MythBlast | Wizards and Warriors Camp
Note: We continue our theme of gratitude this November, with an article written by former teacher and JCF Rights and Permissions wrangler, Michael Lambert. As we do, we thank all of the people who bring...
Category: MythBlast
MythBlast | Practical Campbell: Original Campbell
Editor’s Note: This month, we are celebrating gratitude…our gratitude for Campbell’s ideas and work in the world, and for all of the thousands of people who are a part of JCF’s mythological community around the...
MythBlast | Samhain: Sympathetic Magic
If you peel back the frivolous mask of a holiday that inspires $8.4 billion in candy; decorations; and costumes sales for little kids, grownups looking for a moment of escapist fantasy, and long-suffering pets; you’ll find...
MythBlast | Art as Revelation
The Joseph Campbell Foundation is releasing a new e-publication entitled Art as Revelation, one of the last pieces that Campbell wrote and finished before his death. As David Kudler remarks in his Editor’s Note at the end...
MythBlast | The Fortunate Fall
In Anne of Green Gables, L. M. Montgomery wrote, “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.” I understand her sentiment; oaks, maples, sumac are everywhere ablaze, the morning air is...
MythBlast | Practical Campbell | The Mythologist & the Muses
Editor’s Note: We are delighted to share one of the essays in the Practical Campbell series as this week’s MythBlast. Practical Campbell essays search for areas where we can follow Joseph Campbell’s insights off the page...
MythBlast | From the Great Mother to the Age of Belief: Campbell on the Mythologies of Europe & the Middle East
Over the last several months, we have been sharing MythBlasts with you: tastes of a mythic idea framed in not only Joseph Campbell’s work, but together with historic and contemporary mythologists. We are so...
MythBlast | This Day, the Beginning of Works; Remembrance of the First Day
Tomorrow, Wednesday, September 20th, Rosh Hashana begins at sunset. Rosh Hashana is the Jewish New Year marks the time for inner reflection, atonement, and renewal. Rosh Hashana literally means head (or beginning) of the year, and on this day it...
MythBlast | The Labor of Following Your Bliss
Like many Americans, I spent the day yesterday dancing between celebrating Labor Day and, well, laboring. I was editing an interview I did a couple of weeks ago with dance icon Twyla Tharp for...
MythBlast | The Giver of Gifts Who Destroys Obstacles
This year, Ganesha’s birthday is celebrated in the Hindu month of Bhadrapada, which on the Gregorian calendar falls on August 24th. A festival of celebration, called a Chaturthi, lasts for eleven days ending on...
MythBlast | Eclipse: It is in Darkness One Finds the Light
Yesterday, on August 21, Americans living within the “umbral cone” had a ring side seat to the latest total solar eclipse visible from the U.S. for the first time in 26 years. As you...
MythBlast | Mine and Yours: Wandering into Story
We tell stories about who we are, to understand what makes us different – what makes us alike – what connects us what our families might be and look like – and who our...
MythBlast | Telling Big Stories: Paradox & Personal Myth
“Tell me your myth that the whole world may turn to myth.” — Nikos Kazantzakis The Talking Heads were right. We can’t truly know where we are going without reflecting upon where we have...
MythBlast | The Boon of a Well-Furnished Mythic Toolbox
This past week, from Sunday, July 23rd through Friday, July 28th, Joseph Campbell Foundation President Bob Walter led a workshop called, Your Hero’s Journey® Redux: A Mythological ToolBox® PlayShop. Bob is a theatrical playwright and...
MythBlast | The Word Divine
‘In the beginning, there was the Word.’ While this is obviously a prominent phrase in the Judeo-Christian psyche, it is not an idea unique to one culture. In origin stories from around the world, a...
MythBlast | Hopi Kachinas: The Essence of Everything
Every year in Northeastern Arizona, around July, the Hopi Tribe celebrates the Niman Kachina Festival. The word “Hopi” is shortened from Hopituh Shi-Nu-Mu, a Hopi word meaning “The Peaceful People.” An important use of the...
MythBlast | Mythic Play
When I first was drawn to myth, it was through play. My sisters and I, nerdily passionate children of academics, spent a lot of time playing “Greek Gods and Goddesses” in a father-made fort...
MythBlast | Independence and Hanging Together
In the United States, July 4th is a national holiday celebrating the Second Continental Congress’s approval of The Declaration of Independence, a document created to explain congress’s decision on July 2, 1776 to formally...
MythBlast | The Afflictions of Philoctetes: The Work of Some Rude Hand
It seems to me, life on this planet displays a disturbing propensity for the powerful to further afflict the already afflicted. The personae non-grata, the sick, the powerless, the poor, are forced to live in...
MythBlast | The Transcendent Summer Solstice
It is high summer in the Catskill mountains of New York where I live: green, lush, blooming, sparking with life. It’s an enchanted time. Every morning I walk my dogs in our meadows and...
MythBlast | Ramadan: The Empowerment of Self Restraint
Ramadan, celebrated this year between May 27th and June 24th by approximately a quarter of the world’s population, is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar and commemorates the revelation of the Quran to...
MythBlast | Juno: Not Everyone Knows How to Love the Terrifying, Strange, or Beautiful
As we enter the month of June remember that this month, her birth month, is named for Juno, the Roman goddess married to Jupiter (who is also her brother), and who has traditionally been...
MythBlast | The Goddess, Beautiful in Tears
As I watch the renewing, generative energies of spring wrestle with the lingering insistence of winter in the mountains of Northern Arizona it might be apt to remember Freyja, the most familiar and powerful...
