The Masks of God, Volume 1 Quotes

“Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume 1: Primitive Mythology

“But the mistery of the woman is no less a mystery than death. Childbirth is no less a mystery; nor the flow of the mother's milk; nor the menstrual cycle -in its accord with the moon. The creative magic of the female body is a thing of wonder in itself.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume 1: Primitive Mythology

“The child's world is alert and alive, governed by rules of response and command, not by physical laws: a portentous continuum of consciousness, endowed with purpose and intent, either resistant or responsive to the child itself.

This infantile notion of a world governed by moral rather than physical laws, kept under control by a superordinated parental personality instead of impersonal physical forces, and oriented to the weal and woe of man, is an illusion that dominates men's thoughts all over the world.

The sense then, of this world as an undifferentiated continuum of simultaneously subjective and objective experience (Participation), which is all alive (Animism), and which was created by a superior being (Artificialism), may be said to constitute the frame of reference of all childhood experience no matter where in the world.

No small wonder then, that the above Three Principles are precisely those most represented in the mythologies and religious systems of the whole world.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume 1: Primitive Mythology

“For the human mind in its polarity of the male and female modes of experience, in its passages from infancy to adulthood and old age, in its toughness and tenderness, and in its continuing dialogue with the world, is the ultimate mythogenetic zone -the creator and destroyer, the slave and yet the master, of all the gods.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume 1: Primitive Mythology

“Mythology -and therefore civilization- is a poetic, supernormal image, conceived, like all poetry, in depth, but susceptible of interpretation on various levels.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume 1: Primitive Mythology

“But the mistery of the woman is no less a mystery than death. Childbirth is no less a mystery; nor the flow of the mother's milk; nor the menstrual cycle -in its acoord with the moon. The creative magic of the female body is a thing of wonder in itself.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume 1: Primitive Mythology

“The Neanderthal graves and bear sanctuaries, our earliest certain evidences of religious ritual, point to an attempt to cope with the imprint of death.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume 1: Primitive Mythology

“In the West we know the military uniform, clerical collar, medical goatee, and judge's wig. But where people are naked, it is the body itself that must be changed.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume 1: Primitive Mythology

“Mythology is not invented rationally; mythology cannot be rationally understood.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume 1: Primitive Mythology

“Schopenhauer sagely remarks in his paper on The Will in Nature, “we are sunk in the sea of riddles and inscrutables, knowing and understanding neither what is around us nor ourselves.”
― Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology