THE MASKS OF GOD, VOL. 2

Somewhere Professor Campbell speaks of a celestial palace shining with a million jewels and a thousand golden colored rays, "the whole continually changing in appearance: now a , now a pearl net"; this description could, give or take a few numbers, sum up his own of Oriental myth. The scholarship is staggering, as is the Professor Campbell, the "continuous condition" of Eastern art resembles the harmony of the social order. There are Biblical counterparts: the Flood, the job, the Tree, a Chinese Sodom. There are antiquity equations with Dionysius, Krishna with Herakles. From the bull-to we go on to the search for Nirvana, mythic identification and inflation, Vedas of Brahman, Buddha and the Gita and the current Chinese Communist Professor Compbell loves his lore, spinning one enchantment after another, he also notes early Indian renunciation giving way to sexual opulence: Krishna's simultaneous with Radha and a thousand other playmates, doing things which their minds". Cultural cross-references abound: Marx, Jung and Freud on two views of Ego; Plato's the author believes all religions and myths are rooted in apprehension of the and, like Dr. Suzuki, that the "metaphysical tremendum" and "sublime " somehow lost to the West in its incessant preoccupation with free will and an autonomous future. However, he does not note Koestler's recent Lotus and attack of the entire . Nevertheless, Masks of God is a landmark for mystic thought.