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Each week, an author in the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s community contributes an original essay interpreting our theme of the Power of Myth in Music and a featured Campbell work. This little blast of mythology—a MythBlast—forms the centerpiece of our weekly newsletter, which also contains curated selections from our archives.
Subscribe today to receive a weekly email with this springboard into myth, storytelling, and the work of Joseph Campbell. As you read, listen along with our Spotify playlist.
FEATURED WORK
THE HERO WITH
A THOUSAND FACES
Since its release in 1949, The Hero with a Thousand Faces has influenced millions of readers by combining the insights of modern psychology with Joseph Campbell’s revolutionary understanding of comparative mythology. In these pages, Campbell outlines the Hero’s Journey, a universal motif of adventure and transformation that runs through virtually all of the world’s mythic traditions. He also explores the Cosmogonic Cycle, the mythic pattern of world creation and destruction.
The Sirens’ Song of Endless Streaming
Well, Odysseus is in the news, and given our theme of music, mythology, and the Return phase of the hero’s journey, I remembered the Sirens’ song he faced on his return home. Now, the recent movie didn’t stick perfectly to the original text, and my musing here strays outside the canonical Campbellian lines, but it all set me to musing about things that keep us from getting home to our own Ithacas…and how music can distract us. The Sirens posed a dangerous temptation...
Mark C.E. Peterson
6 days ago6 min read
Return: The Idé Fixe
This, to me, is the essence of the human project: to be transformed—sometimes undone—by experience and then return to the always-ongoing project of living. One powerful yet often overlooked return is to remember the beginning in the light of experience. We will then see, perhaps, ourselves as a different creature, holding memories of the old, certainly, but with a renewed vision for the future, and the realization that life itself—like the river—is transcendent.
Bradley Olson, PhD
Sep 68 min read
The Living Memory of Song
In times of transformation, music often accompanies us. We make playlists to listen to as we process the emotions. And memory is often here too, as we try to make sense of what is happening to us, ask how we got here, and how to get beyond this moment. As Campbell says, “Are you going to try to hang onto what you have been, or are you going to let today burn you into something else?”
Stephanie Zajchowski, PhD
Aug 306 min read
The Initiatory Function of Creativity
This, I think, is what makes On Creativity more than a collection of Campbell's reflections on creativity, artists, and artistic practice. Creativity, for Campbell, is not confined to the studio or to the page. It’s a way to enter a deeper relationship with the world and with the deeper movements of one's own life. The artist learns to attend to what is struggling to emerge rather than simply reproducing familiar ideas and forms. The same could be said of living.
Bradley Olson, PhD
Aug 247 min read
Citizen Cope: Honing the Voice (and Soul) on the Road of Trials
When soul comes into the conversation (as it so often does in music) and shows itself through the voice, we’ve crossed over from the concrete into a dimension of abstractions. Suddenly, we’re dealing with something that’s highly complex and possesses very indistinct boundaries. We cannot clearly see its face, so to speak. Yet, this apparent impediment makes way for a deeper encounter because its face has become more permeable, and the speaker’s presence is amplified.
Craig Deininger
Aug 238 min read
When the Landslide Takes Us Down
We’re greeted instead by two parents living in a consumer culture that demands they make it on their own. They can’t possibly give us what we expect, because two exhausted people can’t be a village. This is our ordinary world, insufficient from our first breath.
So childhood becomes a call to adventure, a call to solve an unsolvable problem: how do I turn two people into the village my mind and heart ache for?
Carl R. Nassar
Aug 167 min read
Echoes from the Multiverse
The nexus of culture and the environment has driven the mythic imagination for millennia, shaping human civilization and its development pathways. Music in particular has been a medium to reconnect people, nature and the cosmos. Music, as well as other art forms, has allowed communities worldwide to express the mythic imagination, the changing nature of global and local ecosystems, the shifting balance between people and nature, as well as their fears, hopes and collective vi
Kishan Khoday
Aug 97 min read
The "Sedimented" Hero: How Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey Reimagines Myth for a Secular Age
Contemporary storytelling that employs a text as ancient as Homer’s The Odyssey consists of more than merely adapting a well-known Greek epic poem. Consciously or not, the contemporary adaptation is adding to three millennia of interpretive sedimentation. Christopher Nolan's cinematic adaptation of The Odyssey is merely the latest example of this process.
Bradley Olson, PhD
Aug 56 min read
The Sound of Silence: When the World's Noise Drowns the Inner Voice
This year, MythBlast invites us to explore the stages of the Hero's Journey through music. The current theme is Initiation, the stage in which the hero crosses the threshold and begins the long work of transformation.
My first impulse was to write about Frank Sinatra's “My Way,” a song I have always loved. Yet another melody kept returning, quietly but persistently, until it became impossible to ignore: Simon & Garfunkel's “The Sound of Silence.”
Monica Martinez, PhD
Aug 26 min read
Finding Our Way Back: An Odyssey Toward Heart and Home
I first heard Jefferson Starship’s “Find Your Way Back” (from 1981’s Modern Times) in high school, before I had left the nest for a greater adventure. I loved the music itself, right from the opening picked, descending guitar line, which immediately signaled the song’s melancholic tone. Many years would pass, however, before the lyrics spoke to me and I could echo the opening words: “It’s been a long, long road / Since I packed up and left on my own.”
Scott Neumeister, PhD
Jul 266 min read
The Doors: Making the Invisible Audible
Leather pants. Sweat. Whiskey. The low, hypnotic pulse of John Densmore’s drums. Robbie Krieger’s flamenco-infused guitar winding like smoke through Ray Manzarek’s swirling, trance-inducing keyboards. And at the center of it all, Jim Morrison moved like a man both summoning and being consumed by something primordial.
Tyler Lapkin
Jul 197 min read
In the Wee Small Hours: Eros and the Initiatory Descent
We tend to imagine mythological initiation as an ancient and rather dramatic affair: a youth led into a subterranean chamber by torchlight, or a medieval knight entering a dark forest at its thickest, most impenetrable point. But in modern life, our introduction to the sharp edges of love rarely occurs in such places. More often, it happens alone in the dark in the wee small hours around 3:00 AM, illuminated only by the glow of a cell phone’s Spotify playlist.
Bradley Olson, PhD
Jul 128 min read
King Kunta's Crown: Identity and Initiation in To Pimp a Butterfly
Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly delivers a distinct resolution to initiation. The album embodies Joseph Campbell's reading of Jung's individuation, told as a modern myth built on the oldest structure we know: the rite of passage. Separation, the liminal crossing, the return. The album fords that liminal space, track by track, until the caterpillar who begins the journey recognizes the butterfly it was carrying all along.
Jason Batt, PhD
Jul 56 min read
Singing in Love of the Self: A Musical Initiation into Apotheosis
Where does the power lie, and how is it extracted to take the plunge into the dark, the dangerous temptation of the unknown—for…love?
Revisiting the psyche’s Road of Trials for the soul and…
Let’s revisit something we all might know: the myth of Psyche and Cupid. Psyche undertook the quest, laden with challenging tasks set by Venus, the mother of Cupid, for love. Venus laid out the trials carefully, one after another, each task a challenge, each challenge a step in the
Priyanka Gupta
Jun 286 min read
“How Can I Keep from Singing?”
Holding a hymnal, standing in a pew, and singing with a congregation is often where I find myself in times of deep loss, uncertainty, or desolation. Not necessarily to change anything or feel comforted by those standing with me, but to sing collectively, to feel the music flow through me, to reach for something greater than myself for solace.
Stephanie Zajchowski, PhD
Jun 216 min read
Initiation on Bald Mountain
It’s no small miracle that the VHS copy of Disney’s Fantasia (1940) survived all of the times I rewound it to the Night on Bald Mountain sequence when I was three to four years old. The imagery of the grand demon Chernabog summoning skeletal wraiths from their graves and initiating a frenzied Walpurgisnacht upon an near-volcanic Bald Mountain utterly entranced my childhood psyche.
Teddy Hamstra, PhD
Jun 145 min read
Hamilton, My Mom, and Me
My mother liked to read history; I like to read myth. She listened to classic Johnny Cash; I prefer the American IV album. She loved college basketball; I love Stranger Things. But we did find one media experience we agreed upon: she and I watched the movie version of Hamilton together approximately eighty-seven times. How did Hamilton work this miracle? The show activated our imaginations, embodied Joseph Campbell’s functions of mythology, and enabled us to connect with each
Joanna Gardner, PhD
Jun 75 min read
The Monomyth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
How rarely can we tap into the well of inspiration and transcend universal ideas and emotions? How special it is to exit Plato's Cave of shadows and return with illumination. Two brilliant minds stand at the mouth of Plato’s Cave, blinking from an excess of ideas: Joseph Campbell, the cartographer of myth, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, its composer. One maps the journey; the other lends voice to it.
Lejla Panjeta
May 317 min read
The Sand and the Bow: Music, Chaos and the Initiated Soul
There’s an experiment first performed in the eighteenth century by the physicist Ernst Chladni that reveals something about the nature of transformation that no amount of psychological attribution or theological conjecture quite manages. Chladni would scatter fine sand across a circular, flat, metal plate then draw a violin bow slowly down its edge. The sand, disturbed by the vibration, would skitter and scatter—seemingly at random—and then within moments, the sand would gath
Kristina Dryža
May 248 min read
Birdsong, Thresholds, and the Infinite: Initiation Ascending with the Lark
Every year on my birthday, I listen to Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending.
I have for most of my life.
My birthday falls just after the spring equinox, and for as long as I can remember, The Lark Ascending has marked the beginning of the year for me far more than January ever has. January feels administrative. March feels initiatory: the air still carries winter inside it, but the world begins to open again.
Leigh Melander, PhD
May 176 min read
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