Cover art for Debí Tirar Más Fotos © Rimas Entertainment “Artists are magical helpers. Evoking symbols and motifs that connect us to our deeper selves, they can help us along the heroic journey of our own lives.” — Joseph Campbell, On The Hero’s Journey  (Essentials Series) Now that Valentine’s Day is behind us, let’s talk about … breaking up. The break-up song is universal. Billboard  dedicates an entire page to it, and after asking my friends for their favorites, I now have a Spotify Playlist  spanning four hours — an emotional marathon. Joseph Campbell rightly calls artists “magical helpers.” On our Hero’s Journey navigating love, the singer croons us through the fires of a relationship’s end, catapults us into new territory, and gives us the confidence to brave a new adventure.  What role do music and mythology play in our break-up journey? According to Campbell, when we press play on the break-up song, we find ourselves at the stage of Separation. By contextualizing a relationship within a mythological framework, we can better understand how and why we need to push through the pain of love, and ultimately return to the world in one piece —but transformed .  The hero’s journey and love: Separation “Love itself is a pain, you might say — the pain of being truly alive.” — Joseph Campbell, On Love  (Essentials Series) Love is a right of passage. Thankfully, all forms of art have wrestled with the subject, ad infinitum. Lyrics and music are no exception. The oldest known love poem, “ The Love Song Of Shu-Sin ” (c. 2000 BCE), flows like a melody. The author yearns … hard. Her words are erotic, eager, and a quintessential example of the depth love can unlock within us.  Fast forward a couple of millennia, and those themes remain. From Otis Redding’s sorrowful “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” to Alanis Morissette’s biting “You Oughta Know,” our magical helpers have continued to articulate love’s agony and ecstasy.  When love ends, we are thrown into a chaotic spiral, separated from the world we’ve known and forced to traverse through what Campbell refers to as “the dark forest … the world of fire” ( On the Hero’s Journey ). Like Odysseus torn from his wife, infant son, and home, we too are ripped from the comforts of our relationship during a break-up. The break-up song and artist, then, become our guiding harmonic. DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS , this year’s Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards, is riddled with themes of Separation. Over the course of 17 tracks, Bad Bunny aka Benito delivers a love letter to his motherland of Puerto Rico, a celebratory stereophonic of salsa and reggaeton. Like his Super Bowl performance, it was a triumph. But moments of pain pierce the joy. In “ Turista ,” for example, we find a break-up song that confronts the initial pain of lost love.   The song opens with a classical guitar, soon joined by soft keys, and finally Benito’s deep baritone as he revisits memories of a now-ended relationship. Even without understanding a word, we know that this is a song of mourning. But his words provide an important narrative for the listener: En mi vida fuiste turista  / Tú solo viste lo mejor de mí (In my life you were a tourist / You only saw the best of me) […] Una foto bonita / Un atardecer hermoso / Una bailaíta (A pretty photo / A beautiful sunset / A little dance) […] Dime si vistes la pena / De mi corazón roto (Tell me if you saw the sorrow / From my broken heart) Separation often arrives unexpectedly, leaving a hero disoriented and confused. The task? Reconstructing the self after losing the things that grounded their identity — family, home, love. Odysseus does this by narrating his own story in The Odyssey — his first person account turns the chaos of Separation into a story he can control, stabilizing his disposition. Benito does the same thing in “Turista.” He embraces vulnerability, tells his story truthfully, and frames his pain in a meaningful way. By allowing himself a moment to remember and mourn what he’s left behind, he begins to make sense of his imbalance. Once a hero acknowledges and copes with Separation, they can power through Campbell’s dark forest and move forward.  When love ends, we are thrown into a chaotic spiral, separated from the world we’ve known and forced to traverse through what Campbell refers to as “the dark forest … the world of fire”  The hope we hear in harmony: Return  “That’s the basic motif of the universal hero’s journey — leaving one condition and finding the source of life to bring you forth into a richer or mature condition.” Joseph Campbell, On The Hero’s Journey  (Essentials Series) After reconciling Separation, how do we return to the world, post-heartbreak?  The entire DeBÍ  album is, in a sense, a homecoming. Benito returns to his roots, his family, and the sounds that shaped his music. Where “Turista” is a reflective rumination on the initial hurt of a break-up, his song “Baile Inolvidable” gives us hope.  After Separation, a hero must return home. Upon this return, he is equipped with knowledge he lacked prior to his journey. Benito explores this in “Baile”: Tú me enseñaste a querer / Me enseñaste a bailar (You taught me to love / You taught me to dance) […] En otra vida, en otro mundo podrá ser / En esta solo queda irme un día (In another life, in another world, it may be / In this life, all that remains for me is to leave one day) While somber, his lyrics radiate the understanding and acceptance that he’s learned through his journey. The music behind his words celebrate this — the song’s frantic pace, with its powerful horns and drums, welcomes Puerto Rico back into Benito’s life. Benito remembers that because of his relationship, he learned to dance. He learned to love. And we see our hero and “magical helper” return transformed —n ot back home to the relationship, but to a place of new hope.  “As though struck by lightning, so is one by love, which is a divine seizure, transmuting the life ...” — Joseph Campbell, On Love  (Essentials Series) MythBlast authored by: R.A. Noble is a writer and attorney based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of the chapbook Asymptotes: On Closeness and the short story Post-Colonial Poop. His forthcoming novella Barbarians of Batangas was published in November 2025 by Bad Words Press. His first short play co-written with the artist Kyle Wilhite entitled This Is How You Fall in Love, debuted at Under St. Marks Theater in New York. This MythBlast was inspired by the Separation stage of the hero's journey. Latest Podcast Pathways with Joseph Campbell is an official podcast of the Joseph Campbell Foundation and the MythMaker Podcast Network, hosted by Brad Olson, PhD. Each episode uncovers rare recordings of Joseph Campbell and explores the deeper currents beneath his words. The hero’s journey never really ends. It just takes a breath. We are taking a brief pause. New episodes return in June. Until then, explore the archive - five seasons of conversations that illuminate myth, meaning, and the human adventure. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Love is not only a life experience, but a mystical experience. In courtly love, the pain of love, the impossibility of fulfillment, was considered the essence of life." -- Joseph Campbell A Joseph Campbell Companion , 37 Four Functions of Mythology See More Videos Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Charley Patton - Paramount Records and the F. W. Boerner Company   Three voices from the late nineteenth century miraculously reach out to us through crackling, hissing, scratchy recordings: Charley Patton, Henry Thomas, and Blind Willie Johnson. Blues musicians from the Mississippi Delta and scattered towns of Texas, the recordings of these African-American troubadours strike the modern ear like dispatches from a distant moon. When I first encountered these recordings made in the first decades of the 20th century at fourteen, I intuited but could not yet name an overpowering mythic quality in their “lunar” sound.  Jazz bandleader Oliver Nelson titled an album The Blues and the Abstract Truth . Besides being an incandescent record, the title is also one of the best unintentional six-word haikus, that phrase locating something at the heart of this unofficial fellowship of the blues between Patton, Thomas, and Johnson. Their unvarnished and unadorned recordings—only the strings of a single guitar, the hums and moans from a lone throat and pair of lungs,and the eerie dust of early recording technology—are songs of separation in the key of mythology. The blues taps into deep emotional reservoirs in our being, encounters with naked pain and regret’s sorrowful shadow. Yet the blues also reaches towards that place of “abstract truth,” a collective unconscious of rhythm, timbre, and the human voice in confrontation and communion with eternity’s AUM.  Yet the blues also reaches towards that place of “abstract truth,” a collective unconscious of rhythm, timbre, and the human voice in confrontation and communion with eternity’s AUM.  Songs of Saturday Nights, Songs of Solitude Mythology was  music for the African American ancestors of bluesmen like Patton, Thomas, and Johnson. The mythological and musical traditions of West Africa fused with those of the indigenous Caribbean, and in turn, those of the American continent. Gospel music, born from the Christianity of enslavement and colonialism yet also the source for a new mythology of freedom all its own, became the “sacred” sounds of the black experience. The blues, gospel’s “profane” nocturnal trickster, soundtracked Saturday nights before the call and response gospel spirituals of Sunday mornings in the black American south. Blues music is not exclusively solitary (the later Memphis and Chicago styles of blues were usually in bands presaging rock groups), but figures like Patton, Thomas and Johnson reveal the mythic power of their phonographic solitude. Joseph Campbell illuminates this power in one of his most stunning (and indeed symphonic) passages: But, on the other hand, there have always been those who have very much wished to  remain alone, and have done so, achieving sometimes, indeed, even that solitude in which the Great Spirit, the Great Power, the Great Mystery that is hidden from the group in its concerns is intuited with the inner impact of an immediate force. And the endless round of the serpent’s way, biting its tail, sloughing its old skin, to come forth renewed and slough again, is then itself cast away—often with scorn—for the supernormal experience of an eternity beyond the beat of time. like an eagle the spirit then soars on its own wings. The dragon “Thou Shalt,” as Nietzsche terms the social fiction of the moral law, has been slain by the lion of self-discovery; and the master roars—as the Buddhists phrase it—the lion roar: the roar of the great Shaman of the mountain peaks, of the void beyond all horizons, and of the bottomless abyss. ( Primitive Mythology , 240) A Lunar Blues Trio When I hear Charley Patton’s “ A Spoonful Blues ,” I think of the Desert Fathers, Julian of Norwich, and those other mystics who wrote of the unquenchable thirst for their Christ, their ever-flowing yearning for their God. Shifting the call-and-response of a literal gospel choir and preacher into the interplay between unfinished lyrics and his guitar playing, Patton summons the paradoxical euphoria of eros that comes from the soul’s deep longing for its distant beloved. In the pleas of Henry Thomas’ “ Don’t Leave Me Here ,” we hear the unbridled ecstasy of that communion with what Campbell calls “the Great Spirit, the Great Power, the Great Mystery”—or perhaps, more aptly, the Great Frequency. Thomas’ desperation carries an unexpected joy, borne from the shamanic humility of those whose separation in the solitary zone of trials and healing leads them in a jubilant choreography back to their community. Blind Willie Johnson’s “ Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground ” feels like a musical adaptation of Campbell’s prose about “the roar of the great Shaman of the mountain peaks, of the void beyond all horizons, and of the bottomless abyss.” Stretching out the syllables of hums and moans above his guitar plucking into a meditation on the Crucifixion, Johnson becomes the great shaman of Central Texas, softly roaring a divine darkness into the great horizons of the Lone Star skies. Not for nothing was Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” included on the “golden record” placed aboard the Voyager space probe sent into the outer reaches of the galaxy to greet our extraterrestrial kin with the sounds of the earth and its inhabitants. The heartland of the blues is indeed that battlefield of which Campbell spoke, where the “dragon” of restriction and limitations is slain, guitar string by guitar string, by the howling mystery nestled deep in the leonine vocal chords of a Henry Thomas, a Blind Willie Johnson, a Charley Patton. It is lunar music because it is everpresent, like our moon, in the DNA of all subsequent “popular” music, a beacon at times dimmed and at others effervescent in the songbook of modern life. And it is lunar, too, in its eerie comfort and strangeness of inspiration: the blues is a musical mythology of those sleepless “daimonic” full moons, energetic, erotic, and exhausting in equal measure. I hope that when you listen to these missives from the moon, as it were, you enter into relation on those terms that all mythology demands, those exhortations to boogie-woogie with the eternal.  Solitude, as the medieval mystics to the Mississippi Delta blues singers to Joseph Campbell have intuited, is not synonymous with isolation. Instead, a shamanic solitude, with its rhythms of courage and melodies of daring, is the song of our innermost being when faced with the necessary separation that all spiritual quests demand.  MythBlast authored by: Teddy Hamstra  is a writer and seeker in Los Angeles. He is the recipient of a PhD from the University of Southern California, where he completed and successfully defended a dissertation entitled 'Enchantment as a Form of Care: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Mysticism.' Recently, Teddy has been working for the Joseph Campbell Foundation, spearheading their Research & Development efforts. As an educator and research consultant for creatives, Teddy is driven to communicate the wonder of mythological wisdom in ways that are both accessible to, and which enliven, our contemporary world. This MythBlast was inspired by the Separation stage of the hero's journey. Latest Podcast In this episode, we welcome Brandon Boyd . Best known as the lead vocalist and lyricist of the multi-platinum band Incubus, Brandon has cultivated a parallel life as a painter, writer, and visual artist. He has published three books of visual art, exhibited internationally, and created large-scale installations and residencies across the U.S. Across music and visual work alike, his creative output returns to themes of impermanence, identity, nature, and transformation. Alongside his work with Incubus, Brandon continues to release solo music while expanding into acting and mentorship. In this conversation with Tyler Lapkin of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, we explore where creativity begins, Brandon’s movement between music and painting as a single inner current, the influence of myth and Joseph Campbell, and the artist as a conduit for something larger than the self. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "The still point is the firmly burning flame that is not rippled by any wind. When you find that burning flame within yourself, action becomes facilitated in athletics, in playing a musical piece on the piano, or in performance of any kind. If you can hold to that still place within yourself while engaged in the field, your performance will be masterly." -- Joseph Campbell A Joseph Campbell Companion , 198 All the Gods are Within Us See More Videos Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Guns N' Roses Use Your Illusion II (1991) Listen to “Civil War” by Guns n' Roses Armed with 1980's soundtracks and fully protected with headband bandanas and plaided flannel shirts around hips, driven by courage and pride, the young of Sarajevo defend their besieged city in 1992. Using almost supernatural power, we succeed in stopping the aggressor set not only to kill, but to destroy all the culture and civilization in this multifaceted small European city. We were not separated by our religions, nationalities, ethnicities, nor color of the skin. We were united by our culture in protecting our monomyth and elementary ideas introduced by Adolf Bastian. We embarked on a real-life hero's journey, empowered by the images of Bruce Willis, Silvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Eddie Murphy and Tom Cruise with the music of Bruce Springsteen, U2, Bon Jovi, Guns N' Roses, AC/DC, Metallica, etc. But behind the black pilot mask of the Top Gun  bogey was not an evil unidentified mythological enemy. It was our neighbour but raised, bred and fed by Adolf Bastian’s folk ideas. Those were the ideas of separation and differences created by the higher powers of politics. If tempered with, they create stereotypes, from which prejudices are born, and they in turn give birth to conflicts, war and genocide, as is perfectly explained in “Civil War” by Guns N' Roses. Moral refusal Across cultures, epochs, and belief systems, Joseph Campbell observed a recurring narrative pattern: the monomyth. This narrative structure, as old as humanity itself, is a sort of shared psychic grammar. Adolf Bastian would call this Elementargedanken (Elementary Ideas): the ideas embedded in human consciousness, independent of culture, waiting to be expressed in different metaphorical costumes. On the other hand, his Völkergedanken  (Folk Ideas) are the same universal ideas expressed differently in specific social and physical environments. When these folk ideas are frozen into ideology, they create enemies, because the self (us) in those ideas needs an antagonist (they) as a threat, in order for “us” to survive. “They are not us.” “They threaten our way of life.” “They must be removed.” Shared human ideas are binding humanity. But when abstracted into rigid ideologies, they exterminate logic. Myth stops being a mirror. It becomes a weapon.  Campbell would say that when a myth stops evolving and is not based on elementary ideas, it rots. “ Civil War ” by Guns N’ Roses is precisely about this rot. It is a song that stares directly at a corrupted myth and says, “I’m not going.” I refuse to participate in this festered journey. “Civil War” is not just a protest song; it is a mythological malfunction. It asks a heretical question: what if the adventure itself is a lie?  In traditional myth, the Call to Adventure is an invitation to leave status quo comfort behind and confront chaos. Odysseus was summoned to Troy, Luke Skywalker beckoned by Obi-Wan, and Gilgamesh haunted by mysteries of immortality. The call initiates transformation. But Campbell also emphasized the Refusal of the Call. Sometimes the hero hesitates out of fear. Sometimes, however, the refusal might be the wisdom behind transformation. It is not passive withdrawal but an ethical issue of saying no to something that demands obedience over conscience. In that moment, courage of our convictions is not found in advancing forward, but in standing one’s ground against a lie dressed as an adventure. “Civil War” transforms refusal not as weakness, but as moral clarity: My hands are tied The billions shift from side to side And the wars go on with brainwashed pride For the love of God and our human rights And are washed away by your genocide And history hides the lies of our civil wars The lyrics expose the mythic camouflage. Folk God, not Campbell’s metaphor of the God, and human rights are here invoked not to protect life, but to rationalize its destruction. History becomes a skilled editor, trimming inconvenient truths until slaughter looks like sacrifice. The hero does not embark on a sacred quest but is being conscripted into a recycled narrative as in the Slavic folk wisdom saying: "In war, the state gives cannons, the rich oxen, and the poor their sons. When the war is over, the state takes its cannons, the rich get new oxen, and the poor look for their sons in graves." “Civil War” is a song about refusing this threshold of no return because the destination is well known and morally bankrupt. Real daring lies not in marching forward blindly, but in recognizing the abyss before stepping into it. Refusing a false adventure requires more bravery than accepting a myth that is not based on elementary ideas that unite humanity. The song understands that the call to adventure is industrialized and sold back to young people as sacred obligations: nation, land, honor, God, while quietly serving someone’s balance sheet.  I don't need your civil war It feeds the rich, while it buries the poor The heroic sacrifice, once sacred, is revealed as a lie. In the belly In Campbell’s Belly of the Whale phase of the journey, the hero is swallowed by darkness, stripped of identity, and forced to confront truth. In “Civil War,” it is a collective realization.  Look at your young men fighting Look at your women crying Look at your young men dying Look at the blood we're spilling Look at the world we're killing Look at the hate we're breeding Look at the fear we're feeding Look at the lives we're leading The way we've always done before The symbolism of the verses’ repetition is ritualistically literal. Guns N’ Roses expose how myth is falsified. The hero refuses to participate in a narrative where death is outsourced downward and profit flows upward. This is not a sacred story, but a scam. Modern ideologies, nationalism, religious extremism, racial mythology often exploit the Separation phase of the monomyth. Young people are told: leave the ordinary life; it is small, corrupt, unworthy. The world beyond is painted as sacred destiny. Obedience becomes transcendence. Campbell warned that societies often externalize the hero myth onto their youth, demanding literal sacrifice instead of symbolic transformation. In such cases, the return never comes. The hero does not come back with wisdom; he comes back in a coffin, or not at all. “Civil War” is not just a protest song; it is a mythological malfunction. It asks a heretical question: what if the adventure itself is a lie?  Uselessness of the false journey In “Civil War” the listener is swallowed into the symbolic death of identity by images and sounds of hate, fear, repetition, and inherited violence. In concert, lead singer Axl Rose jumps, runs and screams on the stage as if trapped in the belly. He debunks the false stories constructed by politics, ideologies, extreme religions and media. This song is not a rebellion, but a confession that this adventure is false. Heroic battle between a Top Gun  F14 and bogey is not a part of it. Instead, this call is completely useless and should be refused.  What remains after this distorted myth collapses is not heroism, but humility in the knowledge of how small human life is, how easily manipulated, and how actually very precious it is when stripped of grand but false narratives and folk ideas that separate us. Survival itself is a lesson in scale: no gods, no glory, just people keeping each other alive. So, for four years Sarajevo civilians stayed in the belly of shelters. Ironically and absurdly, I remember unplugged playing and singing Guns N' Roses’   “Civil War” there. We thought our hero’s adventure belonged to the monomyth elementary ideas, but in the fifth stage of the first act of the Journey we found ourselves just waiting for it to end. This was not a story. We returned with the knowledge on how to survive without water, electricity, and food in the urban jungle. And how to make an oil lamp. Sarajevo city siege was the longest siege in modern warfare; it lasted 1492 days. 200,000 were killed in Bosnia in the early 1990’s. Nothing monomythical about Sarajevo Safari and killing children, women, and stray dogs for fun. The Sarajevo siege was a twisted and orchestrated destruction, fueled with lies aimed at destroying elementary ideas and universal cultural identity. This was not even a civil war. As Axl Rose said: “What’s so civil about the war anyway?”  MythBlast authored by: Dr. Lejla Panjeta  is a Professor of Film Studies and Visual Communication. She was a professor and guest lecturer in many international and Bosnian universities. She also directed and produced in theatre, worked in film production, and authored documentary films. She curated university exhibitions and film projects. She won awards for her artistic and academic works. She is the author and editor of books on film studies, art, and communication. Her recent publication was the bilingual illustrated encyclopedic guide – Filmbook , made for everyone from 8 to 108 years old. Her research interests are in the fields of aesthetics, propaganda, communication, visual arts, cultural and film studies, and mythology. https://independent.academia.edu/LejlaPanjeta This MythBlast was inspired by the Separation stage of the hero's journey. Goddesses: A Weekend Retreat with the Feminine Divine Hosted by the Joseph Campbell Foundation This summer, dare to brave the adventure and join the Joseph Campbell Foundation for a transformative weekend retreat dedicated to goddess mythology . Together, we’ll explore the sacred energies that resonate within you, restoring your connection to the humility of our humanity and the divine feminine. As Joseph Campbell reminds us, myth has the power to “exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason.” Surrounded by fellow seekers, you’ll experience the hope we hear in harmony—a shared journey of discovery, empowerment, and renewal. The Goddesses Retreat will be held in person in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York on July 24-25, 2026. Mark your calendar and stay tuned for more details—this is your invitation to step into myth, community, and transformation. Latest Podcast Bonus: Maya and the Mask of the Divine Recorded in 1966 at Sarah Lawrence College, this bonus lecture follows Joseph Campbell through the symbolic ascent of Kundalini yoga - moving from instinct and desire at the base of the spine to the awakening of the heart, where the sacred syllable OM is heard as the vibration of being itself. The chakras become a psychological and spiritual map: religion begins, Campbell suggests, when fulfillment is no longer chased outward but discovered as a dimension within. Yet even heaven is not the end. The final barrier is the subtle illusion of “I” encountering God. From there, Campbell turns to maya - the cosmic power that obscures, projects, and reveals reality. Gods, myths, and even theology are masks pointing beyond themselves. Brahma creates, Vishnu dreams, Shiva dances - but all are symbolic foregrounds of an unnamed mystery. The ultimate cannot be described, only realized - when the division between self and transcendent falls away. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "I see that war now, in terms of our contemporary culture, is superfluous. That’s not the way to win anything." -- Joseph Campbell Myth and Meaning , 196 Psyche & Symbol - God is not one, God is not many, God transcends those ideas. See More Videos Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

"Fairy Tale of the Kings" by Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis There’s an ancient saying that music is the language of the gods. Long before it was entertainment or background sound, music was understood as something closer to enchantment, a force capable of aligning the human soul with powers larger than itself. In antiquity, specific forms of elevated music were believed to hold real efficacy to heal, summon, order chaos, and attune human life to the rhythms of the cosmos. Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau ranked music as the highest of the arts, writing that it “paints everything, even objects that are only visible: from an almost inconceivable prestige, it seems to put the eye in the ear.” Music doesn’t merely describe reality; it translates experience across sensory and symbolic thresholds.  To experience the power of myth in music goes far beyond identifying mythological references embedded in sound. It is to evoke something stirring within us that is older than language, an echo of a time when human beings were still woven into a living world whose song resonated within them. Both myth and music share this quality because they bypass the intellect and speak directly to the body, the imagination, and the nervous system. Separation as a modern condition Joseph Campbell explained separation as the opening movement of the hero’s journey to Bill Moyers during the PBS documentary series Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth   (1988). “To get out of that posture of dependency, psychological dependency, into one of psychological self-responsibility,” he stated, “requires a death and resurrection, and that is the basic motif of the hero journey. Leaving one condition, finding the source of life to bring you forth in a richer or more mature or other condition.” Here separation extends beyond the personal and psychological by also unfolding culturally and cosmologically. One of the defining separations of modern life is our estrangement from nature. Early human consciousness was immersed in the natural world. There was no hard boundary between human and non-human, between our inner life and the outer environment. Rhythm preceded reason, and sound preceded meaning. Rivers, winds, seas, and seasons functioned as participants in a shared musical world. Much of this more uplifting music as it exists today grew out of this intimacy. Birdsong shaped early melodies, while the pulse of waves, the cadence of walking, and the rise and fall of the breath became the first measures. Long before notation, music was something humans entered into, not something they produced. Today something in us still recalls this — though faintly — as the modern mind too often privileges dry abstraction over living participation. The intellect tends to isolate, categorize, and dominate, severing itself from the rhythmic intelligence of the body, of nature, and of the planet itself. Campbell warned that when we lose contact with nature’s wisdom, we lose our mythic orientation as well. “We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature,” he expressed in the PBS series, “and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea.” It is precisely this lost accord that the music of Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911) mourns, and — for a moment — restores. Čiurlionis and the sound of remembered nature At the turn of the twentieth century, as Europe stood between old cosmologies and modern fracture, a small number of artists began searching for forms capable of holding both inner vision and cosmic scale. Among them was the Lithuanian composer and painter Čiurlionis. He was a musical prodigy from early childhood, able to play by ear at five (some reports say three), and sight-read fluently by seven. Technical brilliance alone, however, fails to account for the depth of his work. Over a remarkably short life, he composed hundreds of musical works, alongside an expansive body of paintings and other literary writings.  His symphonic poems In the Forest  (1901) and The Sea  (1907) sound like nature remembered from the inside. These two compositions evoke immersion in a living, rhythmic world drawing the listener’s perception towards participation ... the music gently carries us back into nature. For Čiurlionis, music offered contact with something primordial, a universal symphony underlying visible reality. As such, his musical creations are saturated with a longing directed towards reunion. He also experienced synesthesia, perceiving sound and image as intrinsically interconnected. In the Forest : re-entering the living world In the Forest  unfurls slowly, patiently, almost ceremonially. Themes emerge and recede as if following hidden paths. The music envelops and shelters the listener ... creating space to breathe. The forest held profound significance in Lithuanian cultural memory. For centuries it served as a refuge of sustenance, boundary, and threshold. It protected communities, fed them, and accompanied them at the end of life’s journey. In Baltic pagan cosmology, forests were believed to be inhabited by spirits and ancestral presences. Death unfolded as a movement deeper into the living fabric of the world. The forest functioned as a mediator between human and ancestral realms, serving as both provider and witness. Čiurlionis appreciated forests as a lived reality, and not simply folklore alone. In this symphonic poem, the forest becomes a mythic space of separation and return. Time loosens, and linear progression gives way to cyclical movement. The music invites the listener to slow down to hear what modern life has trained them to ignore. In the Forest  resists extractive ways of knowing. Greater meaning unfolds through an embodied presence as the listener’s perception begins to shift. And here, myth blossoms as a lived experience within nature. The Sea : encountering infinity Where the forest encloses, the sea dissolves. The other symphonic poem, The Sea , unfolds on a vastly different scale while carrying the same underlying movement of separation and return. Čiurlionis’ sea arrives with an elemental force shaped by depth, motion, and magnitude. This same quality is what gives his paintings–just like his music–a mythic register, which draws the viewer directly into elemental realities. As a side note, the largest painting ever created by Čiurlionis, Rex  (1909), gathers all the elements into a unified order held by a supra-human intelligence radiating a sense of cosmic totality. And within the 1908 painting cycle, Sonata No. 5  ( Sonata of the Sea ) , water appears as rhythm, vibration, and movement, and is experienced as pulse rather than image. The sea appears as a cosmic substance, an elemental field of infinity, hidden depths, and dissolution that overwhelms human scale. This same force reverberates through The Sea , where sound carries the listener into the vastness that the image evokes. The music rolls and engulfs ... at times gently, at other times with overwhelming force. Harmonic layers rise and fall like tides, leaving us feeling both held and dwarfed. The sea appears here as a threshold; a meeting place between the known and the unknowable. In this sense, music — uniquely among the arts — allows us to experience scale without representation. A painting can depict vastness, while sound enacts it. In The Sea , time stretches and contracts drawing the listener into rhythms older than human memory. The sea carries this infinitude as something felt, and its mythic power becomes known through sensation. Silence, sound, and the mythic threshold In a 1908 letter to his future wife, Sofija, Čiurlionis wrote: “I’d like you ... to listen to silence, which is a song of the New Language. I would like to compose a symphony of the murmur of the waves, from the mysterious language of the ancient forest, from the twinkling of the stars, from our songs, and from my immense longing.” This longing is central to his works and reflects a mythic yearning for reconnection.  In Čiurlionis’ words, silence carries the quality of Source, and highlights how the most important elements of music often reside in the spaces between notes. Music is heard within silence. Poetry recognizes this as well. Drawing on John Keats’ notion of negative capability, the deepest creation transpires before conscious thought, before words even arrive. And in a similar way, music articulates what lies beyond sight, just as myth gives form to what remains unnamed. Music as mythic re-alignment Campbell identified one of myth’s core functions as aligning society with the natural and cosmic order. Čiurlionis’ music fulfills this function through experience, restoring a felt relationship to rhythm, cycle, and scale. Through this medium he emerges as a mediator between worlds, translating rhythms beyond the visible, and harmonizing the listener with nature. His works In the Forest  and The Sea  exquisitely give voice to our separation from nature. Through sound, they allow us to feel what has been lost, and to briefly touch what remains recoverable. To experience the power of myth in music is to remember that the world once sang to us, and that we once knew how to listen. In that shared listening, a quiet hope takes hold that is rooted in reconnection, attunement, and the possibility of hearing the world — and one another — anew. To close with the words of Čiurlionis: “One must carry light within oneself, to shine through the darkness for those standing along the way, so that, seeing it, they too may find light within themselves and follow their own path.” Listening to nature’s rhythms, and to silence, sustains and carries our inner light and offers illumination to others. music articulates what lies beyond sight, just as myth gives form to what remains unnamed. MythBlast authored by: Kristina Dryža is a futurist-turned-archetypal consultant who helps people understand the unseen forces shaping their lives. At a time when speed, fragmentation, and overwhelm define modern experience, she shows how myth and archetypes offer something many of us have lost: an inner map. Her work reveals the patterns beneath behaviours, relationships, creativity, and change, giving people a way to interpret their lives with meaning rather than confusion. A member of the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Editorial Advisory Group, Kristina brings depth, accessibility, and emotional intelligence to her translation of ancient wisdom into practical insight. This MythBlast was inspired by the Separation stage of the hero's journey. Stream The Power of Myth in Music playlist on Spotify Latest Podcast In this episode, we welcome Brandon Boyd . Best known as the lead vocalist and lyricist of the multi-platinum band Incubus, Brandon has cultivated a parallel life as a painter, writer, and visual artist. He has published three books of visual art, exhibited internationally, and created large-scale installations and residencies across the U.S. Across music and visual work alike, his creative output returns to themes of impermanence, identity, nature, and transformation. Alongside his work with Incubus, Brandon continues to release solo music while expanding into acting and mentorship. In this conversation with Tyler Lapkin of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, we explore where creativity begins, Brandon’s movement between music and painting as a single inner current, the influence of myth and Joseph Campbell, and the artist as a conduit for something larger than the self. Listen Here This Week's Highlights " Music, however, has a role apart; for it deals not with forms in space, but with time––sheer time. It is not, like the other arts, a rendition of what Plato calls “ideas,” but of the will itself, the world will, of which the “ideas” are but inflections ." -- Joseph Campbell The Masks of God, Vol. IV: Creative Mythology , 80 Dynamics of the Unconscious See More Videos Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

"Aphrodite" Briton Rivière, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Like the ancient Greeks and Romans, we still sing to the goddess of love. The hit song “ Venus ” (1969) by Shocking Blue — d elightfully covered  by Bananarama in 1986 — opens with: “Goddess on the mountain top / burning like a silver flame / the summit of beauty and love / and Venus was her name.” Natalie Merchant’s “ Come On, Aphrodite ” (2023) echoes this call: “Come on, Aphrodite, you goddess of love / Come on, Aphrodite from that mountain above, / Come on, Aphrodite, I’m begging you, begging you, / I’m begging you please.” These songs summon Aphrodite, supplicate her, and tell her of her own charms, all in the hopes that she might deign to call the singer to the heroic adventure of love. Aphrodite’s call to adventure We could say that Aphrodite, or Venus in the Roman tradition, serves as the patron deity of On Love , the newest title in the Joseph Campbell Essentials series. On Love  collects Campbell’s most poignant quotes about Aphrodite’s domain into a single, pocket-sized volume. Her metaphorical music sings from every page, channeled through Campbell’s unique wisdom. One theme recurs in the book: the beginning of love, or what Campbell describes as the separation stage of the heroic journey to which Aphrodite calls brave souls. He describes this moment as “the mighty jolt” (29) when “someone walks in the room and that’s it! ... You think: This is it, this is my life” (71). Truly, every love is its own journey. Whether short-lived or long, whether in the genre of comedy or tragedy, relationships follow the same three-part structure that Joseph Campbell charts in The Hero with a Thousand Faces : separation, or departure; initiation, or transformation; and return with a boon (23). Aphroditic journeys don’t happen every day, but when they do, when she issues her sacred invitation, then “ the laws that govern all prudent life will dissolve” ( On Love , 44). Aphrodite scorns prudence. Instead, she embodies passion, abandon, and surrender ,  demanding humility, courage, hope, and daring, as well as a complete willingness to appear foolish. She requires sacrifice on behalf of her values: love, laughter, pleasure, and beauty. As a metaphor, Aphrodite is  love, laughter, pleasure, and beauty. She asks much on behalf of those archetypal forces, but then when you least expect it, she turns around and shares them with you and maybe with someone you love. Journeying with Aphrodite Aphrodite stands, in her sultry way, for the ultimate mystery of the infinitely renewable resource called love. No matter how far we follow the path of love, more always awaits. Complete love is impossible to reach or even imagine, but Aphrodite has only to glance, to whisper, to breathe the smallest sigh or hum a single note for her presence to burst forth. “As though struck by lightning, so is one by love, which is a divine seizure, transmuting the life, erasing every interfering thought” ( On Love ,   7). Aphrodite changes everything. No one returns unchanged after journeying with her. Aphrodite scorns prudence. Instead, she embodies passion, abandon, and surrender, demanding humility, courage, hope, and daring, as well as a complete willingness to appear foolish. A song, too, is a journey. Words alone brush the surfaces of feeling, but words combined with music open the floodgates of soul so emotion can course through. The opening of a song is a separation or departure from the world outside the song into the special world within it. In that world, lyrics and music can effect an initiatory experience, and the end of the song delivers the listener or musician back to their ordinary world changed somehow, perhaps with a boon to share with their metaphorical village. When Aphrodite sings Aphrodite issues an invitation to practice relationship skills with her, the better to practice with others. I can ask myself: how well do I listen when Aphrodite speaks? How do I show her my gratitude? How can I express my needs and desires to her? What kind of gifts do I offer her? These questions map to the human realm of love as well. So we sing to Aphrodite, and sometimes she sings back. Campbell describes this as the moment lovers realize “that beneath the illusion of two-ness dwells identity: ‘each is both.’ This realization can expand into a discovery that beneath the multitudinous individualities of the whole surrounding universe—human, animal, vegetable, even mineral—dwells identity; whereupon the love experience becomes cosmic, and the beloved who first opened the vision is magnified as the mirror of creation” ( On Love , 74). Aphrodite uses surface appearances to push past them all the way to the spiritual realization of our connection with all beings. That means the name for what connects us is love. She offers this mighty boon for the small price of humble courage and hopeful daring, or what Campbell calls a “noble heart” (9). Because Aphrodite is sacred, so is love. So is laughter. So are beauty, pleasure, and relationships, whether they last for the span of a fleeting fancy, entire lives, or any amount of time in between. Although mythic music might imagine her on a mountain top, Aphrodite reveals love as the fundamental force that supports creation, which means she  is the force that supports creation. That’s one boon her journey offers, and the way to finding it begins with a single step on her sacred path. MythBlast authored by: Joanna Gardner, PhD , is a writer, mythologist, and magical realist whose work focuses 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 the Separation stage of the hero's journey. Latest Podcast In this bonus episode, " Archetypes of the Christ Legend" , recorded at Mann Ranch in 1971, Joseph Campbell explores the Christ story not as literal history but as mythic revelation. Tracing shared archetypes across Buddhism, Mithraism, Hinduism, and Judaism, Campbell reveals how motifs like the virgin birth, the cave, exile, the threatened child, and the tyrant king express a universal pattern of spiritual awakening and renewal. Listen Here This Week's Highlights “As though struck by lightning, so is one by love, which is a divine seizure, transmuting the life, erasing every interfering thought.” -- Joseph Campbell The Masks of God, Vol. IV: Creative Mythology , 80 Slaying The Dragon See More Videos Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

At the Joseph Campbell Foundation, our mission is to invite you to experience the power of myth. In 2026, we focus in particular on the power of myth in music. Four key values guide this exploration: the humility of our humanity , the courage of our convictions , the hope we hear in harmony , and the daring to brave the adventure . Humility  reminds us of our shared limitations as humans on this earth, as well as our unique individual limits—everything that makes us gloriously ordinary. In both myth and music, creativity so often emerges not in spite of these limits, but because of them. Limits can also clarify those values which we refuse to surrender. Most importantly, humility grants the gift of compassion.  The courage of our convictions  serves as the bedrock of our faith in ourselves and each other. Think of spirituals and anthems. These powerfully mythic and courageous forms of music speak directly to the soul, insisting that the human spirit can sing no matter what—that the human spirit matters. The hope we hear in harmony  reminds us of new ways of being and new possibilities, no matter what challenges we face. Hope helps us work creatively with our limitations and realize that we’re capable of so much more than we often imagine, on our own and especially when we sing together. Music does not deny suffering but instead gives voice to it—and, in doing so, shines a beacon through and beyond it.  Finally, the daring to brave the adventure  puts courage into action. This is the audacity of stepping outside our metaphorical doors, placing one foot in front of the other. It’s the audacity that constitutes a consent to learn, to change, to grow, to transform. Daring answers the call to “the experience of being alive,” as Joseph Campbell says, with all its trials and its joys.  We believe myth has the power to clarify and console, especially in difficult times and especially through music.  Myth and music help us communicate on deeper levels than language alone, and together, they tell a fuller truth. We believe myth has the power to clarify and console, especially in difficult times and especially through music. Mythic music asks us to listen rather than control. It doesn’t eliminate fear, frustration, or despair but instead offers a rhythm we can use to walk with those feelings, maybe even to move through them. Orpheus didn’t sing to overcome death or retrieve his beloved, but to respond to life, to be in conversation with it. We sing not to explain the world but to be one with it and with each other.  Thank you for singing along with us.  The Joseph Campbell Foundation Leadership Team John Bucher, Executive Director Joanna Gardner, Managing Director Bradley Olson, Publications Director Stephanie Zajchowski, Operations Director  This MythBlast was inspired by the Separation stage of the hero's journey. Latest Podcast In this bonus episode, " Archetypes of the Christ Legend" , recorded at Mann Ranch in 1971, Joseph Campbell explores the Christ story not as literal history but as mythic revelation. Tracing shared archetypes across Buddhism, Mithraism, Hinduism, and Judaism, Campbell reveals how motifs like the virgin birth, the cave, exile, the threatened child, and the tyrant king express a universal pattern of spiritual awakening and renewal. Listen Here This Week's Highlights " Music, however, has a role apart; for it deals not with forms in space, but with time––sheer time. It is not, like the other arts, a rendition of what Plato calls “ideas,” but of the will itself, the world will, of which the “ideas” are but inflections ." -- Joseph Campbell The Masks of God, Vol. IV: Creative Mythology , 80 Kundalini Yoga: Solar & Lunar Energy Pathways See More Videos Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

I always cherish the honor of contributing to the MythBlast series.  Moreover, with this first essay of the new year, I am pleased to introduce the MythBlast Theme for 2026, which we’re calling Experience the Power of Myth in Music.  Music is at least as old as Homo sapiens , and it might well be even older. Neanderthals appear to have possessed the vocal anatomy for making complex sounds, suggesting that early human ancestors used their voices to sing or hum long before developing language. The hyoid bone found in the throat of Homo heidelbergenis  indicates that this species had the anatomical ability to sing at least 530,000 years ago.  Flutes have been found in Germany and Slovenia that date back forty to sixty thousand years. Anthropologists believe music began with natural sounds—the rhythmic pounding of tools, clapping hands, or mimicking bird songs. Why, we’re still transported to an altered state by drum beats approximating the rhythms of the human heart. Every human culture we’re aware of has some form of music, and as such it must be considered a fundamental aspect of human identity.  Music is arguably the most “mythic” of the arts because it is the least representational. It signifies  without pointing to any single, discrete meaning. Just as myth speaks in images that exceed explanation, music speaks in tonal structures that exceed language. Music may not be a secondary "voice" for ancient stories, but the very symbol—the singular psychological image-experience that triggers their creation in a human mind.  By utilizing structural principles found in, perhaps, all cultures—repetition, contrast, and circularity—music provides an immediate, non-verbal experience of the infinite, the ineffable, which mythology then attempts to name . This may explain why cultures throughout history have insisted on the "divine origin" of instruments: the sound itself is such a potent, evocative force that it feels like "miraculous rhetoric," something that has always existed, long before human language. Myth and music are symbolic languages of the unconscious or “the inward.” In one of my favorite works of poetic art, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass , the poet writes:  All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the  instruments,  It is not the violins and the cornets, it is not the oboe nor  the beating drums, nor the score of the baritone singer singing  his sweet romanza, nor that of the men's chorus, nor that  of the women's chorus,  It is nearer and farther than they. (“ Song for Occupations ”) “It is nearer and farther than they.” Whitman’s “It” doesn’t refer to—and I hate myself just a little for this terrible pun—the instrumental cause of the music. Rather, he refers to the paradoxical nature of the ineffable, of the transcendent apprehended. Immanent transcendence. It’s Plato’s music of the spheres, Harmonia tou kosmou , the harmony of the universe that produces its inaudible, utterly sublime "music." In “ The Myth of Er ,” Plato described a vision of the cosmos where eight celestial spheres revolve around a central spindle. On each sphere sat a Siren who sang a single note; together, those eight notes created a single perfect harmony. As Plato well knew, there are also eight notes to a diatonic scale forming an octave, and serving as a fundamental unit of rhythm and phrasing especially in dance, where a complete musical "sentence" often lands on the eighth beat (an "8-count"). Music provides an immediate, non-verbal experience of the infinite, the ineffable, which mythology then attempts to name . Campbell, music, and myth This symbolic power of music was not merely theoretical for Joseph Campbell. Like Whitman, Campbell believed that music has an awakening function. In The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work , he says:  [Music] has an awakening function…Music is a fundamental art that touches our will system. In Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea he speaks of music as the sound that awakens the will. The rhythm of the music awakens certain life rhythms, ways of living and experiencing life. So it’s an awakener of life. (261) Music was always central to Campbell’s life. Trained on the violin as a boy, he soon added guitar, banjo, ukulele, and mandolin, and later the saxophone. After transferring from Dartmouth to Columbia University in 1922, he joined a jazz band formed through the Instrumental Club, playing night gigs in Manhattan that emphasized improvisation and ensemble over technique alone. Though he often played saxophone, the university newspaper highlighted his banjo playing as a standout feature of student concerts—an early hint that Campbell’s lifelong sensitivity to myth would be shaped as much by rhythm as by words. There were, of course, the usual rowdy college audiences, but Campbell and the band often had invitations to headline at more upscale venues such as dances at the Plaza Hotel. Campbell’s musical career proved surprisingly profitable; in 1925 he was able to save $3,000 that year alone—equivalent to over fifty-five thousand dollars today, a hundred years later. Campbell later claimed that it was on the savings he earned during his years in the band that he was able to “retire” to Woodstock during the Great Depression and spend those all-important years reading in the Catskill woods. Thoughts no words can utter Music, it is said, expresses "thoughts which no words can utter," and I recall having such an experience in my childhood. I was quite young, young enough to hold my father’s hand as we walked through the boreal forest of northern Minnesota lake country, when we came to a small clearing, absent enough trees to let the direct sunlight shine on us. Pausing for a moment—whether to enjoy the sun on our faces, reorient, or simply take in the scene, I don’t remember—I heard the most sublime a cappella choral music. I turned to my father and excitedly said, “Did you hear that?” “Hear what?” he replied. “Nothing” I said, as I instantly became aware of the disturbingly strange, alien power of the uncanny, blurring the boundaries between reality and the surreal, causing even the familiar to seem alien and somehow dangerous.  I revisited that childhood moment when I was an undergraduate studying William Wordsworth’s poem, " Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey . "  This poem reframed my experience. It was no longer an experience of the uncanny, nor of reality bleeding into surreality. By then it was exactly for me as Wordsworth wrote: “For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.” The sublime’s chastening, subduing power is the constant companion to those who seek to reconcile the demanding conditions of life with the deep longing to see what this human stuff is capable of.  For Plato the sirens sang the enchanting music of the spheres. For Homer their enchanting songs also lured sailors irresistibly nearer, causing them to steer their ships onto rocky shores, resulting in shipwrecks and death. The mysteries of existence and the mysteries of death are inseparable. They give us both the vitalizing fanfare of life and the dirge-like march toward death. One way or another, death must be the coda in the music of life. Mortal we remain, after all. Yet death, too, is a manifestation of the sublime, with the ultimate power to chasten and subdue. But how can something universal to all living things—not just human beings—be “bad”? How can the consequence of death be torture or separation from divine apprehension? No. If death is, as I have said, a manifestation of the sublime, then as such it also delivers an aesthetic revelation of unanticipated beauty.  Here, I return to Whitman again:  The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas'd the moment life appears. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. (“ Song of Myself ”) This is the eternally recurring refrain in the music of life: death leads forward life, and that is luckier than anyone supposes.  MythBlast authored by: Bradley Olson, PhD  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 Separation stage of the hero's journey. Latest Podcast Rebecca Armstrong is a mythologist, minister, and educator whose life has been guided by the transformative power of story. For twelve years, she served as the International Outreach Director of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, helping to create and nurture the worldwide Mythological RoundTable™ groups that carried Campbell’s work into communities around the globe. With an earned doctorate and two master’s degrees, Rebecca has spent over three decades teaching myth, religion, ethics, and film studies at major universities, and she currently leads a course called Movies & the American Myth at Indiana University. In her private practice as a Jungian Coach and Spiritual Guidance counselor at workingwithsoul.com, she helps others reconnect with the deeper stories moving through their lives. In this episode, Rebecca joins JCF’s John Bucher for a rich conversation about her life, her relationship with Joseph Campbell, and how myth continues to inform her work in the world today. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Music has an awakening function. Life is rhythm. Art is an organization of rhythms . . . The rhythm of the music awakens certain life rhythms, ways of living and experiencing life." -- Joseph Campbell The Hero's Journey , 261      The Hero with a Thousand Faces See More Videos Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Listen to “ Darkstar ” from Top Gun: Maverick as you read. There is freedom waiting for you, On the breezes of the sky, And you ask, "What if I fall?" Oh but my darling, What if you fly? --Erin Hanson I plunged the throttle of the Cessna 172 forward so I could gain altitude. As a solo student pilot, I had just attempted to land my plane but had come in “too hot,” impacting the runway so hard that it bounced back into the air. Rather than try to force the landing, I decided to execute a “go-around”—a re-ascent to come back for another attempt. Instantly my engine began to sputter. While I was gaining some  altitude, it was not nearly enough to properly and safely perform the maneuvers I needed to circle around and land. With the motor fitfully coughing on and off, the idea that I might crash erupted into my mind. Would my dreams of flying then turn me into a modern version of Icarus, a story that had fascinated me since childhood? From fragile to mighty (and musical) wings: a Separation tone poem The fantasy of flight is a common theme of the myths that spoke to me as a youth: the triumphs of Bellerophon riding Pegasus, of Perseus flying with Hermes’ cap and sandals; the tragedies of Icarus with fragile wings, of Phaethon attempting to drive Helios’ chariot. My imagination can easily activate when flying is involved, so I found it no surprise that a film like Top Gun: Maverick  would hold delight for me. While the plot and visuals of the film captivated me, the music score speaks in mythical modes as well (just like Norland Téllez’s MythBlast  last week, I haven’t quite left the film world of last year’s thematic). Although main composer credit belongs to Hans Zimmer, one can’t underestimate Lady Gaga’s musical contribution and Lorne Balfe’s weaving of Harold Faltermeyer’s original theme into the motifs. I want to explore the resonance of the pieces “ Darkstar ” and “ Penny Returns—Interlude ” from the film’s post-opening credits sequence (watch here ) with Campbell’s Separation stage of the hero’s journey; both pieces work as cinematic tone poems with archetypal richness. The music and the myth merge, transforming flight into a heroic journey that soars beyond the screen and into the soul. The film begins with test pilot Pete Mitchell (Tom Cruise) receiving orders to stand down from his pending flight of the hypersonic, experimental Darkstar aircraft. Yet, true to his “Maverick” callsign, he flaunts the command and flies toward the stratosphere. Most of this sequence is set to “Darkstar.” Its persistent, march-like rhythm pulses with militaristic precision, emphasizing the setting for Maverick with his duties as a naval aviator. The repeated rhythm riff—called an ostinato—evokes Gustav Holst’s Mars, Bringer of War , calling to mind the mechanical and disciplined aspects of the soldier’s (or test pilot’s) attitude facing mortality.  A specific Separation-related mythic aspect, related to the martial dimension of this sequence, is the “arming scene.” Before a hero/warrior can cross the threshold into battle, some myths describe in detail the look and placement of the martial accoutrement. The most famous of these is in Book 19 of The Iliad , with Achilles putting on the armor crafted by Hephaestus before going to kill Hector (the parallel scene in The Aeneid ’s Book 9 details Aeneas equipping himself with Vulcan’s armor). Maverick ritually “arms” himself as he climbs into his flight suit, puts on his helmet and gloves, and activates the Darkstar’s systems. As he ignites the Vulcan-like fire of the engines and taxis to the runway, the flight crew on the ground meticulously monitors all the “divine” technology surrounding him. The insistent marching music accentuates Mars and Vulcan, the gods of war and fire, collaborating to motivate and equip Maverick to cross the threshold of adventure. Major and minor: the musical polarity of hope and struggle The composers continue by instilling musical tension into this piece to evolve this insistent, single-note figure. While one note cannot have a tonality (like major or minor), the addition of other notes develops the piece’s harmonic content. At first, slowly rising major chords—ascending in both pitch and volume—give a gently uplifting and optimistic feeling. Beyond foreshadowing the literal climb that Maverick will achieve in his jet, they build anticipation for the amazing, heroic feat to come.  The music and the myth merge, transforming flight into a heroic journey that soars beyond the screen and into the soul. The gradual uplift of the major, however, is intermittently punctuated by string runs in a minor tonality. These elicit a contrasting sense of stress, uncertainty, or even nostalgia, perhaps reflecting Maverick’s flouting of his orders, the dangers of the mission, or the weight of his past—the death of his backseater and flying companion Goose (Anthony Edwards) in the first film. The darker notes symbolize struggle and doubt, a common occurrence during the call to adventure phase of a hero’s journey, sometimes manifesting as the refusal of the call. Here, in a sense, Maverick is heeding an inner  call to fly and refusing an outer  call to stay on the ground. Further tying the mythic Separation phase to both plot and score, this sequence has two archetypal figures Campbell emphasizes. First is the Mentor, providing guidance, and is embodied by "Hondo” (Bashir Salahuddin). He counsels Maverick, very  Daedalus-like, to not go past the Mach 10 goal of the flight, which interestingly he calls “the threshold.” He also could represent the other figure, the Threshold Guardian, who warns or tries to prevent the hero from continuing, but this role more clearly belongs to the admiral (Ed Harris). Musically, when Hondo admonishes Maverick, the major/minor tension predominates—he cautions out of solicitous care. When the admiral, who is about order and structure, finally bursts into the control room to order Maverick’s landing, the music then reverts to the simple, one-note military rhythm with only the minor runs. “Where you belong”: bliss, grace, and longing As Maverick ascends like Icarus, the triumphant strains of “Darkstar” fade. At his cruising altitude, the piece titled “Penny Returns—Interlude” enters, a complete contrast to the prior musical setting. Here, gentle and ambient piano and strings, all in major tones, accent the majestic flight of the jet through the stratosphere at hypersonic speeds. I see this as Maverick entering into his Campbellian bliss, being “where he belongs.” Dialogue emphasizes this notion twice later in the film, particularly as Hondo remarks in amazement, “He’s the fastest man alive.” Moments later, as Maverick witnesses the sun rising, the music shifts to an achingly melancholic minor, as he whispers, “Talk to me, Goose,” summoning his dead fellow warrior/best friend, as Achilles does with Patroclus in The Iliad . Both grace and longing accompany this hero as he approaches the Mach 10 threshold of adventure, and the score’s emotional curve highlights all of this beautifully. Of course, Icarus must fall. But unlike Icarus, both Maverick and myself survived our falls to have other adventures. And in an interesting directorial choice by Joseph Kosinsky, in Maverick’s final moments in the Darkstar, no music plays, just the blaring sounds of technology warning of impending doom. This incident in the film creates a new   call to adventure for Maverick—to return to the Top Gun school to teach. For me, it was a call away  from being a pilot to simply marvel at flying as a passenger … or as a lover of on-screen flight. In the film’s case, the musical craft of Zimmer, Gaga, Balfe, and Faltermeyer to access the archetypal emotions of this Separation phase speaks deeply to me and provides, in retrospect, a soundtrack to my own Icarus moment.   MythBlast authored by: Scott Neumeister, PhD  is a literary scholar, author, TEDx speaker, mythic pathfinder and Editor of the MythBlast series from Tampa, Florida, where he earned his PhD 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 Separation stage of the hero's journey. Latest Podcast In this episode of The Podcast With A Thousand Faces, mythologist Leigh Melander joins longtime friend and fellow Campbell scholar Brad Olson for a wide-ranging, playful, and deeply human conversation about myth, imagination, and meaning. Drawing from their shared history at Pacifica Graduate Institute and their long involvement with the Joseph Campbell Foundation, Leigh and Brad explore myth not as a static archive of ancient stories, but as a living, breathing way of seeing — one that quietly shapes how we understand ourselves, our culture, and the world we’re making together. Along the way, Leigh brings her full mythic lineage into the room: her background in cultural mythology and psychology, her longtime leadership with the Joseph Campbell Foundation, and her work as co-founder of Spillian, a regenerative center for imagination and creativity in the Catskills. She shares how her scholarship and creative practice converge around play, frivolity, and the imaginal as serious forces for transformation — whether through ritual, community, writing, or her evolving SpillianQuest project, a mycelial web of tools and adventures designed to help people create meaning in times of change. What emerges is a conversation rooted in friendship and intellectual play — a reminder that myth doesn’t give us answers so much as it sharpens our questions. It’s an invitation to loosen our grip on the literal, re-enter the imaginal, and remember that myth is still alive, thinking through us, and quietly asking us to participate. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "If the call is heeded, the individual is invoked to engage in a dangerous adventure. It's always a dangerous adventure because you are moving out of the familiar sphere of your community. In myths, this is represented as moving out of the known sphere altogether into the great beyond. I call this cossing the threshold." -- Joseph Campbell Pathways to Bliss , 114 Parzival - Medieval Troubadour Traditions of Love See More Videos Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Stephen King’s IT (2017) - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by Benjamin Wallfisch Floating in Floating into the soundtrack of IT , the 2017 film adaptation of Stephen King’s infamous novel, the central musical theme of the film turns around the titular character of It, an unspeakable “alien” entity of savage violence, very much tailored to the specifications of the Freudian Id. Its relentless “compulsion to repeat” (every 27 years) expresses the mimetic dynamism of death drive ( todestrieb ) that animates It. A creature that imitates your worst fear, It takes the shape-shifting form of “Pennywise the Dancing Clown,” who, like Kali dancing over the corpse of Shiva, dances over a pile of children’s corpses that have learned to float in the sewers of Derry. Understood in the widest sense of mystery, It embodies the sacrificial mystery of human violence itself in the cradle of infanticidal slaughter.  As the musical element points beyond words, through the medium of musical tones and auditory images, Benjamin Wallfisch gives expression to the agonies and ecstasies, the horror and beauty, of the film. The sound score will transport us from the soft and sentimental, the nostalgic and gentle, to the shrieking cacophony and pounding terror of infanticidal violence. So does the composer succeed in translating into music the unspeakable collective horror of that which is IT .  Departure from innocence In the opening seconds of the soundtrack of IT , a nursery rhyme gives sound to an infanticidal undertow. The ghostly voice of a young girl sings this very special nursery rhyme, one which George Orwell also used in 1984 .  “Oranges and Lemons” is indeed a remarkable lullaby which, as a whole, portrays a curious vignette of social and economic relations. With the desire “to grow rich,” the consequence of debt and repayment of “five farthings", the nursery rhyme ends in an explosion of murderous frenzy.  A singular voice of the ghostly child multiplies into the mournful echoes of many voices which can barely carry their mournful tune as far as the bells of St. Martin, finally expiring at the fatal debt of five farthings. The initial sequence of the film thus begins its gloomy descent into the dreary town of Derry.  The sound score will transport us from the soft and sentimental, the nostalgic and gentle, to the shrieking cacophony and pounding terror of infanticidal violence. The lullaby Establishing the basic plot of the musical journey, it is well worth having the entire iconic rhyme in mind. For already in its basic structure, this lullaby anticipates and executes a sign of collective murder—both the murder of the many by the one and of the one by the many: Oranges and lemons Say the bells of St. Clement's.   You owe me five farthings, Say the bells of St. Martin's.   When will you pay me? Say the bells at Old Bailey.   When I grow rich, Say the bells at Shoreditch.   When will that be? Say the bells of Stepney.   I do not know, Says the great bell at Bow.   Here comes a candle to light you to bed, And here comes a chopper to chop off your head! Chip chop chip chop the last man is dead. The archetype of child sacrifice Even the small fragment of the lullaby which is used drags with it the entire mythic pattern which is to reverberate throughout the film. It creates an anticipatory build-up that generates tension and suspense, leading to a mind-boggling explosion of homicidal fury. From the underground of Derry, in the shadow of white-picked-fenced America, innocence belies the serial murder of children. The lyrics of this lullaby, which introduce the musical score of It , are oddly familiar though distinctively British. They are also distinctively monetary, fiscal, and gilded, finally endowed with the brutality of capital punishment. The whole nursery rhyme couples an economic social relation of payment and debt, the desire to grow rich, with capital punishment and dismemberment.  Although the very last part of the rhyme, where the chopping begins, was a later addition, it elicits the primordial background of its mythic pattern: the archetype of ritual child sacrifice. There is consistency in the logic of the poem from beginning to end. Decapitation and dismemberment are the price of the debt you pay to Derry — especially if you are not Pennywise! Decimation of the most vulnerable is thus required to sustain the capitalist white-picket-fenced social order of Derry America. The connection between dismemberment, decapitation, capital punishment, and capitalism comes together in the dark underground tunnels of Derry. The archetypal image of the sacrificial slaughter of children, their decapitation and dismemberment, gives expression to a level of systemic violence that is required to maintain the status quo of Derry America.  Herzogian connection Right from the beginning, in this initial track of IT ’s soundtrack, “Every 27 Years,” Benjamin Wallfisch makes the Herzogian connection between childhood nostalgia and collective murder. This nursery rhyme, in the first 40 seconds of the musical score, establishes the unspeakable connection between child murder and the capitalist social order. The name “Pennywise” is indeed emblematic of a monetary and fiscal order whose dismal underground It represents.  This horrifying English nursery rhyme gives musical utterance to the unconscious violence of our system’s capital order. With images of bells, religious and institutional symbols, the dynamic of loan and debt, and the desire to grow rich, the rhyme develops a scene that is fated to lead to the horrifying end of beheading and dismemberment.  Shelter from the Storm " Every 27 Years " Once the voices of children expire, we hear the keys of a maternal piano which opens the film with its inaugural track “Every 27 Years.” Providing shelter from the storm, the warm melody of the piano welcomes us to Derry.  In the novel, Stephen King has the mother figure play Für Elise  on the piano, while Bill helps Georgie make his fateful newspaper boat. Wallfisch recaptures the melancholic introspection of Beethoven, but goes on further to re-create his version of Für Elise  for Derry. The storm of collective murder that comes every 27 years has been unleashed over the town. The Shakespearean image of The Tempest  may lurk behind this image of a storm as an archetypal symbol of the mimetic cycles of violence that threaten to break a human community from within. Into this narrative atmosphere Wallfisch introduces his musical elements with a flavor of nostalgia, which gives this initial piece an indelible American character. So does the composer recreate Beethoven’s masterpiece into an American classic.  The “maternal” quality of the melody is highlighted in the 2017 film by allowing the piano to transition from a non-diegetic into a diegetic musical space. Just as the novelist envisioned it, mother actually plays this piece on her piano inside the Denbrough home.  As a diegetic element, the characters themselves can hear the tune which is used by the composer to welcome us into the hallowed interior of a Derry home.  The fact that a mother is the one who plays this initial piece reveals to us the distinctive stamp of the archetypal Mother as a ruling symbol of its mythic dimension. Its associations with the violence of the storm, the nostalgia for a safe home, a sheltering space, express the paradoxical nature that belongs to every archetype. For these are bipolar or even multipolar structural entities of the collective mind.  As the maternal abyss of incestuous violence, Mother is the raging wind and storm, the environmental chaos, that has taken down the electric grid of Derry, leaving all the houses dark. This Mother of Darkness is descending upon Derry as It prepares to unleash a new flood of infanticidal violence.  As mother—the home maker, the very house that shelters—she is the maternal guardian of the most intimate space of familiar relations. She offers solace and protection against the storm of murderous incestuous violence. The undertone of sadness which haunts this melody has an equal measure of foreboding and nostalgia. A latent shadow appears with its sweet melody as it prepares a young boy, Georgie Denbrough for “his strange death” (It, 6), on his way down the gutter of sacrificial slaughter.  The foreboding character of Mother’s piano playing is emphasized in the book with italics: “My mother was playing that the day Georgie died” (12), as Georgie’s older brother remembers the day with goosebumps.  With this foreboding, a deep nostalgia also calls us back home and welcomes us into the town of Derry. We feel cozy and secure, well enveloped in the maternal fold of a safe home. The ending of the piece suggests a certain limit has been reached. Overcome by sweet lethargy, the melody slowly gives way to the silence, vanishing into the abysmal silence from which It emerged.  The soundtrack of IT  is a magnificent complement to the mythos of the film. It helps to articulate its murderous fury, ratifying the unspeakable in the realm of music and sound. Finding a distinctive voice, the music heightens the horror of what is truly horrifying about the collective Id, its capacity for collective murder and child sacrifice, in the form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown, “the apotheosis of all monsters,” “A creature … especially hungry for boymeat” (9) living in the underground sewage system of our very Derry, American society. MythBlast authored by: Norland Téllez  is an award-winning writer and animation director who currently teaches Animation and Character Design courses at Otis College of Art and Design, Cal State Fullerton. He is also conducting a Life Drawing Lab at USC School of Cinematic Arts. He earned his Ph.D. from Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2009 with a dissertation on the Popol-Wuh of the K’iche’ Maya, which he is currently translating and illustrating in its archetypal dimensions as the Wisdom of the Peoples. You can learn more at norlandtellez.com . This MythBlast was inspired by the Separation stage of the hero's journey. Latest Podcast In this 1966 lecture recorded at the Cooper Union, Joseph Campbell presents mythology as humanity’s oldest response to the awareness of death and selfhood. Across cultures, myth arises not as history but as symbolic language - shaped by shared human concerns about mortality, belonging, and the mystery of existence. While societies differ, the core mythic themes remain constant, revealing a common psychological ground beneath cultural variation. Campbell contrasts Western and Eastern interpretations of the same mythic images - the Garden, the Tree, the Serpent - to show that myth points not to obedience or belief, but to awakening. As modern society becomes more stable, the role of myth shifts from protecting the group to transforming the individual. The true heroic journey, he suggests, is not escape from the world, but the discovery of timeless meaning within the act of living itself. Host, Bradley Olson, introduces the lecture and offers commentary at the end. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Myths and legends of an earlier period, now discredited or no longer understood, their former power broken (yet still potent to charm), have supplied much of the raw material for what now passes simply as animal tale, fairy tale, and heroic or romantic adventure. The giants and gnomes of the Germans, the “little people” of the Irish, the dragons, knights, and ladies of Arthurian Romance were once the gods and demons of the Green Isle and the European continent." -- Joseph Campbell The Flight of the Wild Gander , 8 The Individual Adventure See More Videos Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) © Columbia Pictures A lot of people think that it’s about remaining as a child…No, it’s becoming as a child again…building your adulthood self, absolutely…but then returning to this imagination, creativity—and rediscovering it. Robert Maldonado, Jung on Purpose  Podcast We have reached not only the final week of 2025 but also the ending of the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s yearlong focus on the Power of Myth at the Movies. Each month, our thoughtful authors have offered powerful insights into how films across the spectrum of genres evoke all twelve of our chosen archetypes. As the editor of the MythBlast series, I have been enriched by the ways in which all our contributors have explored the ongoing ability of these archetypal figures, so essential to Campbell’s understanding of myth, to fascinate us. Moreover, they let us see ourselves  in modern visual storytelling media. For the closing MythBlast of the year, and inspired by Devon Deimler’s MythBlast  earlier this month on the Steven Spielberg-directed E.T. , I am going to not only look to the skies but also within for the Magical Child. In December of 1977, eleven days before Christmas, Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind  (1977) debuted on the big screen. Released in the season traditionally tied to the appearance of an otherworldly “magical child,” this film is more than a sci-fi masterpiece about humanity’s first direct contact with extraterrestrial life; it profoundly explores wonder, transformation, and the rediscovery of childlike awe in a jaded world. At its heart, the film juxtaposes two unlikely characters—young Barry Guiler (Cary Guffey) and adult Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss)—both of whom embody the Magical Child archetype: a symbol of innocence, curiosity, and unshakable belief in the unknown.  A dual call: two journeys to wonder While Barry’s youthful fascination with the mysterious lights and unseen forces reflects the pure, unfiltered wonder of childhood, Roy’s journey from disillusioned everyman to wide-eyed seeker reveals how the Magical Child can emerge even in those burdened by adulthood. Through their parallel narratives, Spielberg invites viewers to consider how the loss—and subsequent reclamation—of this archetype shapes our ability to perceive the extraordinary, suggesting that true connection with the cosmos requires not just technological advancement, but a willingness to embrace the imagination and vulnerability of a child. Barry and Roy, though separated by age and circumstance, mirror each other in their rejection of the mundane and their surrender to the inexplicable. Barry, a literal child, is fascinated by his encounters with the otherworldly—his toys come to life, his face is lit with rapture as the UFOs descend, he trusts in the unknown, absolutely and unquestioningly. His journey is one of pure instinct, unconstrained by doubt or the boundaries of logic.  Roy, by contrast, begins as a man trapped in the routines of adulthood: a husband, a father, a lineman whose life is defined by responsibility and practicality. Yet, as the film progresses, his exposure to the same mysterious forces awakens a dormant, childlike curiosity within him. His obsession with the image of Devil’s Tower, his willingness to abandon his family and career, and his eventual regression to a state of wide-eyed wonder—culminating in his playful sculpting of the tower from a pile of mashed potatoes—reveal a man shedding the weight of adulthood to reclaim the magic he once knew.  Both characters are drawn to the unknown not by logic (which the adult world heavily leans into), but by a primordial longing, a call to something greater that transcends chronological age and is often dismissed as too vulnerable or irrational. Spielberg visually reinforces this parallel through framing and lighting, often bathing both in the same ethereal glow, as if to suggest that the Magical Child is not a phase of life, but a state of being available to anyone willing to listen. As Thomas Moore reminds us, “We care for the soul by acknowledging the place of eternal childhood, seeing its disadvantages to be virtuous and its inadequacies to be the conduits of soulful sensitivity” ( Care of the Soul , 54). Roy and Barry’s journeys are not about disparaging adulthood, but about embracing the soulful sensitivity that arises when we dare to see the world—and ourselves—through the eyes of eternal childhood. Growing down : reclaiming the magic you left behind Roy Neary’s embrace of the Magical Child archetype in Close Encounters isn’t just a cinematic fantasy—it’s an invitation for all of us to reconnect with the wonder, curiosity, and openness we often leave behind in adulthood. To experience this transformation in our own lives, we can start by cultivating curiosity: actively seeking out new experiences, asking questions, and allowing ourselves to be captivated by the unknown. This might manifest as exploring a new hobby, revisiting a childhood passion, or simply taking a different route home. We can also prioritize play and creativity, carving out time for activities that spark joy without the pressure of productivity—painting, stargazing, or even daydreaming. Additionally, letting go of rigid expectations and embracing spontaneity can help us break free from the constraints of routine, just as Neary abandons his mundane life. Finally, we can listen to our intuition, those quiet nudges that often lead us toward meaningful experiences, even if they don’t immediately make logical sense. By doing so, we open ourselves to the magic of the world, just as Neary does. We can rediscover the childlike wonder that makes life feel extraordinary—what Campbell has called “the rapture of being alive” ( The Power of Myth , 1). Archetypes as living bridges: from screen to self As we conclude our year-long exploration of archetypes in film, we’re reminded of Joseph Campbell’s deep reverence for these universal patterns—not as abstract concepts, but as living forces that shape our myths, our stories, and ultimately our lives. Campbell understood that archetypes are the shared language of the human experience, the echoes of our collective unconscious that resonate across cultures and centuries. Film, with its vivid imagery and emotional immediacy, serves as a powerful mirror for these timeless motifs, allowing us to witness the Hero’s journey, the Shadow’s struggle, and the Magical Child’s wonder unfold on screen in ways that feel both deeply personal and profoundly universal. Yet, the true magic lies not just in recognizing these patterns in the stories we watch, but in seeing how they reflect our own inner landscapes—how the Hero’s trials mirror our own challenges, how the Lover’s longing speaks to our deepest desires, and how the Trickster’s chaos disrupts our rigid certainties. Archetypes are the bridge between the stories “out there” and the stories within us, inviting us to engage with every tale—whether on screen or in life—as both observer and participant. As Campbell often reminds us, myth is not something to be studied from a distance, but a living dialogue, a call to see ourselves in the narratives that surround us and, in doing so, to discover the mythic dimensions of our own lives. We can rediscover the childlike wonder that makes life feel extraordinary—what Campbell has called “the rapture of being alive”  Thank you for continuing to let MythBlasts help you explore the power of myth in your life, and we can’t wait to reveal our mythic theme for next year’s writings. Happy New Year! MythBlast authored by: Scott Neumeister, PhD  is a literary scholar, author, TEDx speaker, mythic pathfinder and Editor of the MythBlast series from Tampa, Florida, where he earned his PhD 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 Myth & Meaning and the archetype of The Magical Child. Latest Podcast Rebecca Armstrong is a mythologist, minister, and educator whose life has been guided by the transformative power of story. For twelve years, she served as the International Outreach Director of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, helping to create and nurture the worldwide Mythological RoundTable™ groups that carried Campbell’s work into communities around the globe. With an earned doctorate and two master’s degrees, Rebecca has spent over three decades teaching myth, religion, ethics, and film studies at major universities, and she currently leads a course called Movies & the American Myth at Indiana University. In her private practice as a Jungian Coach and Spiritual Guidance counselor at workingwithsoul.com, she helps others reconnect with the deeper stories moving through their lives. In this episode, Rebecca joins JCF’s John Bucher for a rich conversation about her life, her relationship with Joseph Campbell, and how myth continues to inform her work in the world today. Listen Here This Week's Highlights “Old age is implicit in the generation of a child: the child’s old age is there waiting. Similarly, the older you get, the more you realize that you are still a kid, and your early experiences are the ones that are now just opening out. It is one system all the time.” -- Joseph Campbell Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living , 40      The Circle See More Videos Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

The Golden Compass (2007) © New Line Cinema When Philip Pullman’s book Northern Lights  was released in the United States under the title The Golden Compass , and later adapted as a film , something more than a simple marketing shift occurred. Rather than foregrounding the Northern Aurora, the American title centered attention instead on the alethiometer, a golden, compass-like instrument   derived from the Greek words for “truth” and “measure.” This device reveals the truth to those intuitive and courageous enough to read it, like Lyra Belacqua (played by Dakota Blue Richards), who embodies the Magical Child archetype. The 2007 film has its critics. Many found it contrived or disappointing compared with Pullman’s richly layered novel. Yet despite these flaws, the film remains worth discussing because the protagonist’s archetypal presence shines through with such vivid clarity. Even when the narrative falters, Lyra’s still one of cinema’s most luminous embodiments of the Magical Child: intuitive, unguarded, and attuned to the world’s hidden layers. Where adults falter, the Child perceives The Magical Child is not a symbol of perfection, but of perception. She’s the archetype of imagination, intuition, wonder, and enchantment. In the film we notice this archetypal pattern arising when adults forget why — and how — to sense the world as alive and meaningful, having slipped into either literalism or cynicism. Conversely, the Magical Child perceives reality as communicative and symbolic, and so consequently reads the subtle, inner signals as naturally as adults read text. In this way the Child retains the capacity to apprehend magic in the everyday, a quality that so many adults — unfortunately — have lost. Most of the adults in Lyra’s world are burdened by ideology or fear, but she perceives their motivations with striking immediacy. Early in the film, already suspicious of Mrs. Coulter (played by Nicole Kidman), she snaps, “You’re hurting me! Let me go!” revealing her instinctive recognition of future danger long before any adult intervenes. Here, Lyra’s lucidity isn’t analytical but intuitive. She reads people and situations with an unfiltered intelligence, dulled in most adults due to the weight of their responsibilities. the Child retains the capacity to apprehend magic in the everyday, a quality that so many adults—unfortunately—have lost. Orphanhood and the mythic calling Lyra’s orphanhood also intensifies her perceptual openness. Without parents shaping her worldview, she remains unmasked and unarmored. She’s not yet burdened by the rigid persona that family systems can impose. When we turn our gaze to the wisdom revealed in myths, we learn that the orphan is not simply abandoned. Rather, she’s unclaimed by the world so that she may be claimed by destiny.  In Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces ,   he writes , “The child of destiny has to face a long period of obscurity. This is a time of extreme danger, impediment or disgrace. He is thrown inward to his own depths or outward to the unknown; either way, what he touches is a darkness unexplored.” The innocence that sees clearly It’s Lyra’s imagination that allows her to touch into unexplored darkness. We witness her imagination not as escapism, but as a vivid mode of engaging reality. She senses when someone is lying, easily recognizes hidden motives, and relies on her bodily knowing long before reason even has the chance to catch up. This coherence sets Lyra apart from the adults from the get-go. The grown-ups in the film are governed by imperiousness and a desire for control, and their perception is numbed by rigidity. The Magisterium, in particular, mistrusts intuition and suppresses imagination. It fears anything that can’t be measured empirically. Lyra sees through these constraints, and it’s here where we find the essence of the Magical Child: the ability to perceive truth without the occlusions that adulthood imposes. The alethiometer and the truth-speaking child Nowhere is Lyra’s perception clearer than in her relationship with the alethiometer. As the Master of Jordan College hands her the device, he tells her:  It tells the truth.  We’ve always tried to acquaint you with the truth.  But the secrets at the heart of things elude scholars and authorities.  But this lets you glimpse things as they are. Adults require years of study to interpret its symbols. Lyra simply declares, “I can do it… I can!” By entering a liminal state,  and the same imaginal consciousness that we all have access to through deep play , she allows symbols, emotions, intuitive hints, and energetic pulls to seamlessly flow together.  Lyra doesn’t need to chase meaning because she directly receives it. The truth naturally rises to meet her by virtue of her not severing the connection to a more receptive mode of knowing. In modern parlance, we’d say she’s “aligned and attuned.” So to reiterate, what makes Lyra magical is not performing magic tricks, but the capacity to perceive through a lens of enchantment that many  of us have forgotten. Pan: the soul that stays close Her relationship with her daemon, Pantalaimon, expresses this same openness. Pan shifts form constantly — moth, ermine, cat — mirroring Lyra’s own receptive psyche. Daemons of adults are fixed, while a child’s daemon remains unfixed because the child hasn’t yet hardened into a single identity.  We watch Pan externalizing Lyra’s instinctive wisdom so that when danger nears, he cries, “Lyra, run!” revealing what she senses long before she even has the opportunity to articulate it. Their bond visually represents her intuition as a living presence guiding her through the world. And this is very similar to what Campbell wrote in Pathways to Bliss , “The psychical realm is the symbolic realm. It is where the energy of the body becomes transformed into images, impulses, and intuitions.” Stepping into new realms with bears and witches Lyra’s encounters across the figurative North reveal yet another feature of the Magical Child: the ability to cross thresholds naturally. She speaks to the rightful ruler of the armored polar bears (panserbjørne), Iorek Byrnison, with disarming directness: Is that what they pay you? Whiskey? Iorek Byrnison, you’re the first ice bear I ever met. I was ever so excited, and scared. But now I’m just disappointed. I heard that bears lived to hunt and to fight. Why are you wasting your time here, drinking whiskey? She addresses him not as a beast, but as a being with dignity and potential agency. This recognition earns his loyalty. Lyra’s approach doesn’t come from any premeditated strategy. Instead, it comes through her authentic attunement to what’s unsaid. This is why the witches trust Lyra, the Gyptians follow her lead, and also why the landscapes appear so incredibly responsive and attuned to her. We watch Lyra move through snowfields, winds and frozen light as if  they’re alive because enchantment is not an idea she holds ... it’s become a world that she thoroughly inhabits. Solstice and the return of the Magical Child The Magical Child holds particular power at solstice times: moments when the darkness turns, when one world fades and another begins, when the familiar no longer guides us, and the unknown calls. Now many of us can feel orphaned during the holidays — whether literally, emotionally or spiritually — yet the myths teach us that these states are not individual failings, but rather invitations. When false belonging falls away our perception sharpens, and our imagination reawakens from a deep slumber. By observing Lyra, we get to notice how renewal doesn’t come from any control tactics or a grand master plan. Instead, we’re shown how renewal arises from a deep attentiveness to the life moving within, around,   and through us. The Magical Child’s invitation for the New Year So in summary, to live with Lyra’s sensitivity is to bring a subtler quality of awareness into our days. It means noticing the world as if  it were   personally—and continuously — addressing us ... because it is. From this state, our imagination can inform how we perceive. We can more easily trust those bodily cues and inner stirrings that surface long before thought intervenes. And with a calmer nervous system we can stay curious, even when outcomes are unclear. When we can consciously invite a sense of wonder to return to all those overlooked moments of life, we allow the Magical Child within us to be resurrected. And we do it not by regressing into childhood, but by retrieving our perception from the numbness of habit. In this way enchantment is no longer fantasy. Alternatively, it becomes a magical relationship with reality ... a way of seeing that reveals what’s been present all along. Therefore, as we cross the solstice threshold into a new year, the character of Lyra Belacqua offers us this gentle, yet potent reminder: imagination is not a childish pastime ... it’s a mode of touching truth. Lyra demonstrates to us that the world becomes more magical not when it  changes, but when we  do.  So may this New Year’s turning awaken in us the same instinctive clarity and intuitive receptiveness that guided Lyra. And may the Magical Child within each of us step forward — like a daemon at our side, golden compass in our hands — pointing us towards whatever feels most alive. Happy holidays!   MythBlast authored by: Kristina Dryža is a futurist-turned-archetypal consultant who helps people understand the unseen forces shaping their lives. At a time when speed, fragmentation, and overwhelm define modern experience, she shows how myth and archetypes offer something many of us have lost: an inner map. Her work reveals the patterns beneath behaviours, relationships, creativity, and change, giving people a way to interpret their lives with meaning rather than confusion. A member of the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Editorial Advisory Group, Kristina brings depth, accessibility, and emotional intelligence to her translation of ancient wisdom into practical insight. You can explore her mythic lens and travel-based storytelling on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@kristinadryza This MythBlast was inspired by Myth & Meaning and the archetype of The Magical Child. Latest Podcast Recorded in 1963 for WNET-TV New York, this rare lecture features Joseph Campbell guiding us through the long, layered emergence of The Gods of Egypt , tracing how five millennia of cultural mingling - from Paleolithic hunters to Neolithic farmers to Near Eastern migrants - slowly shaped the myths that would define Egyptian civilization. Campbell follows the evolution of sacred animals, mother-goddess figures, burial rites, and symbolic art that culminated in the unification of Egypt and the rise of the pharaoh as a living embodiment of cosmic order. He then unfolds the great mythic drama of Osiris, Isis, Horus, and the solar god Re, showing how themes of death, rebirth, and divine kingship became the spiritual heartbeat of the Nile. This bonus episode offers a vivid, revealing look at how Egypt’s iconic gods were not born fully formed, but forged across centuries of imagination and ritual . Listen Here This Week's Highlights "In sum: the child of destiny has to face a long period of obscurity. This is a time of extreme danger, impediment, or disgrace. He is thrown inward to his own depths or outward to the unknown; either way, what he touches is a darkness unexplored." -- Joseph Campbell The Hero with a Thousand Faces , 280      The Eternal Principle See More Videos Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) © Amblin Entertainment As the aperture of winter solstice closes upon us in the Northern Hemisphere, the psyche too coils, nestles into darkness and focus, before the gradual expansion of sunlit hours begins again and psyche stretches long towards spring. This pronounced moment of daylight turnover is sometimes, mythologically, figured as the divine child. Dionysos, child of a chthonic spring, who the ecstatic Thyiades cyclically reawaken on frozen Parnassos. Or the Christ child, who follows his vine brother’s footsteps in miraculous birth, rebirth, and embrace of the margins. But here I wish to spend time with another sort of alien visitor and magic child—two magical children, actually. And though my tale takes place at Halloweentime, I write this at the advent of Christmas, the season in which many return to the place my characters give everything to reach: Home. When presented with the list of cinematic archetypes for JCF writers to choose from this year, the Magical Child immediately chose itself for me, as it had already done so over 20 years ago, when I made my initial return to E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial  (1982). What I share here is brief and selective, beamed through the opportunity to focus on said archetype and relevant passages thereto from Campbell. E.T. remains a sacred companion for the long journey. Campbell speaks of “the child of destiny,” in the context of the hero’s childhood. This phase of a heroic life is already marked by encounters with “unsuspected presences,” including angelic or other-specied helpers who teach of what resides “just beyond the sphere of the measured and the named.” To survive these uncertain conditions, “the myths agree that an extraordinary capacity is required” ( The Hero with a Thousand Faces ,   301-302). A magic, let’s say. Spoilers follow. To the moon and back The magical child heroes of E.T. are E.T., an alien from an unnamed planet, and Elliott (played with otherworldly soul by Henry Thomas), an earthborn boy feeling alienated from his family after his father’s departure. The film begins in nighttime, in a redwood forest, where a spaceship of gentle alien botanists has landed. They are soon frightened away by the arrival of government agents, and E.T. is thus stranded by his mothership. Via a trail of Reese’s Pieces, alien and boy eventually encounter one another (viewers don’t get a clear view of E.T. until Elliott does), and a deep, psychosomatic bond is established. Elliott introduces E.T., under a most excellent promise of secrecy, to his siblings, Michael (Robert MacNaughton) and Gertie (Drew Barrymore), who join Elliott in hiding E.T. from their mother, Mary (Dee Wallace).  E.T. exhibits special powers of empathy and vitalization; he can levitate objects, resurrect wilting flowers, and heal wounds with his glowing finger. Elliott is deeply protective of E.T. and the connection they share (they “feel each other’s feelings”). Seeking to contact E.T.’s home planet, the two build a communicator out of household items, sneak E.T. outside through a Halloween ghost costume, and take off for the forest (the iconic magic flight across the full moon) to install their device. As the communicator shows signs of working, Elliott’s heart aches over the impending loss of his magical double. He wishes for E.T. to stay in Elliott’s home; they could grow up together. By morning, E.T. has become very ill and government agents descend upon them (they are the true alien invaders of the film, wrapping Elliott’s home in plastic). E.T. and Elliott are hooked up to machines and monitors. Their synchronized heart rhythms separate and E.T. fades away. An agent credited as “Keys” (Peter Coyote) allows Elliott time alone to say goodbye to E.T.. After expressing his love, E.T. suddenly returns to life, and a plan is hatched. Michael and his formerly too-cool-for-Elliott friends assist in escaping E.T. back to the forest by outwitting the agents (bicycles can go where cops can’t). In the forest clearing, the mothership returns. The time for a real goodbye has come, but E.T. points from his heart to Elliott’s head, reassuring him he will always be right here . The ship door closes like a camera iris over E.T.’s glowing heart, and the ship takes off. Elliott watches with wizened eyes and blowing hair. The magic child has become a hero, one who will remain so for not relinquishing the magic child that remains inside him, animating his imagination and ethos forever after.   “I’ve been to the forest” E.T. pulls on distinct mythic lineages for its symbolic effects and aesthetic enchantment. From Christian iconography: E.T.’s sacred heart, his radiant emergence and ascension, the divine spark of his finger. The bookend site of the film, the forest, is a premiere fairy tale landscape, a genre ruled by magical children. When Keys says to Elliott, “I’ve been to the forest,” we can read him as saying, I was a child of imagination, once, too . Andrew Gordon  describes the film’s director, Steven Spielberg, as transforming “tract homes into fairytale cottages,” and cites the eternal child motif, noting how such children are often born from a shiny egg (or spaceship) and exposed to “extraordinary dangers while also possessing extraordinary hidden powers” (288).  While these mythic kin—touchpoints of varying intentionality for Spielberg—add constellatory sparkle to E.T. ’s universe, its magic is already given with the film itself. As Glen Slater  claims, what we’re after in a meaningful cinematic experience is “archetypal resonance,” which manifests not by excavating “recognizable substructures” but by experiencing the “phenomenal foreground”—how a film’s audio-visual metaphors evoke emotional responses carrying “timeless and universal undertones,” regardless of whether one is knowledgeable of cultural motif patterns (8, 12). This resonance evokes James Hillman’s definition of “archetypal” as indicating a sense   of   importance , a knowledge of the heart. Close-up encounters For me, the most powerful scene of E.T.  is when the camera zooms into Elliott’s face, just as his escape mission seems about to fail. In that moment, E.T.’s telekinetic magic (and the equal powers of John Williams’s score) lift the children into the air and away from the guns below. This sequence, each and every time I see it, reignites the aesthetic arrest that hit me twenty years ago. My pounding heart soars with the music and tears fall. It’s an aesthetic arrest like that which Campbell (following James Joyce) articulates: a “healing force” of compassion, a mirror “reawakening the eye and heart to wonder” ( The Inner Reaches of Outer Space ,   100): “There is a telling moment of impact when this recognition strikes, and one is held as by the mystery of one's own face in a glass. Therewith, the radiance” (102).  What my heart recognizes in E.T. , and particularly in that scene above, is an archetypal resonance, an emotional correlate of my own life experience, though my experience does not literally resemble the film. What E.T.  granted me unexpectedly years ago, and still, is catharsis. It is an indirect image by which I can directly look at and move through the emotions tethered to a great loss in my own world, and an unrelenting wish that I, too, could have saved somebody. In no small terms, by the light of its moon, this 1982 movie about a ridiculous-looking alien and a boy with a bike has saved me many times. The child who is gone is always right here . Movie magic. Stay young at heart One need not have such a high Richter-scale, personal association for the archetypal resonance of this film to be felt. When Roger Ebert  reviewed E.T. , he said it’s “a reminder of what movies are for. Most movies are not for any one thing, of course. Some are to make us think, some to make us feel, some to take us away from our problems, some to help us examine them.   What is enchanting about E.T. is that, in some measure, it does all of those things.” And it is what it pluralistically does: John Williams’s score affects a technical-metaphorical mimesis; it is polytonal, utilizing two different keys at the same time, a musical mirroring of E.T. and Elliott’s dynamic. Spielberg loved Williams’s music for the final chase scene so much that he even edited the sequence to fit the music—they are that music. For Spielberg, E.T. was a cinematic materialization of the emotions he felt as a lonely child of divorced parents, which made him long for an imaginary friend. He positioned his camera at a child’s eye view for significant portions of the film so that viewers took on a child’s perspective. What is magical about our child hero and his childlike alien friend is their ability to feel each other’s feelings, and to act on those feelings. What is magical about E.T. , for those moved by it, is the same: we  feel their feelings. And the experience acts, perhaps, as Campbell says of the type of love associated with a Christmas Crib, to cultivate “in one’s heart the inner divine child of one’s own awakened spiritual life” ( Myths to Live By , 151). by the light of its moon, this 1982 movie about a ridiculous-looking alien and a boy with a bike has saved me many times. The child who is gone is always right here.   MythBlast authored by: Devon Deimler, PhD  is a writer, artist, and teacher. She is an Associate Professor in Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Mythological Studies program, Curator of exhibits and events at OPUS Archives and Research Center (home to the collections of James Hillman, Marija Gimbutas, and Joseph Campbell), and a lecturer and special editions editor for The Philosophical Research Society, where she has served as Contributing Artist/Scholar. Devon earned her PhD in Mythological Studies with an emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica. Her dissertation,  Ultraviolet Concrete: Dionysos and the Ecstatic Play of Aesthetic Experience , won the Institute’s Dissertation of Excellence award. She holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her experience in the arts includes founding an independent record label, Wildfire Wildfire Productions, and working as Assistant to the Director at the Dennis Hopper Art Trust. She was recently published in  Truth and Soul: A Robert Downey, Sr. Reader. This MythBlast was inspired by Myth & Meaning and the archetype of The Magical Child. Latest Podcast Rebecca Armstrong is a mythologist, minister, and educator whose life has been guided by the transformative power of story. For twelve years, she served as the International Outreach Director of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, helping to create and nurture the worldwide Mythological RoundTable™ groups that carried Campbell’s work into communities around the globe. With an earned doctorate and two master’s degrees, Rebecca has spent over three decades teaching myth, religion, ethics, and film studies at major universities, and she currently leads a course called Movies & the American Myth at Indiana University. In her private practice as a Jungian Coach and Spiritual Guidance counselor at workingwithsoul.com, she helps others reconnect with the deeper stories moving through their lives. In this episode, Rebecca joins JCF’s John Bucher for a rich conversation about her life, her relationship with Joseph Campbell, and how myth continues to inform her work in the world today. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "My family helped me, all the time, just to do the thing I really, deeply, most wanted to do. I didn't even realize there was a problem . . . You have to know your child and be attentive to your child. You can help." -- Joseph Campbell Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers , 147      The Hidden Dimension See More Videos Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter