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Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I)
Primitive Mythology
Primitive Mythology, published in 1959, is the first volume of Joseph Campbell’s four-volume The Masks of God — the tetralogy that the editors of the Joseph Campbell Foundation place alongside The Hero with a Thousand Faces as Campbell’s “most important and enduring writing.” Where Hero was structural and comparative, the Masks project is historical: it traces the development of mythic consciousness from its Paleolithic origins through its Oriental, Occidental, and Creative articulations.
Volume I opens with a prologue, “Toward a Natural History of the Gods and Heroes,” announcing the thesis that “the comparative study of the mythologies of the world compels us to view the cultural history of mankind as a unit; for we find that such themes as the fire-theft, deluge, land of the dead, virgin birth, and resurrected hero have a worldwide distribution” (Campbell 1959). Part One, “The Psychology of Myth,” precedes the archaeological survey with a deliberately Jungian question: whether the human psychosomatic system itself contains structures from which the origins of myth might be derived.
The work reaches back through the aceramic Neolithic of Jericho, Hacilar, and Çatal Hüyük, tracing the earliest evidence of the mother-goddess cults and the skull rites that prefigure the great mythologies of the historical period. Its most load-bearing formulation returns the mythic imagination to its somatic ground: the body itself, Campbell writes, “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 sentence is the signature of Campbell’s late method — comparative in its reach, archetypal in its grammar, somatic in its ground.