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Once heroes have endured the longest nights and defeated the mightiest monsters, once they have stared death in the face and survived to tell the tale, their journey is by no means over.  What may seem to be an afterthought may turn out to be the real point behind the quest. Perhaps the greatest obstacle for would-be heroes is to recognize the trap set against them where they least expect it: after the climactic battle in the small details of the morning after, hidden there by the unconscious. In the last stage of the hero’s journey, which Joseph Campbell calls the Return, there is one last task to perform, a task which might prove to be their undoing, or that might aid them in the  acquisition of the ultimate boon. Campbell speaks of a task in which the hero: […] has yet to confront society with his ego-shattering, life-redeeming elixir, and take the return blow of reasonable queries, hard resentment, and good people at a loss to comprehend. (The Hero of a Thousand Faces , 216) This life-redeeming elixir is ego shattering because what is at stake in the quest is not just one's “personal fate,” as Campbell says, “but the fate of mankind, of life as a whole” ( The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 234). This connection to the collective is a tell-tale sign that we are stepping into the archetypal dimension of the collective unconscious, the native land of myth and ritual. The integration of the hero’s gift into society in the end may turn out to be the real difficulty of the entire quest.  Why is the hero’s gift so difficult to integrate into society? Why isn’t it, like most gifts, more enthusiastically welcomed? The answer should be clear: because it implies a revolution within the collective unconscious—including the sociopolitical and economic orders of our lives. The hero’s ultimate boon is, after all, the possibility of changing the world, and such change requires the transformation of the entire symbolic order governing our collective lives.  The fact that the symbolic order of the collective unconscious is as much spiritual as it is political is often obscured by ideologies of Self-Development or Supreme Meaning, which are supposed to surpass even the value of human life. By way of contrast, true enlightenment begins with the recognition that the internal and the external, the personal and the collective, along with the entire set of binary oppositions are, in fact, not external to each other. Each opposite is reflected into itself via the other.  In the Eastern doctrine of mokṣa , the state of enlightenment means a kind of release from the tyranny of opposites, a self-transcending mode of consciousness in which our enslavement to samsara comes to an end. But this triumph of redemption doesn’t mean that opposites simply disappear or are conflated and done away with. For they belong to the nature of existence as profoundly as Being itself. They are not pitted in flat opposition to each other, but are to be viewed dialectically as integrated aspects of the life of the psyche in its totality. Throughout his Asian Journals , which chronicle Campbell’s travels throughout Asia and his various conversations with spiritual leaders, there is a constant theme concerning the question of the true nature of mokṣa : “Is it release from the world? Or is it release from ignorance?” (208). Especially when confronted by the world-negating tendency in some strains of Indian philosophy, Campbell declared himself a clear partisan of the latter view: “”I preferred the Bhagavad Gītā’s karma yoga to the monastic rejection of the world” ( Asian Journals, 208). There were strong arguments on both sides, and things could have gotten heated, but luckily in the end the comradery shared among friends remained the victor: It was getting late and so I let the argument stay at this pleasant point, suggesting, however, that if one had found or even heard about the still point in the center of  Śiva’s dance, involvement in the fury of the world was different from what it would be without that knowledge. (Asian Journals, 209) “Involvement in the fury of the world” is a great way to describe the sociopolitical dimensions of human existence. In fact, the reference to the Gītā points to the struggle for political power between brothers and sisters in the broader context of the Mahābhārata . The still point in the midst of the gruesome dance of Śiva places us at the crux of the soul’s existence, inside the sacred ring of myth, in which antagonism and tension—indeed, outright war —between brothers and sisters is always taking place. The dualistic tension of opposites thus belongs to the political order of things — indeed, that tension more than belongs to the political order, it defines it. The endless existential struggle for freedom and justice is not merely a metaphor for the cosmic dance but a concrete fight for the soul of humankind.

“Thinking of Lady Yang at Midnight” by Edmund Dulac On the 146th night of Scheherazade’s captivity, as told in Joseph Campbell’s edition of The Thousand and One Nights, The Story of the Birds and Beasts and the Son of Adam keeps her sovereign Sultan from ending her life. In this translation by John Payne edited by Joseph Campbell, the fairytale affords a comical glimpse at our own species’ collective shadow. Like all tales of this sort, the story shifts our human point of view to that of animals, especially those that have been “domesticated” by our industry. The story imagines the terrifying, omnipotent figure that humanity must cut in the eyes and flesh of animal-kind, in their day-to-day suffering, in their subservience to humankind. Looking through the inverted mirror of myth, our celebrated creative qualities and ingenuity are reflected into the shadow of a trickster figure, the archetype most closely resembling humankind. Through the lens of the trickster, our creativity exhibits itself in the destructive aspects of human industry, craft, and skill, the very instruments through which we exert absolute dominion over other species—as well as over our own—with unrelenting greed and cruelty. “The Story of the Birds and Beasts and the Son of Adam” projects an image of humankind which is not opposed to, nor built against the concept of “beasts”; it is rather an image of ourselves as the sovereign beasts on this planet. Beginning with the appearance of a duck on an “island abounding in trees and streams,” a virtual paradise untouched by humankind, the account of the treacherous ways of the “Sons of Adam” is related again and again. The wily character of the sovereign beast was already imprinted in the soul of every animal that immigrated to the island. One after the other—a lion whelp, a runaway ass, a black horse, a furious camel—each beast gives a similar account of their first and last encounter with a Son of Adam. As the birds listen intently, we hear about diabolical technological means through which humanity exerts its dominion over all creatures.  The shocking truth that is finally revealed, however, comes in the guise of man himself: a poor human carpenter who claims to be a victim of the Sons of Adam as well. The old carpenter suggests to the animals that whatever the sons of Adam are capable of doing to beasts, they are quite happy to do to one another. Man is the sovereign beast which devours itself and all others: Homō hominī lupus est. Now, with this insight into the dark side of human nature, how could we possibly build a bridge between that and a feeling of deep gratitude for the whole? Is it possible to find a mode of gratitude that does not exclude the pain of its shadow—including our sins, our treachery and inhuman cruelty? Like the portentous dream of the duck at the beginning, the story ends with a warning against a false sense of gratitude based in a deep persecutorial anxiety. Perfectly happy to endorse the status quo, content with its privileges and given power structure, this final attitude is revealed in the person of antelope. For antelope was the last and only animal seemingly ignorant of humankind upon arrival, although he is quickly made aware of the extent of our murderous treachery as the island is finally “discovered” by the Sons of Adam.  Despite the tragic loss of duck, the peacocks and antelope are able to escape this last encounter and are thankful for having survived. Unable to think through the meaning of the situation, an attitude of mediocre self-contentment finally emerges among survivors, a feeling of resignation and unease which is perfectly captured by antelope’s final prayer: “Glory be to the Requiter of good and evil, the Lord of glory and dominion!”(1001 Nights, p.594) It is as though the myth were asking us: is gratitude simply a way to acknowledge our dependence on worldly masters? Or is it a ritual worship of the unjust world order against which we are pleased to “count our blessings”? Touting a kind of ‘slave morality’ of its own, the antelope’s prayer allows us to rest content with a “business as usual” kind of attitude—together with the collective shadow that is pushing us to the brink of extinction. By narrowly concentrating on personal wealth and power, our sense of gratitude remains enclosed in a narcissistic bubble, a mechanism of fetishistic disavowal, which is portrayed by antelope and peacocks’ final subjective attitude.  Thus the story ends with this comical note, a sad joke which is made to stand for the failure to cope with the situation that threatens all living creatures: duck’s tragedy and the deep inheritance of persecutory anxiety. Rather than splitting the psyche into personal vs. collective, or creative vs. destructive, true insight rests in the recognition of opposites always touching each other in the depths of the psyche. “The secret,” as Jung says, “is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive” ( The Portable Jung,  345). In a truly transcendent sense of gratitude, therefore, we could even be thankful of the destructive impulses of humankind in the drive towards the whole of creative being itself. In a mode of gratitude that is no longer based on fear and anxiety, we could acknowledge the wound of the existential crisis as a gift in disguise. Not that the literal destruction of the environment and loss of lives are gifts, but that the responsibility we take is the gift and the light of the future. For this responsibility points the way to a revolution of the collective soul which will end and begin anew the history of human life on earth.

Rendering Based on Night Way Chant, d.1937, exhibited at the Wheelwright Museum designed by William Henderson, in collaboration with Hosteen Klah and Mary Wheelwright, oil on beaverboad, 47 1/4 x 47 1/4 inches In his 1986 publication The Inner Reaches of Outer Space , Campbell turns to a Navaho sand painting of a Blessing Ceremony which depicts a rite of passage for the initiate. Campbell sees this painting as a specific illustration of a psychic process of transformation which is archetypal in nature; it possesses mythic structures shared among all peoples and cultures. In the Navaho vision the sand painting represents a kind of gateway to another world, an attitude or mode of consciousness hitherto unknown to the initiate. The painting acts as a great transformer of psychic energy, channeling all its impermanence and sense of becoming. For the sand painting will dissolve after the ritual is done, thus showing in a most concrete way its thoroughly temporal sense of eternity. In its purely formal structures the sand painting depicts the journey of a divided mind undergoing a profound shamanic psychoanalysis. As a kind of White Walker of the mind, the initiate enters the bottom right of the picture; their path leaves white cornmeal footsteps that reflect a mind divided against itself, an ailing mindset walking along a divided path. The color of the mind is lunar white, the color of the cornmeal footprints left along the Pollen Path.   As the counter-intuitive abstract unity of all colors, the whiteness of the footsteps represents a thinking mindset. It denotes a mode of consciousness already charged with spiritual intensity. The Navaho White Walkers stand for the ghostly consciousness of psychic existence, a mode of dialectical self-awareness which relates itself to itself in a doubling of the mind. The White Walker of the Pollen Path means the initiation of twin consciousness as the self-awareness of the psychic substance in its own  spectral dimension, a realm of pre-existence between the lines of being and non-being.  The walk of the Pollen Path involves a peculiar mode of thinking, a thinking with “naked feet,” which are allowed to step into the inner life of things. Walking over the red coals of solar feelings and the blue waters of lunar sensations, the White Walker of the Pollen Path learns to step between false alternatives and belief systems, and the pseudo-oppositions of thinking/feeling, which beleaguer the alienated state of the divided mind. Releasing itself from its own ideological traps, its own neurotic conflicts, the initiate gives way to the liberation of the Pollen Path.  The path of twin consciousness is a doubly reflected path wherein the energies of Sun and Moon intertwine. Instead of splitting the world into rigid dualisms, thinking and feeling, sensation and intuition, all walk hand in hand along the dialectical movement of the Pollen Path. The integration of all five ritual colors (red, blue, yellow, black and white) sets the mind, soul, body, and spirit within the cosmic background of Night. In my digital recreations of the Navajo design featured here, I emphasize the dialectical relationship of the conscious elements of the painting against the vast unconscious background of cosmic space-time.  As Campbell also describes the mythic dimension of this painting:  Footprints of white cornmeal mark the path of the initiate throughout. As already noticed, they approach along a road that is of the two symbolic colors of the male and female powers, fire and water, sunlight and cloud, which at the place of the Spirit Bringers abruptly blend to one golden yellow of the color of pollen.( Inner Reaches , 71) The Spirit Bringers ignite with lightning the process of psychic transformation. This happens at the turning point of the initiatory walk, where ascension begins. It is here where opposites become creative rather than destructive as they enter into a dynamic relationship which ultimately becomes a helical movement upwards which fructifies the corn plant.  The healing means a regeneration of the soul-body in order to effect change. Although there may be all kinds of intoxicating aids for this shift in every culture, as Campbell writes, the main point is that the “ordeal is an act of sacrifice” (Inner Reaches, 73) .   What ultimately effects this mysterious “blend” of opposites, however, is not the simple agent of an “altered state,” which may be a passing phase or lapse of the moment. The ritual must not only be felt and intuited, imagined or played with as if it were a matter of make-believe. No, the ritual must be seriously lived through and internalized, existentially reflected in the very logic and syntax of our lives. As the real origin of psychic change, the walk of the Pollen Path exemplifies the unity of opposites in time, but it is the work of the walk itself that matters one day at a time.  As we saw, the emergence of the Pollen Path happens at the turning point where the Twins reveal themselves in their true nature as lightning strikes. It is a twin light of consciousness that appears to ignite the power of the mythic image as the source of a healing experience. Rather than being a “talking cure,” however, the Pollen Path is a cure by means of archetypal sight. It is the visionary way of the shaman, philosopher, and artist soaring into the depths of Night, in other words, “assuming an intentionally metaphorical, mythological cast of hierophantic personifications” as Campbell writes. ( Inner Reaches,  70) The need for an authentic sense of vision in order to bring about the desired healing effect cannot be over-emphasized. As Jung himself sternly remarked: “It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing” ( Psychology and Alchemy , page 13, ¶14). This is where myth comes in as the indispensable instrument of vision to light our paths—like the Phoenix reborn from the ashes of time.

Kālī atop Śiva and Śava (watercolor, India, c. 1740 a.d. Courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art) I love those moments in which Joseph Campbell, the world-class scholar of myth, also becomes a story-teller, often drawing a line of Native American wisdom. In The Flight of the Wild Gander, he opens the chapter on “Mythogenesis” with a Sioux folktale to introduce us into the mysterious “center” of all mythological traditions: Early one morning, long ago, two Sioux Indians with their bows and arrows were out hunting on the North American plains; and as they were standing on a hill, peering about for game, they saw in the distance something coming toward them in a strange and wonderful manner. When the mysterious thing drew nearer, they perceived that it was a very beautiful woman, dressed in white buckskin, bearing a bundle on her back, and one of the men immediately became lustful. He told his friend of his desire, but the other rebuked him, warning that this surely was no ordinary woman. She had come close now and, setting her bundle down, called to the first to approach her. When he did so, he and she were covered suddenly by a cloud and when this lifted there was the woman alone, with the man nothing but bones at her feet, being eaten by terrible snakes. “Behold what you see!” she said to the other. “Now go tell your people to prepare a large ceremonial lodge for my coming. I wish to announce to them something of great importance.” (Flight, 57-58) Although later the mysterious woman reveals her teaching using mandala symbolism, the ultimate secret she bears is her very presence as a sexual being. It is indeed the secret of sexuality itself in its connection with death that seems to be the core of her wisdom. Isn’t the dark connection between sexuality, death, and wisdom one of the biggest secrets there is? The archetypal image of the goddess laying on top of the dead bones of man immediately conjures the Hindu goddess of death, Kālī, who is the bearer of the sacred śakti of feminine sexuality and creativity. She is often pictured as a dancing figure over the dismembered corpses of men, herself wearing a sacrificial skirt of mutilated arms and a gruesome collar of heads and other body parts.  From a psychoanalytic perspective, it is abundantly clear that the message of “great importance” that the mysterious feminine figure wants to convey is not an ideology or belief system, nor is it the revelation of a “higher meaning” above ordinary life. The mystery is the very presence of the sacred feminine in the midst of the hunt for wisdom.  Staying close to the mythic image, the Goddess immediately represents the fundamental unity of sexuality and death at the core of the human psyche—the two fundamental psychic forces postulated by Freud—which may lead a new hunter for truth to ask with Nietzsche: “Supposing that Truth is a woman—what then?” ( Beyond Good & Evil , Preface). We need to emphasize the fact that the image of the alluring Goddess belongs with that of the hunters—a connection which makes Campbell resort to the parallel myth of Actaeon and Artemis for further elucidation of the Sioux legend. In both cases, the hunter and the hunted belong to the same archetypal complex, a moment of mythological self-reflection, which depicts the primordial encounter of the soul with itself as the event of “the naked” Truth.  Thus the Intellect as Hunter, looking for an “object of knowledge,” runs into the figure of the sacred feminine by sheer accident. Rather than game for objective research, however, she appears as a mythic image that brings the mysteries of eros and death into a single apparition. At this ultimate stage of self-revelation, we are no longer interested in meaning per se . Conversely, the threat of meaninglessness, the fear-mongering of the Void, no longer affects us. As Campbell wrote of the function of art in general, the point of myth is “to render a sense of existence , not an assurance of some meaning […]” ( Flight, 151). Campbell also understood that ultimately: […] the objective is to be born from the womb of myth, not to remain in it, and the one who has attained to this “second birth” is truly the “twice born,” freed from the pedagogical devices of society, t he lures and threats of myth, the local mores, the usual hopes of benefits and rewards. (Flight, 38 — emphasis added) The true purpose of metaphysics, then, is to transcend the need for metaphysical meaning itself; it is to be released into the arms of the Goddess, the Lady of our dismemberment, in a primordial experience of our material immortality, an experience afforded by the mystery of sexuality and death. For She brings the excitement of Eros with the becoming of death—both symbols without Meaning—in a material image of the being that simply is in the generation of its disappearance.

A Hindu monk walking during sunrise in a mango garden in Dinajpur, Bangladesh. Creative Commons. Although famous for stressing the psychological and metaphysical dimensions of myth, Joseph Campbell also had a grasp of myth’s historic foundations, including its sociological and ethnological inflexions in specific environments. When discussing Hinduism, for instance, Campbell is quite aware of the basic material conditions reflected in mythic archetypes such as that of Manu, the Hindu prototype of the Primordial Man, the First Man and progenitor of humanity. As an image of the archetypal Self, Manu is at once an individual and a symbol of real collective power in the world. It constitutes a certain spirit or “mentality” which is both a literal force and an ideology exercising its domination over the social body.  In his beautiful exploration of Indian mythology, Campbell shows us that myth is “real” in the sense of being an ideological structure that interweaves the political and socio-economic fabric of society. That is why real myth never needs to be literally “believed in” by individuals, for it is like the very air we breathe, the unquestioned reality of our social existence.   On the other hand, when myth becomes an explicit object for us, an object called “myth,” it is already dead, having become a historical phenomenon. Living myth is, by definition, a collective manifestation of the archetypal psyche; it is not simply a metaphor for the reflection of my private experience. The latter is “myth” in the sense of fantasy or an aesthetic plaything but not in the sense of an existential commitment to the truth of our lives. Rather than being a specific object in the world, therefore, true myth constitutes our very sense of actual reality. That is why it is so hard to see it, not because it lies buried in some deep cavern of the soul, but because it is so close to us, so familiar, so taken-for-granted — like the very end of our nose that we never see and yet follow religiously! As Campbell turns his discussion of Hinduism to the ‘Spirit’ or mentality of Manu, the harshest aspects of true myth come to the surface: I have discussed the Indian law books, the so-called Laws of Manu. Manu is a word related to our word man, also mentality. Manu is the sort of primordial man image of India. The Laws of Manu say in one passage that I remember reading with amazement, that if a śūdra hears the recitation of the Vedas, even by accident, he shall have boiling lead poured into his ears. The Vedas are power, in both senses of the word; they are like atomic secrets. They are the powers by which the brahmins direct the energies of the universe, and this power must not be leaked to the subject people. (Myths of Light, 107) Now, what a śūdra or shudra is in the context of the caste system may need some clarification for those not familiar with it. For the symbolic order of Manu constitutes a mythology of its own, wherein each caste of the system is assigned a function analogous to the various functions of the human body.  The brahmins constitute the head of the social body; they are the intellectual and religious elite, preoccupied with sacred texts and esoteric research. Then we have the kshatriyas who are represented by the arms and thighs; they are the “doers” who constitute the political class, the rulers and administrators of the state, also known as the “warrior cast.” The merchant class, vaisya , are the “providers” who are aptly represented by the belly. Then the fourth and lowest caste, the shudra , are the feet of the society, a class of servants or working poor which do all the manual labor. Lastly, we have to name the nameless class, the literal out-casts of the caste system: the dalit — a term more literally translated as “divided, broken, or scattered.” This is the class of people infamously labeled “untouchables,” the lowest strata of society, who effectively occupy the position of being “part of no part,” lacking any generally defining characteristic as a social group or caste. They are nevertheless tasked as a group with the removal of human feces, dead animals, and the like, and, for that reason, they are deemed to be spiritually and biologically “contaminated” and therefore “inferior.” This kind of viral quality associated with the dalit is also shared by the shudras , as Campbell describes it: Why may the brahmin not accept water from these lower śūdra? Because he would become contaminated. These people, the śūdras, are regarded not only as socially but also as spiritually low. It is as though they were diseased and to touch the unclean śūdra, that is to say those from whom one cannot take water, is to contaminate yourself with a spiritual infection. The ruthless avoidance of these people, what is, from our standpoint, the horror of their lives, is a function of the belief that they are infectious, like lepers; they are spiritual plague bearers.Myths of Light, 107 The equation of horrible social oppression with the functioning of a myth that sanctifies it should not escape our eye. It is a kind of transcendent union of physical and metaphysical violence which has been produced by a fierce antagonism that has raged in the collective unconscious from time immemorial. Violence is constitutional of any nation state; rather than being some kind of glitch in the system, such violence underpins its very functioning, the capacity to produce and reproduce itself and its relations of power. As ruling ideology, therefore, real myth casts and recasts the heart of a society, throwing its deep historical shadow into the darkness of human existence.

Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes“And he turns his mind to unknown arts.”Metamorphoses (Ovid, Book VIII, l. 188) As this pandemic rages on, exposing the structural flaws of an economic system bent on profit-making over the lives of ordinary people, we are compelled to turn our minds inward and to step up to the threshold where the doors of the collective unconscious begin to open up the mystery of our own souls. In a sense, under the present pandemic conditions, the general population has been delivered willy-nilly into the underground of the collective psyche, those secret landscapes of the soul where artists have already learned to make their home. In this interior place of the night of the soul, a journey through the many infernos of our psychic existence, we sail over the waters of the unconscious mind at the bounds of knowability. Although bound to make us feel uncomfortable, it is here where we come face to face with the unknown, the other in ourselves. At the same time we also come to the source of creative being itself as the eternal formation and transformation of the entire symbolic order of the human spirit. This is the place of self-creation for the archetypal mind that has been caught in the smithy of the self, what alchemists termed the vas bene clausum (well-sealed vessel). As we get used to our own well-sealed spaces, the somber cloud of this deadly pandemic, together with the socio-political upheavals of our times, have worked to drive everybody into their own inner caves, unwittingly called to become artists of some kind, to improvise with our material conditions on the canvas of the self. We are called to do this not only to stay afloat but also, somehow, to thrive within the cracks of a quaking system. Can such a thing be done without getting in touch with the archetypal well-springs of human creativity? Joseph Campbell alludes to the archetypal dimension of creative being whenever he points to the psychological foundations of myth. It is here, on the archetypal ground of the human psyche, that Campbell finds the encompassing dimension of myth which underlies the entire complex of mythic functions: The first function served by a traditional mythology, I would term, then, the mystical, or metaphysical, the second, the cosmological, and the third, the sociological. The fourth, which lies at the root of all three as their base and final support, is the psychological: that, namely, of shaping individuals to the aims and ideals of their various social groups, bearing them on from birth to death through the course of a human life. And whereas the cosmological and sociological orders have varied greatly over the centuries and in various quarters of the globe, there have nevertheless been certain irreducible psychological problems inherent in the very biology of our species, which have remained constant, and have, consequently, so tended to control and structure the myths and rites in their service that, in spite of all the differences that have been recognized, analyzed, and stressed by sociologists and historians, there run through the myths of all mankind the common strains of a single symphony of the soul.(Mythic Dimension: Selected essays 1959-1987, p. 221) One wonders if, in describing the psychological ground, Campbell had in mind one of the central axioms of Medieval Alchemy as formulated by Maria Prophetissa: “One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth.” (Jung CW12, ¶25) In formulations such as these, it is clear that the fourth term is overdetermined in the precise sense of the word: it is at once a class among others and the cause that underlies the whole. Psychologically speaking, overdetermination doesn’t mean “many meanings” (polysemy); it means the incorporation of an inner division and agreement within itself; it is its own whole in every part, its own identity in every difference. Thus it returns to itself with every new appearance. History is also governed by a similar dialectical pattern of consciousness which is expressed in the famous rise and fall of civilizations; it is a material and spiritual pattern of transformation which plays out, in spectacular fashion, in all the bloody struggles and compromises between traditional ideology, the guardian of the status quo, and the radical emergence of new mythic horizons. We often call this pattern “revolution,” suggesting both a movement of eternal return and the birth of something new out of the crumbling edifice of the past. Moreover, seen through the lens of evolutionary biology, the miracle of radical self-emergence suggests that the level of the archetypal is not eternally fixed or frozen in time; it can also evolve in sudden bursts of revolutionary creativity. Rather than understanding the eternity of archetypes as something literally “timeless,” we should recognize it for what it is phenomenologically: an ecstatic mode of temporal temporality, which Heidegger also characterized as a kind of “being-toward-death.” Thus the experience of the archetypal delivers us once again into an experience of death-drive ( todestrieb ), with its compulsion to repeat, again and again, the eternal return of a new birth out of the ashes of time. This is just as Campbell would have it. The psychological experience of the archetypal constitutes the true mythic dimension. But the object of experience here is no longer a subjective fancy. It is an experience of what Jung appropriately called “the objective psyche,” a term which stands for the gates of the collective unconscious and its archetypal potentialities. For Jung the “subjective psyche” was identical with a mode consciousness entirely ruled by the “personal unconscious,” that is, by a purely ideological and personalistic attitude, whereas “the objective psyche is something alien even to the conscious mind through which it expresses itself.” (CW12, ¶48) In part, this alien character is due to the fact that “the objective psyche is independent in the highest degree.” (CW12, ¶51) It is a will that is not our own in which we come to meet the archetypal force of transcendent creativity — even, or most especially, in times of pandemic and social unrest.

Detail from Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss. Antonio Canova, 1787-93. If anyone doubted that the essence of the individual is thoroughly interwoven with the collective fibers of society, our continued state of social distancing and isolation is further proof of the case. Robbed of our participation in the collective, we feel robbed of part of ourselves. Our sense of individuality and uniqueness rests on a social matrix of institutional forces and collective energies well beyond our egocentric control. Perhaps this is the reason Aristotle came to the conclusion long ago that a human being is by nature a “political animal” ( zōon politikon ) (Politics 1.1253a3). And this is not dissimilar to the way feminism came to formulate its rallying cry at the end of the 1960s: “the personal is political.” Now, with the advent of social media, it has become startlingly clear that one’s “personal” life experience — once caught in the dynamic of our virtual networks and the order of the symbolic — gets entangled in the spider web of our collective psyche. Nevertheless, there’s more to the story. The surface show of our collective consciousness does not exhaust the resources of the collective unconscious proper at its deepest foundation. In their native soil of possibility and pure potentiality, the archetypes of the collective unconscious are the nocturnal creatures of nightmarish fantasy, hidden deep in the dark primeval forests of cosmic matter and its universal unconsciousness. This is why archetypes, when properly understood, do not become fixed objects of empirical cognition. They are accessible only to a peculiar “dark mode” of consciousness — an existential hermeneutic of myth which takes place near the threshold of being and nonbeing in the "noumenality" of time. Speaking in this “dark mode” of mythic consciousness, Joseph Campbell writes about the deepest substratum of the archetypal psyche, this pre-symbolic realm of pure psychic energy hinting at the strange state of non-being before the positivity of the world of objects. This is an unheard of space before the act of creation, where rather than heroes or monsters or any other definite mythic typos, Campbell comes upon a nebulous set of “primal energies and urges of the common human species: bioenergies that are of the essence of life itself, and which, when unbridled, become terrific, horrifying, and destructive.” ( Inner Reaches , xv) Campbell wants to highlight four distinct channels of primordial influence (nutrition, sexuality, the “will to plunder” and compassion), making a distinction with the latter two as being impulses “launched from the eyes” (xviii), which is to say that they are more ideological in nature. This is especially true of compassion, as it was “late to appear in the evolution of species, yet evident already in the play and care of their young of the higher mammals.” (xviii) Upon closer inspection, however, each of these primordial impulses appears as a slight modification of a singular self-generative life-force or libido and its uroboric logic. Subverting the world of appearances, libido stands for the paradoxical and irrepressible sexual energy of Love, the self-generating and self-consuming power of life, bubbling up to human consciousness in the metaphysical boiler of the death drive ( todestrieb ). As Campbell begins to elucidate each of these primal impulses, we can see how “the innocent voraciousness of life,” as he writes, is already “linked almost in identity with […] the sexual, generative urge.” ( Inner Reaches , xv) And the same is true of “the will to plunder” which is ultimately explained by the “the ‘Law of the Fish’ ( matsya-nyåya ), which is, simply: ‘The big ones eat the little ones and the little ones have to be numerous and fast’ (xviii) — an analogy that once again brings us back to a secret “ identity with […] the sexual, generative urge.” (xv) This is an illustration of Freud’s point against the Jungian stratification of the psyche and its brutal reduction of sexuality to some blind biological urge. The irony of this debate is that only Jungians reduce sexuality to biology whereas Freud saw very clearly what all religious ideologies, including Jung’s, seek very much to repress the knowledge of: the fact that sexuality (Eros) is a rival metaphysical force beyond Meaning and the need for religious ideology. Although in its inception psychoanalysis postulated Eros and todestrieb as the primordial pair of opposites, it was Jacques Lacan who settled the theoretical ground of the Freudian vision by clarifying the ultimate identity between Love and the death drive. They are two sides of the same metaphysical coin as the singular force embodying a mortal sense of transcendence. The common essence that binds sexuality and todestrieb is present in the deadly excesses of life itself, the way it presses against itself in order to maintain and create itself through endless cycles of death and reproduction. As Jung himself put it, “The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive.” (CW12:¶93) Hence the tendency shared by each of these primordial impulses to “become terrific, horrifying, and destructive,” as Campbell observed in Inner Reaches (xv). But this is the stillpoint of archetypal psychoanalysis, the mortally transcendent concept of libido, which embodies the tremendous essence of life itself at the bounds of knowability. Aptly pictured in sci-fi horror movies by the voracious alien creature, the concept of libido has “infinite plasticity” and “can morph itself into a multitude of shapes,” as Slavoj Žižek writes in How to Read Lacan , adding that in this alien image “pure evil animality overlaps with machinic blind insistence. The ‘alien’ is effectively libido as pure life, indestructible and immortal.” (63) Denying us the comfort of a parental archetypal image, the representation of libido becomes The Thing in John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi horror classic — a masterpiece of psychoanalytic fiction which effectively deploys the image of the alien as an “image to cancel all images, the image that endeavors to stretch the imagination to the very border of the irrepresentable.” (64) “This blind indestructible insistence of the libido is what Freud called ‘death drive,’ and one should bear in mind that ‘death drive’ is, paradoxically, the Freudian name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis.” (62) With this apt description of the passion of the infinite, we come to rest here, in the grip of our creative daimon, where a state of ceaseless productivity provides the ground for a transcendent vision. Driven by its relentless desire to reproduce itself, possessed by the “compulsion-to-repeat” again and again the act of creation, the soul finds her proper rest here, in the stillness of Love’s madness, beyond the cycles of life and death.

Once Upon a Midnight Dreary. Illustration to The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe. Édouard Manet, 1875. Public Domain. Edgar Allan Poe once wrote a little piece called “The Imp of the Perverse,” and I do believe that there must be in the fashioners of piously held beliefs, all over the world, an exceptionally strong strain of the faculty and impulse that he there describes; for it cannot be that they do not know what they are doing. Neither can it be that they regard themselves as deceivers. Nevertheless, they are seldom satisfied merely to brew for the moral nourishment of mankind an amusing little beer of what they know to be their own apocryphal fantasy, but they must needs present their intoxicant with deliberately pompous mien as the ambrosia of some well of truth to which they, in their state of soul, have been given access. It is exactly as my author, Poe, has said. “All metaphysicianism,” as he terms such work, “has been concocted a priori. The intellectual or logical man, rather than the understanding or observant man, set himself to imagine designs —to dictate purposes to God. Having thus fathomed, to his satisfaction, the intentions of Jehovah, out of these intentions he built his innumerable systems of mind.” And with a curious strain of the same perversion by which the sages teach their designs, both vulgar and the learned everywhere have been forever loath to see any such facts brought to light as might tend to inform them of the true nature of the brews by which they live, dream, and regulate our lives. (The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology 518-519) Although we tend to think of the Campbellian enterprise of Mythological Studies as providing honey-sweet “positive” content for our lives, passages like the ones above tell a slightly different story, more critical of the positivity of mythic ideology. As a consequence of this double task, both affirmative and critical, any piece of mythological studies issues a call to confront the traumatic truths of our mythic past, the composition of the brew of our national ideology, forcing us to come face to face with the imp of the perversity of mythic consciousness.   In "The Imp of the Perverse," Poe anticipates such notions of depth psychology, later developed by Freud and Jung, as the Id (The Thing) and the Shadow. With this level of psychoanalytic insight, Campbell can easily explain to himself the “curious strain of the same perversion by which the sages teach their designs,” and the great resistance of “both vulgar and the learned everywhere” to “forever loathe […] any such facts brought to light as might tend to inform them of the true nature of the brews by which they live, dream, and regulate our lives” – Namely, the true nature of what we adopt as our “personal mythology": the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves which are mostly lies.  For it is generally acknowledged that if we want to get to know someone, we cannot base our judgement solely on what this individual thinks about herself; Instead, we must turn to the content of this person’s actions in order to know their true character. Sometimes these self-serving fantasies are crushingly belittling, sometimes narcissistically self-aggrandizing, but any sympathetic observer and listener would recognize at once the perversity of such “personal mythology.” What is true of the individual is also true of entire nations and their mythic pasts. We all have to deal with the imp of perversion at the heart of our founding narratives. For without this shadow work, without this making conscious of the unconscious lie, the true blooming of mythology cannot come to pass. As with the psychotherapy of the individual so it is with entire nations; the problem is not so much the "creation of a new myth" but the elimination of repressive elements that block the spontaneous outpouring of mytho-historic truth. This is the reason that a well-trained psychotherapist will refrain from providing “answers'' or assigning “meaning” to an individual’s life, no matter how much they may beg for it. A significant part of working through the transference, the spontaneous co-dependence of the patient to the analyst, is to free the individual from this delusion. For it is taken for granted that delusions are never good for the life of the soul.  “Truth is the ultimate repressed,” as Wolfgang Giegerich states in The Soul’s Logical Life (217). What is ultimately repressed in the depths of the psyche is not some mysterious “self“ waiting in the wings, nor is it the intensity of sexuality, but a painful truth that speaks at the place where the psyche must enter the flesh. For there is the existential rub, the irrepressible edge of the symptom, where the unconscious mind forces itself upon the conscious ego and breaks down all its defense mechanisms.  So when we advocate for the “non-binary” logic of myth as the logic of both/and over against either/or , we should not forget the full implication of this proposition: that the logic of both/and must include either/or as its internal complementary opposition. Otherwise we remain caught in the literal split of external opposites. True myth thus operates through the logic of both/and and either/or , following the paradoxical logos of the soul, as an upsurge of the mythic imagination into the material light of history. Hence, we would do myth a disservice were we to relegate it to the purely metaphoric or personal realm of make-believe and wish-fulfillment—where we can have everything both ways and speak out of both corners of our mouths. No, that is not the true nature of myth but the work of the imp Campbell and Poe warned us about. If we believe that myth truly matters, on the other hand, we must turn to the material truth of its existential mystery. It is when myth is allowed to bloom in truth that it becomes living history.

Corn Husk Mask (Iroquois) Exhibit in the Château Ramezay - Montreal, Quebec, Canada. There is nothing more mythic than the ceremonies and stories that have gathered around the winter solstice. They are powerful metaphors that are present across cultures, irrespective of time and places, with the vastness of the skies as their native home. It is no accident that the solstice continues to reflect the highest value for the human soul. The transcendental significance of the season persists even when this astronomical aspect seems lost in the decked halls of consumerism and electronic mass media. Both inside and outside the United States, people continue to relate to the land in its primordial agricultural aspect. To them, this astronomical event is not only a decorative item but a matter of vital significance. If we take a broader view of our side of the hemisphere, going south of the border across Mexico to the Guatemalan Highlands, the end of December is a time of year-end festivities for the Maya peoples who, like all Mesoamericans, celebrate their ancient religion beneath the mythic garments of Christian rites and symbols. Beneath the conventional religion, something deeper stirs in the native soul; a subterranean stream of archetypal ideas and images continues to flow in, through and around Roman Catholicism. So the winter solstice is not simply a celebration of the birth of Christ, but also of El Niño Dios, (the Child God), who appears together with the Feathered-Serpent Goddess of Maize. As a child growing up in Nicaragua, I still remember being struck by the processional “Christmas” parades which featured El Niño Dios accompanied by all manner of saints and virgins. It was a crowded street filled with the spectacle of sacred figurines and mythic people riding on elaborate floats. Beside the float bearing a life-sized figure of El Niño Dios, a second chariot bore a half-naked woman standing erect with arms outstretched and tied to a cross. She was carrying signs of the Feathered Serpent—a combination of feathers, make up, and lizard skins, surrounded by offerings of corn and other signs of agricultural abundance. Even before I was nine years old, I knew that all these mythic figures somehow belonged together, although no explanation was given to me in official Catholic doctrine. I had a distinct feeling that these figures belonged together: the Child God, the Virgin, the Cross, and the naked Goddess of the Corn. Their coexistence inspired a strange sense of awe and fear, mixed with erotic excitement, which I could hardly explain to myself as a young child. What I knew, and knew with deep conviction, however, was the love of my family and friends, together with the pride of belonging to these “People of the Corn.” So it was in my childish imagination, then and to this very day, that the odd constellation of mythic figures, the Child God along with the naked Goddess of the Corn, were engraved in my soul as the “true” meaning of Christmas. And even then, I had a sneaking suspicion that the mystery of sexuality was also mixed up in it—just like everything in the adult world! Indeed the celebration of the winter solstice has everything to do with an upsurge of productive and reproductive energies, the celebration of the fertility and bounty of the land, the public enjoyment of rivers of milk and honey. There is no doubt that in such gratifications of the collective spirit, the power of the mythic image is truly alive. As Joseph Campbell never tires of saying: "The life of a mythology derives from the vitality of its symbols as metaphors delivering, not simply the idea, but a sense of actual participation in such a realization of transcendence, infinity and abundance.…” (Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space , xx). The winter solstice is indeed such a realization of transcendence in the world, a materialization of its abundance and infinite grace. It is a kind of spiritual-material reward that was originally reaped by our parents and ancestors on the ground of organized human life. It commemorates a communal enterprise animated by a fundamental sense of solidarity and neighborly love which extends to all living things. Far from being a celebration of private wealth and power, which at best can only simulate a spurious form of transcendence, living myth is the reaping of the collective “blessings” that come from being a member of a productive society working for the benefit of all.

Moon Rising Over Craftsbury, by Bernard Lebleu. Craftsbbury, Vermont.2015. Used under Creative Commons license. "Get up!" Through his sleep, Freddy Bliss vaguely heard the agitated voice, but he was unwilling to open his eyes. “Up! Up! Up! Up!” (Mythic Imagination, 3) For readers of Joseph Campbell, the name “Freddy Bliss,” the young man who stars in his short story Moonlight in Vermont , immediately conjures up the central theme of the hero’s journey with the promise of bliss buried with the “treasure hard to attain.” The Call to Adventure thus begins with a rude awakening for the youngster, who, as “a jitterbug from Brooklyn,” had no experience with the tribulations of farm life. Indeed, he was so green and out of touch with farm life that Freddy Bliss had scarcely “seen hair nor hide of a cow before two weeks ago.”(6) Now in the midst of a cow pandemonium, Freddy’s instincts would be put to the test. Chaos had broken loose on the sleepy farm; a large herd of “immense Guernseys,” a fine breed of milk cows, was accidentally let out in the middle of the night. The Young Hero, which in many ways resembles Campbell himself as a young man, is thrown into the bovine mayhem only to lose his way in the darkness of the night. So was Freddy Bliss set up to embark on his own idyllic brand of “night-sea journey” under the brilliant moonlight of the New England countryside. Now, I don’t wish to spoil the story for anyone, but from what follows in the narrative it becomes increasingly clear that at the heart of Freddy’s journey, as that of Campbell’s own, is the curious question: “What is poetry?” As the implicit notion of transcendence, the development of the concept of poiesis itself seems to be the centerpiece of the mythic quest; it marks a crucial development of the heroic mind, an alteration of everyday consciousness into the consciousness of the One as it reveals itself in the visual language of story. It should come as no surprise that the theme of poetry comes out the mouth of an erotic fantasy or “anima figure,” a lovely maiden ready to initiate our Campbellian hero into the charms of the countryside. She was, of course, a farmer’s daughter, an archetypal figure and source of inspiration which prompts Freddy to ask: “Will you teach me about poetry?” In Campbell’s story, his explicit question concerning the nature of poetry re-inscribes the theme of the re-awakening in the consciousness of Art, now imbued by the pale light of the moon: T he unbelievable beauty gently shook his shoulder. “Wake up, young man,” she insisted softly. In the light of its internal dynamics, Moonlight in Vermont attempts to illustrate the magnitude of the question of being in art, the “unbelievable beauty” or impossible reality lying at the heart of the mythic imagination itself. The ability to even raise the question implies an archetypal encounter with one’s inner muse, an event igniting a spiritual journey—the deployment of the Concept in Art—in the soul’s mythological life. So the young Campbell writes: Freddy caught her hand, and she let him experience the texture of her skin while employing the moment to assist him to his feet. “The night is beautiful,” she whispered. They were clutching each other’s hands. “Come,” she urged quietly, “let us wander again under the moon.” (Mythic Imagination, 13) The warm immersion of the scene in the sensuality of love should not mislead us into believing that we are dealing with a non-intellectual or anti-intellectual “thoughtless” experience. Quite the contrary. As the young man clutches hands with the muse of poetry, the archetypal logos in Art has already unleashed its creative activity and transfigured the sensuous experience of the world. The question of being in Art, however, transcends the bounds of the aesthetic consciousness as such. Unable to nurture itself by itself, mythic consciousness requires the energy of all the fundamental spheres of human existence—such as politics, science and religion—in order to fulfill the promise of its Great Opus. Jung also recognized the severe limitation that vitiates the purely aesthetic approach to the fundamental problem of the human soul. Tracing this problem historically through various authors leading up to Nietzsche and his own work, Jung evaluated Friedrich Schiller’s brave response to the “problem of opposites”—or what others might simply call the evil at work in mankind—as simply inadequate: In Schiller it was a sort of aesthetic solution, very weak, as if he had not realized the length and depth of the problem. To try to solve it by a vision of beauty is like trying to put out a great fire with a bottle of lemonade. (Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934 – 1939, Vol. 1, p. 120) Despite its historical obsolescence, Schiller’s thesis may still be persuasive to some people. Nevertheless, Jung had his eye on something more than meets the sight of beauty and her lovely semblance of truth. Far from a repudiation of the power of myth, however, the critical move beyond aesthetics itself, which has become a hallmark of modern art and philosophy, renews the path for the self-transcending mytho-historic nature of Art: to point beyond itself to the profound reality of our own lives.

"Flamenco." Photography by Flavio Grynszpan, 2011. Used under Creative Commons license. It is easy to glamorize the gifts and benefits of artistic creativity, the unique sense of transcendence it brings to mind, a kind of panacea to cure all the ills of life. To be sure, there is magic in it, a grace we can’t control, which in one stroke seems to make us equal to God, allowing our shadows to fly in the infinite light of the spirit. Nevertheless, if you ever wanted to be an artist, you must be careful what you wish for. After all, gods are designed to be flayed and dismembered before they can be brought back to life — if they’re brought back at all. Campbell also understood the apparent paradox of creativity, the fact that it involves a degree of self destructiveness as much as a renewal of spirit. Creation and destruction are but two aspects of the same Force of creative-being itself. There is no real division between the light and dark side of the Force. Whenever opposites are undialectically torn apart, we are no longer dealing with the reality of true myth but with the alienation of an ideological fantasy. In The Ecstasy of Being , which contains fragments of Campbell’s aesthetic philosophy, he writes of the art of dance in such universal terms that it may apply to allthe arts: From earliest times, the dancer has been the human symbol of life- indestructible. The Dionysos-dance of annihilation is at the same time the dance of the fire of creation: the oxidizing fire of the interior of the living cell. Need it be pointed out that life is a process; process, change; change, painful: pain-and-death the other face of joy-and-birth? (Ecstasy, 5) Apparently, it does need to be pointed out: Art is not a function of wish-fulfillment alone, flowing along the channels of the pleasure principle. Under the spell of positivistic slogans and feel-good wisdom, the mysterious conjunction of opposites that brings pleasure and pain together will remain an incomprehensible riddle. The very notion of such unconscious prospects will not be a welcomed guest—let alone a permanent resident of our mental make-up and understanding. Nevertheless, such is the passion of the infinite that drives a being from the depths to the heights of artistic creation. Campbell also knew that the psychoanalytic con-fusion of eros and death-drive is, indeed, the secret of passion (from the Greek pathos or “suffering, enduring”) which is better comprehended as a category of death-drive ( todestrieb )—a notion which Freud never called “Thanatos” because what he had in mind was something that stands beyond gods and men. Neither a literal death-wish nor a mystical annihilation in Nirvana, todestrieb is more like a spiritual force which is made primarily manifest in “the compulsion to repeat”—the relentless character of the drive, which presses us to go on and on, again and again, as if to test the very limits of our mortal existence. For this reason, death-drive has been called by psychoanalytic thinkers “as the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis.” (Žižek, Slavoj. How to Read Lacan , 62) Todestrieb is indeed the psychoanalytic category of transcendence—but of a material kind of transcendence which is tied to historical repetition—in contradistinction to the idealistic version of the transcendent that has come down to us in traditional wisdom. As every artist knows, matter is of the essence in the creative process. Art, like alchemy, is a kind of “dialectical materialism” which recognizes the inseparability of matter and spirit at every stage of the game. No one can be a creative spirit—or indeed a human being—without immersion into the material substance of their everyday life and artistic medium. The imagination of art is a material imagination which distinguishes itself from mere fantasizing “in one’s head.” Matter did matter—quite literally, not only symbolically—to the alchemist as it does to the artist and the work of art. We breathe and revel in matter as we do in our own bodies; the more literal the thing, the more symbolic it becomes, replete with the possibility of transcendence. In this sense, alchemy anticipates a modern material notion of transcendence, one in which the compulsion to repeat—and not the escape into ideology—underscores its fundamental character. Finally, with respect to the “pursuit of happiness,” we should say that people don’t become artists—and I mean great artists—in order to be “happy” or enjoy themselves. At one level, this is quite simply the general distinction between amateur and pro. Amateurs stick to a subject as long as it is a mode of “having fun,” that is, as long as they can remain within the limits of the pleasure principle. The minute the work begins to hurt a little, however, when serious discipline enters the picture and demands its pound of flesh, the throng of amateurs suddenly melts away and only a few are left to complete the task. Furthermore, if you go into the biographies of the greats you will also find that ordinary human happiness was by no means their goal or objective; it was rather a casualty in the wake of their ecstasy of being in art.

Mosaiculture at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Photograph by Eric Sonstroem, 2013. Used under Creative Commons license. There is no doubt: we have entered unprecedented times as a global community, brought together by an ingenious virus which, biologically speaking, does not like to discriminate among race, class, or gender, although it has a marked preference for people suffering from respiratory problems and the elderly.  There is no doubt this is a vicious and malignant virus, an “invisible enemy,” bearing all the mythic contours of a crowned hero hot from the underworld. But what if we’re wrong to demonise the virus so? What if Mother Nature is not angry at us or raging against the system; what if She is simply expressing her love for her microbial son, a creature which she perhaps had long neglected? In an atheistic cosmology, where humanity holds no special position or ontological priority, there is no reason to believe that Mother Nature would care for us more than her viral baby—not to mention the biosphere as a whole, which is definitely benefitting from the cessation of human industry. Living and working in Los Angeles, I can safely report a dramatic improvement in air quality. Who could deny the virus’ salubrious effect upon our natural environment? Nevertheless, such ostensive “mythological” approaches to our present crisis fail to articulate the deep foundations of what is happening; they are nowhere near the latent archetypal background of the collective psyche as it manifests itself in our own times . Of course the “power of myth” is not dead, it’s just not where we expect to find it. For the true power of myth always speaks with the power of truth, and this is radically different from spinning subjective fancies “into the blue.” As a form of mytho-historic consciousness, true myth speaks with the power of the Real in our lives; it does not need to be “believed in” in order to function as such. You may call this power of the Real and its existential rub “God,” if you’d like, for it is a mythic expression of the truth that transforms our lives—for better or worse. Such is the ruthlessness of the living God as Job’s testimony shows in the Bible. But in contrast to the logic of “make-believe” and wishful thinking, Jungian thinkers like Wolfgang Giegerich have put the definition of myth in the categorical terms of a human actuality rather than a system of belief or subjective fancy: Real myth is the simple expression of truth, of the truth. The Greek word mythos = ‘word’ ( as opposed to other Greek words for ‘word,’ e.g., logos) means ‘the true word,’ the word that did not need to be proven inasmuch as it carried its truth within itself; it came as unquestionable truth.(W.F. Otto, with Kerényi concurring. Cf. Vico: “similarly, mythos came to be defined for us as vera narratio, or true speech…”) (The Soul’s Logical Life, 171) This is the real depth of myth as vera narratio where the fundamental “mystical” function, as Campbell understands it, aims to make “a connection between our waking consciousness and the whole mystery of the universe.” ( Thou Art That , 103) Nature is on the side of this mystery of the unknown, both in her real material concretion as in her resistance to being known by man. “That is its cosmological function,” Campbell continues, which “allows us to see ourselves in relationship to nature, as when we speak of Father Sky and Mother Earth.” (103) Given that knowing the world is this fundamental mode of human relationship, the latter cosmological function of myth coincides with our scientific picture of the world—a world of human cognition that is literally the realization of Campbell’s dream of “symbols without meaning.” Just as Jung often talked of the “just-so” nature of psychic facts, science is also part of our existential destiny as a species. Why is this the case? We don’t know; it is just so. Because the virus is a cosmic phenomenon on its own right, in order to understand the present pandemic in its true mytho-historic light we must begin with a thorough cognitive mapping of the situation, its microbiology and epidemiological ramifications, etc. But it would not be long before our inquiry would also run into the nature of our human institutions, their power structures and hierarchies, an awareness of their historic conditions and class structures, together with the deconstruction of ideological fantasies that sustain the status quo—even as it implodes before our very eyes and noses. In the face of such destruction, we should not be deceived by appearances to the contrary: a mythless empirical understanding of COVID-19 is the first step we must take along the road of true depth as vera narratio , that is, to the extent that we can embody the truth of the collective psyche in our lives. The healing power of truth by no means excludes understanding of fact and reason, but quite the contrary: it constitutes that Higher Power which encompassess both truth and fact in the synthesis of matter and spirit. For under certain conditions, there is nothing more divine than to stress the obvious facts. It is precisely such “divine intervention” of human reason which is now needed to counteract and eventually beat this virus in reality— not just in the celebrations of myth and symbol, artistic and philosophical representations which can only come afterwards as a series of fundamental reflections.  Over against campaigns of disinformation coming from the highest office as well as  from the lowest regions of the internet, true myth stands against the proliferation of conspiracy theories and their dangerous false mythologies and “fake news.” The true power of myth, on the other hand, threatens the dominion of death with a renewed sense of reality and truth as well as social justice.  Accordingly, our journey must begin with a firm grasp of the factual situation, on the one hand, and on the other, with a rehabilitation of the concept of truth and reality —both encompassing and going beyond the order of objective cognition. For it is only an actual —not just metaphorical—understanding of the current crisis that can save lives and heal millions. This is the magic of human science and its empirical attitude.  This is only the beginning, though. The truth is that we are all called upon an unprecedented hero’s journey, challenged to dig ever deeper into our inner resources, both as an individual as well as the exponents of the collective psyche—otherwise known as being citizens of a country.  Our epic journey through this pandemic is only beginning to unfold. But now that civil unrest unites with the deadly force of the virus, we do have a fuller picture of this first chapter of 2020 by COVID-19. In the crucible of myth and history, the intersection of race, class, and gender can no longer be ignored if we wish to arrive at an actual understanding of our present situation and how to respond to it. We must get hold of truth in the light of nature on the ground of factual information. Before succumbing to the temptations of Fate or the perspective of the Final Judgement, we must do all we can to prevent further catastrophes. But only time will tell the truth we are now too blind to hear even as it speaks in images before our very eyes.