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This final volume marks the homecoming of Joseph Campbell's remarkable safari through the jungles, across the plains and over the mountains of world mythology. The first volume, Primitive mythology, followed the history of mythology back to its beginnings in the Paleolithic and Neolithic ages. The second, Oriental mythology, describes the mythology of the great city states from their origins in the fourth millenium B.C. in Egypt, China and the region in between. The third, Occidental mythology, recreates the mythical structure of the Mycenaean and early Greek cultures and some parallel myths in barbarian Europe among the Teutonic and Celtic tribal societies. The present volume, Creative mythology, specifically treats the European Celtic tradition, featuring its key legends, the quest of the holy grail and Tristan and Isolde.
Campbell is an ideal guide for such a journey because he is primarily a literary man who knows how to teach his reader what is worth reading, and there are lengthy quotations which acquaint the reader first-hand with the best textual sources of the myths. In this volume, a good example of this is a masterly exposition and interpretation of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzifal. But the impact of this work is not merely literary. It encompasses the full tradition of religious and philosophical development as it spread from the mystery religions of antiquity in and through the early Christian era up to our own time.
Campbell's development as a mythologist is strikingly parallel to the course of Jung's research in alchemy, and in this volume he makes full use of this parallelism in acknowledging and elaborating much of Jung's material, especially the archetypal image of the coniunctio. In fact, this study makes an excellent adjunct to any study of Jung's later work, and it will help his students immeasurably to supply a coherent body of knowledge concerning the cultural traditions from which Jung's alchemical texts sprang.
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