TRANSFORMATIONS OF MYTH THROUGH TIME

Thirteen classroom lectures by the late Campbell, which will air on PBS early next year and are already available on video cassette. As ever, Campbell is spellbinding in these lightly edited transcripts, offering for the nonacademic reader a simplification of his five-volume historical atlas and four-volume The Masks of God The subjects and themes are prime Campbell: the nature of initiation; myths of the Native Americans; neolithic gods and goddesses; Egyptian myths; Buddhism, kundalini yoga, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and mystery religions; European consciousness and the Grail myth; the legends of Arthur and of Parzival, which Campbell ranks higher than Dante's Divine Comedy, because it "ends up on earth, and the thing is solved here, now, in the flesh, and in a magnificent way." Profuse illustrations throughout enliven and explicate the text.