Foreword
On Completion of The Masks of God
Looking back today over the twelve delightful years that I spent on this richly rewarding enterprise, I find that its main result for me has been its confirmation of a thought I have long and faithfully entertained: of the unity of the race of man, not only in its biology but also in its spiritual history, which has everywhere unfolded in the manner of a single symphony, with its themes announced, developed, amplified and turned about, distorted, reasserted, and, , in a grand fortissimo of all sections sounding together, irresistibly advancing to some kind of mighty climax, out of which the next great movement will emerge. And I can see no reason why anyone should suppose that in the future the same motifs already heard will not be sounding still — in new relationships indeed, but ever the same motifs. They are all given here, in these volumes, with many clues, besides, suggesting ways in which they might be put to use by reasonable men to reasonable ends — or by poets to poetic ends — — or by madmen to nonsense and disaster. For, as in the words of James Joyce in Finnegans Wake: “utterly impossible as are all these events they are probably as like those which may have taken place as any others which never took person at all are ever likely to be.”
A Note on the 1969 Edition of Primitive Mythology
Hardly two years after the publication, 1959, of this first volume of The Masks of God, a series of sensational revelations from the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, East Africa, set back the date by more than a million years for the earliest known appearances of manlike species on this earth. Whereas the previous specimens, from half a dozen South African sites (see below, pp. 357-60), had been dated circa 600,000 b.c., the Tanzania finds were in 1961 determined by the newly developed Argon-40 method to be approximately 1,750,000 years old.[Note 1] moreover, at least two distinctly different types of hominid were found to have existed at that time. The one called Zinjanthropus — the “Ethiopian anthropoid” (from the Arabic Balad al-Zinj, “Land of the Ethiopians”) — was a heavy-jawed eater of largely vegetable food, while the other, smaller, was an eater of meat, apparently a competent hunter, and a user of flaked stone tools. Dr. L.S.B. Leakey, the excavator of Olduvai, regards the latter as the more likely prototype of our own fully human species and has named him, accordingly, Homo, “man” — Homo habilis, “able or competent man.”[Note 2] All the rest, both of earliest Tanzania and of the later South African sites, are now generally regarded as off the main evolutionary line toward Homo sapiens and classified under one rubric, Australopithecus, “southern ape.” The more flattering title that I have used on page 357, Plesisanthropus, “near man,” is restricted to but one assortment of skulls, teeth, and bones — that from Sterkfontein, South Africa: which, according to the leading expert on these matters, Dr. Carleton S. Coon, seems to represent a rather special case, pointing, as do none of the other South African Australopithecines, forward along the evolutionary line, to ourselves.[Note 3]
A second highly significant — though very different — field of research in which discoveries relevant to the argument of this volume were announced almost immediately after its publication was that of the archaeology of the nuclear Near East, where a series of disclosures from the Anatolian plain of Southern Turkey revealed an unsuspected period of beginnings, antecedent to the earliest evidences of the known neolithic cultures. As a consequence: I. The proto-neolithic has been carried back two thousand years, to circa 12,500 b.c., and II. The basal neolithic now appears to have first arisen neither in Iraq, Iran, Palestine, nor Syria, but in Asia Minor, circa 7,500 b.c., and to have developed there in three stages:*
1. A formerly unsuspected stage, known now as the pre-pottery or aceramic neolithic, which has been identified in Palestine (at Jericho) as well as at Hacilar, Çatal Hüyük, and certain other Anatolian sites. [Note 4] The apparent luxury of the settlements, with their tidy little brick houses and the sense throughout of a manner of life already well established, suggests that the arts of agriculture and stock breeding must already have been mastered, though still supplemented by the hunt. And of the greatest interest, furthermore, both at Hacilar and at Jericho, is the evidence of a domestic skull cult of some kind (compare below, p. 127).
2. Then at Çatal Hüyük, circa 6500 b.c., ceramic wares suddenly appear, and, as the excavator, Dr. James Mellaart, observes: “we can actually study the transition from an aceramic Neolithic with baskets and wooden vessels to a ceramic Neolithic with the first pottery.” [Note 5] Along with this pottery, furthermore, which is the earliest yet discovered anywhere, there have also come to light the earliest known neolithic figurines, in association with some forty or more symbolically ornamented chapels — revealing, in superb display, practically all the basic motifs of the great mother-goddess mythologies of later ages. And these earliest known Neolithic figurines are of an easy, natural, lifelike grace, not the least “archaic,” primitive, or stilted.
3. It is only in the next and final stage of the early Anatolian development, and then gradually also in neighboring areas — circa 7000-3500 b.c. — that those well-known, unlifelike, conventionalized naked-goddess figurines appear that have been generally associated with the earliest village arts. A trend from naturalism to abstraction, from visual to conceptual thought, would seem thus to be indicated. And in the Anatolian sphere, meanwhile, which is still in advance of all, signs have begun appearing of the dawn of the earliest age of metals, the early chalcolithic: beads and little tubes of copper and lead, various trinkets, and even a few metal tools. A truly superb painted pottery is also being manufactured, pointing toward the great ceramic styles of the following millennium (Halaf wares, Samarra wares, Obeid wares, etc., as discussed in the body of my text). The expansion southward and eastward of the arts and manners of settled village life now has begun to cover the whole of the Near East, new centers of creative transformation are developing, and — as reviewed below — the stage has been set for the rise in Mesopotamia, circa 5000 b.c., of the first of the great historic civilizations.
A third area of archaeological research — and the last that I shall mention here — where a startling discovery transformed the situation almost immediately after the publication of this book, was the coast of Ecuador, where, in December 1960, a piece of Japanese pottery was picked up on a beach. Subsequent excavations yielded many fragments more, all of the early Jomon (“cord-marked”) style of circa 3000 b.c. — which is the earliest date for pottery yet registered for the New World. A number of ceramic female figurines turned up, also, in these digs, and these are the earliest figurines — — indeed the earliest works of art — — yet unearthed in the Americas. [Note 6] I take note of this with considerable glee, as supporting most dramatically the argument of my chapter on the possibility of an early trans-Pacific diffusion of culture traits to the New World. And meanwhile, as for researches into the beginnings of the planting and agricultural traditions of pre-Columbian America: an extremely well-conducted program of excavations in Mexico, in the once-inhabited caves of southwest Tamaulipas and the Valley of Tehuacán, has lately shown that by about 3500 b.c. (plus or minus a few centuries) some sort of plant domestication was being practiced by cave-dwelling hunting and fishing folk. Maize, it seems, was then first cultivated; and during the next two thousand years the signs increase of a developing horticulture, until, by circa 1500 b.c., the beginning of something like a genuine neolithic stage of village farming seems to have been attained. [Note 7]
Now all three of the fields of research into man’s past of which I have here taken note are today in such rapid and promising transformation that there will, no doubt, be as many astonishing disclosures during the seventies and eighties as there were in the decade of the sixties. In the main (I suspect) they will support, as have these, the arguments of my pages: but if not, the reader (I dare to hope) will know how to add and subtract.
— Joseph Campbell
New York City
Christmas Day, 1968