The Mythic Dimension: Answers from beyond the grave

 

For a long time I have wanted the pinnacle books in a series written by Joseph Campbell literally until his death in 1987 for many years now. The Historical Atlas of World Mythology books are five of the most all encompassing books on history and mythology collected anywhere by anybody���ever. They are absolutely phenomenal. They were released not long after his death and published by the Joseph Campbell Foundation. I was given book three of the five in 1997 by the Foundation which became one of my greatest treasures. But I was not able to get the rest of the books before they went out of print by the close of the century.

The Historical Atlas of World Mythology is a multi-volume series of books by Joseph Campbell that traces developments in humankind’s mythological symbols and stories from pre-history forward.

Campbell is perhaps best known as a comparativist who focused on universal themes and motifs in human culture. He first conceived of the Historical Atlas in the late 1970s as an extension of his works, The Mythic Image and The Masks of God. Like those books, the Historical Atlas of World Mythology intended to show the ways in which those universal themes and motifs were expressed differently by different cultures in different times and places.

Heavily illustrated and annotated, with numerous charts and maps to show both variations and similarities in different cultures’ expressions of mythic themes, this series was intended to serve both academic and lay readers.

The Historical Atlas was left incomplete when Campbell died in 1987.

Only the first volume was completed at the time of Campbell’s death. Published by Alfred van der Marck editions as a single book in 1983, it was rereleased by Harper and Row in 1988, in the wake of Campbell’s posthumous fame, brought by the airing of the television series, The Power of Myth. The first three parts of the second volume, which Campbell was working on literally to the day that he died, were completed by Campbell’s long-time editor, Robert Walter, and published by Harper and Row in 1989. Both volumes are currently out of print.

Campbell left rough text for the last two parts of Way of the Seeded Earth, as well as notes for the final two volumes. The Joseph Campbell Foundation has expressed the intention to rerelease the existing books, and, if possible, to complete Campbell’s magnum opus.[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Atlas_of_World_Mythology

For Christmas this year my daughter managed to find two of the missing books on Amazon which can cost up to several hundred dollars because they are so rare and hard to get. After receiving them for a present I was able to then find the other two by the same means and complete my collection. The final two books arrived on my doorstep on the first day of the New Year and marks a new phase for which I am about to embark.

We have tried to help as many people as possible, and we���ve done it for not just the five years of this blog site, but for many years prior leading up to it. We have saved all who we could, and these words will now remain out there like a lighthouse to those late coming to the show. But at some point, you have to draw a line, and now it is thus marked. The bus is leaving the station and if you���re not on it, tough luck.

Our society has been successfully destroyed by internal insurgents. Lately, a Facebook war between family members confirmed my thoughts and showed me that if they represent a certain segment of society���which they do, then people are too far gone to help���so it is pointless to continue. The process of rebuilding society has to begin and to do that a firm understanding of who we are where we are going must be understood. For me, the best place to start is in the mythic dimension.

The mythic dimension was written in the opening of the very first book in the series by Campbell shortly before his death and describes how the laws of our human knowledge have been largely governed by Newton and his three dimensions, with the fourth being time and all the stuff we have talked about in great detail here at Overmanwarrior���s Wisdom many times. But there are other dimensions and previous cultures had a relationship with them that we do not have now���and if society is to begin again, it will have to have an understanding of that relationship.

Nothing can help John Boehner, John Kasich, or even Barack Obama now. They are doomed to the status quo and the answers are not in that political realm. So it is time to deal with the answer and not just the problem. To do that will require a lot more different kinds of information. So to put my mind in the right state, I have dusted off a lot of this old Campbell work to meet that need. Receiving those old Atlas books of World Mythology are the culmination of a long time of effort and need given to the current moment. The mythic dimension is where the answers are and they exist in that fifth dimensional brane��which runs parallel to our current brane��of four-dimensional��existence in what is called the ���out-back.��� It���s a very thin realm of quantum fluctuations where history runs in a kind of free flow existence without the concerns of time, length, width, or height. Older cultures made many religions out their observations of the quantum fluctuations that intersected our brane of reality from that place. And they had an understanding that we have lost in our current time and there is no way to solve the problems of our day without that understanding, because it is directly relevant. You can���t solve hard problems without all the answers intact, and those answers have been taken from our reality and tossed into concealment back into the mythic dimension by modern politics.

So it was wonderful to see the Atlas��books by Campbell for the first time in my life all in one place for my use. And of course that use is to uncover the answers hidden in the mythic dimension. Politics, philosophy, and economics are all primary by-products of the mythic dimension so it is pointless to concern ourselves with the fools who reside in the brane��of four-dimensional space when there is much more at work that must be dealt with. So to that end, the Historical Atlas of World Mythology by Joseph Campbell as his last work on planet earth will speak to me from beyond the grave���from the mythic dimension where the real keys truly reside. And it is a journey that will be extremely, profitable.

Rich Hoffman

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