Mythological Diffusion

IV. Parallelism or Diffusion? The archaeology and ethnography of the past half-century have made it clear that the ancient civilizations of the Old World … derived from a single base, and that this community of origin suffices to explain the homologous forms of their mythological and ritual structures.

Campbell frames diffusion versus parallelism as the central explanatory choice in comparative mythology, arguing that a single neolithic Near Eastern origin sufficiently explains Old World mythological homologies.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959thesis

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The modern theory of migration, or borrowing, according to which the individual myths originate from definite peoples [especially the Babylonians], and are accepted by other peoples through oral tradition … The profound and extensive research of modern investigations has shown that not India, but rather Babylonia, may be regarded as the first home of the myths.

Rank surveys and endorses the migration-and-borrowing model of mythological diffusion, identifying Babylonia as the probable origin point from which hero myths radiated across the inhabited globe.

Rank, Otto, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, 1909thesis

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even if stories ‘migrated’ with the people telling them, in the diffusion theory there is usually no accounting for why a given story would have been remembered so faithfully across so many (often non-literate) retellings through so many generations rather than simply forgotten.

Goodwyn identifies a fundamental explanatory gap in diffusion theory: it presupposes faithful transmission without accounting for the cognitive mechanisms that would preserve specific stories across non-literate generations.

Goodwyn, Erik D., Understanding Dreams and Other Spontaneous Images: The Invisible Storyteller, 2018thesis

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the wonderful life-organizing assemblage of ideas and principles — including those of kingship, writing, mathematics, and calendrical astronomy — reached the Nile … it spread to Crete on the one hand, and, on the other, to the valley of the Indus … to Shang China … and, according to at least one high authority, Dr. Robert Heine-Geldern, from China across the Pacific … to Peru and Middle America.

Campbell maps the geographical reach of a single diffused mythological and civilizational complex, tracing its transmission from Mesopotamia across Eurasia and, tentatively, into the Americas.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959thesis

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the most recent findings of archaeology demonstrate that the earliest center from which the idea of a state governed by a divine king was diffused was almost certainly Mesopotamia. The myth of Osiris, therefore … must be read as Egypt’s variant of a common, late Neolithic, early Bronze age theme.

Campbell applies diffusionist reasoning to the Osirian mythology, arguing that its structural resemblance to Mesopotamian dying-and-rising god narratives is explicable by historical transmission from a Mesopotamian origin.

Campbell, Joseph, Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume II, 1962thesis

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a map titled ‘The Diffusion of Bisexual Mythic Beings and Powers’ … powerfully delimit the concept of the androgyne and show it is not the universal theme scholars often assume it to be.

Cartographic evidence of diffusion is invoked to challenge archetypalist assumptions of universality, demonstrating that specific mythological themes have bounded geographical distributions explicable by contact rather than collective inheritance.

Campbell, Joseph, The Power of Myth, 1988supporting

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a map titled ‘The Diffusion of Bisexual Mythic Beings and Powers’ and another, ‘The Ritualistic Permanent Sex Change,’ powerfully delimit the concept of the androgyne and show it is not the universal theme scholars often assume it to be.

Noel’s commentary highlights how Campbell’s diffusionist cartography undermines Jungian universalist readings of the androgyne by revealing historically bounded rather than pan-human distributions.

Noel, Daniel C., Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion, 1990supporting

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the arts of grain agriculture and stock-breeding … now seem to have made their first appearance in the Near East somewhere between 7500 and 4500 b. c., and to have spread eastward and westward from this center in a broad band … until both the Pacific coast of Asia and the Atlantic coasts of Europe and Africa were attained by about 2500 b. c.

Campbell establishes the material-cultural substrate for mythological diffusion, grounding the spread of mythic and ritual structures in the documented archaeological diffusion of Neolithic agricultural civilization.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting

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of their diffusion they undoubtedly met and possibly were amalgamated … the cave, as literal fact, evoked, in the way of a sign stimulus, the latent energies of that other cave, the unfathomed human heart, and what poured forth was the first creation of

Campbell acknowledges diffusion as a process of amalgamation between spreading mythological complexes, while simultaneously gesturing toward an archaic psychological substrate that gives diffused forms their enduring resonance.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting

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sacrifice came together on this wave from the West … the outrigger canoe … bore the assemblage not only westward to Madagascar but also far eastward to Easter Island, and no doubt beyond. The basic rites of the cannibals of Ceram, and the Panpipes as well of Brazil as of the Solomon Islands, were almost certainly transported by this culture wave.

Campbell traces a specific oceanic diffusion wave carrying both ritual practice and mythological content from Southeast Asia across the Pacific, treating material culture as the vehicle of mythological transmission.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting

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The dating of this diffusion, c. 2500-1500 b. c., is about the same as that of the seaways from Crete westward and the megalithic ‘giant graves’ of France, Spain, Portugal, southern Scandinavia, Denmark, northern Germany, and the British Isles.

Campbell uses archaeological dating to correlate distinct but contemporaneous diffusion waves, establishing chronological precision for the spread of a mythologically charged material culture across prehistoric Europe.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting

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1898 Leo Frobenius announced a new approach to the study of primitive cultures (the Kulturkreislehre, ‘culture area theory’), wherein he identified a primitive cultural continuum, extending from equatorial West Africa eastward, through Indi

Campbell situates the intellectual history of diffusionism within the development of anthropological method, noting Frobenius’s Kulturkreislehre as a foundational theoretical framework for identifying culture-area continuities.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting

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the features of a newly entered land are assimilated by an immigrant people to its imported heritage of myth … the new land, and all the features of the new land, are linked back as securely as possible to the archetypes … of whatever mythological system the people carry in their hearts.

Campbell describes the psychological mechanism of mythological diffusion as ‘land-naming,’ the process by which migrating peoples transpose their inherited mythic structures onto new geographical and ecological features.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting

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this notion of early diffusion by means of multiple routes … also allows one to make more sense of the later history of the Way of the Celestial Master in the south … a much broader diffusion of the Way of the Celestial Master than can effectively be accounted for by the single-route theory.

Kohn applies diffusionist reasoning to the transmission of Daoist religious traditions, arguing for a multi-route model of diffusion as superior to single-origin accounts in explaining the geographic breadth of textual and ritual evidence.

Kohn, Livia, Daoism Handbook, 2000supporting

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Oswald Menghin, therefore, has proposed that western China may have been the initial center of swineherding, which then would have been diffused in two directions: southeastward to Indo-China, Indonesia, Melanesia … and directly westward into Europe, the Near East, and Africa.

Campbell surveys competing hypotheses for the geographical diffusion of swine-husbandry and its associated mythological complex, illustrating the methodological challenge of tracing a specific ritual-animal symbol to a single origin.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959aside

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in the first we have found the vigorous microlithic-Capsian diffusion, which did not extend into the second … Province a would appear not only to have been the earlier of the two, but also to have retained the cultural lead at least until the end of the paleolithic.

Campbell employs archaeological evidence of the Capsian diffusion to delineate paleolithic culture provinces, providing the material-cultural substratum from which later mythological diffusion would proceed.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959aside

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