Campbell / Kudler Oriental Mythology

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61178-002-4
Verlag: Joseph Campbell Foundation
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, Band 2, 576 Seiten

Reihe: The Masks of God(TM)

In this second volume of The Masks of God - Joseph Campbell's major work of comparative mythology - the pre-emimenent mythologist looks at Asian mythology as it developed over the course of five thousand years into the distinctive religions of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, and Japan. 

The Masks of God is a four-volume study of world religion and myth that stands as one of Joseph Campbell's masterworks. On completing it, he wrote: 

This new digital edition, part of the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell series, includes over forty new illustrations.

(Comparative Mythology: Ancient Egypt, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism)

Autoren/Hrsg.

Campbell, Joseph

Kudler, David

Leseproben

Chapter 1 - THE SIGNATURES OF THE FOUR GREAT DOMAINS

I. The Dialogue in Myth of East and West

The myth of eternal return, which is still basic to Oriental life, displays an order of fixed forms that appear and reappear through all time. The daily round of the sun, the waning and waxing moon, the cycle of the year, and the rhythm of organic birth, death, and new birth, represent a miracle of continuous arising that is fundamental to the nature of the universe. We all know the archaic myth of the four ages of gold, silver, bronze, and iron, where the world is shown declining, growing ever worse. It will disintegrate presently in chaos, only to burst forth again, fresh as a flower, to recommence spontaneously the inevitable course. There never was a time when time was not. Nor will there be a time when this kaleidoscopic play of eternity in time will have ceased.

There is therefore nothing to be gained, either for the universe or for man, through individual originality and effort. Those who have identified themselves with the mortal body and its affections will necessarily find that all is painful, since everything — for them — must end. But for those who have found the still point of eternity, around which all — including themselves — revolves, everything is acceptable as it is; indeed, can even be experienced as glorious and wonderful. The first duty of the individual, consequently, is simply to play his given role — as do the sun and moon, the various animal and plant species, the waters, the rocks, and the stars — without resistance, without fault; and then, if possible, so to order his mind as to identify its consciousness with the inhabiting principle of the whole.

The dreamlike spell of this contemplative, metaphysically oriented tradition, where light and darkness dance together in a world-creating cosmic shadow play, carries into modern times an image that is of incalculable age. In its primitive form it is widely known among the jungle villages of the broad equatorial zone that extends from Africa eastward, through India, Southeast Asia, and Oceania, to Brazil, where the basic myth is of a dreamlike age of the beginning, when there was neither death nor birth, which, however, terminated when a murder was committed. The body of the victim was cut up and buried. And not only did the food plants on which the community lives arise from those buried parts, but on all who ate of their fruit the organs of reproduction appeared; so that death, which had come into the world through a killing, was countered by its opposite, generation, and the selfconsuming thing that is life, which lives on life, began its interminable course.

Throughout the dark green jungles of the world there abound not only dreadful animal scenes of tooth and claw, but also terrible human rites of cannibal communion, dramatically representing — with the force of an initiatory shock — the murder scene, sexual act, and festival meal of the beginning, when life and death became two, which had been one, and the sexes became two, which also had been one. Creatures come into being, live on the death of others, die, and become the food of others, continuing, thus, into and through the transformations of time, the timeless archetype of the mythological beginning; and the individual matters no more that a fallen leaf. Psychologically, the effect of the enactment of such a rite is to shift the focus of the mind from the individual (who perishes) to the everlasting group. Magically, it is to reinforce the ever-living life in all lives, which appears to be many but is really one; so that the growth is stimulated of the yams, coconuts, pigs, moon, and breadfruits, and of the human community as well.

Sir James G. Frazer, in , has shown that in the early city states of the nuclear Near East, from which center all of the high civilizations of the world have been derived, god-kings were sacrificed in the way of this jungle rite,[Note I.1-1] and Sir Leonard Woolley’s excavation of the Royal Tombs of Ur, in which whole courts had been ceremonially interred alive, revealed that in Sumer such practices continued until as late as c. 2350 b.c.[Note I.1-2] We know, furthermore, that in India, in the sixteenth century a.d., kings were observed ceremoniously slicing themselves to bits,[Note I.1-3] and in the temples of the Black Goddess Kali, the terrible one of many names, “difficult of approach” (), whose stomach is a void and so can never be filled and whose womb is giving birth forever to all things, a river of blood has been pouring continuously for millenniums, from beheaded offerings, through channels carved to return it, still living, to its divine source.

Figure 3. Kali in her aspect as Camu??a, devouring goddess of war and disease (wood, India, eighteenth–nineteenth century a.d.)

To this day seven or eight hundred goats are slaughtered in three days in the Kalighat, the principal temple of the goddess in Calcutta, during her autumn festival, the Durga Puja. The heads are piled before the image, and the bodies go to the devotees, to be consumed in contemplative communion. Water buffalo, sheep, pigs, and fowl, likewise, are immolated lavishly in her worship, and before the prohibition of human sacrifice in 1835, she received from every part of the land even richer fare. In the towering Siva temple of Tanjore a male child was beheaded before the altar of the goddess every Friday at the holy hour of twilight. In the year 1830, a petty monarch of Bastar, desiring her grace, offered on one occasion twenty-five men at her altar in Danteshvari and in the sixteenth century a king of Cooch Behar immolated a hundred and fifty in that place.[Note I.1-4]

In the Jaintia hills of Assam it was the custom of a certain royal house to offer one human victim at the Durga Puja every year. After having bathed and purified himself, the sacrifice was dressed in new attire, daubed with red sandalwood and vermilion, arrayed with garlands, and, thus bedecked, installed upon a raised dais before the image, where he spent some time in meditation, repeating sacred sounds, and, when ready, made a sign with his finger. The executioner, likewise pronouncing sacred syllables, having elevated the sword, thereupon struck off the man’s head, which was immediately presented to the goddess on a golden plate. The lungs, being cooked, were consumed by yogis, and the royal family partook of a small quantity of rice steeped in the sacrificial blood. Those offered in this sacrifice were normally volunteers. However, when such were lacking, victims were kidnaped from outside the little state; and so it chanced, in 1832, that four men disappeared from the British domain, of whom one escaped to tell his tale, and the following year the kingdom was annexed — without its custom.[Note I.1-5]

“By one human sacrifice with proper rites, the goddess remains gratified for a thousand years,” we read in the Kalika Pura?a, a Hindu scripture of about the tenth century a.d.; “and by the sacrifice of three men, one hundred thousand. Siva, in his terrific aspect, as the consort of the goddess, is appeased for three thousand years by an offering of human flesh. For blood, if immediately consecrated, becomes ambrosia, and since the head and body are extremely gratifying, these should be presented in the worship of the goddess. The wise would do well to add such flesh, free from hair, to their offerings of food.”[Note I.1-6]

In the garden of innocence where such rites can be enacted with perfect equanimity, both the victim and the sacrificial priest are able to identify their consciousness, and thereby their reality, with the inhabiting principle of the whole. They can truly say and truly feel, in the words of the Indian Bhagavad Gita, that “even as worn out clothes are cast off and others put on that are new, so worn out bodies are cast off by the dweller in the body and others put on that are new.”[Note I.1-7]

For the West, however, the possibility of such an egoless return to a state of soul antecedent to the birth of individuality has long since passed away; and the first important stage in the branching off can be seen to have occurred in that very part of the nuclear Near East where the earliest god-kings and their courts had been for centuries ritually entombed: namely Sumer, where a new sense of the separation of the spheres of god and man began to be represented in myth and ritual about 2350 b.c. The king, then, was no longer a god, but a servant of the god, his Tenant Farmer, supervisor of the race of human slaves created to serve the gods with unremitting toil. And no longer identity, but relationship, was the paramount concern. Man had been made not to be God but to know, honor, and serve him; so that even the king, who, according to the earlier mythological view, had been the chief embodiment of divinity on earth, was now but a priest offering sacrifice in tendance to One above — not a god returning himself in sacrifice to Himself.

In the course of the following centuries, the new sense of separation led to a counter-yearning for return — not to identity, for such was no longer possible of conception (creator and creature were not the same), but to the presence and vision of the forfeited god. Hence the new mythology brought forth, in due time, a development away from the earlier static view of returning cycles. A progressive, temporally oriented mythology arose, of a creation, once and for all, at the beginning of time, a subsequent fall, and a work of restoration, still in progress. The world no longer was to be known as a mere...