The Way of the Animal Powers/ Pre-Columbian Art
Highwater, Jamake
22 March 1985: 183 Books: THE MYTH IS THE MEDIUM Speaking of his painting, the American artist Arthur Dove said: "We cannot express the light in nature because we have not the sun. We can only...
...The physical book itself is certainly one of the finest examples of exquisite bookmaking which not only complements the text but, in a valid sense, extends its imaginal and scholarly reach in a manner that is possible only with the most ingenious artistic efforts...
...Campbell tells us that the first function of a mythology is to waken and maintain in the individual a sense of wonder and participation in the mystery of this finally inscrutable universe...
...At its simplest it is the {Continued on page 187) telling of tall tales, at its most profound, the creation of masterworks of art...
...The universal inclination to evoke a reality that is truer than the one before us—even the everyday creation of tall tales—is simply the most commonplace aspect of a profound disposition of the human psyche: the making of myths...
...We are myth makers...
...For Pre-Columbian Art is not simply a coffee table book...
...We follow hjm through time and geography, examining the traces of early mankind: the first human burials, the artifacts of a worldwide cult of animal powers, details imprinted in temple-caves, upon rock face, and on fragments of bone and shell...
...But these are small matters, indeed, in comparison to the epic intellect and imagination which functions at the heart of Joseph Campbell's brilliant new book...
...And the world that it illuminates for us is the realm of ritual by which we know ourselves and what we have been and what we are becoming...
...The process by which this complex network of myth and ritual makes itself visible and effective is metaphoric, poetic, imaginal...
...The Way of the Animal Powers requires a special note of praise in regard to its achievements in the field of bookmak-ing...
...The imagination illuminates and, finally, defines our only reality—the only truth we can know...
...Of all the animals we alone are capable of dreaming ourselves into existence...
...We cannot fail to recognize among the sumptuous images of Pre-Columbian Art a revelation which is probably one of the greatest realizations of the twentieth century: that mythologies and the arts reflecting them are the anvil upon which human mentality distinguishes itself, upon which it names itself, and ultimately knows itself...
...An index, bibliography, series of chronological tables and maps, along with a list of major Maya and Aztec deities and rulers helps readers and researchers find their way through this outstanding visual presentation of the arts that sprang from the unique cosmologies of pre-Columbian America...
...At the book's foundation is hidden the same myth-making that we are skillfully helped to discover in Joseph Campbell's luminous writing...
...Mythologies differ as the horizons, landscapes, sciences and technologies of their civilizations differ...
...Our lives are filled with every conceivable ploy to escape or penetrate the "ordinary...
...Conceptual and pictorial bookmaking is not, however, the ultimate%thrust of Pre-Columbian Art...
...The Way of the Animal Powers is about dreams and myths and the countless, ingenious ways in which we ritualize the ineffable cosmos as social as well as personal experiences...
...Clearly, tall tales are not true, and yet, even for naive realists (fundamentalist or scientistic) those who fervently believe in something as obsolescent and undependable as "the truth,'' such tales are not counterfeit...
...These terms are efforts to describe die remarkable interaction of imagination and something even more quixotic than imagination: that which many of us innocently call the truth...
...Campbell's text is handsomely integrated with a lavish series of color plates, full-color maps, drawings, black and white photographs, and charts...
...it is a valid and remarkable pictorial encyclopedia of the pre-Columbian arts of Mexico, Central, and South America...
...Campbell's The Way of the Animal Powers is a masterful presentation of the imaginal miracle that lies behind the term "shamanism"—an excellent and insightful description of those animistic, hunting ^allures that have survived into our own century and which may reflect dimly upon our Paleolithic ancestors: the Bushmen, Pygmies, Andamanese, Tasaday, Australian Aborigines, Native Americans, and many others...
...And we may not be inclined to accept the Jungian insistence upon the "spiritual unity" of human beings...
...Campbell is himself a legender who speaks to us through an exceptional amalgam of scholarship and imagination...
...I: HISTORICAL ATLAS OF WORLD MYTHOLOGY Joseph Campbell Alfred van der Marck/Harper & Row, $75, 300 pp...
...It is this realization of the intricate interface between mythology and art that is the legacy of Joseph Campbell...
...It is not by accident that we have invented imagery that overcomes the limitations of language...
...PRE-COLUMBIAN AST Jose Aldna Franch Harry N. Abrams, $125, 618 pp...
...Common to all of us is the manipulation of truth we call "poetic license...
...In fact the real achievement of this book is its conceptual dependence upon pictures and captions as a form of communication...
...This concern for personal myths and their dynamic interface with the myths of the community is especially important in our time when society is no longer supported by a truly pervasive and significant system of beliefs...
...The essential function of mythologies is the instruction of the group and the individual in "the passages of human life, from the stage of dependency in childhood to the responsibilities of maturity, and on to old age and the ultimate passage of the dark gate...
...THE WAY Or THE ANIMAL POWERS VOL...
...Jamoke Highwater Joseph Campbell tells us that "it is a curious characteristic of our unformed species that we live and model our lives through acts of make-believe...
...The power of the dream is still in the capacity for dreaming...
...We are legenders...
...The art of producing sumptuous books is also evident in Pre-Columbian Art by Jose Alcina Franch, a professor in the Department of American Anthropology and Ethnology at the University of Madrid...
...Its designers have conscientiously produced a cinematic experience for the reader, even to the the extent of providing a one-hundred page photo-montage of aesthetically, graphically, and historically interrelated black and white photographs entitled "The Image as Document...
...It is a time when the creative impulse has been internalized and has few resources in the external world...
...And it is the reason he can speak to us so compellingly about both the ancient cosmologies found in myth and the ultramodern cosmologies discovered in the writings of James Joyce...
...Yet another sequence of drawing, text and photographs is a survey of principal archaeological sites, while the major portion of the book, however, consists of 360 glorious pages of full-color plates and captions...
...Almost fifty years later, this remark is still powerfully suggestive...
...It attests to the fact that even our mythologies must be dynamic if they and, through them, we are to survive...
...Though the text is finely wrought and instructive, it definitely serves a subordinate role in relation to the glorious illustrations: over one thousand of them, of which 177 are in full-color...
...Art for the pre-Columbian peoples of the Americas was many things: monumental displays of political muscle, designations of social rank, a medium of exchange, and a form of tender which determined wealth and power...
...That light is a mythic lantern...
...We do not have the sun, and yet we must have a light so we can find our way through the unspeakable darkness of our inscrutable cosmos...
...Commonweal: 188...
...We can only express the light we have in ourselves...
...We can only express the light we have in ourselves...
...But it was also born of and supported by a complex mythology which was the basis of an all-encompassing religiosity...
...Even those of us who are most mundane despise our condition, and when we recount the simplest story it inevitably becomes something else: a "tall tale," or a "fish story...
...The sweep and scope of his new book is truly astonishing...
...It is surely the culmination of his life's work, and we can only look forward with great anticipation to the remaining volumes in the series...
...Ezra Pound, in 1937, wrote that "it has taken us two thousand years to get round again to meditating on mythology...
...We may not wish to follow Campbell step by step...
...As Herbert L. Schneidau has said, "It may be that the most important development of twentieth-century consciousness has to do not with atom bombs or moon 22 March 1985: 187 walks, but with a new seriousness toward prehistory and mythology.'' We have rediscovered the capacity to recognize realities which exist outside our own empiricist frame of mind, and we have developed an eye which permits us to see—through the "primitivist" works of Picasso and Mondrian—the hitherto neglected aesthetic achievements of primal artists and societies...
...We may decline his assumption that we can know our ancestry through the examination of twentieth-century aboriginal peoples...
Vol. 112 • March 1985 • No. 6
