Category: MythBlast

In circles where myth is a topic of discussion, the name Disney has sometimes brought about unsympathetic commentary, and often for justifiable reasons. The perceived bastardization of the stories of Hans Christian Anderson and...

In 2022, the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s MythBlast Series will take an in-depth, year-long look at the Hero. However, this exploration of heroism will be more than a simple reification of the themes Professor Campbell...

A theme behind Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology is the release of the mind to freedom through the creation of a living mythology. Artful dance is a superb example...

We now enter the festivals of the Winter Solstice and celebrate the birth of the savior archetype, which in the Catholicism of Latin America is presented with the image of the Niño Dios (God...

I should probably warn you about bad puns and purple prose inbound this week. This month’s theme is Return and Campbell spent a lot of time thinking about this topic, specifically in his analysis...

Mythology is filled with riddles. These questions and turns of phrase were an important literary form in the Greek-speaking world. The most famous riddle is the Riddle of the Sphinx, a mysterious question about...

Readers of the MythBlast Series will, no doubt, detect a Joycean flavor to this month’s offerings not only from the highlighted text, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: Unlocking James Joyce’s Masterwork, but also...

The release of Denis Villeneuve’s remake of Frank Herbert’s influential sci-fi novel Dune has its entire fandom reflecting back on what made the novels great, thus bringing to mind the mythic dimension of the...

“We all know the myth of the four ages—of gold, silver, bronze, and iron—where the world is represented as declining from its golden age, growing ever worse. It will disintegrate, presently, in chaos—only to...

One of the many magical qualities of stories is that we can go to them again and again, discovering something new with each return. As we mature and grow, we find new lenses for...

There is something about existence that has been puzzling to human beings, it seems to me, since the beginning of our species: a nagging intuition, an impression—an apprehension, really—that there is much more to...

October is metamorphosis month.  Dropping back a few thousand years, as human experience of the world changed, so too did the mythology that puts us into relationship with that world. Campbell notes that mythology...

Change is in the air. Again. As usual.  The climate is changing. The pandemic changes. Technology changes. Our lives change. Once upon a time, change happened more gradually, or so it seems. Now it...

 For the rest of the year, we at JCF are highlighting the final volume of Joseph Campbell’s remarkable Masks of God series, The Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology. Many of my friends...

Do something, you change. Do nothing, you change. Fight change, you change. Embrace change—well, you get the picture. And while we change, “things” change too. So it seems in the field of relative life,...

If we ever wanted to find a contemporary exemplar of living myth par excellence, we would need to look no further than the UFO phenomenon—especially with the recent video leaks and subsequent Pentagon disclosures...

“People often think of the Goddess as a fertility deity only. Not at all—she’s the muse,” Joseph Campbell elucidates in Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine. “She’s the inspirer of poetry. She’s the inspirer...

A passage from the Homeric Hymns tells us of a goddess that stretches out her bow and fires her creation into the world. “The peaks of mountains tremble. The forest in its darkness screams...

This month the MythBlast Series is focusing on Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine which is, I think, a tremendously important contribution to the Campbell oeuvre edited by the gifted Safron Rossi (who is...

“And my understanding of the mythological mode is that deities and even people are to be understood in this sense, as metaphors. It’s a poetic understanding.” Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine,...

A man stands at the mouth of the Forest Adventurous, “where we meet our adventures when we are ready for them.” (Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Romance, 116) He...

Our featured volume this month in the MythBlast Series is Joseph Campbell’s Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth. There is much to like about this lovely volume as it...

Amidst the tales of chivalrous knights and exciting Arthurian quests that Joseph Campbell unpacks in Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth, he makes an intriguing observation about how the...