Two most interesting interpretations of the origin of humans: religion says we are made of dust (some of us from the rib), and Darwin says we share common ancestry with apes. There is also a third one, whimsical but very prominent today–we are the progeny of the extraterrestrials who planted their seeds in the ancient civilizations. Whatever you believe, human development has been scientifically theorized to start some two million years ago. How did our ancestors develop abilities to address the problems they were facing? In order to survive, these first hunter-gatherers and cave artists had to communicate. Communication begins with the living world and art with the appearance of humans. The first people to band together for survival in ancient times were the first syncretic artists. They did not just invent fish stories around the fire for entertainment, but were spiritually connected with the world around them, creating a magical reality that extends to the energy fields where "drawn buffaloes are killed buffaloes." Power-off ritual Performing the first rituals, the psychoanalysts of that era–the shamans–became the first artists. Music, painting, and performing arts, as well as the first letters originate from the stories and rituals of the Stone Age. These rituals begin with an understanding of the concept of death. "The oldest evidence of something resembling mythological thinking comes in connection with graves," says Campbell in his conversation with Bill Moyers in the series The Power of Myth . He affirms that, around 50,000 BCE, “We have evidence of a ritualized burial, with sacrifices and with the grave gear, which certainly indicated that the experience of death started something” ( The Hero’s Journey , 86). Ancient burial ceremonies are the first evidence of human thought around which stories and rituals were formed. Ritual is the revival of a myth with the active participation of all members of the community, and some of the most widespread in the world are the rituals of death and sacrifice, birth, growing up, and weddings. These rituals very much resemble the defragmentation and cleanup of a modern computer system, while the final ritual–the ritual of death–is comparable to the formatting and rebooting to the initial settings and finally pressing the power-off button of the system. Early people explained the cycle of life and the “power of powering-off” with myths and rituals. By participating in a ritual, one participates in a myth. Campbell generalized his notion about the importance of the death rite for society as a whole, remarking in Myths to Live By , “Individual death and the endurance of the social order have been combined symbolically and constitute the nuclear structuring force of the rites and, thereby, society” (23). However, he says that today we no longer have rituals. We have replaced myths with New York Times–news of the day. A society without rituals becomes barbarian, and young people do not grow up, because they don’t defragment themselves until their later years. We pride ourselves on being a wise species while often oversimplifying and trivializing the power of unobservable planes of mythology. We pride ourselves on being a wise species while often oversimplifying and trivializing the power of unobservable planes of mythology. Rituals are symbolically preserved by religions nowadays, but Campbell believed that today's rituals are too mild relative to the meaning they are supposed to convey. Religious or national holidays are almost the same everywhere: fanatical shopping, excessive cooking and eating, visiting relatives, and gratitude for returning to the peace and quiet of individuality and daily routine. For example, the sacrificial offering in Islam practiced during the holiday Eid al-Fitr nowadays somewhat reduces the weight of experiencing Abraham's/Ibrahim's sacrifice. In most Islamic countries, believers pay money to the butcher to slaughter a sheep, camel, or cow for them, without having any contact with the animal or the sanctity of the sacrificial process. Stories about animal sacrifices, warriors, and the diet of the first people are a process through which respect is paid to the cycle of life and in which, allegorically and anagogically, one comes to the realization that we are all the same and that everything is connected. "We are made of star stuff" is a famous quote by Carl Sagan, richly interpreted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson , who speaks of atoms as an integral part of all of us. We are made of those same particles found in the first stars, thus making the Universe live in us and vice versa. We are the stars, and we are the Universe–all one and all connected by the same power of energy and matter. Nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon are integral elements of life on Earth, as well as the energy created from the Big Bang. The connection of subatomic particles can be compared to the mythologically invisible, which supports the visible world, as temporality in eternity and movement in time that takes place in Axis Mundi. Campbell himself referred to the theme of mythology as the notion “that there is an invisible plane supporting the visible one, and whether it is thought of as a world or simply as energy that differs from time and time, and place to place” ( The Power of Myth, 90). First storytelling refers to this invisible plane.  Lies that keep us alive The origins of storytelling can be found in cave rituals around fire and the first syncretic art from which all the arts as we know them today are born. Prehistoric man dances, sings, paints and acts, practicing syncretic rites of the concept of his mythic consciousness. Myth is understood here as a conception of consciousness, while ritual is its action. This mythical concept and ritual action, make communication between the members of the tribe in a syncretic combination of artistic expression so that art evolves later into the experience completely opposed to reality and separated from that initial syncretism of the magical consciousness of early Homo sapiens . Art has become a lie, a game, a metaphor, and a pretense, unlike the original rituals, which reflected the invisible planes to our consciousness. That magical consciousness through archetypes has remained to this day an inseparable part of what differs our starry molecules from other species.  The first stories were created in Paleolithic caves where Homo sapiens  created culture. We have replaced the cave and the light of the fire in modern times with an altar in the center of our living room that emits photons from flat screens amusing us with stories which have mythological ancestry. The multitude of worlds that we discovered and created in the narrative patterns of the first myths, we have today translated into the entertainment industry. Binge-watching series from the comfort of the sanctity of our living room is just a remnant of our innate desire to experience the myth and adventure we call life. Miracles in movies and series are offered to us on the altar in our living room, without us having to make any effort. The question is when they will be replaced by other technological content, which will include cinematic means of expression, virtual reality, metaverses, and artificial intelligence. In the 2024 series 3 Body Problem , based on the 2008 Chinese bestselling trilogy by Liu Cixin, humanity must prepare for destruction by a high-tech species coming from outer space. The reason they want to destroy us is–the story of RED RIDING HOOD! This highly advanced species does not understand why the wolf was lying to the grandmother. For them: “This story is a lie about a liar. A liar is someone not to be trusted. We communicate what is known." Far more technologically advanced than us, but devoid of the ability to lie, these aliens are a metaphor for our future with artificial intelligence and neurolinks as envisioned by author and philosopher Alan Watts . In his future, human beings will be connected by neural connections, and every thought and desire will be open and accessible to everyone. It sounds scary, but we are already living the prototype of this vision with social networks and the Internet. We are well on our way to erasing what makes us “lying humans,” with the help of artificial intelligence, algorithms, and silicon networks. In our living room with myths in front of a flat screen, we are slowly creating a civilization completely devoid of rituals and mystical experiences.  3 Body Problem  species are not capable of understanding the story of the Lying Wolf, imagination in fairy tales or fantasy, grasping the concepts of play, metaphors, or anything non-factual. We humans are not to be trusted, because we tell stories. A Homo liar who understands and enjoys the story of Little Red Riding Hood cannot survive in a world of algorithms that is deprived of myths and rituals. There is no place for defragmentation cycles and mystical power-off experience in it. But that world is exactly what makes us a wise species– Homo sapiens . If we renounce the experience of the invisible that supports the visible world, stories that anagogically lead us to mystical knowledge, lies that interpret the truth, artists who preserve myths, and natural cycles of life–then we renounce ourselves, we lose our connection with the stars from which we are all built.  MythBlast authored by: Dr. Lejla Panjeta is a Professor of Film Studies and Visual Communication. She was a professor and guest lecturer in many international and Bosnian universities. She also directed and produced in theatre, worked in film production, and authored documentary films. She curated university exhibitions and film projects. She won awards for her artistic and academic works. She is the author and editor of books on film studies, art, and communication. Her recent publication was the bilingual illustrated encyclopedic guide – Filmbook , made for everyone from 8 to 108 years old. Her research interests are in the fields of aesthetics, propaganda, communication, visual arts, cultural and film studies, and mythology. https://independent.academia.edu/LejlaPanjeta This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 3, and Romance of the Grail Latest Podcast In this episode entitled "Interpretation of Symbolic Form" which was recorded around 1970, Joseph Campbell delves into the meaning of symbolic forms and narrative. In the lecture, he explores how symbolic forms point to the human capacity for the transcendent experience. Host, Bradley Olson introduces the episode and gives commentary after the lecture. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "There are two attitudes toward religious and mythic images today. One is that they are references to facts, and the other is that they are lies. But they are neither facts nor lies; rather, they are metaphors. Mythology is a compendium of metaphors." -- Joseph Campbell Myth and Meaning , 19 Living in Accord With Nature (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

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

Divorce is often experienced as trauma by one or both parties, but it can also be the first step on the hero’s journey—a decision to retrace one’s steps in search of lost former identity. Meet my mother. Betty Steck was raised in a devout Irish Catholic family and married into a devout Italian Catholic family. And while the two merging clans had little in common, culturally, socially, or financially, they did hold as sacred the belief that divorce was a mortal sin, basically the worst kind of sin, the kind that sends you straight to hell. That’s the way it was taught. Thus, mid-century attitudes about divorce provided a very powerful disincentive to unhappy wives and miserable husbands to make a break for it. I think my mom was part of a distinct demographic of women who married under false circumstances, that is, believing that patriarchy was a noble system which existed for their best interest. That idea was dying in real time for women married in the 1940s and 50s, coinciding with the famous “second wave of feminism.” Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published in 1964. No-fault divorce became the law of the land in our adopted state of California in 1969, and two years later Mom and Dad availed themselves of this new legal remedy to their irreconcilable differences. Halfway through the journey of life The day came when mom would simply proclaim that the legal and moral underpinnings of her union with my father were henceforth dissolved. She was taking a road no one on either side of the family had even considered before, the kind of road we meet in the first canto of Dante’s Commedia. When halfway through the journey of our life I found I was in a gloomy wood, Because the path which led aright was lost. And ah, how hard it is to say just what. This wild and rough and stubborn woodland was, The very thought of which renews my fear! (1.1-6, Langdon) Mom had every right to be afraid. The benefits of divorce seemed obvious to her, but so did the disadvantages. Without Dad, she would be at the bottom of the economic ladder, struggling to meet basic expenses. Dad had been the “breadwinner.” Without Dad, her credit rating would plummet. Bank officers would find it easy to disqualify her for home and car loans. Employment possibilities would dry up—all those years of wiping butts and cooking dinner meant little in the job market, a market which did not recognize the value of her domestic experience. Dante at least had Virgil to guide his path. Mom had a really second-rate litigator whose attempt to navigate the intricacies of divorce law in California left her, in the end, technically independent, but factually broke. Neither side of the family was supportive of my mother’s mad dash for freedom, but she pursued some version of happiness in spite of them. She was now an outlier, estranged from family and friends and ably playing the role of the ostracized hero described by Campbell as being "in diametric opposition to that of social duty and the popular cult. From the standpoint of the way of duty, anyone in exile from the community is a nothing. From the other point of view, however, this exile is the first step of the quest” ( The Hero with a Thousand Faces 332). Inanna's descent as the divorce journey I have already invoked Inanna this MythBlast season to explain my (positive) reaction to the movie Barbie, but, really, the image of Inanna as a divorcee being stripped of her titles, dignity, jewelry, and by inference, her gym membership, job prospects, and Gelson’s credit card and then ending up with her problematic sister—well, that’s irresistible. That happened. Mom ended up moving in with Aunt Jackie, her sister, her confidante and her Ereshkigal. One humiliation after another. In Campbell’s retelling of the Sumerian heroine’s journey, each level of approach to the “land of no return” was marked by some degradation, the loss of some token of power, a necklace here, a crown there. So it was with Mom. Like Inanna she starts out in the Great Above. Mom starts out in the Great Above in terms of southern California property values. Great Above? Hell, we were “South of the Boulevard,” the fancy part of town. Four bedrooms. Two baths. Water softener! We were gods. We lived in the hills, the Great Above, and we looked down on anybody north of the Boulevard. Just as Inanna inexorably dropped level by level into the underworld, so did Mom find herself in cheaper lodging among the glittering lights which had once been our backyard view. In Campbell’s retelling of the Sumerian heroine’s journey, each level of approach to the “land of no return” was marked by some degradation, the loss of some token of power, a necklace here, a crown there. So it was with Mom. You’re gonna leave the Great Above? Really? You’re gonna leave our automatic sprinkler system? Our dishwasher? Our intercom? The Mercedes? The Gelson Credit card? Us? Aunt J was insufferably superior at times, but she, unlike Ereshkigal, had a good heart and an extra bedroom. And if Aunt Jackie had one thing to teach my mother, it was: Life without a man is doable, baby. Try it. Auntie was going on her fourth decade since she’d broken up with her fiancé in college, and she looked none the worse for it. So Mom ended up in this intense, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? sort of arrangement. She went through the fearsome passage—the door of which dissolved her status in society—and came back changed, full of harmless revelations and emptied of formerly held belief systems. The woman who raised us, who took us to church, who taught us table manners and slipped sex education pamphlets under our doors at night, simply disappeared at some point in her heroic journey. As Ananda Coormaraswamy writes, “No creature can attain a higher grade of nature without ceasing to exist” (qtd. in Campbell The Hero with a Thousand Faces 77). Mom ceased to exist. In her place, a hero emerged who had learned to embrace solitude as others might an old friend. I have never met a woman so unspeakably complete in the absence of a husband. MythBlast authored by: John Bonaduce, PhD , a seasoned writer for Norman Lear and for most of the major Hollywood studios (Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros, et al.) developed a profound interest in story structure beyond the commercial objectives of the industry. His exploration led him to conclude that much of what we call myth derives from a biological origin. This insight inspired his pursuit of deeper relationships between biology and narrative through his theory of Mythobiogenesis, which he explored in his dissertation at Pacifica Graduate Institute and was recognized as a “discovery” in the field of prenatal psychology by Dr. Thomas Verny. John was recently appointed to the editorial board of the Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health (JOPPPAH) where he advocates for an unrecognized level of human consciousness which exists at the border of biology and mythology. As a featured writer for the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s MythBlast, he passionately showcases Joseph Campbell’s enduring relevance to a modern audience. This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 6, and The Hero with a Thousand Faces Latest Podcast In this episode, we welcome Dr. Ben Rogers. Dr. Rogers is an Assistant Professor of Management & Organization at Boston College. He the author of a groundbreaking research paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which reveals how framing our own lives a Hero’s Journey is associated with psychological benefits such as enhanced well-being, greater life satisfaction, a sense of flourishing, and reduced depression. “The way that people tell their life story shapes how meaningful their lives feel,” he says. “And you don’t have to live a super heroic life or be a person of adventure—virtually anyone can rewrite their story as a Hero’s Journey.” In the episode, JCF'S John Bucher speaks with Ben about Ben’s research, why Campbell’s Hero’s Journey structure is such a powerful context for storytelling, and how adopting the narrative structure of the hero's journey can enrich our lives with greater meaning and sense of fulfillment. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "I have taught hundreds of young women, many of whom have gone into the arts, as did Jean, who went into classic dance. But many of the others had husbands who would not stand for that. Each of these women had to make a choice, and if she chose to knuckle down to what her husband wanted, that ended her adventure. It really did. Everything else then became a substitute. But the objective is to have your own adventure, not a substitute, and it is not by any means an easy thing to do." -- Joseph Campbell A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living , 230 On Consciousness (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

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

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

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

I have on a wall in my study at home in New Braunfels, Texas, a professionally framed letter from James Hillman to me dated 20 November 2000. It is one of several precious letters I received from him over the years. Nothing lengthy or elaborate, but all of them are thoughtful and carry a warm hue. By the way, they are all hand-written, not typed. Two of them are on The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture letterhead. In it James is wondering what part of a review of mine of one of his books that was published in a psychology journal that the review editor could not understand. He also asked me if I could send him what the editor either removed or altered of my typed original and the later published version. He was curious about what they felt needed to be changed from the original and how the two renderings differed. But that is not why I took the time and care to preserve this letter “in his own hand,” as we say, framed and hung in a prominent place in my work space. No, it was what he wrote at the end: “Meanwhile, my thanks to you for your many kind and intelligent reviews, as well as your own continued valuable writings. Best, James.” I begin this short reflection on letter writing with James Hillman's kind and extremely valued note to me about my own writing, as a warm expression of appreciation, exhibited in his own cursive hand. It is my lead in to a volume titled, Correspondence: 1927-1987, which Evans Lansing Smith and I worked on for years as co-editors before finally bringing to fruition this year the letters of  Joseph Campbell to others as well as letters to him, and about him, spanning the years mentioned in the title. It is a handsome volume by New World Library that joins an expanding list of excellent publications of Campbell’s studies in mythology as well as edited volumes on a variety of  themes from his life-long work. I may have been thinking of James’ letter above when I wrote the Foreword entitled “Letter Writing: The Imagination’s Personal Genre” (Correspondence, xiii-xvi). There I mused on the personal, informal and more humanly-inflected rhetoric of a letter. Some of the observations I included in the Foreword I want to emphasize in the rest of this short essay. First of all, letters most frequently carry affect—feeling and emotion on a different register. A personal letter, directed not at a wide audience but to a specific individual, carries its own vocabulary, its own brand of sentiment as well as its own personal acknowledgement of the recipient. And yes, it can convey sentimentality as well. Letters have as their subject matter the writer's own feelings, how their own emotional life steps forward to be recognized. Letters seem to convey above other forms of writing a conjunction of both thinking and feeling, such that their affective reality is prominent and carried often in the form of affection. Letters, as is certainly true with the varied forms of expression from and to and about Campbell, reveal the qualities of a person, over and above the data imbedded in their vitae. Moreover, a hand-written letter is embodied, unlike other forms of communication. I remember working in the archives at Pacifica Graduate Institute where the letters were arranged in boxes. I wore a pair of white gloves in order to handle the sheets of paper that Campbell himself handled, or that other individuals, whether famous or not, held as they wrote on the paper. I remember, for instance, so many of the letters to Campbell from his mother thanking him for gifts sent to her and his father and how proud she was of him. Precious artifacts touched by both affection and gratitude. I remember as well one letter in particular, dated February 29, 1940, that the famous novelist and political activist Thomas Mann, whom Campbell admired so, wrote to thank Campbell for his kind words about Mann’s book, Lotte in Weimar. Mann mentions that he was also delighted to learn that Campbell had read the publication in the original German. The letter, though typed, carries Mann’s hand-written signature, splitting the difference between the mechanical and the hand-made. As I read the original document, I felt connected to Mann and Campbell in a new way, knowing I was handling the very sheet of paper that Mann had signed and that Campbell held while reading it. My own history entered the conversation at this moment, for Mann’s fiction was a central part of my student life decades ago as an English Major at Kent State University, and I had been teaching Campbell’s work for over a decade to graduate students. In his short missive, I learned something of Mann’s own temperament, his warmth and generosity, affectionately shown to the mythologist and extended out to include his wife, Jean Erdman. I end with the observation that hand-written or typed, signed letters revitalize history in a different way than, say, the publication of a book, even the publication of a book of letters that is the topic of this reflection. It is as if touching, handling and reading letters that are “hand-written” and hand-held, stretch the hand of the writer and the hand of the reader out to one another, across the expanse of time, culture and circumstances. In this reach there arises a numinous connectedness between the living and the living as well as, more poignantly, the living and the dead. The dead live once more in the hand-written and/or signed letter, a literal reliving of the dead in the present.

Pt. I: The Hobgoblin of Doubt (April 15, 2019) We all know about things. In fact, we all know a lot of things about a lot of things. The human brain is stunningly complex; a new born baby has somewhere around 100 billion neurons—twice as many as adults, and in a brain half the size. No wonder a child’s brain from birth to around the age of three functions as a knowledge sponge, constantly learning things, all sorts of things. The extravagant diversity of thingness makes the world and its inhabitants an utter wonder. Most of us grow up learning to have a mind of things, filled with the qualities of things and heuristic schemas that help us manipulate those things. Materialism constitutes the foundation of most of human learning. For example, parents speak to children materially: what animal is this? What color is that? How many fingers do you have? We ask children to perform counting, but we seldom go beyond material applications and ask them, for example, what numbers actually are. We never ask them whether ourselves or our universe is real, whether there’s free will, or an objective reality; we never ask them why is there something instead of nothing. It’s proper, of course, that we don’t introduce metaphysics and existentialism to young children, for they would likely dissolve into an angsty goo right before our inquisitorial eyes, and parents would be forced to save for their child’s long term psychoanalysis rather than college. In Thou Art That, Joseph Campbell notes that Zen masters always dissolve the material world by including the opposite immediately after whatever object or concept they might reference: “That which is no thing. That which is no that. This is the ultimate reference of our metaphors […] opening the mystery of the operation of this transcendent energy in the field of time and space” (Thou Art That, 18). And in Myths of Light, Campbell writes, “You cannot say a thing either is or is not. The things are no things, there is nothing there. Here, below, all things [are] dual. This line is the mystery of māyā. The word māyā comes from a root ma, which means ‘to measure forth; to build.’ Māyā is what builds forth the world” (Myths of Light, 73). It’s easy to imagine Lear’s Fool as a Hindu scholar when he asks King Lear, “Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle” (King Lear, Act I, Scene IV)? Myth’s foundation is metaphor, and metaphors are the no-things of which myth makes the most extraordinary use; correspondingly, a mind of myth makes use of everything. Living often gets in the way of understanding life, of seeing through the illusions of materiality, and a mind of myth saves one from the emptiness of a life lived solely, and soullessly, on its surface. A mind of myth frees one from the pernicious distraction of pursuing happiness. Furthermore, myth saves us from a too remote, too sterile history, one that neglected to send a salubrious message in a bottle downstream to us in the present who struggle to find meaning in a history largely content to present the past as a quaint curiosity. Developing a mind of myth requires one to think mythically, striving to see through the world of appearance, the world of convention, the world of belief, of life, of death—the literalized world—to the world in which nothing is not a contradiction (at the same time everything is and nothing is contradiction). In his poem, The Snow Man, Wallace Stevens put it this way: One must have a mind of winterTo regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. A mind of myth is created from a long, uncompromising practice of saying yes to the world exactly as it is—yes to all its suffering and pain, its joy, its beauty, its impenetrability, its staggering disregard for human concern. A mind of myth is the result of saying yes to “the full catastrophe,” as Zorba put it, the mysterious māyā that gives rise to human consciousness and existence itself. It isn’t simply knowing the stories of mythology that develop a mind of myth; one must inhabit them until thinking mythologically becomes second nature, until one is able to see the nothing that is not there and the no-thing that is. The ability to do just that was Joseph Campbell’s particular genius.

Resurrecting the Hobgoblin of Doubt We love our myths, don’t we? We love how they empower us, we love how they make us think, we love how they enlarge our world. We love feeling that, as students of myth, we’ve captured—or nearly so— the enticement as old as humanity itself: occulted or forbidden knowledge, knowledge that is covered or eclipsed, hidden from general view. Often, the feelings stimulated by a deeper penetration into myth are accompanied by the satisfying sense that one has, if not found the truth, at least found more truth. One basks in a sense of accomplishment—“That I,” as Wordsworth put it, “at last, a resting place had found: ‘Here will I dwell,’ said I, my whole life long.” Eternal dwelling seems always to me to be a risky ambition. That one has explained the unexplainable, that one knows which of the innumerable roads stretching out before us leads to wisdom or virtue, these are invariably lessons in vanity and human folly. I think most of us believe, at some level, that certainty is impossible, and it’s usually in the inky dark hub of night that the hobgoblin of doubt is resurrected once more and we feel as if, to gloss Kierkegaard, we’re being trampled to death by geese. But the hobgoblin of doubt is not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, quite to the contrary. In his essay, Self Reliance, Emerson noted that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” an attempt, he says, to avoid being misunderstood and thereby win the approbation of others. But Emerson rejects such approval: “With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do,” (and one might easily substitute the word certainty for consistently to create another fine and useful dictum). “To be great is to be misunderstood,” Emerson notes, and I would personally add that to be great one must live with uncertainty. To be uncertain about life, about its purpose or its meaning, requires one to live with the greatest courage. Believing that we can’t be certain may be pessimistic, but it certainly need not be perceived as nihilistic. In fact, pessimism encourages important faculties like critical thought, humility, and skepticism. Nihilism, on the other hand, is a species of certainty and arises from believing that life is inexorably and unrelentingly impoverished; that the world as it is, is the worst of possible worlds. But Nihilism is not the same as doubt; doubt arises because there is simply too much life and one’s capacity to embrace it in its totality is much, much greater than one’s capacity to live it. And in that disjuncture, in that abyss between one’s understanding and ambition on the one hand, and one’s incompetence on the other, lays the consoling, sublimely aesthetic experience of pathos. Pathos is fundamental to myth and suggests that an ending isn’t the end of anything, that there is so much more to come. Robert Browning describes the consolation of pathos in Andrea del Sarto: [I] Know what I do, am unmoved by men's blame Or their praise either. Somebody remarks Morello's outline there is wrongly traced, His hue mistaken; what of that? or else, Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that? Speak as they please, what does the mountain care? Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? Ultimately, it’s not the opinions of others that need matter, for what does the mountain care? Others offer opinions as if they were Rockefeller and opinions were dimes and, again, what does the mountain care? What matters is that we understand that life often outstrips our ability to live it or even understand it, and we live it anyway; we live it as though we were gods, and our consolation is found, not in living as gods, but rather by living indomitably in the wreckage of our human, our all-too-human failures, unavoidable failures that are always accompanied by the consolation life unfalteringly extends when we exceed the limits of ourselves, when we are forced to recognize we are finite and fallible creatures sent into this breathing world, scarce half made up*. Life always offers consolation—not always of the sort we may strive for or desire, but certianly a deeper and more salutary consolation than we could have imagined. I think one may fairly characterize Joseph Campbell as a pessimist, albeit a joyful one. He often remarked on the tragedy and suffering of life but, like Nietzsche, he always said yes to the world. He seemed to have begun his life in wonder, he marveled at the world and was drawn to all its manifestations, whether horrifying or sublime, and he never retreated to, nor lived within some comforting illusion. In next week’s MythBlast, I’ll discuss further how one might develop a Mind of Myth. Pt. II: The Nothing That Is Not There and The Nothing That Is (April 22, 2019)

The classic characters and narratives of Greek mythology sculpted in stone throughout antiquity display a wide range of human emotions and psychological motifs. One particular expression, however, is often curiously absent – laughter. While laughing Buddhas and images of a jovial Kālī are common in Eastern mythology, most images of Dionysus show barely a hint of a smile. In his Republic, Plato warns that “if anyone represents men of worth as overpowered by laughter we must not accept it, much less if gods” (Book III, lines 388e9-389a1). Even many statues of Gelos, the divine personification of laughter in Greek mythology, are themselves without mirth. While there are likely simple cultural and logistical explanations for this, Joseph Campbell spoke to the romanticisation of the stoic and painful in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He states: “Modern literature is devoted, in great measure, to a courageous, open-eyed observation of the sickeningly broken figurations that abound before us, around us, and within . . . Hence we are not disposed to assign to comedy the high rank of tragedy” (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 20). Campbell goes on to deconstruct the rejection, in some corners of society, of stories with happy endings. He laments the misunderstanding of these myths, fairy tales, and divine comedies, stating that in the ancient world such narratives were “regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete” (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 21). Our era has had its share of tragedies, some of which have rivaled other historically profound devastations, and others whose profundity is amplified because of their accessibility through technology. The commodification of outrage and voyeurism has often clouded our current vision of what tragedy might truly be. Sensing this same issue in his own time, Campbell suggested that tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms ; but that comedy is “the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life and experience which includes them both and which they bound: the down-going and the up-coming” (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 21). This definition of tragedy seems especially pertinent with the recent fire at Notre Dame, which demolished the church’s iconic spire. Tragically, that familiar form was lost, and many of us experienced an attachment to that form that we were unaware we even had. While the bulb was shattered, the light emitting from those destructive flames reminds us that the mythological light within the form continues to shine even as the form gives way. The spire fell in its down-going, but those that recognize mythic patterns and seasons, understand that an up-coming is inevitable. In such moments, Campbell offers the words of Ovid in Metamorphoses, stating “All things are changing; nothing dies. The spirit wanders, comes now here, now there, and occupies whatever frame it pleases…For that which existed is no more, and that which was not has come to be; and so the whole round of motion is gone through again” (The Hero with a Thousand Faces,21). Are we capable of experiencing the joy of the up-comings with the same intensity we experience in the despair of our down-goings?  Have we afforded greater significance to our stories with tragic endings than those with happy endings? Mythic understanding helps us to recognize that the most profound narratives transcend endings altogether. In his concluding thoughts on the issue, Campbell suggests that it is the business of mythology and fairy tales, to reveal the specific dangers and techniques of the dark interior way from tragedy to comedy. In a strange reverse play on the Persephone myth, some of us have taken up residence in the comforts of the darkness of tragedy, only maintaining a summer home in the world of comedy. May our heroic faces be those of laughter and smiles as often as they are of despondency and agony. For this is the way of the mythic life.

Joseph Campbell pondered his future in 1932 in a letter to a friend and mentor that he met while studying in Europe: The thought of growing into a professor gives me the creeps. A lifetime to be spent trying to kid myself and my pupils into believing that the thing that we are looking for is in books! I don’t know where it is – but I feel just now pretty sure that it isn’t in books (Letter to H.K. Stone, January 22, 1932, Grampus Journals). What Campbell is speaking about here is often called ‘book knowledge.’ We could assume that on this occasion, Campbell is not disparaging the worth of books as containers and interpreters of facts, information, and knowledge. Rather, he’s reminding us that there’s a ‘felt reality’ around us – and perhaps also permeating us – transcending the capacities of books to articulate. This may be so, even if the book is  written by a sophisticated, proficient scholar. The reality around and within us is just too expansive and too subtle to be captured by books and their words (which is why the poetic mode is sometimes most fit for purpose in this respect). However, having said this it’s possible that Campbell is also  referring to ‘book knowledge’ in another sense. Meaning that we may have conceptual knowledge of a subject while not yet having internalized it yet in our heart and soul. Even if we’re  polymaths, and even if our abstract knowledge is vast, if we’ve not internalized it to the extent that we’ve made the book’s material entirely our own, then it remains at a distance from us. But if we do fully assimilate the knowledge, and wholly interiorize it within our own souls, then there’s no longer any duality between ourselves and it. The knower and the knowledge breathe together. Metaphorically, when such rich assimilation has occurred, the ‘scroll’ has been eaten: “So I went to the angel [and he told me] ‘take it, and eat it’” (KJV Bible, Revelation, 10:9). A popular way of expressing this is by picturing a car and its driver. Most drivers, however proficient they might be as drivers, merely have a dashboard understanding of their car. They’re familiar with the settings on the dashboard, whilst having almost no knowledge of the inner workings of the motor. The dashboard understanding is sufficient for most occasions, but there may come a time when – usually during a crisis – a more thorough understanding of the motor would be helpful. And in a way, it’s disrespecting the full potential of the vehicle, if we don’t also appreciate its deep mechanisms.  Through this allegory, I recognize in my own experience that much of my conceptual and abstract knowledge hasn’t deepened or translated into assimilated understanding. As such, I’ve been a consumer of information that hasn’t been soul-incorporated, and so therefore, it’s not transformed into embodied wisdom deep in my bones.     In public speaking, if we’ve not fully embraced our subject, then only concepts wrought from instrumentalist words can be conveyed to the audience. But if in our speaking we’ve been able to embody our subject, then our words come alive and transmit both a life and an energy. When an alignment occurs between the speaker’s words and their integrated, lived experience, they’ve moved beyond mere words and concepts. There’s no alienation of the subject material from the communicator. As such, an inner knowing is conveyed to the audience because the subject has become ‘beloved’ by its bearer. The intellect and the heart have combined and the audience is touched accordingly. It’s as if we’ve encountered something of the living essence of the subject. And it’s this ‘aliveness’ that induces a change in the feeling field of the audience because a heightened sense of the topic presents itself.  One reason I believe that the documentary Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers  became so popular is because Campbell and Moyers, for all their erudite scholarship, were well aware that their research and analysis doesn’t, on its own, enable an audience to experience and embody myths as mighty pictures of the human experience. (Just like detailed footnotes to a thesis won’t assist a reader in meeting the transcendental mysteries of the mythological landscape.) Only when the lecturer or writer has soul-absorbed their material can we glimpse the endless depths of a topic.   We can witness this enfleshed wisdom in the conversation between Campbell and Moyers in The Power of Myth, Episode 5: Love and the Goddess . The subject being discussed is the Grail and its mysteries. Moyers postulates to Campbell at 15 minutes, 58 seconds,   And the Grail that these romantic legends were searching for is the union once again of what had been divided?” [Although Moyers and Campbell in this conversation were alluding to a different kind of union, in respect to my topic for this MythBlast, I’m focusing more on the union of the outer concept with the inner life that they both demonstrate.] And though I can’t fully explore this now within the word limits of this essay, it can be posited that with early humanity there was no firm divide between speech and the inner soul. All consisted of one spontaneous flow, springing from the womb of the human being. Later in the same discussion Moyers encapsulates this by saying, “ Well, that’s why I’m not so sure that the future of the race and the salvation of the journey is in space. I think it is well right here on earth in the body, in the womb of all of our being. So how might we arrive at such a fluent union between our outer words and inner lives like the masters, Campbell and Moyers? Lectio divina  (divine reading) was  – and still is –  a monastic practice involving the reading of sacred text, accompanied by prayer and meditation. This, the senior monks and nuns claimed, assisted the more junior monks and nuns to enter into a communion with the text and indeed, with God. I’m suggesting that, where possible and with similar modalities, we too could choose to engage with our subjects of study much more contemplatively. We’d then meet the subject with minds and hearts in unison and cultivate the possibility for embodied wisdom.  For myself, I’m attempting to read and think more slowly. Much, much more slowly. (A New Year’s resolution!) And with more mindful and heartful reverie, too! By decelerating the speed of this reflective process, I refrain from degrading or soiling the subject I’m studying with a consumerist or superficially expedient attitude. Rather, the subject requires – and receives – my genuine, loving attention.  Only then will it disclose its inner truths.     MythBlast authored by: Kristina Dryža is an ex-futurist, author, TEDx speaker, archetypal consultant, one of the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Editorial Advisory Group, and a steward for The Fifth Direction. Based between Australia and Lithuania, her work focuses less on the future and more on the unknown. Presence. Not prediction. What’s sacred? Not only what’s next. Kristina is passionate about helping people to perceive mythically and sense archetypally to better understand our shared humanity, yet honor the diverse ways we all live and make meaning. To learn more about Kristina, you can view her TEDx talk: Archetypes and Mythology. Why They Matter Even More So Today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o4PYNroZBY&t=525s This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 5, and Romance of the Grail Latest Podcast In this episode which originally aired in March 2023, John Bucher of the Joseph Campbell Foundation and Satya Doyle Byock discuss her book Quaterlife, and how her life and work have been influenced by Joseph Campbell. Satya is a psychotherapist in private practice in Portland, Oregon, and the founding director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies, where she teaches and hosts other speakers online. Her book “Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood,” was published in July 2022. Her articles have been published in Psychological Perspectives, The Utne Reader, goop, and elsewhere, and she is the co-host of the podcast on Carl Jung’s Red Book. Satya’s clinical work, teaching, and writing draw influences from a few primary areas, including Jungian psychology, trauma research, and social justice advocacy. She holds a Master’s in Counseling, with an emphasis on Depth Psychology, and a Bachelor’s in History. Find out more about Satya and her work at https://satyabyock.com/ Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Change the focus of the eye. When you have done that, then the end of the world as you formerly knew it will have occurred, and you will experience the radiance of the divine presence everywhere, here and now." -- Joseph Campbell,  Mythos I, Episode 3: “On Being Human"  The Virgin Birth (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

The Hero enters the forest. He doubts, struggles, sacrifices, and overcomes. He fights the dragon, gathers treasure, and returns home forever changed. The Heroine lingers at the crossroads. Her doubts knit themselves around her heart, entwining more quickly than she can unwind them. After some struggle, she begins to suspect that the unwinding may not be the point. In fact, if she stops pulling at these threads in vain, she can pull at others—larger ones, older ones. She unwinds what she can, knowing she’ll never finish: her journey is perpetual. Joseph Campbell’s hero cycle was drawn from his observation of parallels in mythologies across cultures, but immediately became a lens through which to examine our own lives. While people of any gender can find themselves on a “Hero’s journey,” it’s an undoubtedly masculine cycle—a linear, often physical march through ego to conquest—that represents only a corner of human experience. It lends itself so well to the concept of masculine transformation, though, that it’s been co-opted for decades by conmen who sell the elixir of “ideal” manhood to wounded and vulnerable men as a means of quashing perceived weakness and actual ambiguity. Rather, the male and female associations are purely archetypal: far from being a gender essentialist concept, the Hero and Heroine are representative of the masculine and feminine in us all—that is, Jung’s animus and anima, respectively—and our quest for balance between the two. In her 1990 book The Heroine’s Journey, Maureen Murdoch explains the heroine cycle this way: “The model I am presenting does not necessarily fit the experience of women of all ages, and I have found that neither is it limited only to women [ . . . ] It describes the experience of many people who strive to be active and make a contribution in the world, but who also fear what our progress-oriented society has done to the human psyche and to the ecological balance of the planet.” (4) Murdoch drew her own analysis directly from her experience as a therapist working mainly with women, adapting her observations to mirror Campbell’s hero cycle as a means of filling in what many perceive as a gap in his work. She writes that while the hero cycle is illuminating, “it did not address the deep wounding of the feminine on a personal or cultural level.” I mention this not to dismiss or devalue Campbell’s assertions of the hero’s journey, but to raise up its yin. Campbell was clear that the basis of his own philosophy was softness, kindness, and shared understanding. “The fundamental human experience,” he writes in an essay collected in A Hero’s Journey, “is that of compassion” (219). For at least 50% of the planet’s population, the journey cannot begin with a Call to Adventure: something else has to happen first. Rejection of the feminine Consider for a moment the now-ubiquitous Strong Female Character. While some live up to the concept (with varying levels of nuance), “likable” female characters must walk a fine line. Popular Strong Female Characters tend to satisfy the demands of a masculine culture by being physically strong, outspoken, rejecting formality and fuss, but still conform to the incredibly narrow definition of acceptable femininity by being slim, pretty, fragile. Failing to stay in bounds lands them in a sea of other labels, where they drown as a Shrew, a Tease, a Nag. In Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel Gone Girl, titular girl (and antagonist) Amy famously excoriates the “cool girl,” a type of woman that she believes suppresses her feminine self in order to appeal to the men around her. She sees this rejection of femininity as itself the weakness, a coward’s path out of navigating feminine ambiguity—and masculine pushback—to endear themselves to men. The truth is that in a world where masculinity is loud, fast, physically powerful, individualistic, definitive, and lacking in nuance, praise can signal protection. Being sensitive, thoughtful, questioning, and gentle is an existential risk. Optimism and kindness is perceived as naivete, a liability in a masculine culture. Initial rejection of the feminine isn’t a choice so much as a compulsory protective stance in a crush-or-be-crushed world, the only way to survive long enough to pick it back up down the road. While women and those outside the gender binary are most clearly in the crosshairs, even men who have always identified as straight and cisgender have been harmed by the indiscriminate shrapnel of patriarchy, friendly fire from a world that still alleges to have been built for them. Like the deep, unhealing wound Anfortas takes to his literal manhood in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal, it’s not damage that can be healed by the hard science of medicine but requires an approach so obvious as to be almost insulting: compassion. The road beyond survival While the Heroine’s initial rejection of the feminine is most often shown as critical to her survival, the pattern can play out even in the safest utopia. Becky Chambers’s 2021 novella A Psalm for the Wild-Built takes place in an idealized future world that has learned from our own: humans, having narrowly avoided disaster centuries before, now live in closer harmony with one another and the natural world. A nonbinary monk named Sibling Dex wakes up to realize they’ve reached their goal, but they still feel unhappy. Dex, whose doctrine is based in brewing tea and offering comfort, feels a deep, inescapable feeling that something is missing. Immediately, they berate themself: “Something is missing. Something is off. So, how fucking spoiled am I, then? How fucking broken? What is wrong with me that I can have everything I could ever want and have ever asked for and still wake up in the morning feeling like every day is a slog?” Dex’s life sounds so peaceful, so kind, that some readers may be tempted to agree with their self-assessment. Even so, Dex decides to leave the comfort of their home and career to set off on a dangerous journey, completely alone and without a concrete goal. This feels like the beginning of a Hero’s journey, but no—Dex did that already, before this story even began: they left their childhood home, found their grail, settled down in a new world of their own making. What Dex is actually doing here is rejecting the feminine—their quiet life of studies, tea, and compassion—to fill the emptiness in the most masculine way possible. They must find the Thing that will make them whole. A foolhardy journey into the woods may have been the last thing they ever did if not for a chance encounter with a strange, wild creature—a robot, of all things, named Mosscap. Just as Parzifal approaches the Grail King, Mosscap asks Dex what the trouble is. And Dex, in their struggle to make Mosscap understand, is forced to interrogate their own need for meaning. Mosscap offers a deceptively simple reframing, one which becomes the thesis for this novella and its sequel: “You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is.” Participating in the joys and sorrows of the world isn’t one quest with a reward but a lifelong wandering, an evolution with many deaths and rebirths. This is a hopeful, freeing, radical realization. Dex’s journey is, like all Heroine’s journeys, unending. Participating in the joys and sorrows of the world isn’t one quest with a reward but a lifelong wandering, an evolution with many deaths and rebirths: you don’t leave your mark on the world, but on other people. Recognizing this interconnectedness is the heart of the Heroine’s strength: while the Hero alters his own perception of the world through one epic quest, the Heroine’s infinite waves of influence, like water against stone, can alter its reality. Maybe all Hero’s journeys are followed by a Heroine’s journey, and if we push past “happily ever after” we’ll always find “what now?” MythBlast authored by: Gabrielle Basha is a writer, illustrator, and educator based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is a working associate for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and a member of the executive communications team at the Wikimedia Foundation. In addition to an informal yet life-long study of where pop culture meets folklore, Gabrielle holds a BFA in art history and illustration and an MFA in creative writing, both from Lesley University. This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 6, and The Hero with a Thousand Faces Latest Podcast In this bonus lecture to Episode 32: "Mythologies of Quest and Illumination", Campbell discusses the mythology of the Buddha, and gives a comparison of the Buddha's "Tree of Illumination" to the Bible's "Tree of Immortal Life". Listen Here This Week's Highlights All of the great mythologies and much of the myth storytelling of the world is from the man’s point of view. When I was writing The Hero with a Thousand Faces and wanted to bring in female heroes, I had to go to the fairy tales. These are told by women to children, you know, and you get a sense of the woman’s journey. There is a feminine counterpart to the trials and the difficulties, but it certainly is in a different mode. I don’t know the counterpart—the real counterpart, not the woman pretending to be male, but the normal feminine archetypology of this experience. I wouldn’t know what that would be. -- Joseph Campbell Myth and Meaning, 148 The Adventure of Being Alive (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter