Mythogenetic Zone

The mythogenetic zone is Campbell’s late-period name for the somatic-psychic ground out of which myths arise. The formulation appears in campbell-primitive-mythology-masks: the human body, “in its toughness and tenderness, and in its continuing dialogue with the world, is the ultimate mythogenetic zone — the creator and destroyer, the slave and yet the master, of all the gods” (Campbell 1959).

The concept does exegetically significant work for the Seba lineage. It locates the source of mythic imagery not in cultural diffusion, not in abstract archetypal forms, and not in ideational structures alone, but in the lived, sensing, desiring, dying body. Campbell thereby collapses the Cartesian distance between soma and psyche and aligns — without his explicit articulation of the alignment — with the Homeric phenomenology of body-as-psyche that bruno-snell, richard-onians, and the philological tradition recover. The body is mythogenetic because the body is the theatre on which the gods appear.

The formulation sits within Campbell’s Part One of Primitive Mythology, “The Psychology of Myth,” where he asks whether “in the human psychosomatic system there have been found any structures or dynamic tendencies to which the origins of myth and ritual might be referred” (Campbell 1959). The question is Jungian in form — myth as a function of the living psychosomatic organism — and the answer, for Campbell, is affirmative: myth is the native language of the body in dialogue with the world.

Relationships

Primary sources

campbell-primitive-mythology-masks (Campbell 1959)