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Growing up in East Texas, I was afraid of exactly two things—funerals and poison ivy. I occasionally had nightmares about having to attend the local rituals of the dearly departed. To be fair, many...
An immense billboard looms over Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. On it, a woman appears to be consumed with deep sorrow, hot tears streaming down her cheeks. A crown of flowers rests ironically upon...
Who will tell the stories if not You? Who will tell the story if not Me? Who will tell Our story if not Us? My story begins in the 70’s. A time of dissolution....
My grandfather was a farmer in rural Minnesota on land that was homesteaded, probably by my great-grandfather, in the late 19th century. It was a small farm by today’s standards, not much more than...
For most, the term revolution brings to mind matters of nations and politics. We see irruption, violence and wars in which all involved parties incur tremendous loss. However, on a less severe scale, revolutions can simply...
“…to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act . . . Joyfully participate in the sorrows of the world and everything changes.” —Joseph Campbell, Sukhavati: Place of...
Once heroes have endured the longest nights and defeated the mightiest monsters, once they have stared death in the face and survived to tell the tale, their journey is by no means over. What...
This month we in the US celebrate the genesis of our country, marked by the signing of a document establishing the sovereignty of 13 colonies and establishing their collective intention to form an entity...
What the holy grail symbolizes is the highest spiritual fulfillment of a human life […] It has to do with overcoming the same temptations that the Buddha overcame: attachment to this, and that, or...
Somewhere in the middle of my journey with stories of individuation, as Carl Jung and others would term them, I became curious about where the feminine lives in the story of the self’s becoming....
In the field and scope of mythology, those of us who think or work in and around myth often discuss the apparent absence of a contemporary mythology. In conversation, Joseph Campbell sometimes noted that...
Let’s pick up some threads from last week, namely “initiation” as we discussed it, and the modern mediation of myths. This week, we will add to that an engagement with the notion of the...
One of Joseph Campbell’s key innovations was mapping his model of a heroic story-cycle onto so-called “rites of passage” as they were so eloquently dubbed by anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (1873–1957). Centuries earlier, however,...
Looking at my life, I cannot escape a basic fact: my individual existence is enmeshed in the life of the collective—not only my immediate family and friends, but in the larger institutions and systems...
The classic characters and narratives of Greek mythology sculpted in stone throughout antiquity display a wide range of human emotions and psychological motifs. One particular expression, however, is often curiously absent – laughter. While...
My first memories of Joseph Campbell are through my dad’s love for him. Dad played Campbell’s lectures on cassette tapes on long, sun drenched drives to visit our family’s patriarch in the desert. Ironically,...
It is the first day of spring as I sit down to write. The sun has entered Aries, the first sign in the Zodiac, marking the dawning of a new astrological year. The sun...
The Nothing That Is Not There and the Nothing That Is Pt. I: The Hobgoblin of Doubt We all know about things. In fact, we all know a lot of things about a lot...
Resurrecting the Hobgoblin of Doubt We love our myths, don’t we? We love how they empower us, we love how they make us think, we love how they enlarge our world. We love feeling...
I have on a wall in my study at home in New Braunfels, Texas, a professionally framed letter from James Hillman to me dated 20 November 2000. It is one of several precious letters...
Myths that involve resurrection span cultures from the Pharaohs to the Pagans. We see them appear, be forgotten, and then reappear throughout history. From Passover to the Paschal Mystery, we continue to celebrate them...
The deeper my relationship with Joseph Campbell, the more I see him everywhere—and not just what I come across for the Campbell in Culture posts I help curate. The references we hear about, the overt mentions,...
With the 1949 publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell accomplished the rare task of uniting wisdom with mainstream interest, presenting foundational patterns of human experience through the archetypal content embedded...
Joseph Campbell was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work covers many aspects of the human experience. His philosophy is often summarized by his phrase: “Follow your bliss.” More…
