Creative Mythology

The fourth and final volume of the Masks of God tetralogy, completing the comparative survey Campbell began with Primitive Mythology (1959). Where the earlier three volumes treated archaic, Eastern, and Western inherited mythologies as collective property, Creative Mythology treats the modern West as the case in which mythogenesis has devolved upon the individual — most concentratedly upon the artist. The book traces the inward turn from the Grail romances and the troubadours through Dante, the Romantics, Joyce, Mann, and Jung, reading each as a station in the long European movement by which the symbolic life ceased to be carried by inherited religion and began to be carried by individual creative work.

The volume’s interpretive ambition is greater than its predecessors’. Primitive, Oriental, and Occidental organize material under the comparative method Campbell inherited from Bastian and Frobenius; Creative makes a thesis-driven historical argument about the modern condition. It is in this volume that Campbell most directly meets carl-jung on Jung’s own ground — the diagnosis of modern symbolic poverty and the prescription that each soul must now do for itself the symbolic work the tribe once did for it. The book is also the most literary of the four, drawing as much on Joyce and Mann as on the comparative-religious source-material the earlier volumes survey.

For the Lineage reading, Creative Mythology is the bridge volume — the place where Campbell’s comparative project becomes a project of depth psychology in everything but name.

Concepts introduced or developed

• mythogenesis-of-the-individual
• four-functions-of-myth
• mythogenetic-zone

Cited by

• joseph-campbell
• james-hillman