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)

These bits of information from ancient times, which have to do with the themes that have supported man's life, built civilizations, and informed religions over the millennia, have to do with deep inner problems, inner mysteries, inner thresholds of passage, and if you don't know what the guide signs are along the way, you have to work it out yourself. (Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, Episode 2) Our MythBlast theme for February is “The Message of the Myth,” title of the second episode of the interview series that first aired on PBS eight months after Campbell’s passing. Given his influence on popular culture, many today are surprised to learn Joseph Campbell was little known during his lifetime, apart from a relatively small circle of influential artists, scholars, and readers. It’s The Power of Myth that is responsible for posthumously introducing Campbell and his work to the public-at-large. The six hours of this popular series are distilled down from twenty-four hours of discussions filmed in 1985 and 1986 at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch in California, and the Museum of Natural History in New York. This was not Moyers’ first encounter with Joseph Campbell: in the spring of 1981, he invited Campbell to be a guest on two episodes of Bill Moyers Journal. The overwhelming public response to these conversations provided the impetus for a more extended exploration of the aging mythologist and his ideas, before it was too late . . . and the rest is history. MOYERS: So there is in the myth a kind of message from the unconscious to the conscious. CAMPBELL: Right. And it takes only a little training to be able to understand the language of this vocabulary. (Bill Moyers Journal, April 17, 1981) The Power of Myth programs also spawned a companion volume with the same title, edited by Betty Sue Flowers, Ph.D. (Emerita Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, and former director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum). Despite plenty of overlap, The Power of Myth book is not a transcript of the televised interviews; these are distinct, albeit related, works. This is immediately clear from their structure: the PBS series consists of six episodes, in contrast to the book’s eight chapters –– and even those chapters that share the same title as programs in the series include additional and often rearranged content. For example, “The Message of the Myth,” the program that supplies our February MythBlast theme, does not have its own chapter in the companion volume; nevertheless, much of the content from that episode appears in the book’s first two chapters (“Myth and the Modern World” and “The Journey Inward”). Betty Sue Flowers faced a formidable task editing the book. Where Bill Moyers was able to directly engage Campbell, she instead engaged the material generated from that collaboration, though their goals were the same: to create a platform that allowed Campbell to convey “the message of the myth.” While the book’s themes and much of the content overlap with the broadcast interviews, the questions have been moved around and many of the responses on video broken up, rearranged, and spliced together with bits and pieces taken from other episodes, as well as material that did not make it onto the screen. The result is more than just a transcript; it’s a new work, created from the same raw material, that complements rather than duplicates the PBS series. What draws my interest are the editorial choices that lead to such differences between the video and print versions of the Power of Myth interviews (hence my title: “Questioning Campbell”). Books that Joseph Campbell authored during his lifetime are essentially solo efforts; he alone determined how best to convey the message of the myth. Interviews, on the other hand, are collaborative efforts between interviewer, subject, and often, after-the-fact, an editor. This is more than just a passing fancy, given my role as editor of this month’s featured title, Myth and Meaning: Conversations on Mythology and Life, the most recent addition to The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell. Sourced from 34 relatively obscure print and audio interviews over the last twenty years of Campbell’s life, along with 10 lengthy audience question-and-answer sessions following lectures, this is a “big picture” survey, gathering together bits and fragments of Campbell’s thoughts from many different conversations and blending those fragments into one whole. The fifteen years spent compiling and editing this work offered insight into the different kinds of questions (and questioners) Campbell encountered. Of those sources, a handful are live radio interviews that aired one time on one or another local station as much as half a century ago, with no opportunity for editing before broadcast; there is a sparkle and spontaneity to these exchanges that comes through even very fuzzy audio. Others are local newspaper articles written by a reporter assigned to interview Campbell during a book tour, who may or may not have known anything about myth, or what to ask (in such moments, Campbell skillfully pivots away from generic queries, answering instead the unasked questions). And then there are skilled interviewers who have done their homework and are willing to dive deep, allowing Campbell the time and space he needs to thoroughly cover a subject; a few of these, however, also have their own thoughts to share, and questions sometimes morph into speeches longer than Campbell’s response. Sources also include a few lengthy taped sessions where only a small portion of the recorded discussion made it into print, along with two detailed transcripts of interviews that remain wholly unpublished, all providing insights and observations no one has seen before now. But my favorite sources are Q & A sessions with audience members, regular people rather than journalists, motivated to understand Campbell’s work and its relevance to their own lives. Their sincerity and desire to learn delighted Joe, which comes through in his replies. My challenge was to sift through this wealth of material, extract the gold, and meld the results into one seemingly seamless conversation. Naturally, it was essential to eliminate repetition, especially on topics Campbell frequently addresses. For example, he would often “set the stage” by providing a description of the four functions of mythology before launching into a more direct response to an opening question. It wouldn’t do to bore the reader with eight iterations of the same concept; nevertheless, having access to so many versions did offer considerable flexibility, allowing me to weave the best from each into the conversation. At the same time, many of Campbell’s lengthy responses tended to cover multiple topics tangential to the specific point of an interviewer’s question, so it wasn’t unusual to discover several sentences in one answer that could serve as the perfect coda to an interrupted description culled from a completely different discussion. Given that, I opted to compose a truly syncretic work: tickle out the constituent ideas, break them apart, and then braid them together to form a comprehensive, dynamic reflection of Campbell’s mythological perspective, taking care not to dilute his meaning or present his ideas in a scattershot pattern. No wonder the process took fifteen years! After early efforts kept hitting a brick wall, what made the most sense was to discard the original questions and then sort Campbell's comments into separate "bins," or categories, based on the central theme of each passage. Some paragraphs could find their way into more than one bin; for example, a discussion of the Bronze Age Goddess might include references to the emergence and development of agriculture, so could fit into two different bins; much later, I'd have to decide which category fit best, or whether it was possible to split the comment into separate statements on separate subjects without doing damage to Campbell's intentions. Of course, trying to combine insights from so many different conversations over so many years into one unified text could have come across as forced and disjointed. I believe I successfully resolved this conundrum by composing new questions to help stitch these many discrete pieces together. Of course, the focus of Myth and Meaning is wholly on Joseph Campbell and his ideas; the questions merely serve to get us there. Questions are generally brief and suggested by the material, or what might be missing from the material, thus bridging gaps and helping Campbell’s comments move gracefully from point A to point B to point C. The questions provide a sense of continuity and internal cohesion, serving as the strand on which are beaded Joe's observations. Whether new to Joseph Campbell’s work, or longtime aficionados, I trust readers will be pleased with the results. Hearing the song that is beyond that of your own individual life cycle is the thing that opens you to wisdom. You can hear it in your life, interpreting it, reading it, not in terms of the calamities or boons of your individual existence, but as a message of what life is. (Joseph Campbell, Myth and Meaning, 16) Find out more about what Campbell means by “the message of the myth” by delving into one or all of these works. You should be able to purchase the hardcover edition of Myth and Meaning at your local bookstore, as well as any of the usual online platforms, or by downloading the Ebook directly from JCF.You can order the paperback of The Power of Myth here (JCF receives a small percentage of the sale price when purchased through an Amazon affiliate link). And all six episodes of Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers can be viewed for free on JCF’s YouTube Channel. This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 2, and Myth and Meaning. Latest Podcast In this episode of Pathways (the final full episode of season 3), Joseph Campbell speaks about similarities in the symbolism of Christianity, Buddhism, European Paganism, and the Arthurian Romances. Host Bradley Olson introduces the episode and gives commentary after the lecture. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Hearing the song that is beyond that of your own individual life cycle is the thing that opens you to wisdom. You can hear it in your life, interpreting it, reading it, not in terms of the calamities or boons of your individual existence, but as a message of what life is." - Joseph Campbell - Myth and Meaning, p.16 All the Gods are Within Us (see more videos)

“We were not new. They were. Sapiens are just the improved model of Homo. Erectus was the first to journey. They were the original imagination-motivated travellers.” ---Daniel Everett (How Language Began: The History of Humanity’s Greatest Invention, 48) As we all know from Greek Mythology, Prometheus was the Titan and Creator God who stole Fire from the Olympian Gods and gave it to the benefit of humankind. What is often not recognized, however, is that the treasured Promethean Fire that made us human first came from the Goddess Athene, who “taught [Prometheus] architecture, astronomy, mathematics, navigation, medicine, metallurgy, and other useful arts, which he passed on to mankind” (Robert Graves, Greek Myths: Vol. I, p. 141). Athena was the source of the technological and scientific knowledge of the day, already mediated through the collective activity of Zeus as the principle of established social order among homo sapiens. The relationship between Prometheus and Athene has given rise to an abundance of mythic speculation. There is even a suggestion that the Titan and the Goddess had, at one point, a love affair. What we can say with more certainty is that Prometheus was there in attendance to the birth of Athene. He assisted Hephaestus, another Fire God, in the procedure of splitting open the head of Zeus “from which Athene sprang, fully armed, with a mighty shout” (Greek Myths, 51). As we recall the myth, Zeus fell into this state of pregnancy after swallowing the Goddess Metis, who was herself made pregnant by Zeus. The old fear that haunted Olympian lineage, punctuated by the image of a castrated Chronos, came back to Zeus. For it was prophesied that Metis would give birth to a son that could depose Zeus, just as he had done with Chronos, and Chronos Uranus. The great fear of castration at the heart of a patriarchal lineage is indicated here in the powerful connection between Athena and Metis. Although Athene thenceforth became branded as her “Father’s daughter,” she was fully functioning as herself within the new patriarchal order established by Zeus. The Titaness Metis, daughter of Okeanos and Tethys, was the original figure of archetypal wisdom. She was one of the Okeanides, a colossal sea-nymph, “Titan-goddess of good counsel, planning, cunning and wisdom” who “hatched the plan through which Kronos (Cronus) was forced to regurgitate his devoured children” (theoi.com). Metis thus played a crucial role during the great war of the Titanomachy, when the Olympians fought against the primeval order of the Titans. This tactical wisdom in war passed over to Athene, who thus carries her mother’s legacy into the patriarchal era. Even the ploy to steal the Fire back from the Olympians was possible only because of Athene. It was she who helped Prometheus gain access to the halls of Olympus through the back door. Only then could he steal a glowing piece of the Sun’s Chariot, wrap it in the pith of a fennel-stalk, and bring it back to humanity, thereby achieving general acclaim. Although Prometheus is the poster boy for human knowledge and inventiveness, a closer reading of the mythology can show a slightly different meaning. From the angle of the Goddesses, we can see the chthonic and tactical wisdom of the Goddesses irrepressibly pass through Zeus, from Thetys to Metis and finally Athene, before landing into the thieving hands of Prometheus as the vaunted “archetype of human existence” (Kerényi). Prometheus was not the Apollonic Hero that so enthralled the romantic period. He was a wily trickster figure and not the figure of an ideal humanity raised to the Divine. It was Prometheus’s treachery that provoked Zeus into punishing humans “by withholding fire from mankind. ‘Let them eat their flesh raw!’ he cried.” (The Greek Myths Vol. I, p. 141). Before Prometheus had to steal it back, humans already had fire at their disposal. Prometheus was not the Apollonic Hero that so enthralled the romantic period. He was a wily trickster figure and not the figure of an ideal humanity raised to the Divine. Although some will say it was originally Zeus, others insist it was Prometheus, who first gave fire to humanity, the fact remains that “humans” (hominins) have been using fire for well over a million years. Humanity had fire even before we became “human” (sapiens). If there was ever any fire theft, it did not come from some Olympian height but from the savage earthly origins of homo erectus and its kin, the first creatures on earth to use and control fire. These fellow humans, you might say, were entirely enveloped by the wisdom of the Goddess Gaia. They would fit “the mood […] of Mother Goddess thinking” where there is a perfect sense that “we are one with the deity” as Campbell says in Goddesses (228). These distinguished hominins not only possessed fire in the literal sense, they also possessed the Fire of the human mind, or as Daniel Everett argues, “Humanity’s Greatest Invention”: the symbolic power of Language (logos). Prometheus appears more like a propagandistic figure for sapienkind, appropriating the goods and discoveries of others as our own. For we did not invent fire or hunting and cooking technologies. These fundamental homo skills, which point to the use of language and its higher functions, are already present with homo erectus and its kin, who are the true Promethean figures of humanity as we know it today. We were not the first storytellers, they were. Theirs were the first conversations on earth. With them, the faculty of human language first emerged as a multi-dimensional symbolic order independent of sense perception. And Fire, both literal and symbolic, was their supreme invention. MythBlast authored by: Norland Tellez is an Artist and Teacher with over 25 years of experience in the animation industry. He graduated from CalArts in 1999 with a degree in film animation, while training and working at Walt Disney Studios, Turner Feature Animation, and Warner Brothers Feature Animation. As a Writer and Director, Norland has produced award-winning educational properties in Once Upon a Sign mini-series which features deaf actors using American Sign Language. As a teacher of Life Drawing and the animated arts, Norland has taught at CalArts and Santa Monica Academy of Entertainment and Technology, as well as AIC-LA. Norland completed a Masters and Doctorate degrees in the study of mythology at Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2009 with a dissertation on the Popol-Vuh, a classic of Mayan mythology. This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 3, and Goddesses. Latest Podcast In this episode, Trudy Goodman speaks with Tyler Lapkin of the Joseph Campbell Foundation. One of the earliest teachers of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Trudy taught with its creator, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn at the MBSR clinic at University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1983. In 1995 she co-founded, and is still the Guiding Teacher at the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, the first center in the world dedicated to exploring the synergy of these two disciplines. She was an early adopter and now smiles seeing mindfulness everywhere. In the conversation today, Tyler and Trudy discuss her life, meditation, mindfulness, and her perspective on the famous Campbell quote, "Participate Joyfully in the sorrows of the world". To learn more about Trudy visit: https://www.trudygoodman.com/ Listen Here This Week's Highlights "There is one bit of evidence earlier [of mythological thinking], and that comes from the period of Homo erectus (before Homo sapiens, before Neanderthal man) about 500,000 B.C. from the River Thames. A hand axe that’s very long, too big to use, but is symmetrically beautiful. This is what Robinson Jeffers called “divinely superfluous beauty,” and is the first signal we have of a tool that’s not simply a practical tool, but something that is a beautiful, beautiful piece of stone. No animal would do a thing like that. The only thing you can guess from it is for a ritual of some kind . . ." -Joseph Campbell -The Hero's Journey, 87 The Mythic World of the Navajo: The Vision of Black Elk (see more videos)

Sigmund Freud wrote that in our mourning, the world becomes “poor and empty.” I felt something like that sensation in the days after hearing the news that a dear friend and JCF colleague passed away. Some of you reading this were fortunate enough to have met or known the magical Jimmy Maxwell, a beguilingly kind, generous, good-humored man who seemed to have never met a stranger. Jimmy was a Joseph Campbell Foundation Fellow, one who achieved success in their individual field and volunteered their time and talent to JCF. For years Jimmy has been helping us sort through, compile, cross reference, digitize, and otherwise clean up our extensive audio collection of recorded Joseph Campbell lectures. It was an Augean task, and his efforts in this regard were invaluable. Jimmy was a gifted and well-known bandleader, the pied piper of New Orleans live music generally and Mardi Gras specifically. The Jimmy Maxwell Orchestra is synonymous with the music of the New Orleans Mardi Gras and additionally, he was also the director of the Louis Armstrong Society Jazz Band. He has performed for U.S. presidents as well as members of the British royal family. He’s performed with the Neville Brothers, Harry Connick, Jr. (and Sr.), and for several years in the ‘80’s Jimmy partnered with Peter Duchin, the famed society band leader from New York City. In addition to being a first rate musician, he was a self-educated philosopher, but perhaps most of all, he was a story-teller. Whether musically or in quiet conversation, Jimmy enchanted, surprised, and captivated with his stories. In addition to being a first rate musician, he was a self-educated philosopher, but perhaps most of all, he was a story-teller. Whether musically or in quiet conversation, Jimmy enchanted, surprised, and captivated with his stories. But the one story he had the hardest time talking about, which is also the story that eventually brought Jimmy into our lives here at JCF, was the devastation wrought by 2005’s Hurricane Katrina upon his beloved New Orleans, her people, and his own psyche. Fortunately, Jimmy and his family were able to evacuate the city, but the loss of life among those who were unable to leave was staggering. The city was left in chaos, emergency services were overwhelmed, and the damage inflicted by the hurricane was appalling. Eighty percent of the city remained flooded for weeks and most of New Orleans's transportation and communication infrastructure were destroyed, leaving tens of thousands of residents struggling to survive with little access to food or shelter, and largely unable to meet even their most basic needs. The life he had been living was gone, people he cared about, landmarks—both personal and public—were gone, wiped away by a pitiless, “once-in-a-century” flood. Jimmy once told me he felt “broken” by these events, and in their aftermath he had lived a strange sort of half life, not really alive but not dead either, feeling helpless to know what to do for himself. Jimmy had begun reading Joseph Campbell years before in his longstanding, determined effort to make sense of life’s vicissitudes and complexities, and the March following Katrina, searching for ways out of his despair, he decided to dive more deeply into Campbell’s work by attending a “playshop” called “Your Hero’s Journey: A Mythological Toolbox,” which was facilitated at Esalen by Robert Walter, who at that time was the Joseph Campbell Foundation president. During the six-day playshop, through a range of deceptively playful exercises, participants in the playshop remember and explore significant life events and learn to recognize the human propensity to mythologize at work in their own lives. They gain a deeper understanding of the ways in which myth grows, evolves, and coalesces into a single, and singular, narrative. Participating in this workshop, one sees that the way one became oneself—how one was shaped and the patterns one’s life formed—isn’t accidental, nor is there at work a kind of supernaturally assigned destiny. The “self” is formed by a narrative woven together from a unique constellation of biological manifestations and personalized perspectives. And when life brings us to our knees, when we lose ourselves, it’s our helplessness that becomes our greatest asset. In the universe of the Grail Legends it seems that everything and everyone is connected—in Wolfram’s Parzival this is particularly so, and by recognizing those connections Parzival receives help at every turn. In the beginning, Parzival is utterly helpless, it’s true, but it is precisely that helplessness which becomes the greatest tool in his toolbox; helplessness inspires magic—another way to say this may be to say that helplessness catalyzes creativity, it’s the activator of enchantment. Perhaps it is helplessness itself that desires and searches for the Grail. Helplessness is also the spring from which morality flows, it helps us recognize the good and the just and, importantly, love. In his book, The Future of an Illusion , Sigmund Freud saw helplessness as “…the primal source of all moral motives” and we learn through the experience of helplessness that what’s good for us is often good for others. I want it to be clear that I’m speaking of a particular kind of helplessness, a generative helplessness, a helplessness that is curious and determined to learn, helplessness that is anxious without panicking, earnest without being innocent, a helplessness born of the awe one feels standing in uncertainty overwhelmed by the sublime mystery of existence. Neurotic helplessness is needy, desperate, dependent, grasping, and greedy; the wrong sort of helplessness repels and nullifies love, but generative helplessness inspires love, perhaps that’s why the grail romances spend so much time describing romantic love and the helplessness and vulnerability that attend it. Jimmy returned to the Esalen playshop the following year, and again for a third year, and every year thereafter for nearly two decades, because he found the playshop to be so nourishing and transformative. His relationship with Bob and with Campbell’s work became supremely important in developing his ability to make some sense of, to contextualize and reimagine the catastrophe of Katrina. Not only did Jimmy spontaneously provide and coordinate musical entertainment in the evenings after the day’s activities (as well as a grander production for the celebration of Campbell’s birthday which always fell during the week of the playshop), that third year at Esalen he began discussing ways to become more involved in the foundation. These discussions led Jimmy to take on the responsibilities for curating the audio database—digitizing, organizing, and enhancing the numerous lectures Campbell recorded over the course of his career, dating back to wire recordings made in 1941. Jimmy was something of an autodidact, teaching himself not just sound engineering, the new digital technologies which were rapidly evolving, or Campbell and Schopenhauer. Most recently, right up until some weeks before his death, he was exploring and teaching himself about AI and all its diverse applications. Working with Joseph Campbell’s material helped him to make meaning out of seemingly meaningless tragedies and gave him exciting new insights into events with which he was long familiar. For instance, Campbell’s work helped him understand, for the first time, the mythic meaning underlying the Mardi Gras celebration. “They don’t realize what they’re doing!” he once remarked excitedly to Bob Walter as he unpacked the symbolism of Mardi Gras. Finally, with a musician’s impeccable timing, Jimmy made the Great Leap into the mysterium on Leap Day, February 29th. Over the past several years Jimmy and I had conversations about death, his own and death in general—after all, it’s an irresistible topic and virtually dripping with inevitability. And yet, his indomitable joy in living, and his resolute determination to continue to do so, made it difficult to imagine that that day, Leap Day, would in fact, arrive. Death is a fundamentally impenetrable mystery of life, and it’s a mystery that, no matter how desperately we seek answers from it and for it, remains indifferent to human inquiry. What we do know is that life and death define one another; we wouldn’t recognize the one without the other. They’re inextricably linked in such a way that it suggests to me that they are likely one and the same. It appears to be impossible to know with certainty anything about the most important features or aspects of life, and death is no exception. We lurch through life hoping to uncover some vital piece of information that will, at long last, free us from an existential detention center and let us finally and freely live, rather than merely survive. But science, theology, and philosophy have been epistemologically inadequate when it comes to navigating what the poet Theodore Roethke called that “dark world where the gods have lost their way.” Therefore, we must here turn away from words and rather, feel or sense our way through the dark world, for this world is not made up of clearly drawn boundaries: up is not always up and down is not always down. Evil wins more often than it should, and good is sometimes mistaken for evil. That indistinctness, that grayness, covers the universe and embeds itself in time so that the very flow of it–its seconds, minutes, hours, and days–distorts, transforming one into another, making the languid second seem like days, while decades pass in the blink of an eye. But there are hints of something in us, Walt Whitman insists, that is without name. It is a word unsaid, it is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol. Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on, To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me. … Do you see O my brothers and sisters? It is not chaos or death—it is form, union, plan—it is eternal life—it is Happiness. Whitman goes on to say that he wishes he could find words to give to this presence, this indivisibility, this homogeneity, this indomitable, this perfect, inexhaustible dynamism of life… All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it (Song of Myself). It’s lucky to die?! I wish I could ask Jimmy if this is so. Pour a dram or two of a nice scotch and sit back while he regales me with tales of his sojourn through that “undiscovered country.” Perhaps he’d tell me the same thing Dante wrote in the Inferno : “Do not be Afraid; Our Fate Cannot be Taken From Us; it is a Gift.” Our fate is a gift. It’s lucky to die. Those like Walt Whitman, whose imagination was able to reach far enough into the Mysterium and pick up the straws in the wind, have always described an experience of death that is far, far removed from the mawkishly saccharine, schmaltzy idea of heaven or the ghastly, unrelenting and overdetermined image of hell. It seems, judging from such “letters from the front,” that the reality of it remains largely unimaginable, but death is without a doubt “different from what anyone supposed.” The great challenge is to see that one’s own fate—the one life that we have and must live—is also the life that we must love and experience as fully as possible, despite everything and no matter what happens in the living of it. However, there lies within the explorations of our own mortality an even greater achievement, a boon, if I might borrow a word from Campbell, and it is precisely this: to understand, as Dante did, that our fate will not, nor cannot, be taken from us. Our fate won’t be altered, renovated, or retrofitted. Despite all our efforts, we must live the life that we have. The great challenge is to see that one’s own fate—the one life that we have and must live—is also the life that we must love and experience as fully as possible, despite everything and no matter what happens in the living of it. The gift is discovered living this way, and it’s the most precious gift we could possibly receive, for by accepting our lives as they are, not needing or wanting anything to be different than it is, we make it possible to experience complete freedom. Jimmy Maxwell certainly aimed to do that and, suffering his loss, sad are the daughters of Mnemosyne. Silent, too, is the house of weeping, wine-dark Dionysos. Thanks for reading, To learn more about the extraordinary life of Jimmy Maxwell, go to https://everloved.com/life-of/james-maxwell/ MythBlast authored by: Bradley Olson, Ph.D . is an author, speaker, and a psychotherapist. He serves as the Publications Director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation, as well as the Editor of the MythBlast Series and the host of JCF's flagship podcast, Pathways With Joseph Campbell . Dr. Olsonholds a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Dr. OIson is also a depth psychologist in private practice in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he has lived since 1995. Dr. Olson has graduate degrees in psychology from the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Olson offers mythic life coaching at What's Mything in Your Life ( bradleyolsonphd.com ). This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 4, and Pathways to Bliss. Latest Podcast In this episode originally released in December 2022, Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Tyler Lapkin interviews British Explorer, Levison Wood. Levison is a world renowned explorer, writer & photographer who has written nine best-selling books and produced several critically acclaimed documentaries which have been aired around the globe. He has travelled and filmed in over one hundred countries worldwide, and his expeditions include walking the length of the river Nile, the Himalayas, all of central America and circumnavigating the Arabian Peninsula. His most recent project followed the migration and conservation of elephants in Botswana. He also has a new book, "Endurance: 100 Tales of Survival, Adventure and Exploration". John Bucher introduces the guests and follows up with commentary about their conversation. Find out more about Levison at http://www.levisonwood.com/ Listen Here This Week's Highlights "It’s the experience of death that I regard as the beginning of mythic thinking: actually seeing someone dead who was alive and talking to you yesterday—dead, cold, beginning to rot. Where did the life go? That’s the beginning of myth.” -Joseph Campbell - Myth & Meaning, 15 Life is Always on the Edge of Death (see more videos)

Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. (John 12:24, NIV) The term sacrifice has become somewhat of a dirty word over the course of my life. This changeover began in the 1970s with the ascent of the “Me Generation” of Baby Boomers. However, the creeping selfishness of this period of time has not diminished. Reinforced by social norms, an ever-present pressure to acquire rather than to give up, lurks behind much of our modern thoughts and actions. Even the literary and filmic heroes we so admire, with whatever sacrifices that they make on their journeys, almost always in the end get to participate in what Joseph Campbell called “the boon” or the benefit they bring back to the collective. Very rarely does a fictional hero climb to the heights of popular culture whose story involves making the ultimate sacrifice—forfeiting their very life for a boon that they cannot experience. However, inevitably such “A Hero Will Rise” and this is indeed the subtitle of the 2000 DreamWorks film Gladiator, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russell Crowe. With a sequel to this movie currently in production, I will turn my mythic inquiry to the original film–set in a highly fictionalized Imperial Rome–to see what a fresh examination of it, incorporating Campbell’s ideas of The Power of Myth episode “Sacrifice and Bliss,” could offer us (please note the typical warning of spoilers to come). Even before we are introduced to Gladiator’s protagonist Maximus (Crowe) as the head of the Roman army, we see daydream images of him walking through a wheat field, his hand brushing the sheaf tops, which are ready for harvest. Soon after he awakes from this reverie, we learn that General Maximus is actually a farmer who longs to return home to his agrarian life after an epic battle that ends a long campaign. Yet Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) has one last duty for him: to become “The Protector of Rome” and oversee its transition from an imperial state to a Republic after Caesar’s death. Making Endings and Beginnings Sacred The archetypes of birth and death are, for Campbell, the main concerns of sacrifice. The loss of something—its being given up or dying—is “made sacred” (sacer: “sacred”; facere: “to make”) because something is being born. “Unless there is death, there cannot be birth,” he asserts to Bill Moyers in the Sacrifice and Bliss episode of The Power of Myth. “Every generation has to die in order that the next generation should come. As soon as you beget or give birth to a child, you are the dead one; the child is the new life, and you are simply the protector of that new life.” In the fictional Rome of Gladiator, the dying generation is that of the Caesars, and the “child” coming into being is the Republic. Echoing Campbell’s word, Marcus wants to pass the initial protector role to Maximus. Maximus’s self-concept is as a farmer first, a warrior second, and not at all a political participant. He views himself as the wheat we see in the film’s first image: ready for harvest in a rural backwater of the Empire, at the end of a journey, not at the start of another. Both longing for the comfort of his old way of life and not wanting to take on a new one, Maximus hesitates, an action which Campbell has labeled “the hero’s refusal of the call” (see Michael Lambert’s January 28th MythBlast). Consequently, Marcus’s immoral son, Commodus, kills his father and assumes the throne, ostensibly ending Marcus’s “dream of Rome.” In doing so, Maximus falls under the power of Commodus, who orders him and his family killed. While Maximus escapes, his family does not, and his farm is burned. Remarking on the refusal of the call Campbell states, “Whatever house [the refuser] builds, it will be a house of death” (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, pg. 49). Thus, Maximus’ clinging to the life he planned led to its demise. He is eventually enslaved, becomes a gladiator, and must fight his way to Rome to fulfill the role at which he initially balked, and to exact his revenge on Commodus. No Death, No Birth The metaphorical death of Maximus the Farmer/General is the seed of his new journey, for, as Campbell paraphrased the idea found in John 12:24, “If the seed does not die, there is no plant” (A Joseph Campbell Companion, pg. 19). Under the mentorship of the retired gladiator Proximo (Oliver Reed), Maximus learns the ways of “winning the crowd.” This idea of pleasing the people will eventually be sublimated into benefiting the people, as Maximus’ goal is to end Commodus’s tyranny for the sake of all of Rome. As a general, he had fought for one person—his father-figure, Marcus Aurelius. Now he fights for the collective. The film's ending beautifully merges the themes of sacrifice and bliss, death and birth. Commodus agrees to face Maximus in single combat in the Colosseum but treacherously stabs him before the duel to gain advantage. As Maximus fights and bleeds to death, he begins to see visions of the bliss of the afterlife—a reunion with his wife and son, and a return to his agrarian life. Elysium awaits and even tempts him, but he has not yet bestowed on Rome the ultimate boon. Maximus, in a final burst of herculean effort, kills Commodus. As he openly declares Rome’s transition to a republic before dying, Maximus succeeds in being the Protector of Marcus’s dream. His death marks the birth of the new Rome, a Rome from which he himself will not experience benefit. His sacrifice produces the seeds of freedom from imperial authority. At the same time, he himself is born into immortality and a much more spiritual wheat to harvest than his original, mundane goal. Time to Harvest, Time to Plant How are all of us non-gladiators supposed to see ourselves in this story? We are all, at the same time, both the wheat and the seed within. We are growing and evolving where we are planted, yet there exists within us potential for more in life, more that might require death and replanting. The call to extend beyond our current paradigm (like Maximus’s Farmer/General) may come when we think we are ready for harvest and the enjoyment of our labors. But as Campbell often repeated, “We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us” (A Joseph Campbell Companion, pg. 18). That getting-rid-of process is the symbolic death and sacrifice. Yet our losses are made sacred through the boons that come through our new callings, new paradigms, and new crops. Many folks have adopted Campbell’s saying “Follow your bliss,” but perhaps more accurate would be to say “Follow your sacrifices to your bliss.” Even though it contains that “problematic word,” it would more deeply reflect the wisdom of what I believe Campbell was conveying. MythBlast authored by: Scott Neumeister is a literary scholar, author, TEDx speaker, and mythic pathfinder from Tampa, Florida, where he earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of South Florida in 2018. His specialization in multiethnic American literature and mythology comes after careers as an information technology systems engineer and a teacher of English and mythology at the middle school and college levels. Scott coauthored Let Love Lead: On a Course to Freedom with Gary L. Lemons and Susie Hoeller, and he has served as a facilitator for the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Myth and Meaning book club at Literati. This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 4, and Pathways to Bliss. Latest Podcast In this episode we welcome Ben Katt. Ben has been helping people experience deep transformation and access lives of greater joy, compassion, and purpose for the past twenty years. His first book, The Way Home: Discovering the Hero’s Journey to Wholeness at Midlife, is a guidebook and memoir about the inner journey we all must embark on in order to live our fullest lives. He writes regularly about identity, purpose, creativity, and belonging in his STILL newsletter on Substack. He is a certified advanced meditation teacher with 1 Giant Mind, holds a Master of Divinity degree, and was an ordained minister for over a decade. Previously, he led The On Being Project’s work in supporting religious and spiritual leaders in social healing. Ben is a perpetual student of religious, spiritual, and cultural wisdom and an expert at adapting ancient personal development practices for modern contexts to help people wake up to who they are and why they are here. He lives with his wife, three children, and a bunny in Milwaukee, WI where he enjoys walking by the lake, trail running, karaoke, and volunteering as a hospice companion. In the conversation, Ben and Tyler Lapkin of the Joseph Campbell Foundation speak about Ben’s life, why he based his book around Campbell’s hero’s journey, what it means to have your heart, the necessity of following your weird, and why midlife is such an important crossroads for us all. To learn more about Ben and his book, visit https://www.benjaminkatt.com/ Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Unless there is death, there cannot be birth. The significance of that is that every generation has to die in order that the next generation can come. As soon as you beget or give birth to a child, you are the dead one. The child is the new life, and you are simply the protector of that new life ." -Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, 137. The Ego and the Tao - Q&A (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Joseph Campbell reminds us in Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation: Perfection is inhuman. Human beings are not perfect. What evokes our love – and I mean love, not lust – is the imperfection of the human being. So, when the imperfection of the real person, compared to the ideal of your animus or anima, peeks through, say, ‘This is a challenge to my compassion.’ […] Of course, Saint Paul says, ‘Love beareth all things,’ but you may not be equal to God. Who else can relate to feeling inadequate in viewing their challenges from God’s eyes? Campbell continues, To expect too much compassion from yourself might be a little destructive of your own existence. Even so, at least make a try, and this goes not only for individuals but also for life itself. It’s so easy. It’s a fashionable idiocy of youth to say the world has not come up to your expectations. ‘What? I was coming, and this is all they could prepare for me?’ Throw it out. Have compassion for the world and those in it. Not only political life but all life stinks, and you must embrace that with compassion. (103) When tempted to go into the dangerous realms of ‘fair and unfair’ regarding what life brings our way, we’d be wise to consult Job 38:1-7. Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the cornerstone thereof? When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? What may we take from this? Perhaps we could say that in the final analysis, the universal cosmos is inscrutable and that we can never really know its deepest workings. But despite this, we’re called upon to engage with the world—and ourselves—with courage and compassion. While most of us have long given up the misguided notion that our individual thinking is the measure for the universe, and that its sole mandate is to revolve around us and our egotistical pursuits, have we actually realized the absurdity of this? The above-mentioned narrative within the Book of Job serves to remind our sometimes haughty left brains of their rightful place, i.e. “Where were you, left brain, when the stars were put into place and when the laws of creation were propelled into motion?” And, more generally, do we contemplate this question from a genuine position of humility? Far too often we demand that the sun always shines on us, and only us, as if we are the center of special privilege. How utterly misconceived! Could it be that we are prone to build an identity that gives shelter to self-inflated pride because we can’t summon the courage to face our own imperfections? On the topic of the novel Tonio Kröger by Thomas Mann, Campbell writes these words about the protagonist: Tonio is a young man who is stuck between two worlds: the world of unimaginative doers that he was born into and the world of intellectual bohemian critics with whom he has been wandering. He ultimately discovers that anybody who is in the world is imperfect, and that imperfection is what keeps the person here. He realizes that nothing alive fits the ideal. If you are going to describe a person as an artist, you must describe the person with ruthless objectivity. It is the imperfections that identify them. It is the imperfections that ask for our love.  (104) All human beings have challenges, meet obstacles, suffer betrayals, humiliations, and disappointments. These we are obliged to bear. Self-compassion also means encompassing such things because in the wider embrace of compassion, everything gets to be included. But many of us fail to develop a gentle rapport with ourselves. Too often we’re a tiger to our own gazelle. In this we can become a danger to ourselves, forgetting that together we are all on the same team: the team of humanity. In this sense, humanity is one collective “we” and it operates across various levels of human awareness. Or, put in a more poetic way, an aspect of divinity exists in all our friends, enemies, interactions… and within us, residing at the seat of our soul. For the sacred is truly in everything. We bear an archetypal human divinity within us, although it can sometimes feel barely emergent. It’s what I sense Campbell is getting at here by discussing participatory companionship. The thing that turns what Mann calls a litterateur—that’s a person who writes for a New York magazine, say—into a poet or an artist, a person who can give humanity the images to help it live, is that the artist recognizes the imperfections around him with compassion. The principle of compassion is that which converts disillusionment into a participatory companionship. So when the fact shows through the animus or anima, what you must render is compassion. This is the basic love, the charity, that turns a critic into a living human being who has something to give to—as well as to demand of—the world. (105) It’s our fidelity to compassion in a difficult situation that enables that situation to be transmuted. In this way, our wounds often make us more of a person, not less. Lamenting and bemoaning why something happened the way it did only further removes us from the imperfections (personal and worldly) that require our recognition and love. Despite its many possible causes, in the end, the situation happened because it did, and we can’t always find a reason why. At some stage we must simply accept the fact of this. By incessantly questioning, “Why?” we circle up within our heads believing that the universe somehow made a mistake. Meeting reality—even if our process of meeting it is far from perfect—is really the only effective thing that we can do. Believing that nothing in this world is good enough is a staid condition for the soul. In so believing, we’re implying that we’d rather suffer than accept and encompass what presents itself to us. When we remove our self-reproaching judgments, we also help to promote the virtues of acceptance and forgiveness as universal precepts. It’s a universal act of humility that we make when we remove disabling judgements. In and of itself, the very changing of our self-perception can then become a compassionate deed for the world.

Following my June contribution to JCF's MythBlast essay series, a friend asked about Joseph Campbell's personal experience with tarot. According to Campbell, his introduction to the tarot occurred in 1943, as friend and mentor Heinrich Zimmer discussed the symbolism of playing cards. Zimmer died unexpectedly soon thereafter, and Campbell didn’t give tarot much thought until 1967, when the subject came up during a Q & A session following a lecture at Esalen. A few days later Campbell contacted his friend, Richard Roberts, an authority on tarot. Roberts offered to read Joe’s cards; the results were compelling enough that Campbell purchased three separate tarot sets (the Marseilles deck, an Italian deck, and what today is known as the Rider-Waite-Smith deck). His exploration of their imagery prompted a collaboration with Roberts on a book about the symbolism of the tarot (Joseph Campbell and Richard Roberts, Tarot Revelations, 3 - 4). However, Joseph Campbell’s interest was that of a mythologist. When asked whether he “believed” in the tarot, Campbell replied as follows: No, I don’t do anything like that. I just see. I can show you how it works and what a beautiful thing it is. It gives you a program for life, what the concerns are in the different stages of life and what the spiritually lower and spiritually higher attitudes are toward the experiences of life at different stages (Campbell, The Hero’s Journey, 176). In that same conversation, Campbell observed that tarot offers clues to “the mystery.” Though he didn’t consult the tarot as a means of divination, Campbell did regularly contemplate the imagery of the cards, albeit in a most non-traditional way: Joe swam 44 laps in the Olympic-sized pool at the New York Athletic Club every day, keeping track of where he was by swimming two laps for each card of the major arcana! What turned Joseph Campbell on about the tarot was its symbolism. Symbols are essentially images, whether visual or verbal, with a multitude of associations—personal and collective—compressed into each, conveying a broad range of meanings at once complementary and contradictory. Take for instance, this month’s theme, Card XVI in the major arcana: The Tower. Most versions of this card depict a tower, struck by lightning, in the process of collapsing. In a tarot spread, The Tower is often assumed to signal danger, crisis, and destruction. But, of course, it’s more complicated than that. A deeper understanding can be achieved by examining the many different facets of this image. We encounter multiple types of towers in both history and myth. This of course includes watch towers that are part of defensive fortifications (“towers, turrets, and armed keeps”). Then there are what I call “towers of power,” which are associated with either national prestige or economic power (from the Eiffel Tower in Paris, to Wall Street skyscrapers in New York). There are towers that serve as prisons: Rapunzel, locked up in a witch’s tower with no door and only one window; Gandalf, imprisoned atop the tower Orthanc at Isengard by the wizard Saruman in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings; Prince Kamar al-Zaman, confined to an old stone tower in a tale from 1001 Arabian Nights; and then all sorts of historical figures, including Anne Boleyn, Sir Walter Raleigh, and even Guy Fawkes, who have been held captive in the Tower of London. There are towers that serve as a refuge for introspection, separating one from the mundane concerns of the surrounding world. Examples include poet Robinson Jeffers’ Tor House on the California coast, the stone tower Jung built at Bollingen, and even the proverbial “ivory tower” of academia (though that last has morphed into a pejorative term today). And then there are towers that serve as a conduit between heaven and earth, such as the ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia and the step pyramids of Mesoamerica, as well as church spires, minarets, and Buddhist stupas. The ancient cities of Sumer, Akkad, and Babylon, from whose mythological systems much biblical myth was derived, were organized roughly in quarters, with a towering temple of the presiding god at the center. This “height” or “ziggurat,” as it was called, at the summit of which heaven and earth came together, was symbolic of the axis mundi, the world center, where the vitalizing energy of eternity entered the revolving sphere of space-time—as known from the revolving night-sky (Campbell, The Mythic Dimension, 196). The top of a tower offers a far-seeing, unrestricted view of the world around one – a powerful metaphor. However, a perspective that may at one time have been entirely appropriate can become constricted and confining when long-held beliefs no longer serve. Hence the lightning strike depicted on the tarot card, signifying an external event that heralds abrupt change. When such rapid change occurs in our lives, it’s often experienced as disruptive and catastrophic. We all too easily grow comfortable with the status quo, no matter how unsatisfactory. It often takes blowing up those prison walls before one is motivated to venture out into the unknown. That lightning can take many forms. It might be the loss of a job, a humiliating failure, the death of a loved one, or any major life transition. This is always traumatic at first, as the only life one knows is irrevocably changed, but these events often anticipate the beginning of a new and more rewarding life. In the myth of the Tower of Babel, that external change takes the form of God “confounding the language” so that humans building the tower, who previously spoke with but one tongue, can no longer understand one another – and so they end up scattered around the world. The resulting multiplicity of languages marks the end of the old order, and the beginning of the world we know today. The mythical figure of Babel is in this connection doubly appropriate, since it was actually in the early city-states of Mesopotamia, ca. 3500 B.C., that the original foundations were laid of all higher (i.e., literate and monumental) civilization whatsoever; so that it was indeed from the Levant, and even specifically, those early temple cities of the towering ziggurats, that all branches of the one great tree of the four domains of civilization have stemmed (Campbell, Myths to Live By, 62). Stepping away from myth and into the contemporary world, we witnessed this dynamic play out in its most tragic and concrete form with the 9/11 attacks that collapsed the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. In a matter of minutes, the long-held assumption of America’s impregnability dissolved; the old order disappeared as the United States realized it shares the same vulnerabilities to fanatical extremism as the rest of the world. Given such examples from myth and modern life, it’s easy to understand the trepidation that greets the Tower card when it appears in a spread. That was certainly my initial reaction when first introduced to tarot many decades ago. Fortunately, in the years since, my favorite mythologist has helped expand my vision. In discussion of this card, Joseph Campbell references one of his favorite authors: James Joyce, whose chief literary model was Dante, in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, lets the sound of a thunderclap represent the moment of the humbling of his hero’s pride . . . In Finnegans Wake, the fall from his ladder of Finnegan, the great builder of cities and towers, is to the sound of a hundred-lettered word composed of thunder syllables from many tongues: “bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!” (Campbell and Roberts, 20-21). And the next was a thunderbolt hitting a tower, the Tower of Destruction, which is . . . the tower of evil being smashed by the thunderbolt of God’s destruction of all of your tight ego-system relationships (The Hero’s Journey, 172-174). Over the past thirty years I have indulged in tarot not to divine the future, but as a means of re-imagining and mythologizing my life. When I do draw the Tower card, instead of reading it as a harbinger of disaster, I take it as a prompt to ponder what I am holding on to that no longer serves. But even in those rare instances when I pull The Tower as I happen to be experiencing major upheaval in my life, Campbell provides the guidance with which to face the inevitable: Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called “the love of your fate.” Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, “This is what I need.” It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment – not discouragement – you will find the strength is there (A Joseph Campbell Companion, 38).