Joseph Campbell's multivolume Historical Atlas of World Mythology, his magnum opus, marked the culmination of his brilliant career as scholar, writer, teacher, and one of the foremost interpreters of our most sacred traditions.

Campbell described his work as an attempt to tell humankind's "One Great Story"—our saga of spiritual awakening and the subsequent development of the many different mythological perspectives that have shaped us throughout time. His central theme is that our seemingly disparate spiritual traditions are neither discrete nor unique, but rather each is simply an "ethnic manifestation" of one or another of those "elemental ideals" that have forever transfixed the human psyche.

There were to be four volumes in the completed work, each with several subparts:

1. The Way of the Animal Powers
   1. The Mythologies of the Primitive Hunters and Gatherers
      
   2. The Mythologies of the Great Hunt
      


2. The Way of the Seeded Earth (Published posthumously)
   
   1. The Sacrifice
      
   2. The Mythologies of the Primitive Planters: The Northern Americas
      
   3. The Mythologies of the Primitive Planters: The Middle and Southern Americas
      


3. The Way of the Celestial Lights (Bronze Age — Unfinished)


4. The Way of Man (Classical to Modern — Unfinished)

As of 2008, the Historical Atlas is out of print. We are considering the best method and medium through which to make this extraordinary work once again available.

Reviews:

No one but Joseph Campbell could conceive of such a scheme or carry it out as boldly as he does in this extraordinary book. He has woven an intricate and beautiful web in which one can trace the threads of a number of basic religious concepts through time and space.... [T]he overwhelming impression of The Way of the Animal Powers is majesty and ecstasy. — Wendy O'Flaherty, The New York Times

For anyone interested in world mythology in all its ramifications this book contains quantities of information that he would not come across otherwise except in a lifetime of reading, and specialized reading at that. Thus, it is an invaluable contribution to contemporary knowledge. — Winthrop Sargeant, The New Yorker

Well done, and thank you, Joseph Campbell. — The Times of London 

JOSEPH CAMPBELL is embarked upon an enterprise of the first importance: nothing less than a history of the human mind from its earliest beginnings, an account of how man has understood himself and symbolized in myth the meaning of his existence. In its four volumes, Campbell's majestic work will take us from the now silent cultures of prehistory through the present. It will follow the human odyssey from the original cross-over from the anthropoids, who did not create symbols for death or awe, to the early humans, who did, and on through subsequent modes of understanding to modern man with his computers and space voyages. [...]

Campbell's latest enterprise is clearly a summa of his career as a student of myth, and also... one of the great works of our time. It has the epic sweep of Pound's Cantos or Joyce's Ullyses. — Jeffrey Hart, National Review