Joseph Campbell: Primitive Mythology
The Ziggurat of Ur. Wikimedia Commons.
The Primitive Planters
The Neolithic and the Emergence of the High Civilizations.
Agriculture and stock-breeding, which were the basic forms of economy supporting the original high civilizations of the world, made their appearance in the Near East somewhere around 7000 B.C. They spread eastward and westward from this center in a broad band, displacing the earlier hunting and food-collecting cultures, until both the Pacific coast of Asia and the Atlantic coasts of Europe and Africa were attained by about 2500 B.C. Meanwhile, in the nuclear zone from which this diffusion originated, a further development took place, in the period 3500 – 2500 B.C., which yielded all the basic elements of the archaic high civilizations: writing, the wheel, mathematics, the calendar, kingship, priestcraft, the symbolism of the temple, taxation, etc.
The first plantings, in the broad equatorial zone of the vegetable world, supplied not only the food, clothing, and shelter of man since time immemorial, but also his blossom and seed, wherein death and life appear as transformations of a single, superordinated, indestructible force. A number of scholars have developed the concept of a single culture realm, out of which three major developments of grain agriculture matured, namely: Southeast Asia (rice), the Near East (wheat and barley), and Peru and Middle America (maize). These would, if that idea is upheld by further research, represent local adaptations of a system of arts carried by diffusion through the early Neolithic period 7500 – 5000 B.C.
The second phase of the crucial Near Eastern development can be assigned schematically to the millennium between 5500 and 4500 B.C. In this period, settled village life on the basis of an efficient barnyard economy now becomes a well-established pattern in the nuclear region, the chief grains being wheat and barley, and the animals the pig, goat, sheep, and ox (the dog having joined the humans much earlier as a companion to the hunters of the late Paleolithic, perhaps 15000 B.C.). Pottery and weaving have been added to the sum of human skills, likewise the arts of carpentry and housebuilding. The women’s role in the economy changes radically in this period of transformation. She participated – perhaps even predominated – in the planting and reaping of the crops. As the mother of life and nourisher of life, she was thought to assist the earth symbolically in its productivity. In the following millennium (4500 – 3500 B.C.), a multitude of female figurines appear among the archeological finds. The association of fertile womanhood with the idea of the motherhood of nature is being established.
In the period in which this neolithic constellation of naked female figurines first appears, a period which may be called the high-neolithic, the pottery very suddenly becomes extraordinarily fine and beautifully decorated, showing a totally new concept of ornamental art and organization of aesthetic forms. In the earlier, paleolithic art of the great caves of southern France and northern Spain – which we deal with under the theme of the Primitive Hunters – one finds no evidence of any concept of the geometrical organization of an aesthetic field. Neither does this appear in the works of the later stages of the paleolithic hunting period. Then - in the high neolithic - coinciding with the appearance of well-established, strongly developing settled villages, there breaks into view an abundance of the most gracefully and consciously organized circular compositions of geometrical and abstract motifs, on the pottery of the so-called Halaf and Samara styles.
The Halaf pottery is scattered through an area in northern Syria, where the river Euphrates and its tributaries descend from the foothills of the Taurus Mountains to the plain. Samarra is located in Iraq, on the river Tigris, some seventy miles north of Baghdad. Symbols like the Maltese cross, the bull’s head, the goddess, the dove and the double ax are prominent in this area. All the symbols in this Halafian culture complex appeared a millennium later in Crete, and from there were carried by sea, through the gates of Hercules (Gibraltar), northward to the British isles and southward to the Gold coast, Nigeria and the Congo. It is the basic complex, also, of the Mycenaean culture, from which the Greeks derived so many symbols. This could be the earliest evidence of the mythologies associated with the names of Ishtar and Tammuz, Isis and Osiris, Venus and Adonis, Mary and Jesus. The celebration of the mystery of mythological death and resurrection is an ongoing process.
The Hieratic City States
Around 4000 B.C. certain of the villages in this area began to assume the size and function of market towns. In this period the Sumerians first appear on the scene, establishing on the Euphrates and Tigris delta flats sites that were to become kingly cities like Ur, Kish, Lagash, Eridu, Sippar, Shuruppak, Nippur and Erech. Mud and reeds were the natural resources. Mud could be fashioned into sundried bricks, which now appear for the first time in history. They could be used for construction of temples, which likewise now appear for the first time in history. Their typical form was that of the ziggurat, a height constructed with a sanctuary on its summit for the ritual of the world-generating union of the earth-goddess with the lord of the sky. Later evidence suggests that the queen or princess of each city was in those earliest days identified with the goddess, and the king, her spouse, with the god.
We know nothing of the social and political structure of the high-neolithic market town. However, in the period immediately following - that of the hieratic city state, which may be dated around 3500 – 2500 B.C. for the south Mesopotamian river towns – we encounter a totally new and remarkable situation. From 3500 B.C. the south Mesopotamian temple area are increasing notably in size, and around 3200 B.C. in Uruk there appears the whole cultural syndrome that has since constituted the germinal unit of all the high civilizations of the world.
At this time appears a new order of humanity, namely the professional, full time, initiated and strictly regimented temple priest. The new inspiration of civilized life was based, first, on long and meticulous observations of not only the sun and the moon, but the movements of five other visible or barely visible heavenly spheres of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Secondly, a notion that the laws governing the movements of the seven heavenly spheres should in some mystical ways be the same as those governing the life and thought of men on earth, was evolving within the priesthood.
The whole city, not simply the temple area, was now conceived as an imitation on earth of the cosmic order, a sociological “middle cosmos”, established by priestcraft between the macrocosm of the universe and the microcosm of the individual. The king was the center, as a human representative of the celestial power. The walled city centered around the pivotal sanctum of the ziggurat. There was a mathematically structured calendar to regulate the city’s life according to the passages of the sun and moon among the stars, as well as a highly developed system of liturgical arts, including music (rendering audible to human ears the world-ordering harmony of the celestial spheres.
It was at this moment in time that the art of writing first appeared and that scriptorially documented history therefore begins. There is evidence of the development of two numerical systems still employed, the decimal and the sexigesimal systems. The former was at that time used mostly for business accounts, whereas the latter was used for the ritualistic measuring of space and time as well. Three hundred and sixty days, plus five, marked the measurement of the circle of the year, the cycle of time. The five days that bring the total to 365 days were taken to represent a sacred opening through which spiritual energy flowed into the round of the temporal universe from the spheres of eternity, and they were designated, consequently, days of holy feast and festival. The ziggurat, the pivotal point in the center of the sacred circle of space, was also characterized by the number five: the four sides of the tower, oriented to the points of the compass, came together at the summit, the fifth point, and it was there that the energy of heaven met the earth.
This life-organizing assemblage of ideas and principles reached the Nile, to inspire the civilization of the First Dynasty of Egypt around 2800 B.C. It spread to Crete and to the valley of the Indus around 2600 B.C., and to Shang China around 1600 B.C. From China, according to this line of thought, it may have crossed the Pacific during the seafaring period of the Chou Dynasty between 700 B.C. and 300 B.C. The Egyptian term for this universal order was Ma’at; in India it is Dharma, and in China Tao. The myths and rites derived from this order, constitute a mesocosm - a mediating, middle cosmos, through which the microcosm of the individual is brought into relation to the macrocosm.
The macrocosm, with the movements of the sun and the moon, was the backbone of the mythology of the city states, and the king – the human representative of the celestial powers - was to be deposed (die) and then resurrected at regular intervals determined by the priesthood. In the early times of the enactment of these rites, the king was physically sacrificed, whereas they in later times were sacrificed only symbolically. The king’s journey through the realm of death, and all the myths and legends derived from this starting point, represent basic themes common to all city states at that time – and form the basis of the mythology of the great civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt.
The leading theme of the primitive village mythology of the planters is the coming of death into the world, and the point that death comes by way of murder. The plants on which man lives derive from this death. Reproduction without death was inconceivable, as was death without reproduction. Death as the life of the living is the fundamental motivation supporting the rites around which the social structure of the early planting villages was composed. Depending on the local traditions along the equatorial zone, human sacrifice or animal sacrifice represented the enactment of the death rituals, through which the fertility of the soil was to be ensured.
Agriculture and stock-breeding, which were the basic forms of economy supporting the original high civilizations of the world, made their appearance in the Near East somewhere around 7000 B.C. They spread eastward and westward from this center in a broad band, displacing the earlier hunting and food-collecting cultures, until both the Pacific coast of Asia and the Atlantic coasts of Europe and Africa were attained by about 2500 B.C. Meanwhile, in the nuclear zone from which this diffusion originated, a further development took place, in the period 3500 – 2500 B.C., which yielded all the basic elements of the archaic high civilizations: writing, the wheel, mathematics, the calendar, kingship, priestcraft, the symbolism of the temple, taxation, etc.
The first plantings, in the broad equatorial zone of the vegetable world, supplied not only the food, clothing, and shelter of man since time immemorial, but also his blossom and seed, wherein death and life appear as transformations of a single, superordinated, indestructible force. A number of scholars have developed the concept of a single culture realm, out of which three major developments of grain agriculture matured, namely: Southeast Asia (rice), the Near East (wheat and barley), and Peru and Middle America (maize). These would, if that idea is upheld by further research, represent local adaptations of a system of arts carried by diffusion through the early Neolithic period 7500 – 5000 B.C.
The second phase of the crucial Near Eastern development can be assigned schematically to the millennium between 5500 and 4500 B.C. In this period, settled village life on the basis of an efficient barnyard economy now becomes a well-established pattern in the nuclear region, the chief grains being wheat and barley, and the animals the pig, goat, sheep, and ox (the dog having joined the humans much earlier as a companion to the hunters of the late Paleolithic, perhaps 15000 B.C.). Pottery and weaving have been added to the sum of human skills, likewise the arts of carpentry and housebuilding. The women’s role in the economy changes radically in this period of transformation. She participated – perhaps even predominated – in the planting and reaping of the crops. As the mother of life and nourisher of life, she was thought to assist the earth symbolically in its productivity. In the following millennium (4500 – 3500 B.C.), a multitude of female figurines appear among the archeological finds. The association of fertile womanhood with the idea of the motherhood of nature is being established.
In the period in which this neolithic constellation of naked female figurines first appears, a period which may be called the high-neolithic, the pottery very suddenly becomes extraordinarily fine and beautifully decorated, showing a totally new concept of ornamental art and organization of aesthetic forms. In the earlier, paleolithic art of the great caves of southern France and northern Spain – which we deal with under the theme of the Primitive Hunters – one finds no evidence of any concept of the geometrical organization of an aesthetic field. Neither does this appear in the works of the later stages of the paleolithic hunting period. Then - in the high neolithic - coinciding with the appearance of well-established, strongly developing settled villages, there breaks into view an abundance of the most gracefully and consciously organized circular compositions of geometrical and abstract motifs, on the pottery of the so-called Halaf and Samara styles.
The Halaf pottery is scattered through an area in northern Syria, where the river Euphrates and its tributaries descend from the foothills of the Taurus Mountains to the plain. Samarra is located in Iraq, on the river Tigris, some seventy miles north of Baghdad. Symbols like the Maltese cross, the bull’s head, the goddess, the dove and the double ax are prominent in this area. All the symbols in this Halafian culture complex appeared a millennium later in Crete, and from there were carried by sea, through the gates of Hercules (Gibraltar), northward to the British isles and southward to the Gold coast, Nigeria and the Congo. It is the basic complex, also, of the Mycenaean culture, from which the Greeks derived so many symbols. This could be the earliest evidence of the mythologies associated with the names of Ishtar and Tammuz, Isis and Osiris, Venus and Adonis, Mary and Jesus. The celebration of the mystery of mythological death and resurrection is an ongoing process.
The Hieratic City States
Around 4000 B.C. certain of the villages in this area began to assume the size and function of market towns. In this period the Sumerians first appear on the scene, establishing on the Euphrates and Tigris delta flats sites that were to become kingly cities like Ur, Kish, Lagash, Eridu, Sippar, Shuruppak, Nippur and Erech. Mud and reeds were the natural resources. Mud could be fashioned into sundried bricks, which now appear for the first time in history. They could be used for construction of temples, which likewise now appear for the first time in history. Their typical form was that of the ziggurat, a height constructed with a sanctuary on its summit for the ritual of the world-generating union of the earth-goddess with the lord of the sky. Later evidence suggests that the queen or princess of each city was in those earliest days identified with the goddess, and the king, her spouse, with the god.
We know nothing of the social and political structure of the high-neolithic market town. However, in the period immediately following - that of the hieratic city state, which may be dated around 3500 – 2500 B.C. for the south Mesopotamian river towns – we encounter a totally new and remarkable situation. From 3500 B.C. the south Mesopotamian temple area are increasing notably in size, and around 3200 B.C. in Uruk there appears the whole cultural syndrome that has since constituted the germinal unit of all the high civilizations of the world.
At this time appears a new order of humanity, namely the professional, full time, initiated and strictly regimented temple priest. The new inspiration of civilized life was based, first, on long and meticulous observations of not only the sun and the moon, but the movements of five other visible or barely visible heavenly spheres of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Secondly, a notion that the laws governing the movements of the seven heavenly spheres should in some mystical ways be the same as those governing the life and thought of men on earth, was evolving within the priesthood.
The whole city, not simply the temple area, was now conceived as an imitation on earth of the cosmic order, a sociological “middle cosmos”, established by priestcraft between the macrocosm of the universe and the microcosm of the individual. The king was the center, as a human representative of the celestial power. The walled city centered around the pivotal sanctum of the ziggurat. There was a mathematically structured calendar to regulate the city’s life according to the passages of the sun and moon among the stars, as well as a highly developed system of liturgical arts, including music (rendering audible to human ears the world-ordering harmony of the celestial spheres.
It was at this moment in time that the art of writing first appeared and that scriptorially documented history therefore begins. There is evidence of the development of two numerical systems still employed, the decimal and the sexigesimal systems. The former was at that time used mostly for business accounts, whereas the latter was used for the ritualistic measuring of space and time as well. Three hundred and sixty days, plus five, marked the measurement of the circle of the year, the cycle of time. The five days that bring the total to 365 days were taken to represent a sacred opening through which spiritual energy flowed into the round of the temporal universe from the spheres of eternity, and they were designated, consequently, days of holy feast and festival. The ziggurat, the pivotal point in the center of the sacred circle of space, was also characterized by the number five: the four sides of the tower, oriented to the points of the compass, came together at the summit, the fifth point, and it was there that the energy of heaven met the earth.
This life-organizing assemblage of ideas and principles reached the Nile, to inspire the civilization of the First Dynasty of Egypt around 2800 B.C. It spread to Crete and to the valley of the Indus around 2600 B.C., and to Shang China around 1600 B.C. From China, according to this line of thought, it may have crossed the Pacific during the seafaring period of the Chou Dynasty between 700 B.C. and 300 B.C. The Egyptian term for this universal order was Ma’at; in India it is Dharma, and in China Tao. The myths and rites derived from this order, constitute a mesocosm - a mediating, middle cosmos, through which the microcosm of the individual is brought into relation to the macrocosm.
The macrocosm, with the movements of the sun and the moon, was the backbone of the mythology of the city states, and the king – the human representative of the celestial powers - was to be deposed (die) and then resurrected at regular intervals determined by the priesthood. In the early times of the enactment of these rites, the king was physically sacrificed, whereas they in later times were sacrificed only symbolically. The king’s journey through the realm of death, and all the myths and legends derived from this starting point, represent basic themes common to all city states at that time – and form the basis of the mythology of the great civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt.
The leading theme of the primitive village mythology of the planters is the coming of death into the world, and the point that death comes by way of murder. The plants on which man lives derive from this death. Reproduction without death was inconceivable, as was death without reproduction. Death as the life of the living is the fundamental motivation supporting the rites around which the social structure of the early planting villages was composed. Depending on the local traditions along the equatorial zone, human sacrifice or animal sacrifice represented the enactment of the death rituals, through which the fertility of the soil was to be ensured.