This third volume of Campbell's classic study of world mythologies covers the central myths that still inform the consciousness of the European West. Campbell traces these back to the cosmology built around the Levantine earth-goddess of the Bronze Age, changed but only partly suppressed by the patriarchal tribal invasions which shaped Judaic and Greek myth. He then examines the interplay of Persia, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, Islam and Christian Europe upon the matrix of ancient beliefs.