March 1964
From Book Week, 22 (March 1964): 6, 19. This is a review of Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (New York: Viking, 1964), vol. 3 of his series The Masks of God. Page references to this volume, which is in Frye’s library, are in brackets in the text.
The chief difference between Eastern and Western mythology, Mr. Campbell feels, is the difference between a monistic and a theistic attitude. In the great Eastern religions the goal of religious experience is unconditioned; in the great Western ones it is a personal creating God, and the dialectic of a transcendent Creator and a worshipping creature allows nothing beyond it [3–4]. The Hindu or Buddhist works toward an identification of himself with the ground of his being (“Thou art That”); the Christian, Jew, or Mohammedan tries to make himself an instrument of a divine personal will.
This distinction is theological rather than mythological. The chief mythological difference is that Western mythology has to have a strong historical bias, deriving from a moment in time at which a divine will was revealed to man through Moses, Jesus, or Mohammed. Oriental mythology is based on the conception, as old as the Bronze Age at least, of an eternal cyclical round of nature as forming the model for human life on earth. Western mythology, starting with Zoroaster in Persia, is based on the conception of a historical drama that begins with a beginning of time, at the creation, and ends at the end of time, with an apocalypse.
A corollary of this historical bias is that Western religions are compelled to assert that their myths are historically true in a way that does not oppress Oriental belief to such an extent. Mr. Campbell aptly compares the development of Gnosticism in Christianity to Mahayana Buddhism,1 and the contrast in their fortunes, the one a suppressed and persecuted heresy and the other the religion of the majority of practising Buddhists, is instructive enough. Religion is obviously a very deep and sore part of that massive structure of libido-repression which, according to Freud, is civilization. Mr. Campbell seems to feel that what is usually called mysticism is the least neurotic development of it, and that this fact gives the Eastern religions more flexibility than the Western socio-religious anxiety machines.
This third volume of Mr. Campbell’s projected four-volume work on mythology—the first two volumes were Primitive Mythology and Oriental Mythology—is more genial and less self-conscious in style than at least Primitive Mythology, where some technical sociological language perplexed the narrative.
Mr. Campbell begins his story with the Bachofen principle of an original cult of a mother-goddess, to whom a dying young male god is subordinated, as the general religion of the ancient world, later displaced by the historical religions which were father-centred rather than mother-centred, sky-centred rather than earth-centred, solar rather than lunar.2 Like Robert Graves, Mr. Campbell shows some hankering to idealize the earlier cult,3 though it seems clear that as far as its social and ceremonial effects are concerned it was quite as repulsive a superstition as its successors. In any case Mr. Campbell traces the change whereby the ancient Sumerian “serpent’s bride” was degraded to Medusa in Classical religion, and the serpent himself cursed as demonic in the Hebraic one.4
Certain themes are thus stated at the outset and are repeated later: the cult of Eros in Platonic dialogue is a late recrudescence of the ancient mother of love and her son, and the Mithraic ritual bull-slaying takes us back to the beautiful Minoan artefacts where the Great Mother is portrayed as the consort of the lunar bull.
So far, the organization and argument, an exposition based on a sequence of illustrations, are excellent. Mythology, however, is part of religion; religion is part of history, and a strong centrifugal drift away from mythology in the strict sense towards historical narrative sets in very early. Before long the book has settled down to being an introductory survey of the history of religions in the West. Perhaps this is not a bad thing for a book to be, but one had expected a greater novelty in the structure, if not in the material itself.
Mr. Campbell’s writing is always lucid: sometimes he quotes a good deal from readily accessible sources, including the Bible (the Passion according to Mark takes up five pages), but there are illuminating passages from the Gnostics, from Plutarch (whom he describes as a “sober Roman”),5 and from Spengler, whose account of “Magian” culture has clearly fascinated him.6 At every point he uses the right and obvious authorities: Josephus for a lively account of the Maccabean dynasty, Gibbon for the theological squabbles of Justinian’s time, and the most reputable modern scholars throughout. But one has read about all this before, probably in his sources: one would have hoped, from the author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, for a much more concentrated study of the vicissitudes and modulations of the earth-goddess, the thundering skygod, the dying god, the demonic adversary, and the rest of the divine personae as they fluctuate and change roles through their Greek, Hebrew, Roman, Christian, and Moslem incarnations.
Mythology is not theology, not ritual, not ecclesiastical history, not religion in general, but a definable subject that can, up to a point, be separated from other aspects of religion and culture and unified by its own nature. As Mr. Campbell rightly says, “the vocabulary of symbol is to such an extent constant through the world that it must be recognized to represent a single pictorial script” [312].
Of course mythologies run parallel to social developments: in fact, one would like a more precise paralleling of local and epiphanic gods with tribal society, departmental and Olympian gods with warrior aristocracies, and monotheism and syncretism with world empires. But what seems to prevent Mr. Campbell from sticking to his subject is the relentless chronological sequence of his narrative. A chapter called “The Persian Period” starts with Zoroaster, summarizes the history of the age of Cyrus and Darius, and then, when we come to Darius’s invasion of Greece, we switch over to Greece and read about Plato.
The effect of this is to uproot mythology, when actual mythology is treated, from its cultural context. We get no connected account of Greek mythology: Plato is not seen against the background of the Homeric religion that he tried to purify, and we are thrown back to the old oversimplified half-truths about Greek sweetness and light and devotion to beauty and science. Similarly, Christianity is largely deprived of its Jewish context—the reluctant passage of Judaism from monolatry to monotheism is mentioned, but not connected with the historicizing tendency that made Christianity a possible Jewish heresy—and the mythical parallels suggested with the Gospel stories are, even morphologically, remote.
So much elementary history is included that events of no direct mythological significance, such as Xerxes’ invasion of Greece or the burning of Huss, get the same amount of space as, say, the introduction of Cybele-worship into Rome.
It would be harsh to say that Mr. Campbell has simply not bothered to write his book, but the reader determined to read about Occidental mythology has to pick things out in bits and pieces. Many of the bits and pieces are extremely good in themselves. There is a brief but clear account of Mithraism, some sensitive and astute remarks on the homosexual cult in Plato, with its resistance to “the female system of seriousness” [229], some interesting comments on solar and lunar symbolism in the Odyssey and in the mythologies of Northern Europe, some good passages on the smith-and-fire symbolism of the Celtic Iron Age, and many other things that one would like to see much further developed. Perhaps in the fourth and final volume they will be.