MythBlast | What Will Be, Is
In his 1944 preface to A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Joseph Campbell calls Joyce’s book “…a kind of terminal moraine in which lie buried all the myths, programs, slogans, hopes, prayers, tools, educational...
Category: MythBlast
MythBlast | Why We Rise
The Role of Story in Crafting New Beginnings for Our Lives Most attribute the foundations of Western story structure to Aristotle. His simple idea that stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an...
MythBlast | Joyce, Campbell, and Jim Morrison
I recently had the pleasure of reading Michelle Obama’s Becoming—a story, eponymously, about Michelle’s “becoming,” grateful for the accessibility of an autobiography that models the unfolding nature of finding one’s purpose. I think how...
MythBlast | The Transparency of the New Year
Many years from now, at the crossroads of our lives, our souls will want to remember the day our lives were given a fresh start. In such moments of reflection, the past, future, and...
MythBlast | A Toolbox For the New Year
This month, the first month of the new year, we begin again; and beginning again is, in fact, our theme for January at JCF. No doubt we’ll soon be inundated by numberless lists extolling...
MythBlast | El Niño Dios, the Goddess, and the Cross
There is nothing more mythic than the ceremonies and stories that have gathered around the winter solstice. They are powerful metaphors that are present across cultures, irrespective of time and places, with the vastness...
MythBlast | The Winter Solstice and Other Metaphors
The winter solstice approaches and soon the sun’s course will reach its lowest noon altitude and its shortest day, marking both the end and beginning of another solar year. Hence, this day aligns itself...
MythBlast | The Vicarious Reaches of Cyberspace
1986 saw the publication of three seminal books: The Society of Mind by MIT cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky, On the Plurality of Worlds by philosopher David Lewis, and The Inner Reaches of Outer Space...
MythBlast | Joseph Campbell: Virtuoso of the Sublime
There is a saying attributed to Hermes Trismegistus: “As above, so below; as within, so without” (The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean, p. 47). This means that whatever happens on any level of reality...
MythBlast | Thus Were the Meditations of the Serviceable Mind
W.H. Auden once remarked that a real book reads us, an observation that seems right enough to me, and certainly seems right to apply to the work of Joseph Campbell. After all, Campbell spent...
MythBlast | The Season as Sacred
As we move into the holidays, experiencing the passage of seasons, the weather shifts to a cooler disposition, the world darkens early, and the sun’s transit diminishes, foretelling the coming winter lull. We light...
MythBlast | Where Do Stories Come From?
For every profession, there’s a question people ask that isn’t the real question. When I was an actor, the question audience members asked was, “How do you learn all those lines?” when what they...
MythBlast | Tat Tvam Asi: The Blessing of Compassion
For the month of November, we at the Joseph Campbell Foundation are exploring the theme of blessings. The comfortable blessings of bounty, family, and health are certainly likely to spring to mind, but there...
MythBlast | Wearing the Mask of God
“Who was that Masked Man?” A childhood memory, televised in black and white––yet I still feel chills up my spine in anticipation of the weekly revelation, followed always by the sound of thundering hooves,...
MythBlast | Creative Mythology: Revelation of the Real
Let’s play a game of mental association. I say “Joseph Campbell.” You say, “Hero with a Thousand Faces.” If I ask, “Which of Campbell’s ideas is the most influential?” There’s a good chance you’ll...
MythBlast | Campbell, Virtual Reality, and Artificial Intelligence
In this fall season, when masks are donned in the celebration of our collective shadow, we may naturally consider Campbell’s own discussion of divine masks. However, when I revisit Campbell’s Masks of God, vol....
MythBlast | The Human Symphony: Notes From Asia
In this, the month of October, we at Joseph Campbell Foundation are celebrating the theme of masks; a theme apropos, I think, for October and Halloween. After all, it is the time of the...
MythBlast | What’s Old Is New Again: Primitive Mythology
When I was asked to lead the team of academics responsible for fact-checking and updating the archaeological discoveries, anthropological theories and migration patterns presented in the Primitive Mythology, the first volume in Joseph Cambpell’s...
MythBlast | The Rules of Enchantment
As we at the Joseph Campbell Foundation wrap up our celebration of the month of September with the theme of Timeless Tales, I want to return to an exploration of the Grail Romances and...
MythBlast | The Flowering of the Feminine Divine
In “On the Great Goddess,” the introduction to Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, Joseph Campbell addresses “the challenge of the moment” for women, which is to “flower as individuals, neither as biological archetypes nor...
MythBlast | Mysteries of the Feminine Divine
Six years ago I was literally elbow deep in the Joseph Campbell archives, retrieving dozens of audio cassette tapes on whose delicate ribbons were etched hours of Campbell talking about goddess myths. Between 1972...
MythBlast | The Magic of Timeless Tales
The Romance of Tristan and Iseult – Artist’s representation of a 14th Century Tapestry The theme for the month of September at the Joseph Campbell Foundation is “Timeless Tales,” and what tales are more...
MythBlast | The Song of the Quest
Editor’s Note: After a year and a half of editing this MythBlast series for the Joseph Campbell Foundation, the time has come to hand the editorial pen to the next set of writers and...