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Original Title:	Creative Mythology (The Masks of God, #4)
Edition Language:	English
Series:	The Masks of God #4

The Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology (The Masks of God #4)

Joseph Campbell

Paperback | Pages: 752 pages

Rating: 4.3 | 1575 Users | 41 Reviews

Specify Of Books The Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology (The Masks of God #4)

Title	:	The Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology (The Masks of God #4)
Author	:	Joseph Campbell
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Deluxe Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 752 pages
Published	:	November 1st 1991 by Penguin (first published 1968)
Categories	:	Fantasy. Mythology. Nonfiction. Religion. History. Philosophy. Psychology

Chronicle Toward Books The Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology (The Masks of God #4)

OKAY. For as much as I generally love Campbell for his scholarship and his breadth and depth of knowledge on all things religious, mythical, and anthropological, I have to say he goes rather overboard in a DIFFERENT direction for this book.

What direction, you ask?

Living culture. And I'm not really talking about modern culture so much as I'm referring to the scope of the Dark Ages through Thomas Mann and James Joyce. He does the literary analysis thing. In spades. Want Beowulf? Check. Want tons of Parcival, Gawain, and even the tragic love story of Adelard and Heloise? Check. Want the erudite traditions, influences, mythological connections and cultural transformations laid out? You got it.

But wait, that's not all! We get some of the best and fully explained nastiness of the truth behind chastity in Christianity and the best visceral descriptions I've ever read that makes me UNDERSTAND why the whole Romantic Love thing took off so HARD back at the opening days of the Rennaisance. Grail Legend? Chivalry? The whole love thing was bucking the Church and Society HARD. Trubadors were the punk bands of the day. :)

We get the influence of Alchemy and Science in poetry, music, and opera. We get dozens of traditions, a great analysis that shows just how much Islamic thought is slathered throughout the Divine Comedy, and so much more.

So what's my problem?

It feels like half the book was devoted to fanboying over Thomas Mann and James Joyce.

I mean, sure, these guys were like a wet dream for mythographers and sociologists and Jungian analysts and they wrote some fine fiction, too, but I would have been JUST FINE with... a slightly abbreviated analysis.

Don't get me wrong! I'm now interested as hell in reading more of Thomas Mann and I may go ahead and revisit Joyce soon, but BY NO MEANS is this very good reading if you're not at least slightly interested in either author.

Of course, if you're prepping yourself in College for writing one hell of a great essay on Joyce (or 14 of them), then DO YOURSELF A BIG FAVOR and read this book or the relevant sections. Some of it rather blew me away. :)


Is this the best stuff Campbell ever wrote? Hell, no. It's very learned and I learned TONS, but it was almost nothing like what I had come to expect from him. More like he had been sitting around doing a lot of reading and his brilliant mind came up with fantastic random crap that sooner or later coalesced into a huge coherent literary epiphany. I think that's great and all but damn... I wanted the world, not fiction, THIS TIME. :)

Rating Of Books The Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology (The Masks of God #4)

Ratings: 4.3 From 1575 Users | 41 Reviews

Notice Of Books The Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology (The Masks of God #4)

this is the completion of a 30 year reading project, 4 volumes, thousands of pages.

Creative Mythology is the fourth and last volume in Masks of God. Up to this book, I thought the work had become stronger with each volume. The first book, Primitive Mythology published in 1959 by and large dealt with the pre-historic era Campbell sees at the root of world culture, and so relied quite a bit on archeology and the speculations of such psychologists as Freud. It was very dry and I suspected, dated. The second volume, Oriental Mythology, primarily examined Egypt, India and

Mankind explained. The Manifestation.

This is how it is done . pursuit of your happiness.

I did not read this. I really want to like Joseph Campbell but I just can not get into it. This was so wordy. I found myself wishing he would get to the point.

I'm obsessed with Joseph Campbell, and his words of wisdom are like the ambrosia of the gods to my un-mythologized mind. I think just about everything he writes is amazing. But on the scale of "kinda amazing" to "really FREAKING amazing," this book falls more in the range of "kinda amazing." All of the other books in the series fell in the "really FREAKING amazing" range. If you've read the other three books, no doubt you're going to read this one just to finish the series. So maybe my review is