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An exploration of Eastern mythology as it developed into the distinctive religions of Egypt, India, China, and Japan.
- Sales Rank: #72534 in Books
- Published on: 1991-11-01
- Released on: 1991-11-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 2
- Dimensions: 8.43" h x .91" w x 5.46" l, 1.04 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 576 pages
Review
"It is impossible to read this startling and entertaining book without an enlarged sense of total human possibility and an increased receptivity—'open-endedness' as Thomas Mann called it—to the still living past."
—Robert Gorham Davis
About the Author
Joseph Campbell was interested in mythology since his childhood in New York, when he read books about American Indians, frequently visited the American Museum of Natural History, and was fascinated by the museum's collection of totem poles. He earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees at Columbia in 1925 and 1927 and went on to study medieval French and Sanskrit at the universities of Paris and Munich. After a period in California, where he encountered John Steinbeck and the biologist Ed Ricketts, he taught at the Canterbury School, then, in 1934, joined the literature department at Sarah Lawrence College, a post he retained for many years. During the 1940s and '50s, he helped Swami Nikhilananda to translate the Upanishads and The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. The many books by Professor Campbell include The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Myths to Live By, The Flight of the Wild Gander, and The Mythic Image. He edited The Portable Arabian Nights, The Portable Jung, and other works. He died in 1987.
Most helpful customer reviews
48 of 52 people found the following review helpful.
Heavy reading
By Amazon Customer
This book is a massive summary, comparison of, and commentary on oriental mythology. It is divided into 3 major parts: Western Oriental mythology, Indian mythology, and the mythologies of the Far East. Campbell's incredible scholarship is very impressive, and rather overwhelming at times. He obviously had a great familiarity with the mythologies and religions of practically all areas of the planet. However, his explanations for general readers of foreign mythologies weren't always clear, as evidenced in this book. Much of this book focuses on developing the idea that Oriental mythologies had one major origin, in the Egypt of the Pharaohs. According to Campbell, traces of the religion and mythologies of the Pharaohs, as well as implements of their material culture, could subsequently be found in every major culture heading eastward, from Persia to India, from China to Japan.
This idea is not exactly clear in the beginning of the work, and the initial chapters about the Pharaohs start with a jerk, leaving some readers wondering "Why start here, so far west?" The idea is stated more and more explicitly as the book progresses, so that by the time we reach the Chinese section, Campbell writes about the "primacy of the West-to-East cultural flow". Later in the same section, Campbell writes "the question of the impact of sentiments and ideas carried from one domain to another, which is basic to our study, is ...well illustrated by the annals of the settlement of Buddhism in China..." Is there really enough evidence to support the idea of a single common mythology that spread from West to East? Is this theory accepted by modern specialists in mythology? A reader who comes to this book independently of a class or other mythology background can only speculate on these questions.
Campbell does a masterful job of laying out similarities across cultures, such as his description of the "archetypal Savior Biography", where he lists the following elements (among others):
--scion of a royal line
--miraculously born
--amid supernatural phenomena
--of whom an aged holy man prophesies a world-saving message
--whose childhood deeds proclaim his divine character
--engages in arduous forest disciplines
--which confront him with a supernatural adversary
He points out that this list applies to the Jains, Buddhists, as well as Christians, and, if I read him correctly, presents it as one piece of evidence for linkage between Western and Oriental mythologies.
The lucidity of Campbell's descriptions and summaries of myths vary. Sometimes he quotes stories or myths at great length. But other times, he passes over the details quickly with such statements as "We need not rehearse the legends of his miraculous birth..." in his haste to get to commentary about the stories in question. For newcomers to the topic, this can be somewhat of a disappointment, since the commentaries are difficult to understand if one is not already familiar with the stories, and it is to learn about the stories themselves that some readers pick up this book. The book itself seems to have developed from Campbell's notes. Thus, there is considerable explicit enumeration of points, as well as the occasional sentence fragment. This style of writing requires very active study from a reader who is determined to wrestle the kernel of meaning from Campbell's words.
The one disappointing chapter was the chapter on Tibet, which actually includes only a few paragraphs about the mythology of Tibet. The remainder of the chapter is a brief collection of ideas from Maoist communism, juxtaposed with stories of atrocities during the Chinese takeover of Tibet. While the story of Tibet is indeed extremely lamentable, perhaps these details would better fit in a political description of Tibet in order to make more room for an overview of Tibetan mythology.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By Lucile Arnusch
Classic Josephy Campbell!
22 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Uneven but fascinating commentary
By K.S.Ziegler
"Oriental Mythology" is the second in the "Masks of God" series, the follow up to "Primitive Mythology". It covers more of the mind boggling extent of humankind's mythic past, material that is the basis for religion and philosophy. Campbell presents all sorts of details from artifacts dug up by archeologists and some rather long-winded quoted passages. Much of it is rather uneven and challenging to follow, but the payoff is usually Campbell's own commentary which often uses a soaring language to elucidate, to associate and connect different myths of different cultures.
The especially fascinating part of the book for me concerns the mystery of how yoga philosophy and practice came into being and evolved as it did to different forms such as Buddhism and Hinduism. Yoga philosophy defines a very different state of being than the Abrahamic tradition of the West. It does not situate humankind in a state of sin and guilt, stranded in a corrupt world, alienated from a transcendent God; but rather, in a state of ignorance with knowledge as the key to escaping from inevitable suffering caused by the delusion of living in a material world. The ancient civilization in the Indus Valley contains seeds of it's development, but it is far from clear just how it developed and what role the Aryans, who invaded and plundered India, played. In any event, Campbell concludes "tentatively" that yoga is "indigenous" to India.
The many different forms and manifestations of Buddhism follow from the ancient yoga tradition of asceticism. The book is not an good introduction to Buddhism, and it can be difficult to distinguish between the many sects and their different metaphysics and practices. It's influence burgeoned and then waned in India, but spread throughout the Far East, and combined with the Native nature religions of Tao in China and Shinto in Japan. Though Buddhism in whatever form mainly involves a turning away from the affairs of the world, from what is shown here, it has hardly ever failed to provide a civilizing influence.
I have to echo some of the criticisms of other reviewers. The inclusion of a chapter on ancient Egypt and also a section on the hieratic city states of Mesopotamia do not go the way of clarifying how Oriental myth grew as it did. The organization of the book would have been a lot more straightforward if he had gone directly from the introduction, in which Campbell compares East with West, to ancient India and directly to the mysteries of the Orient. He seeks to trace the influence of Egypt and Mesopotamia to the East, but the influences are so scattered and so relative, that it would have been better to have stuck with India, China, and Japan. Also, the final section on Tibet, although illuminating, departs in large measure from the subject matter.
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