This is one of my proudest moments as a trickster-teacher, an archetype blend that comes to me quite naturally. Many of my lessons contained what I label a “spinach-in-the-ice-cream” approach: some element of sweetness on the surface that belied the nutritional goodness of the information being imparted. In 2003, when I decided to switch from a career in information technology to middle school teaching, I watched (and loved) School of Rock.

High school. Wednesday. All the students wear pink sweaters, shirts, trousers, and skirts. Come any other day to our school, and you'll see the depressing black color on hormonal, buzzing teenagers who didn't get much sleep the previous night. But come Wednesday, we all wear pink with big smiles on our faces. Our chemistry professor is dressed entirely in pink and purple: clothing, shoes, stockings, bags, glasses, pencils, notebooks, nails, hairpins…teaching how to fix poison

All these years, I had only watched 60s and 70s Hindi cinema with my father. For the first time, we watched an English film together, The Karate Kid (2010). It opened a new portal of understanding how to recognize the guiding light and the hand that draws you closer to your potential through sometimes brutal confrontations to work through our prudent folly that marks the journey as a seeker and learner.

Symbolically speaking, the Magician, or Magus, (typically in the guise of an ancient Wise One) initiates a transformational, alchemical process in the world or, more to our purposes here, in the psyche of someone on their pilgrimage to a more “heroic” or authentic life. They do this by articulating the Word, the Logos, that manifests those alchemical processes in the world, or in the consciousness of everyday life—and sometimes even in the form of “the word made flesh.”

The Magician is often portrayed as a single person who can tap into the unconscious, but what if magic is the power that comes from a people? Can magic be innate, ancestral and cultural? What better way to examine our collective humanity than an action-packed vampire horror film?

Before we get to my MythBlast for the week, I want to draw your attention to our new Joseph Campbell Essentials Series. The first two volumes—Joseph Campbell on Bliss and Joseph Campbell on The Hero’s Journey—launch a collection of beautifully designed pocket gift books that bring together Campbell’s most inspiring reflections.

With September we shift our focus to the magician archetype, which shows itself in many guises: wizards, witches, warlocks, shamans, alchemists and, even, our contemporary street-magicians, to name only a few. What exactly is magic? Well, that’s a complex inquiry, ranging anywhere from tactful trickery to genuine miracles, from subjective experience to so-called objective fact.

The terror in Psycho doesn’t come from what we see, but from how we see it: through keyholes and from behind curtains. In Psycho, the shadow isn’t just a cinematographic choice—it’s a confession. The true genius of the Oedipal buffet of Psycho lies in the mirror it holds up. We scream at our own shadows. Psycho forces us to look at the parts of ourselves we’d rather flush away.

What better way to explore the power of the shadow—its consequences of inflation—than in The Godfather (1972), a film consistently ranked among the greatest ever made. Given its exalted place in the canon of cultural literacy, I would be surprised to learn of someone who hasn’t seen it, but, nevertheless there are, of course, spoilers in this essay if you haven’t. The Godfather doesn’t simply entertain—it mythologizes.

Sitting in the theater for a superhero film doesn't usually come with an expectation of deep psychological reflection. The beats of the genre often follow Campbell's hero's journey, albeit often with just cursory attention to the underworld experience. Thunderbolts* (2025) shoves the trends and tropes of the genre aside and dives headfirst into the darkness of the psyche’s underworld.

The shadow is one of the many archetypes that populate our psyches. According to Jungian psychology, the shadow is frequently associated with one’s personal unconscious: everyone has a shadow, but every shadow is different, depending on its contents

We are in fertile and vibrant transpersonal psychic territory from the first FADE IN of Michael Mann’s Collateral with actors Jamie Foxx, Tom Cruise, and Jada Pinkett Smith as Cab driver Max, his homicidal hit man passenger, Vincent, and a high-end public defender, Annie Farrell. Full disclosure. This is not a movie review. I don’t care if you liked it or if you hated it. Our task this month is to identify the presence of an archetype, The Shadow, as it manifests in cinema.

There are films that depict history, and there are films that distill it into myth. Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth (1998) is one such mythic work, not because it meticulously tracks the political maneuvers of the Tudor court, but because it translates the life of Queen Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603) into a sacred rite of passage. The film therefore moves beyond biography and becomes the chronicle of a soul initiation.

The film The Lost King (2022) tells the fictionalized story of a real woman who, inspired by Shakespeare’s fictionalized play Richard III, successfully led the discovery of the real remains of King Richard III of England. Although the movie includes no literal, living kings or queens, it revolves around the archetype of the Sovereign in the form of the historical Richard (Harry Lloyd) and an utterly charming, modern-day apparition of him visible only to the protagonist, Phili

The Sovereign archetype embodies power and the expression of the vital energies of life in the world. Thus, the Sovereign can use their power to enliven or extinguish life, use their authority to help create a stable world where others can grow, or become authoritarian, controlling, and life-suppressing. Wonder Woman depicts both aspects of the Sovereign archetype, and we as viewers are able to see how the world responds.

As we enter into the month of July in this year’s MythBlast series, we turn to filmic expressions of the archetype of the Sovereign (occasionally called the Ruler or sometimes split into the binary of the King and Queen). While certainly this archetype appears in many societal structures—families, businesses, religious institutions—its presence in politics often garners the most attention.

I admit, somewhat wryly: I generally avoid horror. I don’t seek out slasher films, and I’d rather skip the books that keep me awake with my heart racing—I get my adrenaline hits elsewhere. But horror with comedy? That’s a different alchemy altogether. There is something fascinating in the juxtaposition—the grotesque sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with the ridiculous. When horror and humor converge, something mythic stirs.

The death of Bill Moyers is not only the passing of a journalist or public intellectual. It is the loss of a distinctive American voice that, for decades, has asked us to think more deeply, remember our humanity, and explore with wonder the mysteries of life. The New York Times obituary, quoting Peter J. Boyer, the journalist and author, called Moyers “a rare and powerful voice, a kind of secular evangelist.”

In an unconventional take on Selfhood and healing in Indian cinema, the 2016 film Dear Zindagi (meaning “Dear Life”) opens up a space for modern viewers to engage in a softer foray into the inner vulnerabilities, insecurities, and emotional struggles alchemical in finding oneself, much like the archetypal healing journey.

The Healer, longed for by those in search of cures, is yet an intimidating, perhaps unrelatable, archetype, providing a vital act of care but not typically the protagonist of the myth. How then, you may rightly ask, can I suggest that the titular heroine of Sean Baker’s Anora (2024), a twenty-three-year-old sex worker played by Mikey Madison, is one of the great Healers we have seen on the silver screen in many years?