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Hamilton, My Mom, and Me
- Joanna Gardner, PhD
- 4 hours ago
- 5 min read
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 other through the power of a modern myth.
A mythical, musical imagination
Sometimes myth appears in prose, as in the works of Herodotus in ancient Greece, and sometimes in poetry, as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. But when you really need to channel myth’s archetypal forces, nothing matches the power of poetry set to music, as in Hesiod’s Theogony and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Hamilton makes that same mythic gesture,retelling the exploits of historical heroes through the magic of contemporary music.
Stories transform when filtered through song. Music literally sets a story’s tone. The music rises and falls with emotion, speeds up and slows down with the action, soars outward or delves inward. Music also makes words more memorable through mnemonic rhyme and melody. Music lifts characters’ voices out of the realm of the mundane spoken language and into something else—something otherworldly, something sacred. In short, music can make a story more mythical. Hamilton certainly brought myth to the way Mom and I imagined American history.
Hamilton’s music imagines historical figures as mythic heroes. From Alexander Hamilton to George Washington to the Schuyler sisters, these singing characters are both simpler and grander than real people, making them more vivid in the mind’s eye and granting them near legendary status. The absence of props and scenery engages the imagination differently, compelling the audience to conjure everything that isn’t there, from ships to buildings to battlefields. By picturing historical characters and settings together, through the singing and dancing of players on a largely empty stage, Mom and I found a common wavelength of the imagination, an imaginal register we could both occupy.
Music lifts characters’ voices out of the realm of the mundane spoken language and into something else—something otherworldly, something sacred.
Campbell’s functions of myth in Hamilton
Hamilton also reflects Joseph Campbell’s functions of myth. Psychologically, the show depicts the sweep of Alexander Hamilton’s life and his navigation of key thresholds and challenges. Sociologically, the show captures moments of profound collective change when the American colonies rejected kingship and embraced self-rule. The surrounding world (Joseph Campbell’s cosmological function of myth) is the least present in the show, but spiritually—Campbell’s metaphysical function of myth—ghosts are very real. Dressed in white, they sing from beyond the grave. Hamilton vividly senses them as his death approaches. In the show’s final seconds, Eliza gazes into the infinite distance of her own death and gasps with emotion beyond words or song. This is the moment when everything that happened up until that point, all the grime and all the glory, gives way to an open window on the divine and becomes “transparent to transcendence,” as Campbell would say. “Mythology opens the world so that it becomes transparent to something that is beyond speech, beyond words, in short, to what we call transcendence” (The Hero’s Journey, 51). It’s my favorite moment of the show, and one that Mom and I discussed many times. Hamilton gave us mythic images for conversations about life, death, and what lies beyond.
The power of myth to connect
Mom is gone now, but whenever I hear King George’s first song (she laughed every time) or “Dear Theodosia” (her favorite), Mom is with me again in a way that wouldn’t happen without the show’s myth and music.
The myth of Hamilton provided us with experiences and ideas to share. Together, we felt the courage of Hamilton’s rebels and revolutionaries. We mourned with the human humility of the Hamilton family in crisis. We heard hope in the harmony of united vocalists and colonists. We thrilled to the daring that led soldiers into battle. Without Mom, I never would have watched the film so much. Without Hamilton, she and I wouldn’t have shared so much time.
This year, 2026, marks 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, yet Hamilton remains both historical and fresh, addressing enduring themes like fathers and sons, death and time, the power of stories and who gets to tell them, immigration, diversity, and homogeneity. Songs about all these simultaneously old and new issues collapse the time between then and now, opening a new version of mythic time where these characters from history both were and were not the way they are on stage, and things are and are not like that now. These juxtapositions force the mind to distinguish past from present and to wonder how things could be different. The music and story brought Mom and me into that liminal space where we could see anew, imagine anew, and think new thoughts. It was an experience of what Joseph Campbell would call initiation, or change, and Hamilton’s mythic power to connect us, letting Mom and me experience it each in our own ways and also together.
MythBlast authored by:
Joanna Gardner, PhD, is a writer, mythologist, and magical realist who serves as the managing director of the Joseph Campbell Foundation. She is the author of The Practice of Enchantment: MythBlast Essays, 2020-2024 and the lead author of Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide. Joanna co-founded and co-led the Fates and Graces, hosting webinars and workshops for mythic readers and writers, and she teaches in Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Mythological Studies program. For Joanna's updates and additional publications, you are most cordially invited to visit her website at joannagardner.com.
This MythBlast was inspired by the Initiation stage of the hero's journey and The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on his Life and Work.
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Welcome to Season 6 of Pathways with Joseph Campbell. Whether you’ve been listening from the very beginning or are just discovering the podcast, we’re glad you’re here. This new season continues our journey into the archived lectures and enduring insights of Joseph Campbell, exploring the ways myth continues to shape the human experience across time, culture, psychology, and spiritual life. In this illuminating 1982 lecture recorded at the San Francisco Zen Center, Campbell explores the deep relationship between mythology, psychology, and the human body itself. Moving fluidly between anthropology, biology, religion, and depth psychology, he argues that myth is not simply an intellectual system or collection of stories, but something rooted in the living energies of the body and psyche. From the mother archetype and tribal ritual to the instincts underlying culture, aggression, spirituality, and transcendence, Campbell traces how myth emerges from the most elemental dimensions of human experience. Along the way, Campbell challenges the modern world’s obsession with politics, economics, and surface level distraction, suggesting that contemporary culture has largely lost touch with mythology’s deeper initiatory function. With characteristic wit, insight, and philosophical range, he reflects on metaphor, religion, the symbolic imagination, and the mysterious forces that shape both the body and the soul. This rare archival lecture offers a fascinating glimpse into Campbell’s later thinking and serves as a reminder that mythology is not merely about ancient stories. It is about understanding the living myth unfolding within ourselves.
This Week's Highlights
"Mythology opens the world so that it becomes transparent to something that is beyond speech, beyond words, in short, to what we call transcendence."
-- Joseph Campbell
