As with many archetypal motifs the Hermit (tarot card IX) can present as both a higher and lower modality of itself. In its lower representation, the Hermit may seek withdrawal from society because they feel insecure within communal life or hold contempt for other human beings. The higher representation can involve the Hermit withdrawing from society to pursue a relationship with the macro cosmic soul or to commune within the deeper recesses of their own soul. The higher representation often involves a sort of inner pilgrimage – introspection, self-reflection, contemplation – the end goal being a stronger connection with both the macro cosmic soul and their own sagacious inner depths. In this case, the hermit condition can arise as a consequence of the Hermit having become ‘other,’ that is a different identity profile i.e. they’ve become ‘other-wise.’ By means of a long process of interior work, they’ve attained a refinement of consciousness beyond the societal norm. Through such experiences, the Hermit rises above the usual group-think of the tribe. Their distance from the crowd is not due to a condition of self-satisfied contempt for other people, but evolves from stepping into their own individuated power and agency by giving birth to their higher and authentic self. They’ve literally become their own compass through finding their own unique voice. Yet because of this journey, the Hermit becomes somewhat ‘homeless.’ They’re no longer merely an automaton of their tribe, society, or culture and it’s this ‘homelessness’ that results in a deep, existentialist estrangement. We have an example of this solitary condition of soul in the Gospels where there occurs the phrase, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” (Matthew 11:15). Such words indicate that the fully individuated Jesus is lamenting the fact that he’s attained a mature gnosis (wisdom of both heart and mind) and will willingly impart this to others, but sadly, only a few people will have the ‘ears’ – intuitive hearing – required to receive and understand His words. It indicates that the quiddity of life can’t be so easily found on the surface of things because most people don’t yet possess the spiritual ears to ‘hear’ the pulse of the world’s mysteries, nor the pulse of their own soul’s deeper longings. It leads those with a strong hermit archetype to often be misunderstood. They may even be seen as fools because through the common societal lens, they don’t always conform to normal behaviors and expectations. The Hermit can also be perceived as being aloof because they’re a threat to the tribal identity, or even demonized due to the negative shadow projection of the tribe. The projection is that this outsider holds negative judgments regarding the tribe’s collective psyche and accompanying social behaviors. The Hermit has though occasionally begun life as a fool … a fool in the sense of being naïve, child-like (not to be confused with childish), and relatively innocent. In this respect, we’re reminded of Parcival of the Grail journey fame. Parcival – an archetypal figure – is raised as a child by his widowed and hermit mother in a forest. He knows almost nothing of the wider world. He lives somewhat uncouthly in – and with – nature. His life is rustic, simple, and virtually unmediated by human culture. After Parcival ‘by chance’ meets some knights on horseback in the forest, he tells his mother that he too will become a knight and sets out to explore the world (a  journey that’s really an inner pilgrimage and adventure of soul). His distressed mother sends him forth dressed in fool’s attire upon a limping horse. But because Parcival began his life’s pilgrimage as a fool, he’s well prepared to be radically receptive to the ever-fresh wonders of the world and to the clarion calls of the future. Incrementally, Parcival’s journey leads him through many soul struggles from fool to loner before he can finally embrace all of humanity with his ripened faculties of gnosis, wholeness, and humility. How does this relate then to the hermit depictions in the tarot card? Well, the figure stands on a mountain peak, and this is the result of his striving upwards after emerging from the darkness of his unconscious. He holds a lamp in one hand and a staff in the other. The lamp shines forth with a six-fold light indicating that he’s now entered his own authenticity, power, and wisdom. This six-foldness reminds us of the Seal of Solomon, often symbolized by the hexagram, which speaks of a wisdom that’s moving toward a universal love … a love that embraces all of humanity and creation with this heart-imbued gnosis. The anonymous author writes in Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, “The Hermit of the ninth Card is the Christian Hermeticist, who represents the ‘inner work of nine’, the work of realizing the supremacy of the heart in the human being – in familiar, traditional terms: the ‘work of salvation’ – because the ‘salvation of the soul’ is the restoration of the reign of the heart” (229). Now, these are words truly worth pondering. The Hermit achieves the salvation of the soul by restoring the reign of the heart, and in this way, becomes a lamp that shines a light for fellow travelers on the inner path. He and his lamp of light are especially welcome when the traveler experiences the inevitable nights of disillusionment and despair as described in St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul. But of course, the hermit archetype lives in each of us, inspiring us to reach for the higher octaves of ourselves, even while our current nascent version awaits its full voice. Joseph Campbell stated that the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek, and it’s precisely the Hermit who will lead us to this cave and give us the courage to enter. Resting upon the staff of consolidated gnosis and the grounded steadiness of composed experience, the Hermit with their lamp lights and reveals the way on our inner journey towards this very awakening.

“Till then, think of the world.” (Julius Caesar 2.2 line 319) As we turn to the closing of the year, it seems like that state of the world is the last thing we want to think about. And yet “the World,” the ultimate card of the major arcana, bids us go beyond our subjective fantasies in order to face the realities of the world—grim though they may be. For every violent event in the world can be read as the explosion of a certain repressed truth in the collective unconscious which is yet to be thought out. In the first place, the World card represents the culmination of the whole process of individuation portrayed in the classic tarot deck. It represents the full integration of the Self as the synthesis of the four elements, the higher and lower realms. Therefore, it is generally considered a fortune laden card which brings together “Assured success, recompense, voyage, route, emigration, flight, change of place” with their opposites “Inertia, fixity, stagnation, permanence” (AE Waite. The Pictorial Key to the Tarot , p. 81.) Even its “reversed” significance does not seem too detrimental. So it may be a surprise to learn that the card of the World is ruled by the astrological sign of Saturn, with all its “negative” constellations and attributes. In Medieval alchemy, Saturn corresponded to lead, the heaviest and darkest of metals. It constituted the emblematic starting point of the Great Opus. As a manifestation of the prima materia  or primal matter, Saturn was associated with the stage of the nigredo  or the “blackening”—a state of deep depression and melancholic introspection which today is being triggered by the state of the world.  The mythic associations that belong to Saturn as Chronos devouring his own children points to the uroboric nature of the prima materia . It is another variation of the self-relating movement of the “serpent that bites its own tail” as the alpha and omega of the Great Opus. Lead thus became the literal and symbolic ore out of which the philosophical gold of Alchemy was to be mined and extracted.  The card of the World is, after all, an archetypal image of a mode of consciousness that shows itself to be, as it were, in full possession of the lapis philosophorum or “Philosopher's Stone .” But such consciousness only emerges out of the background of Saturn as the absolute negativity of the soul. As we can read in an alchemical text from the 17 th  Century: “My child shall know, that the Stone called the Philosopher's Stone, comes out of Saturn”. ( A Work of Saturn. Johann Isaac Hollandus from Of Natural & Supernatural Things. London, 1670 .) Saturn thus indicates the “negative” source of wisdom emerging out of the unconscious recesses of truth. Determined as the flow of temporality, Saturn also symbolizes the process of generation, becoming, and change. If the World card is to represent, as Waite suggests, “the rapture of the universe when it understands itself in God (Nature) ( p. 53),” then this rapture must surely include the Saturnian element of absolute negativity which would prevent a positive consciousness of the whole.  Jung expresses a thought in a similar vein when he writes: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious” (CW13: 265-266¶355). The darkness that needs to be made conscious, however, is not only of a personal nature. As a proponent of the collective  unconscious, Jung implicitly understood that this task of enlightenment aims at the elucidation of a collective darkness. This piece of unconsciousness corresponds to an archetypal strand of truth   which runs through an individual as it does through entire societies and cultures— across the centuries . Weaving and unraveling our collective existence, these unconscious forces will cry havoc with a Monarch’s voice as long as the hidden and repressed truth of the conflict is not borne out. Joseph Campbell seems to have understood this supreme insight when he wrote: In India, the objective is to be born from the womb of myth, not to remain in it, and the one who has attained to this “second birth” is truly the “twice born,” freed from the pedagogical devices of society, the lures and threats of myth, the local mores, the usual hopes of benefits and rewards (Flight of the Wild Gander. Bios-Mythos 38). True spiritual maturity lies on the other side of the mythic wonderland of our subjective fantasy where we have become attuned to the nature of reality as such. For “The seat of the soul is there, where the outer and the inner worlds meet,” as Campbell quotes Novalis, a German philosopher and mystic from the 18th century, immediately remarking: “That is the wonderland of [true] myth” (The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, 5). True myth as vera narratio (true story ) takes place in the real world, where the seat of the soul actually is, in the crucible of myth and history. For the soul is out there in ecstatic existence, where there is real joy and actual fulfillment, as well as real pain, suffering, death, and the terrible capacity for mass murder and genocidal revenge. To remain in the subjective womb of myth implies a state of being like a spiritual stillbirth—a condition that befalls millions inside the world religions. It also means that we are already caught in the ideological sack of status quo wisdom, where we quickly dwindle into pawns of industry or rabid watchdogs of the principalities of the “powers that be.” But if we can put aside the law of children and be freed from “the lures and threats of myth,” then we have a real chance at transcendence. Having been twice born into the World, we learn to live humbly under the light Truth and Justice—yes, precisely in their capital or archetypal senses. Rather than a mystic vessel of light designed to escape into subjective fantasy, the nature of true myth ( vera narratio ) is to bring us into contact with the painful truths of the Soul of the World, putting us in touch with the Saturnian background of the collective psyche.  Featured Video Featured Work

This will be the last card in my year-long commitment to the Tarot as a reader. While I have learned much, I am left with a question. If I am the reader, who is the subject of my reading? As a man, I think this card may offer a reading for men in general because it may be understood to herald a fundamental shift in their societal status. Gentlemen, be seated. The card you see on the table before you is called “The World,” usually associated with momentous change. The message is hard to miss, framed by symbols of the Christian gospels, one evangelist in each corner. We know that “gospel” translates as “good news,” and it is good news indeed if you have grown weary of the burden of being an Alpha Male 24/7. It is good news for you and good news for women because it suggests that a historical reckoning is about to take place. There was a time, according to Joseph Campbell and Maria Gimbutas, when the divine principle was female and operated under the aegis of the Goddess. She had many names and Campbell loved to recite them: Artemis, Ishtar, Astarte, Anahit, Aphrodite, and Mary who, while not a deity herself, is clearly the dominant member of her odd marriage to a local carpenter. But, as James Hillman liked to say, the gods never show up alone. Each member of the female pantheon partnered with some male divine which, while full of potency, is nevertheless a secondary character in a supportive role. Just as Barbie has Ken, Ishtar has Tammuz, Inanna claims Dumuzi, Venus delights in her Adonis, Isis is unavoidably linked to corpse-like Osiris, and Mary enjoys a Platonic marriage of convenience with a local craftsman. My point is that patriarchy is never a permanent state but a condition always in flux which can leave us in positions of public power, or reduce us to ancillary functions. Consider Mary and Joseph. She is Theotokos, or “god bearer.” He’s good at miter cuts. The current epoch of male hegemony began one afternoon when Persephone was plucking a narcissus from the meadow where she and her all female crew were gamboling under the eye of a watchful mother goddess, Demeter, whose attention wandered just long enough to allow a chthonic kidnapper to burst through the mantle of the earth, urging his unblinking horses onward to capture the lovely Persephone. Is it more than a story? I think so. That momentous afternoon speaks of the abruptness by which one monad supplanted another.  I have always intuitively felt that Hades’ abduction of Persephone is a historical echo of those very real thundering hooves under the saddles of the Indo-Europeans in 4400 BCE, a date favored by Gimbutas, who cites as evidence the artifacts she found from that period among the broken shards and abandoned granaries of her digs. “Weapons, weapons, weapons!” cries the Lithuanian archeologist to her interviewer from the L.A. Times (6/11/89). “It’s just incredible how many thousands of pounds of these daggers and swords were found from the Bronze Age. This was a cruel period and the beginning of what it is today—you turn on the television, and it’s war, war, war, whatever channel.” The invaders brought more than daggers. They came with their deities. Derived from guardian family gods throughout the second millennium BCE, they pillaged the sleepy Neolithic towns throughout southeastern Europe and Asia Minor to the Indus Valley. “The chief gods of the invaders were predominantly male warrior gods, champions, each, of his special people. Those of the invaded agricultural territories, in contrast, were chiefly of the earth’s fertility and life, local forms for the most part, of the one great ‘goddess of many names,’ of whom all beings, even gods and demons, are the progeny” (The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, 20). So goodbye village and tillage, hello horse and battle ax. But the historical reckoning which I see in the card before me is now upon us. The mandorla, Campbell reminds us in Tarot Revelations, is comprised of overlapping circles, their point of intersection creating a Venn diagram or, if one prefers, an almond such as we see framing the central figure of the face card. “Moreover, the form of the mandorla is traditionally interpreted as a reference to the female organ of birth, the vulva, as though the cosmic mother-goddess of all space-time were here to be seen giving birth to the Christ of the Second Coming, and thereby to the Kingdom of the Father which is within us.” Only, the “Father” is noticeably absent within the mandorla. The evangelists are heralding a woman, although the figure can be construed (with effort) as a hermaphrodite. Either way, the second coming will be a rude awakening for those whose prayers are still directed to a male god residing somewhere just beyond the moon. In the subject’s hands are, respectively, a wand to the left, indicative of the male principle, according to Campbell, and a conch shell to the right, symbolic of the female principle. But the reassuring balance is undermined by the displacement of Christ altogether. As Campbell directs our attention to the West Portal of Chartres Cathedral, we discover a remarkably similar constellation of symbolic representations: Four Evangelists with a central Christ framed by a mandorla. The meaning of Card 21 could not be clearer: A woman is giving the hip-check to the boy from Bethlehem. The pivot from gynocentrism to phallocentrism can happen in an instant, as when Hades drags his unwilling prey to an undesired throne in Hell. Or it can occur naturally over centuries: I am thinking of another “hermaphrodite” whose career began in India as the mustachioed male Avalokiteshvara, but, by the time he gets to China and Japan, has become the most merciful Kuan Yin, holding in her sublime hands, not the conch of card No 21, but the “vase of her compassion” which she pours out upon the suffering earth. “In our present day,” writes Campbell in apparent sympathy with the premise of imminent historical transition, “it does indeed seem that a fundamental transformation of the historical conditions of its inhabiting humanity is in prospect, and that the age of the conquering armies of the contending monster monads… may be about to close” (Inner Reaches, xix). Not a moment too soon. Featured Video Featured Work

I’m sitting in the middle seat on an airplane flying west over the Atlantic Ocean. My tray table holds a flimsy cup of strong coffee, a pen, a pad, and a book, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion by Joseph Campbell. The chairs beside me are occupied, so my elbows remain tucked in against my sides. Only my hands and forearms can move as I gingerly raise and lower the coffee, steady the pad to write, and hold the book up to read. Inner Reaches is one of my favorite Campbell books, with its focus on imagination and art. I love the title, too, suggesting the infinite inwardness of the cosmos, and the cosmic reaches of the inner self. I’m reading Campbell’s reflections on NASA’s photo of earth from the moon, an image which “lacks those lines of sociopolitical divisions that are so prominent on maps” (94), when I glance up from the book and notice that the screen on the seat in front of me shows an animation of the airplane’s path as though from above. Not as far away as the moon, but high enough to see the planet’s curve and the contours of continents. At intervals, this image of the globe spins on its virtual axis, a gratuitous pirouette for no purpose other than to entertain us passengers. Some places are labeled, but the graphic shows no borders. There go Canada and the United States, the Pacific Ocean, Japan, Mongolia, Turkey, Norway, Spain. It’s nighttime over Tokyo, Hong Kong, Delhi, Dubai. In the animation, cities necklace the land with yellow beads of electric light. Campbell believed the image of the world from space might bring humanity together and usher in a new myth, a “mythology of this unified earth as of one harmonious being” (xix). The key word here is “being,” an entity possessed of animate wholeness–like a person is. And because beings in myth are so often imagined as goddesses and gods, Campbell could be wondering how a new myth might emerge of Earth as sacred, honored, and archetypal, a deity to be met in heart-space with reverence and awe. But to see a being in a photo of a planet requires a mythic images and a mythic imagination. Which brings us to the tarot cards. In the tarot deck’s image-rich major arcana, the last card is the World, number twenty-one. If the Fool begins the cards’ metaphorical journey, the World completes the adventure. In some decks, the World shows a nearly nude figure adorned only with a sportive scarf that floats in undulating waves like Aphrodite’s magical, love-inducing wrap. Fully formed and fully breasted, the person is an adult, not a child. This figure’s beauty is vibrantly alive, suggesting metaphorically the living, loving soul of a living, loving world. Hovering in clouds at the corners of the card are other beings: angel, eagle, lion, bull. The four of them surround the World, who holds a magic wand in each hand as lightly as though about to twirl them. A powerful, ensouled being supported by other powerful souls, the World’s love works magic effortlessly, with both hands at once. I’m flying to New York after a few weeks in London, where I saw thrilling art and architecture, savored global food and wine, and walked among throngs of people from everywhere who spoke more languages than I could identify. My visit felt like an encounter with the world up close and personal: a fountain of life, a ferment of making, a fertile tumult of blending and reblending earth, air, water, and fire. The creativity of the city seemed spontaneously buoyant, and now I feel replenished with insights and experiences. This radically different vantage point gave my day-to-day world an infusion of fresh perspectives, the way the Earthrise photo gave us all a new view of our shared home. The tarot card’s metaphorical World dances through a massive wreath. It’s an opening bound by an eternal circle, hence an opening into eternity, or a space outside time. The World hovers between realities, suspended between everything that came before and everything yet to come. This card of culmination shows the fleeting, floating simultaneity of endings and beginnings and the infinite expanse between. The World’s immense, generous love creates beauty in those transitions as if by magic. My coffee is almost gone. The plane is approaching New York. When I finally stretch my folded limbs and exit the aircraft, stepping out of the doorway I entered only a few hours ago, I will hover for a heartbeat in a timeless space of completion before returning to the world from my brief time away. I will cross the plane’s threshold a different person than when the flight began, different than I was when I left home. And after passing through that portal, I will step into the realm of the Fool again, because when one journey ends another begins. I hope for some of the Fool’s radiant faith, relaxed in the gnosis of what it is that waits at the end of the next adventure. Or rather, who it is who waits. Featured Video Featured Work

The World … The Entire World. This entirety speaks to the grand enhancement of our consciousness and its embrace of all things. Throughout much of the Hermetic tradition, ‘The World’ also means the World Soul. And here in this tarot card we have the Dancing Maiden whose consciousness is merging with the circuitry of the earth and kosmos reflecting Isadora Duncan's statement that "one truly lives only when one dances." Through this dance, a cosmic consciousness is entered … a harmonious intercourse between the subconscious, conscious, and super conscious realms of the psyche. Our Dancer here is fully poised because she is replete and synchronized within herself and is in harmony with the entirety of the world. She also holds a wand in each hand suggesting the principle of polarities. We see this principle expressed in life through constant contraction and expansion. The human heart and most other bodily organs expand and contract continuously in a process mediated through rhythmic pulse. Similarly, our planet breathes out in the summer of one hemisphere and breathes in during the winter of the other. Plus there’s also the rhythms of sleep and wakefulness, sympathy and antipathy, and in a physics setting, of negative electrical charges and positive charges. The anonymous author writes in Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism: Seen in the light of the Arcanum ‘The World’ – the Arcanum of rhythmic movement or dance – joy is the harmony of rhythms, whilst suffering is their disharmony. The pleasure that one experiences in winter when one is seated close to a fire is only the restoration of an accord between the body’s rhythm and the rhythm of the air – that which we call ‘temperature’. The joy that friendship gives is the harmony between the psychic and mental rhythms of two or more people. […] Joy is therefore the state of harmony of inner rhythm with outer rhythm, of rhythm below with that from above, and, lastly, of the rhythm of created being with divine rhythm (630). Our Mystical Dancer dances with the rhythms and pulses of the great circulation of Universal Life – both the natural, terrestrial rhythms and the planetary and stellar rhythms of the kosmos. She’s both a representative of these rhythms as well as a conduit for them. And our Dancer is naked. Naked because her motive is pure and unadulterated, and she has transcended all possible deceit and hubris. As such, she’s entirely at one with her dance (we could even say her mission), which is to be the intersection vessel for the earth and kosmos. And in this role, she’s free. She’s bound only by the membrane of the living universe, which is why, perhaps, she’s depicted as being surrounded by the wreath of leaves. As a fully individuated human being, our Dancer has become not only a child of the World Soul’s processes, but also somewhat independent of them too. As such, she’s able to step through the immediate sheaths of ‘The World’ – here represented as the circle – and address and speak back to this World Soul as an emissary for a fully actualised and autonomous humanity. Depicted as a human being, she’s therefore able to imbue the World Soul with new and novel life. The entirety of this world can often only be described symbolically and mystically within the hermetic and alchemical traditions. Jennifer Westwood wrote in On Pilgrimage: Sacred Journeys around the World that “Cosmic imagery, the experience of Sufis and other mystics, and the practice of pilgrimage all seem to tell us the same thing: that there is a center that can give us meaning (connection) and purpose (direction). This center is the God described by Saint Bonaventure (1221-74) as a ‘circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.’” Our world as the Earth Body encompasses both Spiritus Mundi (spirit of the world as W. B. Yeats refers to in the poem The Second Coming) and matter, and bears both the whole and interrelated ecosystems of life upon – and within – it. Usually the depths of this World Soul are not consciously accessible, at least not to someone who has devoted their life almost exclusively to external matters of existence. Such a person has not – as yet – achieved a whole, integrated epistemology. But to those who have the capacity to perceive, our earth and kosmos are in a reciprocal relationship and form an exchange circuit of life … though it’s only the consciousness of an individual on the path of individuation (or fully individuated like our Dancer) who may reach – and touch into – the mutual circuitry of this earth-kosmos exchange. Our Dancer ​serves life and the Entire World through her dance and she is the vehicle for the forces of the kosmos and earth to ‘speak’ to – and through – the other. To various degrees, and according to the occasion, each of us can be in service to this macro integrational force too. This occurs when we embody selfless service and joyfully commit to our own self-integration whilst also being aware of the kosmos and its movements. As Joseph Campbell wrote in Myths to Live By, “You don’t ask what a dance means. You enjoy it. You don’t ask what the world means. You enjoy it. You don’t ask what you mean. You enjoy it” (p.102-103). And so, in closing both this MythBlast and the year, I trust that you’ve enjoyed the 2023 series dear readers and I very much look forward to sharing more worldly enjoyment with you in 2024! Featured Video Featured Work

I love to hear stories about when people first encountered mythology, or how they first felt themselves drawn to myth. There’s often a sense of breathless amazement and detailed recollections that accompany life’s seismic moments. For many of us, our mythic origin stories speak to when we first found the work of Joseph Campbell. My first encounter with Campbell’s ideas was in the late 1980s in a college English class called “Introduction to Folklore.” I was attending a large, conservative, religious university with strict oversight of course syllabi to make sure we students weren’t exposed to anything that might challenge our belief in the literal truth of scripture. Instructors had a Sunday-best dress code—suits and ties for men, skirts or dresses for women—and we all had to sign an honor code promising not only that we would behave ourselves in all the required ways, but that we would inform on any students we saw breaking the rules. I’ll never forget that Orwellian sense of living beneath a theocratic tyranny. But the Folklore class met in a small room tucked away at the end of a basement hallway in a quiet evening time slot, and the class had only fifteen or twenty students. It felt like I was able to inhabit a forgotten pocket of freedom away from the glare of religious assessment and evaluation. In an act of rebellion, which my younger self found thrilling, the professor wore blue jeans and flannel shirts. One day, in another gesture of defiance, he brought a copy of The Hero with a Thousand Faces to class and read it out loud to us. I don’t remember the passage he read, but I remember the electricity in the air. I felt like I was floating on it. The second time I encountered Campbell’s work was in another English class, but this one was at a scruffy public community college, where I enrolled after leaving the religious university. The class topic was nature writing, and one day the teacher interrupted our normal activities to march us into the media room to watch Episode 1 of The Power of Myth, “The Hero’s Adventure.” Now I could see Campbell, hear his voice out loud. “My general formula for my students,” he said to Bill Moyers from the TV screen, “is follow your bliss! I mean, find where it is and don’t be afraid to follow it.” These words were nourishing to me as I was struggling to put my life back together after stepping away from religion. Hero, of course, phrases the idea more obliquely: “the hero-heart must be at hand” (4). Where Hero’s literary prose is highly crafted, The Power of Myth is conversational, but both works illustrate Campbell’s signature commitment to the underlying unity of mythic traditions and the diversity of expressions through which the mythic spirit speaks. In different voices, both works reveal Campbell’s insights about heroes, adventure, and bliss. Hero discusses bliss more objectively in the context of recurring mythic patterns, and The Power of Myth makes it practical: follow your bliss already! The implication, I think, is that following bliss has much to do with living the hero’s adventure. It’s about saying yes to its invitations, which means heeding what calls to you regardless of what anyone else says, because the alternative would shrink your soul and leave you filled with regret. Following bliss means facing fear head on and daring to see through it, past it, to the possibilities that await on the other side. It means rebellion and defiance. It means summoning your hero-heart’s reserves of courage. Heroism and bliss-following are lived soul experiences, psychological states marked by a willingness to risk danger on behalf of someone or something you believe in—very much like my professor who defied university rules to read Campbell to us. He put himself in real jeopardy. At that same school, I saw a group of young, muscular, angry zealots confront a beleaguered biology professor because he had dared to teach evolution. If anyone in my English class had reported the professor, he could easily have faced personal, professional, and religious retribution. But he had the courage to defy a system that was trying to control and contain him and us. By bringing Hero to that basement classroom, he brought heroism as well, literally in word and deed. In reading to us about heroes, he showed us what it meant to be one. Campbell died before I took either of those English classes, so in a sense he was speaking to us from beyond the veil, as he still does today through works like Hero and The Power of Myth. When my professor read to us from Hero the book had already been inspiring readers for almost forty years. This year marks the 75th anniversary of its publication, and it’s still going strong, with its unique combination of insight, awe, and wisdom. Neither of my teachers made Campbell a homework assignment. Neither put him on the syllabus or in any kind of test. They just saw to it that he joined us in the classroom. In so doing, they each embraced the radical, subversive heroism of educating our hearts, souls, and imaginations as well as our minds. I am forever grateful to both of them. This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 1, and The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Latest Podcast In this episode of Pathways entitled, "Literary Wizardry - A Discussion with Joseph Campbell" recorded on December 15th 1970, Joseph Campbell holds a discussion session with students after his address to the student body of Sarah Lawrence College on the work of Thomas Mann. Host Bradley Olson gives an introduction and commentary after the lecture. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be. " - Joseph Campbell -The Hero with a Thousand Faces (p1) Slaying the Dragon (see more videos)

Parenting teenagers is not for the faint of heart. As a mother of two, I try to keep my finger on the pulse of their current experience. Teen angst evolves with the challenges of each generation, and storytelling has a way of providing a window of continuity and comfort into these worlds. For that reason, I was drawn to Netflix’s recommendation of Ginny & Georgia, a television show focusing on the relationship of a mother and her teenage daughter. Ten episodes later, with tears in my eyes, I was left wondering why this television show was engrossing me this way. In the show, Georgia flees a childhood of abuse and becomes a mother at age 15. We meet her character as she is finally achieving her vision of the ideal life. Ginny, Georgia’s daughter, is turning 15, the same age Georgia was when she gave birth. As her daughter comes into her own, we witness them struggling to understand one another. Georgia hopes to give her daughter a better life than her own. But Ginny has a completely different experience, drowning in the tumultuous life her mother has created, while attempting to negotiate her teenage years amid the cruelty of American culture. And we, as viewers, are caught up in this tension between mother and daughter. With no maternal role models, Georgia struggles to survive in a system that is not designed to protect her or her children, so she fiercely protects her children at all costs. Her daughter, Ginny tries to understand, but her mother’s fierce love comes with a lot of emotional baggage. The way this show depicts women navigating the dangers of society brings to mind some of the challenges Joseph Campbell acknowledges in Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine. Campbell recognized that many of the “difficulties that women face today follow from the fact that … there are no female mythological models” (xiii). Myths provide frameworks to help us process the human experience. In their absence, we float adrift without an anchor grounding our everyday lives. However, this was not always the case. Throughout the text, Campbell highlights how myths are adapted to reflect current social circumstances, and he cites multiple examples of the abstraction and degradation of female mythic figures. For example, Campbell explains how Athena is a Greek version of an older Mycenaean and Minoan protective snake goddess (136-141). In order to integrate this earlier goddess into the Greek pantheon, Athena is depicted as the daughter of Zeus, a more recent male deity. Artemis, too, is a Greek version of an earlier Minoan goddess or perhaps even Paleolithic (111-113). In Greek myth, she is depicted as Apollo’s twin, who was originally a male deity of the Indo-European Hittites. Artemis is connected to much older mythologies, and the uniting of these two deities as siblings conjoins two different cultures with different value systems: “the god of human culture to balance the nature goddess” (120). And arguably, at least in modern popular culture, Apollo has eclipsed Artemis all together. Myths are fluid, changing to fit the needs of the society. And while transforming ancient goddesses into sisters and daughters helps integrate disparate cultures, it also disempowers those particular goddess figures, at times even erasing them completely. For instance, in the Akaddian myth of Tiamat, who in later biblical traditions is abstracted as the abyss or primordial waters from which creation emerges, “The Goddess is called the Abomination, and she and her divinities are called demons and they are not given the credit of being divine” (87). Mythologies reflect the cultural systems in which we live, and history has not always been kind to women. The absence of female mythological models forces us to forge our own paths. Echoes of ancient powers still reverberate in these abstractions if we know where to look, and Campbell assures us that the task is well within our grasp: “And is it likely, do you think, after all her years and millennia of changing forms and conditions, that she is now unable to let her daughters know who they are?” (xxvi). But what does “telling us who we are” look like when the myths passed down to us have been distilled, distorted, or erased? How do we write new stories when we have yet to dispel the internalization of the stories we’ve been told for millenia? Degradations are embedded in our own stories. Like these goddess figures, we see ourselves as the daughters and sisters of the ones to whom we gave birth. Our myths carry emotional baggage, too. Cultural memory carries stories and it carries trauma as well. Our mothers showed us the protection mechanisms they inherited from their mothers. They told us the fairy tales that whispered warnings. We learned how to build armor to maneuver through spaces that were not meant for us. But ironically, the armor entraps as much as it shields, and these protections are written underneath our skin, like spells binding us from within. I see that struggle in Ginny & Georgia. I see a mother who can’t understand why her daughter struggles to seize the opportunities before her and I see a daughter fraught with internal demons. Desperately attempting to find some way to conceptualize and express the pain she feels internally, Ginny harms herself externally. When Georgia, the mother, realizes this, she begs her daughter “give me your pain, let me carry it.” A wish so many mothers have had for their children. And yet, Georgia can’t carry Ginny’s burden, nor can she fully prepare her for the struggles she will inevitably face. Each generation has to make their own way. We may share a common experience, but our journeys are uniquely our own. As with Georgia’s fierce mother-love, the goddess mythologies women have inherited are fraught with the thorny traumas of the societies that passed them down to us. Much work has been done to fill the gaps left by the goddesses lost to time, but as the daughters before us, we join a long lineage tasked with separating the wheat from the chaff and disentangling the internal knots that bind our ability to step into our own power. To do this, we look for echoes of female power in the eyes of our mothers, the earthly songs of our grandmothers, and the fearlessness of our daughters. And perhaps, we hear whispers in the stories that bring us to tears because, for a moment, we feel seen, we feel a sense of belonging in a world that has not always embraced us. This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 3, and Goddesses. Latest Podcast In episode 6 (orignally released in January 2023), Tyler Lapkin of the Joseph Campbell Foundation and Lonny Jarrett discuss Lonny's career as an acupuncturist, herbalist and teacher. Lonny is recognized worldwide as a leading practitioner, author, and scholar of East Asian medicine. This conversation takes an in-depth look at the Inner Tradition of Chinese Medicine, the role of a practitioner, and what it means to see medicine and mythology from an Integral perspective. John Bucher introduces the guests and follows up with commentary about their conversation. Learn more about Lonny at https://lonnyjarrett.com/ Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Pandora is another inflection of the idea of the woman who brings bounty into the world. The later, smart aleck, masculine-inflected story of Pandora—the notion that every woman brings with her a box of troubles—is simply another way of saying that all life is sorrowful. Of course, trouble comes with life; as soon as you have movement in time, you have sorrows and disasters. Where there is bounty, there is suffering." -Joseph Campbell Goddesses, 206 The Center Of The World (see more videos)

BILL MOYERS TO JOSEPH CAMPBELL: “Why myths? Why should we care about myths? What do they have to do with my life?” CAMPBELL TO MOYERS: “My first response would be, ‘Go on, live your life, it’s a good life. You don’t need mythology.’ I don’t believe in being interested in a subject just because it’s said to be important. I believe in being caught by it somehow or other. But you may find that, with a proper introduction, mythology will catch you. And so, what can it do for you if it does catch you?” When I heard Joseph Campbell say these words in Part II of PBS’ The Power of Myth, I knew exactly what he was talking about, and I’m guessing that many of our readers do, too. Everyone I have met on the myth journey has come to it by a different path,  and has been “caught” by it in a different way. Some had heard the siren call of Skywalker Ranch where Campbell attained Delphic status as a master interpreter of the world’s one great story, the Hero’s Adventure. For them, Campbell studies had a single purpose: to unlock the secret of big budget action adventure moving pictures. For anyone with a screenplay in their Prius the answer to “why myth” is self-evident. Others, just as devoted to Campbell, took the “hero’s journey” as the key to individuation; these were mysteries of the spirit, not of the story conference. Or mythology may “catch you” as a lover of classic literature; it may alert you to a new level of spirituality missing in your relationship; bring you to an understanding of what is transient and what is eternal; or leave you on a street corner without any socks, a card-carrying mystic. Or, as in my case, myth may “catch you” in its most kinetic form, myth as ritual. It was ritual that “caught me.” Like Campbell, I came to myth through the theological complexity of Roman Catholicism. He explains the process better than I can: “I was brought up as a Roman Catholic. Now, one of the great advantages of being brought up a Roman Catholic is that you’re taught to take myth seriously and to let it operate on your life and to live in terms of these mythic motifs. I was brought up in terms of the seasonal relationships to the cycle of Christ’s coming into the world, teaching in the world, dying, resurrecting, and returning to heaven. The ceremonies all through the year keep you in mind of the eternal core of all that changes in time (The Power of Myth, 12). Which partially explains my most outrageous breach of social norms back in Broomall, Pennsylvania, circa 1962. On a day when John Glenn was circling the planet 160 miles overhead, I, too, was making a little orbit in the cul de sac named, synchronistically enough, Glen Circle, circumambulating the neighborhood in a religious procession of my own devising. Why? There is no why. I was “caught,” and here’s how it happened. My parents had transferred me to Catholic school. I never saw it coming. One day, I was a reasonably popular kid in a public kindergarten swapping my slinky for a Davy Crocket cap and the next thing I knew it was all holy water and rosaries. I still managed to meet with my old friends, usually after school in the late afternoons before the lightning bugs came out, before moms called us home. That’s when we compared notes and I learned that my Protestant pals were being subjected to a relentless form of civic paganism in a place without crucifixes on the wall in classrooms where teachers made no reference to God or gods, saints or apostles. No sin. No heaven. No prayers.  It sounded both awful and attractive at the same time. But after a few years, I learned to appreciate the cultural richness in my tradition and I wanted to share it the way I had always shared with my friends, only this time it would not be a Mickey Mantle baseball card still smelling of the bubble gum it originally came with. This time, I would be sharing a ritual practice apparently unknown to these deprived Protestants.  I would demonstrate the principles of putting on a procession. The elements of a good Catholic procession are few. Most important is finding two kids bored enough to want be candleholders. There should be two, for symmetry and to help focus the attention on Mary who would be represented by a statue borrowed from the mantle of our fireplace. I would carry Mary. Catholics sing when processing. Not well, mind you. But apparently that’s not the point.  We sing songs relevant to the ritual act itself, the readings of the day, or in response to special parish events. I could only think of one song that the girls (one my sister, the other her friend Ellen) and I might know in common: “She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes…” Except for my choice of hymnody, there was nothing remarkable about our little trinity solemnly marching along the sidewalks of Broomall but rituals are not supposed to be remarkable. As Campbell points out, “Rituals themselves are actually very boring. They go on and on, beyond your secular tolerance” (The Power of Myth, 29). In a bad way, that’s what happened. Ellen’s Dad had apparently been taken “beyond secular tolerance,” when he saw his only daughter participating in objectionable papist rites. He rushed from his little brick house and grabbed Ellen rudely by the arm. Her candle self-extinguished on the median strip where it fell. My sister just stared in wonder. I blew out her candle. “You are never to play with those children again!” I heard the outraged father shout. I was as mystified as my sister, and I can thank my mother and Joseph Campbell for explaining it all to me. MOM: You see, Johnny… Some folks don’t believe it proper to pay respects to statues. JOSEPH CAMPBELL (sixty years afterward and not in person) “… in India it is believed that, in response to the consecrating formulae, deities will descend graciously to infuse their divine substance into the temple images” (The Masks of God, Vol. 1:Primitive  Mythology, 44). Exactly! Somewhere in my teeming nine-year-old brain, I expected the “real” Mary to somehow inhabit the statue since I had gone to so much trouble to do it homage. That is a true ritualist in the making. There was another cosmological issue at play that February of 1962. Mary herself was the issue. And, again, Mom and Joe explained it to me. Mom claimed that some people don’t feel comfortable paying too much attention to Mary. In fact, Catholics are sometimes accused of worshiping the Virgin as if she were some kind of goddess. Joseph Campbell’s far more disturbing view suggests that Mary is indeed a pagan derivative, an iteration of the original goddess, the Goddess of Many Names. She is Annapurna, from the Indian subcontinent; the Egyptian Isis; the Babylonian Ishtar, and the Sumerian Inanna, all “archaic prefigurements” of the BVM, the Blessed Virgin Mary. Why myth? Because it raises me high above the doctrinal fray and elevates me to a perspective where the transcultural oneness of humankind is as obvious as if I were looking down from a Mercury spacecraft 160 miles above Broomhall, Pennsylvania in 1962. This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 2, and Myth and Meaning. Latest Podcast In this bonus episode of Pathways, Joseph Campbell answers questions from his lecture on the symbolism of Christianity, Buddhism, European Paganism, and the Arthurian Romances. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Going back at least nine thousand years to the early agriculture of the Near East and Old Europe, we have a tradition of the power of the Goddess and of her child who dies and is resurrected - namely it is we who come from her, go back to her, and rest well in her. This tradition was carried through the cults of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and down into the Classical world, before finally delivering the message into Christian teaching." - Joseph Campbell - Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, 8 Four Functions of Mythology (see more videos)

Raised with stories of the gallant of Sri Ram who battled Ravana or Sri Krishna, who shielded his people from the incessant rain (caused by the anger of Lord Indra) by lifting the humongous Govardhan Parvat (mountain) in protection, I have been fascinated with the concept of the hero for most of my life. With Campbell’s much celebrated work on the hero as the base, I took to the Vedas, my sacred homeground, to celebrate the very idea of how a hero is personified. The Sanskrit term Veera is how the archetypal hero is referred to, the one who is brave and shines like the sun and in whose radiance we thrive. Veera is the one with the knowledge of being, the adventurer, the boon seeker, who fights and toils for the people. Lord Indra, in the Vedas is mentioned as an exemplar hero, the Veera who slayed the demon Vritra to release the confined waters that he had captured. Vritra tasted dust when Lord Indra struck him with his thunderbolt, Vajra (Rig veda 1.32 n.d.). This imagery echoed to me of the supreme protectresses, the goddesses who have often engaged in fierce battles with demons possessing powerful weapons as well as might, and then have taken charge when the gods couldn’t. Deconstructing the Hero through Janani Mien and Might This was the inception of my voyage to rethink the idea of the hero through the eyes of the Janani, the divine mother-goddess that manifests it all, including the hero. I thought of the divine yoni, the abode of all existences, and Tripura Sundari-Goddess Lalita, was the vehicle of my calling to know the larger Self through her heroic splendor. The call to dive deep and discern the qualities of what makes of a hero and understand the ultimate boon of the hero, Maa Lalita. It is an endeavor to know the feminine as a divine blessing. With a sugarcane, arrows, book, flowers, chalice, conch, noose, a goad in her hands and exuding the divine essence of her three children, the Trimurti (Lord Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva), as mediums channeling the universe, she perfectly models the archetypal heroic mien, qualities and aura. Her iconography is symbolic of control, wisdom, beauty, guidance and preparedness that a hero needs, and does, display. Om Sri Matre Namah “... So when you are meditating on a deity, you are meditating on powers of your own spirit and psyche, and on powers that are also out there” (Campbell. Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, 14). Beholding the magnanimous supreme, Goddess Lalita, the Great Mother, who juggles the dance of creation-destruction-sustenance, the full circle of life, I delve into all her facets in all her glory as the life narrative for mankind. The Divine Womb: The Heroic Matrix- where it all begins… Campbell, speaking with Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth, gave yet another interesting take on the act of giving birth as heroic. On how mothers are heroes first, as they are the gateway for their child to become the chosen one. From her unfolds the be all and end of all there is. “The psyche is part of the inmost mystery of life, and it has its own peculiar structure and form like every other organism. Whether this psychic structure and its elements, the archetypes, ever "originated" at all is a metaphysical question and therefore unanswerable. The structure is something given a priori, the precondition that is found to be present in every case. And this is the mother, the matrix, the form into which all experience is poured” (Jung, CW9i, §187). As the life for the life to begin, breathing the cosmos alive, Sri Lalita knows how it all is, how it will be, and how it’s going to be, just like Gaia (Lovelock et. al, Atmospheric Homeostasis by and for the Biosphere: The Gaia Hypothesis). The “realm of the Mothers” has not a few connections with the womb, which frequently symbolizes the creative aspect of the unconscious (Jung, CW5, §182). It makes me think of how if mothers are the first heroes then heroes also emulate her, acting motherly. They take on an unprecedented path as seekers of greater knowledge which helps all as questers with a primal wise experience of life. The Mother-Matrix encapsulates the way of life, the know-hows of survival and maps out the larger good through the chosen one. Raksha-Kari Maayi (the protector)- The Heroic Steer on the adventure Lalita “Sahasranama” (meaning thousand names of the goddess in Sanskrit) sings praises of Goddess Lalita as she describes the charms needed by the hero as the adventure awaits. These charms are gifts of guidance by the guardian to the hero without which, the tasks of the adventure are hard to navigate. As heroic herself, the Great Mother with valor, has already trod the path the hero is to unveil. His journey is one of exploring the powers given by her as aids for the Self-soul and archetypal life escapade ahead. Campbell noted that in the spirit of the venture “against the dragon” the supernatural aid appears as the king maker. The aid not only guides the hero, but is a realization of the heroic Self that equips him to overcome the dragons and demons (Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces, 63-66). Sarva Shakthi Mayi- all strength: The Quintessence force in the transition to the yonderland To blaze forward, to leave the familiar, to experience the new, what does the hero need?. Campbell answers that it is the purposive heroic strides taken to break free from the monotony of life and rethink our existence. What is this that challenges us and drags us into such strange and novel states? It is our inner mother that takes us to the higher realm, without which the adventure of life would never begin? Goddess Lalita evinces the larger life force, the capacity for heroism. She as the Samharini (the destroyer), the Pancha Krithya Parayana (the five elements of creation, being and destruction), the Vignanasin (obstacle remover), and Twan (manifesting you and me) is the transformative core-creatrix that precincts and gives life to the voyage of the unknown to be known. Thamopaha: Goddess clearing the path of the unknown It's never easy to bridge over to the unknown, the dark, the dangerous or the completely chaotic. Campbell clarifies that the uncharted territory has its own blunders that can be and will be comprehended by the hero despite all his stumbles. Why the hero first? Why does he need to go through this? It’s because he is the one who can achieve the boon of mastering life in its fullness through his own life-giving, renewing energy, which he as an initiate accesses over and over to overcome the falls and stumbles. He is also the archetypal exemplar of knowing how, when, and why to harness the inner strength, to bring light to the darkness. Darkness is not for the hero, who is the pursuer of sunshine. Goddess Lalita is the forerunner of what the hero tries to achieve, to remove the dark clouds and clear the skies of life. She is the primordial inner strength of the wellspring of growth and fertility as boons and so is called Varadha, the boon-giver (The Hero with a thousand faces , 46-52). The Prodigal Return in the Reign of the Hero, Lalita Amba Bhanda! Bhanda! (well done) exclaimed Lord Brahma as a witness to the three boons received by the Asura (demon) from Lord Shiva. Bhandasura caused a Kama-Pralaya (dissolution) and Lord Shambhu-Shiva knew that his defeat awaited him at the hands of goddess Lalita-parmeshvari as the resurgent creation. This is the classic primal resonance of the cyclical pattern of the hero’s adventure. She is the prodigal return, an elixir for the chosen one to follow her footsteps. What we experience here is the magic of the maternal, the hero of the hero who has been through it all, symbolizing our own transcendent self engagement, our own inner connectedness. In accordance with the Sanskrit text, the harmony of the masculine only resides in the feminine as is conveyed in its contingent essence. Only when Sakti fuses with Shiva can he earn the privilege to be a Lord! (Sastrī & Ayyaṅgār, Saundarya-Laharī, 8-9). This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 1, and The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Latest Podcast This bonus episode of Pathways is the audio from a slideshow presentation that followed the lecture that he gave at Skowhegan on July 27th 1987. The lecture was our podcast Episode 27: Artists, Poets, & Writers. Even though we cannot see the slides that professor Campbell is showing, his rich description is able to guide us through the presentation. This was one of the last public presentations that Campbell gave before his death in October of the same year. Listen Here This Week's Highlights “The hero’s journey always begins with the call. One way or another, a guide must come to say, 'Look, you’re in Sleepy Land. Wake. Come on a trip. There is a whole aspect of your consciousness, your being, that’s not been touched. So you’re at home here? Well, there’s not enough of you there.' And so it starts.” - Joseph Campbell - A Joseph Campbell Companion, p.77 Myth As the Mirror for the Ego (see more videos)

As I explore the mysteries of mythology through Sree Lalitopakhyanam, a dedicated Hindu scripture, part of Brahmanda Purana that captures the divine episodes of Lalita devi, goddess, I feel I can access the myriad expressions of the human Self. These are  unique yet universal. I have charted it as an attempt here to tune into the mythic-mystic fantasies of this scripture that speak to me of my inner cosmology and immerse me in decoding its living quality. It became a transcendental, and cathartic, meaning making process for me—giving me the eyes to see the evergreen awe-inspiring knowledge. Let’s walk through it together. Here, I outline the significant episodes before the birth of the creation mother, Lalita devi narrated by Lord Hayagriva (an incarnation of Lord Vishnu) to the sage Agastya, consequential to understand devi’s raison d'être, her purpose for being. These episodes from Sree Lalitopakhyanam evoke a curiosity for the numinous, psychological maturation and milestones of knowing the self for me that I share here… An ostentatious Lord Indra was once cursed by Durvasa rishi, a sage who enjoyed the blessings of the goddesses of victory and wealth, and was so deluded by his inflated pride that he refused the garland sent by Lord Rudra. Instead of wearing it, he gave it to his celestial elephant, Airavatha. Seeing this, Brihaspati deva, god then took over the baton to teach Lord Indra how not to behave unrighteously, performing adharma. This was the time when the rule of the danavas, the demons, rose and so the devas had to take the reins back into their own hands to create a just world. Lord Vishnu set up the churn to milk the ocean and gain the elixir of immortality, amrit, for the devas to reinstate their prominence. He even transformed himself as an enchantress Mohini to entrap the asuras, demons who were after the immortality elixir (Rao, Sree Lalitopakhyanam, 6-18). A curse, a boon of immortality, and a battle between the asuras and devas. Reading this in 2024 may seem like a metaverse experience in contemporary language. Such  confusion and contemplation was also dealt with by Joseph Campbell, who tried to understand whether the modern world had become bereft of the numinous (Myths Dreams and Religion, pp.119-133). Like Campbell, I want to focus on rekindling mythic consciousness and opening the abysmal psychological symbolism of the curse, boon, and battle. Self development is attributed to balanced actions, so getting rid of the shackles of a negative self-construct (just like Indra’s pride), as well as the hope-like aspiration for amrit, is transformative for a waking Self. This can be achieved by favoring and balancing the inner alchemical symbols in the battle between the demons and the divine, the asuras and the devas. Sree Lalitopakhyanam then speaks of the portentous birth of Bhandasura after the episode of churning the ocean for amrit. Seeing her husband (Lord Shiva) humiliated at her father’s (Lord Daksha) organized yagna sacrifice, Sati couldn’t take it and sacrificed herself in chid-agni, sacred fire. When Shiva heard of this he marched to the yagna, and destroyed it for taking away his beloved. This was the beginning of Sati devi’s transformation to goddess Parvati. Thereafter an asura was born and could only be decimated by a son of Lord Shiva. As Shiva was in samadhi at that time, the highest meditative state, his third eye got activated and he burned the demon down to ashes. It was only after Shiva-Parvati’s wedding that Chitra Karma-Gananadha (a form or epithet of Lord Shiva) shaped the ashes of the burned demon into a human form and presented it to Lord Shiva. Seeing the renewed human form, he embraced him, taught him the Sata-Rudriya Mantra, a divine chant and conferred upon him his blessings and boons of his desire. He was also given the rule of all the worlds and was gifted the supreme armaments to assist in his battles. This form born of ashes thus became Bhandasura. When Lord Brahma saw this creation, he said well done, which in Sanskrit means Bhanda. This is how he got the name, Bhandasura. Gifted by the mightiest of the mighty, Bhandasura so became unconquerable. This was threatening to the devas and they attempted to stop him by requesting Lord Vishnu to lure him with the erotic charm as Mohini, but that didn't last long, and Bhandasura undertook his mission to weaken the protective shield of the devas in his attempt to conquer the devas and devaloka, dwelling of the gods. But as these shields were created by Lalita devi and were impervious, it reassured devas of their belief in their divine rescuer. Bhandasura’s birth was the beginning of kama-pralaya, the ultimate dissolution which could only be countered by the birth of the devi. The devi was so powerful that she was the protector of the devas and the prana, life of the worlds, and what follows is her birth myth. All devas, in order to pray for their protection, performed a yagna wherein they offered their flesh and limbs into the sacred fire from which emerged the goddess. Different kinds of births, such as the mind, sweat, seed, egg, and womb born were rendered to this homa kunda, a sacred fire pit made to perform the yagna. Lord Shiva Shambhu, too, prayed to strengthen devi Lalita’s powers during her creation so she could battle and defeat Bhandasura. In the sacred yagna, Lord Shiva poured all oceans as offerings like the sacred ghee, clarified butter, to amplify her prowess against the demon and his army. Her birth marked the beginning of the restoration of the divine and along with Kamesvara deva, her partner, she was enthroned to rule Sri Nagara, a city created by the goddess after the ultimate battle. All bodies renounced in the maha-yagna, the divine sacrifice for the goddess, were resurrected after this momentous win and the restoration of the worlds took place thereon. From Lalita devi’s physical being rose the sun, moon, fire, sky, winds, directions, stars, flowers, the past, present and the future; in short, life itself. And so she triumphed, crumbling Bhandasura’s illusional city into dust, reinstating and populating the worlds (Rao, Sree Lalitopakhyanam). Campbell posits that myths are divine stories that offer guidance, realizations, and new perspectives, even a slice of life in the here and now (Myth and Meaning, Conversations on Mythology and life, p. xv). Understanding Bhandasura and goddess Lalita’s mythic origins in this context, I want to bring to light its present psychological manifestations. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” born of ashes and nestled by Lord Shiva, Bhanda’s birth is a representation of the impermanence of life, which helps us dwell on our inward relationship to ourselves (Ronnberg & Martin, Book of Symbols, 728). Bhanda’s birth from ashes, and then being reduced to ashes yet again by the goddess, is a lesson on how impermanence teaches us to give way to adaptive, flexible strategies for personal growth. As Campbell puts it, myth is as nurturing as a bird’s nest and functions as a base for the psyche to actualize, and carve out our own unique journey (Myth and Meaning, Conversations on Mythology and Life, 4-7). The visual of the devi shielding the gods from the demon with barriers, making them stronger each time they were demon attacked, serves as a symbol of strength for us. It helps us deal with the contradictory inner turmoil and to construct a harmony as sustainable as the barriers. From time immemorial agni, fire blazes as a source of consciousness and the all-consuming principle of life. Lalita devi’s birth from the fire of consciousness glows on us, illuminating our light, power, purity and transformation. Fed with the divine, it represents the birth of the numinous in us. This mythic genesis communicates the primary feminine essence of life. This is the mythic recipe for an  energy system that permeates our present thought, action, and feeling. It is the source of our functioning, the source of our life force. (Ronnberg & Martin, Book of Symbols, 82-84) As a woman, I wonder about and reimagine my being through the eyes of goddess Lalita. Juggling many roles in order to flourish and endure, I experience the numinous divine in all the stages of womanhood today, balancing the masculine and feminine voices within as a dedicated effort toward a wholesome, yet complex way.  So when Kamesvara deva is needed by the goddess’s side for her to be enthroned and begin a new world, or Lord Shiva performs yagna to empower the goddess for the battle ahead, it is a metaphor for a path that establishes my inner commitment to psychologically renew myself in preparation for new experiences, fostering creativity and fertility. The notion of renewed worlds understood as the bodily offspring of the Goddess can also be seen as a classic example of the iconography of the symbolic processes of mythology. Its creations are our inherited symbols helping us to experience societies, cultures, people, circumstances more deeply and dream the dream of life onwards. Understood in this way, the mythic realm, the sacred, gods and angels are our Sri Nagari, our divine dwelling grounds that gives us wings to experience the yonder. Let God, God in Us (Campbell, Myths Dreams and Religion, 137). This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 2, and Myth and Meaning. Latest Podcast In this episode, we are joined by Anthony Byrne, an accomplished Irish writer, director, and producer renowned for his work on large-scale international dramas like Peaky Blinders, Lioness, and In Darkness. He has also directed music videos for Hozier, Liam Gallagher, The Smile. And as he says, more importantly, he is a new Dad. In this engaging conversation with JCF's John Bucher, Anthony shares insights into his life and career, revealing the influence of Joseph Campbell on his creative journey. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "From a psychological standpoint – trying to recognize where humanity is, in all of this – one sees everywhere the same symbols, and this becomes then the problem of first concern. And what transforms the consciousness is not the language, but the image; it's the impact of the image that is the initiating experience. If you get the point of mythology and see that what's being talked about over here is what's being talked about over there too, you don't have to quarrel about the vocabularies." -Joseph Campbell Myth and Meaning, 6 Adventure into Depths - Q&A (see more videos)

“The call often comes at an important moment. Old life values have often been outgrown and a certain sterility has set in. Parsifal’s quest for the Holy Grail was set in motion by the Fisher King’s realm having become a wasteland. Whatever its form, the call awakens the hero to his or her special destiny” (C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology, Inc.) As I write this, the sun is but a ghost of itself above high clouds on this chilly November day. The last of the leaves will soon let go to dance their way to the ground where squirrels and mice rustle through this season’s fall. Soon enough, a blanket of snow will cover it all in Winter silence. The round of seasons has ever been a metaphor for the cycle of life from birth to death to rebirth. Winter is the wasteland, intent on stealing your warmth until you become one with its stillness. Until the advent of central heating and stocked supermarkets the threat was very real, and for the many less fortunate it still is. The Call to Adventure dares us to cross the threshold into the Winter Dark to face what has been outside the world of experience we have known, a world which may have become stale and sterile, and struggle our way to a Spring renewal. Joseph Campbell tells us the Call comes in three ways: voluntarily (I think I’ll quit my day job and become a writer!), involuntarily (“I have bad news,” the doctor said.) and by seduction (Their eyes met from across the room. Her life would never be the same.). Often, the one called will refuse to accept the invitation. As Bilbo said, adventures are “nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner” (J.R.R. Tolkien. The Hobbit, 1966)! The known world is safe in its predictability, even if it may not be a cozy, comfy chair in front of the fire. However, in the long run, the call cannot be avoided. As Seneca said, “the fates lead  those who will, those who won't they drag” (from Moral letters to Lucilius, 107), and the longer the refusal the more significant the consequences. Take the otherwise successful high school senior, for example, who stops doing work, usually sometime after the holidays. “I’m so sick of this place!” they complain while making sure they become seniors again the following year. Senioritis they call it, and it’s understandable: high school graduation is a terrifying threshold for young adults to cross, young adults who have been surrounded by the same familiar faces and places for most of their lives. The Refusal of the Call is the result of a powerful impulse to remain in the comfort of the known world. It can also be deadly. The following anecdote came to me while considering where to focus this essay and I rejected it at first as too personal. But then, while walking the dog, which is when I do some of my best thinking, I realized that it was exactly what I should write about because it’s so personal and, importantly, far from unique. One 2004 day in the staff men’s room outside the sixth grade wing of the Upstate New York middle school where I worked, I was shocked to see a blood clot in my urine. In the blink of an eye, I went from “That happened,” to “No. It didn’t.” It was a surprisingly seductive impulse.  I shoved the moment into a small corner of my mind and tried to squeeze it into a smaller and ever smaller ball that could be ignored. It remained, though, like a pebble in my shoe for the rest of the day. I wrestled with the temptation to submit to this denial which, looking back, was the threshold guardian, Fear. We all know stories of those who succumbed to the Refusal of the Call until it was too late, and I realize how easy it could have been to do so myself. But I made the phone call, which may well have been the act that allows me to be sitting here on this chilly November afternoon tapping away on my keyboard. At one point that day I realized where I was. Joseph Campbell had already told me. What’s wonderful about the Hero’s Journey as outlined by Campbell is that it’s not just a common story structure to be found in Star Wars, Watership Down, The Hobbit, The Odyssey and so forth. It’s a common story structure because it is an archetypal expression of the human condition. Human beings create meaning through story and the most important story is the story of our own lives. Everyone reading these words is at one step or another of this adventure, and probably at multiple steps on multiple adventures, because life is often a messy amalgam of nested hero journeys. The schemata make sense of them, and when life is spinning you around and everything is in flux, knowing the pattern of the hero’s adventure places you in the calm eye of the storm. You know you must walk into the storm wall; you must cross that threshold, but you also know the path forward—your path forward—will appear. There is great comfort in this. You are not alone. And while there is never a guarantee of a desired outcome, whatever the outcome is, if you walk the path with integrity and courage, you can embrace it as someone who is now more than you were before the journey began. That alone is a Spring renewal, a rebirth. That alone is a boon to be shared. “We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. And where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world” ( Joseph Campbell. The Hero With A Thousand Faces, 18). This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 1, and The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Latest Podcast In this episode Roshi Joan Halifax sits down with Bradley Olson of the Joseph Campbell Foundation. Roshi Joan Halifax speaks to Buddhists and non-followers alike on such universal topics as compassion, suffering, and what it is to be human. Influenced by early experiences as an anthropologist-world traveler, passionate end-of-life pioneer, and her work in social and ecological activism, she eloquently teaches the interwoven nature of engaged Buddhism and contemplative practice. She encourages a wholistic approach to life and training the mind, “that we may transform both personal and social suffering into compassion and wisdom.” Roshi Joan’s personal practice includes creative expression through photography, brush painting, and haiku as explorations in “beingness” and joy. As Founder, Abbot, and Head Teacher of Upaya, her vision for the Zen Center embraces comprehensive Buddhist studies, meditation, service, dharma art, and environmental action as integrated paths cultivating peace and interconnectedness. She knew Joseph Campbell very well. In the conversation, she and Brad discuss her life, her work as a teacher and pioneer of end-of-life care, and her experiences with Joseph Campbell. To learn more about Joan, visit https://www.joanhalifax.org/ Listen Here This Week's Highlights “We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. And where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.” - Joseph Campbell - The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p.18 The Individual Adventure Q&A (see more videos)

I thought I’d focus in this MythBlast on the same quote from Joseph Campbell’s 1969 essay The Symbol without Meaning in The Flight of the Wild Gander  that   I first highlighted in my February 2021 MythBlast titled Metamorphosis: Dreaming the New Songs . I wanted once again to use Campbell’s words, featuring C. G. Jung, as a touchstone to explore the maturing psyche’s journey: As the researches and writings of Dr. Jung have shown us, the deep aim and problem of the maturing psyche today is to recover wholeness (154).   If you’re anything like me, the last few years have often felt like one, big, indistinguishable blur. The essence can be captured in any one of the numerous memes titled: “Leaving 2019, Entering 2022, 2023, 2024” referring to the absolute trainwrecks that both 2020 and 2021 – according to large swathes of the global population – turned out to be. These leaving/entering memes capture how many of us feel: it’s been several l-o-n-g  years now.       My favorite is the one with an image of John Travolta as Danny from the movie Grease , with Olivia Newton-John’s character Sandy by his side, under the heading of 2019. Both appear blissfully happy, looking fresh as daisies with a wide-eyed innocence, and completely unaware of the worldwide chaos that the following years are to bring. Over the past few years, in the final weeks of December we’ve seen the meme pop up on social media, juxtaposing the 2019 image against the title of the upcoming year with an image of Travolta as Vincent from the film, Pulp Fiction,  and this time seated next to Uma Thurman’s character, Mia. Both have an appearance of bone-crushing, beaten-to-a-pulp weariness, looking like they’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards multiple times over. For me, this meme invites reflection on the year I just lived, and to question if it was more Grease  or Pulp Fiction -like in nature? Was I living or merely existing? Thriving or surviving? Full of hope or utterly devoid of it? Did I mostly feel whole in myself, holding a holistic viewpoint of the past year’s events? Or was my mood, countenance, and attitude fragmented like piles of broken glass? At year’s end, was my psyche more shattered, or more unified? Perhaps, with a more meta perspective we could all do with asking ourselves: “Did I/we lean more into my/our wholeness during these last few years? Or did I/we only fracture and divide myself/ourselves further? Or was I/we experiencing both wholeness and multiple fractures simultaneously?” Richard Rohr in Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life  describes how “psychological wholeness and spiritual holiness never exclude the problem from the solution. If it is wholeness, then it is always paradoxical, and holds both the dark and light sides of things.”   In my 2021 MythBlast I wrote that: Only when the impulse for inner renewal, for psychological and spiritual wholeness, becomes far more preferable to the unbalanced and misguided sense of perfection that once satisfied us, do we move towards the more fully rounded and integrated self. By necessity this brings an encounter with the underworld of our psyche, a descent that often involves the grief of separation, an unraveling or a deconstruction of the old patterned self, and both a breaking down and a breaking open.   In the below extract C. G. Jung elegantly describes the necessity of both the breaking down and breaking open that occurs when everyday consciousness intersects with the unknown and unseen workings of the underworld:  But the right way to wholeness is made up, unfortunately, of fateful detours and wrong turnings. It is the longissima via  [longest path], not straight but snakelike, a path that unites the opposites in the manner of the guiding caduceus, a path whose labyrinthine twists and turns are not lacking in terrors ( Collected Works , Vol. 12, 6).  If the labyrinthine twists and turns are necessary on the path to recovering wholeness, then maybe these memes can be seen as faithful portrayals of the psyche’s journey in uniting the opposites rather than providing just mere comic relief. Campbell closes The Flight of the Wild Gander  with these words: However, not all, even today, are of that supine sort that must have their life values given them, cried at them from the pulpits and other mass media of the day. For there is, in fact, in quiet places, a great deal of deep spiritual quest and finding now in progress in this world, outside the sanctified social centers, beyond their purview and control: in small groups, here and there, and more often, more typically (as anyone who looks about may learn), by ones and twos, there entering the forest at those points which they themselves have chosen, where they see it to be most dark, and there is no beaten way or path (186).    So if you’ve started your year in the forest where it’s most dark, with no clear way or path forward, and you’re in desperate need of a metaphorical torch, then picture an image of wholeness that you’d like to use at year’s end to represent your “Finally Leaving 2020-2024, Entering 2025” meme. And then live into and embody this vision of wholeness whilst enjoying all the detours and wrong turnings along the way! This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 2, and  Myth and Meaning . Latest Podcast In this episode, we are joined by Anthony Byrne, an accomplished Irish writer, director, and producer renowned for his work on large-scale international dramas like Peaky Blinders, Lioness, and In Darkness. He has also directed music videos for Hozier, Liam Gallagher, The Smile. And as he says, more importantly, he is a new Dad. In this engaging conversation with JCF's John Bucher, Anthony shares insights into his life and career, revealing the influence of Joseph Campbell on his creative journey. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "The deep aim and problem of the maturing psyche today is to recover wholeness" - Joseph Campbell - The Flight of the Wild Gander , 154 Psyche & Symbol - God is not one, God is not many, God transcends those ideas. (see more videos)