Historical Atlas of World Mythology, Vol. 1: The Way of the Animal Powers, Part 1, Mythologies of the Primitive Hunters and Gatherers

The Way of the Animal Powers Part #1

by Joseph Campbell

Compares and contrasts the themes of myths and legends in different cultures around the world

Genres: Mythology, Philosophy, History, Anthropology, Nonfiction

140 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1988

About the author

Joseph Campbell was an American author and teacher best known for his work in the field of comparative mythology. He was born in New York City in 1904, and from early childhood he became interested in mythology. He loved to read books about American Indian cultures, and frequently visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he was fascinated by the museum's collection of totem poles.

Campbell was educated at Columbia University, where he specialized in medieval literature, and continued his studies at universities in Paris and Munich. While abroad he was influenced by the art of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, the novels of James Joyce and Thomas Mann, and the psychological studies of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. These encounters led to Campbell's theory that all myths and epics are linked in the human psyche, and that they are cultural manifestations of the universal need to explain social, cosmological, and spiritual realities. 


After a period in California, where he encountered John Steinbeck and the biologist Ed Ricketts, he taught at the Canterbury School, and then, in 1934, joined the literature department at Sarah Lawrence College, a post he retained for many years. During the 40s and '50s, he helped Swami Nikhilananda to translate the Upanishads and The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. He also edited works by the German scholar Heinrich Zimmer on Indian art, myths, and philosophy. In 1944, with Henry Morton Robinson, Campbell published A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. His first original work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, came out in 1949 and was immediately well received; in time, it became acclaimed as a classic. In this study of the "myth of the hero," Campbell asserted that there is a single pattern of heroic journey and that all cultures share this essential pattern in their various heroic myths. In his book he also outlined the basic conditions, stages, and results of the archetypal hero's journey.


Throughout his life, he traveled extensively and wrote prolifically, authoring many books, including the four-volume series The Masks of God, Myths to Live By, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space and The Historical Atlas of World Mythology. Joseph Campbell died in 1987. In 1988, a series of television interviews with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, introduced Campbell's views to millions of people.


Reviews

[Granny · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first book of a series, I bought it because I am very interested in the spirituality of prehistoric humans and also how animals impacted their spirituality.

And Joseph Campbell did not disappoint me. Lavishly illustrated with well chosen images of the art works which add to the text, this oversized hardbound book is a treasury of how humans interact with the fauna of their region to build a spiritual mythos which helps them to make sense of their world, and worlds beyond.

The book also includes many charts which help with timelines to make the different human species going back to Lucy. And it goes forward to Stone Age cultures still alive in our time.

The archaeology is sound, but my favorite section was the commentary on the painted caves of France and Spain, especially Lascaux (this will be no surprise to my friends). Again, the illustrations are amazing, and help support the different points of view from different archaeologists on the art therein.

And this is also one of the great strengths of the book, the differing explanations and points of view on the subject. I really appreciate that.

Now I'm itching to read more of the series!

[Brian Griffith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a lavishly illustrated volume that combines myth with historical background, and it's written with long, lyrical, almost unbelievably fact-packed sentences. After an enormously detailed history of early humanity, Campbell focuses quite intensively on a handful of the world's oldest hunter-gathering cultures -- the rock painting artists of Paleolithic Europe, the Sahara, and southern Africa, the Kung Bushmen, the Central African forest Pygmies, the Tasaday of the Philippines, and the Adaman Islanders.

[Brett Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent final effort from an extraordinary life

“We live today in a terminal moraine of myths and mythic symbols, fragments large and small of traditions that formerly inspired and gave rise to civilizations.” Thus Campbell opens the first volume in his final series on mythology and its evolution. The source of myth, Campbell shows, comes from the odd landscape of that space between our ears. Even for we moderns having paved over most of the mystery of existence, in the end there’s something enigmatic about our conscious awareness of the universe and ourselves in it. This is the terrain myths address and it’s best examined fresh, from the beginning, before codes and cannons were established tens of thousands of years after consciousness arose. So, Campbell starts with human evolution and its external expressions – brain size, tool making, cave paintings – and what can be approximated from that.

This large format book is loaded with interconnected charts, maps, and graphics. Each human type links to the fossil image of this creature’s head and notable brain size variation with corresponding changes in tool technology and art. Reasonable generalizations are drawn early in the introduction. For example, the functions of myth are: 1) to awaken and maintain a sense of wonder and participation in this mystery of life shared by community members (there were no “individuals” among the prehistoric or ancients as we now understand “individual”), 2) attach mystical importance to these images (i.e. give them authority), 3) serve social needs of community order, 4) escort individuals through inevitable stages of life. The chief distinction between mythical types is most pronounced between those of Stone Age animal plains vs. tropical jungle, where plants, not animals dominate, and women not men are primary as the source of life, not the ritual hunt which males perform on the plains. One type of mythological template is subject to anxiety and seeks to conquer nature, the other governed by inspirations of joy with childlike participation in nature. (Hmm...wonder which one we inherited?)

With just a little foresight one can see the earliest stages of our modern “holy of holies,” albeit in caves, not temples. Cave paintings begin with no human reference, thousands of years later dominated by human images. In this, the original impulse to worship nature can be seen to transform into a personification of nature’s powers, eventuating in the many gods with their very human characteristics of anger, tantrums, murder, and blessings. On occasion Campbell seems be a bit too egger to accept questionable anthropological conclusions – which might be any of a dozen other possibilities – but this book is nonetheless a fine coalescence of Campbell’s decades-long work as the pioneer in comparative mythology. After reading this book, one can easily see these mythological “fragments” all around us - in the background of society, and in our religions which incorporated mythic symbols readily available to the ancients.

[John Nelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A full review will have to await my completion of this five-volume series. I must say, however, that I was disappointed by Campbell's treatment of the Filipino Tasaday "tribe" as a legitimate example of a pre-historic tribe which managed to survive into the modern age without being contacted by outsiders and without so much as stone age technology. As any student of anthropology knows, the Tasaday were debunked as a hoax during the early 1990s. Although this book pre-dates that time, and Campbell was deceased by the time the hoax was exposed, this gullibility reflects poorly on his scholarship.

[Nancy Raines]

Atlas: Volume 1, Part 1

[David Layton · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first book in a five-book set reviewing the ancient mythologies of the world and presenting a rough idea of how the modern worldview developed and deviated from these origins. Jungian myth and literature critic Joseph Campbell was certainly ambitious, and this project is probably his most ambitious. One might look at it as Campbell's attempt to do what J.G. Frazer did with The Golden Bough. One difference is that while, sprawling as it is, Frazer's opus has a clear thesis to demonstrate, Campbell's equally sprawling opus has a system rather than a thesis to demonstrate. Thus, Campbell's is looser, as he pursues several threads of inquiry. This volume is the first that discusses the paleolithic worldview. It's a difficult task because, with no written record from the period, all one has is inference. To his credit, Campbell knows this and states the point several times. Still, there are occasions when he appears (to me, anyway) to force fit the evidence to his idea of the one great myth (One myth to rule them all, one myth to bind them?). Campbell works through several fields of study in building his system - anthropology, archaeology, ethnography, sociology, psychology, and narratology. The book is lavishly illustrated with color plates, charts, graphs, illustrations, and photographs. He was writing from what was known in the 1980s. Doubtless some of what he presents would need to be updated now in light of new information and scientific advances. For instance, his discussion of the Tasaday people would certainly require updating. The book makes a good introduction to mythographic studies in general.

[Michael Capstack · Rating 3 out of 5]

This read more like an anthropology book than a book about mythology. I did enjoy the discussion of different cultures and symbols.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really interesting. More survey than assertion. The caution in drawing conclusions here is notable.