Bumper sticker vs. rabbit hole? You’ve seen the bumper sticker version of Campbell’s famous aphorism: it’s catchy, filled with portents, a sound and a fury signifying … like, something. But like what? Something like, “What, me worry?”   Or, “Don’t worry, be happy”?   Once you start asking these questions, a rabbit hole opens up and a Cheshire Cat begins to smile from the nearest overhead branch. Aphorisms, like metaphors, can be a little slippery. In some ways, the more obvious they look, the less obvious they are. To get to the bottom of what they mean, you have to follow the White Rabbit all the way down. In this case, for instance, fully understanding a phrase like this one requires unpacking and sorting out exactly what “Follow,” “Your,” and “Bliss” all mean.  Whew.   “Follow” by itself would involve being fully conscious of the entire trajectory of the Hero’s magical mystery (mythstery!) tour. “Your”?  That would require fully understanding your own existence. That’s a lot of heavy lifting.   It turns out that the best bet here is to follow Campbell’s own advice and focus on “Bliss.”  Aphorisms, like metaphors, can be a little slippery. In some ways, the more obvious they look, the less obvious they are. Campbell’s advice Here’s what he said originally: Now, I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: sat-chit-ananda. The word "Sat" means being. "Chit" means consciousness. "Ananda" means bliss or rapture. I thought, "I don't know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don't know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.  I think it worked. ( The Power of Myth ,   pg. 120) This is terrifically practical advice. Getting a handle on “proper consciousness” or “proper being” feels like too much all at once, but bliss? That seems like a more promising place to start–even though we still have to follow that rabbit, and the first step is a bit of a doozy.  “Bliss” is the standard translation of the Sanskrit word ananda   [आनन्द]   and denotes the moment of ego dissolution in which the personal jiva  attains to the status of atman  in order to properly engage Brahman –with the proviso that you still want to taste the sugar without being the sugar. Ananda is, therefore, also deeply connected with samadhi , which is its highest form. Yikes. Whenever I run into technical definitions like this my mind races back to the moment in Monty Python’s Holy Grail when Galahad asks, “Is there someone else up there we can talk to?” Translating technical terms from–shoot–from any other   language (German, Chinese, take your pick) into English is rough enough. Even the simplest words defy easy translation. But attempting to translate ideas from ancient languages, across thousands of years, poses even greater hazards. Too often the subtleties of meaning are lost as you shift between forgotten alphabets and lost cultural contexts.  Fortunately, and much closer to home, similar translation issues are discernible in the meaning of “happiness”: specifically in how its definition has devolved from a more robust, ancient Greek understanding into the fuzzy-slippered, hot-chocolate-yummy-satisfaction we attach to it today. Here’s the idea in a nutshell: think about the difference between being happy and feeling  happy. They look the same, but they aren’t. Feeling happy vs. being happy Feeling happy results from satisfying your immediate appetites or emotions. No matter how bad your day has been, for example, the sudden appearance of chocolate ice cream usually puts you in a better mood. Chocolate ice cream by itself, of course, can’t make you be happy, but it sure can make you feel  happy. By contrast, being  happy (being in a state of happiness) describes, for the ancient Greeks at any rate, the experience of flourishing in the life you’ve been given–hitting on all cylinders, so to speak. Their word for this kind of happiness is eudaimonia. You might notice daimon  lurking in there. This is a big hint. A daimon was understood to be a guardian spirit assigned to help you live your life skillfully and with excellence, and that, in turn, is what it truly means to be , rather than merely feel , happy.  So being  happy always has the aftertaste of a bit of divine assistance. To use Campbell’s language, as we move along our life’s journey we eventually come to a place of amor fati , a point where we can embrace our fate, our own authentic nature, and surf the curl of our own karma. No matter the circumstances we find ourselves in, then, we can still claim to be happy.  So, finally, winding our way back to all that technical language in the definition of ananda, think about those times when you found yourself being happy and not just feeling happy. In moments like that, your normal ego-consciousness is suddenly suspended: most often in moments of aesthetic arrest when the art, the poetry, or music sweeps you up and out of yourself.  The “self” you’re being swept out of is the ego-consciousness (your jiva ) and the “Self” that experiences this liberation or relief is the beginning of experiencing your true nature, your atman .  And that’s what characterizes, and what it means, to be in a state of bliss. Here’s a practical example: can you remember the greatest concert you ever attended?  I know there are some Dead Heads out there but, for me, it was Carlos Santana opening for Eric Clapton. At the end of the concert they played an encore, just the two of them, tossing musical ambrosia back and forth and into the audience, lifting the entire stadium up into stratospheres of ecstasy.  And when they finished?   Everyone forgot to applaud. That’s the bliss we need to follow.  Chocolate chip ice cream–and bumper stickers–can help, but they won’t get us there. Thanks for musing along. MythBlast authored by: Mark C.E. Peterson, Ph.D.   is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Washington County and past president of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture ( ISSRNC.org ). Philosopher, gadfly, poet, cook, writing along the watermargins of nature, myth, and culture. A practitioner of taijiquan and kundalini yoga for over 40 years, Dr. Peterson is also a happy member of the Ukulele World Congress. This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 4, and Myth and Meaning Latest Podcast In this episode, Campbell speaks to the relationship of mythology to psychology. He goes through the four functions of myth and emphasizes the fourth function - the psychological. He focuses on why this psychological function is so important in our contemporary world. The lecture was recorded at the Houston Jung Center in 1972. Host Brad Olson introduces the lecture and offers a commentary at the end. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "I think the best thing I can say is to follow your bliss. If your bliss is just your fun and your excitement, you’re on the wrong track. I mean, you need instruction. Know where your bliss is. And that involves coming down to a deep place in yourself." -- Joseph Campbell The Hero's Journey , 253 Psyche & Symbol - Apollonian vs Dionysian Dichotomy (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Gods within Joseph Campbell had a vision of an independent “science of myth,” a discipline of depth mythologizing which could stand on its own academic legs. Rather than being relegated to literary, anthropological, and archeological disciplines, Campbell wanted to ground myth on its own mythic substance while privileging a depth-psychological approach. Especially leaning on Carl Jung, Campbell comes again and again to a fundamental insight about the universality of myth— the archetypal figures of myth and legend correspond to psychological factors that are at work in the depths of the collective unconscious mind : “And this is one way of saying that in all of us, in our human activities, deities are operating” ( Romance of the Grail , pg. 152). Whenever a human action shines with the power of the archetypal, it has been transfigured by the power of myth. Archetypal images mediate both outer and inner realities. They constitute a psycho-physical medium of consciousness, indispensable to the cognitive function of the symbolic and its capacity to disclose the reality of the world.  Logos vs. mythos Images are not outside of language, not even outside verbal communication. For there is a direct relation between images and their meaning; they belong together as integrated wholes in the symbolic order. When we hear a foreign language, for example, we may have the jarring experience of hearing sounds without meaningful images attached to them. Without the resonance of images in our soul, we could not hear the song of meaning in the vibrations of human thought. As Martin Heidegger put it, “Language itself is poetry in the essential sense,” ( Poetry, Language, Thought , pg.   72) that is, in the sense that language can reveal the essence of things. Hence, he explains: “Language is not poetry because it is primal poesy; rather, poesy takes place in language because language preserves the original nature of poetry” (pg. 72). Rather than external opposites, mythological images are internal to words, as mythos  to logos  and logos  to mythos , in the full concept of mythology . We know that “non-verbal” images have the power to speak louder than words. As structures of signification, archetypal images are core channels of meaning and imagination; they constitute the world wide web of our symbolic life as a species.  Archetypal images retrace the order of the collective unconscious; they express the cultural forms of a collective consciousness which casts its shadow on the reality of the social field where it generally becomes unconscious. The collective consciousness and the collective unconscious are one and the same. Mythic images both hide and reveal the subterranean movement of the universal in the order of conscious thought, a movement that unleashes the power of the creative imagination. Combining the literal with the metaphorical into a single force, it is in the nature of the mythic to become historic.  Mythic images both hide and reveal the subterranean movement of the universal in the order of conscious thought, a movement that unleashes the power of the creative imagination.  The crucible of mytho-history Mythic images mediate between the literal and metaphoric, the manifest and latent, the ghostly and the real, in the virtual medium of psychic in existence. For the mythic only “exists” inside the historic. Mythic images are thus historic self-elucidations of the human spirit, caught between the metaphoricity of language and the literalism of fact.  The mythic and the literal are thus not external factors opposed to each other in fixed hierarchy. The metaphorical is not better than the literal and vice versa; one should not be on top of the other, as good is supposed to rule over evil, right over wrong, better over worse. Adapting the words of Jacques Derrida: “It is not, therefore, a matter of inverting the literal meaning and the figurative meaning but of determining the ‘literal’ meaning of [the mythic image] as metaphoricity itself” ( Of Grammatology , pg. 15). The mythic image expresses this metaphoricity of the literal itself, which opens up new horizons of meaning and archetypal vision. Dehumanizing mythology The human soul as human language, the archetypal Logos, which includes the mathematical and cognitive dimensions, has a demonstrably inhuman reach into the secrets of Nature. This very inhumanity at the same time allows us to peer into the unfathomable workings of nature as revealed by quantum physics, for example.  To speak of the archetypal, therefore, is to lay bare our naked inhumanity. For archetypes come to embody the best and the worst of what humans can do to one another, other creatures, and the environment. In the same vein, James Hillman too was compelled to speak of the “dehumanizing” effect of archetypal experience in general. For better or worse, the archetypal power of the mythic image comes to life in the deeds and misdeeds of human history.  The transparency of the transcendent Campbell had a beautiful way of expressing this opening of the mythic dimension. Rather than the opacity of the black and white, he spoke of achieving a certain transparency to the transcendent . To this purpose, he bid us look to artists for “These people can look past the broken symbols of the present and begin to forge new working images, images that are transparent to transcendence” ( Pathways to Bliss , pg. 20). In their disclosure of archetypal truth, myths are guides and guide posts to help us light our way. The power of their created works is to reawaken our capacity for mythic vision out of the primeval void of the collective unconscious. Artists are thus specialists in the deployment of the symbolic dimension of myth in the light of what is true; we are molders and shapers of the transparency of language to the shattering experience of archetypal truth.  “Thus in the work it is truth, not only something true, that is at work” (Heidegger 54). It is the archetype of the Logos  or the “Holy Ghost” or Spirit of Truth that is also at work in mythological creation. The event of truth in the work of art goes beyond the aesthetic experience of myth.  The aesthetic experience is itself made transparent to the operation of the transcendent function of truth, or logos, through which we as human beings evolve. Mythos and logos are not binary opposites or mortal enemies. In their togetherness alone mythos and logos complete the archetypal pattern of true mythology in the crucible of myth and history. Rather than aestheticizing myth in an imaginary universe divorced from truth, true mythology ( vera narratio ) emanates from “Its Root Ancient Truth,” as the Maya Popol Wuh  has it in its opening pages of creation. The power of myth, therefore, pushes toward the creation of new worlds of truth in time. Rather than a fixed essence, existential truth grows and develops in time. So what Heidegger writes about art is in every sense applicable to the power of true myth defined as: “the creative preserving of truth in the work. Art then is the becoming and happening of truth ” ( Poetry, Language, Thought , pg. 69). The transcendence of this event of truth is the real power that sets us free. Rather than correctness or adequation to a thing, the concept of truth in the existential sense becomes a concept of freedom. Truth as freedom in mythic creation opens the creative space in which we learn to become true  ourselves. In touch with the event of truth in myth, we experience the transcendence of creative being itself as the spirit of our authentic selves. MythBlast authored by: Norland Téllez is an award-winning writer and animation director who currently teaches Animation and Character Design courses at Otis College of Art and Design, Cal State Fullerton. He is also conducting a Life Drawing Lab at USC School of Cinematic Arts. He earned his Ph.D. from Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2009 with a dissertation on the Popol-Wuh of the K’iche’ Maya, which he is currently translating and illustrating in its archetypal dimensions as the Wisdom of the Peoples. You can learn more at norlandtellez.com . This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 3, and Romance of the Grail Latest Podcast In this bonus episode, Campbell answers questions following his 1971 lecture, "Primitive Rites & Traditions", at Esalen Institute. He first speaks about the differences between male and female rites in various times and places and then gives an overview of his interpretation of the meaning of the "Virgin Birth". Listen Here This Week's Highlights “The logics of image thinking and of verbal thinking are two very different logics. I’m more and more convinced that there is, as it were, a series of archetypes which are psychologically grounded, which just have to operate, but in whatever field is available to them. In the myths, they are represented pictorially. There’s a big distinction to be made between the impact of the image, and the intellectual and social interpretation and application of the image.” -- Joseph Campbell Myth and Meaning , 27 The Dynamic of Life (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

“From very early—around four or five years old—I was fascinated by American Indians, and that became my real studying. I went to school and had no problems with my studies, but my own enthusiasm was in this maverick realm of the American Indian mythologies.” —Joseph Campbell ( The Hero’s Journey 6) The maverick realm of Native American mythologies ignited the transcendent passion for mythology that Joseph Campbell is known for. The Native American spirit inspired Campbell to study myth and beyond; it revealed to him a world of wonder and philosophic insight. After all, as Aristotle famously put it, “a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of Wisdom, for the myth is composed of wonders).” ( Metaphysics 982b19) Native American Mythologies extend their wonders and wisdom far south of the border, spreading mythography across three subcontinents: North, Central, and South America. If we were to travel with native leaders across these native lands, we would experience a variety of rituals and customs, strange languages and symbolism, all bearing testimony to the rich creativity of the indigenous mythological imagination. At the same time, we would also be struck by a fundamental sense of agreement, a common-sense wisdom, everywhere shared by indigenous peoples across the Americas—and beyond. The wisdom of the peoples Struck by this remarkable archetypal sympathy among Native peoples, Chief Oren Lyons—a faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan, esteemed member of the Onondaga Council of Chiefs, Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy)—gives testimony to this profound accord of Native American Wisdom. When he visited the Maya in Central America, despite not knowing the language, the specific dances, or rituals, somehow “I know what’s going on,” said the Iroquois Chief. “It’s always the same,” he continued, “Thanksgiving to the creation. Thanksgiving to the life-giving forces of the earth” (“ Tree Media: Oren Lyons on the Indigenous View of the World " 15:20-52). There is a shared font of wisdom that unites indigenous peoples across the earth. Rather than a secret anti-rational or “mystical” doctrine reserved for the privileged few, however, the Wisdom of the Peoples gives itself out as the plainest of rational common sense. Otherwise it would not be of the people. There is a shared font of wisdom that unites indigenous peoples across the earth As Chief Lyons reiterated, it comes down to the most elementary lessons of human coexistence, such as the principle of sharing, about which the Council of Iroquois Nations found themselves in “profound agreement,” summing up their treaty in the emblem: “one dish, one spoon.” Everyone deserves one dish, one spoon. No one should go without. Food and shelter, healthcare and education, are all human rights and not privileges for those who can afford them. Understand, we are all in the same boat, etc. Such are the simple lessons we used to pass to our children: don’t think only about yourself, learn to share; don’t fight, make peace. Be grateful to the earth. Respect the natural environment and its biodiversity, your elders, etc. These lessons seem so childishly simple, and yet, as Chief Lyons observes, everything in our capitalist culture is hell-bent on giving us the “opposite instruction”: think only about yourself; care only for your private gains and benefits; amass more wealth and power; be content to serve your corporate masters, and do not concern yourself with the fate of others. “And they’re rewarded for that” ( 14:00-15:07 ), says the Chief Elder, thus underlining the madness of so-called Western civilization. For the sake of this narcissistic lifestyle, representing the triumph of hyper-individualism, our society rewards sociopaths, liars, thieves, and scoundrels. Dismantling the colonial gaze This is not a controversial claim. All native people across the globe are in full agreement with a growing consensus among young people: our system, in its current shape, causes a lot more harm than good. Placing profits over people, it is committed to the destruction and ruthless exploitation of our environment, our labor, and our very souls. There is nothing that is not for sale within the frameworks of global capitalism, including the human soul. Rather than promoting “democracy” and “freedom,” the interests of a tiny minority takes precedence over the common good—nay, even over the survival of entire peoples, life forms, and ecosystems. There is something absolutely crazy about the system, something that runs against the exercise of reason and common sense. It is no wonder that its ideological matrix profits from the irrationalist “mythic” core of our belief systems and pet theories. Power centers do not want a population to think rationally, to think critically, structurally, about the economic logic of the system that determines and shapes our entire society. It does not want us to see through the basic ideological fantasy that underlies it, namely, the Hobbesian idea that human beings are fundamentally selfish and greedy, and badly in need of a Master. Enemy of the state If we are true seekers of Native American wisdom, however, we cannot get on board this irrationalist bandwagon which opens the door to a narcissistic appropriation of myth as a tool for our success in a capitalist system. We need to be critically aware that this narcissistic appropriation of the other is an extension of the colonial gaze that already frames our study of mythology. As we approach native cultures, we must wrestle with our own unconscious prejudices and beliefs, powerful ideological fantasies that have been driven into us since we were children playing cowboy and Indians. This objectifying and exoticizing gaze is itself derived from hegemonic power structures and material conditions which we take for granted in the West. These economic and political structures have a powerful ideological or “spiritual” hold over Western readers, who are in every way predisposed—or “educated”—to side with imperialist projects of any description. Smuggling the colonial gaze into the study of Native American Wisdom, we do not notice the fatal contradiction inherent in the “metaphysical” violence of our objectifying quest. The patronizing adoration of indigenous culture, the dismissal of their common-sense wisdom as childish or archaic—all speak to the symbolic violence of this colonial gaze. But this violence of cultural appropriation is only an offshoot of the quite real, murderous violence that has always accompanied colonial projects throughout their history. Placing Native bodies in the killing fields of genocidal conquest, the colonial gaze is by definition in full support of imperialist domination over Native peoples and their lands. As the all-seeing eye of “Western interests” with its well-funded capacity to unleash hell on earth, the imperial gaze is ready to annihilate anyone standing in its way—not excluding women and children, schools and hospitals. Accelerating climate catastrophe and socio-economic breakdown, supporting genocidal wars and courting nuclear holocaust, this disastrous mindset is driving us today, full force, to the literal brink of extinction. In the ideological matrix of cultural capitalism, Native American wisdom can only appear as the enemy. Chief Lyons expressed as much when he said that “the American structure” is everywhere giving us “instructions” to go directly against the principle of sharing, that is, against the communitarian sense and socialist vision of the Wisdom of the Peoples. Within the hegemonic space of this selfish culture, “you have an instruction that’s contrary—v ery contrary to this concept [of sharing]” ( 15:08- 15:17 ). How do we subvert and dismantle the colonial cage? Not without a revolution of thought and vision. MythBlast authored by: Norland Téllez is an award-winning writer and animation director who currently teaches Animation and Character Design courses at Otis College of Art and Design, Cal State Fullerton. He is also conducting a Life Drawing Lab at USC School of Cinematic Arts. He earned his Ph.D. from Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2009 with a dissertation on the Popol-Wuh of the K’iche’ Maya, which he is currently translating and illustrating in its archetypal dimensions as the Wisdom of the Peoples. You can learn more at norlandtellez.com . This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 6, and The Hero's Journey Latest Podcast Welcome to the fourth season of Pathways with Joseph Campbell! This episode entitled, "The Psychological Basis of Freedom", was recorded at Bennett College in North Carolina in 1970. Host, Bradley Olson introduces the episode and gives commentary after the lecture. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Black Elk was a Lakota Oglala Sioux who had in his youth a mystical vision of the destiny before his people. He saw “the hoop of his nation,” as he called it, as one of many hoops, and all the hoops interlocking, and all of them expressing the same humanity. The hoop of his little nation had to be opened out and become one of many, many hoops of many, many nations." -- Joseph Campbell , Myth and Meaning , 24 Joseph Campbell — Jung, Pedagogy, and Projection of the Shadow (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

The human mythic imagination Bill Moyers: What do you think our souls owe to ancient myths? Joseph Campbell: Well, the ancient myths were designed to put the mind, the mental system, into accord with this body system, with this inheritance. Bill Moyers: A harmony? Joseph Campbell: To harmonize. The mind can ramble off in strange ways and want things that the body does not want. And the myths and rites were a means to put the mind in accord with the body, and the way of life in accord with the way that nature dictates. Bill Moyers: So in a way these old stories live in us. Joseph Campbell: They do, indeed… (5:08-5:53) In this episode of the Power of Myth , Campbell speaks of the mythic imagination that arose from human interaction with animals as hunters. He points to the Lascaux caves exquisite paintings as a “burst of magnificent art and all the evidence you need of a mythic imagination in full career” ( 28:00-28:10 ). At an estimated 30,000 years old, the Lascaux cave paintings in Dordogne, and the even earlier paintings of Chauvet-Pont D’arc in Ardèche in France are magnificent—Picasso anecdotally said, “Since Lascaux, we have invented nothing.” What if story is not a human invention? I am wondering about an idea, though: while these caves may well be one of the earliest efforts at mythic storytelling by humans, there are actually story-tellers that began these stories millions of years earlier. What if story is not simply a human invention, but one we humans simply understand in a particular way? What if story is not simply a human invention, but one we humans simply understand in a particular way? If we think mythically about stories themselves, and about how these stories create the world as much as they define it—and how as humans we are created by the stories we tell, an intriguing mythic and scientific lens begins to open. The creator microbes In June, The New York Times Magazine published a piece by science writer Ferris Jabr , an adaptation of his book Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life. Jabr accompanied a group of geomicrobiologists down into a mine shaft in South Dakota, a cave carved out by gold miners rather than water, tunneling a mile and a half below the surface. What they discovered here is extraordinary, as Jabr writes: “Here we were, deep within Earth’s crust—a place where, without human intervention, there would be no light and little oxygen—yet life was literally gush­ing from rock.“ Microbes abound there, without human intervention, and they are ancient, living and moving seemingly endlessly, and they breathe, eat, and create rock. It’s a radical realization: that our planet is not life perched on a shallow surface, but is instead constantly being created by life. These microorganisms create their surroundings. Jabr continues, “Subsurface microbes carve vast caverns, concentrate minerals and precious metals and regulate the global cycling of carbon and nutrients. Microbes may even have helped construct the continents, literally laying the ground­work for all other terrestrial life.” Simultaneously, microbiologists are just beginning to parse out the relationship between microbes in the human body, particularly in the human gut, and how they don’t merely inhabit their surroundings, but transform them as well. Genes in the human gut microbiome vastly outnumber the “human” genes we carry, and not only develop human cognitive function, including memory, but our emotional capacity. In an article echoing Jung in its title, “Collective Unconscious: How Gut Microbes Shape Human Behavior,” researchers report that “gut microbes are part of the unconscious system influencing behavior, and microbes majorly impact on cognitive function and fundamental behavior patterns” (pgs. 1-9). Mythic microbial stories If Campbell is right—and our human myths emerged as a way to bring harmony with the natural world—and the microbiologists and microgeologists are right—and the microbe community on the planet are creators and communicators, building both the natural world and human capacities to function within it—is it that outrageous to imagine that the first and most powerful story-tellers were not human at all? But that our stories that we shape and are shaped by each telling of them actually are mythic echoes of microbial stories? I find this idea both utterly compelling and oddly comforting. It weaves a powerful connection and rightness for me, in both scientific and mythic ways, about human kinship with everything else on—and in—this planet. And perhaps this affinity can be an opening into how we might better articulate that connection as we try to respond to a beleaguered natural world. MythBlast authored by: Leigh Melander, Ph.D. has an eclectic background in the arts and organizational development, working with inviduals and organizations in the US and internationally for over 20 years. She has a doctorate in cultural mythology and psychology and wrote her dissertation on frivolity as an entry into the world of imagination. Her writings on mythology and imagination can be seen in a variety of publications, and she has appeared on the History Channel, as a mythology expert. She also hosts a radio who on an NPR community affiliate: Myth America, an exploration into how myth shapes our sense of identity. Leigh and her husband opened Spillian, an historic lodge and retreat center celebrating imagination in the Catskills, and works with clients on creative projects. She is honored to have previously served as the Vice President of the Joseph Campbell Foundation Board of Directors. This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 3, and Romance of the Grail Latest Podcast In this episode we speak with Master Chungliang Al Huang —a tai chi master, writer, philosopher, dancer, and generational teacher. Originally from Shanghai, China, Master Huang moved to the United States to study architecture and cultural anthropology, and later Dance. In the 1960s, Master Huang forged a significant collaboration with philosopher Alan Watts, which led him to Esalen. There, he became a beloved teacher and formed meaningful connections with thought leaders such as Huston Smith, Gregory Bateson, and Joseph Campbell. He and Joe taught together at Esalen until Joe’s death in 1987. Master Huang is an author of many books including the classic Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain. His contributions include pioneering modern dance in the Republic of China and sharing the stage with luminaries like the Dalai Lama and Jane Goodall. He has been an assembly member and presenter at The Council for the Parliament of the World’s Religions and has been a keynote speaker for the YPO (Young Presidents’ Organization) and WPO (World Presidents’ Organization) and at major global gatherings in China, India, Switzerland, Germany, South America, South Africa, and Bali. In 1988 he was featured in the inaugural segment of the PBS series, A World of Ideas, moderated by Bill Moyers. Joseph Campbell famously remarked, “Chungliang Al Huang’s Tai Ji dancing is ‘mythic images’ incarnate. He has found a new way to explain ‘the hero’s journey’ to help others follow their bliss through the experience of tai ji practice in his work through the Living Tao Foundation.” In this conversation, we discuss his life, his relationship with Alan Watts, and his friendship with Joseph Campbell. For learn more about Chungliang visit:  https://livingtao.org Listen Here This Week's Highlights “Within each person there is what Jung called a collective unconscious. We are not only individuals with our unconscious intentions related to a specific social environment. We are also representatives of the species Homo sapiens. And that universality is in us whether we know it or not." -- Joseph Campbell Myth and Meaning , 18 The Center of The World (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Once upon a time… Long, long ago there lived a… In the days when… You’ll never believe what happened… Someone says, “You’ll never believe what happened to me the other day,” and strangers’ ears perk up within hearing distance. We reflexively focus our attention on some random storyteller because we are hardwired to do so. We want to listen. We want to know how it begins and ends. Just watch a small child’s face in front of a skilled storyteller to see how powerful a story can be. Why is this? Joseph Campbell: the storyteller Joseph Campbell was a master, indeed epic, storyteller — epic in that he attempted to tell the human story: from the Paleolithic Great Hunt and animal deities adorning the walls and ceilings of deep, blacker than midnight caves to the shift in stories; to the heavens and the movement of the Sun, Moon, planets and stars. These are stories that continue to influence our contemporary mythic and secular traditions. He cross-referenced stories from around the globe, finding similar patterns and symbology from culture to culture and along that timeline from the First Storytellers to today. He saw the problem we’re still experiencing as these different story traditions — with no new horizons beyond which to populate with our enemies and monsters — crash and grind against each other in their insistence that our cultural stories, our myths, are inherently different instead of differently dressed. Campbell’s work found an audience with the publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces  in 1949 and his revision of that work in 1968, but it wasn’t until the release of Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers  in June of 1988, eight months after Campbell died, that his name and work gained popular attention. I remember first seeing the advertisement for The Power of Myth  on PBS. I had always been interested in mythology, but that promo hit me with the force of a “Once upon a time,” to a child. From there he charmed me, and countless others, with the story he had to tell: a story in which Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed — traditions still at odds with each other and within themselves — all play a similar role in relaying from the deepest wisdom of our shared humanity a similar message. A story for the world His storytelling resonated then and continues to resonate today.  As the Rights and Permissions Manager of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, I negotiate and curate contracts for translations of Campbell’s print works and am in the unique position of seeing that resonance in action around the world. When I first began my tenure in rights and permissions in 2016, I oversaw forty-three contracts of published translations covering sixteen languages. Today, JCF has ninety-four contracts of published translations in twenty-four languages with twenty-nine more translations in production , including  five additional languages .   I should note here that Campbell’s premier title, The Hero with a Thousand Faces , alone has been translated into twenty-seven languages. No country sells more of Campbell’s work than Mainland China, followed by the multi-country Spanish market and the Russian Federation. Other languages added in the past eight years include Arabic, Japanese, German, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Vietnamese, Serbian, and more.  These impressive and growing numbers are not the result of any particular effort on the part of JCF. Publishers, whose mission, of course, is to sell books and make money, come to us  to ask if the rights to this or that title are available. Joseph Campbell’s work sells itself, and one can only imagine that the reason for this is his primary message of the unity of humankind in the intersections and similarities of our cultural stories. People the world over are saying “Yes!” to a message which continues to be shared thirty-six years after Campbell died.  People the world over are saying “Yes!” to a message which continues to be shared thirty-six years after Campbell died. A story for the future Campbell did not live to see the conclusion of his epic “Once upon a time,” and neither, in all probability, will we. But he did foretell where this story, our story, needs to go: The only myth that’s going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that’s talking about the planet … and everybody on it. That’s my main thought for what the future myth is going to be … the society of the planet … You don’t see any divisions there of nations or states or anything of the kind. This might be the symbol for the new mythology to come. That is the country that we are going to be celebrating, and those are the people we are one with. ( The Power of Myth , pg. 41) I can’t think of a more important conclusion to this story: E pluribus unum — Out of many, one. Though the motto of the United States, this phrase embodies the democratic ideal which Campbell expresses so well in Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume 4: There are today no horizons, no mythogenetic zones. Or rather, the mythogenetic zone is the individual heart. Individualism and spontaneous pluralism—the free association of men and women of like spirit, under protection of a secular, rational state with no pretensions to divinity—are in the modern world the only honest possibilities: each the creative center of authority for himself, in Cusanus’s circle without circumference whose center is everywhere, and where each is the focus of God’s gaze. (pg. 645) Joseph Campbell would be pleased that his work, his epic story, played a role in guiding us toward such an outcome. MythBlast authored by: Michael Lambert has worked with Joseph Campbell Foundation since 2002, first as a moderator of the Conversations of a Higher Order forums (where he was known as Clemsy), and more recently managing the foundation's rights and permissions program, protecting and licensing Campbell and JCF's copyright and trademark material. From 1989 until 2016, he taught in the Gloversville, New York public schools, including using the Hero's Journey® as a central theme of a college preparation English course for high school seniors. He can be reached regarding licensing of rights and permissions at rights@jcf.org This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 3, and Romance of the Grail Latest Podcast In Episode 34, " Primitive Rites & Traditions ", Joseph Campbell speaks at the Esalen Institute in 1971. During the lecture, he interacts with participants about the importance and significance of rites and traditions in early mythologies. Host, Bradley Olson introduces the lecture, and offers commentary at the end. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "There are today no horizons, no mythogenetic zones. Or rather, the mythogenetic zone is the individual heart. Individualism and spontaneous pluralism—the free association of men and women of like spirit, under protection of a secular, rational state with no pretensions to divinity—are in the modern world the only honest possibilities: each the creative center of authority for himself, in Cusanus’s circle without circumference whose center is everywhere, and where each is the focus of God’s gaze." -- Joseph Campbell Creative Mythology , 645 Myth and Ritual (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Two most interesting interpretations of the origin of humans: religion says we are made of dust (some of us from the rib), and Darwin says we share common ancestry with apes. There is also a third one, whimsical but very prominent today–we are the progeny of the extraterrestrials who planted their seeds in the ancient civilizations. Whatever you believe, human development has been scientifically theorized to start some two million years ago. How did our ancestors develop abilities to address the problems they were facing? In order to survive, these first hunter-gatherers and cave artists had to communicate. Communication begins with the living world and art with the appearance of humans. The first people to band together for survival in ancient times were the first syncretic artists. They did not just invent fish stories around the fire for entertainment, but were spiritually connected with the world around them, creating a magical reality that extends to the energy fields where "drawn buffaloes are killed buffaloes." Power-off ritual Performing the first rituals, the psychoanalysts of that era–the shamans–became the first artists. Music, painting, and performing arts, as well as the first letters originate from the stories and rituals of the Stone Age. These rituals begin with an understanding of the concept of death. "The oldest evidence of something resembling mythological thinking comes in connection with graves," says Campbell in his conversation with Bill Moyers in the series The Power of Myth . He affirms that, around 50,000 BCE, “We have evidence of a ritualized burial, with sacrifices and with the grave gear, which certainly indicated that the experience of death started something” ( The Hero’s Journey , pg. 86). Ancient burial ceremonies are the first evidence of human thought around which stories and rituals were formed. Ritual is the revival of a myth with the active participation of all members of the community, and some of the most widespread in the world are the rituals of death and sacrifice, birth, growing up, and weddings. These rituals very much resemble the defragmentation and cleanup of a modern computer system, while the final ritual–the ritual of death–is comparable to the formatting and rebooting to the initial settings and finally pressing the power-off button of the system. Early people explained the cycle of life and the “power of powering-off” with myths and rituals. By participating in a ritual, one participates in a myth. Campbell generalized his notion about the importance of the death rite for society as a whole, remarking in Myths to Live By , “Individual death and the endurance of the social order have been combined symbolically and constitute the nuclear structuring force of the rites and, thereby, society” (pg. 23). However, he says that today we no longer have rituals. We have replaced myths with New York Times–news of the day. A society without rituals becomes barbarian, and young people do not grow up, because they don’t defragment themselves until their later years. We pride ourselves on being a wise species while often oversimplifying and trivializing the power of unobservable planes of mythology. We pride ourselves on being a wise species while often oversimplifying and trivializing the power of unobservable planes of mythology. Rituals are symbolically preserved by religions nowadays, but Campbell believed that today's rituals are too mild relative to the meaning they are supposed to convey. Religious or national holidays are almost the same everywhere: fanatical shopping, excessive cooking and eating, visiting relatives, and gratitude for returning to the peace and quiet of individuality and daily routine. For example, the sacrificial offering in Islam practiced during the holiday Eid al-Fitr nowadays somewhat reduces the weight of experiencing Abraham's/Ibrahim's sacrifice. In most Islamic countries, believers pay money to the butcher to slaughter a sheep, camel, or cow for them, without having any contact with the animal or the sanctity of the sacrificial process. Stories about animal sacrifices, warriors, and the diet of the first people are a process through which respect is paid to the cycle of life and in which, allegorically and anagogically, one comes to the realization that we are all the same and that everything is connected. "We are made of star stuff" is a famous quote by Carl Sagan, richly interpreted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson , who speaks of atoms as an integral part of all of us. We are made of those same particles found in the first stars, thus making the Universe live in us and vice versa. We are the stars, and we are the Universe–all one and all connected by the same power of energy and matter. Nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon are integral elements of life on Earth, as well as the energy created from the Big Bang. The connection of subatomic particles can be compared to the mythologically invisible, which supports the visible world, as temporality in eternity and movement in time that takes place in Axis Mundi. Campbell himself referred to the theme of mythology as the notion “that there is an invisible plane supporting the visible one, and whether it is thought of as a world or simply as energy that differs from time and time, and place to place” ( The Power of Myth , pg. 71). First storytelling refers to this invisible plane.  Lies that keep us alive The origins of storytelling can be found in cave rituals around fire and the first syncretic art from which all the arts as we know them today are born. Prehistoric man dances, sings, paints and acts, practicing syncretic rites of the concept of his mythic consciousness. Myth is understood here as a conception of consciousness, while ritual is its action. This mythical concept and ritual action, make communication between the members of the tribe in a syncretic combination of artistic expression so that art evolves later into the experience completely opposed to reality and separated from that initial syncretism of the magical consciousness of early Homo sapiens . Art has become a lie, a game, a metaphor, and a pretense, unlike the original rituals, which reflected the invisible planes to our consciousness. That magical consciousness through archetypes has remained to this day an inseparable part of what differs our starry molecules from other species.  The first stories were created in Paleolithic caves where Homo sapiens  created culture. We have replaced the cave and the light of the fire in modern times with an altar in the center of our living room that emits photons from flat screens amusing us with stories which have mythological ancestry. The multitude of worlds that we discovered and created in the narrative patterns of the first myths, we have today translated into the entertainment industry. Binge-watching series from the comfort of the sanctity of our living room is just a remnant of our innate desire to experience the myth and adventure we call life. Miracles in movies and series are offered to us on the altar in our living room, without us having to make any effort. The question is when they will be replaced by other technological content, which will include cinematic means of expression, virtual reality, metaverses, and artificial intelligence. In the 2024 series 3 Body Problem , based on the 2008 Chinese bestselling trilogy by Liu Cixin, humanity must prepare for destruction by a high-tech species coming from outer space. The reason they want to destroy us is–the story of RED RIDING HOOD! This highly advanced species does not understand why the wolf was lying to the grandmother. For them: “This story is a lie about a liar. A liar is someone not to be trusted. We communicate what is known." Far more technologically advanced than us, but devoid of the ability to lie, these aliens are a metaphor for our future with artificial intelligence and neurolinks as envisioned by author and philosopher Alan Watts . In his future, human beings will be connected by neural connections, and every thought and desire will be open and accessible to everyone. It sounds scary, but we are already living the prototype of this vision with social networks and the Internet. We are well on our way to erasing what makes us “lying humans,” with the help of artificial intelligence, algorithms, and silicon networks. In our living room with myths in front of a flat screen, we are slowly creating a civilization completely devoid of rituals and mystical experiences.  3 Body Problem  species are not capable of understanding the story of the Lying Wolf, imagination in fairy tales or fantasy, grasping the concepts of play, metaphors, or anything non-factual. We humans are not to be trusted, because we tell stories. A Homo liar who understands and enjoys the story of Little Red Riding Hood cannot survive in a world of algorithms that is deprived of myths and rituals. There is no place for defragmentation cycles and mystical power-off experience in it. But that world is exactly what makes us a wise species– Homo sapiens . If we renounce the experience of the invisible that supports the visible world, stories that anagogically lead us to mystical knowledge, lies that interpret the truth, artists who preserve myths, and natural cycles of life–then we renounce ourselves, we lose our connection with the stars from which we are all built.  MythBlast authored by: Dr. Lejla Panjeta is a Professor of Film Studies and Visual Communication. She was a professor and guest lecturer in many international and Bosnian universities. She also directed and produced in theatre, worked in film production, and authored documentary films. She curated university exhibitions and film projects. She won awards for her artistic and academic works. She is the author and editor of books on film studies, art, and communication. Her recent publication was the bilingual illustrated encyclopedic guide – Filmbook , made for everyone from 8 to 108 years old. Her research interests are in the fields of aesthetics, propaganda, communication, visual arts, cultural and film studies, and mythology. https://independent.academia.edu/LejlaPanjeta This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 3, and Romance of the Grail Latest Podcast In this episode entitled "Interpretation of Symbolic Form" which was recorded around 1970, Joseph Campbell delves into the meaning of symbolic forms and narrative. In the lecture, he explores how symbolic forms point to the human capacity for the transcendent experience. Host, Bradley Olson introduces the episode and gives commentary after the lecture. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "There are two attitudes toward religious and mythic images today. One is that they are references to facts, and the other is that they are lies. But they are neither facts nor lies; rather, they are metaphors. Mythology is a compendium of metaphors." -- Joseph Campbell Myth and Meaning , 19 Living in Accord With Nature (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

I'm a dilettante. My governing word is “curiosity.” - Ian Hacking Let me begin by saying that I enthusiastically embrace my status as a dilettante; my doctoral dissertation was on the virtues of frivolity as a way into imagination, pulling from Kant’s work on the “purposefulness of purposelessness.” Often, when I am seeking inspiration for an article or a talk, I’ll go on a meandering quest to find an unexpected spark of wonder or rebellion, from etymological gleanings or a fortuitous quote. A Philosophical Paradox This quote from philosopher Ian Hacking did the trick. Hacking was a prodigious and vastly curious thinker, in the arguably most dilettante field in the world: philosophy), whose thinking spanned science, math, phenomena, probability, metaphysics, and human nature, and more. He has inspired and goaded scholars in a wide range of fields to shake out un-regarded assumptions about their thought constructs. He was also a nominalist, which might simply be defined as the notion that the world is made exclusively from particulars and any universals are of our own making. As a mythologist, I find the idea of a curious dilettante philosopher who dives into the world of metaphysics and challenges ideas about what does and doesn’t actually exist really tempting. For me, the most enduring definition of myth comes from Sallustius, in his treatise on fourth-century Hellenic paganism, On the Gods and the Cosmos : "Myth is what never was but always is" and “Now these things never happened, but always are.” In this definition, myth becomes that which is simultaneously least and most true, sitting in the duality of what is real and what is not, and combined with the energy of metaphor–to transfer–finding insights and meaning in the abstract connections between ideas. For me, this is the heart of the logos that sits within mythos and is its greatest strength. On A Razor and an Ass However, building on the work of medieval philosopher and theologian William of Ockham (1288-1348) and philosopher Jean Buridan (1300-1358), various forms of nominalism challenge the ideas of universals and abstract objects. Ockham, of course, remains in modern awareness through his Razor, which pop culture has translated as “the simplest explanation is usually the best one.” A more nuanced version of the idea that is bandied about in philosophical circles, though also not in precisely Ockham’s words, is Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem , which translates as "Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity." Much of the work in mythology, particularly when perceived through lenses such as those shaped by C.G. Jung and his work on the collective unconscious, as well as Joseph Campbell’s instinct as a literature scholar to look for larger patterns, multiply entities with ruthless enthusiasm. However, I believe that the cold light of questioning those multiplicities that the nominalists encourage is a viable discipline. In a field that can get rather repulsively precious about its broad embrace of the meta, a dash of the empiric can be precise and demanding. As I think about this, I feel the tug of the concrete. It holds its own allures. I find myself frozen between the binaries, wondering which might bring clearer understanding. I find myself frozen between the binaries, wondering which might bring clearer understanding. Like Ockham, Buridan has also stayed with us, not in a razor’s edge, but in the conundrum of an ass, faced by two equally delectable piles of hay. This image emerged long before Buridan’s work, but it was re-energized in a satirical reduction of his work on empiricism, determinism and free will. From a particularly irreverent portion of my dissertation; a dictionary of words both frivolous and frivolously defined: Buridan’s Ass Starve with reason Flourish without Sometimes to act Is better than doubt Melander, The Pointless Revolution: Frivolity and The Serious Business Of Subversive Creativity. 2005. Unpublished. Towards Curiosity and Wonder I think that Ian Hacking would challenge the idea that these must be binary. He characterized himself as a transcendental nominalist, which in itself is a delicious bit on non-binary ontology. Philosopher Peter Kügler illuminates how this actually connects into the logic of the non-empirical, in an article on ontological relativism and transcendental nominalism, stating: Transcendental nominalism construes the pre-conceptual as an experience of individuals. Following a suggestion by Dominik Perler, we may understand this experience, which medieval nominalists called “sensory intuitive cognition”, as encoding information about individuals in analog form … Conceptual schemes classify individuals, particularly objects of experience. They do not structure an unstructured something, nor do they “carve nature at the joints.” (pgs. 269-278) And from Ian Hacking himself, in his obituary in the New York Times: Even in retirement, Professor Hacking maintained his trademark sense of wonder. In a 2009 interview with the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, conducted in the garden of his Toronto home, he pointed to a wasp buzzing near a rose, which he said reminded him of the physics principle of nonlocality—the direct influence of one object on another distant object—which was the subject of a talk he had recently heard by the physicist Nicolas Gisin. Professor Hacking wondered aloud, the interviewer noted, if the whole universe was governed by nonlocality—if “everything in the universe is aware of everything else.” “That’s what you should be writing about,” he said. “Not me. I’m a dilettante. My governing word is ‘curiosity.’” In the spirit of the dilettante (and the ass, of course), I wonder if the answer is to toss all of the hay up into the air and eat with relish. Perhaps the methodology is less important than the question itself. Be curious. And eat. MythBlast authored by: Leigh Melander, Ph.D . has an eclectic background in the arts and organizational development, working with inviduals and organizations in the US and internationally for over 20 years. She has a doctorate in cultural mythology and psychology and wrote her dissertation on frivolity as an entry into the world of imagination. Her writings on mythology and imagination can be seen in a variety of publications, and she has appeared on the History Channel, as a mythology expert. She also hosts a radio who on an NPR community affiliate: Myth America, an exploration into how myth shapes our sense of identity. Leigh and her husband opened Spillian, an historic lodge and retreat center celebrating imagination in the Catskills, and works with clients on creative projects. She is honored to have previously served as the Vice President of the Joseph Campbell Foundation Board of Directors. This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 2, and Pathways to Bliss Latest Podcast In this episode of The Podcast with a Thousand Faces , we welcome the incredible Shelly Tygielski . Shelly is a mindfulness teacher, community organizer, producer, philanthropist, author, activist, public speaker, and former corporate executive. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Shelly founded Pandemic of Love, a grassroots mutual aid movement that has connected millions of people worldwide and facilitated $200 million in direct donations. She is the author of two books, “Sit Down To Rise Up: How Radical Self-Care Can Change the World” and “How We Ended Racism: Realizing a New Possibility in One Generation,” co-authored by Justin Michael Williams which debuted as a #1 Amazon bestseller in October 2023. In 2022, Shelly co-founded Partners in Kind, a production company that aims to highlight important issues through powerful storytelling to inspire social change. Shelly combines her corporate skills with mindfulness principles to drive social justice and support communities affected by trauma. Her dedication to radical self-care and community building has made her a leading figure in the mindfulness movement. In the conversation, Shelly and JCF's Tyler Lapkin explore Shelly’s inspiring journey, her transformative work, and the power of storytelling for a more compassionate world. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Then there is the problem of what’s known as the generalist against the specialist. Just as in medicine, sometimes it’s better to go to a generalist than to a specialist—depends on what your problem is. A specialist can come up and say, in all seriousness, “The people in the Congo have five fingers on their right hand.” If I say, “Well, the people in Alaska have five fingers on their right hand,” I’m called a generalist. And if I say that the people in the caves in 30,000 B.C. had five fingers on their right hand, I’m a mystic!" -- Joseph Campbell Myth and Meaning 237-238 Jung, the Self and Myth (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

The past decade, I've been a part of creating over 200 weddings. And that surprises me a bit.  While I believe in romance and love as an artist, a scholar, and a human being who has been relatively happily married for almost thirty years, I have never been fully convinced that weddings or marriages were inherently good ideas.  In most cultures worldwide, monogamous marriage has been primarily a social and economic construct that strengthens patriarchy, frequently casting women as secondary, as lesser, and often ultimately as a form of property. This perception of marriage centers procreation and strengthens reductive ideas about gender and gender roles that become self-perpetuating and actually don’t serve anyone particularly well, as I wrote about in a MythBlast last year .  Current wedding ceremonies still echo traditions from ancient Greece when marriages were first, in Western culture, identified as a state-sanctioned benefit to the public interest. Wedding partners were chosen by the kyrios , guardian of the bride, usually the father. Potential suitors would show off their plumage with extravagant gifts, feasts, and games, and the victor and kyrios  would then perform a ritual engysis , literally a “pledging into the hand,” where the two men would make a commitment to the marriage over a handshake. The woman being pledged wasn’t even in the room.  Then, as women stepped into marriage, Hera as the archetypal image of wifehood was hardly an encouraging exemplar. Seduced by her brother Zeus in the form of a cuckoo (there’s a metaphor!), she got her version of a Big Fat Greek wedding that women are supposed to want, but then was continually condemned to rebelliously but often ineffectively stand on the sidelines as Zeus romped through affairs and seductions. In an institution defined by the importance of offspring, even bearing children became a place of competition; in revenge for Zeus’ creation of Athena, Hera bore Hephaistos without a father, and Zeus threw him to earth, crippling him. In The Iliad , Homer describes her character as “not of a very amiable kind, and its main features are jealousy, obstinacy, and a quarreling disposition, which sometimes makes her own husband tremble”(i. 522, 536, 561, v. 892. William Smith, ed. A New Classical Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, Mythology, and Geography ). In pop culture and media, wives are frequently still buffooned this way: the old ball-and-chain who nags and talks too much, gaining power by needling and conniving.  As I work with couples who are optimistically seeking wedding rituals and meaning that can set the stage for a marriage that reflects their aspirations together and as individuals, they most often instinctively recoil from these echoes, but aren’t sure how they might supplant them. An entire industry has risen from this uncertainty, seducing couples into perceiving weddings as performative, gigantic overblown selfies, which in their own ways echo the extravagance of Greek suitor-competitors and the consolation prize of a grand wedding designed to impress observers. In spite of how ubiquitously it sits in our collective imagination in the West now, the idea of love being required for marriage is a remarkably new idea. In spite of how ubiquitously it sits in our collective imagination in the West now, the idea of love being required for marriage is a remarkably new idea. Emerging out of the courtly love longings of the medieval troubadours and trobairitz (for whom love and marriage were distinctly not intertwined), it wasn’t until the 18th century that society began to encourage young people to even consider romance as an antecedent to marriage.  Interestingly, in the core definitions of kinds of love in the ancient Greek imagination, there isn’t an delineated image for love between married partners.They include: Eros , erotic love Agápe , unconditional love, primarily of god Philia , affectionate love between equal compadres Storge , the love between parents and children Xenia , the love of hospitality Philautia , self love, which can be either positive or negative In 1973, in his book Colours of Love: An Exploration of the Ways of Loving ,  psychologist John Alan Lee made a valiant effort to broaden these qualities, including borrowing the word pragma as an image to evoke the love between long-time partners. In spite of its eager adaptation by many in the psychological community, there really isn’t much evidence that the Greeks utilized the word in this way. It’s also problematic etymologically, pulling from the Greek pragmatikos , or business-like, which holds layers of its Renaissance connotations of being meddlesome or impertinently busy. What a dreary way to imagine long-term love! How then, might we re-imagine love into marriage? How can we hope to touch the essence of the bliss and the pain of an enduring love such that it amplifies our multitudes: of who we are, of how we love, of how we choose to live into that love?  I think the answer lies in two ideas: First, rather than trying to narrow what a long term love might look like to a single word or idea, we can instead understand ongoing love of a partnership as an intertwined dance of all of the ways we might love others or ourselves. We can love ourselves and partners as flawed and sometimes self-involved creatures who also have allure and divinity, are companions and family and sometimes strangers. This begins to give us a vocabulary of metaphors that could help us to expand into love that can both meet us in the moment and invite us to imagine beyond that.  Second, as Campbell argued in this month’s highlighted book, The Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth , reflecting on the Grail legends and the lessons of the wounded Fisher King, installed by ritual rather than rightness: we find love when we follow our own nature, rather than simply respond to the expectations of society. If we build a wedding and a marriage following the essence of ourselves as two and one, we can begin to redefine marriage itself, and re-imagine love into its heart. MythBlast authored by: Leigh Melander, Ph.D. has an eclectic background in the arts and organizational development, working with inviduals and organizations in the US and internationally for over 20 years. She has a doctorate in cultural mythology and psychology and wrote her dissertation on frivolity as an entry into the world of imagination. Her writings on mythology and imagination can be seen in a variety of publications, and she has appeared on the History Channel, as a mythology expert. She also hosts a radio who on an NPR community affiliate:  Myth America , an exploration into how myth shapes our sense of identity. Leigh and her husband opened Spillian , an historic lodge and retreat center celebrating imagination in the Catskills, and works with clients  on creative projects. She is honored to have previously served as the Vice President of the Joseph Campbell Foundation Board of Directors. This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 5, and Romance of the Grail Latest Podcast In this episode we welcome Chris Vogler. Chris is a Hollywood development executive, screenwriter, author and educator. He is best known for working with Disney and for his screenwriting guide, The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers. Chris was inspired by the writings of Joseph Campbell, particularly The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He used Campbell's work to create a 7-page company memo for Hollywood screenwriters, A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces which he later developed into The Writer's Journey. He has since spun off his techniques into worldwide masterclasses. In the conversation, John Bucher of the Joseph Campbell Foundation speaks with Chris about his life, his work, the Hero’s Journey, the art of storytelling, and Joseph Campbell. Listen Here This Week's Highlights “Love is born of the eyes and the heart; it is an individual experience. The eyes quest in the outer world for the object of inspiration, and the heart receives the image, and this image then becomes the idol of individual devotion” -- Joseph Campbell,   Romance of the Grail, 27 The Goddess and the Madonna Q&A (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

“In the West, you have the liberty and the obligation of finding out what your destiny is. You can discover it for yourself. But do you? … A very common experience is a student who has all kinds of possibilities and talents and essentially limitless money and becomes nothing more than a dilettante. ” [my italics] (Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss ) “Lord Ronald said nothing; he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.” (Stephen Leacock, Nonsense Novels) We can avoid landing on the path to our authentic selves in any number of obvious ways (e.g. denial, laziness, fear), but Campbell raises a more insidious and subtle trap–becoming dilettantes in our own lives. We have to be careful about definitions here. Being a dilettante isn’t the same thing as wandering aimlessly. Wandering aimlessly is one of the best ways to find your path, like Parsifal letting go the reins of his horse. That kind of wandering is central to Daoist thought and appears in western symbolism, for example, as The Fool from the Tarot. That’s not what we’re talking about. Campbell is directing our attention to a cunning kind of threshold guardian that keeps one from wandering–and from an authentic life–by rewarding the urge to ride “madly off in all directions.” History offers a buffet of scholarship regarding the search for an authentic life–the life you author as your own–especially in the work of Søren Kierkegaard, the father of existentialism. Campbell’s description of “the dilettante” is a perfect gloss on what Kierkegaard called a “knight of infinite resignation,” from what is probably one of the most dangerous books ever written, Fear and Trembling .* In ways familiar to any reader of Campbell, Kierkegaard imagines a taxonomy of stages through which any human must pass on the journey from merely accepting a moral compass provided by family and society, to questioning it and then, finally, seeking out and embracing the truth about our lives. He describes these stages as “resignation,” “infinite resignation,” and “faith.” Monomythically speaking, these might be translated as “ignoring the call,” “dithering endlessly about the call,” and finally “accepting the call and everything it implies.” * This is a book that has turned hardened atheists into Christians and evangelical Christians into atheists. Resignation You’ve probably noticed that, everywhere you look, people are ready to resign themselves to lives determined by others: by parental pressure (“You’re going to be a doctor!”), economic realities (“I needed this job just to survive”), or by the temptations of money and power (“Wow, you can make a lot of money in corporate law and military contracts!”). With sufficient financial reward, resigning yourself to a fate assigned by others can be sweet. You might need spiritual insulin later, but it can be delicious and satisfying in the short run. But it’s still not your life. You’d still be living inauthentically. Let’s say you see through this circumstance and recognize the hollowness of the life you’ve accepted. What do you do then? You go looking for alternatives, which begins to sketch the predicament (and trap) faced by the Dilettante. Here’s Kierkegaard’s analysis. Infinite Resignation Infinite resignation is that moment when we realize we have more options about who or what we can be, beyond what society has planned for us. The moment can be exhilarating: a seemingly infinite number of alternatives, each more beautiful than the last, ablaze before us in a whirlwind of sparkling possibilities. Wow. But now there’s a problem: how do you choose? When you have a million options, choosing one can feel impossible. Overwhelmed, we can either retreat, fall back to our preexisting, hollow and unsatisfying lives or–and here comes the Dilettante–we can resign ourselves to this infinity of choices by searching, not for our authentic lives, but for even more options, endlessly collecting pretty shells from along the water margins of our fate. In the language of the Hero’s Journey, this is not only a failure to answer the call, but a clever way of avoiding it altogether. In the language of the Hero’s Journey, this is not only a failure to answer the call, but a clever way of avoiding it altogether. Kierkegaard says that those who live their lives floating in the shimmering dust devil of infinite alternatives, what he calls “knights of infinite resignation,” look like beautiful dancers, suspended in mid-air. Look at ‘em up there. They’re cool. They can do “whatever they want” because all their options are ever present. But –and now the other shoe falls– because they can do anything at all, they never do anything at all. They never land. Never landing spares them the initiations–and the anxiety!–required for a fully authentic life. Following your true path is not always sweetness and light. Campbell notes, quite rightly, that “being a shaman is no fun,” for instance, but avoiding that call is worse. Campbell writes: “... those who choose to refuse the call don’t have a life. Either they die, or, in trying to lead more mundane lives, they exist as nonentities, what T. S. Eliot called ‘hollow men’” ( Pathways , p. 113). And that’s the downside: the inevitable crash landing. They have to come down eventually and the ground, metaphorically speaking, is unfamiliar territory. They’ve spent a lifetime avoiding the consequences of landing on a specific career, or life-partner or, well, a life–and landing makes clear what they’ve lost. What’s most interesting (or alarming) here is that this life of never landing seems preferable to a fully-lived and authentic existence. If you’ll pardon a terrible but wonderful pun, Peter Pan remained in Never Land because growing up posed the threat of a responsible, adult, authentic relationship with Wendy. The temptation to cling to life as a candy store of choices, of Neverland -ing, is the most devious kind of threshold guardian yet. So, what is to be done? How do we navigate beyond this kind of charming threshold guardian? Kierkegaard’s answer is a subtle take on the notion of faith. Faith For Kierkegaard, the solution to infinite resignation is not to fall back into the roles assigned to us by social convention, but to go forward into what he calls “faith”–something that requires a leap rather than a deliberative choice. We’d need a few hours and a glass of wine to unpack everything Kierkegaard has to say about faith, but consider the difference between people who 1) make deliberate and careful choices about the life they want, and 2) those who “find their calling.” Navigating life guided solely by reasonable choices seems always to be missing something–something deeper. This is especially true when those choices are conditioned by money or fame or status, rather than by the calling of those chthonic, subterranean tides tugging at the tectonic undercurrents of our lives. Failure to listen to them eventually produces earthquakes in our expectations, and we land with a thump. Faith, by contrast, requires embracing the paradox of moving beyond the Dilettante’s wasteland of infinite choices into a zone of exhilarating (and sometimes terrifying) anxiety–what Campbell would characterize as being Master of The Two Worlds: a recognition that finding our path means going where there is no path. Never landing lands us in Neverland . But if we accept the paradox of landing on our Path and engaging the burdens of the quest, the reward is a life we ourselves author–and the Grail of authentic existence. Thanks for musing along. MythBlast authored by: Mark C.E. Peterson, Ph.D. is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Washington County and past president of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture ( ISSRNC.org ). Philosopher, gadfly, poet, cook, writing along the watermargins of nature, myth, and culture. A practitioner of taijiquan and kundalini yoga for over 40 years, Dr. Peterson is also a happy member of the Ukulele World Congress. This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 2, and Pathways to Bliss Latest Podcast In this bonus episode, Campbell discusses his "favorite definition of mythology". He also speaks to the four functions of myth, how a moral order relates to mythology, and finally retells the myth of the tiger and the goat. There is no information as to where or when it was recorded. Listen Here This Week's Highlights “What if you want to gain some idea of what your myth is while you are living it? Well, another way to try to discern your destiny—your myth—would be to follow Jung’s example: observe your dreams, observe your conscious choices, keep a journal, and see which images and stories surface and resurface. Look at stories and symbols and see which ones resonate.” -- Joseph Campbell Pathways to Bliss , 112 The Four Functions of Mythology (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

That’s a good question. One of the recurrent themes in Campbell’s work is the idea that our inherited mythology was created to put humans into relationship with a world that no longer exists. Looked at from today's experience of gender, the original stages in the Hero’s Journey seem to bear this out. When he wrote Hero with a Thousand Faces , the material from which he elicited the monomyth described journeys undertaken by a hero , rather than a heroine . For most of the past four thousand years, these narratives of psychological development were crafted around the experience of men and not women. (Still, it is always worth remembering that one of the original “ heroes” in Western mythology was the Goddess Inanna. Ahem. But let’s save that for another day.) So does that mean a heroic life’s journey can only describe the experience of men and not women? I assume everyone is okay with “ NO .” But it does raise some interesting questions. Let’s consider some options. We could just stick with the historical view (and stick our heads in the sand) and argue that if women are essentially different from men, then perhaps women can’t be heroes at all — that such gender differences mean only men can be heroes. Safe to say, 1) this understanding of gender grounds most of the historically sourced mythology bundled together in Hero with a Thousand Faces ,   and 2) nobody today is likely to think this is reasonable. Or we could argue that, if the biological  differences between men and women give rise to entirely different ways of experiencing the world, then women’s experience needs to be reflected in a heroine’s journey, distinct from any male version. Which seems more likely. But , there’s a “but.” The world we live in doesn’t look like this any more either. These kinds of binary presuppositions are increasingly problematic, and the intersectionalities of biology and gender tend to sabotage what seemed obvious a thousand years ago. The world we live in contains a spectrum of gender-related experience. Everyone is different and therefore, if   we follow this logic, we’d require as many journeys as there are humans. Goodbye, monomyth (?)  Hmm. So, what to do? Well, it is obviously true that every person is on a journey specific to their own lived experience, and this begs the question: can a single bit of mythological scaffolding still provide meaning for all human beings?   Surely some psychological continuities remain among humans, regardless of their personal circumstances — and if that’s true, can we still imagine the possibility of a general narrative to provide context and meaningfulness to those experiences? Can a single bit of mythological scaffolding still provide meaning for all human beings? I don’t have a definite answer, but I have some ideas.  A few years ago my colleague Chris Yogerst and I wrote up a book chapter applying Campbell to HBO’s Watchmen  series — in which the hero was a woman. You can find the full details here [ After Midnight: Watchmen after Watchmen   (University Press Of Mississippi, 2022)], but let me pass along an outline of our working hypothesis. We wondered whether it might be possible to reframe the stages of the hero’s journey operationally : by looking at the social and psychological function these stages describe, regardless of gender preference or identity. For practical purposes, we found that the stages belonging to Separation  and Return seem to stand up to today’s evolved understanding of gender, but when you get to Initiation  (i.e.“Meeting with the Goddess,” “Temptation,” “Atonement with the Father,”) gender just kicks in the door and says, “Excuse me, what?? ”  Start by considering the function of Separation .  To become who we really are, humans have to separate and distinguish themselves psychologically from the socially sanctioned roles they’ve been assigned by parents, society, the ambient culture, etc.  So far, so good. Once underway, each of us moves through stages of Initiation  that strip off the masks we’ve been taught to wear, the internalized, socially constructed identities that condition and often occlude our self-understanding. That’s the main order of business if we wish to discover our true natures — whatever those happen to be — and this idea allows us to translate Campbell’s gender-saturated stages into operationally defined and gender-neutral language. Here are some of the details: Meeting with the goddess (and the “sacred marriage”) Looked at as a psychological process, Campbell's historically based metaphor can be reframed as describing that moment when a person embraces amor fati , the   love of one’s own fate — understood as their authentic selfhood. At that point, once separated from their past, a person kind of wakes up and says, “Huh, this is who I might be? This is who I really am?”  Everyone can experience this, regardless of gender. Temptation For those who have embraced a fate truly their own, independent from socially sanctioned authorities (parents, the culture, etc.), the Temptation  to fall back into the role society had planned for you (accountant instead of artist, lawyer instead of teacher, etc.) always remains a challenge. Let’s face it, the path of social acceptance and reward is more tempting (and easier) than, as the Knights of the Round Table did, plunging into the woods where it was darkest and there was no path – the only path to the Grail. Again, there’s nothing gender specific here. And one more. Atonement with the father: It’s not enough, psychologically speaking, to embrace the path toward authentic selfhood and then endure the temptations of socially sanctioned (and socially rewarded) roles: anyone who’s taken this adventure seriously knows that, eventually, they’ll have to live with the anxiety, and the paradox, of walking along the razor’s edge between the two. Atonement  means, finally, to be at-one-with  both the need to follow our path while living with the daily pressures to cave in or to turn, as it were, to The Dark Side. From here on, the remainder of Campbell’s stages (Apotheosis, the Ultimate Boon, the Return, etc.) seem to proceed without trying to fit the round pegs of contemporary lived experience into the square holes of a now-fossilized tradition. Moreover, the usefulness of reframing the stages of Initiation as we have, suggests that the gender described in the history of mythological narrative is, after all, just an accident of birth. Something to consider. Thanks for musing along. MythBlast authored by: Mark C.E. Peterson, Ph.D. is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Washington County and past president of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture ( ISSRNC.org ). Philosopher, gadfly, poet, cook, writing along the watermargins of nature, myth, and culture. A practitioner of taijiquan and kundalini yoga for over 40 years, Dr. Peterson is also a happy member of the Ukulele World Congress. This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 6, and The Hero with a Thousand Faces Latest Podcast In this episode entitled, "Mythologies of Quest and Illumination", Campbell discusses the four functions of myth, love, and discovering one's own authentic life. Host, Bradley Olson introduces the episode and gives commentary after the lecture. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "In northeast Siberia and in many parts of North and South America, the call of the shaman involves a transvestite life. That is, the person is to live the life of the opposite sex. What this means is that the person has transcended the powers of his or her original gender, and so women live as men and men live as women. These transvestite shamans play a very large role in the Indian mythology in the Southwest—the Hopi, the Pueblo, the Navaho, and the Apache—and also among the Sioux Indians and many others." -- Joseph Campbell Pathways to Bliss , xviii A New Mythology - The Planet (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Let me begin by saying what I always say when asked to condense the entirety of my studies in mythology and depth psychology into a small package: “If you want a healthy soul, do your art.” Although I’ve never heard the concept plainly spoken like that, for decades its theme has been lurking in the background, pervading the rooms of all the seminars and classes, the pages of the articles and books. And regardless of the breadth or disparity of topics, the association of art and psychological well-being arise with remarkable frequency. You may have noticed above that I reworded what was originally “healthy soul” to “psychological well-being.” This is not an arbitrary conflation but rather a necessary maneuver to accommodate the more practically-minded—and for whom I often rephrase my original rendering to: “If you want a healthy psyche, do your art.” Really, I do this simply to give the concept a more realistic “from the neck, up” kind of gloss. After all, what’s a soul, anyway? Ironically, the Greek word psyche  translates literally into “soul,” but that aspect is all but forgotten in common Western usage. There are, however, two exceptions to this that I can think of: mythology and depth psychology. On that note, whenever the word psyche  occurs in this piece, feel free to associate it with “neck-up content,” but know that I intend to mean, equally, soul —which I will address in more detail below. Sadly, many who hear my little “healthy soul/do art” formula will shrug their shoulders and say things like, “So you’re saying it’s good to be creative? Well, that’s nothing new.” Or, “Yeah, didn’t Columbia do a study on that? painting lowers blood-pressure or something?”  Fair enough. In a world like this, it is clearly a necessity to honor the practical. After all, time is ticking, we’ve got lives to manage. Agreed! But bear in mind that one-sidedness in practical matters confines psyche to the shallow water when it is in the deeps that she thrives.  Art for art’s sake And I speak here of the process alone, without any concern for the product or quality thereof. It is the “doing” that is so crucial—something about the conscious giving-of-oneself to the task that makes it personal, that adds depth. Perhaps this partially explains why Jung was so adamant (if not downright aggressively insistent) that his paintings were NOT art.   I can only guess that, for him, his “rendered imagery” was more of what could be called a journey into the soul. Or, if you prefer, a journey through the contents of the psyche—through both the conscious and (especially) unconscious strata—and all to the purpose of, in his own words, “kindle a light in the darkness of being” which we can also call, simply, individuation ( Memories, Dreams, Reflections , p. 326). I ask myself, however, am I reducing the making of art to therapy? As in “art therapy?” In part, yes. But I think that by making therapy the focus, one paradoxically flattens the depth of its affect. I’m really attempting to touch something deeper, less prone to the compartmentalization of thought or the reach of words—but again, I’ll get to this, or rather try to, when I get to soul , below.  Nonetheless, for now, I think it’s advantageous that the notion of “therapy” be moved out of the center (in an effort to invite more  of its affect!), and that the resulting void be filled with notions of soul. While, as a fringe benefit, let’s just remember and appreciate that healing is an inescapable consequence  of making art—call it “therapy-blind-to-itself,” or “inadvertent therapy” because as all artists know, when you do your art you cannot run fast enough to escape the sense of well-being that accompanies it. Some words towards soul So, there is something richer at stake, beyond even the healing—or wellness-virtue—but not so far beyond as to be a matter of pure being which just conveniently slides the whole question into the transcendent or ontological. Besides, that would be a conceptual and philosophical move, and not an artistic one. Rather, as artists (which by the way is everyone, whether it’s gardening or how you fold the laundry), we want to stay within the confines of matter, the realm of “stuff,” right here in this so-called mundane miracle called life on Earth, with all the complexities and problems and enigmas that accompany it.  The soulful artist is less concerned with conceptual explanations or solutions to problems than with heeding the drive to explore the unknown. The soulful artist is less concerned with conceptual explanations or solutions to problems than with heeding the drive to explore the unknown .  I’d even venture that when the artist has made the unknown familiar, they do not make residence there, but pull stakes and venture on to new uncharted territory. As mentioned above, psyche/soul thrives in deep water. It is her myth—and her means of making myth. In his   Pathways to Bliss , Joseph Campbell addresses this soulful drive in artists as “mythic-seizure,” which he contrasts against the rational:   The beginning of a mythic world or a mythic tradition is a seizure—something that pulls you out of yourself, beyond yourself, beyond all rational patterns. It is out of such seizures that civilizations are built … [and] the work of any artist who has given his life to producing these things … come[s] from mythic seizure. (p. 153) But let’s not dismiss the practical—so, time for a definition-attempt at soul. In response to this impossible question I offer a direction that has much helped me, inspired by the work of depth psychology’s three chief heavyweights (in my opinion): Jung, von Franz, Hillman. In lieu of abstract denotations, which essentially tell us nothing about anything (as far as the soul’s concerned), these three frequently go at it by juxtaposing soul  with spirit . Please mind that these are merely general “directions,” replete with exceptions, and quite far from any kind of precise finality. That said: spirit is up; soul is down, just as our notion of heaven is up in the sky, while mortal life is down here on earth. Spirit connotes height, ethereality, transcendence and light, whereas soul connotes depth, gravitas, matter and darkness. Spirit connotes ontological “being” removed from matter (more or less), whereas soul’s concern leans into matter. To employ the four elements (as metaphors): Spirit rises like air and burns like fire; whereas soul deepens into earth and pours down like water. To conclude this egregiously brief gloss of “what soul is,” and to provide a concrete sample from the perspective of art, consider the depth and magnitude of soul in African-American poet Langston Hughes’s extraordinary 1921 poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”: I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers.  My soul has grown deep like the rivers. The myth in soul   As the soul leans into matter and the field of life (perhaps in the business of carrying spirit into creation), likewise myth leans into soul—and pours back out of it. Let us say the soul exudes myth, like residual mist from a waterfall or warmth from the sun, giving us—the blind—a means of tracking it. And for some reason we come closest to seeing or touching it (so to speak) when it’s expressed in the graver terms I provide above.  In short, it seems the soul needs (to some degree) “troubled” water—or in the words of Hughes, “muddy” or “dusky.” This is what I like to call “the messiness of myth”—the complexity, heaviness, and even oddness that affirms its accuracy to life . Perhaps it renders a familiarity that psyche can readily embrace and integrate. Perhaps, also, it renders a familiarity she can hone upon in her imaginative power. In like fashion, we can embrace the messes of life that come and  we can hone our souls upon them. Yes, there’s something about the mess that stirs the soul and offers the artist in all of us the opportunity to engage and do our art .  MythBlast authored by: Craig Deininger has been a regularly featured writer for the JCF since 2018. He has taught at many institutions including Naropa University, Studio Film School in Los Angeles, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he earned an MFA in Poetry. He also earned an MA and PhD in Mythology and Jungian Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. He has balanced his scholarship with a long history of (what he calls) "fieldwork," ranging from commercial fishing in Alaska, building trail for the Forest Service in the Rockies, commercial farming in the midwest, years of construction and landscaping across the country and, of course, countless outdoor misadventures in backpacking, rockclimbing, mountain biking, and the like. He ranks himself in the top 99% of the world population in the art of digging a hole with a shovel and acknowledges his inflation for thinking this. His poetry has appeared in several literary magazines including The Iowa Review, and his first book of poetry Leaves from the World Tree, was co-authored with mythologist Dennis Slattery and published by Mandorla Books. This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 2, and Pathways to Bliss Latest Podcast In this episode of The Podcast with a Thousand Faces, we welcome the incredible Shelly Tygielski . Shelly is a mindfulness teacher, community organizer, producer, philanthropist, author, activist, public speaker, and former corporate executive. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Shelly founded Pandemic of Love, a grassroots mutual aid movement that has connected millions of people worldwide and facilitated $200 million in direct donations. She is the author of two books, “Sit Down To Rise Up: How Radical Self-Care Can Change the World” and “How We Ended Racism: Realizing a New Possibility in One Generation,” co-authored by Justin Michael Williams which debuted as a #1 Amazon bestseller in October 2023. In 2022, Shelly co-founded Partners in Kind, a production company that aims to highlight important issues through powerful storytelling to inspire social change. Shelly combines her corporate skills with mindfulness principles to drive social justice and support communities affected by trauma. Her dedication to radical self-care and community building has made her a leading figure in the mindfulness movement. In the conversation, Shelly and JCF's Tyler Lapkin explore Shelly’s inspiring journey, her transformative work, and the power of storytelling for a more compassionate world. Listen Here This Week's Highlights “Art is a message to you of your own being. ” -- Joseph Campbell Myth and Meaning An Experience of Being Alive (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Our given topic for this month–The Message of the Myth: Arts and Artists–is both majestic and expansive. Over millennia and across cultures, countless great art has drawn inspiration from the realm of myth. Frequently in Western societies, artists have sought to represent puissant themes that are embedded in the traditions of both ancient Greece and Rome, as well as in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. In the realm of classic art, most of us are familiar with The Sistine Madonna painted by Raphael, The Last Supper mural painting by Leonardo da Vinci, the many works of art depicting Hercules slaying the Hydra, or the sculpture of David’s Michaelangelo. Such works of artistry are usually admired irrespective of the culture or tradition of the beholder. But what about our immediate time? In this MythBlast I want to focus on the artistic genre of music. Specifically, the voice and phenomenon of Taylor Swift and how powerful our personal experiences can be when they’re associated with a myth or an archetype. Cassandra, the cursed prophetess Swift’s emotional storytelling has the ability to make the personal universal and the universal personal. This can especially be felt in the song “Cassandra” from The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology (TTPD) double album. So, they killed Cassandra first ’cause she feared the worst And tried to tell the town So, they filled my cell with snakes, I regret to say Do you believe me now? Wikipedia succinctly explains, “Cassandra in Greek mythology was a Trojan priestess dedicated to the god Apollo and fated by him to utter true prophecies but never to be believed. In modern usage her name is employed as a rhetorical device to indicate a person whose accurate prophecies, generally of impending disaster, are not believed.” (As an aside, Swift also has a song titled “The Prophecy” on the same album.) Cassandra was a powerful and wise woman who accurately predicted both the fall of Troy and the death of Agamemnon, but was ignored by society. A rhetorical question: “How many women have also experienced their predictions being ignored?” It’s a tale as old as time. Let’s first explore Swift’s connection with the Cassandra archetype and how she links a personal life event with this mythical figure through both her artistry and the shared emotive field of her audience. In 2016 Kim Kardashian leaked a short recording on Snapchat appearing to prove that Swift had given her consent to being mentioned in Kanye West’s song “Famous,” despite Swift claiming she was never told that West planned to use the word “bitch” to describe her. And when the full footage of the call came out in 2020, it exonerated Swift (“Do you believe me now?”). As Swift describes in her Time Person of the Year interview , “Make no mistake–my career was taken away from me. You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar. That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.” Cassandra, anyone? The alchemical snake symbol Swift sings about being betrayed, disbelieved, persecuted, and defamed. These are–unfortunately–incredibly relatable global experiences that she captures in her allegorical, metaphorical, and poetic lyrics. “So, they filled my cell with snakes” references how in the myth it’s the snakes who whisper the prophecies to Cassandra and how she was also taken prisoner. For Swift, the “cell” was her rental house that became a prison and a cell phone full of snakes, because at the time, the overwhelming consensus online was that Swift was a liar–a snake–and so this emoji covered her social media (“filled my cell”). As she mentioned in an Elle interview , “A few years ago, someone started an online hate campaign by calling me a snake on the internet. ... It would be nice if we could get an apology from people who bully us but maybe all I’ll ever get is the satisfaction of knowing I could survive it, and thrive in spite of it.” Swift returned in 2017 with her album Reputation , a fan favorite with the lyrics: “I’m sorry / But the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now / Why? Oh, ’cause she’s dead (oh),” and the snake became a defining symbol of this era. Joseph Campbell in his artful prose writes in The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers: The power of life causes the snake to shed its skin, just as the moon sheds its shadow. The serpent sheds its skin to be born again, as the moon its shadow to be born again. They are equivalent symbols. Sometimes the serpent is represented as a circle eating its own tail. That’s an image of life. Life sheds one generation after another, to be born again. The serpent represents immortal energy and consciousness engaged in the field of time, constantly throwing off death and being born again. There is something tremendously terrifying about life when you look at it that way. And so the serpent carries in itself the sense of both the fascination and the terror of life. (53) A snake symbolizes transformation, transmutation, and alchemy. (Track 15 on TTPD is titled “The Alchemy.”) Now who among us hasn’t had to shed the outer skin of a present identity to reveal a new life chapter? Or in Swiftie language, “era.” No one likes a mad woman I also want to highlight how in the myth Cassandra was viewed as a mad woman instead of a divinely-inspired seer. Author Seth Schein describes Cassandra as one of those women “who often combine deep, true insight with utter helplessness, and who retreat into madness” (12). A madness that comes from being a frenzied prophetess whose “prophetic utterances” are dismissed, ridiculed, and gaslighted by those around them and the wider society. In Swift’s song “mad woman” on the album folklore , she describes this, again, all-too-common experience. And there’s nothin’ like a mad woman What a shame she went mad No one likes a mad woman You made her like that One of many reasons Swift is so popular is because her music makes the listener feel that their personal story is important, their feelings are in fact valid, and their truth matters; their story is just as significant and valuable as the eternal, cosmic stories playing out in the grand myths. And through Swift and other artists, we witness how these ancient and universal stories can indeed be reawakened through the power of creativity. Through Swift and other artists, we witness how these ancient and universal stories can indeed be reawakened through the power of creativity. Archetypal and mythic inspiration Now, speaking about our subject more broadly ... do great works of art draw their inspiration from great myths? Or is it that when a striking piece of art so impresses itself upon our souls, it naturally wakes us up to the potential presence of the underlying myth and therefore amplifies it? Swift’s expressive and evocative songwriting can inspire and encourage us to explore the mythic base of her lyrics so that we too may appreciate the archetypal dimensions at play in our own lives. But the great myths can also press themselves into our own souls, even if we’ve not directly invited them to do so. Even if we’re not immediately led to explore the generative archetypal realm behind (and within) a display of art, some artists’ portrayals of a mythical event will nevertheless move us simply because of the sheer power of their creation. A song can be an ohrwurm (catchy tune) “just because.” Florence and the Machine also have a track on their album Dance Fever called “Cassandra,” and as one fan wrote on reddit , “Cassandra Live at MSG is a perfect example of a live performance making a great song into a spectacular song! That extra verse at the end, the build up from the band, the emotion in her singing, even the cheers from the crowd! It all makes this song go from 10/10 to 15/10.” Both Swift and singer Florence Welch (who collaborate on the song “Florida!!!” on TTPD) draw from the same myth to extract their own lore from their personal lives, and as Welch said in an interview on vulture.com , “‘Cassandra’ very much reminds me of the way that I used to create myths around things that I was trying to understand or wrestle with. ... I just was always an overthinker and anxious, and I had to create worlds and characters to help me understand my feelings.” But even without any of the archetypal and mythic awareness, “Cassandra” is a dance floor banger! Over time we may come to more readily recognize the mythical elements within works of art, as well as sensing something of the larger archetypal impulses living in them. We can best cultivate an awareness of the archetypes at play in the outer world–and within ourselves–when we bring an artistic sensitivity to our act of perception so that we may sense both the mythic in the art, as well as the archetypal impulse within the mythical. For this recognition to occur, we’re called to be artists ourselves–in our perceptive and imaginal lives. MythBlast authored by: Kristina Dryža is an ex-futurist, author, TEDx speaker, archetypal consultant, one of the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Editorial Advisory Group, and a steward for The Fifth Direction. Based between Australia and Lithuania her work focuses less on the future and more on the unknown. Presence. Not prediction. What’s sacred? Not only what’s next. Kristina is passionate about helping people to perceive mythically and sense archetypally to better understand our shared humanity, yet honor the diverse ways we all live and make meaning. To learn more about Kristina, you can view her TEDx talk: Archetypes and Mythology. Why They Matter Even More So Today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o4PYNroZBY&t=525s This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 2, and Pathways to Bliss Latest Podcast In this episode entitled "Interpretation of Symbolic Form" which was recorded around 1970, Joseph Campbell delves into the meaning of symbolic forms and narrative. In the lecture, he explores how symbolic forms point to the human capacity for the transcendent experience. Host, Bradley Olson introduces the episode and gives commentary after the lecture. Listen Here This Week's Highlights “ What we’re taught today mainly has to do with economics and politics. We are not nurturing our spiritual side. So we are left with this void. It’s the job of the artist to create these new myths. Myths come from the artists. ” -- Joseph Campbell Myth and Meaning , 177 All the Gods are Within Us (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter