Category: MythBlast

One of the things that I find endearing about Joseph Campbell is that frequently in his writing, as well as his lectures, he displays a palpable enthusiasm for certain subjects. When I read Myths...

Campbell was fond of talking about dualities and how getting beyond them forms a critical part of the hero’s journey: dualities like finite and infinite, transcendent and immanent, sacred and profane. The blooms of...

Edgar Allan Poe once wrote a little piece called “The Imp of the Perverse,” and I do believe that there must be in the fashioners of piously held beliefs, all over the world, an...

There is a story from the ancient Hebrew tradition in II Samuel 12 where a king spots the beautiful wife of a young warrior bathing on her roof. He sends for her and the...

Once, a very long time ago, the Buddha preached a sermon to his followers by saying nothing at all. Instead of speaking, he held up a single flower. Only one listener, a monk named...

This month in the MythBlast Series, we’re focusing on Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God, Vol II: Oriental Mythology. On page 490 of that volume, Campbell quotes from “The Song of the Cowherd” by the...

Some have confused a mythology as nothing more than an elegantly-packaged ideology. Not so. Nor is it true to say that mythic figures are to be read as literal facts. The confusion commonly stems,...

Art, among other things, is image-making. As a teacher of creative writing, I often emphasize the power of images due to their effectiveness in rendering experiences in our readers. Concrete language, which communicates to...

One of Campbell’s last projects, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, was developed from a series of lectures delivered in San Francisco. The series included a symposium at...

In The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and Religion, Joseph Campbell writes that the mythic metaphor, the mythic image, “is necessarily physical and thus apparently of outer space. The inherent connotation...

“Mythology is the womb of mankind’s initiation to life and death,” states Joseph Campbell in his collection of essays titled, The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension. (34) Death and rebirth...

Anytime I read, and especially reread, Joseph Campbell’s books, I feel like I am in a personal conversation with a priest or a confessor, one who understands the need for the transcendent in our...

There is no doubt that Joseph Campbell’s words sing – and not just his prose, but the titles he chooses as well: The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Masks of God, The Inner Reaches...

All roots are dark, and the deeper they go the darker they get until they touch the light of the primal fire of the human soul. In Masks of God, Volume 1: Primitive Mythology,...

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child. ” Pablo Picasso What do we suppose Picasso meant by the above quote? How, exactly, does one...

The mystery of the universe and the wonder of the temple of the world are what speak to us through all myths and rites—as well as the great effort of man to bring his...

Modern technology has given us more ways than ever before to discover the stories, the rituals, and the characters that make up our mythologies. The technology of the written word vastly changed the ways...

The search for origins has always figured among the greatest adventures of humankind in its epic journey on earth. “Who are we?” “Where do we come from?” “Where are we going?” These fundamental questions...

Over the coming year, we at the JCF MythBlast Series intend to explore Joseph Campbell’s great work, the four-volume series The Masks of God. The first quarter of 2021 will focus on The Masks...

In “Cosmology and the Mythic Imagination,” from this month’s spotlight volume The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Campbell takes us on a stellar romp through myths of the universe and humankind’s place in it....

The December theme for the MythBlast series has been “The Still Point,” a reference to T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets. The still point is a poetic image that Joseph Campbell remarks upon several times...

If anyone doubted that the essence of the individual is thoroughly interwoven with the collective fibers of society, our continued state of social distancing and isolation is further proof of the case. Robbed of...

I don’t remember who called with the news that my father had died. I don’t remember the conversation. All I remember is the daze in which I found myself putting on a coat, driving...