Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume II

Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume II is a work by Joseph Campbell (1962).

Core claims

• Campbell’s diffusionist argument in Oriental Mythology is not primarily historical but depth-psychological: the transmission of mythological motifs from Sumer outward reveals the universality of the psychic substrate that receives and transforms them, not merely the fact of cultural contact.
• By framing Upanishadic, Taoist, and Buddhist thought as mythology operating at its highest register of conscious self-awareness, Campbell inverts Eliade’s developmental model and positions philosophical vocabulary as a technically mastered form of archaic mythological instrument.
• Oriental Mythology occupies a structurally paradoxical position in the tetralogy: it is simultaneously the most admiring and the most diagnostically critical of the four volumes, because the Oriental ideal of dissolving the individual into the cosmic order directly contradicts Campbell’s own deepest valuation of individuation.

Related questions

• Where Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane treats archaic ontology as superseded by historical consciousness, Campbell in Oriental Mythology argues the reverse — does this inversion represent an irreconcilable methodological rupture, or can the two frameworks be made to account for one another’s blind spots?
• Neumann in The Origins and History of Consciousness treats the hero’s separation from the uroboric matrix as the precondition for psychological development; Campbell in Oriental Mythology documents traditions that prize precisely the reabsorption into that matrix as the highest achievement — which framework more honestly confronts the regressive dangers latent in the Eastern dissolution ideal?
• Campbell invokes Bastian’s Völkergedanken and Elementargedanken as the operational model for Oriental Mythology’s comparative method; given that The Hero with a Thousand Faces already employed this distinction, does the later volume refine, strain, or silently abandon Bastian’s original ethnological intent?

See also

• Library page: /library/myth-and-religion/campbell-oriental-mythology/

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