The Masks of God

The Masks of God is Joseph Campbell’s four-volume comparative mythology, published between 1959 and 1968 — the work in which he carried the thesis of The Hero with a Thousand Faces across the full sweep of recorded religious imagination. The four volumes: Primitive Mythology (1959), Oriental Mythology (1962), Occidental Mythology (1964), and Creative Mythology (1968).

The argument across the series is that mythologies are the masks through which a transpersonal depth presents itself to successive epochs. The first three volumes trace the historical-traditional masks — the hunter’s mythology, the mythologies of planted societies, the high mythologies of India, the Near East, and the Levant, the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian inheritance. The fourth volume, Creative Mythology, turns to the modern condition in which the mask has fallen and the individual must render, from the materials of the tradition and from the authority of private experience, a mythology capable of carrying a life. The four-functions-of-myth — mystical, cosmological, sociological, pedagogical — are articulated across the series.

See campbell-primitive-mythology-masks, campbell-oriental-mythology, campbell-occidental-mythology, and campbell-creative-mythology for the individual volumes.

Relationships

• joseph-campbell
• monomyth
• four-functions-of-myth