World of the Gods

...Campbell shows, alterna­tively, that myths create willingnesses, not in plants, animals, or stars, but in the human nervous system, streng­thening the hunter's arm and making young men eager and able to perform the duties socially required in their culture, not to mention creating the ecstasies of supernormal visions...

...Campbell believes that we not only can, but must...

...PRISCILLA ROBERTSON wrote "Revolutions of 1848" and is a former editor of The Humanist...

...One way to achieve this attitude is through art...

...If the loss of the experienced myth produces a loss of individual and social integration, we begin to ask how our own society can win it back...

...As villages grew into cities and priests turned to star-gazing, the myth of the dying-and-rising seed was buttressed by evidence of the dying-and-rising moon and planets...

...SCOTT M. CUTLIP is a pro­fessor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin...

...Camp­bell has brooded on his material until he has caught the kind of thing you can see only in the twilight out of the sides of your eyes, although he fits all this into as solid a framework as the present state of science allows...

...and to show forth such laws in the proper aim of science...

...To none of these groups would myth-making be an appropriate occupation for grown men today...

...There is, however, one attitude which allows full participation alongside awareness of the created game—and that is the attitude of play, which, in­cidentally, was clearly part of the in­sight of the old mythmakers, though often lost by modern orthodoxies...

...It has long been known that all myths are nature myths, but the rela­tionships in time, from Paleolithic days to now, and in space, from Ire­land to Peru, seem to show that the basic myths, elaborately varied, are two...

...The danger, in a skep­tical civilization, is that we shall know all "about" myths without ex­periencing their impact from within...

...This magic was practiced by shamans, such as were depicted on the walls of caves in southern France 30,000 years ago, and wherever men have depended on killing wild prey it has been much the same down to the buffalo hunters on the American plains...

...others that they are deliberate frauds...

...I wonder if Campbell would allow the American Constitu­tion a social "myth," for the super­normal vision it gives of the ordinary man as receiver of justice and partic­ipant in social decision-making, and its consequent transformation of our lives...

...The other great myth, with which we are more familiar, arose in Neo­lithic times, with agriculture...

...One of Campbell's most pregnant ideas is that the maturity and pacifi­cation of the human species might be served better right now by the spirit of the shamanistic vision rather than the murderous fertility orgy...

...Men, accord­ing to him, satisfy their appetite for supernormal stimulation by the crea­tion of myths...

...RICH­ARD SCHICKEL reviews fiction regularly for The Progressive...

...Long one of the most learned and sensitive students of mythology, Campbell believes that enough has now been discovered through psychol­ogy, ethnology, archeology, and Bib­lical criticism so that it is possible for the first time to sketch in "a natural history of the gods and heroes, such as in its final form should include in its purview all divine beings—as zoology includes all ani­mals and botany all plants—not re­garding any as sacrosanct or beyond its scientific domain...

...Some people, of course, believe that myths are literally true...

...Hierarchies were built in imitation of these heavenly rotations, taking their toll of human life...

...and still others, like the Freudians, that they are infantilisms...

...To complete his natural history of the gods he plans three more books—on Oriental mythology, Occidental myth­ology, and on "creative mythology", which he ringingly tells us is flourishTHE REVIEWERS JACK BARBASH, professor of labor ed­ucation at the University of Wisconsin, wrote "Labor Unions in Action" and "The Practice of Unionism" and edited the new volume, "Unions and Union Leadership...

...For, as in the visible world of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, so also in the vis­ionary world of the gods: there has been a history, an evolution, a series of mutations, governed by laws...

...The older is the magic by which hunters conjure their prey, making animals (so they say) "will­ing" to be killed by a promise of re­birth, thus ensuring not only a con­tinuous food supply but a kind of unity between the animals and the tricky yet somehow compassionate hunters...

...ing "in the works of those artists, poets, and philosophers of the West for whom the wonder of the world itself—as it is now being analyzed by science—is the ultimate revelation...

...and when the full vision came it turned out to be a mystic experience of unity with the whole of nature...

...Reviewed by Priscilla Robertson I N A SPECIES of grayling moth, the preference of the male for dark-hued mates is so strong that if offered an imitation female, darker than any seen in nature, he will fly after it, lured by what Joseph Campbell calls a "supernormal image...

...Each shaman, in a hunting culture, sought for his private insight rather than for a mass conformity...

...This whole volume, which deals only with pre-literate cultures, is full of wonderful suggestiveness...

...Plants, it seems, were more blood-thirsty than animals, and required to be propiti­ated by blood offerings, whether of gods, or kings or maidens, in horren­dous but rapturous rites which our ancestors carried on for millenia...

...The rites of the planting cultures, on the other hand, have united man only to their own tribe, have taught them intolerance of others, and the merits of submis­sion to a supreme being rather than how to steal fire from heaven...

...World of the Gods TH E MASKS OF GOD: PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY, by Joseph Campbell...