Historical Atlas of World Mythology Vol II: The Way of the Seeded Earth Part 2: Mythologies of the Primitive Planters: The Northern Americas

The way of the seeded earth #2

by Joseph Campbell

.

Genres: Mythology, Anthropology, Philosophy, History

251 pages, paper

First published November 1, 1989

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

[David Melbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love this! It is too bad that Campbell could not complete this before his death.

And, it did not take me over four years to read this, just four years to get back to reading this! --From A Reader's Journal, by d r melbie.

[John Nelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Volume four of this five-part series.

[Tyler]

enlightening to say the least

[David Layton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Volume 2 Part 2 is a much different sort of book than the previous ones. In discussing the anthropology, mythology, and folklore of the Native Americans of North America (U.S. and Canada), Campbell spends much time on relating the history of how the British and Americans wiped out, enslaved, and transported whole native communities. Thus, this book is far more historical than the previous books in the series. The reason for doing this historical review is that, as Campbell both explicitly and implicitly says, the researcher into the religions and mythographies of these people will find it very hard to separate the genuine and original material of the natives from imported and transformed European material. The reasons for these are several. One is that the pre-Columbian natives of North America had no writing system, and thus all stories must come from later sources. Another is that native North Americans made most of their living structures, tools, and other potential artifacts out of short-lived materials such as bark, wood, reeds, animal skins, and so on. The archaeological record, frankly, is quite scanty. Thus, another reason is that the earliest and often most detailed descriptions of the practices and beliefs of the North American Natives come from European and American sources interested, for one reason or another, in recounting such details. Often, these sources have their own agendas, which color the descriptions and make them not wholly reliable. It is good that Campbell is honest about these matters, and so treads more carefully than he normally does when walking his usual discussions of synthesized mythology. About a third of this book is devoted to retelling folkloric stories of the Native Americans, sometimes quoted verbatim from sources and sometimes retold in a form more suitable for twentieth-century readers. Because of the particularity of historical detail, I find this book the most engaging of the series so far. I still have one to go.

[Elizabeth Scheller Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Got 6 pages into this book and realized that I had already read it in the depths of time. Oh, hell, it's Joseph Campbell so I re-read it. Still good even tho I'm not taking an early American mythology class.