MythBlast | Separation, Initiation, and Return
According to Joseph Campbell, how many stages are there in the Hero’s Journey or monomyth — and why does it matter? What is the Hero’s Journey, really? I talk to writers and others...
Category: MythBlast
MythBlast | Strictly Platonic: The Clash Between Education and Sports
In 2015, Time Magazine ran a piece exploring why student athletes struggled to maintain their grades and the numerous factors surrounding the problem. The article was in response to a report from The Chronicle...
MythBlast | Myth as Fictional Fabrication
Published by New World Library for the Joseph Campbell Foundation in 2012, Mythic Imagination: Collected Short Fiction witnesses many of Campbell’s favorite themes encasing myth spread out through seven stories ranging from 1931 to...
MythBlast | Beyond the Moonshine
“Get up!” Through his sleep, Freddy Bliss vaguely heard the agitated voice, but he was unwilling to open his eyes. “Up! Up! Up! Up!” (Mythic Imagination, 3) For readers of Joseph Campbell, the name “Freddy...
MythBlast | Political Matters
“Politics.” It is the word of the moment. One might even say it’s the word that exemplifies the age we live in. With a presidential election just a few months away, we find ourselves...
MythBlast | There and Stuck Again: The Creative Darkness of the Soul
Writer’s Block by Isabelle Gallino (used through a Creative Commons license) Time and again, as artists and writers we come to a point in our development where that proverbial “block” on the road of...
MythBlast | Joseph Campbell, Angela Gregory, and a Future Awaiting All of Us
The art of letter writing has been significantly threatened since e-mails and text messages brought about faster and more efficient ways to communicate with words. Once human relationships depended heavily on written correspondence. This...
MythBlast | Joseph Campbell: A Normal, Beautiful, Standard Life
The text we’re highlighting this month is Correspondence: 1927-1987, which offers selections of Joseph Campbell’s correspondence over the last 60 years of his life. I have long loved reading the correspondence of people who...
MythBlast | The Known and the Unknowable: A Meeting of Light and Dark
The Dream of Joy (from The Sleep of Sorrow and the Dream of Joy) by Raffaelle Monti (marble, England, 1861. Photo by Chris Beckett; used through a Creative Commons license). Having read and reread...
MythBlast | Why Symbols?
“We speak of the symbolism and metaphor of myth – but why? Why do myths have to use symbols to communicate? Can’t they just be clear about what they mean?” This frustration was voiced...
MythBlast | Dancing with the Unknown
A Journey into the Unknown by Bastian Schmidt. Used through a Creative Commons License How do we know what we know? When does an introduced idea cross that threshold from something encountered to something...
MythBlast | The Dark Light of the Goddess
I love those moments in which Joseph Campbell, the world-class scholar of myth, also becomes a story-teller, often drawing a line of Native American wisdom. In The Flight of the Wild Gander, he opens...
MythBlast | The Unfinished Story
In 1987, the Hindu epic The Rāmāyaṇa was serialized for Indian television. It immediately became immensely popular and was treated with ritualistic honor throughout the country when episodes aired. When it was announced that the...
MythBlast | The Wedding of Dame Ragnell and Sir Gawain
The story of Dame Ragnell and Sir Gawain is one of the most popular tales to come down from late medieval England, and scholars generally attribute it to Geoffrey Chaucer. In “The Wife of...
MythBlast | Renaissance
One of the definitions of Renaissance is that it is a time of rebirth and revival. The romantic ideal that many have of the notion of Renaissance, however, could just as well be defined...
MythBlast | OK, Boomer, Star Wars, and Myth
The recent OK, Boomer brouhaha both amused and bemused me, and made me think (surprise!) about Star Wars and Joseph Campbell, not that I needed an excuse. If you managed to miss it, so-called...
The Grail Never Fails: Continue the Search in the New Year
The Grail by Alice Popkorn. Used through a Creative Commons license As we begin the new year, I express my gratitude to Evans Lansing Smith for so skillfully editing Joseph Campbell’s research and writing...
MythBlast | Metaphors, Video Stores, and Old Magic
Our family had a sacred ritual we practiced every Friday night while I was growing up. We traveled to a video store called Movies and Sounds and paid homage to the higher forces that...
MythBlast | The Still Point of the Turning World
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Deleted: Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is — T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” This December at JCF,...
MythBlast | Reawakening Wonder
The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti once wrote that he was waiting for the rebirth of wonder (“I am Waiting”, A Coney Island of the Mind, 49). In an age where technology has simultaneously brought us...
MythBlast | The Turn of the Pollen Path
In his 1986 publication The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Campbell turns to a Navaho sand painting of a Blessing Ceremony which depicts a rite of passage for the initiate. Campbell sees this painting...
MythBlast | The Birth of Tenderness
Here in America, November marks the celebration of Thanksgiving, and we at JCF have adopted the theme of gratitude for the MythBlasts this month. Gratitude is an interesting assortment of feelings, a complex emotion...
MythBlast | Cultivating Gratitude through the Transcendent Function
Gratitude……….. (photo by smile7/flickr.com; used through a Creative Commons license) For me, it has been a challenging privilege to brush shoulders with this month’s theme of gratitude. Gratitude, to me, is simply appreciation, but...