Toward a Natural History of the Gods and Heroes (eSingle)

Description

The exciting prologue to Primitive Mythology

The comparative study of the mythologies of the world compels us to view the cultural history of mankind as a unit; for we find that such themes as the fire-theft, deluge, land of the dead, virgin birth, and resurrected hero have a worldwide distribution — appearing everywhere in new combinations while remaining, like the elements of a kaleidoscope, only a few and always the same.

Where The Hero with a Thousand Faces looks at the universal themes of myths and dreams, in the four books of his great Masks of God series Joseph Campbell explores the ways in which those themes have varied across the ages and between cultures. Yet in this full-throated introduction, Campbell establishes his basic thesis: that although humanity’s myths are many, their source is “always the same.”