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- Excavating the Gifts of the Goddess
Figure of Persephone by Christian Friedrich Tieck. The Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey appears as one with the small rocky island on the coast of Normandy, France. With its spires pointing to the heavens, the buildings look as though they are floating on the waters. The islet is inaccessible when the tide closes in, the ocean fortifying the abbey from attack or isolating it for solitude. The journey to the island feels mythic as one crosses water, shuttles ferrying the bustling tourists to the mysterious isle, the winds whipping one’s hair with a story all its own. Our intrepid guide led us through the quaint medieval village lined with storefronts and delicious delights, but our journey was upwards, climbing over 200 steps towards the spire at the top of the abbey with its golden statue of the archangel Michael, aspiring to reach the heavens he points to. Passing through the light-filled sanctuary, then the scriptorium where wise words were memorialized in script, and finally through the public meeting rooms where visitors were welcomed, I was filled with awe by the beauty of the gothic structures. The buildings were layered in order of importance, our guide explained, the sanctuary is closest to God, the business of society the furthest. The organization of the buildings seemed to tell a story as well. Our Lady underneath the earth On our descent from the abbey, our guide pointed to a small door and stated: “And through this door is Notre-Dame-Sous-Terre–Our Lady Underneath.” I froze on the steps. Translated as Our Lady underneath the earth, our guide explained that the oratory, or small chapel, remained buried and hidden for years. Built during the eighth century upon what was thought to be an ancient burial site, what remains of the chapel is one of the oldest structures on the island. Throughout the centuries, structures were built on top of Notre-Dame-Sous-Terre. Forgotten to time, the chapel was excavated in the 19th century. So, at the heart of this 13th-century breathtaking gothic structure is a chapel dedicated to Our Lady underneath the earth–an underworld goddess. One must know death to understand life Underworld goddess figures are often feared in mythology. Homer’s Odyssey refers to the Greek underworld goddess, Persephone, as dread Persephone, showing such trepidation. Yet, in the Sumerian myth of the “ Descent of Inanna, ” the goddess Inanna descends through her own agency, seeking the wisdom found in the underworld. At each of the seven gates of the underworld, Inanna relinquishes her worldly power as goddess of heaven and earth and bows low in the inner sanctum to the goddess of the underworld, Erishkigal, seeking the depths found therein. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces , Campbell finds that in the underworld journey: “The hero, whether god or goddess, man or woman, the figure in a myth or the dreamer of a dream, discovers and assimilates his opposite (his own unsuspected self) either by swallowing it or by being swallowed. One by one the resistances are broken. He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty, and life, and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable. Then he finds that he and his opposite are not of differing species but one flesh.” (89) The descent to the underworld deepens the experiences of the hero and is a transformative moment in the journey. The underworld then appears to be reflective of the psychological experience. Sigmund Freud begins The Interpretation of Dreams with a quote from Virgil’s Aeneid, “Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo, ” referencing the idea that if the heavens will not offer help, one will turn to the underworld. The use of this quote seems to illuminate how the underworld is a source of psychological images for Freud. Mythologist Christine Downing highlights how Freud often refers to the underworld as a “privileged metaphor for the unconscious” ( Gleanings , 129). Archetypal psychologist James Hillman echoes Freud's connection between dream imagery and the underworld. Hillman’s book The Dream and the Underworld relates the psychology of dreams to the mythology of the underworld, demonstrating the mythology’s relevance to the field of psychology. In Myth of Analysis , Hillman states that “the Platonic upward movement toward aestheticism is tempered by the beauty of Persephone” (pg. 102). In other words, the driving forces of our daily lives are informed by the knowledge of the depths of human existence. Hillman refers to these depths as “underworld beauty.” These scholars highlight ways in which myths of the underworld are a source of meaning and significance for enhancing the human experience. Beauty is found in laying down one’s pride, power, and identity in life, to attain the wisdom of the underworld. Somehow, one must know about death to understand life, and therefore these myths are touching on what it means to truly feel alive. Beauty is found in laying down one’s pride, power, and identity in life, to attain the wisdom of the underworld. Insight of the underworld I find it interesting how Notre-Dame-Sous-Terre was hidden for so many years beneath the surface. Like so many goddess figures lost to time. In Episode 5 of the Power of Myth , “ Love and the Goddess ,” Bill Moyers introduces the conversation with Campbell by inquiring about the disappearance of goddess figures, stating that “patriarchal authority finally drove the goddess from the pantheon of imagination” (26:58). Moyers then pointedly asks Campbell, “The Lord’s Prayer begins, ‘Our Father, which art in heaven.’ Could it have begun ‘Our Mother’?” (27:27). “What psychological difference would it have made …?” (33:47). “Well,” Campbell responds, “it makes a psychological difference in the character of the cultures” (33:56). The myths we hold dear in our societies inform societal actions. So too Campbell's statement seems to imply that what is lost to time or buried in the underworld affects the upperworld as well. Later in the episode, Campbell suggests that the goddess returned, “She came back with the virgin in the Roman Catholic tradition … Notre Dame” (37:33). Perhaps Notre-Dame-Sous-Terre, Our Lady of the underworld has something to say about this as well. Campbell asserts that these female figures are surfacing, their presence offering balance, insight, and wisdom to the culture. Surfacing What does it mean for female figures who have been lost to time to step into the light? These goddesses, heroines, and leaders who have remained hidden and unseen for so long–do we fear them, like those who fear the Greek goddess Persephone, or do we welcome their wisdom as the Sumerian goddess Inanna seeking Erishkigal? Can we even begin to remember the time when the church upon the island of Mont-Saint-Michel was dedicated to her, Our Lady Underneath, before the gothic cathedral was built atop her? Perhaps a starting point for excavating the gifts of the goddess is where the “Love and the Goddess” episode ends. Moyers and Campbell have taken the conversation beyond words. Moyers inquires, “And it begins here?” (56:06) as he points to his body, the internal world that is “the womb of all of our being” (54:22), represented mythically as the goddess. And Campbell knowingly nods, responding, “It begins here” (56:06). What must it mean then, from the womb of being, to allow what has been repressed, buried, and hidden for so many years to come into the light? What gifts might this goddess from underneath the earth offer? MythBlast authored by: Stephanie Zajchowski, PhD is a mythologist and writer based in Texas. She serves as the Director of Operations for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and is a contributing author of Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide. Stephanie is also a co-founder of the Fates and Graces, hosting webinars and workshops for mythic readers and writers. Her work focuses on the intersection of mythology, religion, and women’s studies. For more information, visit stephaniezajchowski.com This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 5, and Goddesses 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 "There was a whole galaxy of mythologies that influenced each other in that period, back and forth, leading to the Christian recovery of the Goddess. . . . with the Christians in the first centuries, she comes back very strongly. There are certain aspects of Catholicism, for instance, where Mary is more important than either the Father, Son, or Holy Ghost. In all of the great cathedrals of Notre Dame, she is the guardian, protecting, mediating Mother. See, the god image as it is in our tradition is a pretty heavy one—he’s a kind of savage deity—and the mother is a protective, intermediary screen. When she’s wiped out in Puritanism, God becomes really a ferocious figure, as you read in some of those Puritan sermons." -- Joseph Campbell Myth and Meaning , 53 The Great Goddess (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter
- My, She Was Yar
Valentine’s Day This month being the calendar home for Valentine’s Day, the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s MythBlast series is looking at The Lover At The Movies. The origins of Valentine’s Day are a bit murky, but they seem to reach back into the early Roman celebrations of Romulus and Remus and the fertility festival of Lupercalia observed on the ides of February, the fifteenth of February. Lupercus was an ancient Roman god worshipped by shepherds as the promoter of fertility in sheep and the protector of their flocks. Lupercalia was itself a modification of another, even older (dating back to Etruscan or Sabine cultures) springtime cleansing ritual, Februa, which lent its name to the month of the year. As Christianity was emerging in the empire, several Christian martyrs named Valentine or Valentinus were created during the first few centuries of the early church, and we don’t exactly know which one the fourteenth day in February is named for. Regardless, the modus operandi of the early Christian Church was to co-opt venerable pagan celebrations, rename them, and redefine them in Christian terms in order to make the new celebration seem familiar to pagans and facilitate a broader acceptance of Christianity. I am particularly fond of one legend that describes an imprisoned, soon to be martyred, Valentine sending a greeting of love to a young woman whom he adored. He signed the missive, “From your Valentine.” Not only is this a bittersweet story explaining the origins of the phrase, but it also discloses the distressing aspects of love—I recall Joseph Campbell remarking in A Joseph Campbell Companion that romantic love is an ordeal—aspects one would rather overlook for the contemplation of more exhilarating, affirmative, blissful aspects of love. Loving another and communicating that love is often not easy, especially if the thrilling, enthralling, novelty of love has settled into a predictable familiarity—perhaps just such an examination that Valentine’s Day affords. The Philadelphia Story It is certainly the examination that the 1940 movie The Philadelphia Story affords. I think this movie sets the standard for all romantic comedies. Its wit, its pathos, its celebration of love and, to borrow a phrase from Campbell, following one’s bliss is, I think, unrivalled in the genre. In addition, one has the pleasure of watching the unparalleled appeal of legendary actors performing at the peak of their thespian powers. The imperious Katharine Hepburn (of her cheekbones, one Hollywood wag said they were the greatest calcium deposits since the White Cliffs of Dover) overcame her reputation as box office poison. Cary Grant was his irresistible, dapper self. Jimmy Stewart won the Best Actor Oscar for his role as writer/journalist McCauley Connor, and Ruth Hussey flawlessly delivered brilliant, sparking lines of dialogue that helped the movie win the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Released in 1940, the film has its baggage, of course, sprinkled with common early-mid twentieth century themes of male privilege, masculine philandering, implied domestic violence (which the movie attempts to atone for), and Uncle Willie’s creepy lecherousness. However, despite some of these limitations, we watch Katharine Hepburn in the role of the rich, entitled heiress, Tracy Lord, transcend gender role expectations and limitations of the time and assert her own independence in matters of the heart, spirit and mind. As the movie opens, we find Tracy Lord, a wealthy, arrogant socialite, preparing to remarry. Concurrently,her ex-husband, C.K. Dexter Haven (Grant)—who, it’s implied, had until very recently been in rehab in Argentina—smuggles two tabloid reporters into the old Main Line Lord family mansion. It’s a harebrained idea to obtain exclusive pictures and copy of the nuptials in return for Spy magazine’s publisher killing an unflattering story about her philandering father while saving Tracy from public humiliation. As the wedding weekend unfolds, Tracy grapples with her renewed affection for Dexter, who, in overcoming his demons, has become kinder, patient, and more accepting of human frailty. He’s finally become the man that she always hoped he could be. As the weekend unfolds, she discovers Connor also has his charms and realizes that class and privilege should not dictate who one loves. Tracy recognized her unattainable standards and perfectionism stood in the way of her own individuation—her in-her-selfness, and the discovery of lasting, imperfect, human, love. As a wedding gift, Dexter gives Tracy a model of the yacht The True Love, on which they spent their honeymoon—a beautiful, sleek sailboat that she called “yar.” A yar vessel is quick, agile, easy to steer or reef the sails. In the eastern United States where this film is set, a boat is considered yar when it is well-balanced on the helm, quick, and handy. Regarding the model of The True Love , Tracy says, “My, she was yar!” “She was yar, alright,” Dexter replies. “I wasn’t, was I?” “Not very.” Tracy's dawning awareness, the inception of self-objectivity, eventually replaces an egoic self-subjectivity that, until now, always scuttled love and relationship. Tracy’s moment of revelation occurs in the middle of a Dionysian revel, her pre-wedding party: “Oh, it’s just that a lot of things I always thought were terribly important, I find now are—and the other way around, and—oh, what the dickens.” She realizes that her conventional, striving, ambitious, vain fiancé is not the man she loves. She loves Dexter, the patient, kind, clever man, who, like Eros emerging from Chaos, becomes the driving force of creation; in this case, the creation of self-hood in tandem. The two have not become one, but rather each has become, as Nietzsche put it, who one is. It's a dynamic and ongoing creative act of becoming, of actively shaping oneself through self-overcoming and embracing the uniqueness of oneself and the other. Love as a people-growing machine Rainer Maria Rilke w rote to a young poet that Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate — ?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things. Only in this sense, as the task of working at themselves (“to hearken and to hammer day and night”), might young people use the love that is given them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must save and gather for a long, long time still), is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives as yet scarcely suffice. Love is the inducement to individuation, to becoming who one is, and while one is engaged in that process, one finds that love brings out both the best and the worst of oneself. “The whole catastrophe,” as Zorba said. Love is the inducement to individuation, to becoming who one is But love won’t make us beautiful, it won’t make us complete, it won’t make us content with our fate, at least not on its own. That’s where the ordeal comes in. It’s not a struggle with another to mold, shape, or bend them into the person we want them to be. Instead, it’s a struggle with oneself, dealing with the shadowy selves that emerge in sometimes surprising or novel ways. The lover can be the incitation to that inner-self work. The more of it we do, the better love is. In the words of McCauley Connor, “That’s the blank, unholy surprise of it!” Thanks for reading. MythBlast authored by: Bradley Olson, Ph.D. is an author, speaker, and a psychotherapist. He serves as the Publications Director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and the host of JCF's flagship podcast, Pathways With Joseph Campbell . Dr. Olson holds a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Dr. OIson is also a depth psychologist in private practice in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he has lived since 1995. Dr. Olson has graduate degrees in psychology from the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Olson offers mythic life coaching at What's Mything in Your Life ( bradleyolsonphd.com ) This MythBlast was inspired by Creative Mythology and the archetype of The Lover . Latest Podcast This lecture, recorded at the Esalen Institute in 1981, features Joseph Campbell delving into Jung’s concepts of the Anima and Animus, the shadow in psychology, and the role of myth in helping us navigate unexpected life challenges. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "If you go into marriage with a program, you will find that it won’t work. Successful marriage is leading innovative lives together, being open, non-programmed. It’s a free fall: how you handle each new thing as it comes along. As a drop of oil on the sea, you must float, using intellect and compassion to ride the waves." -- Joseph Campbell A Joseph Campbell Companion , 47 Psyche & Symbol (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter
- The Divine Mayhem of What’s Up, Doc?
In 1972, a ridiculous comedy called What’s Up, Doc? burst into theaters like a pack of drunken puppies, leaving audiences across the country weak and wheezing from the film’s hilarity. I didn’t see What’s Up, Doc? until the 1980s, after video rentals became a thing, but the movie’s raucously impetuous brand of humor was precisely calibrated to my adolescent sensibilities. I remember gasping for breath during the madcap shenanigans and feeling that my laughter could never catch up to the snowballing dialogue and action. That delightful sensation of helplessness, I now realize, was a gift of the Fool archetype. When the movie begins, four unrelated travelers are converging on San Francisco, each carrying an identical yet uniquely precious overnight case. One case holds secret government files, one bursts with gems, and one contains lumpen stones belonging to a musicologist named Howard Bannister. Absentminded and distracted but oh-so-handsome, Howard has arrived in town with his tyrannical fiancée, Eunice, to compete for grant money to research how prehistoric peoples played music on rocks. Into this powder keg for mayhem and misunderstanding bursts the radiant but impoverished Judy Maxwell, owner of the fourth overnight case. Judy promptly sets her romantic sights on Howard, turning the story’s genre from a simple case of mistaken luggage into a true screwball comedy, or a romantic comedy that makes fun of romance. Spies, thieves, millionaires, musicologists—as our zany characters compete to get their hands on files or jewelry or grant money, Judy competes only to get her hands on Howard. With a complete willingness to leap headlong into adventure and perfect indifference to social norms, she offers an illustration of the archetypal Fool. Not just any fool At first glance, the Fool and the Trickster might seem like two names for the same archetype, and they do have many similarities. Judy herself has no shortage of Trickster traits: her hungers for food and for Howard drive her actions, she lives on the road, and her linguistic acrobatics leave anyone who blunders into her orbit dazed and reeling. But there’s also an important distinction between the Trickster and the Fool: where the Trickster’s emphasis is on tricking others, or fooling them, the Fool primarily does foolish things. The Fool acts foolishly. In the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, the Fool card shows a figure about to take what appears to be an extremely foolish step into thin air with no possible means of support. This image captures Judy’s defining characteristic: where others fear to tread, Judy leaps. She leaps into traffic, into Howard’s personal space, into disguises of many kinds. At every opportunity—and for the Fool every moment is an opportunity—Judy runs full steam ahead, never pausing or tapping the brakes. An idling car is for speeding off, a hunk like Howard is to be wooed, a banquet invitation she finds is a clarion call to impersonate the person who was invited, namely the hapless, humorless Eunice. For a Fool like Judy to take foolish leaps, she cannot care about rules or regulations. She can be daring, audacious, funny, and charming, but cannot be well-behaved. She must possess immunity to anything resembling “nice girl” conditioning. At one point, wig quivering and voice quavering, an indignant Eunice shouts to Judy, “Don’t you know the meaning of propriety?” “Propriety?” Judy replies jauntily as she disappears down an escalator. “Noun. Conformity to established standards of behavior or manners. Suitability, rightness or justice. See ‘etiquette.’” Judy knows enough about propriety to avoid it. Instead, she claims the freedom to be herself. Joseph Campbell calls this “the will and courage to credit one’s own senses and to honor one’s own decisions, to name one’s own virtues” ( Creative Mythology 30), which he sees as the wellspring of creativity. Judy certainly credits her own senses, honors her own decisions, and acts from her own virtues and her own desires. In fact, her willingness to cause trouble enables her to align her actions precisely with her desires. As a result, she can respond creatively to the many challenges she and Howard face. Judy flings propriety aside and lives authentically—fully awake, fully alive, fully herself. So Judy is a Fool, but three additional traits make her a particular kind of Fool. First, she is invulnerable; neither her feelings nor her person can be hurt. With a spring in her step, she survives every disaster. Second, she glows with conspicuous beauty. In the movie’s sea of horrific hairdos, Judy’s hair shimmers like silk, as does her singing voice. Finally, she knows everything about everything, from geology to music to literature. In other words, she’s omniscient. Invulnerability, sublime beauty, and omniscience all combine to indicate the presence of a deity who is a woman and therefore a goddess—what Campbell might call the “Goddess of Life,” or creative energy (671). Judy is a sacred ray of creative freedom and courage who illuminates how imprisoned everyone else is in custom and conformity. The gifts of chaos For everyone in What’s Up, Doc? who isn’t Judy, disaster blooms in the wake of her footsteps. Hotel rooms burst into flame. Brawls break out. Giant plate glass windows smash to smithereens. But Judy’s chaos, being that of a Holy Fool, reveals the chaotic nature of the divine, which doesn’t necessarily mean the “good” or the “proper.” Divine powers such as the Fool’s can burst in unannounced and turn everything upside down. Judy operates at maximum Fool wattage to make the point that Fool energy can shake things up. Sometimes when that happens, what was brittle breaks, and what was resilient grows stronger. Where most of the characters in this movie see each other only in terms of the contents of their overnight cases, Judy sees what actually matters: she sees Howard. She sees a person and loves what she sees. Neither his literal nor his metaphorical baggage concerns her. What concerns her is coaxing him out of his overly heady approach to music, fixated on the far-distant past, in favor of playing real, embodied music in a very present now. Divine powers such as the Fool’s can burst in unannounced and turn everything upside down. Judy’s ability to leap joyfully at every opportunity is only possible because she inhabits the present moment so completely. This drags others into the present with her, if only to cope with the havoc she creates. She turns each moment into the wackiest possible version of itself, regardless of norms or consequences. And in so doing, she wins the day. She gets her guy. The Fool Goddess’s relentlessly foolish and divine spontaneity leads to love. The helplessness I felt watching What’s Up, Doc? in the 80s is much like the helplessness Howard experiences in Judy’s force field. But helplessness can be a prelude to some sort of surrender. Maybe to laughter and silliness, maybe to music and beauty. Maybe to the divine. Maybe Judy’s invitation is to surrender to a little daring, zest, humor, and audacity, dancing adroitly around convention and leaping into the occasional adventure. MythBlast authored by: Joanna Gardner, PhD , is a writer, mythologist, and magical realist focusing on creativity, goddesses, and wonder tales. She is the author of The Practice of Enchantment: MythBlast Essays, 2020-2024 and the lead author of Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide . Joanna serves as director of marketing and communications for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and as adjunct professor in Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Mythological Studies program. She also co-founded and co-leads the Fates and Graces , hosting webinars and workshops for mythic readers and writers. For Joanna's updates and additional publications, you are most cordially invited to visit her website at joannagardner.com . This MythBlast was inspired by Creative Mythology and the archetype of The Fool . Latest Podcast Today, we’re excited to bring you a conversation with Dr. Robert Maldonado, a pioneering voice in the intersection of psychology, spirituality, and mythology. With advanced degrees in Clinical and Counseling Psychology, Dr. Rob has dedicated his career to helping others overcome limitations and embrace spiritual transformation. As the President, Co-Founder, and Educational Director of CreativeMind, he offers a unique program that blends cutting-edge science with deep spiritual insight—bridging worlds that are often seen as separate. Dr. Rob’s work is deeply influenced by the teachings of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, two legendary thinkers who explored the mysteries of the human psyche and the power of myth. Through his practice and teachings, he invites us to uncover the transformative potential of both science and spirituality in our lives. In this episode, JCF’s Scott Neumeister sits down with Dr. Rob to explore his journey, his approach to the human mind, and the ways in which mythology has shaped his work. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Not only in the sciences but in every department of life the will and courage to credit one’s own senses and to honor one’s own decisions, to name one’s own virtues and to claim one’s own vision of truth, have been the generative forces of the new age, the enzymes of the fermentation of the wine of this great modern harvest — which is a wine, however, that can be safely drunk only by those with a courage of their own." -- Joseph Campbell The Masks of God, Vol. IV: Creative Mythology , 30 Slaying The Dragon (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter
- “This Is Madness”: C-3PO as the Neurotic Fool
Copyright: Starwars.com I hope that you had a chance to read John Bucher’s introduction to the theme of the MythBlast series in 2025. As John observes, the cinema is one of the last remaining places that transports us from the realm of the mundane into the numinous, making it very worthwhile to examine it through the lens of Joseph Campbell’s work. Exploring a different archetype every month, our writers will illuminate how each one presents itself on-screen with delicious variations while yet maintaining common characteristics that aggregate under the archetype’s umbrella. I am thrilled to be both the editor of the series and a contributor this month for The Fool. A very human droid I have chosen for the focus of my article a much-beloved character from the Star Wars Universe: C-3PO, often just called Threepio. Although technically a(n an)droid, Threepio is quite human in many respects. In fact, he and his droid sidekick, R2-D2 (Artoo), carry the bulk of the first quarter of the original 1977 movie, Episode IV: A New Hope . While we quickly grasp that Artoo and Threepio provide comic relief with their banter, by examining Threepio as The Fool we can gain a deeper appreciation for both how he functions and how he resonates with viewers. The Fool often exhibits qualities that keen audiences grasp quickly: a childlike innocence and naivete, blithe disregard for societal rules and norms, simplistic and limited worldviews, and a form of courage and carefreeness that comes from being unaware of conventions and situations. Certainly Threepio fits most of these. His wide-open eyes, combined with his mouth permanently agape, give him a constant look of wonder. His limited movement and lack of fighting capabilities make him seem as non-threatening and defenseless as a child. Threepio often can tend to pontificate, give too much detail on a subject, or not pick up on the social clues that his input or presence is not valued. From the film’s opening, he establishes a pattern of disinterest in the grand struggles of the rebels against the Empire—he worries far more about self-preservation than greater causes. Joseph Campbell famously spoke to Bill Moyers about Star Wars in the interviews that comprise The Power of Myth . Campbell at one point focuses on Darth Vader’s mask which, when removed, shows a man “who has not developed his humanity. He’s a robot” (178). In some ways, the robot Threepio is more human than Vader, in that aspects of his humanity seem developed. However, Threepio’s mask, unlike Vader’s, is fear —the expression that his face carries can be both wonder and horror. Indeed, the one very non-Fool aspect that differentiates Threepio from most Fools, is an over developed survival mechanism—his utterances such as “We’re doomed” and “This is madness” constantly portray dread at his situation. While the Tarot Fool inattentively walks over the cliffside, Threepio is hypervigilant for cliffs of all kinds: a neurotic Fool. While the Tarot Fool inattentively walks over the cliffside, Threepio is hypervigilant for cliffs of all kinds: a neurotic Fool. Holding our shared fears As much as we think of heroic protagonists as fearless, closer to the truth is that they either manage or repress their anxieties in the name of taking action. British film critic Rob Ager (on his YouTube channel Collative Learning) speaks of one of Threepio’s functions in the films: he is the one character allowed to express out loud “the negative emotional baggage that the heroes of the story have to drag about” ( “Star Wars: the hidden complexities of C3PO (character analysis) Part One,” 00:58:50 – 00:58:56). Moreover, Threepio does so with the assistance of computer-driven precision about the odds of survival or failure. In a sense, Threepio’s worry is pure . While we, the audience, tend to lean into the belief that heroes will succeed and everything will turn out alright because “that’s how heroic stories go,” Threepio’s assessments of situations are both coldly rational and bypass our own management and repression of fears about the heroes’ future victories. He functions in the films, not simply as a robot who can serve the heroes’ logistical needs in achieving their goals (something which the audience could not ), but as the deep soul’s expressions about the anxiety of survival (something the audience is sensing, whether conscious of that fact or not). One other aspect of Threepio’s embodiment of the Fool relates to the comic aspect I mentioned before. In his truth-telling and breaking of social protocols, he never conveys heaviness, anger, or hostility. This lightness of delivery makes it easy to ignore his hypervigilance and even find humor in it. While Threepio “poo-poos” the heroes’ plans as “madness,” not once is he banished from the fellowship. Campbell spoke metaphorically about this tolerance in A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living : "As you proceed through life, following your own path, birds will shit on you. Don’t bother to brush it off. Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance. Having a sense of humor saves you" (20). By allowing the flighty Threepio to do his worry-wart thing, both the other characters and the audience can laugh at and give spiritual distance to the defeatism that would cripple their enterprise. “Yes-And” courage My fellow MythBlast authors and JCF colleagues Joanna Gardner and Stephanie Zajchowski are huge proponents of the Yes-And model of holding ideas, taken from the world of improv theater. This approach allows for a tension of opposites to hold in the space of ideas and feelings. While Threepio can be seen as a “But” character in his nature, another overall purpose of his unfiltered Fool neurosis is to allow both his fellow characters and us audience members to be “Yes-And.” Yes, your concerns are valid, AND we are moving forward. And if the heroes (and we as their “confederates” in the cinema) can hold the paradox of fear and faith—with some humor to help things along—then that amplifies the heroic experience of the story. Who knew the Fool could make us laugh and feel more courageous? MythBlast authored by: Scott Neumeister is a literary scholar, author, TEDx speaker, mythic pathfinder and Editor of the MythBlast series from Tampa, Florida, where he earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of South Florida in 2018. His specialization in multiethnic American literature and mythology comes after careers as an information technology systems engineer and a teacher of English and mythology at the middle school and college levels. Scott coauthored Let Love Lead: On a Course to Freedom with Gary L. Lemons and Susie Hoeller, and he has served as a facilitator for the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Myth and Meaning book club at Literati. This MythBlast was inspired by Creative Mythology and the archetype of The Fool . Latest Podcast This lecture, recorded at the Esalen Institute in 1981, features Joseph Campbell delving into Jung’s concepts of the Anima and Animus, the shadow in psychology, and the role of myth in helping us navigate unexpected life challenges. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "As you proceed through life, following your own path, birds will shit on you. Don’t bother to brush it off. Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance. Having a sense of humor saves you." -- Joseph Campbell A Joseph Campbell Companion , 20 Parzival - Medieval Troubadour Traditions of Love (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter
- We Have Heard the Chimes at Midnight
Still from Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight (1966) Happy New Year, and thank you to all who continue to read and support JCF’s MythBlast Series. May the new year bring you all love, joy, and peace. The theme for the MythBlast series during the first month of 2025 is “The Fool at the Movies.” This is a rich vein to mine, indeed, given the cinematic contributions of great geniuses like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Groucho Marx, Madeline Kahn, Gilda Radner, and Robin Williams, to name just a few. All of them, for the most part, absurdly, chaotically, hilariously foolish. But I want to focus on an often overlooked variant of the archetype, the tragic fool. The Film Chimes at Midnight is a 1966 film written, directed by and starring Orson Welles. It's a masterpiece of a film made of loosely adapted scenes from William Shakespeare's plays, Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor that focus on the relationship between the young Prince Hal (Keith Baxter) and his roguish companion Sir John Falstaff (Welles). It is, by the way, Welles’ favorite of all his films: “It's my favorite picture, yes. If I wanted to get into heaven on the basis of one movie, that's the one I would offer up” (Estrin and Welles Orson Welles Interviews ), and more than a few critics have insisted that it is the best Shakespearean film ever made. For what it's worth, so do I. Welles had great affection for Falstaff, he may well have identified strongly with the clever, creative, “huge hill of flesh.” Certainly, they both were similarly immense (Prince Hal says Falstaff “sweats to death and lards the lean earth as he walks along”), both challenged conventional norms, loved wit, revelry, and drink; they were raconteurs of the first order (as an example, do yourself a favor and watch Orson Welles’ Sketchbook , which aired on television in the mid-1950s), and they were both painfully ejected from orbit around a world that was everything to them. Near the end of his life, Welles himself may have become something of a tragic fool, suffering a painful, humiliating fall from cinematic royalty that included drunkenly shilling Paul Masson wine in television commercials. I think that Falstaff is, perhaps, Shakespeare’s most vividly human, most fully realized and embodied figure of all the characters he imagined, and probably for that very reason, one of his most beloved. So much beloved that tradition has it that Shakespeare couldn’t bear to see Falstaff die on stage, and after seeing Henry IV Part I , Queen Elizabeth I asked Shakespeare to write The Merry Wives of Windsor , requesting that Falstaff be shown in love. I think that Falstaff is, perhaps, Shakespeare’s most vividly human, most fully realized and embodied figure of all the characters he imagined, and probably for that very reason, one of his most beloved. Falstaff Was My Tutor If I might be allowed a short digression, in the early Twenty Teens I wrote a blog called Falstaff Was My Tutor. It proved to be modestly popular; in fact at one point I was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in creative nonfiction, and some of you who followed me then may remember it. I began the blog thinking that I would share sad, funny, strange, poignant stories from the time when I, a rather callow young man, was a police officer. The blog was inspired by a friend and frequent patrol partner who, as I reflected upon his premature death, I understood to be a Fallstaffian influence: a man of vast appetites, sometimes questionable ethics, a riotously funny, self-deceptive man who often told the hard truth about the world, while struggling with the fact of seeming ill-suited for it. Having left that career, that world, behind, I foolishly identified with Prince Hal, who as king finally decided to take upon himself all the responsibilities of his station and renounce his former way of life: I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers; How ill white hairs become a fool, and jester! I have long dream'd of such a man, So surfeit-swell'd, so old, and so profane; But being awake, I do despise my dream [...] Presume not, that I am the thing I was [...] I have turn'd away my former self; So will I those that kept me company. When thou dost hear I am as I have been, Approach me; and thou shalt be as thou wast, The tutor and the feeder of my riots : Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death (emphasis is mine). I say foolishly because now, in my late middle age, I see that I have always been Falstaff. Not so much in the sense of his riotous behaviors or too much sherris-sack, food, or licentiousness, but rather in the sense of his tragic foolishness: his vulnerability, his loneliness, and his self-delusional overcompensation. How could Shakespeare not be speaking to me? Just look at my photo accompanying this post. “How ill white hairs become a fool and a jester.” But unlike Hal, I no longer despise my dream, and I attempt to incorporate it into the broader fabric of my life. That’s the thing with archetypes; we’re constituted by so many, and each one contains its own opposite which, at some time or another demands to be reckoned with. Shakespeare’s Falstaff reflects this quality, and Welles’ film depends upon this nuance. The Fool as Truth Teller Falstaff, like other Shakespearian fools, was a truth-teller. He revealed the sordid realities underlying high flown ideals like honor, duty, and patriotism. He even tells the unflinching truth about himself. When the Lord Chief Justice, a grave, important advisor to the king, scolds Falstaff, saying, “Well, the truth is, Sir John, you live in great infamy…Your means are very slender, and your waste is great.” Falstaff replies, “I would it were otherwise. I would my means were greater and my waist slender.” He knows, painfully, that he is not what he once aspired to be, and instead he finds his untapped potential in the youthful Prince Hal, who will soon be the shining sun of the realm. Traditionally, the king is the central source of life, power, and authority within the kingdom, just as the sun is the center of the solar system, providing light and warmth to all who come into his orbit, and Falstaff loves the young prince whose bright light warms his old heart. Earlier in the film his companions ask him to put his ear to the ground and listen for the approach of travelers of whom they might relieve their material goods and Falstaff—knowing that once he’s prostrate on the ground will have great difficulty rising—replies, “Have you any levers to lift me up again, being down?” But Falstaff's question seems to foreshadow a time when he will be so far down that no lever large enough could ever be found to lift him up again and he will die, killed by regret and a broken heart. And sure enough that old heart, that great ironic, comic heart, that poor, foolish heart, is broken when Henry V banishes Falstaff from his presence, a fate he can’t quite accept. In the film we’re told that Falstaff is dead, that “the King has killed his heart.” His companions can’t accept that Falstaff is dead, and because Shakespeare and Welles have given such zeal to Falstaff, such an immense, vivid vitality that theatergoers, like the aforementioned Queen Elizabeth I and those of us watching the film, have a hard time accepting it, too. Mistress Quickly insists that surely he’s not in hell, but instead, “He’s in Arthur’s bosom, if ever a man went to Arthur’s bosom.” A curious thing to say, and a number of scholars argue that being an uneducated, uncouth woman, Mistress Quickly intended to say “Abraham’s bosom” rather than Arthur’s. But I think she’s got it exactly right. Falstaff went to Arthur’s bosom, and like the once and future king, he will return when we most need him. This is the essence of a tragic fool; they live life to the fullest while knowing they will surely die—perhaps sooner rather than later since they tempt fate so often—and they diminish the influence and authority of death by laughing at it, taunting it, domesticating it, and most of all, humanizing it. The rest of us may not realize their value until they’re dead, but like Orson Welles, we love them all the more after death. The archetypal fool provides a lever large enough to lift us all out of our powerlessness, ennui, and existential dread, encouraging the rest of us to make a game of life, discovering joy, enthusiasm, and wonder in the midst of its terrifying mystery. Thanks for reading. MythBlast authored by: Bradley Olson, Ph.D. is an author, speaker, and a psychotherapist. He serves as the Publications Director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and the host of JCF's flagship podcast, Pathways With Joseph Campbell . Dr. Olson holds a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Dr. OIson is also a depth psychologist in private practice in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he has lived since 1995. Dr. Olson has graduate degrees in psychology from the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Olson offers mythic life coaching at What's Mything in Your Life ( bradleyolsonphd.com ) This MythBlast was inspired by Creative Mythology and the archetype of The Fool . Latest Podcast Today, we’re excited to bring you a conversation with Dr. Robert Maldonado , a pioneering voice in the intersection of psychology, spirituality, and mythology. With advanced degrees in Clinical and Counseling Psychology, Dr. Rob has dedicated his career to helping others overcome limitations and embrace spiritual transformation. As the President, Co-Founder, and Educational Director of CreativeMind, he offers a unique program that blends cutting-edge science with deep spiritual insight—bridging worlds that are often seen as separate. Dr. Rob’s work is deeply influenced by the teachings of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, two legendary thinkers who explored the mysteries of the human psyche and the power of myth. Through his practice and teachings, he invites us to uncover the transformative potential of both science and spirituality in our lives. In this episode, JCF’s Scott Neumeister sits down with Dr. Rob to explore his journey, his approach to the human mind, and the ways in which mythology has shaped his work. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Wisdom and foolishness are practically the same. Both are indifferent to the opinions of the world." -- Joseph Campbell A Joseph Campbell Companion , 215 The Individual Adventure - Q&A (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter
- The Beautiful Lie That Leads To Renewal
Gustav Klimt's Death and Life (1910-1915) The theme for the MythBlast Series this month is “Death and Renewal,” but we should not take for granted that these two are a happily wedded pair, that one follows the other axiomatically, nor should we think that renewal necessarily means rebirth. It might be more useful, more practical, to think of renewal as renovation, revival, or restoration—much what one would do with an old house fallen into disrepair. Renewal is derived from the Latin word renovare (to restore, to flourish once more), and we can likewise remodel our thinking, restore our reinvigorated metaphors to their proper soulful place at the heart of life, and revive our sometimes flagging energy and rediscover enthusiasm for life. Often things—including the metaphors of myth—are beautiful, not because they’re true, but because they are not. W.H. Auden’s poem “ September 1, 1939 ” contains the oft-quoted, cherished-by-many line”: “We must love one another or die.” Auden was not at all happy with this line, primarily because it simply isn’t true and moreover, as Auden later reflected, not one word of poetry—regardless of its beauty or consolation—could have prevented the Second World War, or any other cataclysm for that matter. What’s more, love doesn’t ameliorate nor, even for a moment, forstall death. To believe otherwise is a comforting illusion of the kind without which, Nietzsche would say, we might die of the truth. Great Deceptions Great poetry is often a great deception, and often the greatest poetry considers the coldest truths deceptively, as if mythopoesis had a mind of its own with an intention to comfort or steel the reader just enough to be able to finally face what is inescapably, dreadfully, perhaps even humiliatingly true. Auden later changed the famous line to “We must love one another and die.” More true, I suppose, but less poetically powerful, so he got rid of it entirely. Much later, friends convinced him to reinsert the line in a late book of selected poems. Ultimately, restoring the line proved irresistible because—if I have learned any single thing having been a student of unadulterated human nature throughout the course of my life—we are utterly besotted with the beautiful lie. Facing the unalterable facts of life is difficult, especially facts like death, which seem to offer no consolation of understanding, no comprehension of what death is or what, exactly, happens to us when we die. In their inevitability, however, in their stubborn resistance to inquiry, those unalterable facts can reconcile us however surprisingly, probably always uneasily, to their inscrutable reality. Auden’s wrestling with seven words in one of his most famous poems reflects how much he, like all of us, would like to avoid certain inescapable mortal realities, regardless of their inevitability. Nevertheless, through a clever bit of metaphorical or artistic jujitsu, the beautiful lie, Picasso says, “...makes us realize the truth. At least the truth that is given us to understand,” and by deploying it, Auden gives us the possibility of entering into a profound truth in such a way that all our resistances to it fall away. If we live long enough with the idea that we must love one another or die, we will inexorably be led to the conclusion that we cannot avoid death; not even love can nullify its cold, all-consuming, mortal embrace. The cracks in the foundation of the beautiful lie quickly become apparent: people often love deeply, fully, sometimes with abandon, yet still have to face death—their own, or worse, that of their beloved. Death’s reality, its pervasively singular presence, cannot be denied. The bliss of love may obscure the inconvenient truths of mortality, but sadly it will not alter them; nor will a beautiful metaphor repeal the force of natural law. Immortal Longing “Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have immortal longings in me ” (My emphasis). In Shakespeare's play Antony and Cleopatra (5.2.280-81), Cleopatra utters these lines just a few moments before she places a poisonous snake to her breast, releasing its venom into her body, and dying. Most of us, I suspect, would be in agreement with the semblance of her sentiment; when thoughts of death occupy our minds, most of us long for immortality, too. One may understandably understand her as literally longing for immortality; she’s expressing a self-conscious wish not to die. One may also read something else in her statement and conclude that she’s telling us that it’s longing itself that is immortal. Longing is much more than mere desire. Desires can be fulfilled, sometimes even achieved, but longing is never completely satisfied. Even when we’ve achieved long-cherished goals, when we’ve acquired what we’ve only dared dream of, what remains is a nagging sense of incompleteness or emptiness as though we expected to feel something more, find some sort of all-encompassing satisfaction, to finally feel complete. Longing is fundamental to our all-too-human constitution: we long for that which cannot be humanly attained, for that which cannot be humanly grasped. We long for something that reaches beyond our human existence—some transformative force that impels us beyond human limitations. Ultimately, I think that we long for a fundamentally aesthetic experience, the experience of beauty and transcendence to which mortal flesh can hold to but for a moment. In order to have the illuminating experience, however, we must follow the beautiful lie to its ultimate conclusion. Beauty is the product of an alchemy of impermanence: our own on the one hand and on the other, the rarity, the strangeness, the fragility of the beautiful. The aesthetic impulses within ourselves bind, for a transcendent moment, to the same qualities in the regarded beauty and for a split-second, we are transported outside of ourselves. We experience a longed-for moment of awakening that simultaneously obliges us to understand that the beautiful is also ephemeral, and the longing we must perpetually live with returns to us with the formidable realization that deep beauty is a regenerative fugitive from conscious intention or will, even from death. Ultimately, I think that we long for a fundamentally aesthetic experience, the experience of beauty and transcendence to which mortal flesh can hold to but for a moment. Its transience in no way diminishes the renewing, revitalizing impact of beauty—in fact it defines it. The 14th century Zen poet Yoshida Kenko in his wonderfully charming book called Essays in Idleness wrote: “If we lived forever, never to vanish like the dews of Adashino, never to fade like the crematory smoke on Toribeyama, men would hardly feel the beauty of things.” So if it is, in fact, our longing that is immortal, it is still possible to experience the eternal, to realize immortality in a significant, life-changing, evanescent moment of aesthetic rapture. From such a transcendent experience, mere seconds in terms of ordinary time, we “...see a world in a grain of sand And heaven in a wildflower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour...” (William Blake, Songs of Innocence ). Death Opens to Life Mortality and death are the primary organizing principle of human life. Material possessions, success, fame, and embodied power are all subordinate to the knowledge that we will one day die. In Myths to Live By , Joseph Campbell writes, “This recognition of mortality and the requirement to transcend it is the first great impulse to mythology” (17). Apparently the long contemplation of eternal nothingness, or worse, eternal suffering, tends to focus the mind on discovering ways to deny such an eventuality. But more specifically, and from my perspective a more salutary thought, is that the recognition of mortality is the first great mythopoetic impulse, whose aim it is to find beauty, poetry, and narrative epistemologies that make the project of living a human life under the shadow of death not just bearable, but irresistibly appealing just as it is, on its—life’s—own terms. (As an aside, Professor Campbell touches on this idea in his lecture called “Man and His Gods,” which is featured on the most recent Pathways With Joseph Campbell podcast episode https://pathways-with-joseph-campbell.simplecast.com ). It is death itself that makes life beautiful, and perhaps surprisingly, it is death that makes life bearable. Living consciously with the fact of death renews our spirit, our compassion, our feeling for life. In that affirming feeling for life there is peace, a sense of order, propriety, and a heroically steadfast tenderness towards life itself. Finding beauty in the living and dying of life remains, after all, the first duty of the living. Thanks for reading, MythBlast authored by: Bradley Olson, Ph.D. is an author, speaker, and a psychotherapist. He serves as the Publications Director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and the host of JCF's flagship podcast, Pathways With Joseph Campbell . Dr. Olson holds a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Dr. OIson is also a depth psychologist in private practice in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he has lived since 1995. Dr. Olson has graduate degrees in psychology from the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Olson offers mythic life coaching at What's Mything in Your Life ( bradleyolsonphd.com ) This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 6, and The Hero's Journey Latest Podcast In this episode, we’re pleased to welcome Phil Cousineau —a modern mythologist, storyteller, and inspirational speaker whose life and work are deeply rooted in the world of myth and the wisdom of Joseph Campbell. Cousineau’s journey through mythology is woven into every aspect of his career, from his prolific writing and filmmaking to his role as a teacher and speaker. His fascination with mythology began at an early age and has led him around the globe, exploring the intersections of culture, art, and the human spirit. Over his decades-long career, Cousineau has become an influential voice in translating ancient myths into relevant insights for the modern world, emphasizing what he calls “the omnipresent influence of myth in modern life.” In this episode, he and JCF’s John Bucher delve into Cousineau’s wide-ranging work as an author, filmmaker, and consultant, and explore his relationship with Joseph Campbell. So get comfortable and enjoy this conversation with John Bucher and Phil Cousineau. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Hearing the song that is beyond that of your own individual life cycle is the thing that opens you to wisdom. You can hear it in your life, interpreting it, reading it, not in terms of the calamities or boons of your individual existence, but as a message of what life is." -- Joseph Campbell Myth and Meaning , 16 Kundalini Yoga: Flying Elephants that Support the World (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter
- Experience the Power of Myth at the Movies
Myth is a holy ghost, moving effortlessly through boundaries while making sacred appearances that sometimes seem to come out of nowhere. It moves as a zeitgeist that has always resisted being confined to a single expression. It defies linear history, geographic borders, and profane attempts to capture and confine it. For some, it primarily manifested in oral tales; for others, it appeared in written words; and still, for others, it has been revealed through images and symbols. In Creative Mythology , the final volume of his Masks of God series, Joseph Campbell explores images and symbols, stating, “Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies or reason and coercion” (6). It's perhaps no wonder that images and symbols are carried into our eyes on something as delicate as light itself. Campbell continues discussing this fragile relationship between symbols and light, saying, “The light-world modes of experience and thought were late, very late, developments in the biological prehistory of our species. Even in the life-course of the individual, the opening of the eyes to light occurs only after all the main miracles have been accomplished of the building of a living body of already functioning organs, each with its inherent aim … though our eyes and what they witness may persuade us ...” Hearing Campbell speak of light passing through the opening of the eyes and persuading our beliefs, I cannot help but think of how this also occurs in cinema. Dream palaces and cathedrals The moving images of myth have always struck me in ways that I haven’t always had language to describe. As a young boy, I was mesmerized by Star Wars, though not just by the spaceships and the Wookies. They transported me into a world much larger than the Texas landscape I grew up in. Entering that dark room, sitting with strangers, eating popcorn, and drinking soda felt magical, transcendent, and almost ritualistic. I wasn’t just transported into a different time in a galaxy far, far away. I was transported into something that felt beyond the experiences of reality and consciousness I had previously known. Now, years later, I have come to recognize the similarities between theaters, temples, and cathedrals. All involve the coming together of the community to participate in spoken and unspoken rituals. The experience in the theater was not unlike my experience each Sunday at church. The bread and the wine were reflected in the soda and the popcorn, echoing the ancient practice of buying ritual corn before entering the temple. The movie theaters of the 1940s explicitly recognized the mythic connection, often referring to their venues as “Dream Palaces,” referencing the fact that both dreams and movies take place in the dark and often outside the conscious experience. Campbell famously described the dream as a personalized myth and the myth as the depersonalized dream (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, pg. 19). The 6200-seat Roxy Theater in New York City claimed to be “the cathedral of the motion picture” and offered what was akin to a religious experience for many attendees—an ecstatic event that inspired awe. That ecstasy came from the movies themselves and the surroundings in which they were presented—the cinema. Since its inception, the cinematic experience has been recognized as a container for something larger than itself. The art form of cinema is a container for the archetypes of ancient myth. Cinematic sacred spaces The movie theater remains a place where we go to enter another world. It was (and maybe still is) one of the only places you could go and sit in total darkness with strangers, experiencing something together. It was (and maybe still is) one of the only places where it was okay to cry in public. These factors, and dozens of others, made movie theaters special and even sacred for some. As a culture, we went to experience something we couldn’t experience by ourselves at home. When society began watching movies in their homes and then on their phones, noticeable confusion set in about that type of space the movie theater was. It became ordinary, less special, and no longer sacred, and in turn, people started behaving as if it was not a special place anymore—a reality that has kept many away from theaters in recent times. But I would suggest that for those with eyes to see it, cinema still holds all the power it ever did, even though we as a culture have slowly stopped recognizing it in its fullness. Throughout its brief history, cinema has played a crucial role in identity formation for many and helped others negotiate significant changes in their identity. Films have reflected who we believed we were at the time of their creation and traced our transformation from one “world” to another. For these reasons and so many more, we have decided, here at the Joseph Campbell Foundation, to theme our 2025 MythBlast series around an invitation to experience the power of myth at the movies. We believe that in this age of screens, great value can be found in allowing those screens to act as mirrors, reflecting who we are and who we could be. We believe those reflections can lead us toward deeper insights into some of the most profound mythic questions that can be asked—what it means to be human, who we truly are, how we can experience life fully—and countless others. Over the coming months, writers and thinkers in this series will explore stories, characters, archetypes, and motifs of the screen that have made an impact on them individually or on us collectively. We hope that by better understanding mythic ideas through the lens of cinema, unforeseen understandings about our journeys might also be revealed to us all. So, we invite you to sit back, get comfortable, grab your popcorn, and experience the power of myth at the movies with us in 2025. MythBlast authored by: John Bucher is a renowned mythologist and story expert who has been featured on the BBC , the History Channel , the LA Times , The Hollywood Reporter and on numerous other international outlets . He serves as Executive Director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and is a writer, podcaster, storyteller, and speaker. He has worked with government and cultural leaders around the world as well as organizations such as HBO, DC Comics, Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon, A24 Films, Atlas Obscura, and The John Maxwell Leadership Foundation, bringing his deep understanding of narrative and myth to a wide array of audiences. He is the author of six influential books on storytelling, including the best-selling Storytelling for Virtual Reality, named by BookAuthority as one of the best storytelling books of all time. John has worked with New York Times Best Selling authors, YouTube influencers, Eisner winners, Emmy winners, Academy Award nominees, magicians, and cast members from Saturday Night Live . Holding a PhD in Mythology & Depth Psychology, he integrates scholarly insights with practical storytelling techniques, exploring the profound connections between myth, culture, and personal identity. His expertise has helped shape compelling narratives across various platforms, enriching the way stories are told and experienced globally. This MythBlast was inspired by Creative Mythology and the archetype of The Fool . Latest Podcast This episode of Pathways with Joseph Campbell, titled " The Harmony and Discord of Religions ," was recorded at Brandeis University in 1958. At the time, Joseph Campbell was 54 years old and nearing the completion of Primitive Mythology, the first volume of his Masks of God series. In this lecture, Campbell offers an affirmative defense of comparative methodologies, exploring both the commonalities and differences among the world’s religious traditions. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "I think that the movie is the perfect medium for mythological messages. The medium is so plastic and pliable and magic things can happen. And then the combination, you know, of fantastic landscape and possible modes of action and voyaging that we can hardly conceive of in good solid terms ... That’s a mythological realm, and movies could handle this kind of thing." -- Joseph Campbell The Wisdom of Joseph Campbell (© 1997 New Dimensions Foundation) Tape 3, Side 1 The Hero with a Thousand Faces (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter
- Standing Still: The Soulstice of the Dark Night
Unsplash The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation. When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed. Joseph Campbell, Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion The Joseph Campbell Foundation is publishing this MythBlast the day after the winter solstice of 2024 (for Northern Hemisphere residents). When it happens, no matter one’s hemisphere, this monumental event in the sky manifests as the sun appears to stop its retreat down the dawn and dusk horizons—the term solstice coming from sol, sun, and sistere, to stop. It also marks the longest night of the year, and although the winter has officially only begun and more cold times lie ahead, the turning of the sun to higher angles signals that days will soon increase in length, darkness will retreat, and warmth will return. While those in equatorial regions miss this aspect of the changing length of days and temperatures, most of us have the yearly, lived experience of sunlight lessening, weather cooling, and vegetation withering and dying before the opposite occurs. This sky event and longest night have always reminded me (in the as-above-so-below way) of a phenomenon termed “the dark night of the soul.” This phrase, coined by the Spanish poet and mystic St. John of the Cross , has come to equally signify a distressing, troublesome life season and a subsequently transformative spiritual episode. In view of the MythBlast themes this month, a dark night can be a death of sorts, especially since loss and endings of all kinds quite often accompany it. The renewal theme is not guaranteed, however, as simple recovery from this period might not evoke any newness, only grief and despair (all of these themes have been skillfully addressed by my fellow MythBlast writers this month). The transformative quality of the soul’s dark night must be evoked through intentional contemplation and meaning making. Viral impairment: mono(litihic) weakness Of the times in my life that I can unequivocally label as a dark night of the soul, one was my experience of mononucleosis. While the onset of my infection with the Epstein-Barr virus felt like other viral illnesses (producing fever, body aches, fatigue), as time progressed the weakening of my muscles overtook all other symptoms. I gradually found walking short distances tiring, and soon even the standing rest that I was forced to take more frequently didn’t renew my energy. When speaking, I started randomly failing to produce sound—I would simply go silent mid-sentence. Prying open sealed jars or bags, never before a problem, became difficult and then impossible. I needed to remain in bed almost for the duration of my waking hours, with only trips to the bathroom and kitchen possible. At my lowest point, I actually would roll off my bed as I could only to crawl to my destination; walking had become that difficult. I hadn’t realized how much my life and ideology leading up to this point had been founded on the assumption of bodily autonomy, physical power, and (directly influenced by Emerson’s essay as a teen) self-reliance. No prior illness or injury had placed me for so long into the category of disabled. I could not have even imagined myself in such a category. Yet there I was, with no say in the matter and no path out of it. In Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way through Life’s Ordeals, Thomas Moore conveys this feeling of helplessness and the encounter with something so beyond one’s normal way of facing the world. During the dark night there is no choice but to surrender control, give in to unknowing, and stop and listen to whatever signals of wisdom might come along. It’s a time of enforced retreat and perhaps unwilling withdrawal … a profound initiation into a realm that nothing in the culture, so preoccupied with external concerns and material success, prepares you for. Many of Moore’s words echo the events of the fall-into-winter progress of the sun and seasons: “surrender,” “stop” (as in sun-stop/solstice), “enforced retreat,” “a profound initiation.” And in my case, the physical component reflected a sort of autumn and then winter of my body, which evoked the darkness within my soul. This was a soulstice—an enforced standing still of my physical and spiritual aspects. This was a soul stice—an enforced standing still of my physical and spiritual aspects. Gifts of the night: making meaning in the dark Campbell regularly addressed the need for darkness as a precedent to light/enlightenment. Aside from the epigraph of this essay, one of his most-quoted affirmations concerning this concept is: “It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life … The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you were looking for” ( Reflections on the Art of Living, 24). Somehow, these night-evoking places—the abyss, the cave—are both tomb and womb, both a death and a renewal, as is the renowned Belly of the Whale in the hero’s journey. In the case of my bout of mononucleosis, what treasures of life were there in it for me? What was I looking for, even if unconsciously? Cliché though it may be, we only get to know the full experience of life through contrasts, and my foray into the abyss of disability galvanized my appreciation for all the abilities I’d enjoyed and taken for granted all my life. To move, to walk without tiring—these were not givens, they were gifts. Even more deeply, I found myself, as I began to recover some strength, at the grocery store for the first time in a long while and moving quite slowly. Suddenly, I noticed the others there who were moving slowly, people who before I might have simply blown past or even gotten annoyed at for their sluggishness. I unexpectedly realized that I had been “erasing” or, worse, disparaging fellow humans who were outside of my energy/strength paradigm. The treasure of life I had found was the feeling of connection with and compassion for more people because my experience had allowed me to live in their world. So as to approach the dark nights of the outer or inner world more mindfully, we can ask ourselves: what aspects of life-as-it-is has this loss or deprivation made me appreciate more? What new segment of humanity is now my “tribe” because of it? What qualities has this “initiation,” as Moore calls it, evoked in me, unbidden though the experience was? Only through careful contemplation can any experience of the dark acquire the power of the death and renewal that Campbell envisions. MythBlast authored by: Scott Neumeister is a literary scholar, author, TEDx speaker, mythic pathfinder and Editor of the MythBlast series from Tampa, Florida, where he earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of South Florida in 2018. His specialization in multiethnic American literature and mythology comes after careers as an information technology systems engineer and a teacher of English and mythology at the middle school and college levels. Scott coauthored Let Love Lead: On a Course to Freedom with Gary L. Lemons and Susie Hoeller, and he has served as a facilitator for the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Myth and Meaning book club at Literati. This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 6, and The Hero's Journey Latest Podcast This bonus episode, titled The Birth of the Savior , was recorded in 1962 at WNET, a PBS member station in Newark, New Jersey, serving the New York City area. In this lecture, Joseph Campbell examines the mythology of the "savior" across cultures, with a particular focus on the image of the Christ child. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be—if we are to experience long survival—a continuous 'recurrence of birth' ('palingenesia') to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death." -- Joseph Campbell The Hero with a Thousand Faces , 11 - 12 The Circle (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter
- Death and Renewal: A Metaphor for Approaching Metaphor
Death Valley by Pedro Szekely Death: the good version and the bad version As I love telling my fellow associates and colluders in myth: “If death’s not your favorite part of this stuff, then you’re just not studying hard enough.” Granted, my zealous ultimatums have been known to prompt concern—especially from the more literal-minded—who then take steps to deescalate my passion through masterfully rendered rebuttals cloaked in neutral tones like: “I don’t think so” or “Maybe you should sit down for a minute?” or “Here, have some of this non-caffeinated herbal tea.” I gladly comply because I see the unconscious affirmation concealed in their reactions. They are all reducible to notions of death and underworldly directions whether through a nonplussed disagreement intentionally engineered to have as little to do with the matter (cf., the realm of the living) as possible, or through a striving toward calmness, stillness—an out, so to speak, from the heated blood of life for which the shades of Hades so yearn in the Odyssey . Oh, the irony. For once one gets past its literal face, there’s something about how the content of and around death deepens downward (and concurrently grows upward) the more one looks at it, watches it, reflects on it—something about its fertile richness, its dark mystery that is so present and necessary to the fullness of psyche. Technically the full topic is “death and renewal,” but as far as mythology’s concerned, renewal is the inseparable complement and completion to death. More pressing for the moment, however, is all this glib talk, my light tossing around of such a heavy term. Precisely what makes “death” so amenable and easy on my tongue is simply the notion that I am talking here about metaphorical death, which means I am encountering the concept of death through the innumerable attributes and entailments of whichever sources are fitting comparisons (e.g., sunsets, waning moons, winter, sleep, etc.). Let that foundational fact sink in, please. For surely there is that other death, literal death—the kind we read about in headlines, and that we all have witnessed one way or another, and been touched by. I mean the kind of death that we have crumbled before on those ruinous occasions when it came and took everything and left in its wake not a thing but the poignantly tangible absence of what once was present and dear and warm and suddenly, irrevocably gone. I will not presume to investigate this literal version—a separate thing altogether—before which I cover my mouth, lower my head, and am silent. Coming to life through metaphor Meanwhile, back to the metaphor, which presents a very different perspective and which renders a depth of experience by providing contexts of association through relationships in place of denotative definitions. Before proceeding, let’s do a quick refresh on metaphor so we can sate the logos (our trusty and necessary threshold guardian) and get on with the mythos… Simply put, a metaphor works by making a comparison between two things (and a “thing” can be an image, an action, or a concept), in which attributes are borrowed from one thing (the source ) and applied to another thing (the target ). On a deeper level, however, attributes are not borrowed from only the source itself, but from the “domain” of that source—meaning, from that source’s whole environment . This includes all the other phenomena that inhabit that same environment and all the relationships that the source has with those other phenomena! This very complex network of relationships ( entailments ) within a particular source-domain is then mapped onto the equally complex domain of a target. Thus metaphor is not just a comparison of one thing to another thing, but a comparison of the innumerable relationships within one thing’s “life” (to employ a type of metaphor called “personification”) to the equally innumerable relationships within another thing’s life. In short, metaphor puts relationships into relationship with each other. Whew, that was hard work. But don’t worry, there’s more… As an example, one can say that a sunset is a metaphor for death—or even an archetype for death, as it is seen, for example, as marking the beginning of the sun god’s journey through the “twelve hours” of the Ancient Egyptian underworld. For our purposes here, archetypes are simply metaphors that are universal, metaphors that register across cultures. As Jung reminds us, “An archetype expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors” ( The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious , 157). Whether we call it metaphor or archetype, the many entailments that accompany a sunset can easily be applied to the concept of death: a sunset is a transitioning event that eventually ends; a sunset sinks down into a horizon and disappears; a sunset is a thing of warmth that becomes cold, a thing of light that becomes dark. And speaking of entailments within domains, “light” is a subcategory of the broader category of sunsets. Within this subcategory, light is (independently) a metaphor for “consciousness” and for “being alive.” Perpetual depth in metaphor If I may take things one step further, let me suggest that metaphors are not the one-way journeys of entailments from a source to a target. Rather, metaphors are simultaneously the reciprocal journeys of entailments from the target back to the source. Why is this important? Because it emphasizes a chief concern of individuated consciousness: Relationship —or, worded differently: “interaction with the cosmos that an individuated consciousness finds itself in.” Moreover this concurrent reciprocity imagines a dialogue between source and target. Unlike the monologues of literal fact that simply put a bow on the matter and end it, dialogues iterate. They actually “go” somewhere—as in two feet working in tandem, striding, the one and then the other, carrying the attention of the witness (i.e., us) deeper and deeper into the ever-unfolding terrain of their perpetual interaction. And this, like all things associative and connotative, renders experience to the witness because the attributes and entailments (which, metaphorically speaking, are the contents of the conversation that the source and target pass back and forth to each other) are never captured . Rather, their perpetual dialogue summons responses and associations from the witness, and so the metaphor is encountered and experienced as living, as protean. In the field of life, everything is relative, encountered and experienced through comparison. The path of the living metaphor simply goes on and on, deeper and deeper towards transcendence and (I like to think) backlit by the pure energy of being that inexplicably emits from transcendence. The only thing that can stop this emittance and perpetual deepening is literal thinking which shifts the perspective from relationships to isolation, from connotative to denotative. And denotation is an experiential dead-end—it is an intellectual solution that stops shy of transcendence. Sure, the connotation never reaches transcendence, either. But unlike the denotation, it does not shut it out completely. Metaphors cease to be metaphors when they become denotative, when the dialogue ends, when the associations borne by comparison become facts, when figurative thinking becomes literal, when “raining cats and dogs” summons naught but the concept of heavy rain (and leaves neither the images nor the ideas of lovely pets anywhere in mind). Fittingly, these are called dead metaphors, more popularly known as clichés: dead bodies or husks of words over which we might as well throw some dirt, some flowers, mumble something or other, and go back to our cars. Maybe a real metaphor will sprout in the spring. With all that in mind, let’s take a moment to appreciate Joseph Campbell’s “new” definition of myth: “My definition of myth now is: a metaphor transparent to transcendence … Mythology opens the world so that it becomes transparent to something that is beyond speech, beyond words, in short, to what we call transcendence. If the metaphor closes in on itself [i.e., becomes literal] then it has closed the transcendence; it's no longer mythological. It's distortion” ( The Hero’s Journey , 40). And so, a death-and-renewal metaphor that can be applied as an effective approach to metaphor: When we die to the confining urge of literalism, we are renewed in the living spaciousness of metaphor and myth. When we die to the confining urge of literalism, we are renewed in the living spaciousness of metaphor and myth. A bird and a stream Here is something that happened to me a few days ago while I was writing this essay in the mountains. I could call it a small myth about death and renewal. I will not explicate, I will not kill the metaphor or the myth. Instead, I leave you to your associations, the only way they can be: Living and as they are. Hopefully all that metaphor-math above has groomed the trail for frictionless passage to that special kind of experience that Campbell spoke of—the kind that has a little transcendence coming through. Anyway, I was walking through 10 degrees Fahrenheit along a ploughed path beside a stream cutting through several feet of snow, edged on both shores by sheets of ice protruding like shelves over the busy water. And then there was this bird, a songbird, about the size of a baseball standing on the far sheet looking into the black glassy current. To my horror the lovely creature just hopped into the water and disappeared. Moments later it reappeared, emerging out of the icy water. A flurry of wings, and it was back on its ice sheet. Then back into the water again, and I mean underwater . This went on for some time and I thought, “Well this is fitting content for my essay: a death-and-renewal metaphor wrought not of words nor of concepts, but of ice and feathers, sunlight and snow.” It was my first encounter with the American dipper. Obviously, my new favorite bird. 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 6, and The Hero's Journey Latest Podcast In this episode, recorded in 1974, Joseph Campbell explores the relationship between humans and their gods. The lecture was given just two years after Campbell's retirement from Sarah Lawrence College and five years after the publication of the final volume in his Masks of God series. Host Bradley Olson introduces the lecture and provides commentary at the conclusion. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Life is but a mask worn on the face of death. And is death, then, but another mask? "How many can say,' asks the Aztec poet, 'that there is, or is not, a truth beyond?" -- Joseph Campbell The Mythic Image , 160 The Eternal Principle (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter
- "No More Horizons"?
Still from 1998's The Truman Show, directed by Peter Weir. © Paramount Pictures This month’s MythBlast topics include: “death and renewal,” “the Hero’s Journey” and “horizons.” Whew. Now there’s a tricky little puzzle for a winter’s game of connect-the-dots. Get some hot chocolate, and let’s see if we can fit these together. Death and renewal Sometimes during the calendar year, metaphors put on their boots and stomp into consciousness. Here in the northern hemisphere we’re enjoying the darkest time of year, just before Sol returns to light up and renew the manger of our hopes. When it comes to Death and Renewal, the Winter Solstice is easily one of those times. Horizons Trickier. Whenever I get into a pickle trying to figure something out, I start by digging into the etymology of whatever it is, and “horizon” has a weirdly contrary genealogy. The word derives from the Greek word horos, stones used to mark boundaries. So, technically, the horizon marks a border. A lot of borders, some with barbed wire, lie between us and the New-Year-of-our-lives. The most imposing ones seem continually out of reach, however, rolling away from us like the rainbow’s end, out there at the edge of our comprehension. But while we’re used to thinking of horizons as something forever in the distance, they’re still borders, and we still stumble into them–a barrier we thought we’d never even approach can turn out to be, surprisingly right there in front of us. Borders can be psychological or temporal or geographical–they can even be gastronomical, if you consider “getting through dinner with some of your relatives” a line you have to cross every year. The hero’s journey Arguably, after getting past the initial threshold guardians, every initiation on the Path is a kind of death and renewal, a doorway that once marked a limit, the horizon of what we knew or believed. In real life a lot of these initiatory stepping stones can seem impossibly distant or impossible to cross: will I ever find a job I love? Will I ever find my people? Will I ever get out of school? Stuff like that. Personally, I was afraid for a while that I’d never fall in love, it was always out there in the receding distance … and then . I got run over by Blitzen. Oops, wrong metaphor. Anyway, you know what I mean. When I think about horizons, I think about The Truman Show, the movie with Jim Carrey where he plays a guy raised entirely inside a huge artificial world as the subject of a highly-rated “real life” television show. He doesn’t know he’s spent his life inside a huge set until, one day, he overcomes his fears, sails across what he’d taken to be the ocean, and bumps into the horizon. Thump. It was a surprise. After that discovery Truman had to leave the world he knew and venture out to meet … well, the rest of the world. Imagine the collisions of expectation and reality. In a sense, we’re all in the same boat. Campbell had some thoughts about the loss of horizons in the current era, and the loss of any mythological compass to help us navigate. He wrote: There were formerly horizons within which people lived and thought and mythologized. There are now no more horizons. And with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples but also of their mythologies. ... That is just what we are experiencing; and we are riding it: riding it to a new age, a new birth, a totally new condition of mankind—to which no one anywhere alive today can say that he has the key, the answer, the prophecy, to its dawn.” ( Myths to Live By , 254) He has a point. It’s a constant theme for Campbell: our mythology puts us into relationship with the universe, but when the universe (and thus, our understanding of the universe) changes, our myths need to change as well. When the sources of our traditional mythological discourse have been washed away by science–when God and the angels have been chased out of heaven–our understanding of ourselves seems lost in a boundless universe, one without a North Star. Our relation to that universe, as well as the meaning attached to that relation, seems to recede into an infinite distance. I don’t know what the solution is and Campbell is right: no one alive today has the answer to this question. But we’re all seeing the collisions and we can prepare for them. every initiation on the Path is a kind of death and renewal, a doorway that once marked a limit, the horizon of what we knew or believed. Crossing horizons Thinking about horizons as boundary stones puts some of this into perspective. A boundary is not a thing in itself, although we often think of it that way: as a fence or barbed wire or a line in the sand. But that’s just what it looks like, not what it is. A boundary is really a zone where two territories meet, a line of mediation between ourselves and an often frightening Otherness. Historically a border is where our territory meets their territory. Now, if the relations are good, all border crossings are an occasion for happy and congenial trade and interaction. If relations are unfriendly, or yet to be established, the boundary can pose a threat or an occasion for conflict–which is why we say that boundaries “mark” territory. “Mark” is derived from Mars, the Roman god of war and the god who, naturally, oversaw boundaries between territories. There’s some useful mythology: the god of war oversaw boundaries and borders. This much is still true today, geographically but also psychologically, philosophically, and metaphorically. One thing we can know about a future without horizons is that we’ll bump into new ones, both out there on The Final Frontier but also inwardly, in the conflict between the self you think you are and the Self revealed to you over time as a result of your pilgrimage through life. No Horizons? Nope. New Horizons. 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's Journey Latest Podcast In this episode, we’re pleased to welcome Phil Cousineau —a modern mythologist, storyteller, and inspirational speaker whose life and work are deeply rooted in the world of myth and the wisdom of Joseph Campbell. Cousineau’s journey through mythology is woven into every aspect of his career, from his prolific writing and filmmaking to his role as a teacher and speaker. His fascination with mythology began at an early age and has led him around the globe, exploring the intersections of culture, art, and the human spirit. Over his decades-long career, Cousineau has become an influential voice in translating ancient myths into relevant insights for the modern world, emphasizing what he calls “the omnipresent influence of myth in modern life.” In this episode, he and JCF’s John Bucher delve into Cousineau’s wide-ranging work as an author, filmmaker, and consultant, and explore his relationship with Joseph Campbell. So get comfortable and enjoy this conversation with John Bucher and Phil Cousineau. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Out of perfection, nothing can be made. Every process involves breaking something up. The earth must be broken to bring forth life. If the seed does not die, there is no plant. Bread results from the death of wheat." -- Joseph Campbell A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living , 19 Kundalini Yoga: Yoking to the Source of Consciousness (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter
- De Profundis Clamavi Ad Te: Transforming Dark Emotions into Art
The theme for the MythBlast Series this month is The Message of the Myth: Art and Artists, so I’d like to take a look at transforming emotion into art, particularly those emotions we are reluctant to express or even acknowledge to ourselves, let alone to others. So let me first say this as unambiguously as I can, if you’re struggling with depression, reach out to your doctor, to a therapist, to a loved one who can support you to find the right treatment for your depression. What I want to explore in this essay is what Sigmund Freud understood as common unhappiness; Fernando Pessoa called it disquiet; William Wordsworth heard the still, sad music of humanity. In his 1895 book, Studies on Hysteria, Freud wrote this: When I have promised my patients help or improvement by means of a cathartic treatment I have often been faced by this objection: “Why, you tell me yourself that my illness is probably connected with my circumstances and the events of my life. You cannot alter these in any way. How do you propose to help me, then?” And I have been able to make this reply: “No doubt fate would find it easier than I do to relieve you of your illness. But you will be able to convince yourself that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a mental life that has been restored to health you will be better armed against that unhappiness.” ( Studies on Hysteria , Vol. 2, 270) Transforming hysterical misery into common unhappiness is no small thing. What Freud called hysterical misery is a defensive response to the awareness, conscious or not, that there is so much life one cannot even begin to live it all. For the hysteric, life has become cumbersome, incomprehensible, and in some curious way, unspeakable; it’s impossible to talk about. The unwillingness to accept life on its own terms creates the intense psychological suffering Freud describes. Transforming such abject misery, becoming “better armed against that unhappiness” may be hard to imagine, but such a transformation is where the art comes in. In King Lear , Shakespeare tells us that “When we are born, we cry that we have come to this great stage of fools” (Scene IV, Act 6). We cry because we have indeed come into this world of fools, and ourselves not least among them; we cry because we have won the role of a human being in the great play of life, and whether it is a tragedy or a farce is, it seems to me, entirely up to us. Art as epiphany In his late work “Art as Revelation,” a section in his unfinished magnum opus The Historical Atlas of World Mythology, Campbell discusses the effects of “proper art” upon the individual: “One is held, on the contrary, in aesthetic arrest, a moment of sensational (aesthetic) contemplation, as before a recognized revelation, or in Joyce’s language, an ‘epiphany’” (p. 19). The key then, as I see it, is to approach our lives, all of our experiences no matter how prosaic or chaotic, all our fears, our griefs, our pain, as well our joys, as we would approach a great work of art. The Raft of the Medusa. Painting by Théodore Géricault, circa 1819 (Louvre Museum, Paris) Théodore Gericault’s painting, The Raft of Medusa , hangs in the Louvre Museum, and I admit I lingered looking at this painting for the better part of a morning. The Mona Lisa hangs in a room not far away, and laying eyes upon her requires patience, as great crowds fill the accordion-like rope lines in the room, cameras at the ready, straining to get a glimpse of this legendary woman before the allotted fifteen seconds or so of viewing time are up and docents move you along. She is beautiful enough, certainly, but she’s not the best painting in the museum; I don’t think she’s even the best Davinci in the Louvre, and like certain reality TV stars, she’s famous mostly for being famous, and no particular epiphany occurred from my encounter with her. But that’s not the case with Gericault’s masterpiece, the epiphany accompanying it virtually reaches out and seizes one by the throat. First, it’s immense, at 16 feet by 23 feet, its figures are life-size, and the figures in the foreground are more than life-size. Because of its enormity, the detail the artist renders is astonishing; the fear, despair, starvation and suffering are viscerally recognizable, etched onto the life sized-faces of the literally overwhelmed, desperate, ship-wrecked survivors clinging to a makeshift raft, while the two men attending the dead reflect a dejected futility. Looking at this painting I immediately understood Joyce’s remarks about epiphany, gripped as I was by a profound, involuntary sense of pity. James Joyce's theory of art In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Joyce lays out his theory of art: “Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer” (Chapter 5). Pity is not an emotion of implicit superiority of the kind which Mr. T referenced when he uttered his catch phrase, “I pity the fool…” Rather, pity is a sympathetic sorrow evoked by the suffering of others. Pity is compassion, pity is empathy, pity is pathos—literally, what befalls one—that projects the observer into the world the art portrays. The Raft of Medusa certainly invites both pity and pathos—not just for the poor survivors on the raft who, by the way, apparently still hold out hope for rescue and try desperately to get the attention of some distant passing ship. One is moved to pity for the fact of human suffering itself, something each of us knows all too well in our own secret ways, precisely because we have come to this great stage of fools. Joyce further proposes that “Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause” ( Ibid ). The secret cause is one’s own fate, one’s own life exactly as one has lived it; the secret cause is ultimately one’s own death: cold, impassive, mortality. To experience the rapture of life we must consciously and intentionally move beyond the personalization of the epiphany, of which would be pity, to the universal human truth, the terror of the realization that we are mortal and we will die. That is the familiar psychic territory in which we encounter terror. If we are able to encounter the terror of our own mortality the same way we encounter “proper art” that terrifies, if we regard the circumstances of our lives as art (as though we ourselves were the pitiable crew of the Medusa), we elicit the sublime epiphany that reconciles us with our own mortality, as well as the circumstances of our own lives exactly as they are. We make the surprising discovery that this life we live, life with all its abundant sufferings and barely sufficient joys, is heart-breakingly beautiful. If we are able to encounter the terror of our own mortality the same way we encounter “proper art” that terrifies, we elicit the sublime epiphany that reconciles us with our own mortality. Epiphanies are not states of being; we can’t occupy the sublime for very long at all until we’re thrown back into the problems of living. We return to them, not with dread nor with hysterical misery, but with that recurring melody of the still, sad, music of life playing in the background, evoking the vaguely dissatisfied, bittersweet sense of common unhappiness. Acknowledging the common unhappiness of life has a salutary, restorative effect when we find ourselves in the grip of the pain of living. Pierrot knows as much by the end of the 1965 Jean-Luc Godard film, Pierrot Le Fou and reflects, rather wistfully, “Life is sometimes sad, but it’s always beautiful.” Beauty is the aesthetic epiphany Joyce refers to, and it functions as a homeopathic remedy for the pain of living; it’s the healing alchemy of like curing like. Beauty, because it is always too fleeting, because each encounter with it is thoroughly novel and personally reconfiguring, creates an aesthetic seizure that works on us consciously to a degree, but much more so unconsciously. What seizes us at first is a barely perceptible sensation of intimate strangeness, the paradoxical disclosure of terrible beauty adorning all life, the full realization of which depends more on mythos than logos . It is a potentially life changing validation of the perplexing nonpareil, the uncommon common life. To feel beauty we must be willing to feel pity and pain, even terror. No pity, no terror, no beauty. For those willing to welcome beauty and its occasionally troublesome collaborators, life holds no misery. In a world that so often exposes us to catastrophes and terrible suffering, common unhappiness is an uncommon achievement. If you have suicidal or other thoughts of self-harm, please reach out to professionals for help, or call 988, which is now the three-digit dialing code that routes callers to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Thanks for reading. MythBlast authored by: Bradley Olson, Ph.D . is an author, speaker, and a psychotherapist. He serves as the Publications Director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation, as well as the Editor of the MythBlast Series and the host of JCF's flagship podcast, Pathways With Joseph Campbell . Dr. Olsonholds a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Dr. OIson is also a depth psychologist in private practice in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he has lived since 1995. Dr. Olson has graduate degrees in psychology from the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Olson offers mythic life coaching at What's Mything in Your Life ( bradleyolsonphd.com ). This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 2, and Pathways to Bliss Latest Podcast Dr. Reedy has a Ph.D. in Marriage and Family Therapy. Brad has broadcast over 1,300 webinars on parenting since 2007, and hosts the podcast “Finding You” He is also the author of two books on parenting and self-discovery: The Journey of the Heroic Parent and The Audacity to Be You. Brad has developed an accessible and liberating approach to adolescents, young adults, and their parents. His powerful ability to use his own story and stories from the thousands of families he has treated, offers hope to families suffering from mental health, addiction, and stage-of-life issues. Brad is a co-founder and the Executive Clinical Director of Evoke Therapy Programs, which provides therapeutic services for adolescents, young adults, parents, families, and individuals looking to gain greater intimacy in their relationships. In the conversation, he and John Bucher of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, talk about Brad’s life and work, storytelling and its role in a therapeutic setting, how myths can be used in parenting, and how Campbell’s work has been an important guide in Brad’s life. Listen Here This Week's Highlights I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you. -- Joseph Campbell Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers, 6 Hell & Transcendence Q&A (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter
- Strange Ego: The Guru and the “Marvelous” Doctor
Still from "Doctor Strange" (2016) Directed by Scott Derrickson. © Marvel Studios. From the time of the first myths and stories, the problem of the overinflated ego and its repercussions has been a recurring theme. This psychic construct, which ostensibly helps us to survive and find a place in our “tribe,” seems to sometimes go astray during its development, distorting a person’s sense of identity and importance. In fact, one of the most prominent signs of excessive ego—hubris—underpins two of the best-known mythic epics, Gilgamesh and The Iliad . And while we certainly do not lack examples of egocentrism in modern culture, I am always fascinated by how fictional storytelling addresses this problem. In 2016, the Marvel Cinematic Universe introduced its version of Doctor Strange, a character that Steve Ditko first developed for comics in 1963. I loved Doctor Strange from the first time I watched it, but I had to reflect for some time on how it was speaking to me and what root themes I felt called to investigate. One of these roots is the archetype of the ego, and I want to explore that motif in the film (note: some spoilers ahead, but not the ending). The fall to adventure Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is undoubtedly a gifted neurosurgeon—so gifted, in fact, that he can spout answers to music trivia questions in the midst of performing the most delicate operation and not make a mistake at either one. Yet after he performs an intricate procedure in the emergency room at the request of ER surgeon Christine (Rachel McAdams), she pointedly explains why he refuses to work consistently in that “butcher shop”: “In the ER, you’re only saving lives. There’s no fame, there’s no CNN interviews.” This insight is confirmed in the very next scene when, as Strange drives to a speaking engagement, he discusses on a phone call the types of cases he will take, all to boost his prestige. Distracted while racing down the rain-slick road, Strange plummets over the edge of a cliff, where his hands are crushed by the vehicle. “Pride goeth before a fall” literalized on film. Wayne Dyer has defined two aspects of ego as “ I am what I do. My achievements define me” and “ I am what others think of me. My reputation defines me” ( The Power of Intention , pg. 10). Of course, this leads to questions we all must face: who are you when you can’t do, and who are you when your reputation changes? For Strange, this is the moment of crisis and desperation, because he has constructed his self-identity around his abilities and status as a skilled doctor. But those abilities are instantly taken away; his hands shake when he tries to steady them, and he finds no chance of recovery (despite his own deep knowledge to guide other surgeons and his herculean rehabilitation efforts). Strange has gotten so accustomed to the esteem his skills and intellect give him that his ego is viewing this as a survival situation–not so much financially but instrumentally (what he can do) and positionally (how he “ranks” in society). With all the possibilities for Western medical solutions exhausted, Doctor Strange heads to a mysterious place in Kathmandu called Kamar-Taj seeking answers and hoping to recover the physical ability he has lost. Meeting (and mistreating) the mentor Joseph Campbell speaks about the encounter of East meeting West and the problem of conflicting worldviews. “In the Orient, the path of salvation is to follow a way that already has been marked out by the guru. You go to a guru with perfect faith and no questions. He didn’t question his guru … The goal of Oriental mysticism is to wipe out the ego” ( Myth and Meaning: Conversations on Mythology and Life 145-146). In Doctor Strange , the guru he meets is called the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton). Still, as relatively humbled as Strange is by his ego defeat, he resists belief in the non-rational/non-scientific vision the Ancient One speaks of—until she evokes several out-of-body and surreal experiences that even more reduce his ego and his trust in the size and power of his knowledge. The overinflated ego, however, can resist deflation quite zealously. Even after Strange submits to a rigorous study of the mystical arts, he continues trying to be clever. He often questions his guru and opposes the more organic experiential/emotional aspects of the training, leading to his difficulty in producing any mystical effects. “[You once] told me to open my eyes,” he complains, “Now I’m being told to blindly accept rules that make no sense!” The Ancient One insists, “Your intellect has taken you far in life, but it will take you no further … Silence your ego, and your power will rise.” Later in the Myth and Meaning conversation, Campbell explains the Western resistance to the path when adopting Eastern philosophies: “When the Westerner puts himself through an Oriental meditation system … [i]t’s as though you were trying to break a boulder with a tack hammer … The way that’s more congenial to us [Westerners] is one of bringing, little by little, the unconscious orders into play in our conscious world; that is to say, a slow integration” (pg. 149). Indeed, more time and experience are needed for Strange to shed his uber-reliance on his intellect before he can begin to uncover his undeveloped/shadow aspects (both his feeling function and his mystical abilities), and thus find integrative power. "… Silence your ego, and your power will rise." Letting (e)go The final hammer-blow to Strange’s ego comes when Earth is faced with a metaphysical threat, and Stephen must kill in order to defend the planet from an initial attack. “I’m not doing that again,” he asserts to the Ancient One, “I became a doctor to save lives, not take them.” She retorts, “You became a doctor to save one life above all others: your own.” Will Doctor Strange return to his old life and simply revert to the ego structure props of what he does and what others think of him? Or will he dedicate himself to a cause far greater than “saving his own life” and be of service for completely different and non-egoic reasons? I won’t reveal the end of the film, but suffice it to say that Strange must address the question Campbell (paraphrasing Schopenhauer) poses in the “Sacrifice and Bliss” episode of The Power of Myth : “How can this happen? That what we normally think of as the first law of nature, namely self-preservation, is suddenly dissolved?” (28:39-28:46). Or more broadly for us viewers, what beloved ego concept must we let go for us to step into our path and power? Strange behavior, indeed. MythBlast authored by: Scott Neumeister is a literary scholar, author, TEDx speaker, mythic pathfinder and Editor of the MythBlast series from Tampa, Florida, where he earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of South Florida in 2018. His specialization in multiethnic American literature and mythology comes after careers as an information technology systems engineer and a teacher of English and mythology at the middle school and college levels. Scott coauthored Let Love Lead: On a Course to Freedom with Gary L. Lemons and Susie Hoeller, and he has served as a facilitator for the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Myth and Meaning book club at Literati. This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 4, and Myth and Meaning 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 "What is it we are questing for? It is the fulfillment of that which is potential in each of us. Questing for it is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself. There is nothing you can do that's more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way you will find, live, become a realization of your own personal myth." -- Joseph Campbell Pathways to Bliss Nature and the Human Mind (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter