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The Masks of God, Vol. 3: Occidental Mythology

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Religion in the West is the story of the battle between immanence (God as present in and suffusing the existence of the world) and transcendence (God as removed from and greater than existence). OCCIDENTAL MYTHOLOGY, Volume III in Campbell's MASKS OF GOD series, tells this story: how Western mythology turned slowly away from polytheism, the transcending of duality, and God's immanence, and toward monotheism, the ontology of duality, and God's transcendence.

Before tackling Christianity, Campbell spends several chapters on its predecessor faiths. We see how Judaism emerges from the scraps of the so-called Jahwist (J), Priestly (P) and Elohim (E) texts, and how the priests who pooled these various tales together created a single mythology for the Hebrew people. Campbell spends a fair clip on the subject of Freud's MOSES AND MONOTHEISM: Did the Great Prophet really exist, and if so, was he Egyptian or Hebrew?

Campbell seems to detour when he takes up the Greek and Roman religions, but we soon realize that it's not as much of a detour as we have fancied. Campbell, following Jane Ellen Harrison's PROLEGOMENA TO THE STUDY OF GREEK RELIGION, argues that Greek mythology began as a group of Goddess-centric mystery cults (of which the Eleusinian, Orphic and Dionysian traditions became the last remaining vestages), and that beginning with Homer, the Greeks edged closer to a monotheistic, paternalistic religion; Zeus' slaughtering of the Titans, the children of the Earth Goddess Gaia, is symbolic of this conquest, and Campbell points out the parallels to the Babylonian God Marduk's slaying of Tiamat, and Yahweh's conquest of the sea-serpent Leviathan. This conquest of the Goddess is driven, Campbell argues, by the rise of the warrior-king - conquerers like Babylon's Hammurabi who used religion to give their invasions the imprimatur of Heaven, necessitating that their faith serve as man's "One True Religion". The Greeks, however, managed to avoid such dogmatism, their religion kept sober by the cool light of reason, bringing a detente between religion and science which has been repeated in few cultures since.

Campbell spends a number of pages on Zoroastrianism. Unlike the Jewish tradition, in which both good and evil flow from God, the prophecies of Zoroaster cast reality as a battle between Ahura Mazda's forces of Light and Angra Mainyu's forces of Darkness - a battle which would end in a single tumultuous war with the triumph of Ahura Mazda. Zoroaster set the stage for the Jewish doomsday cult of the Essenes, and for the foremost apocalyptic prophet of the era: Jesus of Nazareth. We see the message of Christ evolve as it flows through Paul, and then through the councils of the 3rd-5th centuries A.D. Along the way, Campbell delights us with more of his lateral thinking, detailing how the myth of the Disappearing God appears both in the stories of Jesus' resurrection as well as the sudden evaporation of Romulus, the founder of Rome.

In documenting the rise of Christianity, Campbell also shows us all the "heresies" that we lost: the Greek and Roman pantheons; Gnosticism, a "Buddhism for the West", with Christ assuming the role of Shakyamuni; the minor doctrincal differences regarding reincarnation and the bodily existence of Christ that were converted into high crimes. The book finishes with a chapter on Islam, in which Campbell brings the remarkable rise of Mohammed's prophecy to life, and shows how the tradition of immanence nearly lost with the suppression of Gnosticism and the Grecian mystery cults managed to live on in the works of the great poets of Sufism.

While I love the MASKS OF GOD books, and find them a gentle read, the pages upon pages of stone carvings, bas-reliefs and statues can quickly wear down the eyes and the mind. Campbell keeps the pace brisk, but this is still not a book you read in a single sitting. While Freud, Jung and Nietschze make their obligatory appearances, Campbell keeps the psychological theorizing in this volume to a minimum, content to let history tell its own story.

Many Christian authors have accused Campbell of blaming Judaism and Christianity for all the world's ills. But Campbell does the exact opposite: He shows how these religions were part of an inexorable - and, perhaps, inevitable - shift in the religious thinking of the West. This won't satisfy Christian traditionalists bent of proving the "uniqueness" of Christianity, but it will delight students of comparative mythology who seek to understand how religion became a tool of oppression.

When Joseph Campbell died, we lost a treasure. Campbell spent years building his vast knowledge of myths and thankfully, committed much of his distilled knowledge to writing. OCCIDENTAL MYTHOLOGY is one of three major works the author compiled about the history of the myth and is part of the THE MASKS OF GOD series. In OM Campbell reinforces the compelling case he made to Bill Moyers and through his writing, that we need to look beyond the masks if we would truly know `the thing that stands behind'. In the`Masks of the Gods'series, Campbell synthesizes much of the archeological, linguistic, and theological material discovered and analyzed in the 20th Century, to elaborate and modify many themes found in Sir James Frazier's GOLDEN BOUGH written almost a century earlier.

Campbell organizes his series historically across space, showing how the beliefs of one age and place influenced those of another. In OM he discusses in great depth and with scholarly wisdom how the religions of the Levant were shaped by internal and external forces, and how in turn religious movements that originated in the Middle East interacted with the beliefs of the various peoples of Europe. Religious beliefs apparently do not travel one-way. Among other aspects of religious transmission, Campbell discusses the process of `mythological defamation' the priests of newer religions employ to attempt to demonize the old religions. Using art forms such as statuary and painting, Campbell also demonstrates how themes and ideas from older religions survive in the guise of the newer religion as elements of the older religion become incorporated into the newer religion (if you can't demonize it, incorporate it). Some of the more interesting transformations in the West involve the snake, the Goddess, and the risen Lord, which have an ancient history.

After revealing how the attributes of one religion after another became incorporated in a succeeding religion (Christianity and Islam are covered), Campbell summarizes his thesis. It seems a core theological issues is this: If a Higher Power exists, is it (he/she) transcendent or immanent? The transcendent God is "out there" while the immanent God is "down here". In other words is God, part of his or her creation? Thousands of people have died fighting over this and other difficult questions.

I cannot overrate the depth & breadth of Campbell's insights.This book is at once visionary and scholarly, passionate and detached:in sum, it reveals the powerful (under)currents that helped to shape our minds and hearts into what we are. From Persia and Israel, from Greece and Rome, through the crucible of Norse and Irish mythologies of the Middle Ages-this book ends with Zarathustra's words "By my love and my hope I beseech you-do not forsake hero in your soul!"

Occidental mythology developed into the three major monotheistic religions that dominate the West - Islam, Christianity and in particular, Judaism. The role of the divine in the Western psyche has evolved from the Primitive, flirted with the multi-dimensional gods and goddesses of the East before settling down to a one God belief. (Although one would have question how the idea of a Trinity fits in with that belief.)

The notions of sacrifice and redemption are heard throughout the saga, with many religions, lost sects and heresies sharing a similiar prophecy - that a Messiah would come who would lead them to victory. But before this was another belief-the eternal battle between good and evil. Perhaps the hardest idea for Monotheists is the notion of singular God and the presence of evil. This required the invention of yet another divinity - one that is evil.

Campbell traces the origins of Christianity, its strains and morphing theology. Along the was and from an Arian strain of Christianity (which virtually rejected the oneness of a Trinity) arose Islam, a warrior religion that originally worshipped a desert rock. The Kaaba, this rock, is still an object of adoration for Muslims and is circled by pilgrims annually. The ideas of sacrifice and atonement by at first an animal, then a person, had ancient origins - the sacrifice of the one for the many - well before Christian times.

Campbell continually tries to show the parallels between our modern religions and the now-forgotten rituals and beliefs that became universally imbedded in the Occidental mind.

One topic from PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY, the first volume of the MASKS OF GOD, that is especially prominent in the beginning of this volume concerns the mythology of the Earth Goddess reaching back to the Bronze Age. Primitive agriculture spread within the broad zone but first developed in the Middle East, and the myths that come out of that time represent an endless cycle of life and death, growth and decay, in which everything is renewed as in the obvious phases of the moon, in the endless reappearance of the sun. The force of this growth and renewal is necessarily female, of the goddess, and the items that appear in the artifacts dating from this time concern the serpent, the tree, the moon, and include signs of both human and animal sacrifice for the purpose of ensuring fertility.

In contrast with the female element in primitive agriculture is the masculine emphasis of the tribesman and herdsman of the Iron Age. With weapons newly acquired, pastoral warriors sought to extend their power. The ascent of the Mesopotamian god Marduk, in his victory over the goddess-mother Tiamat, parallels the rise of the invader Hammurabi. The patriarchal society that now evolves includes such people as the Hebrews, wanderers of the desert.

As much as the Hebrews have been a center of attention, life did not originate with them and the Old Testament. First came a long history leading up to their arrival, in which civilization began in the Middle East, including a goddess centered mythology and, notably, the foundation of the written word. Scholarship reveals that there were multiple texts that first existed from which the Old Testament was constructed, and two mythologies can clearly be discerned that were blended together to form the creation myth in Genesis. The ancient symbols of the serpent and the tree appear, but here, instead of a divinity that encompasses the force that is in all nature, the divinity is seen as being totally separate and apart, transcendent and at the same time omniscient; and by man's deeds and woman's temptation, human kind is rendered into an alienated, sinful state, in which everything is either a blessing or a curse from God.

Contrary to the Old Testament, the goddess and nature were not reduced to insignificance by the Greeks and Romans. The forces of nature are clearly apparent in Greek myths, and the goddesses, though overshadowed by Zeus and the heroic male, played prominent roles. Rather than having the effect of denigrating nature as being corrupt, the Greek myths encouraged those with an inquiring mind to seek knowledge about the world and ask fundamental questions about life. As a result, at the time of the Greeks, there was a flowering of philosophic inquiry and great strides made in mathematics and science, some of which would not be resumed for almost another two millennium.

With the advent of Christianity, the theology of immanence, as evident in the Roman pantheon or Gnosticism or the mystery cults, falls by the wayside. The author explains three major views that contended for the orthodoxy of the early Christian church: the view of the Jewish Christians that the Messiah meant a restoration and glorification of Israel; the view of the Gnostics that took an entirely different line from the Jewish tradition and emphasized knowledge; and the Marcion view that held that the Old Testament God had created evil and Jesus was the saviour sent by a higher God. What won out as set down by the powers of the early Church made the New Testament a fulfillment of the Old, and stirred in among other elements the Zoroastrian idea of the final judgement day. Rather than incorporating many different views, the early Church, starting with Paul, took a narrow view of rigid consensus and eventually everything else was considered a heresy.

All the elements of Islam, according to the author, continue in the Zoroastrian-Jewish-Christian legacy. His statement - "The mask of God named Allah is a product of the same desert from which the mask Yahweh had come centuries before" - is very interesting in light of the ongoing turmoil in the Mideast. Both Jewish law and Islamic law derive from the same place and both come from a transcendent God of the same forebears. In Islam, the consensus of the clergy in determining laws was derived from the Word of God and became rigid doctrine that had no basis for dissent or change. There were three principle derivations of law: Sunni, Shi'a and Sufi.

The goal in this study (in my reading and in what I see as Joseph Campbell's pursuit) is to gain a sober assessment of the origins of religious and philosophic views of the Occident; to see its mythology for the metaphor that it is and not to grasp it tightly as if it were simply factual. The myths of the ancient world never seem transparent; they open up a study of surprising depth. Reading them is like being confronted with a puzzle in which the solution is never unarguable or definite. The comparative part of mythology helps in this regard. In this book the author draws heavily and enlarges on material from the previous two volumes. There is much to consider in comparing the Occident with the Orient.

Many other excellent longer reviews have been written for this book, so I'll just keep mine (relatively) short. I bought and read this volume first, and it inspired me to order the other three volumes of "The Masks of God". Although I'm not a specialist in comparative religion, I found this volume an excellent introduction: covering the entire history of religion west of and including Persia, but not neglecting to make connections between these and the Oriental religions. But Campbell's approach is more than presenting a hodge-podge of connections between world religions. He was trying to paint a picture of an epic tale of the dialogue and development of religious thought throughout history. For lots of details on particular religions, other sources are probably better, but for presenting the big picture and illuminating the main ideas and trends in Occidental religions, and showing how these threads of belief interacted with one another over time, I found the book very illuminating. Judeo-Christian faithful might be upset with his treatment of their religion as another among many world myths, but those who are open to seeing how their religion fits into the context of other world beliefs might find the comparisons enlightening. For example Jews and Christians might find it interesting to learn that some of their beliefs (afterlife, angels, heaven and hell) may have come from the influence of ancient Zoroastrianism on early Judaism.

I look forward to reading the other three volumes. (Volume 1 is on primitive mythology (e.g. aboriginal, Native American, etc.); Volume 2 is on oriental mythology; and Volume 4 is, I think, Campbell's take on the direction modernity has been going with religious belief. It was a little hard to find the other 3 volumes on Amazon, but they are all there, if you click on the links of the reviewers that point to the correct volumes.

In the third volume of his monumental comparative survey of the development of mythological motifs, Campbell turns his attention to the emergence of the great Occidental religious traditions beginning in the Near East.

Having examined in previous volumes the religious infrastructure of the newly-emergent agricultural and urbanized Levant, Campbell reviews the emergence of the specialized priestly class. The priests of Sumer turn their attention heavenward to the orderly precession of the celestial cycle.

The new priesthood works to integrate individuals within the larger body of the society by reinforcing and, when necessary, coercing subordination to the collective system of sentiments and social stratifications that allow members of a specialized society to function collectively as individual part of a larger whole.

Campbell views this Near Eastern stratum as the point of departure for the great traditions of the Occident, which are characterized to a large degree by the strategies they employ for reconciling the new dictates of the civitas with the underlying neolithic archaic religious impulse. The older, deeper mythological level comes down through the Near East and spreads west from its origin in the Taurus mountains in Anatolia. The primary images of this tradition are the Great Goddess of the earth, who embodies all things within her creative matrix, and her son/consort, a lunar god associated with the bull, the trident, the serpent, and the moon. His death and resurrection represent the expression through time of the eternal energies of the psyche and the cosmos.

This complex comes down through Sumer and is dispersed along with the arts of civilization (writing, monumental architecture, agriculture, irrigation, astronomy, etc.), where it takes local guise in the form of Dumuzi, Tamuz, Attis, Adonis, Osiris, Dionysus, and Christ. We can trace this diffusion out from the Levant through Egypt and into Central Europe to the West, and through the Harappan civilization in India eastward into China to the East. The latter stream is treated in "Oriental Mythology."

In dialog with this blend of Anatolian and Semitic mythology is the proto-Indo-European tradition, which comes out of the Caucuses and breaks into Persia, India, Greece, and on into Europe. The Greco-Roman world reflects the cultural world of the so-called Aryans, who venerate the forces of nature. Their religious culture is preserved outside the classical world among the Germanii and the Celts.

Again, Campbell sees two strata to the early Classical milieu. The first is an archaic pre-Aryan chthonic form based on death/rebirth cults, and associated with the goddess and the pig. This tradition is preserved in the Demeter/Persephone mystery rites of Eleusis. The second is the later overlay of the properly Aryan images exemplified by the shining sky-god Zeus.

By the fifth century BCE the development of philosophical and scientific attitudes allowed the Greeks to reflect on the world though a rational-empirical lens, and to thereby demythologize history for the first time. We see in high Greek culture the startling emergence of a civilization that emphasizes the individual judgment of the mature citizen, instead of requiring subordination to the worldview of the priestly or kingly caste.

This worldview is carried over into Rome where it wins the field for the bright centuries of the mature Republic, until the descent of Rome into tyranny eventually yokes Roman culture to the vicissitudes of its various emperors. By the time Rome is thoroughly Christianized under Theodosius, its political situation has become untenable and it falls to the relentless pressure of the Gothic invasions coming out of Gaul and Germany.

Returning to the now-thoroughly-Semitic Near East, whose original Sumerian stock has long since been overrun by the desert peoples who created Babylon and Assyria, we see the emergence of a religious paradigm characterized by the complete separation between God-the-creator and the created world. Because the creator-deity is wholly apart from his creation, he cannot be known by the study of the world, as in the classical systems, nor through introspection, as in the Orient.

God's will is only known and affirmed through the proper adherence to the rules of the tribe, which are viewed as the unique repository of divine revelation, herein misconceived as a literal, historical fact. So we have the Jewish ideology of the Old Testament which affirms divine revelation as a historical event and elevates the people of Israel to the sole recipients of divine contact and direction.

This view is passed over largely-unmodified to the religious impulses of Mohammad centuries later, although the field is enlarged within Islam to include the tribe of all believers.

When the Judaic tradition is fused with the aforementioned image of the dying and reborn god with its goddess-consort, and this is combined with an eschatology driven by the social pressures of centuries of political domination, the result is Christianity. Christ passes through several incarnations, first an eschatological minister of the Essene variety, then the deity of Paul, and through the disputations of Pelagius, the Docetists, and the Eastern Orthodox theologians with the Universal Catholic Church, until the Trinitarian dogma of the Nicene council gains supreme eminence in western Europe for a millennium.

Much of the remainder of the book traces through lesser-known offshoots of these main branches and the disputations by which canonical orthodoxies were formed to repudiate alternate interpretive impulses. In the Occident subsequent to the Christianization of Rome, the impulses borne by the Zoroastrian, Neoplatonic, Manichean, and non-Augustinian branches of Christianity were increasingly marginalized. The Christian purge of non-clerical religious ideologies reached a ghastly crescendo in the crusades against the Cathars, and then the Inquisition.

Fortunately the book has a happy ending as in the thirteenth century the Renaissance renewal of the classical value placed on the individual in distinction to the priest master-class begins to re-emerge in allegorical form in the Romance traditions of Arthurian legend. We peak ahead at the close of this great work to the Parzifal legend which venerates experience, love, and virtue above the perfunctory salvation conferred by sacraments.

This is a brief summary of only some of the main threads of this enormously complicated book.

The Masks of God series would make a difficult introduction to the study of comparative mythology, assuming as it does a basic familiarity with a very wide range of cultures and beliefs. What Campbell offers is a diachronic survey of the evolution of these motifs and beliefs, which provides an exceedingly rare and invaluable context for understanding the origin and development of the various positions it examines.

Campbell's knowledge is vast, but this book is now about 50 years old, and naturally there is much that we now know that was unavailable at the time. Many of the dates have been pushed back, particularly the Old Testament chronology and the life of Zoroaster. And our vastly-expanded knowledge of the proto-Indo-European cultures changes some of the central details of Campbell's account. Reconstructive linguistic and archaeological work on the PIEs has given strong evidence that some of the mythological motifs Campbell assigns to diffusion based in the Levant are PIE in origin, and spread before that great wave of migrants assimilated the lessons of urbanized Mesopotamia.

In general, the complex interaction between the PIEs and the Semitic peoples of the Near East is a murky topic in the book, owing to the paucity of the available evidence. Campbell vaguely assigns the primary zone of interaction between his Aryans and the Near Eastern cultures to the Hurrians, but the details are fuzzy. This ambiguity receives insufficient attention, because the details of how and when those two great religious traditions interacted is of central importance to understanding Bronze and Iron Age religious culture. Consider Hesiod's Cosmogony and its profound similarity to the Babylonian "Enuma elish." One needs to be able to account for this interaction between Akkadian literature and pre-classical Greek mythology, or at least to confess one's inability to answer this problem.

Along similar lines, I would have liked to see more attention paied to the emergence in the mid-first millennium BCE, in both Greece and India, of a vital constellation of religious ideas that connect the concept of reincarnation into a wheel of suffering with liberation through direct visionary experience. Campbell gives chronological precedence to the Orient for this belief system, placing the Orphics fairly late and assigning an Indian influence, but his evidence for this is slim, and it does not answer the problem of Pythagoras.

This is surely one of the great unanswered questions of religious studies, for this religious motif assumed priority in India by the time of the yogic traditions and spread from there throughout all of Asia.

This book is a captivating masterpiece, both unique and profoundly informative.

If you are interested in the history of religion, the four volume series, the Masks of God, is an excellent choice. Joseph Campbell views all religion as mythology, a somewhat agnostic view for anyone who is a true believer. He also provides overwhelming evidence that all religion derives from the most ancient of mythologies, going back to those of the neolithic cultural era. My only reservation about his writing is that it is both excessively verbose, lacks clarity, and is full of what to me are redundancies. That said, I still found this volume three of the tetralogy both an interesting and a rewarding read.

I learned a great deal from the Masks of God series.Joseph Campbell was a true innovator and one of a kind. I've continued to purchase all of his works. I highly recommend The Masks of God Volumes 1-4 to anyone.

A Myth is not a lie, but, like Art, a rendering of Truth. Subsequently, religion is the extension of myth through ritual. Despite the titles, these texts are as much about religion as myth, and the works are all the better for it. Campbell skillfully explores the Human experience, and what Man has made of it, over the course of these four seminal works. At times, one feels the influence of Toynbee, but Campbell has gone beyond the author of A Study of History and into a world all the more full of wonder.

Man is the most conscious participant in Nature, and, as the Image of God, the only creature capable of reshaping Nature according to his own interpretations of its meaning. These little shapings, which we call art, myth, religion, culture, and philosophy are the stuff a rich existence is made of.

Stated simply, this work dutifully charts the progress, derivations, and points of origin of these shapings. Campbell's prose is warm, friendly, compassionate, loving but stern, and creative. One could not ask for a better introduction to the Man's works.

Occidental Mythology is the third in the series, and deals principally with Indo-European (Hellenism, Zoroastrianism) and Semitic (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) traditions. Through the thick swaths of these mythological histories we can make out a wonderful tapestry that ties the two together in profound ways while clearly outlining their differences. This is an essential work, as for we Westerners it clearly outlines who we are and how we came to be.

For those not familiar with some of the artistic themes discussed in this and other works, Campbell's Mythic Image (Illustrated Edition) makes a strong companion.