collection will serve your knowledge and imagination for a long time.

A powerful book that might change your view of life
Campbell shows how myth and epic story-telling have always played a role in human society and that these myth stories repeat over and over again. They lie under James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake and the works of Thomas Mann. They lie in the ideas of the grail and the alchymical wedding. It is the same story over and over from Jesus to Luke and Anakin Skywalker through King Arthur and Sir Galahad. It shows us how we create our heroes and how we find our wise men and shaman and how this is brought about by human creativity in myth building