In Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: On the Art of James Joyce, Campbell embarks on a mythically based, archetypal study of James Joyce, beginning with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It is here that Campbell picks up the notion of “the Wings of Art” using Joyce’s imagery from the novel. The myth of Daedalus plays a large role in the novel as can be gleaned by the name of the title character, young Daedalus. But the image of Icarus also comes into play at a crucial moment of the young man’s conversion into the path of the artist. This is the vision of a birdman rising toward the sky, “a hawk-like man flying sunward above the sea,” which stands, in the context of the novel, as a symbol of the most radical form of human individuation. Thus Campbell’s idea of the Wings of Art evokes the “transcendent function” which enables our humanity to soar into the heights of cultural achievement. Thus the transcendent quality of all cultural creativity is evoked by the image of the Wings of Art. Notwithstanding the loss of Icarus, as Campbell writes, “release” is possible for an artist following their bliss. “I don’t know why it is that people talking about the flight of the artist always refer to Icarus and not to Daedalus. Icarus flew too high, the wax on his wings melted, and he fell into the ocean. The sentiment on most people’s part seems to be that artists can’t make it. Well, Daedalus did. Joyce was an optimist with respect to the capacity of a competent artist to achieve release” (Mythic Worlds, Modern Words, p. 9). In truth, it is possible for anyone to free themselves from the spiritual bondage of the status quo. It is always possible to break out of the cave of submission to the ruling ideologies of the time, although the hero may need to pay a hefty price. The sacrifice of Icarus is itself part of the transcendent act. Daedelus grieved bitterly after his dear son plummeted into the depths. As we read in Allen Mandelbaum’s translation of The Metamorphoses of Ovid: And Daedelus cursed his own artistry, Then built a tomb to house his dear son’s body. There, where the boy was buried, now his name remains: that island is Icaria. (Book 8, 256) Now in the case of Joyce, this notion of the sacrificial child is not just a metaphor. Sadly, it was in real life played out by the sacrifice of his own daughter’s mental life. James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia Joyce, in the early 1930s consulted Carl Jung as a last resort in dealing with her psychic ailments. Jung did not hesitate to interpret her mental condition as a kind of symptom, the product of being imbued into the titanic spiritual currents with which her father was contending. The presumption is that her father’s creative genius exposed her to the strongest waves of the archetypal psyche from a very young age. Jung described Lucia being “far more lively” than her father: “She was very attractive, charming—a good mind. And her writing, what she did for me, had in it the same elements as her father’s. She was the same spirit, oh they cared for each other very much. Yet unfortunately, it was too late to help her” (C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, 241). In 1934 Jung diagnosed Lucia with schizophrenia and had her committed to the Burghölzi Psychiatric hospital in Zurich. Jung understood both father and daughter to be “like two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling and the other diving” (Richard Ellmann interview, 1953). Evoking this image of the river recalls the first line of Finnegans Wake: “riverrun, …” So did Lucia fall into the abyss as a kind of Icaria, another child who flew too near Father Sun, too close to the source of all life and being. They were both undone at the peak of their flight, falling into the irresistible abyss of the collective unconscious. Would not James Joyce have reason enough to curse his own artistry as Daedalus did? The wonderful Wings of Art are bought at the highest price imaginable, a level of self-sacrifice not stopping short of the “accidental” sacrifice of others, especially those closest to you. So beware of the envy of the great artists and other personages of history. You never know how steep a price they paid for their “success” or genius. In the same vein, we may look at another great artist, Michelangelo Buonarroti, who doesn’t leave things to chance. He does not blame the Wheel of Fortune nor the Stars, any more than Divine Beauty or Fate for the sacrifice that must be made in the name of art. The price to be paid, however, seems to lie in the embrace of the key opposites of Love and Death. As we can read in Michelangelo’s sonnet “The Artist”: The ill I flee, the good that I believe, In thee, fair lady, lofty and divine, Thus hidden lie; and so that death be mine, Art, of desired success, doth me bereave. In this bereavement of life Michelangelo makes death his own. In the most passionate investments of our lives, we burn our lives away as a candle from both sides. The fall of all Icaria, all “eternal children,” is a question of fate. No doubt they were all served a bad turn on the Wheel of Fortune. Were these pueri aeternitatis? Eternal youths only guilty of being there in the wrong place and at the wrong time? Or is the artist’s ambition a self-fulfilling prophecy of dismemberment and death? Michelangelo doesn’t seem to think so: Love is not guilty, then, nor thy fair face, Nor fortune, cruelty, nor great disdain, Of my disgrace, nor chance nor destiny, If in thy heart both death and love find place At the same time, and if my humble brain, Burning, can nothing draw but death from thee. Michelangelo dispenses here with the panoply of excuse-making that makes mortals want a scapegoat for their sorrows and disappointments. This level of ethical responsibility does not come about by chance. Despite Fortuna’s supreme status as Imperatrix Mundi, “Empress of the World,” in every act of transcendence the hand of human freedom interweaves the subjective thread of our lives into the fixed strings of the warp of Necessity. Using the needle of Chance, the soul traces its path through the  given conditions of objective existence. The interblending of both love and death is, therefore, nobody’s fault. It’s not even a matter we need to lament, as the lamentations of Michelangelo very nicely presage a key psychoanalytic insight into the nature of psychic energy: the intrinsic unity of Eros and Death-Drive are the fundamental poles of its dynamic and structures.

The Wheel of Fortune tarot card serves as a poignant pointer to the sobering fact that we do not, and cannot, control the deep substrate behind our lived existence, even though we do instinctively and intuitively experience the presence of this substrate. This reality can, and does, manifest itself pictorially within dreams that bear archetypal motifs and patterns. We commonly have very little capacity to modify this deep substrate realm, and as such, it exists within us as an immutable fact. Within the realm of everyday life we can, and do, have difficulties governing our quotidian feelings and thoughts. Often only by degrees can we transmute or steer the everyday highs and lows, the fortunes and setbacks that come our way due to the mandates of chance or personal and collective karma. An unexpected gift can easily morph into an unexpected disappointment. Much in life is unpredictable, transient, and indeed ephemeral, but through attention, application, practice, and courage, we can build resilience and acquire a raft of skills to advance our lives constructively. The Wheel of Fortune sometimes does bring misfortune and here the Fates present us with opportunities to strengthen and recast ourselves—because that’s their central mission. It’s why this particular tarot card can serve to remind us, although tacitly, that there need be no absolute failure of despair. When our paths are the most gritty and challenging, it’s here where the greatest potential for our soul’s refinement and renewal exists. In this moment the psyche inhabits a zone of freedom, if it can find the still center. Joseph Campbell explained it to Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth this way: “In the Middle Ages, a favorite image that occurs in many, many contexts is the wheel of fortune. There’s the hub of the wheel, and there is the revolving rim of the wheel. For example, if you are attached to the rim of the wheel of fortune, you will be either above going down or at the bottom coming up. But if you are at the hub, you are in the same place all the time” (119). Our psyche-soul is immensely large and richly multidimensional and is an undiscovered territory for our everyday consciousness and its interests. And precisely because so much of it is undiscovered, unrealised, and hence unexplored, when we do begin to enter the psyche’s depths we may encounter realms that are frightfully unfamiliar and seemingly chaotic. But on the positive side, these new realms of unknowing and attendant confusion are in fact a subterranean storeroom, the storeroom of the unconscious. Within this vast storeroom are suppressed energies, or actual soul identities, which have long been alienated. These are awaiting the sight of our compassionate recognition, yearning for our awareness and caring attention. If shunned, neglected, or resisted, the pent-up energies within this subterranean storeroom will impel their presence and demand our attention. Without acknowledging them, they’ll place hindering obstacles along our path. In doing so, they awaken us to a more comprehensive understanding of ourselves, while simultaneously hoping for our aid to release them from the netherworld’s bondage. In this sense, the storeroom is also a treasure room too. Among the treasures are gifts that, when opened, prompt us toward a more rounded self-awareness. And these gifts will help us lean into our nascent and actualized divinity, which wishes to be further born and expressed within us. As particular fairy tales often remind us, we alchemically spin the raw substances of our soul’s underworld into threads of fine gold. This gold is woven into the fabric of our soul’s upperworld when we enlist the darkness to be in service to the sacred Self, guiding our unconscious and instinctive selves toward an ever more refined expression. Along this line of thought, the anonymous author in Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism states that “the practical task which follows from this is that of inner alchemy: the transmutation of fallen instincts into their non-fallen prototypes” (281). However, these are no mere words. There is a Hermetic science within this metamorphic process. The Wheel of Fortune (and Misfortune) rotates around and within our personal lives, ever turning to prompt the movement of individual and collective destinies. We may find ourselves plunged into currents of flux and swirl as we encounter life’s gifts, opportunities, and challenges, but as the card indicates, the Wheel of Fortune has a relative constant (other than the hub, which Campbell mentions). That constant is reflected in the twelve zodiacal signs. The zodiacal realm is an abode of permanence and a zone of reference. In a condensed way, the zodiac is represented by the four fixed signs seen pictorially here by the four creatures, one on each corner of the card. Hence, the reality in which we are embedded and that which embraces us is necessarily composed of contrary dispositions: the steadfast and the mutable, the fixed and the shifting. When the significance of these contrary states is discerned, we can perceive how each is the mentor for the other. In summary, the four creatures can be pictured as follows: Eagle (cognition), Lion (feelings), Bull (digestion and volition), and Man (the original protoarchetypal man as integrator). This integration process is assisted by the Sphinx, which works toward wholeness in the macroexpression (cosmos) and wholeness in its microexpression (the human being). And so it is with our own lives too. Soul-wise we draw on each of these four creatures as the four integral elements of the psyche. Also necessary within this Hermetic science is the powerful exchange between the creatures that sit in direct polarity to each other, i.e. Man and Lion, Bull and Eagle. Within this exchange there exists an unceasing consummation of opposites, a perpetual process-event that provides the vigorous dynamic for the psyche as a living organism. There’s so much to contemplate here—it’s a never-ending project, of course—but it’s hoped that our meditations upon the Wheel of Fortune card (and the Tarot overall) will further inform our experience of life’s both fixed and mutable elements.

The Chariot card is traditionally designed with the image of a strong male figure in a car conducted by two sphinx-like beasts; the dark one at the left side and a white one at the right side. The armored charioteer carries a scepter, suggesting his royal nature or, perhaps, that he is a servant of royalty. In 1976, the first edition of A Feminist Tarot  was published. Authored by Susan Rennie and Sally Miller Gearhart, it began a welcome explosion of women’s tarot decks in the 1980s and 1990s. As the pioneer, A Feminist Tarot refers to the images of the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot Deck, presenting them from the perspective of the emerging cultural feminist theory. Whatever the perspective, though, what this card has in common with other decks is that the central figure is trying to unite distinct animals in dark and white colors. In “The Magic Flight,” chapter six of The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work, Campbell was asked about the more interesting questions that he had heard after his lectures. And his answer was: “The most interesting question I ever got was when I was lecturing here at Esalen in the [Abraham] Maslow Room in 1967. Somebody asked, ‘What about the symbolism of the Waite deck of tarot cards?’” (172). Only people with good ego strength can afford to say I don't know, let me find out and come back the next morning as Campbell did, with the happy smile of having been introduced to something new out of the blue. According to Campbell, he was excited to have had the luck to recognize a couple of sequences in the tarot deck. The first one, he says, is that “there is one for the Four Ages of Man: Youth, Maturity, Age, and what Dante calls Senility. He also calls it decrepitude.” Campbell continues: “Then above that I saw another sequence where there was a woman pouring water or something from a blue vessel into a red one and this was called Temperance.” We may guess that Campbell saw card number seven, the Chariot, contained in the first sequence he referred to as the Four Ages of Man, and identified the theme of the passage from youth to maturity, what the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung called metanoia. Metanoia, very simply, is a shift in the personality, one that would act to balance the dominance of the Persona—the social mask that keep us functional in the world—toward the integration of other autonomous aspects of us, like the shadow, which contains the parts of ourselves we do not develop or accept. No wonder the animals pulling the chariot are meant to, in general, suggest the opposing forces that have been reconciled in the previous card (the Lovers). But, still, a strong yet flexible ego is needed to reconcile the new internal conflicts. And make no mistake, they will be there. These conflicts may present themselves in the form of external enemies, situations, or obstacles in one’s life. However, if we follow the psychological approach to these symbols, they can tell us what is happening inside our own psyche. As Jungian psychoanalyst Sallie Nichols points out in Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, Jung noted that the psyche is a self-regulatory system. Although the beasts might not be heading together toward a direction, they may yet balance the ride and prevent the chariot from ending up in the moat. If we look again to the charioteer, he is privileging neither the left nor the right beast but, in some way, allowing the synergy of these opposing forces to foster a third thing that might show up as a solution (Jung called this the Transcendent Function). The result of the struggle suggested by the card is a transformative change in one’s thinking, feeling, behaving, or relating levels—perhaps even all of them altogether. It is easier to talk about transformations than actually go through them. If you pay attention to the charioteer’s shoulders, you may see the crescent moons. This suggests that we are dealing with unconscious emotional aspects underneath the habit patterns, that this is not an easy nor a crystal-clear process when we are wrestling with what life wants from us in order to facilitate the necessary personal growth. As Campbell said, the next sequence is the Devil, then a thunderbolt hitting a tower: “the Tower of Destruction, which is the traditional sign for purgatory, you know, the tower of evil being smashed by the thunderbolt of God’s destruction of all of your tight ego-system relationships” (172). Benedict XVI may have declared the extinction of the purgatory as a material location in 2011. Whether or not Purgatory has ceased to be important in the popular or symbolic imagination is another matter. In view of this, the Pope said it might be “an interior fire, which purifies the soul of sin.” If we consider sin symbolically as what prevents us from fully being ourselves, from expressing our potential for wholeness (the archetype of the Self), then the suffering we experience in the psychological sphere does indeed make better sense. Campbell was fascinated by the tarot experience, and for him “what it represented was a program for life that derived from European medieval consciousness” (175). And that, in the end, has to do with the mystical path disguised in a pack of cards traditionally used in fortune-telling.

Like all the tarot cards, the Chariot contains a complexity of sub-images and details. We can safely assume that each sub-image is not merely a random or decorative item and that there’s a purposeful and organic relationship between them all. We start, of course, with the main motif: a figure riding in a chariot. His countenance bears authority and clear intent. His gaze is firm. Clearly he is in control. But in control of what? In control of life, it seems. More immediately, he’s in control of the two sphinxes that pull the chariot. On closer examination we realize the sphinxes have inverted black-and-white coloring. And each sphinx would go its own way if it weren’t for the governing will of the charioteer. He carries the wand of authority with such resolute intent that the chariot materializes as a virtual extension of himself as the charioteer. Yet it would seem from the card’s pictorial and structural elements that the charioteer does not bring forth his unquestioned authority out of himself alone. It seems that he has a mandate from the overarching Heavens, the realm of ultimate authority and command. The picture suggests that the charioteer fulfills his mission by uniting the archetypal feminine and masculine (as contrapositions) within himself. The marriage of two contrary elements within the psyche is indicated by the chariot’s crest, which features the lingam and yoni. A thorough study of the tarot requires us to hold a spherical and holographic consciousness, as well as a binary one. So when contemplating this card—beyond the charioteer being driven to merge the dualities within himself and balance the archetypal polarities (the yin and yang of the sphinxes) or the secondary antipodal notions of heaven and earth—there’s still myriad other intersecting influences within the psyche to harmonize, an extensive array of pluralisms, not only singular dualities. Unfortunately, there just isn’t the space in this MythBlast to delve deeper into all the other diverse elements requiring integration, but in Letter VII of Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, the anonymous author does hint at some of the more complex, contrary elements that are simultaneously at play. The integrated man, master of himself, conqueror in all trials—who is he? It is he who holds in check the four temptations—i.e. the three temptations in the wilderness described in the Gospels as well as the temptation which synthesizes them: the temptation of pride, the center of the triangle of temptations—and who is, therefore, master of the four elements which compose the vehicle of his being: fire, air, water and earth. Master of the four elements – that is to say: creative being in clear, fluid and precise thought (creativity, clarity, fluidity and precision being the manifestations of the four elements in the domain of thought). It means to say, moreover, that he has a warm, large, tender and faithful heart (warmth, magnanimity, sensitivityand faithfulness being the manifestations of the four elements in the domain of feeling). There is, lastly, to add that he has ardor (‘man of desire’), fullness, flexibility and stability in his will (where the four elements manifest themselves as intensity, scope, adaptability and firmness). To summarize, one can say that a master of the four elements is a man of initiative, who is serene, mobile and firm. Here presents the four natural virtues of Catholic theology: prudence, strength, temperance and justice; or rather Plato’s four cardinal virtues: wisdom, courage, temperance and justice; or yet again the four qualities of Sankaracharya: viveka(discernment), vairagya (serenity), the ‘six jewels’ of just conduct, and the desire for deliverance. Whatever the formulation may be of the four virtues in question, it is always a matter of the four elements or projections of the sacred name יהוה‎—the Tetragrammaton—in human nature (183). The triumphant charioteer is victorious in bringing these many and variegated life modalities and principles into a coherent working relationship. The union, though, is not one where the contrary elements meld into one another blithely. The elements perpetually remain as a balance of otherwise converse intentions requiring constant vigilance, reanimation and restoration on a moment-to-moment basis. This harmonized symphony can only be acquired through the continuous renewal process occurring within the charioteer’s maturing psyche. This process of ongoing equilibrium is required or else the charioteer and his chariot, and hence his life purpose, will be rudely torn apart. An example of a mythic character with an immature and unintegrated psyche is Phaeton, as shown by his handling of the sun chariot. Joseph Campbell references this myth in The Hero with a Thousand Faces: The mystagogue is to entrust the symbols of office only to a son who has been effectually purged of all inappropriate infantile cathexes—for whom the just, impersonal exercise of the powers will not be rendered impossible by unconscious motives of self-aggrandizement, personal preference, or resentment. Ideally, the invested one has been divested of his mere humanity and is representative of an impersonal cosmic force. He is the twice-born: he has become himself the father. And he is competent consequently now to enact himself the role of the initiator, the guide, the sun door, through whom one may pass from infantile illusions of good and evil to an experience of the majesty of cosmic law, purged of hope and fear, and at peace in understanding the revelation of being (115). The charioteer in the tarot card, unlike Phaethon, masters the situation because he has mastered himself. This card is therefore both an archetypal representation of, and instruction for, our common shared project: healing the psyche by integrating its numerous and disparate parts. Without constant vigilance and self-discipline, the psyche is liable to lapse into discord with the consequent dispersion of its divergent energies. In this card the charioteer is austere in his willful commitment to purpose. And so in our own lives, we, too, are to exert this same discipline and focus, but we must also temper this disposition through the practice of bestowing kindness and compassion to ourselves and others. These are the attributes that empower a supreme sovereign capacity as denoted by the star crown that the charioteer wears. Finally, our anonymous author states, “For mastership is not the state of being moved, but rather that of being able to set in motion.” It’s only a mature and integrated psyche that can set the forces of life in motion, because it’s recognized itself as the vehicle (the Chariot) of the Divine.

Our MythBlast essay series continues to explore the archetypal imagery of the tarot, focusing this month on Card XV in the major arcana: the Devil. For almost two thousand years those who practice the occult arts have been portrayed as dabbling in the demonic. We all know the story from countless variations in book and film: even those who display innocent curiosity are depicted as opening themselves to satanic influences, which never end well. From Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors in 1965 to television’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, drawing the Devil card sets a sinister tone. And small wonder: in Christian dogma the devil is considered summum malam, the highest or supreme evil. But is this what the Devil signifies in tarot––portents of evil? Or is there more nuance to this mythic figure? How the devil did the devil become the Devil? Surprisingly, there is no identification in Hebrew scriptures of the devil with the talking serpent tempting Eve in the Garden. Similarly, the only mention of “Lucifer” (“shining one” or “light bearer”) in the Jewish canon appears to be an allegorical reference to the king of Babylon (Isaiah 14:4–23), though this passage is later taken by Christians (but not Jews) as a veiled account of the devil’s origin. Nor is “Satan” the devil’s name. The Hebrew word śāṭān means “accuser” or “adversary,” and is so translated to describe a number of figures—from King David (in I Samuel 29:4, where the Philistines fear he will become their adversary) to an “angel of the Lord” who blocks the sorcerer Balaam’s way (Numbers 22:22). However, when used with the definite article (ha-śāṭān: “the Satan”), which occurs only in the Old Testament books of Job and Zechariah, it’s a title applied to a member of God’s heavenly court who serves a prosecutorial role. At this stage of his evolution, Satan appears to be a spirit being who reports directly to God in heaven, does God’s bidding, and even indulges in a gentleman’s wager of sorts with the deity; this figure is no fallen angel residing in hell, nor is he at war with God––and he is definitely not the source of evil. That role is reserved for the God of Israel, who declares, in Isaiah 45:7, “I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” (KJV). And He does. Whenever Pharaoh is on the point of agreeing to the Lord’s demand to allow the Israelite slaves to leave, it is God, not the devil, who hardens Pharaoh’s heart, compounding the suffering of Hebrews and Egyptians alike (Exodus 7:13; 9:12; 10:20; 10:27; 14:4). It is God, not the devil, who sends an evil spirit to torment King Saul (I Samuel 16:14). And when Israel’s King Ahab seeks to know the will of God, Ahab is killed in battle because “the Lord hath put a lying spirit” in the mouths of the prophets (I Kings 22: 5–23). The figure of Satan as the epitome of evil, in perpetual conflict with a God who is only righteous and pure and good, doesn’t emerge until the period of the Babylonian captivity. After sacking Jerusalem, in 597 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar II forcibly deports the bulk of the Jewish religious leadership and nobility to Babylon, where they and their descendants remain in exile for the next sixty years. Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid (aka Persian) Empire, eventually defeats the Babylonians and allows the Jews to return to Jerusalem. Thanks to cross-fertilization with Zoroastrianism, the dominant religion in the Persian empire, the exiles bring with them new ideas: Now there were two extremely important innovations that transformed the mythologies of the Levant and that then very soon affected Europe. One came along with the rise of Zoroastrianism, where the principles of light and darkness are separated from each other absolutely and the idea is developed of two contending creative deities . . . absolute good and absolute evil. There is in the earlier traditions no such dualistic separation of powers, and we in our own thinking have inherited something of this dualism of Good and Evil, God and Devil, from the Persians. (The Mythic Dimension, 256-257) With this movement, the figure of Satan morphs into the devil we know today––but in the Christian era the conceptualization of the deity also undergoes a transformation. In most other belief systems, the adversary/trickster figure is not wholly evil––even Loki has his moments––but in Christianity, as in Zoroastrianism, God is conceived of as the ultimate source of all that is Good, and only Good . . . and pure good, pure light, casts a dark and monstrous shadow. If God is only Good, then his shadow, everything that God isn't, must be utter Evil. You cannot have light without the shadow; the shadow is the reflex of the figure of light.(Thou Art That, 75) According to Jungian psychology, the shadow is frequently related to one’s personal unconscious, which is called the unconscious not because it is unconscious and without purpose but because the waking ego (“me,” “I”, how I perceive myself) is unconscious of these deeper parts of the psyche: The shadow is, so to say, the blind spot in your nature. It’s that which you won’t look at about yourself . . . The shadow is that which you might have been had you been born on the other side of the tracks: the other person, the other you. It is made up of the desires and ideas within you that you are repressing—all of the introjected id. The shadow is the landfill of the self. Yet it is also a sort of vault: it holds great, unrealized potentialities within you. The nature of your shadow is a function of the nature of your ego. It is the backside of your light side. (Pathways to Bliss, 73) Shadow contents, those unknown or repressed parts of one’s being, are experienced as threatening to waking ego. Rather than accept these shadow traits as part of oneself, we tend to project shadow contents outside ourselves, onto those who have hooks in their personality, on which those projections might catch and snag, thus allowing us to evade self-loathing and self-knowledge, by directing fear and hatred outward, onto some “Other.” Is it coincidence that God instructs Moses, “Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me to you” (Exodus 3:14)? Certainly, “I AM THAT I AM”––the name of the deity in the Judeo-Christian tradition––has been interpreted as a statement having profound theological implications; at the same time, at least on the surface, it sure sounds like a declaration of ego. And if that divine ego identifies itself only with all things good, then all things evil fall into shadow, which is projected outward onto the gods of others, who are then considered to be devils. In this mythological context the idea of the occult, as black magic, becomes associated with all of the religious arts of the traditional pagan world, and the very symbols of such gods as Śiva and Poseidon, for example, become symbolic of the devil. The trident of Śiva and Poseidon and the pitchfork of our devil are the same. Moreover, there now begins to become associated with the occult a new tone, one of fearful danger, diabolical possession, and so forth, and what formerly was daemonic possession—possession by a god such as Dionysus—becomes evil: a new mythology of warlocks and witches, pacts with the devil, and so forth, comes into being. But there is an earlier mythological law that tells that when a deity is suppressed and misinterpreted in this way, not recognized as a deity, he indeed may become a devil. When the natural impulses of one’s life are repressed, they become increasingly threatening, violent, terrible, and there is a furious fever of possession that then may overtake people; and many of the horrors of our European Christian history may be interpreted as the results of this natural law.” (The Mythic Dimension, 258) Thoth Deck Copyright © 1978 by U.S. Games Systems and Samuel[/caption] And so, we come full circle, back to “the idea of the occult,” specifically, the Devil in the major arcana. This card signifies evil primarily to those unfamiliar with tarot. But there is another way to interpret this image: What is the obstruction in your life, and how do you transform it into the radiance? Ask yourself, “What is the main obstruction to my path?” . . . A demon or devil is a power in you to which you have not given expression, an unrecognized or suppressed god. (A Joseph Campbell Companion, 156) That’s worth repeating: a “devil is a power in you to which you have not given expression.” By becoming aware of and giving expression to what has been unconscious, we disempower the shadow’s ability to disrupt our lives. [T]he attitude that Joyce has in his work is not that of withdrawing but affirming; yet in the affirmation, having lined up on one side, you are not to identify yourself with God and the other side with the Devil; the two represent a polarity. Or if you do identify yourself with God and the other with the Devil, then you must realize that there is a higher principle, higher than the duality of God and Devil of which they themselves are the polarized aspects. (Mythic Worlds, Modern Words, 271) When I draw the Devil in a tarot spread, I do not take the card as evil. Rather, for me, it’s a reminder to seek out what I have ignored, repressed, or overlooked in my life––which takes honest and often challenging self-reflection––and then embrace it. The path to wholeness begins with owning one’s own shadow. As Joseph Campbell often noted, citing Nietzsche, “Be careful lest in casting out your Devil you cast out the best that is in you” (Asian Journals, p. 221). Maybe it’s time we give the devil his due . . .

Some tarot cards conjure dread in folks who have just a passing understanding of them. Either the image itself or the card’s name can be enough to evoke negative associations. In the major arcana, for example, the Tower and Death cards immediately rouse fatal visions of tragedy. However, neither of these images carries the supernatural or occult connotations of the Devil card. As the embodiment of evil, the Devil lives in the Western consciousness as something far worse than loss or dying—he possesses mysterious powers to actively wreak suffering and pain on humanity, even beyond death. But just as the Tower and Death cards have more subtle and nuanced interpretations than their fearful appearances might suggest, the Devil also has a wealth to reveal when grasped at deeper, more archetypal levels. I’d like to use a pop-culture reference in my exploration of this topic. For the Devil card, I instantly think of the Fox/Netflix series Lucifer, taken from Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman comic book. In the show, Lucifer (played by Tom Ellis) leaves Hell and becomes a nightclub owner in Los Angeles. The Devil here appears as a handsome, witty, and charming man, not a being bent on humanity’s destruction. However, he cannot escape the one function he performed in Hell: punishing wrongdoers. This leads him to a position as a consultant with the LAPD, in which he can track down criminals and help mete out justice. One of Lucifer’s superpowers is his ability to ask of anyone what they truly desire, and the fact that he always gets a truthful response proves to be useful in detective work and suspect interrogation. Moreover, Lucifer’s own (mostly hedonistic) desires drive his earthly lifestyle, and thus one of the primary themes of the show is desire and its consequences. The standard Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot presentation of the Devil card carries a strong resemblance to the Lovers: the supernatural figure in the center, flanked by Adam and Eve. But the humans bear the Devil’s horns on their heads and, more tellingly, are bound by chains to the Devil’s perch. Thus, the image insists that bondage and becoming devilish is a consequence of the Devil’s presence. And using the themes suggested by Lucifer, desire itself is the pathway into this slavery. To want something strongly is to become attached to it, and the more intense the desire, the more unbreakable the attachment. In Tibetan Buddhism, the term dö chag means “sticky desire,” the yearning to grasp something or someone that grabs you back when you experience it. Whether we label it adhesion or enslavement, craving fetters us to an external object. Joseph Campbell viewed desire in its proper place as the flip side of fear—what we are most afraid of is often the opposite of “what we truly desire.” And he related desire and fear back to the Garden of Eden and the Fall: “The fear is that of death and the desire is for more of this world,” he asserts in Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor (p. 51), “fear and desire are what keep you out of the Garden.” The Devil, then, is what pulls you in the direction of either debilitating fear or excessive desire, often linked to a common root. Between those two sides lies “the Garden” or, as Campbell references in his conversation with Bill Moyers in the first episode of The Power of Myth, nirvana: “the condition that comes when you are not compelled by desire or fear, or by social commitments, when you hold your center and act out of there.” The ”center” that Campbell refers to resides purely in neither the ego nor in the persona. It is the integrated aspect of the psyche, one that moves beyond the strong pull toward or avoidance of the pairs of opposites in life. The most powerful creator of the Devil, or the demonic, is the psyche’s natural tendency to repress the very powers it contains, the gods of our polytheistic soul. “My definition of a devil,” Campbell posits, “is a god who has not been recognized … a power in you to which you have not given expression, and you push it back” (An Open Life, 28). We often do not even recognize our unconscious gods/devils that drive us within the desire/fear dichotomy. Much of the mystery and supernatural qualities we ascribe to the concretized images of both the divine and the demonic are due to the power we ourselves give them through extremes of attachment or avoidance. One of the many aspects that I appreciate about Lucifer is that the main character goes to therapy. While in daily life he pursues what he himself desires (and avoids what he fears), therapy impels him into self-reflexive spaces where these aspects receive introspection and contemplation. As he experiences the pains of being human for the first time, his acceptance of his unexamined drives leads him toward integration. As Campbell notes, “The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply” (The Power of Myth, p. 202). Lucifer’s painful journey into himself—his self-swallowing, if you will—provides him understanding and power, and we viewers can come along for the journey. Lucifer may have left Hell to be in Los Angeles, but he continues grappling with his fears and desires from an egoic standpoint, which effectively serves to bring Hell with him. For Campbell, “Hell, properly, is the condition of people who are so bound to their ego lives and selfish values that they cannot open out to a transpersonal grace” (Thou Art That, p. 100). Can the Devil, or we who are chained and wear the Devil’s horns, break free of the shackles and move into grace? For the answer found in the series, I suggest watching it on Netflix. For your own answer, perhaps the same kind of reflections on life’s pain, accompanied by a coach, therapist, or conscious friend, can begin the process of emancipation from the chains of desire.

The cards haven’t changed as much as we have. Back in the day, the owners of the tarot decks tended to be royalty and nobility; indeed, the first tangible evidence of their use dates from 1392 when a French painter presented his version of the tarot deck to his employer, King Charles VI. Users tended to be Catholic—almost everyone in fourteenth-century Europe was Catholic—despite the risk of enraging the local church. As Joseph Campbell writes, “It is from the beginning of that century, 1330, 1340, or so, that we begin to hear complaints from clergy about members of their flocks making use of playing cards” (Tarot Revelations, p. 9). Why did the Church care? Perhaps because the deck was stacked against them: people were turning to the tarot for guidance, and guidance was the wheelhouse of Rome. I would argue that this intimate, self-guided practice of augury was a foreshock (as we Angelenos might call it) of the Protestant Reformation wherein the projection of spiritual autonomy was withdrawn from its Vatican headquarters and placed squarely in the homes of Martin Luther’s faithful. While the increasingly curious, Renaissance-influenced, nonreligious humanists dealt cards, the newly empowered Christians thumbed gilt-edged Bibles. There must have been a merchandising genius behind the evolution of the Marseille deck, because there was a shift in imagery commensurate with the evolving Weltanschauung of Luther’s German experiment: [W]hen we turn to any one of our own decks of playing cards, the symbolism that we open to is of the Protestant seventeenth century. The Swords have become Spades … The Cups, which formerly represented the chalice of the Catholic mass, have become Hearts; for in Protestant thinking it was not in the rituals and dogmas of the Roman clergy but in one’s own heart, one’s conscience that spiritual guidance was to be found (Tarot Revelations, 11). There is something very Protestant about arrogating to oneself the facile implements of self-discovery. Who needs a papist confessor? The Devil card, this month’s prompt for our collective reflections here at the Joseph Campbell Foundation, remained a stable icon of evil from an age where evil was projected outward rather than discovered within. That’s who we were back then. We didn’t have Jungian shadows; we had the devil. Or, as Campbell himself put it, “Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward” (Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor, p. 63) The devil didn’t change. We did. I can say this because I had pizza last night at a restaurant on Ventura Boulevard called Lucifer’s. Really? Is the Tempter so drained of efficacy that we can name our pizza joints after him? (They advertise four different levels of “heat” in their spicy sauce.) I never had a personal devil in my universe, although I was raised by Catholics. Both sides of the family were Catholic. Everyone I called family had been baptized, catechized, and, to some extent, hypnotized by the compelling majesty of what Dad liked to call the “one true faith.” He always chuckled when he said it. He never once mentioned the devil except when he was talking about Dante (after whom he named his fourth child). The devil’s card remains fixed in its meaning and intent by that fourteenth-century Italian who basically gave us hell as we know it. Leave it to my people to imagine a place of truly poetic forms of eternal retribution. Imagine the imagination which imagines infinite punishment for finite sins. I come from a grudge-holding culture, and Alighieri is the finest fruit on that bitter tree. My mom never mentioned the devil. Somewhere she had been inoculated against certain symbols from the past, believing that flirtations with the occult were harmless and kept children amused. Like the time she bought a Ouija board for use as a game at my seventh birthday party. The neighbor’s children innocently reported the incident to their parents, and all hell broke loose. As it turns out, my neighbors back in Broomhall, Pennsylvania, really did believe in the devil. And I know this because I’ve been calling them and possibly freaking them out with questions about how they were taught to think about Satan and whether they still believed in those things. Though I haven’t spoken to Tom Shales in over sixty years, I contacted him to ask him if his parents believed in a personal devil. He lived next door. “My parents told me that the devil hated people,” Tom texted, “and wanted to drag them to hell with sins … In my late teens, I talked to Mom about the devil once. She talked with me briefly, but it was clear to me that she was frightened by the subject. That chat took place after my brother dabbled with a Ouija board.” Oops. My informal poll of startled neighbors from sixty years ago has yielded the same results with few exceptions. I grew up surrounded by Satan. The Prince of Darkness has but a slender hold on my psyche and I credit this to my occasionally enlightened parents, who nudged me to look inward, not outward, for evidence of evil. Even Goethe’s Mephistopheles knows better than to cling to past personifications as he objects to a witch’s use of his old name in Faust, Part One: THE WITCH: I’m crazy with excitement, now I see our young Lord Satan’s back again! MEPHISTOPHELES: Woman, don’t use that name to me! THE WITCH: Why, sir, what harm’s it ever done? MEPHISTOPHELES: The name has been a myth too long. Not that man’s any better off—the Evil One they’re rid of. Evil’s still going strong. The “ancient foe” of Luther’s Ein Feste Burg (Google translates this as “a solid castle.” You may know it as A Mighty Fortress.) has been reduced in rank, his pungent, sulfuric scent perfumed by platitudes about moral relativism. As one online influencer put it in his review of the Grateful Dead’s Friend of the Devil, “Rock fans know that our love of the Devil isn’t about devotion to darkness and misery … If holiness involves being a judgmental Puritan, then Satan is just the ultimate bar buddy, the kind of sweaty, good-natured dude who just wants to skull a cold beer.” As I say, the cards haven’t changed as much as we have.

According to the anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, the fifteenth Arcanum of the Tarot introduces us to the “intoxication of counter-inspiration” (401). Throughout this year’s MythBlast series focusing on the Tarot, the authors have been researching and writing about the metaphors and symbols contained within the Major Arcana. What, then, is the devil card a metaphor or symbol of? It may assist our contemplations to place ourselves at the intersection of two fields of discourse. One being the Jungian Shadow and the other the metaphysical Doppelgänger (negative human double). The Shadow is generally thought to be an animated, personified, interior aspect of our psyche. It’s an aspect that is primitive, instinctive, and often reactionary. For most of the time, we’re only partly conscious of it, if indeed we recognize it as a reality at all. The anonymous author here brings our attention to its presence: “Good does not combat evil in the sense of destructive action. It ‘combats’ it by the sole fact of its presence. Just as darkness gives way to the presence of light, so does evil give way before the presence of good.Modern depth psychology has discovered and put into practice the therapeutic principle of bringing unconscious complexes to the light of consciousness. Because – so it affirms – the light of consciousness renders the obsessional complex not only visible but also impotent” (421). Once our awareness of its presence has been evoked, we can then employ the light of consciousness to transmute the destructive effects of darkness and evil. It’s helpful here to remember and appreciate that the Shadow can also contain parts of our psyche that the conscious self has not yet apprehended or heeded. It can also contain what Carl Jung termed the “Golden Shadow,” our submerged creative potential. And let’s not forget that the Shadow often contains collective and societal aspects too. So then, in one sense, we can say that the Shadow is the antithesis to the goals of a higher and more refined personal or collective Identity. It’s the counter-inspiration. Given this, the Shadow (golden or otherwise) is the ‘other side’ of us – invisible – yet bonded to our psyche. Yet it’s our working with individual and collective Shadow material that enables the light to both find its focus and visibly manifest the invisible aspects within the psyche. The Meditations on the Tarot author continues on this theme: Light drives out darkness. This simple truth is the practical key to the problem of how to combat demons. A demon perceived, i.e. on whom the light of consciousness is thrown, is already a demon rendered impotent. This is why the desert fathers and other solitary saints had so much experience with demons. They cast their light on them. And they did so as representatives of human consciousness in general, for whoever withdraws from the world becomes representative of the world; he becomes a ‘son of man’. And being a ‘son of man’ the solitary saint attracted the demons haunting the subconscious of mankind, making them appear, i.e. bringing them to the light of consciousness and thus rendering them impotent (421). Once the light has strengthened and ripened as a discerning faculty within us, it then has the potential to neutralize destructive elements within the psyche. Yet as myth-loving people, which us MythBlast readers surely are, we know that we must simultaneously hold paradoxical teachings like casting a light on the adversary to make it impotent, and using the light to render visible the totality of who we really are. It behooves us to hold the contradiction of employing the light to drive the demons out, while yet knowing that it’s this very light, which brings visibility and awareness of our wholeness. Now let’s turn our attention to the already-mentioned Doppelgänger, a somewhat different concept. Traditionally, this has been thought of (or experienced) as an actual metaphysical identity, not only as an aspect of the psyche. This entity also shows itself to be cold, calculating and in opposition to our personal and collective Zeitgeist. In literature, the adversary naturally moves between the Shadow and Doppelgänger identities, once again inviting us readers to embrace the importance and power of contradictory thinking. The Doppelgänger is variously personified across different legends and narratives, and the following are some fictional accounts of the Doppelgänger. In Goethe’s Faust, there is the cleverness of Mephistopheles, with whom Faust makes a pact, which is really his own distorted reflection, or double. Then there is the criminal, if not evil, Mr. Hyde, in the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. As well as Klingsor (the Duke of Terra de Labur) in the Grail legend. Klingsor is an enemy of the Grail motive and impulse and fortifies himself in the Château Merveil, which is really an occult, oppressive energy field. Here, the sorcerer Klingsor draws nourishment from impurities within the human heart. What’s interesting in all these narratives is that the Doppelgänger is mostly an adversary, and yet this adversary is a part of us too. And a necessary part at that. It’s the Doppelgänger that can propel us forward. It does this by making us confront and address those aspects of our psyche that require refinement and enhancement, and so in this respect, the Doppelgänger has a ‘redemptive’ role. In certain settings, that’s its precise mandate. So then, in a rather circuitous way, it can be an incredibly valuable helpmate on our path of soul development. “Here it is not a question of the annihilation of the demon, but rather of changing its field of activity and the place – or, rather, mode – of its existence,” the anonymous author states (p. 422). With this ‘change of mode,’ we mature by changing our relationship to the external and internal conflicts and contradictions that we all face. We recognize that without the necessary visibility of both the Shadow and Doppelgänger presences, over time, a matter-blinded consciousness would develop within much of the human population ... a consciousness that is blind to perceiving higher soul realities and has no working faculties for intuitive perceptions. Wakefulness therefore comes from rendering visible the very things that put us to sleep. By shining light on both the Shadow and Doppelgänger, we can embrace their revelations and heed Joseph Campbell’s advice: “Well, one of the problems about being psychoanalyzed is, as Nietzsche said, ‘Be careful lest in casting out your devils that you cast out the best thing that’s in you’” (Asian Journals, p. 221). Working thoroughly and diligently with this Tarot card, I trust that the devil will bring out the best in you.

“But the human being is the only animal capable of knowing death as the end inevitable for itself, and the span of old age for this human organism, consciously facing death is a period of years longer than the whole lifetime of any other primate.” Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology, 85 “Do you guys ever think about dying?” Barbie, Barbie We called it “Barbenheimer,” a reference to the simultaneous release (July 21, 2023) of two very different films with nothing in common except for their box office ambitions. Barbie (Warner Bros. Pictures, 2023) draws initially on a nostalgia for a personal past, while Oppenheimer (Universal Pictures, 2023) directs our gaze toward an unthinkable collective future. Critics suggested that this was Warner Bros. attempt at counterprogramming—give the audience a real alternative. Surely, three hours contemplating the apocalyptic consequences of nuclear fission weapons systems will leave a vast percentage of the public desperate for lighter fare. No one anticipated Barbenheimer. “AMC theaters, the largest chain of its kind in the world, recently announced that upwards of 20,000 patrons have purchased tickets for a double feature” (Yahoo! News). With tarot card number 13 as the prompt for this month’s reflection, I am inspired to make the case that death united the cinematic pairing on the Barbenheimer opening weekend. Executives at both Warner Bros. and Universal are banking on our capacity as an audience to contemplate our own extinction. In contemplating her own extinction, Barbie initiates the hero’s journey in what seems an almost deliberate evocation of Inanna’s famous descent to the underworld. Her relationship with Ken has its parallel in that of Ishtar and Tammuz, Venus and Adonis, Isis and Osiris, Mary and St. Joseph and, of course, Inanna and Dumuzi. As the University of Pennsylvania recently posted on their ancient Mesopotamia site, Inanna “does not have a spouse per se, but has an ambivalent relationship with her lover Dumuzi/Tammuz.” That has Ken all over it. (It seems that patriarchy has a competing theme in the very fabric of our collective unconscious: man as supernumerary.) While Innana meets her shadow side in her sister Ereshkigal, Barbie learns the facts of life from Weird Barbie (played by Kate McKinnon), who tells her she must leave Barbieland. From the “great above” she set her mind toward the “great below… To the nether world she descended… And let’s not forget the accessories. Barbie has more accessories than Inanna, but she would approve of the goddess’ couture: Lapis lazuli, gold ring, necklace, shugurra crown. With each degree of passage into the nether regions, an accessory is discarded until she is, in Campbell’s words, “the naked goddess.” With a vulnerable heart, stripped of her defenses, she experiences the unthinkable: her own demise. It is the awareness of death, according to James Anderson, a Kyoto University primatologist, that “may be one of the cognitive differences between us and [other] great apes” (discovermagazine.com). And it is the awareness of death that accounts for the strange affinity between two superficially different audiences: the cosplay crowd and the ban the bomb bunch. In the other eponymously named film, Oppenheimer, our hero seeks out his more famous mentor, Albert Einstein and they have a conversation about the possibility of the end of the world, and their part in it. We do not actually get to hear the words aloud until the end of the story, but the men are, as Barbie put it, thinking about death. But they’re thinking about death on a scale which would make her fully rotatable head spin.  Oppenheimer foresees, like John of Patmos (author of the Bible’s scariest book, Revelations), the end of the world, but without those opaque, first millennium symbols. Still, it’s the same idea. Patmos and Alamos provide the eschatological roadmaps particular to their times. Armageddon this way. One big difference between the Patmos and Alamos—the former was a vision, the latter an historical event. On July 16, 1945, the world’s first A bomb was detonated and for the first time eye-witness accounts superseded existential fantasies. Turning to the Bhagavad Gita for context if not for guidance, the “father of the A-bomb” found these words which he uttered aloud with the most dreadful self-awareness: “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” The Gita also provides theological absolution to Oppenheimer:  Dharma (duty) must be fulfilled and the bloodshed cannot be held against him. Small consolation. Neither Cillian Murphy’s Oppy nor Margo Robbie’s Barbie can ever return to their respective happy places, his with the chalk boards and adoring students, hers populated with variations of herself in a world without conflict. Campbell would recognize the characters’ reactions as perfectly appropriate to the encounter with mortality. "The concerns of house, village, and field boundary fade, and the lineaments of a dark mystery appear gradually from the night that is both without and within. The mind is summoned to a new task; one, however, which, like suffering and rapture, is a grave and constant factor in the experience of the human race” (Masks of God, Vol. 1: Primitive Mythology, 160). Robert Oppenheimer finds solace in the image of Vishnu, the immortal charioteer whose effulgence rivals the explosion witnessed at the Trinity Test Site: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky,” the physicist and Sanskrit scholar remembers from verse 11 of the Gita, “that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.” Shocked at his own handiwork, the Princeton academic becomes a kind of renunciate, giving up any further pursuits of building a better bomb. Barbie’s awakening reminds us of a different chariot ride. Remember how Shakyamuni (Buddha’s tribal name) snuck out of his palace with his driver, Channa, witnessing for the first time, old age, sickness, and death? Barbie’s chariot is a pink Corvette. Instead of Channa at the reins, she has Ken in the back seat. But the destination remains the same: a trip to human reality, and we’re along for the ride. The movie ends and the audience disperses. Some gather by the ice cream parlor, many dressed in pink, head to foot. Don’t be fooled. Pink is no longer the color of frivolity and this after-theater crowd is, I believe, the visible symptom of a maturing civilization. You know a civilization is maturing when its movies are warnings and its toys harbor thoughts of death. Latest Podcast In this episode entitled, “The Quest For The Grail”, Joseph Campbell discusses the Grail Legends. It was recorded in 1967 at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California and is the second lecture in the series Mystical Experience and the Hero’s Journey. Host Bradley Olson introduces the lecture and offers a commentary at the end. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life’s joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect of life. Life in its becoming is always shedding death, and on the point of death. The conquest of fear yields the courage of life." -- Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth (p.129) The Adventure of Being Alive (see more videos)

Some may think it presumptuous for a living person to write of death, and while I agree writers should save paper and time by sticking to what they've experienced, Death is a partner with whom I (and you) have already danced. In birth we are torn from the “actionless waters” of bliss and thrust into a state of total insecurity and trauma: The congestion of blood and sense of suffocation experienced by the infant before its lungs commence to operate give rise to a brief seizure of terror, the physical effects of which…tend to recur [in our waking-life]...whenever there is an abrupt moment of fright (Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. 1: Primitive Mythology, 57). If you’re alive, you’ve experienced Death. Now, our only guarantee is we’ll encounter Death again. Shall we get to know our first and final friend a little better? I invite your eyes to rest on the Tarot’s image of Death. Do not rush along, but find a place to dwell: Death, a skeleton in black armor, seems to dominate the scene. It is mounted on a steed above the dead king and the king’s mourning subjects. In the distance is a river. Is it the Styx? The background is rendered in a chilly blue, reminiscent of Monet’s exclamation: “terrible how the light runs out, taking color with it.” Anyone with a keen thought or eye might suspect that the Death card represents the End. And as most tarot card hobbyists know, if the card is placed in the reversed position, it represents lethargy, petrification, or sleepwalking. Regardless of the card’s rotation, death-experiences, whether physical, psychological, or spiritual, are never trivial. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, the poet begins his adventure by descending through the levels of hell until he comes to the lowest. Here, lost souls are submerged in a frozen lake, many in reversed positions; immobile, actionless. The lake remains frozen because Death personified continuously flaps his wings, producing a petrifying wind. Even Dante, still warm and living, feels half-alive during his encounter with Death: I did not die, nor did I stay alive. Imagine, if you have the wit, what I became what I became, deprived of either state (Inferno, XXXIV, 22-27). Fortunately, Dante did not remain neurotically immobile, but stayed close to his guide, Virgil, who did not retreat from nor succumb to Death, but took hold of the monster and climbed its body further downward. Despite his bewilderment and fear that he was somehow “heading back to Hell,” Dante continued to climb until making it beyond “the point to which all weights are drawn from every side,” and climbing through the darkness of a hidden passage found again “the world of light” (Inferno, Canto XXXIV, 81-134). I, too, take hold of the Death Tarot card to examine it closer. Slowly, my initial macabre impressions dissolve into the golden color of morning (perhaps after a night of mourning) that breaks over the foreground of the card. I see the sun rise between two distant towers. I blur my eyes to uncover the next revelation. The image contains more white than black- Death rides a white horse, and its banner over all is a white rose! On such a rose, my eyes find rest. The Greek Chloris, deity of flowers, once discovered the dead body of a lovely nymph. Upon seeing the dead creature forgotten and alone, lost in the morning-mist of an overcast forest, Chloris transformed the nymph into the most beautiful flower yet. With help from Zephyrus, Aphrodite, the three Graces, the West Wind, Apollo, and Dionysius, the dead nymph was reborn as the queen of flowers: the rose. The beloved one in the Hebrew poem Song of Solomon, is the “Rose of Sharon” and her lover beckons her to rise, “For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone… Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away” (KJV, Song of Solomon, 2:1). In the Christian tradition, Eve is the facilitator of human suffering and death. As an answer to such suffering, the Virgin Mary (her symbol, a white rose) becomes the facilitator of everlasting life. These truths-beyond-facts point to a rapture that quiets the chilling flutter of Death’s deceptive wings, a “thread,” as D.H. Lawrence wrote when facing down oblivion, that “separates itself from the darkness,” resulting in a “Flush of rose…filling the heart with peace” (D.H. Lawrence, The Ship of Death). After descending into hell, encountering Death, and literally coming out on the “other side” (by crawling even further down), Dante ascends the mountain of Purgatory, and enters Paradise where the monk, Bernard of Clairvaux, brings Dante to the “White Rose of Paradise, the eternal home of both Mary and Eve. And around this rose, flit the “saintly soldiery of Christ…as a swarm of bees…Aimed sight and love upon a single goal,” a pollination of peace. Nor did so vast a flying throng, coming between the flower and the light above, obstruct the looking up or shining down. For the light of God so penetrates the universe, according to the fitness of its parts to take it in, that there is nothing can withstand its beam (Paradiso, XXXII, 19-24). Just as Nicodemus asked Jesus how a man could be born when he is old, or enter a second time into his mother’s womb, we may now be asking must we literally die before we can experience death’s rapture? The world’s mythologies respond with a resounding, “No!” In East Africa, a Basumbwa folktale describes Great Chief Death as half beautiful and half rotten. Those who encounter Death and choose to wash and perfume his beautiful aspects, instead of fussing over the parts of his nature that must be, are blessed by Death in Life (Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. 1: Primitive Mythology, 110). Death isn’t an end with a capital E, but merely a threshold passage. A crisis, to be sure, but one we’ve endured before—and one we can endure again, and again, and again—for as long as we dare to live. Eternity is now, as the Buddhist understands: Waves appear to be born and to die. But…waves, although coming and going, are also water, which is always there…Enlightenment for a wave is the moment the wave realizes it is water…When you [achieve such enlightenment]...you will have no trouble building a boat that can carry you across the waves of birth and death…You will know that nirvana, the Kingdom of Heaven, is here and now (Thich Hnat Hanh, Living Buddah, Living Christ, 138). When you are plunged into dark immobilizing waters, realign yourself, be mindful, and dwell deeply in the present moment, knowing you are doing the best thing you can and have all you need (your “little ark,” “oars,” “cakes & “dishes,” “wine,” and “all accouterments fitting and ready for a departing soul”). Then, with a “strong heart at peace,” look Death in the face. You may find a beautiful rose. Latest Podcast In this episode, we embark on a journey where the worlds of dance and mythology converge. Our guest today, Nancy Allison, is a New York-based dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, and educator who has not only danced on stages around the world, but has also expertly woven the threads of dance, myth, and storytelling into her life’s work. Nancy Allison was a member of Jean Erdman’s Theater of The Open Eye from 1976 – 1985. At The Open Eye she also distinguished herself as a leading interpreter of Erdman’s solo dance repertory of the 1940s and 50s. She is the executive producer and featured dancer of the three-volume video archive Dance & Myth: The World of Jean Erdman. Since 1986 she has performed Erdman’s solo dance repertory throughout the US and abroad and has presented Erdman’s work at national conferences and institutes. For more information about Nancy and to find all three volumes of the Dance and Myth Series visit: http://jeanerdmandance.com/events.html Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Eternity is not a continuation of time. Eternity is a dimension of here and now. And we have eternal life now. This is what is meant by “The kingdom of the Father is spread over the earth and men do not see it." -- Joseph Campbell An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michel Toms, p. 78 Joseph Campbell — Jung and the Right and Left-hand Paths (see more videos)

When I began structuring this essay in my mind, trying to make a rational attempt to contemplate the meaning of the hermit’s card (number 9), a song spontaneously took over and started resonating in my heart. Initially, I tried to suppress it (silly me!). ‘Round up the usual suspects,’ as Captain Renault famously said in Casablanca (Warner Bros, 1942). But as we often find, attempting to suppress something only makes it more enticing and alluring, and the song persisted within me. Consequently, I decided to give it a voice, realizing it served as a splendid metaphor to introduce the card! I go with my lantern, And she goes with me. Above, the stars are shining bright; Down here on Earth, shine we The light went out, I’m going back home Sway, sway lantern. My daughter, Laura, and I started singing this song almost a quarter of a century ago when she was two years old and attending the Waldorf Micael School in São Paulo, but it still echoes in my fondest memories when winter approaches. Originally written in German, the song is sung with slight variations in Waldorf School kindergartens all over the world to celebrate the arrival of the winter season. This celebration typically occurs in the Northern Hemisphere around Saint Martin’s Day on November 11th and in the Southern Hemisphere in June. In Brazil, this European-origin festival is celebrated during Saint John’s time on June 24th. It is also a major celebration in the city of Porto, Portugal to this day. It is a festival that prepares us for the quieting of nature outside and, if we allow it, within ourselves. After all, the cold climate and the longer nights foster an attitude of introspection. As I hold The Hermit card from the Rider-Waite-Smith deck in my hands, I see a bearded old man holding a lantern in his right hand and a staff in his left hand. Like the Fool’s card, he is a pilgrim, a wanderer. His wisdom is imparted through his journey. The lantern is lit and placed in front of him and in the distance, mountains suggest that he has completed his journey and has returned to guide us. His solitude indicates the benefits of withdrawing from the chaotic everyday world to turn inward. He wears a serious, trustful expression and we may connect him to the archetypal figure of the elder or the sage if we wish. As such, he is the one who finds meaning in the chaos of life, as Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav suggests in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (CW 9, Part I, § 74). The card depicts a person encouraging us to search within ourselves and seek our own internal light. It’s akin to a busy day at work when, at day’s end, we yearn to return home promptly, seeking the solace and company of our loved ones. What I see in this card is that, especially during childhood and youth, it’s important to have a guiding figure outside of ourselves with whom we can connect. Most studies in psychology emphasize that this is a crucial aspect of feeling safe, of continuing to grow and understand oneself better and act confidently in the world. Eventually, adulthood and maturity arrive. These guiding figures start to become scarce in the external world. Many people come to realize that they carry wounds, small or large, and that the individuals playing the roles of father, mother, or caregivers naturally had their flaws. After all, they are only human, despite bearing the mantle and sword of maternal, paternal, wise man, or wise woman archetypes. This brings us to the Greek myth of Chiron, the Hierophant, who acts as a bridge between earthly knowledge and that which surpasses what the intellect can fathom. Chiron’s injuries transformed him into the Wounded Healer, someone who, through his own pain, could better comprehend the pain of others. It’s an illusion to think we can heal all psychological wounds. Sometimes, it’s about embracing and tending rather than solving. When the masks fall—and it’s crucial that they eventually do—the moment arrives to willingly withdraw a bit from the world and connect with the Hermit residing within us. Doing so, we grant the archetype the chance to reveal the light it carries within each of us. The knowledge that even in the darkest night of the soul, the light remains within us is reassuring. We discover that we have the psychological resources to face our challenges after all. In such moments, the Hermit archetype can emphasize the right to make choices for us, but also expresses the duty to take responsibility for them. Discovering our unique way of existing in the world comes with its costs, particularly if we choose to deviate from the traditions that provide collective protection. It’s important to be prepared to bear the price. When we turn to the Hermit’s card, we cannot help but notice the seeker traveling alone. It’s one of the phrases that struck me the most in The Power of Myth when Joseph Campbell mentioned that at this stage of the hero’s (or heroine’s) journey, it may be beneficial to have someone as a companion, but it is also okay to be alone. For me, the lesson is that in the heroic journey we undertake throughout our existence, we enter this world alone and we will depart alone as well. There’s no need to fear. After all, between these two moments symbolizing the ultimate mystery, we encounter numerous allies, guardians, heralds, shapeshifters, tricksters, and mentors from the outside. If we are fortunate, we will encounter antagonists and, if we’re very lucky, a great villain to teach us how to confront our own shadows. However, the inner guidance, The Hermit, is always there, patiently waiting, just within the reach of a breath. And if we’re wise, we can observe the inhalation and exhalation of nature’s seasons, revealing the opportune moments to turn inward and outward in a rhythmic pattern throughout the year. We can utilize this wisdom as a metaphor, akin to how Jung correlates the phases of life with the seasons, and as life progresses, we traverse the spectrum from Spring to Winter. You can listen to the sweet English version of the Waldorf song by searching for ‘I go outside with my lantern’ and ‘Waldorf lyrics’ on your preferred search engine. However, here is the version I found used in U.S. Waldorf Kindergartens: I go outside with my lantern, my lantern goes with me Above the stars are shining bright, down here on Earth shine we. The cock does crow, the cat meows, la bimmel, la bammel, la boom. ‘Neath heaven’s dome till we go home, la bimmel, la bammel, la boom. When I finished writing this text, or rather, when the text finished writing itself, I was humming ‘La bimmel, la bammel, la boom. Balanga, Balanga, lampião’ And it felt so good!” Monica Martinez Primavera de 2023

In 1862, John Henry “Professor” Pepper summoned a ghost in front of a live audience. Though the illusion he used dated back at least as far as 16th century Italy, this particular visitation was just in time for a renewed fascination in the afterlife with the peak of Spiritualism, a belief that the dead are not gone but exist alongside the living, reachable and sometimes even visible to those who know how to pull aside the veil. Professor Pepper made a fortune showing “Pepper’s Ghost” to audience members looking for just such a spectacle throughout the late 19th century. As the trick lost its novelty, though, Pepper decided to reclaim relevance by using his understanding of the illusion to debunk Spiritualism, gathering audiences with the promise of explaining how the effect was done — only to find that those who believed in ghosts weren’t terribly convinced, or even concerned, by this “proof.” The fact that Spiritualists still practice today is, perhaps, an example of the triumph of belief over provable fact: even though the mechanics of Pepper’s Ghost and other illusions are revealed, the story is too compelling to be solved for good. Debunkers can — and have — spent entire lives and fortunes compiling evidence that runs contrary to a belief in spirits among us. They offer a million dollars for just one certifiable photo of a real ghost. The contests run decades without a claimant, and this has no impact at all on the conviction of believers. While skeptics and cynics pull out their hair, anyone who has read Shakespeare knows that a ghost is never just a glob of floating ectoplasm or a trick of the light, and attempts at gathering physical evidence to better understand the ineffable are solidly beside the point. To quote Douglas Adams: “If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat.” Myth, like any organic thing, has to be approached with some understanding of its behavior before dissecting it does any good. Joseph Campbell writes about the perils of missing metaphor in a 1986 article for the Houston Chronicle: “If myth is translated into literal fact, then myth is a lie.” This is an expansion of an concept he speaks on in his earlier works, including the collection Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal: I think what happens in our mythology here in the West is that the mythological archetypal symbols have come to be interpreted as facts. Jesus was born of a virgin. Jesus was resurrected from the dead. Jesus went to heaven by ascension. Unfortunately, in our age of scientific skepticism we know these things did not actually happen, and so the mythic forms are called falsehoods. The word myth now means falsehood, and so we have lost the symbols and that mysterious world of which they speak. In the deification of the material — or is it a materialization of the deity? — we lose a universe of meaning. The symbols aren’t gone, exactly, but Campbell points out that they’re generally relegated to the psychiatric: “It was Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Jacob Adler who realized that the figures of dreams are really figures of personal mythologization. You create your own imagery related to the archetypes.” The tarot deck has long been a staple of the Spiritualist’s toolbox for seeking wisdom from the spirits (or the unconscious, depending on the practitioner) through associations with the archetypal. Perhaps the most self-referential card in the deck is the Hermit, a figure who represents this spirit of wandering the in-between in search of spiritual clarity. As illustrated in Pixie Smith’s iconic deck, the Hermit doesn’t spend his days shut away in a damp hovel on the wrong side of the hedge. He may be separate from society, but he’s not sequestered; a Hermit’s life is one of seeking, and seeking is a living thing that takes place on foot. The Hermit seeks the occult — the true sense of the word, meaning the obscured or hidden — that impacts you so entirely you lose yourself as an individual and see your place in the cosmos. Campbell refers to this as the “sublime.” The sublime encountered between you and your chosen destination may tell you more than arriving at your destination ever could. The Hermit’s background may look to be an empty blue — uncharacteristically empty, compared to Smith’s other illustrations — as he wanders through it alone at twilight, but the space isn’t empty at all, and in fact represents a deeply important aspect of the spiritual journey. Rebecca Solnit writes about this phenomenon of the substantive in-between in “The Blue of Distance,” an essay from her 2005 book A Field Guide to Getting Lost: The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. The “blue of distance” is, technically and literally, a mirage. The mountains you’re walking toward aren’t blue; if you try to close in on that enchanting blue place, the illusion will fade and you’ll see all the colors you’re used to from back home. By then you may realize too late that the blue was the point. Art critic and writer John Berger expresses the risk of taking that blueness literally in an essay from one of his final books, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance: Every day people follow signs pointing to someplace which is not their home but a chosen destination… some are making their journeys for pleasure, others on business, many out of loss or despair. On arrival they come to realize they are not in the place indicated by the signs they followed. They now find themselves at the correct latitude, longitude, local time, currency, yet it does not have the specific gravity of the destination they chose.[…] They are beside the place they chose to come to. The distance which separates them from it is incalculable. Maybe it’s only the width of a thoroughfare, maybe it’s a world away. The place has lost what made it a destination. It has lost its territory of experience. The blue between here and there isn’t supposed to be concrete. It isn’t the destination, but neither is it empty. The cat doesn’t purr because it’s a vital function, but because it’s communicating comfort or stress. The ghost appearing onstage may be an illusion created by physical trickery, but the nature of its creation is irrelevant to the meaning of a ghost; the vital thing about Banquo appearing to Macbeth isn’t that he’s a literal haunt, but the fact that his apparition symbolizes Macbeth’s terror and guilt over Banquo’s murder. Campbell’s response to this misunderstanding of symbology is to encourage a more Zen understanding of metaphor — that is, by reminding us that the visible plane isn’t the moon itself, but the finger pointing toward it: “The mythology of a people presents a grandiose poetic image, and like all poetic images, it refers past itself to principles that are mysterious and ineffable” (emphasis mine). “The question,” Campbell writes, “is whether or not there can ever be a recovery of the mythological, mystical realization of the miracle of life of which human beings are a manifestation.”