MythBlast | The Lively Art of Letter Writing
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...
Category: MythBlast
MythBlast | Death, Eggshells, Zombies
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...
MythBlast | 70 Years of the Hero’s Journey
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,...
MythBlast | Sustaining the Celebration
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...
MythBlast | The Emerging Hero
Searching for the Face of Heroism in the Modern Era Joseph Campbell famously suggested that the hero has a thousand faces. While time and space have molded that hero into a vast number of...
MythBlast | The Mythology of Celebration
As we celebrate Joseph Campbell’s birthday this month, we can use the occasion to consider the mythological roots of our rituals of celebration. Sometimes we celebrate a one-time occasion, like a college graduation, getting...
MythBlast | Myths We Love By
A love of wonder: according to Aristotle, this is what brought the lover of wisdom (Greek, philosophos) and the lover of myth (Greek, philomuthos) together. For Socrates, love was that most ancient of gods,...
MythBlast | Love: The Burning Point of Life
One of my favorite quotes by Joseph Campbell, in Myths to Live By, refers to Love as the burning point of life. When he elaborates, what we come to understand is that life is...
MythBlast | The Power of Love Story
In Creative Mythology (Masks of God, Vol. IV), Joseph Campbell’s exquisite musings on love offer a palliative to the Hallmark-style simulacrum of Valentine’s Day love drenching this month in heart-shaped candies, teddy bears, and...
MythBlast | The War of Sport
The theme for the month of February at JCF is love, and February, with Valentine’s Day at its heart, is certainly the month to celebrate love. But there is another event every February that...
MythBlast | What Will Be, Is
In his 1944 preface to A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Joseph Campbell calls Joyce’s book “…a kind of terminal moraine in which lie buried all the myths, programs, slogans, hopes, prayers, tools, educational...
MythBlast | Why We Rise
The Role of Story in Crafting New Beginnings for Our Lives Most attribute the foundations of Western story structure to Aristotle. His simple idea that stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an...
MythBlast | Joyce, Campbell, and Jim Morrison
I recently had the pleasure of reading Michelle Obama’s Becoming—a story, eponymously, about Michelle’s “becoming,” grateful for the accessibility of an autobiography that models the unfolding nature of finding one’s purpose. I think how...
MythBlast | The Transparency of the New Year
Many years from now, at the crossroads of our lives, our souls will want to remember the day our lives were given a fresh start. In such moments of reflection, the past, future, and...
MythBlast | A Toolbox For the New Year
This month, the first month of the new year, we begin again; and beginning again is, in fact, our theme for January at JCF. No doubt we’ll soon be inundated by numberless lists extolling...
MythBlast | El Niño Dios, the Goddess, and the Cross
There is nothing more mythic than the ceremonies and stories that have gathered around the winter solstice. They are powerful metaphors that are present across cultures, irrespective of time and places, with the vastness...
MythBlast | The Winter Solstice and Other Metaphors
The winter solstice approaches and soon the sun’s course will reach its lowest noon altitude and its shortest day, marking both the end and beginning of another solar year. Hence, this day aligns itself...
MythBlast | The Vicarious Reaches of Cyberspace
1986 saw the publication of three seminal books: The Society of Mind by MIT cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky, On the Plurality of Worlds by philosopher David Lewis, and The Inner Reaches of Outer Space...
MythBlast | Joseph Campbell: Virtuoso of the Sublime
There is a saying attributed to Hermes Trismegistus: “As above, so below; as within, so without” (The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean, p. 47). This means that whatever happens on any level of reality...
MythBlast | Thus Were the Meditations of the Serviceable Mind
W.H. Auden once remarked that a real book reads us, an observation that seems right enough to me, and certainly seems right to apply to the work of Joseph Campbell. After all, Campbell spent...
MythBlast | The Season as Sacred
As we move into the holidays, experiencing the passage of seasons, the weather shifts to a cooler disposition, the world darkens early, and the sun’s transit diminishes, foretelling the coming winter lull. We light...
MythBlast | Where Do Stories Come From?
For every profession, there’s a question people ask that isn’t the real question. When I was an actor, the question audience members asked was, “How do you learn all those lines?” when what they...
MythBlast | Tat Tvam Asi: The Blessing of Compassion
For the month of November, we at the Joseph Campbell Foundation are exploring the theme of blessings. The comfortable blessings of bounty, family, and health are certainly likely to spring to mind, but there...
