Explore the power of myth as it exploded from medieval Europe into the modern world
In this fourth volume of The Masks of God — Joseph Campbell's major work of comparative mythology — the pre-eminent mythologist looks at the birth of the modern, individualistic mythology as it developed in Europe beginning in the twelfth century A.D. up through the modernist art of the twentieth century.
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:
Its main result for me has been the 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 today, 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.
This new digital edition, part of the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell series, includes over forty new illustrations.
(Comparative Mythology: Christianity, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Arthurian Romance, Modernism)
Original release date: 1969