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...
Category: MythBlast
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...
MythBlast | Voicing Joseph Campbell: How His Story Becomes Our Own
My life long, I’ve loved the relationship between a big mind’s biography and the themes and patterns of their oeuvre. The two mirror one another comparatively, opening up the symbolic dimensions, refracting, reflecting, reiterating...
MythBlast | An Impossible Thanksgiving: Story of the Birds and Beasts and the Son of Adam
On the 146th night of Scheherazade’s captivity, as told in Joseph Campbell’s edition of The Thousand and One Nights, The Story of the Birds and Beasts and the Son of Adam keeps her sovereign...
MythBlast | Myth and Magic
One of my earliest memories is centered around a lit stage draped in a red velvet curtain, inside a small theater in Colorado, watching a magician named Max Hapner pour a gallon of milk...
MythBlast | A Bastion for Hope
Back in November of last year, an opinion piece in The New York Times entitled “Fighting the Spiritual Void,” about the challenges faced by returning combat veterans, came to my attention and I was...
MythBlast | Doors Will Open
What did Joseph Campbell mean when he said, “Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be” (Joseph Campbell and the Power of...
MythBlast | Scares and Scars
Scars are curious things given an even more curious name: the word scar is derived from the Greek word eschara, meaning “place of fire.” The word does not mean “caused by fire,” nor does...
MythBlast | Through The Looking Glass
I myself have been traveling around quite a bit, these years, from one college campus to another, and everywhere the first question asked me is, “Under what sign were you born?” The mysteries of...
MythBlast | The Undiscovered Country
The exploration of death in this MythBlast is not a departure from our theme of Harvest for the month of September; instead, it’s an inescapable deepening of the Harvest motif. Harvest time means reaping,...
MythBlast | The Province of the Primitive
This month at JCF we are entertaining the theme of harvest. I’m not imagining a solely agrarian notion through which to explore that theme, but rather am also referring to the harvesting of the...
MythBlast | Paleolithic Cave Art, Time, and Eternity
Joseph Campbell wrote about the great painted and engraved Paleolithic “temple caves,” as he called them, of southern France and northern Spain. Lascaux in the Dordogne and Les Trois Frères in the Pyrenees are...
MythBlast | The Power of Story to Enrapt and Entrap Us
What is it that brought you to Joseph Campbell? I remember distinctly what it was for me: In the early 1990s, I stumbled upon The Power of Myth docu-series on television. I don’t know...
MythBlast | Re-membering: A Mythopoetic Interpretation of The Handless Maiden
“The Handless Maiden,” collected by the Brothers Grimm, is one of the most complete stories of feminine individuation in fairy tales. It addresses the wounding of the feminine by the patriarchal shadow, but it...
MythBlast | Funerals, The Devil, and Poison Ivy (Mythology of Horror Films)
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...