Customer Reviews
A powerful book that might change your view of life - By: Andrew Dalby, 02 Jul 2008 
Campbell shows how myth & epic story-telling have always played a role in human society & that these myth stories repeat over & over again. They lie under James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake & the works of Thomas Mann. They lie in the ideas of the grail & the alchymical wedding. It is the same story over & over from Jesus to Luke & Anakin Skywalker through King Arthur & Sir Galahad. It shows us how we create our heroes & how we find our wise men & shaman & how this is brought about by human creativity in myth building
A Textbook in the Art of Collection - By: , 16 Aug 2002 
"The Masks of God, Vol 2" reallly is a book only for those with a hardcore interest in the subject. Campbell is both a prolific & well respected author in the field of mythology. "The Masks of God" is his triumph of four volumes, of which this - of Oriental mythology - is typical. The book is a dense fog of information - statistics, quotes, stories & anecdotes.
Once, however, you dip into the book you will invariably begin to find passages of with information so surreal & bizarre that it seems out of place in a book with the layout & style of a textbook. Campbell finds the most obscure & strange rituals & legends from long lost cultures & brings them back to life, not with creative flair but with the sheer impact of the content of his words.
Recommended especiallly is the final chapter, in which he describes an experience of a samurai warrior fulfilling his own death sentence through suicide by disembowelling himself with a dagger before he is beheaded his kaishaku.
It may not be compulsive reading, but the information contained within this collection will serve your knowledge & imagination for a long time.
Eloquent exploration of the evolutions of symbols/gods - By: , 13 Aug 2001 In these four volumes, Joseph Campbell gathers the scattered fragments of world myth & weaves a rich tapestry in which the intermingled threads help trace the evolution of consciousness from the paleolithic through to modern times.
It is a tapestry of gods,stories & symbols which shift,rearrange & change meaning around a core of ubiquitous motifs which persist across ages & civilisations.
While a great philosophical work in its own right the nature of the material means that rather than just been thought provoking, it engages you at gut level. Divesting the mind of some of its theatrical props you can be left with a sense of sublime awe, in the face of, for lack of a more poetic work, we calll life.
Like alll adventures its hard work in places & the intrepid reader might find 'The Hero of a Thousand Faces' a useful scouting foray into this terrain ( a bit like Bilbo Baggin's outing in advance of the Frodo Baggin's epic).
