A review by
Carroll Quigley in The Washington Sunday Star, 5 December 1964,
of a book:
The Masks of
God: Occidental Mythology,
by Joseph
Campbell.
New York:
Viking Press, 1964
"Background on Rites That Now Surround Us"
THE MASKS OF
GOD: Occidental Mythology.
By Joseph
Campbell. Viking Press. 564 pages. $7.95.
In recent years, we have become increasingly familiar with the writings
of social anthropologists and have read the more popular of these, such as Ruth
Benedict's "Patterns of Culture." As a result, most of us now recognize that
people in different societies and in distant tribes see the world through quite
different eyes and judge it with value systems quite unlike our own. But there
is another half to that story; our own traditions and culture were entirely
different (often the opposite) in the remote past.
It is now becoming clear that the great change, even reversal, in the
history of our traditions occurred about 500 B.C. when Greek two-valued logic
and ethical monotheism appeared, inaugurating a revolutionary break in the
development of our traditions and creating a gap which has made it increasingly
difficult for us, on this side of the gap, to comprehend the actions, symbols,
explanations, and values of our cultural ancestors on the earlier side of t hat
gap. As a result, we do not see that many of the earlier rites, symbols, and
stories are still with us, their existence concealed by a reversal of values
which made earlier deities (such as snakes, fertility goddesses, and harvest
deities) into figures of evil and sin, devils or witches. Many of these
earlier rites, such as the crowning of apple blossom or cherry-blossom queens,
Maypole dancing, Halloween, Irish "wakes" for the dead, and many archaic signs,
such as the physicians' symbol of snakes, the triangle-and-eye on our dollar
bill, the fasces on our ten-cent coin, and the Earth-Mother's breasts as the
volutes of Ionic capitals on government buildings (or more explicitly in the
pages of Playboy magazine) surround us every day. We no longer see the
significance of them, however, because the ethical gap of 500 B.C., which made
these rites and symbols sinful, but was unable to prevent their continued use,
had either to absorb them or to conceal their earlier meaning. The same thing is
true of the "literature" of that earlier archaic period which explained the
cosmos to believers and which still reappears, in fragments of "old tales" and
mythology today.
No one is more erudite in these matters than Prof. Joseph Campbell of
Sarah Lawrence College. He has explained them to us in a number of
writings of which his most recent and most elaborate is the three-volume "Masks
of God." This third volume, "Occidental Mythology," was preceded by
"Primitive Mythology" and "Oriental Mythology," but it stands as an independent
work and may be read as such.
Anyone who takes the trouble to read it carefully will find that our
world today is filled with survivals from the rites, symbols, and tales of the
archaic period. Moreover, many readers will come to recognize that recent
changes in our outlook, including much of our literature, customs and philosophy
(semantics and existentialism) are largely unconscious efforts to reverse the
revolution which two-valued logic and ethical monotheism made in the evolution
of our beliefs and social traditions more than 2000 years ago.
CARROLL QUIGLEY.
