[In the following excerpt, Highwater provides a laudatory assessment of The Way of the Animal Powers, calling the volume a “masterful presentation” of aboriginal folklore and mythology.]

Speaking of his painting, the American artist Arthur Dove said: “We cannot express the light in nature because we have not the sun. We can only express the light we have in ourselves.” It is not by accident that we have invented imagery that overcomes the limitations of language. Common to all of us is the manipulation of truth we call “poetic license.”

Our lives are filled with every conceivable ploy to escape or penetrate the “ordinary.” Even those of us who are most mundane despise our condition, and when we recount the simplest story it inevitably becomes something else: a “tall tale,” or a “fish story.” These terms are efforts to describe the remarkable interaction of imagination and something even more quixotic than imagination: that which many of us innocently call the truth. Clearly, tall tales are not true, and yet, even for naive realists (fundamentalist or scientistic) those who fervently believe in something as obsolescent and undependable as “the truth,” such tales are not counterfeit.

The universal inclination to evoke a reality that is truer than the one before us—even the everyday creation of tall tales—is simply the most commonplace aspect of a profound disposition of the human psyche: the making of myths. Joseph Campbell tells us that “it is a curious characteristic of our unformed species that we live and model our lives through acts of make-believe.” We are myth makers. We are legenders. Of all the animals we alone are capable of dreaming ourselves into existence.

Campbell's The Way of the Animal Powers is a masterful presentation of the imaginal miracle that lies behind the term “shamanism”—an excellent and insightful description of those animistic, hunting cultures that have survived into our own century and which may reflect dimly upon our Paleolithic ancestors: the Bushmen, Pygmies, Andamanese, Tasaday, Australian Aborigines, Native Americans, and many others. The Way of the Animal Powers is about dreams and myths and the countless, ingenious ways in which we ritualize the ineffable cosmos as social as well as personal experiences. This concern for personal myths and their dynamic interface with the myths of the community is especially important in our time when society is no longer supported by a truly pervasive and significant system of beliefs. It is a time when the creative impulse has been internalized and has few resources in the external world. It attests to the fact that even our mythologies must be dynamic if they and, through them, we are to survive. The power of the dream is still in the capacity for dreaming.

Campbell tells us that the first function of a mythology is to waken and maintain in the individual a sense of wonder and participation in the mystery of this finally inscrutable universe. “Mythologies differ as the horizons, landscapes, sciences and technologies of their civilizations differ.” The essential function of mythologies is the instruction of the group and the individual in “the passages of human life, from the stage of dependency in childhood to the responsibilities of maturity, and on to old age and the ultimate passage of the dark gate.”

The process by which this complex network of myth and ritual makes itself visible and effective is metaphoric, poetic, imaginal. At its simplest it is the telling of tall tales, at its most profound, the creation of masterworks of art.

Campbell is himself a legender who speaks to us through an exceptional amalgam of scholarship and imagination. The sweep and scope of his new book is truly astonishing. We follow him through time and geography, examining the traces of early mankind: the first human burials, the artifacts of a worldwide cult of animal powers, details imprinted in temple-caves, upon rock face, and on fragments of bone and shell.

We may not wish to follow Campbell step by step. We may decline his assumption that we can know our ancestry through the examination of twentieth-century aboriginal peoples. And we may not be inclined to accept the Jungian insistence upon the “spiritual unity” of human beings. But these are small matters, indeed, in comparison to the epic intellect and imagination which functions at the heart of Joseph Campbell's brilliant new book. It is surely the culmination of his life's work, and we can only look forward with great anticipation to the remaining volumes in the series.

The Way of the Animal Powers requires a special note of praise in regard to its achievements in the field of bookmaking. Campbell's text is handsomely integrated with a lavish series of color plates, full-color maps, drawings, black and white photographs, and charts. The physical book itself is certainly one of the finest examples of exquisite bookmaking which not only complements the text but, in a valid sense, extends its imaginal and scholarly reach in a manner that is possible only with the most ingenious artistic efforts.