“You’re going on a trip,” Great-Gramma Jennie told my mother. Mom was a child then, in the prewar years of the Great Depression. Grampa and my uncles left during the day for work and school, and Mom stayed home with her mother and her mother’s mother, my Great-Gramma Jennie. Every afternoon these three generations—maiden, mother, and crone—paused their work of garden weeding, jam canning, laundry hanging, butter churning, and pie baking to gather at the table for tea. Loose-leaf green tea it was, brewed in an enameled pot tinted the same pale green as pistachio ice cream. Steam shot from the kettle like destiny, impatient to hear itself discussed, as Gramma poured hot water over the leaves. Then, to Mom’s child-sized cup, Gramma added warmed milk from the family cow and a spoonful of sugar. The woody perfume of Grampa’s pipe smoke lingered in the very floorboards of that kitchen, blending with the aroma of whatever simmered on the stove for supper. As Gramma and Great-Gramma Jennie drank their warm, grassy tea, they chatted about news and neighbors, and when they finished, Jennie completed the ritual by examining the remaining leaves that flecked the bottom of Mom’s cup. “You’re going on a trip,” Jennie told her granddaughter every day, peering seriously into the cup as though it were a tiny Holy Grail. “Yes, you’re going on a trip.” That was always Mom’s future: you’re going on a trip. If Jennie used tarot for divination instead of tea leaves, she might have kept the Chariot card on top of the deck. Portending travel and adventure, the Rider-Waite version of the card shows a rider standing in a chariot harnessed to two full-bosomed sphinxes. But instead of reins, the rider holds a scepter. In The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work, Joseph Campbell relates the story of the Arthurian knight Parzival, who, at one point in his quest for the Grail, rides with the reins slack, letting his horse lead the way. “The horse represents nature power and the rider represents the controlling mind,” Campbell says. “The slack reins mean that he’s riding nature. His own nature. It’s a noble horse who has the same heart as he” (p. 128). Perhaps the Chariot rider, too, has learned to share the same noble heart as the wise-woman sphinxes who give the Chariot its energy and wisdom. The rider exerts the soul’s sovereignty, symbolized by the scepter, to let other powers lead, relying on faith and instinct more than control. You’re going on a trip. I can imagine Mom’s big green little-girl eyes shining at this thrilling oracle from her adored Gramma. Jennie’s prediction was a blessing, a benison bestowed on a beloved granddaughter. For me, this family story underscores how similar in meaning the words godmother and grandmother are: wise older women who cherish and gladly work magic on behalf of the youngling. In 1892, when she was eighteen years old, Jennie herself spent ten weeks traveling alone by stagecoach-chariot from upstate New York to Boston and then to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Her cousin invited her, Jennie later wrote, telling Jennie that “if I came they would take me around and I would see things to think of and tell of in ‘future’ years and it has proved so. For every night … after I go to bed—it all comes back to me in the quiet hours—of the night—like a moving picture.” Jennie’s adventure became a lifelong stream of mythic memories. She carried her tales of travel in the chariot of her heart as she moved from maidenhood to motherhood and then into cronedom. When she read Mom’s tea leaves, maybe she wished a similar gift for her young granddaughter. That same—or greater—opportunity. Soon after Jennie’s trip, she earned a teacher’s certificate and got a job at a school for the children of homesteaders who raised sheep and cows far up a hillside riddled with gullies and streams. To deliver Jennie to that remote village, where she lodged with the families of her students, a school trustee gave her a ride up the hill in his wagon-chariot at the beginning of the term, and back down again at the end. That steep, forested, rock-pocked trail would have been a bumpy ride indeed, but something about the company must have proved agreeable, because before long Jennie married the trustee and gave birth to my grandmother. The Chariot carried Jennie to adventure, to her work in the world, to her future family. That’s what the Chariot does: It carries. It conveys. The Chariot moves the soul from Point A to Point B faster than that soul could have traveled on its own power. I imagine Jennie as the rider on the card, standing tall with a twinkle in her eye, holding that scepter of sovereignty, propelled by wisdom. I see Gramma as the rider too. I see Mom as the rider. Myself. My whole family. You, if you like. Myth is not only the province of princes and queens. Quiet lives are mythic too. “You’re going on a trip,” the Chariot says, and that’s how many stories begin—stories of adventure, quest, healing, discovery. “The trip is called your life, and I will carry you anytime you like.”

One day, long ago, the ever-spinning Wheel of Fortune found me sitting at a desk in an open office workspace, my back to a room full of coworkers. Absorbed in a document on my computer, I had just reached an impasse and needed to go ask someone a question. But at that moment a colleague I hadn’t seen for years was striding toward me. He whooshed into the chair beside my desk at the same instant that I whirled around. Whoosh-whirl—and our faces were way too close together, so close that his leather-and-sandalwood cologne must have mixed up with my jasmine perfume, and I found myself staring deep into unknown eyes without even seeing the rest of this person’s face. But I didn’t see his eyes, not really. I saw through them, past them, beyond them into a midnight-blue cosmos where stars explode and nebulae roil with galactic lightning. The whole idea of eyes fell away. I felt like I saw the million invisible dimensions of his soul, its shimmers and flickers spiraling into the indigo infinity. “Hello!” he said. I jerked back to a decorous distance, stammering, confused. This was a person. A literal, rational, breathing human. And we were at work. I couldn’t burst out with an “Oh my goodness, I saw your soul and it’s gorgeous!!” Instead, I stuck to convention. “Hello!” We chatted and caught up, but a part of my awareness remained drunk with awe, high on the vapors of beauty and magnificence. That feeling of altered consciousness lingered for days as I went through the motions of meetings and emails, while the Wheel of Fortune kept turning. That’s the Wheel’s job, after all. It turns, turns, turns, turns. In the tarot deck, the Wheel of Fortune depicts the ongoing roll of the universe. If we didn’t know better, we might think this card was a four of something. Four lines form a compass decorated with four Latin letters, four alchemical sigils, and four Hebrew letters that would spell the name of God if they were all together. Four golden animal powers hover on the muscle of their beating golden wings in four separate clouds while perusing their four books. But the card shows important threes, too: three concentric circles around which three cosmic powers ride like a merry-go-round of Egyptian myth. Apopis, the troublemaking serpent, wiggles down into the thick of things. Anubis, the guide of souls, cruises upward and glances at us as though to say, “Buckle up, kiddos, we’re going around again.” And a wise, regal Queen Sphinx rules over it all, unperturbed and unperturbable. Of all the beings on this card, there isn’t a single earthbound human. We see gods, forces, symbols, and ideas, but not one mortal. Instead, powers gather here to show the dynamic processes of the cosmos in a productive, creative tension that keeps the wheel turning. At any moment, the card says, big things could happen. But the card shows something else too, something tiny and yet key to the whole image. If we drew a line from the upper left corner to the lower right corner, and then another line from the upper right to the lower left, those lines would intersect in the center of the card. What do we find there? The center of the Wheel. The hub. The unmoving spot without which the wheel couldn’t turn. This is the stillness required for change, the stillness necessary for new life. “The New Life,” Joseph Campbell observes in Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: On the Art of James Joyce, “is the life of the awakened spiritual, poetic … relationship to the world through the physical realm” (35). Campbell is referring to Dante’s Vita Nuova and James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, both of which blossom forth from an experience of what we might call the center of the Wheel, where new life emerges from a revelatory moment of awe. That’s where Dante stood when he saw Beatrice, where Stephen Daedalus stood when he saw the young woman at the beach, where I stood, so to speak, that day at the office when I saw the cosmos in a colleague’s eyes. Campbell calls this experience “a ray of the light of eternity” (19). Once in a while, we inhabit the hub and feel reborn. For Dante and Joyce, the experience inspired singular literature. “Time and space are gone in the enchantment of the heart,” Campbell continues, and I think he’s right. The Wheel of Fortune’s compass can guide us through the vicissitudes, but the card’s center is the aperture to magic. I never told my coworker what happened that day. But I kept an eye on him for a while, in case he turned inside out in a cloud of purple smoke and revealed to everyone the secret that, in the center, you fall in love with everything, anything, and most of all with love itself.

What, if any, is the value in consulting the tarot? In an age where the rational mind reigns supreme, all forms of divination would seem little more than the fading traces of archaic superstition. After all, how could anything so vague and subjective impart any useful information? That question misses the mark. True, there can be no independent, objective meaning to a tarot card apart from the individual who draws it, but that’s a feature, not a flaw. The point of any oracle isn't so much to predict the future as to access the imagination by stepping outside the linear, rational constructs that prevail in our contemporary culture. That perceived vagueness is why oracles work. It’s much the same way that two different people spy two different images in the same cloud, or in a single Rorschach inkblot; neither is either right or wrong—it's still a cloud, still an inkblot—but the patterns one sees there are projections of one’s own imagination. The same holds for horoscopes, tarot spreads, and other forms of divination: what we make out is a reflection of what we bring to the medium, those possibilities and concerns licking at the edges of perception, past, present, and future. To repurpose as metaphor an insight borrowed from physicist Werner Heisenberg, the act of observation determines what is observed. Oracles serve as a mirror, bringing that inner world into sharper focus, offering an opportunity to reimagine and mythologize the circumstances of one’s life. What the tarot, dream imagery, astrology, the I Ching, and other oracles all have in common is a rich trove of symbols, images layered with polymorphic meanings (the same symbols and motifs that surface in mythology), in combinations that both mirror the present moment and correspond to those patterns in the human psyche that Jung terms archetypes of the collective unconscious. Joseph Campbell’s explanation of how to read the I Ching fits all forms of divination, old and new: The seeker is supposed to look for some sort of correspondence between all this and his own case, the method of thought throughout being that of a broadly flung association of ideas. One has to feel, not think one's way into these secrets, letting each symbol grow into a cosmos of associated themes ...”(The Masks of God, Vol. II: Oriental Mythology, 413) But beyond insights peculiar to one’s own life, these archetypal figures inspire deeper reflections as well. One such image in tarot is the Wheel of Fortune. The central image on Card X of the major arcana in the Thoth deck (pictured here) is typical for tarot cards: a spoked wheel bearing different creatures as it turns—some going up, some going down. Often those figures are Anubis (guide of souls to the Underworld), Typhon (a serpentine dragon associated with chaos), and the Sphinx, though these may differ in more modern decks. But what is constant, from one deck to the next, is the depiction of a wheel. The Wheel is an archetypal image that rolls through a wide range of mythological belief systems: In tantric yoga, the kundalini serpent rises up the spine, passing through seven stations, or çakras (“wheel” or “cycle,” in Sanskrit). The Wheel of Rebirth figures prominently in Hindu and Buddhist belief systems, as does the Wheel of Dharma. Aeon, a Greco-Roman deity associated with Time, is often depicted holding a wheel bearing the signs of the Zodiac (a belt of constellations that encircle the earth). Large stone medicine wheels with spokes, created by a variety of First Nations peoples, have been identified at seventy different sites in the northern United States and southern Canada (the oldest, the Majorville Cairn and Medicine Wheel in Alberta, constructed roughly 5,200 years ago, shows evidence of near constant use, save for a significant gap three thousand years ago; one could even argue that the woodhenge at the Cahokia Mounds outside St. Louis, Missouri, erected circa 900 CE, is one of the more recent variations on this theme). The word yule, marking the winter solstice, is descended from the Old English geol, apparently derived from the Indo-European base qwelo, meaning “go round”—the source of both “cycle” and “wheel”—thus denoting the turn of the year. And this is a recurring theme throughout James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which Campbell (in Mythic Worlds, Modern Words, JCF’s featured work this month) describes as “one continuous present tense integument [that] slowly unfolded all cycle-wheeling history” (xxii). Jung even saw this shape, in the form of a mandala, embedded in the human psyche. These various wheels have no beginning and no end, and appear to be associated with the cycles of the heavens, the cycles of the seasons, and the cycles of life. On the one hand, that is a profound realization. From an individual perspective, however, each of us lives our life out on the rim, where there is no escaping that roller coaster ride. The Wheel is turning and you can’t slow down, You can’t let go and you can’t hold on, You can’t go back and you can’t stand still, If the thunder don’t get you, then the lightning will. (From “The Wheel” by the Grateful Dead) When I pull the Wheel in a tarot spread, it suggests a change in circumstance—maybe for better, maybe for worse, but the one certainty is that change is inevitable. The Wheel just keeps on turning. And yet, if I step back from my immediate drama, there is a deeper dimension to this image, one easy to overlook. We join spokes together in a wheel But it is the center hole That makes the wagon move (Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell translation, © 1988) As Joseph Campbell explains to Bill Moyers, In the Middle Ages, a favorite image that occurs in many, many contexts is the wheel of fortune. There’s the hub of the wheel, and there is the revolving rim of the wheel. For example, if you are attached to the rim of the wheel of fortune, you will be either above going down, or at the bottom coming up. But if you are at the hub, you are in the same place all the time, centered.(Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, 119) The hub is symbolic of the axis mundi, or World Axis, the still point around which all things revolve. It appears in myth in many forms: as the World Mountain (Mounts Sinai, Olympus, Meru); the World Tree (e.g. Yggdrasil in Norse mythology); the immovable spot at the foot of the Bodhi Tree where the Buddha experienced illumination; and in the symbol of the Cross. The image of a wheel, however, presents a more complete picture of the axis mundi in relation to the field of opposites that surrounds it and forms the world we experience. To man’s secular view, things appear to move in time and to be in their final character concrete. I am here, you are there: right and left; up, down; life and death. The pairs of opposites are all around, and the wheel of the world, the wheel of time, is ever revolving, with our lives engaged in its round. However, there is an all-supporting midpoint, a hub where the opposites come together, like the spokes of a wheel, in emptiness. And it is there, facing east (the world direction of the new day), that the Buddhas of past, present, and future—who are of one Buddhahood, though manifest in series in the mode of time—are said to have experienced absolute illumination(The Masks of God, Volume II: Oriental Mythology, 16) On one level, the Wheel of Fortune in the tarot speaks to the ever-changing circumstances of one’s own life. For those who are adept at reading symbols, however, this card also offers a more profound realization: yes, we continue to live on the rim, experiencing all the ups and downs, all the agonies and the ecstasies, of this passion play that is life—but when we seat our consciousness at the hub, the nature of that experience changes dramatically. The key is learning to embrace both realities at once. The last word belongs to Joseph Campbell: But for those who have found the still point of eternity, around which all—including themselves—revolves, everything is glorious and wonderful just as it is. The first duty of man, consequently, is to play his given role—as do the sun, the moon, the various animal and plant species, the waters, the rocks, and the stars—without fault; and then, if possible, so to order his mind as to identify it with the inhabiting essence of the whole.”(The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays, 1959-1987, 20)

I am not exactly sure when I first heard “Wedding Song (There Is Love)” by Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul, and Mary, but I am quite sure it evoked what Joseph Campbell terms (in a reference from James Joyce) “aesthetic arrest”—a moment of complete seizure when viewing a work of art. Mind you, this was in the 1970s and I was a preteen, so my stunned state was probably due more to the song’s musical rather than lyrical qualities. However, growing up in a church environment, I understood the basics of the words’ surface meaning: a Judeo-Christian view of what marriage “means.” Only later in life, did I come to realize the more expansive meanings associated with the vision Stookey evokes. So in the context of poetic images from “There Is Love,” I want to meditate on the tarot’s version of The Lovers. “He is now to be among you”: I find it interesting that Stookey’s first word is “He.”* The song celebrates two people uniting in marriage, but this other—this third—occupies the prime spot, not “you” or “you both.” (Stookey later clarified, “In matters of theology, it’s wise that we remember, in Christ there is no East or West, in God there is no gender.”) The Rider Waite Smith tarot indeed shows this third figure as an angel hovering between the male and female. In conversation with Bill Moyers, Campbell contends, “By marrying the right person, we reconstruct the image of the incarnate God, and that’s what marriage is.” (This and all subsequent Campbell quotes are from The Power of Myth, Episode VII, “Tales of Love and Marriage.”) This incarnation of the third relates to Jung’s concept of the transcendent function, “a living, third thing…a living birth that leads to a new level of being.” (Collected Works, Vol. 8, 90) Stookey references this aspect later as he paraphrases Matthew 18:20: “Whenever two or more of you are gathered in His name.” (Lyrics by Noel Paul Stookey, ©1971 Public Domain Foundation) A joining in accord, a “union of spirits,” no matter its nature, summons the transcendent into their midst. And although “the two shall be as one,” in that one are three, the “something that you’ve never seen before” Stookey refers to later. “At the calling of your hearts”: When Moyers presses Campbell on how one chooses this “right person,” Campbell replies, “Your heart tells you.” While the Lovers card depicts Eve and Adam naked in their pre-fallen state, their open-armed gestures indicate an even deeper vulnerability—an open-heartedness. Something about this core part–indeed, core comes from the Latin word for “heart,” cor–shows that the third is invoked and evoked from the inmost place, not the brain or the reproductive organs. Clearly Stookey wants to differentiate the “language” of the heart from that of the lower or upper chakras of the human being. “Rest assured this troubadour is acting on His part”: The troubadours celebrated a much different view of love (Amor) than had been part of the earlier overculture—a person-to-person connection that transcends both the animalistic erotic and the generically spiritual. Campbell elaborates Stookey’s reference to the troubadour’s role when he suggests, “The troubadours recognized Amor as the highest spiritual experience,” even paradisical, as the Lovers card depicts. This is as opposed to Eros, a purely physical/psychological experience, and Agape, an impersonal, though noble, one. As the angelic presence in the card represents the third that appears in an Amor connection is both personal and of the highest spiritual order. Stookey as troubadour is reassuring the uniting couple that his work aligns with this supreme sphere of human self-actualization. “Woman draws her life from man and gives it back again”: While overtly this alludes to the biblical story of Eve being created from Adam’s rib, a deeper reading awaits. If we use the esoteric approach of yin and yang—the feminine and the masculine as emblems—then the principle of “the receptive” drawing in, transmuting, and creating in reciprocation to “the directive” removes any hint of male primacy. Moreover, referring to the yin/yang relationship, Campbell asserts, “You couldn’t relate at all to something in which you did not somehow participate.” The male and female principles not only need each other but somehow contain each other; they are not absolute others. Nor, as he goes on to say, is the Divine. Thus Stookey encapsulates the mystery of the union of two opposites: woman and man, as well as human and divine. “Is it love that brings you here, or love that brings you life?”: While most of us would define libido as just sexual drive or lust, depth psychology views it more subtly as energy itself, in particular the energy of life. “Libido is the impulse to life,” Campbell explains, “It comes from the heart…the organ of opening up to somebody else.” The Lovers card also portrays the Tree of Life and the serpent, symbolic of libido. So Stookey asks the philosophical question—are you getting married because that’s what people in love do? Or are you doing it because that’s what life does? “What’s to be the reason?” he wonders. Is your heart open enough to look beyond what you think of as an individual choice to see these greater powers at play? Self and other, the directive and receptive, the transcendent third, life energy itself? I have been receiving so much pleasure later in life, having encountered the works and ideas of Joseph Campbell and many others in the fields of myth and depth psychology. And when I reexamine cultural “artifacts” from my early years—songs, books, movies, and so on—with a fresh set of lenses, I almost always find that the texts which I loved as a child hold so much hidden treasure that my childhood eyes failed to apprehend. Paul Stookey’s beautiful and seemingly simple song is a perfect example of this phenomenon, especially when contemplating the richness and complexity of the Lovers in the tarot. Perhaps it will get you closer to something you have never seen before.

Joseph Campbell’s work is full of reflections on love. I like to think this is due to his successful marriage to his life partner, the dancer and modern dance choreographer Jean Eardman (1916–2020). In a Q&A session during Joseph Campbell's Mythos series, The Ego and the Tao, the mythologist uses the Eastern notion of Tao, that circle with a sinuous line that divides it into equal parts, one white and luminous and the other black and dark, to speak of the wisdom of the body to produce the world. In this symbol, he highlights the interaction of the pairs of opposites, rotating his hands in a moving sphere to convey the idea that this interaction is not static, but happens in a continuous, circular way. Therefore, life must conform to this cycle. According to Campbell, it’s important to watch closely in order to take the right action at the right time. This essential capacity for observation and discernment, which underlies the processes of choice, is clearly represented in tarot card six, the Lovers. Most people interpret it as the arrival of romantic love in life, which may be correct in some cases. But if you have a Raider-Waiter-Smith deck, hold card six in your hands. You will see a sun that opens wide onto an angel-like figure with its wings spread out over male and female figures. The woman is innocently standing in front of a tree with a snake wound around its trunk. The metaphor captures Eve, of course, on the verge of eating the forbidden fruit, a choice that will grant them wisdom but also represents the end of their paradise, or at least that particular experience of paradise. Well, Jungian psychology is solidly based upon the concept of the union of opposites. This is because the male and female figures are not only symbols of love and marriage, but also of our own dual nature. In this psychological approach, the integration of the conscious and the unconscious is the ultimate goal. The interesting thing is that in this choice the union of duality gives rise to a third condition, which is dialectical, called the transcendent function. Something new emerges that did not exist before. In the mythic tarot deck this card is represented splendidly by a scene inspired by the judgment of Paris. As we know from the Greek myth, Paris is minding his own business tending cattle. He is the son of King Priam of Troy. And out of nowhere, Hermes chooses him to award the golden apple to whichever of the three goddesses before him he deems fairest: Hera, Athena, or Aphrodite. A tough choice, and he doesn’t want to do it, as he probably intuits the mess it will inevitably cause. The goddesses, as is their way, try to cast their spells upon him: Athena promises him power in war, Hera promises to make him king, and Aphrodite promises he will get the most beautiful woman in the world. The most beautiful woman in the world? Paris is a young man, and like most young men he has romantic love on his mind. He can plainly see that Aphrodite is offering him the most beautiful mortal woman in the world, Helen. And, as we know, this event precipitates the Trojan War, for the beautiful Helen is married to King Menelaus of Sparta. There’s perhaps a side of us that wants to point the finger at Paris and say, “Hey, you didn’t choose wisely.” But let’s face it, the contest had been imposed on him (by a God, the metaphor for that divine part of the psyche that wants our personality to relate to the Self, the most integrated, whole version of ourselves). The contest takes him out of his bucolic comfort zone and throws him into something entirely new. After choosing love, his entire known world is radically transformed. What he will likely learn as the story unfolds is that every choice has its own particular consequences, and we are responsible for them. And yes, as the ancient Greeks might have said, skata happens, and eventually it will be all right. And this brings us to one of Joseph Campbell’s favorite themes: the troubadours and the Arthurian legends. The troubadours used to associate love to spiritual life. Perhaps, in our troubled times more than ever, it is necessary to have a kind heart—that is, a heart capable of love—in order to face the interesting and challenging times of today. As Campbell says in Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, “the best we can do is ‘lean towards the light’ in an attempt to understand the other in a compassionate way. (197) Because the other mirrors a conflict that is within us, in our family, our community, our country, our culture, our world. It was Campbell’s integrated perspective on body, love, and spirituality that captivated me when I first heard him talking about stories of love and marriage in the Power of Myth series with Bill Moyers. I never forgot the journalist’s frequent surprise when he asked Campbell a question. It was as if he were facing a wise old man like no other. I felt the same way. I imagine that, like many, I was hooked by the erudition and sympathy of the mythologist, who interpreted profound mysteries in a passionate and simple way. The series first aired on Brazilian public TV in 1991. I diligently recorded each episode on VHS tapes so I could review them whenever I wanted. Eventually the series could be purchased, and I acquired the box set to use in the mythical narrative structure classes I taught to students of journalism in those days. For the past year, and two residences later, I’ve been organizing my house and moving things up to the attic. I confess that I couldn’t merely put these old tapes in a cardboard box and banish them to the solitude of the attic. For me, those tapes represent something that I consider to be among the best of my academic and human training. They reflect the heart of who I am. I have learned from Campbell that troubadours recognized love as the highest spiritual experience. And, for me, the individual experience in relation to another is still the toughest and the most sacred journey, one that smooths one’s edges day after day. Woe to Paris, woe to Tristan and Isolde, and woe to us lovers all!

Suspended between Strength and Death is the Hanged Man. He doesn’t look particularly concerned. The illustrator of the emblematic Smith-Waite tarot deck, Pamela “Pixie” Coleman Smith, portrayed him as seemingly unsurprised and unbothered by his situation. His hair dangles down, and blood begins to pool in his head, which is encircled by a halo of yellow light. He swings gently in the breeze from one elegant leg, the other bent down behind it as a sort of physical and visual counterbalance. His hands are—clasped? tied?—behind his back. For more than one hundred years, tarot readers have wondered at Pixie’s illustration, turning its meaning over in their minds and deciding how it might reflect a truth personal to them alone. And the numbers of those handling cards are growing: the early pandemic years saw a boom in the number of tarot cards sold in the United States, causing some game companies to double their printing in 2020 and 2021 to keep up with demand. In this month’s featured text, The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays, 1959–1987, Joseph Campbell reflects on the cycle of humanity’s love of the occult in the essay “The Occult in Myth and Literature” (302): The Old Bronze Age realization of a micro-macrocosmic unity is returning, and everywhere all the old arts that once were banned are coming back. I have myself been traveling about quite a bit these years, from one college campus to another, and everywhere the first question asked me is, ‘Under what sign were you born?’ The mysteries of the Tarot pack, the I Ching, and Transcendental Meditation … Well, all this is just the beginning, the first signaling of a dawning realization of the immanence of the occult, and of this as something important for our living. When Campbell published this line in 1977, the curtain had just gone up on the Broadway revival of Hair, the “American tribal love-rock musical” of 1967. The show had been regaling audiences with its representation of hippie subculture for ten years, enthralling and alarming viewers in equal measure with nudity, drug use, and occult references alongside a vehement rejection of the country’s puritanical Christian philosophy. The musical is called Hair, for gods’ sakes, the ultimate symbol of liberation and power across cultures for millennia from the Indigenous peoples of the Americas to ancient Greek gods and heroes. “My hair is holy,” Dionysus says in Euripides’s tragedy The Bacchae. “I grow it long for the god.”  Hair is packed with references to Christianity as both allegory and foil to the tribe’s aims and antics. Alongside these are vibrant celebrations of the natural world, especially the stars, a mainstay of the occult. Even though British astrologer Neil Spencer referred to “Aquarius,” the show’s anthem, as “astrological gibberish,” it had no bearing on its wild and sustained success. The Civil Rights movement, the sexual revolution, antiwar fury, and women’s liberation made it imperative for Western seekers to find beliefs that better suited their ideals of love, freedom, and connection with all things. Christianity fell extraordinarily short in all areas, leading to a surge of Eastern practices in the US and England, as well as a rebirth of many esoteric practices, including tarot and astrology. The “ancient” feeling of these disciplines resonated with people looking to escape the confines of their tight-laced post–World War II upbringing, even though many of these practices had been refined at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it was music that offered the direct pathway to the ineffable. Campbell was given the opportunity to see the Grateful Dead in concert near the end of his life. He told his audience in a lecture after the show that “this is Dionysus talking through these kids.” He further describes the experience in The Mythic Dimension: Rock music had always seemed a bore to me, but I can tell you, at that concert, I found eight thousand people standing in mild rapture for five hours. The place was just a mansion of dance. And I thought, ‘Holy God! Everyone has just lost themselves in everybody else here!’ (260-261) “[Music] is the oldest form of religious worship,” writes Peter Bebergal in his 2015 book The Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll: when magic and religion were inseparable, where myth was communicated through a colorful and often wild blending of costume, song, and dance. This type of yearning for freedom and self-expression is our first and earliest glimmer of the spirit of rock and roll, a primeval and communal method to transmit a truth, to celebrate, to mourn, to sacrifice something to the gods. And to do it together. (18) Occultism isn’t one set belief, making the figure of the witch the perfect symbol of counterculture, outcasts, and weirdness: too loud, unpredictable, otherworldly, and, most terrifying of all, sexually liberated. An accusation of witchcraft is still mortally dangerous in many parts of the world; far from a kitschy symbol of rebellion, the witch is a declaration of freedom in spite of legitimate deadly risks. It’s little wonder that witches were invoked in the face of life-or-death causes like Civil Rights and the Vietnam War, or by groups like WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) founded by radical feminists to fight for women’s liberation. One of the leaflets WITCH dispersed at their protests in the late 1960s read: If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a Witch. You make your own rules. You are free and beautiful. You can be invisible or evident in how you choose to make your witch-self known. You can form your own Coven of sister Witches (thirteen is a cozy number for a group) and do your own actions ... You are a Witch by saying aloud, "I am a Witch" three times, and thinking about that. You are a Witch by being female, untamed, angry, joyous, and immortal. (Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshipers, and Other Pagans in America. Margot Adler, 1979) Witchcraft, this vector of fascination as well as fear, was criminalized in Britain until 1951 when the old law was repealed and replaced with the Fraudulent Mediums Act. Hair itself wasn’t permitted to be performed in London’s West End until 1968, when the Labour government repealed a 1737 law that prevented the show on the grounds of nudity and drug use, itself a revolutionary act for free speech that boosted the show’s popularity in the UK. Once the curtain was up, reviews began flowing in. Most were positive, if overwhelmingly English; Philip Hope-Wallace wrote for the Guardian, “It is all a good deal less awful than it sounds but will probably find its own proper audience, if that is the right adjective.” The renewed celebration of the witch, and the discomfort and alarm that follows, is not so different from the journey of the Hanged Man himself: someone unfamiliar with the tarot will often take the card as a bad omen based on the name and imagery, but spending time with the card, turning it over and examining the details with an open mind, might lead them to some surprising revelations. A.E. Waite of the Smith-Waite deck wrote The Pictorial Key to the Tarot in 1910, which includes descriptions and interpretations of Smith’s illustrations. He wrote of the Hanged Man that “it has been called falsely a card of martyrdom, a card of prudence … a card of duty.” A rope ties you in place where you hang, uncomfortable and unable to release yourself. What it does mean, Waite writes, is enlightenment: expansiveness, perspective, intuition, circumspection, prophecy. One interpretation of the card even says the Hanged Man put himself up there, tying himself deliberately to the Tree of Life to gain knowledge from experiencing a new perspective. As long as there are cultural norms, there will be the drive to rebel against them, and the witch will be there. As the Hanged Man alarms passersby in his personal quest to achieve enlightenment, the witch strives for truth and empathy with the full knowledge of disruption and fury it will inevitably provoke. The old arts that were once banned are back. A “micro-macrocosmic unity” is what makes the occult appealing, and is why it will always, in some form, return. We need this connection: tying ourselves upside down to the Tree of Life, a radical rejection of convention, a tug-of-war between duty and spiritual expansion—and a responsibility and connection to one another.

Before diving into the symbolism of the Star card of the tarot, let’s first consider its predecessor the Tower, whose sudden onslaught of destruction will have already descended (precisely) like lightning upon us. By now, however, we have hopefully distanced ourselves from the drama enough to compartmentalize events in the gentler, more manageable abstractions of “dissolution” or simply of “loss.” Sometimes this act of distancing comes naturally with the passage of time, while at others it requires a conscious choice. The element of conscious choice has a significant place in the present look into the symbolism of the Star card because it invites Logos into the mix. “Logic?” you ask. “Intellect and reason in the business of symbols?” Yes, because it’s the literalist—the dogmatist of symbolic hermeneutics who leans exclusively on the intuitive/associative/experiential encounter with the image—who believes the intellect has no part to play. For Logos is both complementary and necessary to an albeit predominantly intuitive, irrational process—and if the adjectives complementary and necessary are not ample, then let me add inescapable. We’ll return to the Logos later, and to its correlation with choice, so please hold that thread. For now, however, having found ourselves here at ground zero, centered and empowered to consciously contribute as creators and cocreators to our own rebuilding, we are able to proceed with options of far greater scope and scale had the lightning not come in the first place. For such is the case with foundational work: the deeper we’ve gone—or should I say been sent?—the greater the potential if we choose to “build big.” So, on to the images of the Star card as our formative stage of renewal, and with a fuller appreciation of what they can teach us not about loss but rather about what we can do now that we’re back. First we register the gestalt, the overall feel of the scene: distinctly serene, more at ease and in flow, and all in a deeply natural setting. Clearly it is nature’s harmonious aspect, her tending, nurturing side, not her destructive one. However at ease the scene may be, it is not idle, as demonstrated by the calm industriousness of the central actor and action of the card: the Woman. Her composed demeanor deepens the unembellished simplicity (and sincerity) of her nakedness. She is strong. And without need or concern for the egoic armor (symbolized by clothes) that we must don to defend ourselves from all the physical, social, and psychological dangers that accompany the human context. Vulnerable? Sure. But without urgency or fear. She instead possesses a quiet kind of confidence that seems to affirm all the more that shebelongs here, her sensibilities and sensitivities exposed to a more immediate relationship with her environment and story—in short, with her myth. I am tempted to say she is vulnerable to destiny. But not as a victim, not as acted upon as we see in the Tower, but rather by choice. Call it destiny in its dharmic sense, where one is simply on the Path, playing one’s part, doing precisely what it is one is called to do. One foot is placed on top of the water and not submerged in it as one would expect, emphasizing the conscious over the unconscious (for water is, among other things, an archetype of the unconscious). This highlights the conscious, rational attributes of choice and the capacity to act, both Logos based and intellect initiated. On that note, I must insert an irrational criterion for relevant reasons to come—and because it’s just too valuable to omit: Hope—an irrational, emotional phenomenon quite beyond the domain of intellect. For the Star card is widely known as the card of hope, which is probably the single most potent initiator and ally to renewal. For sake of time, and rather than defining hope, to fully appreciate its value one needs only to consider its opposite: the ruinous destroyer despair (literally “de-hope”) and move on. So, hope. Sometimes descending by grace, but more often requiring us to open the door and get involved via conscious choice and action. In short, we must jump-start an attitude. Enter Logos. And please note that this simple act need not take more than a moment—less than even a second!—to perform its priceless function. However brief, this intellectual maneuver is paramount, and not just with hope but with all kinds of content and contexts. Although it’s not my intention to get into the distinction between symbols and signs right now, I’ll share the following popular quote from Jung as an analogy, in lieu of an explanation, of what attitude can do: “Whether a thing is a symbol or not depends chiefly upon the attitude of the observing consciousness.” (The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Psychological Types, 603) Point being, with attitude we can actually shift our conscious perspective, and in so doing we shift the whole (apparently) external environment, dimension, reality—whatever one wishes to call it—to reveal that which formerly lay hidden, embedded in the topography of our initial encounter. And this, as you’ve probably gathered by now, I find astounding. With that point established to reinforce our focus on attitude’s relationship to what we can do, let’s return to the Woman, because for all this talk of being conscious and “above,” her business is quite “down.” She is kneeling down, looking down, pouring water down from jugs in her hands, all of which demonstrates a conscious perspective toward the unconscious, toward the foundational, with an attitude of tending—in other words, to “inner work.” In this image one cannot help but think of Demeter, the Eleusinian Mysteries, and its theme of renewal, initiated first through Persephone’s abduction by Hades (surely a Tower event) and subsequently by Demeter’s fierce quest to retrieve her daughter from the underworld. She attends to the chthonic, the unconscious (cf., the jug that the Woman pours into water). Third is Demeter’s archetypal role as grain goddess. And this is the conscious, the field of life symbolized by the other jug poured upon earth. Joseph Campbell speaks to both the conscious and unconscious sides of renewal while addressing the figures on the Terra Nouva Sarcophagus: “Demeter is seated on a sacred serpent-coiled basket, and from the mystic basket precedes the serpent, that which sheds its skin to be born again and which represents the engagement of life-giving consciousness in the field of time and space.” (Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, 195) But we have further correlations to Demeter in the Woman’s bright golden hair. Straight from the poet’s mouth nearly three-thousand years ago: … a lovely fragrance from her perfumed veils spread about and a brightness from the immortal flesh of the goddess shone far away and her blond hair fell to her shoulders and the sturdy house was filled with light like lightning (The Homeric Hymns, Charles Boer, Trans. 139) Consider a moment all the brightness in the passage above. And next, how the Woman’s hair matches precisely (and only) the gold of the one larger star on the card. Is she then linked to a sun symbol, albeit shaped like a star? I’m fine with that. Or have we forgotten our sun is a star? Or so it is in the empirical fantasy. Since archetypal interpretation tells us sun is masculine, then we have an exception, which increases its emphasis via uniqueness. In short, there is something exceptional to the Woman’s sun connection, less as an ultimate symbol of Source or Being but rather more worldly in the Demeter sense—as in that which shines down and causes the flora and grain to grow—from germ to flower, from darkness to star.

Hence in a season of calmer weather Though inland far we be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither, Can in a moment travel thither, And see the Children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. (Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood by William Wordsworth) The vernal equinox marks the transition from winter to spring here in the northern hemisphere, and our friends in Australia can now breathe a sigh of relief as a tough, hot summer transitions into autumn. Regardless of where you are, this astronomical moment marks a boundary both factually and symbolically. Appropriately enough, this month our MythBlast family has been musing on the seventeenth trump card of the tarot: the Star. The Star is one of the goddess cards in the tarot. There are a number of such cards representing different aspects of the “Divine Feminine,” that is to say a variety of characteristics ascribed to the symbol as “feminine” based partly in a socially constructed and culturally inflected set of experiences and conceptual structures and then projected into that misty ganz andersein (Ultimate Other) lying just beyond, or below, normal waking consciousness. I'm being careful in this description, because describing something as “one aspect of the Divine Feminine” suggests that these representations are prototypes, as if they describe a set of “divine” characteristics or Platonic Forms to which human beings are supposed to aspire and against which human lives are to be judged. I think this view is exactly backwards. Symbols like these are projections of our psyche captured in metaphor—the metaphors can be beautiful, but their value depends upon the degree to which they effectively disclose, or direct our attention to, deeper parts of our own experience. Metaphors like these put us in relationship with the world and, when our understanding of the world changes, so too must those metaphors. As civilization moves into a less binary understanding of life and culture, these metaphors will have to morph as well. In any case, while women can be stereotypically understood using these aspects of the Divine Feminine, the symbolic topography of Divine Feminine must first be understood as having been determined by what a particular culture, situated in a particular time and space, deemed to be a “woman.” The same goes for the masculine side of this traditional binary. There is a chicken-and-egg analogy working in the background here, but it's important to get the order of signified and signifier right. With that safety lock in place, let's get starry eyed. The Star, as a verb instead of a noun, seems to work regardless of current social constructions. Operationally defined, she symbolizes the boundary layers and the mode of transit between daily, mundane consciousness and that which lies beyond. Discerning readers will have noticed that in some sense the metaphors that link us to what lies beyond mundane consciousness will, to mundane consciousness, often seem to be understood as lies. What lies beyond often seems to lie. That’s always the problem with metaphors. The fact that it’s ironic and corny at the same time is always the first indication of a deeper hermeneutical, and hermetic, mystery. The Star card typically shows a woman at the water's edge, sometimes a river, sometimes a pond, but the water always represents the Great Sea. She kneels beside it wielding two jugs, one held aloft pouring water (or starlight) onto herself and the other slung below, pouring that water out into the world. She inhabits the shoreline, marking the tide, straddling the boundary between Here and There, making accessible the Yonder Shore or, at least, the watery starlit pathway that transits Here to There. In normal life you may have had the experience of walking the beach at night when the water is still, rippled by hushed zephyrs, and felt the sea dew gentle itself against your face: a barest intimation of the vast and mostly opaque ocean depths rolling out of sight to the horizon. Arguably, most days, our unconscious selves communicate in the same way, as the slightest, almost unnoticeable mist bringing material to consciousness from what seems a mostly opaque and inscrutable depth rolling out of sight beyond the horizon of normal consciousness. It whispers misty intimations (I really want to say mythsty intimations). Sometimes we recognize and rejoice in these mythsty intimations of immortality, but, more often than not, we perceive these whispers as nothing more than a spray of healthy hydration that keeps the hardening skin of adulthood softer, and more pliant, and more functionally alert. So, to normal waking consciousness, the Star card represents a kind of humidifier—although, admittedly, sometimes a fire hose—powered by the unconscious. We notice it only when we shut it off or when it runs out of starlight … I mean, water … and our skin, or the protective membrane of mundane consciousness, dries out and hardens, or cracks. The metaphor here suggests how we can share in this transverberation by absorbing the sea dew, the spilled starlight, and then acting as a conduit, spilling it out into the world. Spilling starlight into the world is a pretty dense, if twinkly, metaphor, but it would come down to something like this: once one is in touch with the Great Sea—and the “Great Sea” here is a kenning for the Jungian unconscious or even for the universal architecture which Aristotle reminds us is accessed through wonder—one cannot help but spill the water from that Grail out into the world. Twinkle twinkle. Thanks for musing along.

In The Power of Myth, Bill Moyers remarks that the Lord’s Prayer begins with, “Our father, who art in heaven,” and then asks Joseph Campbell if it could begin with our mother. It is a delightful trigger for the mythologist to talk about female metaphorical images as a representation of the world. In this context, the field of the symbolic images, the challenge of March’s MythBlast theme is to delve into the tarot card called the Star. We can use Moyers's curiosity as a prompt to remember the history of the Waite Tarot, a popular deck which dates back to 1911. It was created by the American-born British poet and mystic Arthur Edward Waite (1857–1942), and is sometimes also called the Rider-Waite, bearing the name of its first publisher, the British company, William Rider & Son, Ltd. (which is still alive, so to speak, as a part of Penguin Random House UK). However, it is also known by the name of Rider-Waite-Smith, acknowledging its British illustrator, Pamela Colman Smith (1878-1951), a theatrical designer, artist, and writer. So, in this text, Rider-Waite-Smith it is. Card number seventeen, the Star card in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck shows a woman kneeling like the ancient knights: one leg on the ground and the other in a flexed position. Two knees to the ground means full and strict submission, so in this case the individual has surrendered to their fate, but the other leg in a flexed position shows that the ego is properly in its structuring, balancing function. “I surrender of my own will: having said this, do Thy will,” we can imagine the woman murmuring. We know that this position in general is also associated with a duly respectful and humble attitude towards people and life—and her bowed head confirms it. She is still young, but she appears to be well on her way to becoming a wise old woman, taking the responsibility for her life into her own hands and yet listening to the mystery.  Her right leg is solidly resting on the ground—grounded—representing her practical abilities, skills, and, perhaps, her attentiveness to the traditions she inherited. But the other foot is gently resting on a pool of water, usually a symbol for the Source of Life, showing us her willingness to listen to her intuition and inner resources. She holds a jug of water in each hand, the one in her right hand pours into the pool (the unconscious) while the jug in her left hand empties onto the earth (consciousness). An auspicious image by all means, if we consider the lush, fertile greenery around her, as well as the bird on the verge of taking flight in the background. The two feminine elements, earth and water, seem to be at peace and in balance: common sense and inner voice. In the image of card seventeen, the feminine principle in women and men makes the connection between the water element (usually linked to the emotions) and the earth, generally associated with firmness, strength, determination, objectivity, practicality, and structure. This individual has her foot on the ground, in touch with and stabilized by the earth. It is also on earth that the material treasure of gold is found, so in a broad sense the earth can be related to prosperity. The background of the card shows eight stars with eight points, one star being larger in relation to the other seven. Let's remember the Star’s tarot card number is seventeen: if we add the numbers one and seven we will have eight again. In both Eastern and Western cultures, the number eight is a lucky number and related to the idea of growing, victory, and prosperity. The woman is naked, which symbolises her naïve attitude—no shame, no social masks, a perfect state of trust. It’s not accidental that this card is associated with hope, faith, purpose, renewal, and good paths, as well as a bridge to something larger than material life and the present, something we can call spirituality. In the Mythic Tarot, the Star card features Pandora, possessed by curiosity, opening the tricky box given to her by Zeus, designed to obtain revenge for Prometheus’s theft of fire, which was then given as a gift to the human race. We can see Pandora’s wow face at the exact moment she sees its contents released into the world, not yet realizing she is actually letting loose all manner of misery and evil. Things like illness, death, and probably aging too. Though she hastened to close the container, the only thing that was left behind is usually translated as hope. For the ancient Greeks, hope was an expectation without a corresponding action and might be interpreted as a sign of self-deception or delusion. Pandora must have seemed like a happy child waiting to open a Christmas package, whose jaw drops when she doesn't get exactly what was envisioned. From some future perspective, however, the present may turn out to be even better than one might have hoped, but in the moment it causes pain, feelings of betrayal, and disappointment. Pandora seems distraught in this image and therefore, in the reversed position, the card usually refers to a star traveler’s setbacks, bewildered because their foundations are not solid enough, and they may feel lost. In that case, the card is associated with a lack of faith and trust, despair, disconnection, a detour in the path, possible losses of various types (the opposite of the abundance card number eight promises). If we refer to the inverted Rider-Waiter-Smith Star card, the containers of water would fall towards the sky, showing an upside-down rain that would obviously not be in accord with nature. The starry night sky is not in the heavens, a metaphor for the peaceful state of mind known as Nirvana in Eastern traditions. What may the Star card teach us today? Perhaps it speaks to a part of our psyche that, despite the frustrations and disappointments inherent in human life, with its ups and downs, does not allow itself to be endlessly trapped in the depressions caused by the inevitable losses experienced in the process of living. That despite everything, after the necessary period of sadness and mourning, every individual has the inner resources and strength to let the dead take care of the dead, to see the successes embedded in the failures, and to find meaning enough to cling to life again and again. Somewhere out there is a dim light that shines softly like a guiding star that heals our wounds and leads us home. After all, as Campbell points out in Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, these mythological images are references to the field of potential experience of the human spirit. “These are to evoke attitudes and experiences that are appropriate to a meditation on the mystery of the source of your own being,” says Campbell. It is indeed a pleasant challenge to take on. In the Christian tradition, we can remember the saga of the three wise kings who were guided by the star of Bethlehem to pay their respects to the divine child. And let's face it: the star was up there in the sky, in plain sight, within everyone's reach. But only three people were open enough to see what it meant. What remains is the notion that the symbols and synchronicities are all around, but it is necessary to pay attention to the signs and stars so as not to let them, or our own lives, pass by unnoticed.

Jean Marion Erdman, choreographer, director, co-founder of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, and wife to Joseph Campbell for 49 years, was born on February 20, 1916. This week, in honor of her birthday, Diane McGhee Valle explores how the polarities in Erdman's life were integral to her art. We cannot know Joseph Campbell without knowing Jean Erdman, and likewise, we cannot know Erdman if we ignore the life and work of Campbell. This week we celebrate the birthday of Joseph Campbell’s spouse, Jean Erdman (Feb. 20, 1916 – May 4, 2020). The occasion presents an opportunity to note a contrasting variety of influences on her life and artistic work. Erdman was an extraordinary creator, performer, and producer of dance and theatre. The influences discussed here, can be seen as opposing tensions that pushed, pulled, and ultimately guided her to experience the fullness of life. Each challenge she faced provided insights that allowed her to achieve the epitome of artistic expression and create sublime works of art. Her challenges can be viewed through lenses of culture, geography, the art of dance, and of course, illuminated by her relationship with Campbell. Joe Campbell frequently wrote about the psychological concepts and opposing tensions of duality and non-duality. Whereas duality refers to a split or fracture of our consciousness, non-duality represents the complete union of it. We often long for the distinctions of duality to be eliminated; true art offers a way to discover this divine form. It can sometimes be encountered when extraordinary beauty brings “aesthetic arrest”; when opposites seem to dissolve, and a viewer experiences a sense of “wholeness, harmony, and radiance”. (See Campbell’s discussion of proper art in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, 100-102.) Dance can also offer these qualities, and is “a powerful way of embodying and realizing the moving potential of the human soul”. (Jean Erdman Papers. 1939 – 2001. 18(2:2):4, New York City Public Library Collection) Although a dance-maker could create choreography for the purpose of special effects or to induce desire, both Joe and Jean did not consider this approach to be powerful or “true”. Instead, they believed, proper art is realized through the liberation from clichéd earthly ideas. In The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Campbell observed that both the mystic and the artist show similar innovative insights. For both, “It is of their own inmost truth brought to consciousness: by the mystic, in direct confrontation, and by the artist, through reflection in the masterworks of his art.” (91) An artful choreographer may hone a somatic approach to movement invention. She may actively pursue the fluctuations between the conscious and unconscious mind and permit these to interplay in metaphorical ways, ultimately to be expressed by the moving body. For dancers, movement can be qualitatively analyzed using a system of opposites. The choreographer finds artistic opportunities by selectively passing through and among the opposites to create a visual interest in the human form. For example, force can range from heavy to light; the speed of the dancer can vary from fast to slow; and directionalities are assigned terms, such as forward or backward, right or left, high or low. Body shapes are also defined within frameworks of opposites, illustrated by terms such as symmetrical or asymmetrical, straight or curved, large or small, wide or narrow, and so forth. Exploring these possibilities could go on ad infinitum. In the art of concert dance, Jean Erdman drew from the entire spectrum of possibilities. She was a genius in her methods. Her selected actions were derived from both from basic skills and a priori knowledge, and also from various cultures and artistic styles that she had studied. These experiences gave Erdman a vast store of dance knowledge that provided her greater mastery of the body and opened avenues for artistic innovation. Reared in Hawaii, Erdman learned well from her childhood dance experiences. She practiced the ancient Hawaiian sacred traditions, especially hula, and was deeply interested in the traditions of Japanese and Chinese theatrical styles. She studied American tap dance and learned the basics of modern dance from an innovative teacher while at the Punahou School. These opportunities turned her attention to the remote philosophies and values of Asia, and these teachings subsequently left a deep impression on her identity. Jean identified as Oriental and Polynesian but, she acknowledged, the modes of living and thinking were often at odds with those of her family’s old New England roots. (Jean Erdman Papers, 1939 – 2001. 7:8) One of Erdman’s challenges was to resolve the tension between these internal opposites. Erdman noted that distinctive dance traditions developed according to location and culture but also revealed that all humans are essentially the same. This idea seemed to parallel the theories of ethnologist Adolf Bastian (1826 – 1905). Following both Bastian and C. G. Jung, Erdman recognized that traditional dances frequently retained the characteristics of ancient archetypes and were steeped in mythology and thus, often timeless in their meanings. She felt, “There is value [in] the uniqueness of each dance tradition – and that each style should be approached as a complete unity.” (Jean Erdman Papers, 1939 – 2001, 10(1:2):9) Much of Erdman’s early professional dance training took place under the tutelage of several significant 20th century icons, such as Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman. Each choreographer had invented a dance style that bore the name of its originator. But Erdman eventually came to the opinion that such individual methods and styles were pieces fractured from the glorious whole of movement possibilities. For art’s sake, she sought release from the subjective sentiments of her respected masters. She advanced the position that an individual cannot claim ownership of a technique or dance, and stated, “The style belongs to the dance, not to the dancers.” (The Ecstasy of Being: Mythology and Dance, 162) Erdman subsequently sought to transcend the elements of distinct styles and use the capacity of myth to give strength and structure to her dances. In the early 1940s, Erdman briefly sought the company of the New Dance Group to gain choreographic and teaching experience. The Group was an association of Erdman’s peers from the various modern dance camps in New York. Most members were strong-willed women who held deep ideological beliefs about socialism. Erdman soon discovered that the Group did not provide the creative freedom that she sought. It seemed the Group’s call to “freedom” frequently became a story for political advocacy and propaganda. It was a difficult decision, but ultimately Erdman pulled away from the collective to become the agent of her own myth.  She went forward using, as her husband wrote, the “courage to let go of the past, with its truths, its goals, its dogmas of ‘meaning,’ and its gifts: to die to the world and to come to birth from within”. (Campbell, J., The Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology,  677 – 678). One of the most transformational influences for both Erdman and Campbell was their love story. Through Erdman’s early days of college and professional career, Campbell was her mentor. As they matured together, she achieved the place of his intellectual equal. They were well-matched in their social abilities, as well as their mutual fascinations with myth, literature, religions, philosophy, and aesthetics.  In 1972, they collaborated to co-found the Theatre of the Open Eye. Throughout their careers, the two often operated at great distances from one another; yet, their personas melded so closely they seemed of one consciousness, an idea symbolized in Hindu mythology by the image of the androgynous deity, Ardhanarishvara. In this deity, the paradox of the opposites form the unity of the male and female principles, transcending all distinctions. Such a union is a true and proper likeness of this remarkable couple.

The magician made a modest request. Could he and his friends from the local chapter of the Society of American Magicians perform the “broken wand ceremony” at my grandfather’s open-casket, Catholic funeral? My resistance, bordering on physical revulsion, to the casual syncretism of wand and crucifix is difficult to explain and makes me sound like a cultural bully, but I think Joseph Campbell can help me out here. Throughout the history of the Christian cult,” he wrote in Creative Mythology, “the liability of its historicized symbols to reinterpretation in some general mythological sense has been a constant danger.” Or, put another way, keep your wand in your pocket. We do our own magic here. Indeed, we have our own magic wand. According to my treasured Dictionary of Symbols (a Penguin reference), the Bishop’s staff or “crosier” has the same approximate function as a magic wand, both of which confer hieratic status upon the owner. “Like the staff, the wand is the symbol of authority and of second sight.” And yet, the symbols appear to be in competition rather than mutually reinforcing, evoking from me a swift rejection to the Magician’s plea. And what was he asking for? Nothing more than the radical inclusivity one might expect of a mythologist. And yet, Campbell, whose unum mundum philosophy underlies every important work of his oeuvre, recognized the limits of interfaith exchange. “For, as every serious study of intercultural exchange has shown, it is simply a fact—a basic law of history, applicable to every department of life—that materials carried from any time past to a time present, or from one culture to another, shed their values at the culture portal and thereafter become mere curiosities or undergo a sea change through a process of creative misunderstanding” (Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology, 137). In short, the pairing of your Wal-Mart magic wand with our bishop’s sacred crosier does credit to neither, bringing the dime-store novelty a step closer to a status it frankly should never have and simultaneously taking the fun out of it. Or, worse, from the Catholic’s point of view, the puissance of cross and crosier are reduced, their mystic voltage diminished, the spiritual charge sputtering from the association to a cheap contender in the field. It is a sad fact of life that men cannot help comparing their wands. When Harry Potter shows up in the Little Hangleton graveyard in a duel with Lord Voldemort, their respective wands, both composed of a phoenix-feather core, refuse to attack one another. They are “brother wands.” The officiating priest at my grandfather’s funeral would probably balk at recognizing any “brother wand” equivalences at play in the Requiem Mass underway in the Sanctuary. More typical is the wand contest of the book of Exodus, where Aaron throws down his staff and it becomes a snake. Not to be outdone, Egyptian magicians do the same. Aaron and Moses watch as their predatory wand literally swallows the wands of the opposing tribe, the Egyptians. Catholic magic, it could be argued, is on the order of miracle, never a “trick.” It is a miracle going by the tongue twister transubstantiation in which ordinary bread is transformed into the body and blood of Christ. The distinction between miracle and trick is not always obvious. When a professional illusionist is about the do the big reveal where the broken egg emerges from the hat as a full grown rabbit, he might (in simpler times) be heard to say “Hocus Pocus Dominocus,” a medieval corruption [many scholars agree] of the words “Hoc Est Corpus meum” (This is my body) said by the priest to announce the completion of the mystic conversion of flour to flesh. So, on that level, the magician could be forgiven for thinking he is among friends. And what about that water into wine business? And those loaves and fishes? How is the magician asking you to pick a card, a different species from the Savior telling the women to roll back the stone? Are they not at least on the spectrum of the same archetypal figure? If so, why do I find the idea of a magic wand in church so provocative? Campbell had a similar reaction to a third-century panel of graven images which once adorned the ceiling of Rome’s Domitilla catacomb. “In the center of the panel, where a symbol of Christ might have been expected, the legendary founder of the Orphic mysteries appears, the pagan poet Orpheus, soothing animals of the wilderness with the magic of his lyre and song” (14). It’s not just an anachronism. It ignores the ocean of philosophic difference separating the Orphic mysteries and the early Church and, maybe worse, ruins the aesthetic. It doesn’t belong. It’s the wrong kind of magic. The magician’s request to place his magic wand in the open casket of the late Jack Steck, my beloved grandfather, was not a crime, nor a sin. It was just presumptuous. Catholics are no longer a miracle-dependent faith community. We’re more like this: I never saw him calm the sea Nor change the water to wine But he has calmed the rage in me And changed my heart and my mind I never saw him multiply the loaves and fishes one day But he has multiplied my love which grows more when given away. I wrote this song to remind the audience or congregation that the best miracles do not require the suspension of the laws of physics.  So, nothing personal, Magic Man. I know you loved my grandfather who, himself, was a card-carrying member of your society. But it’s no longer about magic. We’ve moved on. The magicians ignored me. When they got to the coffin, they encircled it, spoke their words of commendation, snapped the wand in half, and placed it somewhere on the body of my grandfather. It was inappropriate, ill-considered, contrary to rubrics of the one true faith, and absolutely adorable.

The wheel of the year ROTATes and the next card in the TAROT pops up. What card did we pull out of the Year of the Rabbit’s hat for 2023? The next one: The Magician. Tarot decks typically display roughly the same symbolic features for this card. A mercurial figure holds aloft a scroll, or a wand, or a hollow-tube-to-bring-down-fire-from-heaven. Before him we see a table prepared for some kind of work: a workbench, or a scrying table, or an altar. Tools float in his vicinity or are laid out on the table waiting for the action to begin. In Frieda Harris’s deck he’s shadowed by an ape. Hm. This month we’re looking into Campbell’s Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology. We now live in an era in which mythology had to become creative rather than inherited. How do we appropriate these traditional symbols and retrofit them to make sense of our situation today? People who haven’t worked with symbolic structures can see the process as more magical than rational, although there is plenty of good sense floating through proper magic. What we’re being asked to do in the twenty-first century is to come up with ways to put ourselves back into a relationship with the ground of our being—whatever that happens to be. And that’s tricky because, and regular readers will recognize a common theme, the world that the old myths related us to has vanished. So how do we proceed? Well, one of the ways to uncover the ground of our existence was discussed last month when the MythBlast series took up the Fool card of the Tarot. The Fool seems to wander aimlessly while never missing a step, an idea reinforced in the classic Daoist texts which remind us that the best way to find yourself is to lose yourself. Whenever you lose yourself in an activity, you almost always discover something that seems to be most suitably you. (For instance, the religious cult I spend most of my time with, I discovered by accident, by wandering aimlessly, by leaving the road where the woods were darkest, where there was no path—the cult of the ukulele. There are a lot of really interesting people in that cult. You should join us.) Maybe that’s a MythBlast for another time. If the Fool card (and the important, but apparently aimless wandering it symbolizes) can bring us to the truth about who we are in the world, and begins to describe our relationship to living-in-the-world, then the follow-up would be understanding and articulating the life this foolish wandering recommends. The Magician, the Magus, carves the runes of that understanding. This is easier said than done. Mythology has to be creative now, but creativity can be funny. Edison seems to have captured it best when he said that invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Sometimes you have to wander a lot before you get to wonder about the wandering, and once you wonder about the wandering, you have to use the wand, the pen and ink, of your will to articulate the fire you’ve brought down from heaven, and then let the wonder determine itself. And this is where the magic comes in. You have to take the moment of aha!, the sigh, the breath, the inspired respiration of that moment of discovery and then carve that column of air—using your teeth and tongue—into a Word, a Logos, that can be transmitted not just to others but also to ourselves. I want sublime and amazing experiences, but I also want to be able to think about them—and that requires making them definite, and making them definite is always a problem because they don’t like being definite. That’s why there are so many tools laid out on the table in front of the Magician. The inspired insight, the fire brought down from heaven, must be crafted into concrete meaning using the elements available to us—earth, air, fire, water, and spirit—in order to determine it. And while I’m thinking about it, sometimes German is really helpful. The German word for “determinate” is bestimmt or bestimmtheit. But Stimmen is also the word for “voice” and so, to determine something means “to give voice to it.” Until we can say it, until we can speak it, we haven’t fully grasped or understood it. We may have had an amazing experience of some kind—and it could be spiritual, or scientific, or even pizza—but experiencing and understanding are not the same thing. Any attempt to articulate our relationship to an experience, whether that means my relationship to my spiritual adventures or even to an amazing and “heavenly” pizza (and sometimes these are the same thing), will always and of necessity be inadequate to the task. We can get close, but that relationship will always be expressed metaphorically in the language of myth and it will, therefore, always be inexact—close, sure, but never perfect. By the way, this applies equally to attempting descriptions of sublime spiritual attainment and descriptions of sublime pizza. You’ve probably had that experience. So the symbol of the Magician card reminds us that, in some serious sense, any overly serious attempt to articulate that truth will always end up a kind of lie. This, of course, is the conundrum of all mythological discourse. When we believe myths are attempts to explain the facts about the universe, all myths turn out to be lies—and when we recognize that their function is, instead, a narrative one that places us into relationship with the deep experiences of our lives, all myths are the truth. Speaking of which, the idea that all mythological speech is, in some sense, inadequate to the task of complete expression, provides a useful analysis of the craziest and most dangerous of all human beings—the ones who demand the purity of perfect clarity instead of a useful, and liveable, approximation. For more of which, stay tuned for September’s MythBlasts when I take up The Tower. I suppose there’s also the truth that any time anyone brings down fire from heaven, there’s hell to pay. Thanks for musing along!