Required Reading: The Masks Of God

Speaking of penetrating insights and lapidary prose as we were recently in a more humorous-frivolous context, we've been revisiting a book, the first volume of The Masks of God, a four-volume series by the brilliant scholar and mythologist Joseph Campbell, the first volume of which we read in the early-'60s soon after its publication in 1959, but haven't revisited since.

Campbell was for decades a professor at Sarah Lawrence College beginning in the early '30s, and during his lifetime (he died in 1987, age 83) produced a huge literature on comparative religion and mythology, and, beginning in the late '70s, attained the status of culture hero, even icon, for the New Age crowd which attention seemed to please him, but, in our estimation, did him a meaningful measure of disservice as both scholar and writer.

The first volume of The Masks of God, the volume we're presently revisiting, is titled, Primitive Mythology, an examination of the beginnings of myth and how it functioned and was used and practiced in primitive cultures from about 7500-2500 B.C. What particularly struck us anew on this rereading was the volume's Prologue titled, "Toward a Natural History of the Gods and Heroes", and the following Introduction to Part One of the book proper titled, "The Lesson of the Mask" in both of which Campbell sets the stage for all that's to follow in Volume 1 as well as the remaining three volumes of the series. Campbell's insights here are often penetrating, his prose always lapidary, even, at times, poetic, and his erudition more than a little impressive. Here, for instance, is an excerpt from the Prologue:

[M]ythology 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 form 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 [i.e., c. 1959], joining the world in 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 far too small, and men's stake in sanity too great, for any more 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.

And this, from the Introduction to Part One of the book proper:

The artist's 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 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 be sought, the gods and demons are not conceived in the way of hard and fast positive realities.

[...]

[In a living mythology] there [is] 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 or play sphere, where they are accepted for what they are experienced as being and the logic is 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.

[...]

[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.

[...]

[In a highly played game of "as if",] 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.

[...]

[I]n the play of children, where, undaunted by the banal actualities of life's meager 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.

If any era of Homo sapiens needed to learn and understand what Campbell has to teach us in the four volumes that constitute The Masks of God, and in this first volume in particular, it's our present postmodern era that needs it most, and most urgently. The four volumes are still in print, but to our utter astonishment, not as a set in paperback, each volume having to be purchased individually. All four volumes are available for immediate shipment from Barnes and Nobel (but, not, amazingly enough, from Amazon which doesn't have available except as a used book from independent sellers Volume 4, Creative Mythology). The four volumes are: Primitive Mythology (Vol. 1), Oriental Mythology (Vol. 2), Occidental Mythology (Vol. 3), and Creative Mythology (Vol. 4).

We cannot recommend to your attention too highly these four volumes that together constitute The Masks of God. As far as we're concerned, they're required reading for everyone whose IQ is larger than his belt size.