The masks of god - joseph campbell

JOSEPH CAMPBELL
THE
MASKS OF GOD:
PRIMITIVE
MYTHOLOGY
LONDON : SECKER & WARBURG : 1960
OCR by Angel (Christian Library)




Version 1.0
COPYRIGHT © 1959 BY JOSEPH CAMPBELL
The author wishes to acknowledge with gratitude the generous support
of his researches by the Bollingen Foundation
Printed in England by
The Pitman Press Ltd., Bath
and first published 1960 by
Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd.
7 John Street, London
W.C.I
CONTENTS
Prologue: Toward a Natural History of the Gods
and Heroes 3
I. The Lineaments of a New Science 3
II. The Well of the Past 5
III. The Dialogue of Scholarship and Romance 8
PART ONE: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MYTH
Introduction: The Lesson of the Mask 21
Chapter I. The Enigma of the Inherited Image 30
I. The Innate Releasing Mechanism 30

II. The Supernormal Sign Stimulus 38
Chapter 2. The Imprints of Experience 50
I. Suffering and Rapture 50
II. The Structuring Force of Life on Earth 57
III. The Imprints of Early Infancy 61
IV. The Spontaneous Animism of Childhood 78
V. The System of Sentiments of the Local Group 88
VI. The Impact of Old Age 118
PART TWO: THE MYTHOLOGY OF
THE PRIMITIVE PLANTERS
Chapter 3. The Culture Province of
the High Civilizations 135
I. The Proto-Neolithic: c. 7500-5500 B.C. 136
vi
CONTENTS
II. The Basal Neolithic: c. 5500-4500 B.c. 138
III. The High Neolithic: c. 4500-3500 B.c. 140
IV. The Hieratic City-State: c. 3500-2500 B.C. 144
Chapter 4. The Province of the Immolated Kings 151
I. The Legend of the Destruction of Kash 151
II. A Night of Shehrzad 161
III. The King, and the Virgin of the Vestal Fire 165
Chapter 5. The Ritual Love-Death 170
I. The Descent and Return of the Maiden 170
II. The Mythological Event 176
III. Persephone 183
IV. The Monster Eel 190
V. Parallelism or Diffusion? 202
VI. The Ritual Love-Death in Pre-Columbian America 216
PART THREE: THE MYTHOLOGY OF

THE PRIMITIVE HUNTERS
Chapter 6. Shamanism 229
I. The Shaman and the Priest 229
II. Shamanistic Magic 242
III. The Shamanistic Vision 251
IV. The Fire-Bringer 267
Chapter 7. The Animal Master 282
I. The Legend of the Buffalo Dance 282
II. Paleolithic Mythology 286
III. The Ritual of the Returned Blood 295
Chapter 8. The Paleolithic Caves 299
I. The Shamans of the Great Hunt 299
II. Our Lady of the Mammoths 313
CONTENTS
vii
III. The Master Bear 334
IV. The Mythologies of the Two Worlds 347
PART FOUR: THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF MYTH
Chapter 9. Mythological Thresholds of
the Paleolithic 357
I. The Stage of Plesianthropus (< 600,000 B.c >) 357
II. The
Stage
of
Pithecanthropus (< 400,000
B.C >)
360
III. The Stage of Neanderthal Man (c. 200,000-
75,000/25,000 B.c.) 365
IV. The Stage of Crô-Magnon Man (c. 30,000-

10,000 B.C.) 374
V. The Capsian-Microlithic Style (c. 30,000/10,000-
4000 B.C.) 379
Chapter 10. Mythological Thresholds of
the Neolithic 384
I. The Great Serpent of the Earliest Planters
(c.
7500
B.C.?)
384
II. The Birth of Civilization in the Near East (c. 7500-
2500 B.C.) 391
III. The Great Diffusion 418
Conclusion: The Functioning of Myth 461
I. The Local Images and the Universal Way 461
II. The Bondages of Love, Power, and Virtue 464
III. The Release from Bondage 469
Reference Notes 473
Index 489
ILLUSTRATIONS
Sign stimuli releasing parental reactions in man
47
A child's drawing of his dream of the devil 79
Pottery designs, c. 4000 B.C. 142
Prevalence of ritual regicide (map) 167
Designs from shell gorgets, Spiro Mound, Oklahoma
233
Figures in the sanctuary of Trois Frères
287
The Venus of Laussel

288
The wizard-beast of Lascaux
300
Figures in the crypt of Lascaux 301
Ceremonial mask with horns (pointing sticks)
302
Australians with pointing-stick horns
303
The "Sorcerer of Trois Frères" 309
The Venus of Lespugue
326
The bear cult (map)
340
Capsian hunting scene, Castellón 380
Three women, Castellón
380
Man with a dart, Castellón
381
The "White Lady," Rhodesia
382
Sketches for illustrations on pages 288, 300, 301,
302, 303, 309, 326, 382 are by John L. Mackey.
viii
THE MASKS OF GOD:
PRIMITIVE
MYTHOLOGY

TOWARD A NATURAL HISTORY
OF THE GODS AND HEROES
I. The Lineaments of a New Science

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—appearing everywhere in new
combinations while remaining, like the elements of a kaleidoscope,
only a few and always the same. Furthermore, whereas in tales
told for entertainment such mythical themes are taken lightly—
in a spirit, obviously, of play—they appear also in religious con-
texts, where they are accepted not only as factually true but even
as revelations of the verities to which the whole culture is a living
witness and from which it derives both its spiritual authority and
its temporal power. No human society has yet been found in which
such mythological motifs have not been rehearsed in liturgies; in-
terpreted by seers, poets, theologians, or philosophers; presented
in art; magnified in song; and ecstatically experienced in life-
empowering visions. Indeed, the chronicle of our species, from its
earliest page, has been not simply an account of the progress of
man the tool-maker, but—more tragically—a history of the pour-
ing of blazing visions into the minds of seers and the efforts of
earthly communities to incarnate unearthly covenants. Every peo-
ple has received its own seal and sign of supernatural designation,
communicated to its heroes and daily proved in the lives and ex-
3
4 PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY
perience of its folk. And though many who bow with closed eyes
in the sanctuaries of their own tradition rationally scrutinize and
disqualify the sacraments of others, an honest comparison imme-
diately reveals that all have been built from one fund of mytho-
logical motifs—variously selected, organized, interpreted, and ritu-

alized, according to local need, but revered by every people on
earth.
A fascinating psychological, as well as historical, problem is
thus presented. Man, apparently, cannot maintain himself in the
universe without belief in some arrangement of the general in-
heritance of myth. In fact, the fullness of his life would even seem
to stand in a direct ratio to the depth and range not of his rational
thought but of his local mythology. Whence the force of these
unsubstantial themes, by which they are empowered to galvanize
populations, creating of them civilizations, each with a beauty and
self-compelling destiny of its own? And why should it be that
whenever men have looked for something solid on which to found
their lives, they have chosen not the facts in which the world
abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination—preferring
even to make life a hell for themselves and their neighbors, in the
name of some violent god, to accepting gracefully the bounty the
world affords?
Are the modem civilizations to remain spiritually locked from
each other in their local notions of the sense of the general tradi-
tion; or can we not now break through to some more profoundly
based point and counterpoint of human understanding? For it is
a fact that the myths of our several cultures work upon us, whether
consciously or unconsciously, as energy-releasing, life-motivating
and -directing agents; so that even though our rational minds may
be in agreement, the myths by which we are living—or by which
our fathers lived—can be driving us, at that very moment, dia-
metrically apart.
No one, as far as I know, has yet tried to compose into a single
picture the new perspectives that have been opened in the fields of
comparative symbolism, religion, mythology, and philosophy by

the scholarship of recent years. The richly rewarded archaeological
researches of the past few decades; astonishing clarifications, sim-
TOWARD A NATURAL HISTORY
5
plifications, and coordinations achieved by intensive studies in the
spheres of philology, ethnology, philosophy, art history, folklore,
and religion; fresh insights in psychological research; and the many
priceless contributions to our science by the scholars, monks, and
literary men of Asia, have combined to suggest a new image of
the fundamental unity of the spiritual history of mankind. Without
straining beyond the treasuries of evidence already on hand in
these widely scattered departments of our subject, therefore, but
simply gathering from them the membra disjuncta of a unitary
mythological science, I attempt in the following pages the first
sketch of a natural history of the gods and heroes, such as in its
final form should include in its purview all divine beings—as zo-
ology includes all animals and botany all plants—not regarding
any as sacrosanct or beyond its scientific domain. For, as in the
visible world of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, so also in the
visionary world of the gods: there has been a history, an evolution,
a series of mutations, governed by laws; and to show forth such
laws is the proper aim of science.
II. The Well of the Past
Very deep," wrote Thomas Mann at the opening of his mytho-
logically conceived tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers, "is the
well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?" And he then
observed: "The deeper we sound, the further down into the lower
world of the past we probe and press, the more do we find that the
earliest foundations of humanity, its history and culture, reveal
themselves unfathomable."

l
*
Our initial task must be to ask if this be true. And to this end
we shall explore first the psychological aspect of the question, to
learn whether in the human psychosomatic system there have been
found any structures or dynamic tendencies to which the origins
of myth and ritual might be referred; and turn only then to the
archaeological and ethnological evidences, to learn what the ear-
liest discoverable patterns of mythological ideation may have been.
However, as Mann has already warned, concerning the founda-
tions for which we are seeking, "No matter to what hazardous
* Numbered reference notes begin on page 473.
6 PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY
lengths we let out our line they still withdraw, again and further into
the depths." For beneath the first depth, namely that of the
earliest civilizations—which are but the foreground of the long
backward reach of the prehistory of our race—there rest the
centuries, millenniums, indeed the centuries of millenniums of
primitive man, the mighty hunter, the more primitive root-and-bug
collector, back for more than half a million years. And there is a
third depth, even deeper and darker, below that—below the
ultimate horizon of humanity. For we shall find the ritual dance
among the birds, the fish, the apes, and the bees. And it therefore
has to be asked whether man, like those other members of the
kingdom, does not possess any innate tendencies to respond, in
strictly patterned racial ways, to certain signals flashed by his en-
vironment and his own kind.
The concept of a natural science of the gods, matching the
compass of the materials already classified in the pertinent scientific
files, must therefore include in its ken the primitive and pre-

historic as well as recent strata of human experience; and not
merely summarily and sketchily, as a kind of protasis to the main
subject. For the roots of civilization are deep. Our cities do not
rest, like stones, upon the surface. The first, rich, great, and terrible
chapter in the textbook of this subject will have to be developed
no less fully than the second, third, and fourth. And its range will
be immensely greater than theirs; for it will extend into "the dark
backward and abysm of time" that is the racial counterpart of that
psychological unconscious which has been recently exposed—
sensationally—within the individual. Fathoming the grottoes of the
Crô-Magnon artist-wizards of the Great Hunt; deeper still, the dens
of the crouching cannibals of the glacial ages, lapping the brains of
their neighbors, raw, from cracked skulls; and still beyond, ex-
amining the enigmatic chalky, skeletal remains of what now would
seem to have been chimpanzee-like hunter-pygmies on the open
plains of the early Transvaal, we shall be finding clues to the
deepest secrets not only of the high cultures of both the Orient and
the Occident, but also of our own most inward expectations,
spontaneous responses, and obsessive fears.
TOWARD A NATURAL HISTORY 7
The present volume, therefore, explores with what light is avail-
able the deep, very deep well of the past. And, like the aim of
Bacon's Advancement of Learning, its intent is "to point out what
part of knowledge has been already labored and perfected, and
what portions left unfinished or entirely neglected." Moreover,
where the view is broad and certain distinctive, suggestive land-
marks can be descried, occasional guesses are ventured as to
indicated implications. But the whole review—rich and colorful
though its materials—together with its ventured hypotheses, is
necessarily in the way rather of a prospectus than of a definition;

for these materials have never before been gathered to a single
summation, pointing to a science of the roots of revelation.
Furthermore, after this study of the spiritual resources of pre-
historic man, I shall in three subsequent volumes review the forms,
successively, of Oriental mythology, Occidental mythology, and
what 1 propose to call creative mythology, as representing the re-
maining natural divisions of this subject. For under the rubric
"Oriental" can be readily comprised all the traditions of that broad
and various, yet essentially unified, major province represented
by the philosophical myths and mythological philosophies of India,
Southeast Asia, China, and Japan—to which can be joined the
earlier yet closely related mythological cosmologies of archaic
Mesopotamia and Egypt, as well as the later, remoter, yet essentially
comparable systems of pre-Columbian Middle America and Peru.
And under the rubric "Occidental" the progressively, ethically
oriented mythologies of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam naturally fall, in relationship and counterplay to the Greco-
Roman pantheons and the Celto-Germanic. And finally, as "creative
mythology," will be considered that most important mythological
tradition of the modern world, which can be said to have had its
origin with the Greeks, to have come of age in the Renaissance, and
to be flourishing today in continuous, healthy growth, in the works
of those artists, poets, and philosophers of the West for whom the
wonder of the world itself—as it is now being analyzed by science—
is the ultimate revelation.
8 PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY
Moreover, since it is true, as Mann has said, that while in the
life of the human race the mythical is an early and primitive way
of thought, in the life of the individual it is a late and mature one,
2

an impressive accord will be heard resounding through all the
modulations of this subject, from the primitive to the most mature.
III. The Dialogue of Scholarship and Romance
The quest for a scientific approach to mythology was hampered
until the end of the last century by the magnitude of the field and
scattered character of the evidence. The conflict of authorities,
theories, and opinions that raged in the course, particularly, of the
nineteenth century, when the ranges of knowledge were expanding
in every field of research (classical and Oriental scholarship,
comparative philology, folklore, Egyptology, Bible criticism,
anthropology, etc.) resembled the mad tumult of the old Buddhist
parable of "The Blind Men and the Elephant." The blind men
feeling the animal's head declared, "An elephant is like a water
pot"; but those at his ears, "He is like a winnowing basket"; those
at his tusks, "No, indeed, he is like a plowshare"; and those at his
trunk, "He is like a plow pole." There were a number feeling his
belly. "Why," they cried, "he is like a storage bin!" Those feeling
his legs argued that he was like pillars; those at his rectum, that
he was like a mortar; those at his member, that he was like a
pestle; while the remainder, at his tail, were shouting, "An
elephant is like a fan." And they fought furiously among them-
selves with their fists, shouting and crying, "This is what an
elephant is like , that is not what an elephant is like"; "This is not
what an elephant is like; that is what an elephant is like."
"And precisely so," then runs the moral of the Buddha, "the
company of heretics, monks, Brahmans, and wandering ascetics,
patient of heresy, delighting in heresy, relying upon the reliance of
heretical views, are blind, without eyes: knowing not good, knowing
not evil, knowing not right, knowing not wrong, they quarrel and
brawl and wrangle and strike one another with the daggers of their

tongues, saying, 'This is right, that is not right'; 'This is not right,
that is right.' "
3
The two learned disciplines from which the lineaments of a
TOWARD A NATURAL HISTORY 9
sound comparative science might first have emerged were those of
the classics and the Bible. However, a fundamental tenet of the
Christian tradition made it appear to be an act of blasphemy to
compare the two on the same plane of thought; for, while the
myths of the Greeks were recognized to be of the natural order,
those of the Bible were supposed to be supernatural. Hence, while
the prodigies of the classical heroes (Herakles, Theseus, Perseus,
etc.) were studied as literature, those of the Hebrews (Noah,
Moses, Joshua, Jesus, Peter, etc.), had to be argued as objective
history; whereas, actually, the fabulous elements common to the
two precisely contemporary, Eastern Mediterranean traditions
were derived equally from the preceding, bronze-age civilization
of Mesopotamia—as no one before the development of the modern
science of archaeology could have guessed.
A third, and ultimately the most disturbing, discipline contribut-
ing to the tumult of the scene was the rapidly developing science of
Aryan, Indo-Germanic, or Indo-European Philology. As early as
1767 a French Jesuit in India, Father Cœurdoux, had observed that
Sanskrit and Latin were remarkably alike.
4
Sir William Jones
(1746-1794)—the West's first considerable Sanskritist, judge of
the supreme court of judicature at Calcutta, and founder of the
Bengal Asiatic Society—was the next to observe the relationship,
and from a comparative study of the grammatical structures of

Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit concluded that all three had "sprung,"
as he phrased it, "from some common source, which perhaps no
longer exists."
5
Franz Bopp (1791-1867), published in 1816 a
comparative study of the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian, and
Germanic systems of conjugation.
6
And finally, by the middle of
the century it was perfectly clear that a prodigious distribution of
closely related tongues could be identified over the greater part of
the civilized world: a single, broadly scattered family of languages
that must have sprung from a single source, and which includes,
besides Sanskrit and Pali (the language of the Buddhist scriptures),
most of the tongues of northern India as well as Singhalese (the
language of Ceylon), Persian, Armenian, Albanian, and Bulgarian;
Polish, Russian, and the other Slavic tongues; Greek, Latin and all
the languages of Europe except Esthonian, Finnish, Lapp, Magyar,
10 PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY
and Basque. Thus a continuum from Ireland to India had
been revealed. And not only the languages, but also the civilizations
and religions, mythologies, literary forms, and modes of thought
of the peoples involved could be readily compared: for example,
the Vedic pantheon of ancient India, the Eddic of medieval Iceland,
and the Olympian of the Greeks. No wonder the leading scholars
and philosophers of the century were impressed!
The discovery appeared to indicate that the most productive, as
well as philosophically mature, constellation of peoples in the
history of civilization had been associated with this prodigious
ethnic diffusion; for it seemed that even in the Orient, the homeland

of many darker races, it had been the lighter-skinned Indo-Aryans
who had given the chief impulse to the paramount cultural trend—
namely that represented in its earliest recorded phase by the
Sanskrit Vedas and the Vedic pantheon (so close in form and spirit
to the Homeric hymns and Olympic pantheon of the Greeks that
the Alexandrians had had no difficulty in recognizing analogies),
and in its later, more highly developed phase, by the gospel of
Gautama Buddha, whose princely mind, inspired by what many
scholars throughout Europe took to be a characteristically Aryan
type of spirituality, had touched with magic the whole of the Orient,
lifting temples and pagodas not to any God but to Buddhahood:
that is to say, the purified, perfected, fully flowered, and fully
illuminated consciousness of man himself.
It was a fateful, potentially very dangerous discovery; for, even
though announced in the terminology of tranquil scholarship, it
coincided with a certain emotional tendency of the time. In the
light of the numerous discoveries then being made in every quarter
of the broadly opening fields of the physical, biological, and geo-
graphical sciences, the mythological Creation story in the Old
Testament could no longer be accepted as literally true. Already
in the early seventeenth century the heliocentric universe had been
condemned as contrary to Holy Scripture, both by Luther and by
the Roman Catholic Inquisition: in the nineteenth century the
tendency of the learned world was rather to reject Holy Scripture
as contrary to fact. And with the Hebrew Scripture went the
Hebrew God, and the Christian claim to divine authority as well.
TOWARD A NATURAL HISTORY 11
The Renaissance had opposed to the Judeo-Christian ideal of
obedience to a supposed revelation of God's law, the humanism
of the Greeks. And with the discovery, now, of this impressive

ethnic continuity, uniting that humanism, on the one hand, with
the profound, non-theological religiosity of the Indian Upanishads
and Buddhist Sutras, and on the other hand, with the primitive
vitality of the pagan Germans, who had shattered Christianized
Rome only to be subdued and Christianized themselves in turn,
the cause of the pagan against the Judeo-Christian portion of the
European cultural inheritance seemed to be greatly enhanced.
Moreover, since the evidence appeared to point to Europe itself as
the homeland from which this profoundly inspired and vigorously
creative spiritual tradition sprang—and, specifically, the area of
the Germanies *—a shock of romantic European elation quivered
through the scientific world. The Grimm brothers, Jacob and
Wilhelm (1785-1863 and 1786-1859), gathered the fairy tales of
their collection with the belief that there might be discovered in
them the broken remains of a nuclear Indo-European mythology.
Schopenhauer greeted the Sanskrit Upanishads as "the most re-
warding and elevating reading possible in the world."
7
And
Wagner found in the old Germanic mythologies of Wotan, Loki,
Siegfried, and the Rhine-maidens the proper vehicle of his German
genius.
Thus it was that when a couple of dilettantes with creative
imagination brought this sensational product of philological re-
search out of the studies of the scholars, where thought leads to
further thought, into the field of political life, where thought leads
to action and one thought is enough, a potentially very dangerous
situation was created. The first step in this direction was taken in
* For a modern review of this evidence, see Paul Thieme, "The Indo-
European Language," Scientific American, Vol. 199, No. 4 (October 1958),

pp. 63-74, and Peter Giles' article, "Indo-Europeans," Encyclopaedia Britan-
nica, 14th edition (1929), Vol. 12, pp. 262-63. The homeland of the nu-
clear folk is placed by Thieme in an area between the Vistula and the Elbe,
in the late fourth millennium B.c., and by Giles roughly in the area of the
old Austro-Hungarian Empire. A. Meillet and Marcel Cohen, on the other
hand, in their great work on Les Langues du monde (Paris: H. Champion,
1952), p. 6, place the area "in the plains of southern Russia and perhaps
earlier in Central Asia."
12
PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY
1839, when a French aristocrat, Courtet de l'Isle, proposed a
theory of politics on the basis of what he conceived to be the new
science, in a work entitled La Science politique fondée sur la science
de l'homme; ou, Etude des races humaines (Paris: 1839). The
tendency was developed in Count Arthur de Gobineau's four-
volume Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (1853-1855), and
Count Vacher de Lapouge's L'Aryen et son rôle social ( 1899 ), and
required, finally, only the celebrated work of Wagner's English
son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, The Foundations of the
Nineteenth Century (1890-1891), to supply the background for
Alfred Rosenberg's Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (1930) and
break the planet into flames.
Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of
archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men
of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images
or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest
centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving
mobs, moving civilizations. There is a real danger, therefore, in
the incongruity of focus that has brought the latest findings of
technological research into the foreground of modern life, joining

the world in a single community, while leaving the anthropological
and psychological discoveries from which a commensurable moral
system might have been developed in the learned publications
where they first appeared. For surely it is folly to preach to children
who will be riding rockets to the moon a morality and cosmology
based on concepts of the Good Society and of man's place in
nature that were coined before the harnessing of the horse! And
the world is now far too small, and men's stake in sanity too
great, for any more of those old games of Chosen Folk (whether
of Jehovah, Allah, Wotan, Manu, or the Devil) by which tribes-
men were sustained against their enemies in the days when the
serpent still could talk.
The ghostly, anachronistic sounds of Aryan battle cries faded
rapidly from the nineteenth-century theaters of learning as a
broader realization of the community of man developed—due
primarily to a mass of completely unforeseen information from the
pioneers of archaeology and anthropology. For example, it soon
TOWARD A NATURAL HISTORY
13
appeared not only that the earliest Indo-European tribes must
already have been mixed of a number of races, but also that the
greater part of what had been taken to be of their invention
actually had been derived from the earlier, very much more highly
developed cultures of ancient Egypt, Crete, and Mesopotamia.
Moreover, the worldwide diffusion of the major themes of classical
as well as biblical mythology and religious lore—far beyond any
possible influence either of Aryan or of Semite—so greatly mag-
nified the frame of the prehistory of civilization that the old prob-
lems, prides, and prejudices were rendered out of date.
A sense of the import of these new discoveries for the nine-

teenth-century image of man can be gained from a summary
schedule of a number of representative moments; for example:
1821 Jean François Champollion derived from the Rosetta
Stone the key to Egyptian hieroglyphics, thus unveiling
a civilized religious literature earlier than the Greek
and Hebrew by about two thousand years.
1833 William Ellis, Polynesian Researches (4 vols.),
opened to view the myths and customs of the South
Sea Islands.
1839 Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Algic Researches (2 vols.),
offered the first considerable collection of North Amer-
ican Indian myths.
1845-50 Sir Austen Henry Layard excavated ancient Nineveh
and Babylon, opening the treasuries of the Mesopo-
tamian civilization.
1847-65 Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes, Antiquités
celtiques et antédiluviennes (3 vols.), established the
existence of man in Europe in the Pleistocene Period
(that is to say, more than a hundred thousand years
ago) and, on the basis of his classification of flint tools,
identified three Old Stone Age periods, which he
termed: (1) "the Cave Bear Age," (2) "the Mammoth
and Woolly Rhinoceros Age," and (3) "the Reindeer
Age."
1856 Johann Karl Fuhlrott discovered in a cave in eastern
Germany the bones of Neanderthal Man (Homo nean-
derthalensis), mighty hunter of the Cave Bear and
Mammoth Ages.
1859 Charles Darwin's great work, On the Origin of Species,
appeared.

14 PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY
1860-65 Edouard Lartet, in southern France, unearthed the re-
mains of Crô-Magnon Man, by whom Neanderthal
Man had been displaced in Europe during the Reindeer
Age, at the end of the Pleistocene.
1861 The Popol Vuh, an ancient Central American mytho-
logical text, was introduced to the learned world by the
Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg.
From this momentous decade of the sixties onward,
the universality of the basic themes and motifs of my-
thology was generally conceded, the usual assumption
being that some sort of psychological explanation
would presently be found; and so it was that from two
remote quarters of the learned world the following
1868 comparative studies appeared simultaneously: in Phil-
adelphia, Daniel G. Brinton's The Myths of the New
World, comparing the primitive and high-culture my-
thologies of the Old World and the New; and in Berlin,
Adolf Bastian's Das Beständige in den Menschenrassen
und die Spielweite ihrer Veränderlichkeit, applying the
point of view of comparative psychology and biology
to the problems, first, of the "constants" and then of
the "variables" in the mythologies of mankind.
1871 Edward B. Tylor, in his Primitive Culture: Researches
into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Re-
ligion, Language, Art, and Custom, directed a psycho-
logical explanation of the concept of "animism" to a
systematic interpretation of the whole range of primi-
tive thought.
1872-85 Heinrich Schliemann, excavating Troy (Hissarlik) and

Mycenae, probed the pre-Homeric, pre-classical levels
of Greek civilization.
1879 Don Marcelino de Sautuola discovered on his property
in northern Spain (Altamira) the magnificent cave-
painting art of the Mammoth and Reindeer Ages.
1890 Sir James George Franc published the culminating
work of this whole period of anthropological research,
The Golden Bough.
1891-92 In Central Java, on the Solo River, near Trinil, Eugène
Dubois unearthed the bones and teeth of "the Missing
Link," Pithecanthropus erectus ("the Ape-man who
walks erect")—with a brain capacity halfway between
that of the largest-brained gorilla (about 600 cc.) and
that of the average modern man (about 1400 cc).
1893 Sir Arthur Evans commenced his Cretan excavations.
TOWARD A NATURAL HISTORY
15
1898 Leo Frobenius announced a new approach to the study
of primitive cultures (the Kulturkreislehre, "culture
area theory"), wherein he identified a primitive cul-
tural continuum, extending from equatorial West
Africa eastward, through India and Indonesia, Mela-
nesia and Polynesia, across the Pacific to equatorial
America and the northwest coast.
8
This was a radical
challenge to the older "parallel development" or "psy-
chological" schools of interpretation, such as Brinton,
Bastian, Tylor, and Franc had represented, inasmuch
as it brought the broad and bold theory of a primitive

trans-oceanic "diffusion" to bear upon the question of
the distribution of so-called "universal" themes.
And so it was that, during that epochal century of almost un-
believable spiritual and technological transformations, the old
horizons were dissolved and the center of gravity of all learning
shifted from the little areas of local pride to a broad science of man
himself in his new and single world. The older, eighteenth-century
disciplines, which formerly had seemed to fill sufficiently the field
of humanistic concern, had become but provinces of a much larger
subject. And whereas formerly the prime question seemed to have
been that of man's supernatural as against merely natural endow-
ment, now, with the recognition of the universality of those
mythological themes that formerly had been taken as evidence of
the divine source of the higher religions, "surpassing man's natural
knowledge," as St. Thomas Aquinas argued, and therefore proving
that "God is far above all that man can possibly think of God";
9
with the realization that these supernatural motifs were not peculiar
to any single tradition but common to the religious lore of man-
kind, the tension between "orthodox" and "gentile," "high" and
"primitive," simply dissolved. And the major questions, the prob-
lems of man's highest concern, now became, first, whether such
mythological themes as death-and-resurrection, the virgin birth,
and creation from nothing should be rationally dismissed as mere
vestiges of primitive ignorance (superstitions), or, on the contrary,
interpreted as rendering values beyond the faculty of reason
(transcendent symbols) ; and, second, whether, as products of the
spontaneous operations of the psyche, they can have appeared
independently in various quarters of the world (theories of parallel
16 PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY

development), or rather, as the inventions of particular times and
persons, must have been spread about either by early migrations
or by later commerce (theories of diffusion).
Few in the nineteenth century were competent to face either of
these questions without prejudice or to control the necessary
evidence for their analysis; for the psychology of the time had
simply not come into possession either of the information or of the
hypotheses necessary for a probing of the psyche in depth. The
eminent physiologist, psychologist, and philosopher Wilhelm Wundt
(1832-1920), who in 1857 began lecturing at Heidelberg and in
1875 at the University of Leipzig, masterfully reviewed the whole
ethnological field from a psychological point of view in his
numerous works on ethnological psychology (Völkerpsychologie);
but he realized and frankly averred that the breadth and depth of
this richly promising subject had not yet been adequately meas-
ured.
10
A scientific probing of the psyche in depth, however, had
already been initiated at the neurological clinic of Salpêtrière, in
Paris, where Jean Martin Charcot (1825-1893), professor of
pathological anatomy in the medical faculty of the university, was
opening new horizons in his studies of hysteria, paralysis, brain
disease, senility, and hypnosis.
11
The young Sigmund Freud
(1856-1939) and Carl G. Jung (b. 1875) were among his pupils;
and something of the force and direction of his researches may be
judged from their distinguished careers in exploration of the dark,
inaccessible reaches of the psyche. However, the application of
the new realizations concerning the phenomenology of the "un-

conscious" of the neurotic individual to a systematic interpretation
of ethnological materials had to wait for the twentieth-century
movement initiated by Jung's Wandlungen und Symbole der
Libido (1912),
12
and Freud's Totem und Tabu (1913).
13
The
orientations and researches of Wundt and Charcot prepared the
way, but the full-scale application of the laws and hypotheses of
the science of the unconscious to the fields of religion, prehistory,
mythology and folklore, literature and the history of art, which
has been one of the outstanding factors in the development of
twentieth-century thought, we find only suggested as a richly
promising possibility in the science of their day.
TOWARD A NATURAL HISTORY 17
And yet, as Thomas Mann observed in his important speech on
"Freud and the Future," delivered in Vienna on the occasion of
Dr. Sigmund Freud"s eightieth birthday, the profound and natural
sympathy between the two spheres of literature and the science of
the unconscious had for a long time existed unperceived. The
romantic-biologic fantasies of Novalis (1772-1801); Schopen-
hauer's dream psychology and philosophy of instinct (1788-
1860); the Christian zeal of Kierkegaard (1813-1855), which had
led him to extremes of penetrating psychological insight; Ibsen's
view of the lie as indispensable to life (1828-1906); and, above
all, Nietzsche's translation of the metaphysical pretensions of
theology, mythology, and moral philosophy into the language of
an empirical psychology (1844-1900)—these not only anticipated,
but in scope and richness sometimes even surpassed, the wonderful

insights that were now being coolly systematized in the formidable
hypotheses and terminologies of scientific exactitude. In fact, as
Mann suggested in his somewhat ironical praise of the eminent
scientist whose scientific exactitude had not permitted him to regard
philosophy very highly, it might with justice even be claimed that
the modern science of the unconscious no more than writes the
quod erat demonstrandum to the whole great tradition of meta-
physical and psychological insights represented by the romantic
poets, poet-philosophers, and artists, who, throughout the course
of the nineteenth century, had walked step by step alongside the
men of analytical knowledge and experience.
14
One thinks of Goethe, in every line of whose Faust there is
evident a thoroughly seasoned comprehension of the force of the
traditional symbolism of the psyche, in relation not only to individ-
ual biography but also to the psychological dynamics of civilization.
One thinks of Wagner, whose masterworks were conceived in a
realization of the import of symbolic forms so far in advance of
the allegorical readings suggested by the Orientalists and ethnolo-
gists of his time that even with the dates before one (Wagner,
1813-1883; Max Müller, 1823-1900; Sir James George Franc,
1854-1941) it is difficult to think of the artist's work as having
preceded the comparatively fumbling efforts of the men of science
to interpret symbols. Or one thinks of Melville (1819-1891),
18 PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY
captured by cannibals on the South Sea island of Nukahiva and
even scheduled to become an item on the menu, in whose Moby
Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852) the profundity of the author's
psychological insight is rendered through an infallible use of the
language of symbol.

"The myth," as Thomas Mann has seen, and as many of the
depth psychologists would agree, "is the foundation of life, the
timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it
reproduces its traits out of the unconscious."
15
But on the other
hand—as any ethnologist, archaeologist, or historian would observe
—the myths of the differing civilizations have sensibly varied
throughout the centuries and broad reaches of mankind's residence
in the world, indeed to such a degree that the "virtue" of one
mythology has often been the "vice" of another, and the heaven of
one the other's hell. Moreover, with the old horizons now gone
that formerly separated and protected the various culture worlds
and their pantheons, a veritable Götterdämmerung has flung its
flames across the universe. Communities that once were comfort-
able in the consciousness of their own mythologically guaranteed
godliness find, abruptly, that they are devils in the eyes of their
neighbors. Evidently some mythology of a broader, deeper kind
than anything envisioned anywhere in the past is now required:
some arcanum arcanorum far more fluid, more sophisticated, than
the separate visions of the local traditions, wherein those mytholo-
gies themselves will be known to be but the masks of a larger—all
their shining pantheons but the flickering modes of a "timeless
schema" that is no schema.
But that, precisely, is the great mystery pageant only waiting to
be noticed as it lies before us, so to say, in sections, in the halls and
museums of the various sciences, yet already living, too, in the
works of our greatest men of art. To make it serve the present
hour, we have only to assemble—or reassemble—it in its full
dimension, scientifically, and then bring it to life as our own, in the

way of art: the way of wonder—sympathetic, instructive delight;
not judging morally, but participating with our own awakened
humanity in the festival of the passing forms.
Part One
THE PSYCHOLOGY
OF MYTH