Book Report: Occidental Mythology

39. Joseph Campbell, Occidental Mythology, vol. 3 in The Masks of God (1964) (8/10/21)

I do not report here on the books I read for work. But I am making an exception in this case. 

 Mainly because this behemoth has taken up a good couple weeks of my life. And I did read the damn thing! Every last word, every last punctuation mark. And seriously, I think the actual errors I caught could be counted on my ten fingers. Most of my queries (because I've got to do something to earn that big fat paycheck) involved commas and semicolons, or on occasion a spurious date span.

I should clarify: I was proofreading a reprint of the 1964 edition of The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology, to be published by New World Library of Novato, California, later this year.

In the end, I must admit, I understood very little of this big (500-page) book. Campbell obviously had a large mind. But I got the feeling he was puzzling through arcane minutiae for his own pleasure, his own sorting out—or, sure, for scholars who are also into arcane minutiae. But not for your average pretty well educated person interested in mythology, and who knows basically nothing coming into it. Who just wants a basic picture.

When I accepted the job, I thought I might learn something. 

But Campbell dashes off in too many directions. I was impressed by the energy and the curiosity, but not by the storytelling per se. I wanted something more coherent, more cohesive—more enticing. 

He was not writing for me. He was writing for a fellow scholar, sitting over a coffee talking through an exciting new insight.

What the book left me with, then, was an impression of immensity and confusion, of the vastness of the human life on this planet, of the mystery and the desire for control—or to be controlled, perhaps, but in a positive way: to be directed, to be driven forward. We humans want magic, but we also want potency. I was also struck by all the millions and millions of little people who are essentially worthless, mere peons, workers, potential sacrifices to the gods. And by the few numinous personages, or powerful leaders, who steer our human destiny.

I don't know how Campbell is viewed nowadays. His perspective strikes me as old-fashioned, but that doesn't mean it isn't correct. (His particulars may no longer be correct, in light of more recent discoveries, but I'm talking big picture here.)

Here is an example of a passage that, whoa nelly (the following is three sentences):

The rites of Demeter and Persephone of Eleusis, Isis of Alexandria, Mithra of the Persians, and the Great Mother, Cybele, of Asia Minor, mutually influenced and enriched each other in the course of these centuries—all in terms of a common ability to sense and experience the miracle of life itself as divine, and wonderfully so. In contrast to which we find that in the orthodox Zoroastrian church, as well as in Judaism and, later, Christianity and Islam—where the ultimate view was not of boundless time but of a time when time began, as well as of a time when time would end: moreover, where it was supposed that the world and its inhabitants might be judged as, for the most part, evil, yet susceptible of some sort of ontological correction: and finally, where (particularly in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) no immanent divinity was recognized in the material world, but God, though omnipresent and (in the phrase of the Koran) “closer to man than his neck vein,” was absolutely other and apart— the ultimate goal was not, and could not be, the realization of eternal life in this world. Consequently, whereas in pagan mysteries the symbolism of world annihilation always applied, finally, to a psychological, spiritual crisis in the initiate, whereby the shadowplay of phenomenality was annihilated as by a thunderbolt and the adamantean Being of beings realized immediately and forever, in the orthodox, ethically scaled Levantine religions, the same symbolism of world annihilation was applied, rather, historically, as referring to a day to come of terminal doom.

Whew, right? 

So yeah: job well done, me! I'm sending it off tomorrow, yay! 

Is my world larger? Well, yes, in, as I said, a rather overwhelmed way. And I should appreciate that—in the sense of realizing, for example, that the total nonsense going on in American politics right now, or the Covid disaster, or the changing climate, is . . . just a dream, a passage of time. It won't last. Or rather, even if it does, it doesn't matter in the grand scheme. Life, the universe, existence, just goes on. We should simply focus on living the best life we can. Which, for each of us, lasts only so long.

Though P.S. here: I am very distraught by the utter lack of attention by our so-called leadership to climate change. We could be doing so much more to address this catastrophe. I'm not advocating sitting back and doing nothing, not by a long shot. I'm just endorsing perspective. And whatever does happen re climate change, the earth and life, of one sort or another, will endure.