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).

In the intricate tapestry of the Tarot, the sixteenth card stands as a potent symbol of upheaval and transformation, the tumultuous nature of the human journey. This card, known as The Tower, resonates deeply with the wisdom of mythologist Joseph Campbell, who explored the universality of the hero's journey and the transformative power of chaos. As we delve into the archetypal landscape of The Tower from Campbell's perspective, we uncover layers of meaning that illuminate the human quest for self-discovery and growth. Which, between you and me is, in most cases, not done without pain. Joseph Campbell, renowned for his concept of the Hero's Journey, emphasized that myths are mirrors of the human psyche, reflecting universal themes that transcend cultural boundaries. The Tower card, with its vivid imagery of a towering structure struck by lightning and figures plummeting, encapsulates this notion. Let's take a closer look at card sixteen. The Tower is in the process of falling down or being destroyed, perhaps by fire or lightning. The forces of “heaven” (the Self) are “angry” (“listen to me!”) and attacking the structure (the Ego). In the Waite-Rider-Smith deck, a crown has been blown off by the impact, and two human figures (an elder and a young person) are catapulted from the windows. The social mask (persona) that served so well until then, either in the construction of the Ego towards adulthood or in its deconstruction in maturity, is no longer balanced, and the divine part of the psyche (self) is generating a rattle to see if the mask can be peeled off like an old snake skin that needs to be shed so it can grow. The fall from the tower parallels Campbell's "belly of the whale" stage, wherein the hero faces a perilous ordeal that is often characterized by the disintegration of the ego. This phase signifies the descent into the unconscious where the hero must confront their deepest fears and challenges. Campbell viewed this ordeal as an essential part of personal growth, as a profound encounter with the hidden aspects of the psyche that must be reckoned with in order to achieve transformation. The Tower, in its catastrophic imagery, mirrors this descent into the abyss—an archetype Campbell would recognize as a critical element in the hero's transformative journey. It's an easy Subject to think about and reflect on, but rather difficult to digest when you're going through it. In 2020 (two or three weeks before the global pandemic lockout) I was working in Paris and stopped to rest for a few days in Florence before returning to Brazil. There, I intended to buy a new tarot card deck. Serendipitously I came across the Golden Tarot—a beautiful gift set including a faithful reproduction of the historic Visconti-Sforza tarot deck and a book describing its history and symbolism—in a neighborhood bookstore. Looking back on those days, I am still surprised that I was in doubt about whether to buy it or not, despite its affordable price (I suppose it may have been because it was missing the purple satin cloth for readings it usually goes along with the box). Fortunately, the box accompanied me on the flight back home and was a source of inspiration during the difficult times of coping with Coronavirus. The Sforza deck, commissioned by the Duke of Milan in the 15th century, is a significant precursor to modern Tarot decks and provides a fascinating glimpse into the evolution of Tarot symbolism. I learned, from reading its accompanying book, that four cards had to be recreated in modern times, for they were lost from the original Visconti-Sforza tarot deck at some point in history: The Tower, The Devil, the Three of Spades (not by chance called La Sinistra – left –in Italian, meaning delusion), and the King of Diamonds. I am not sure about the missing King of Diamonds – the book suggests it would mean a person who wants money but doesn't work to get it. However, it never hurts to remember Campbell talking about the mentality that reigned in the Middle Ages and how people of that time literally believed in figures like God and the devil. Therefore, the absence of The Tower (as well as The Devil, and La Sinistra) may represent a narrative tampering—tampering by someone in the Middle Ages, who pilfered the cards so that there would be no representation of evil in the beautiful cards decorated with real gold. But, of course, this hypothesis is my fantasy rather than historical fact. The Tower's collapse and the figures plummeting suggest a confrontation with personal and collective shadows, challenging individuals to grapple with aspects of themselves that have been suppressed or ignored. From Campbell's perspective, this confrontation is integral to the hero's journey, as it paves the way for growth and self-integration. Campbell's exploration of mythology and symbolism sheds light on The Tower's potential for personal enlightenment. Just as the hero, amidst trials and tribulations, ultimately discovers the elixir of transformation, so too The Tower card offers an opportunity for self-discovery. Campbell asserted that the journey's ultimate boon is self-realization and integration—a state of being that transcends ego and embraces a deeper understanding of interconnectedness. The Tower, with its violent upheaval, provides the impetus for this transformative journey. It catalyzes the destruction of old structures that hinder personal growth, and leads to the revelation of a more authentic and resilient ego. Ok, the old structure is crumbling. What do we do now? The Tower's chaotic energy resonates with Campbell's interpretation of myth as a psychological blueprint for navigating life's challenges. Mythology, in Campbell's view, serves as a repository of collective wisdom that can guide individuals through the labyrinth of existence. The Tower's symbolism, marked by lightning and destruction, aligns with Campbell's notion of mythic events as representing internal psychological processes. Just as lightning illuminates the darkness and reveals hidden truths, the upheaval depicted in The Tower card unveils the hidden aspects of the self. Through this lens, The Tower can be seen as a wake-up call inviting individuals to embrace chaos, if it presents itself, as a catalyst for transformation. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung used to say “when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as Fate” (Aion, CW 9ii). So, the call here may be to open up and deal with the situation in an adult, autonomous way, without waiting for the necessary transformation process to be present by external means. Throwing yourself off the symbolic tower is difficult, but letting yourself stay in the burning building can be even more psychologically lethal. This universality underscores the card's resonance as a mirror for personal experience, and invites individuals to navigate their own heroic journeys. After all, Campbell's concept of the "monomyth" underscores The Tower's universal significance. The monomyth, or Hero's Journey, posits that all myths share a common structure reflecting the human psyche's universal stages of growth and transformation. The Tower card, despite its variations in imagery across different tarot decks, encapsulates a core archetype that resonates with the monomyth's stages: call to adventure, ordeal, confrontation with the shadow, and ultimately, transformation. Finally, The Tower emerges as a powerful emblem of chaos, transformation, and self-discovery. In the light of Campbell's insights into the hero's journey, mythic symbols, and the transformative power of the unconscious, The Tower reveals its deeper significance as a catalyst for personal growth. As lightning strikes the tower and figures plummet, myth and archetype intertwine, inviting individuals to embrace the chaos and upheaval that propels them into a realm where profound transformation is possible. Just as the hero faces trials and descends into the unconscious, so too does The Tower card beckon the individual to journey inward, ultimately echoing Campbell's call to embrace the mythic adventure of being yourself, confronting one’s shadow, and emerging transformed.

The hermitage offers the seclusion required to hear one’s inner voice, a knowing that is often drowned out in the noise and bustle of daily life or, even worse, silenced by society’s enculturation. For people like me, breaking through the internalized restrictions of society requires an internal struggle, our own voices entangled with what we have been told to be. In such circumstances, solitude becomes all the more necessary to differentiate the driving forces in one’s life. Perhaps this is why I have always been fascinated by the stories of female mystics in their hermitages. For instance, in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, Parzival’s cousin, Sigune lives in a hermit’s cell. Dedicating her life to prayer, she exists on the margins of the Arthurian court and is, therefore, not bound by her courtly responsibilities. Her hermitage frees her from the repressive societal rules pertaining to women. In some ways, this bestows her with social power she would not otherwise hold. She is known for her wisdom and receives nourishment directly from the Grail every Saturday evening (438, 439). Sigune’s strength is found not in her aristocratic rank or wealth, but rather in the wisdom she has found in the seclusion of the hermitage. Sigune separated herself from society and committed to a life of poverty and prayer. Eschenbach’s Sigune resembles the female mystics who arose during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries who also separated themselves from the world in order to devote their lives to prayer. Their vivid visions were often seen as threatening, but being divinely inspired, they were not threatening to God. As the medieval scholar Caroline Walker Bynum explained, “When religious superiors denied the cup or the host to women…Christ often fed them directly in visions” (Bynum 118). These female mystics challenged the societal spaces that were not available to them by finding wisdom within. The Hermit card offers a similar invitation. In Myths of Light, Joseph Campbell tells a story told to him by Ramakrishna, a story of a tiger who was raised by goats. The tiger grew up believing it was a goat because goats were the only family this young tiger knew of the world. The tiger ate grass, grazed the fields, and bleated as goats will do. And yet, the tiger always felt out of place, unfulfilled, and experienced an unsettledness that seemed to be ever-present. One day, while the herd grazed, a large elder tiger hunting for food pounced on the herd. The goats scattered, but the young tiger held its ground; an instinctual impulse from within urged the small tiger to challenge this aggressor. The large tiger looked down in astonishment, asking why this small one lived amongst the goats. The young tiger answered with a bleat and then continued to eat grass. The strange response disturbed the aged tiger. To see one of its own so disconnected from its true nature was upsetting. There had to be something done about this situation. So the elder tiger grabbed the young one by the scruff of the neck and took it to a nearby pond. “Look,” the elder tiger said, “You are not a goat. You are a tiger.” The young tiger appeared confused, but the elder tiger kept at it, teaching the young one day-by-day the various experiences of a tiger. Eventually, the tiger nature within the young one awoke and took hold. Driven by something deep within, the young tiger stretched out as far as its body would allow and released the uncertain rumblings of what might be interpreted as a roar. At least, for the elder tiger, it was a vision of what might be possible once the young one embraced its true nature. Campbell returned to this story often, finding it meaningful, he said, for it showed how we are each a tiger living among the goats, mirroring the behaviors surrounding us and silencing the pull from within to become something different, something more, something that is more genuinely ourselves. Campbell found within this story an invitation to ignite our inner light. As Campbell states, “go into the forest, and in the forest of the night, find the tiger burning bright in your own profound depths” (138-140). For the young tiger who thinks of itself as a goat, this process of finding one’s inner light begins by separating from the herd. The image of the Hermit evokes this journey. One must disconnect from society to find one’s own inner light, the tiger burning bright in our own depths. In the Rider-Smith-Waite deck, the Hermit carries a lantern, illuminating the pathways in the darkness. The Hermit invites us to leave the material world in order to illuminate our internal world. We maneuver these depths not with our intellect but by following our intuitive wisdom, by learning to see in the dark. The paradox of this journey is that to find one’s own light, one must venture into the dark, for it is the darkness that teaches us how to find the light within.

The Hermit and Reflection My first favorite hermit was Obi-Wan Kenobi, who came to the big screen in the early summer of ’77. I suppose I was drawn to the whole package, the whole iconography of this unusual figure cloaked in a deep-hooded, earth-toned mantle, thoughtfully discerning tracks in the sand to read the tales of events just-passed. There was something different to this character from the standard Hollywood heroes and heroines whose special abilities were more overtly rendered, more consistently on display. Obi-Wan seemed to possess an unfamiliar hidden power beneath all that quiet appearance and quiet action. I recall the wonderful scene where he tells the stormtroopers (and with a simple wave of the hand) that they don’t need to see Luke’s identification, and the stormtroopers parrot back “we don’t need to see his identification”—even then it was clear that something was afoot. Luke, however, had not quite caught it: “I don’t understand how we got past those stormtroopers.” But didn’t you see him do that thing with his hand??? I wanted to blather, wide-eyed, as any ten-year-old amped on candy and movie-magic would. Naturally, we played imaginal Star Wars that summer, all the kids running around exclaiming: “I’m Luke and I’m gonna get you with my starfighter” or “I’m Han Solo and I’m gonna shoot you with my blaster!” It was weird to me that nobody wanted to be the seasoned jedi, and so I never played Obi-Wan in our games and kept my fondness for this apparently less popular figure to myself—not unlike what a hermit might do in such situations: holding a quiet, personal space for oneself, which introduces a scale of hermitting: on the one extreme, something as simple as listening more than speaking in a social setting, or taking a Friday night off to read alone and not play Star Wars with the other faculty members in your department. I think the influence of the hermit-figure can arise whether others are around or not. This approach helps make the content of the Hermit-card more applicable to our often less than isolated lifestyles. And it suggests that we aren’t necessarily obligated to engineer extreme productions of solitude that leave us shivering and alone, drifting through starlight on ice floes in the arctic sea. Nonetheless, extreme productions have extreme benefits: extreme balance, extreme composure, extreme presence. And if “extreme” sends up a red flag (as it probably should) then feel free to substitute with “very deep.” The relationship between extreme/deep solitude and social-involvement is seen in the recently-enlightened man in the tenth image of the Zen Ox-Herding Pictures, who returns after a long solitude to walk transformed among the people of the village. However, to the others he appears unchanged and unremarkable—attributes which, like an immaterial cloak, preserve the integrity of his hard-won internal solitude, and the unique individuality of this one-of-a-kind, self-aware event moving through the masses, a part of the crowd but alone. Fittingly, our word “alone” derives from the Old English eall-ana, being “all + one.” Hence the all one-ness of individuation (although it’s really two as one, or many as one, but that for another time). And with such comes the inevitable onset of “loneliness” (derived from the same root). Simply being aware of this etymological correlation (for me at least) makes the slow ache of loneliness more welcomed, if not more bearable, because I know I’m being deepened, soulfully enriched. And so concurrent with the pain, the healing virtues of individuation can be appreciated while the price is being paid. To amplify our understanding of the hermit archetype, let’s look to the other, more extreme side of our scale, like living in a cave deep in the mountains or in a remote desert, like Obi Wan did. By the way, “hermit” descends from the Greek erimίtis or, literally, “desert.” The setting is important, especially for those who find it challenging to preserve their psychological status in the turbulent face and faces of society with their perpetual influx of projections. Hence, natural settings are ideal, removing their influence altogether. As with all (or nearly all) things psychological, the hermit-stage is not a level slated for completion, to merely pass through and receive a nifty certificate or trophy to gather dust on a shelf. Rather, it is a stage to integrate, to carry and employ when contexts call for it. I prefer “stage” to “level” because it denotes a venue or environment within which one’s perspective is forced to shift to accommodate in order to competently navigate its terrain and conditions. Further, let’s keep in mind that our external environments are also reflections (to whatever degree) of our own internal, psychological environment. After all, if I’m pulled over in the middle-of-nowhere with a flat tire and without a spare, how miraculous and lovely is that epic sunset? Either way, a shifted perspective indicates a psychological transformation, whether great or small. Shifted perspectives are both the catalysts for, and the effects of, being transformed. To this point, the hermit card’s number is nine. Much can be said of nine, but for now I’ll only highlight that it’s the number of months (or etymologically, “moons”) it takes a human being to gestate in the womb from conception to its own autonomous body. The moon is a great symbol of transformation, perpetually waxing and waning from nothing to fullness and back again. Furthermore, it symbolizes reflection, which is precisely what makes it visible to us in the first place. Similarly, the business of the hermit is reflection, whether by meditation or mindfulness or what-have-you. If we look into the “environment” that surrounds the hermit-figure in the Rider-Smith-Waite deck as being also the metaphorical representation of his perspective, we see that the moon is present, albeit implied, latent in that environmental property called color. Perhaps more so than any other component of an image, color bears the message of tone, the message of “mood,” reflected in shades and hues, in degrees of dimness and brightness. Never quite pure white, but rather in off-whites, greys and blues as rendered in the card: the snow-clad mountaintops; the subdued, gently illumined, steel-blue atmosphere; even the grey of the hermit’s cloak and beard. In fact, nothing in the environment is not of a moonlike color with the exception of the bright gold lantern (consciousness/sun) that he bears along with the similarly golden staff, grounding that consciousness back down into matter-earth, down into the body—a narrative which provides us with the instructions for (and the direction of) reflection.

I pulled the card, turned it over, and there it was…Death. My stomach turned at the sight of it. It was a sunny day in New Orleans and I was captured by the atmosphere of the city. Having my Tarot cards read seemed adventurous at the time, after all, a Southern Baptist from Texas would never do such a thing! I was mesmerized by the rhythm of the shuffling cards and the delight as each card was turned over to reveal a curious image. I waited with anticipation to be told what it all meant, until the Death card revealed itself. I couldn’t take my eyes off the image. Some of the information I received that day was welcome and some less so, much like life. But the feeling of dread at the sight of the Death card loomed over the ordeal. This moment, at least as memory recalls, was my first lesson in how to hold endings. Facing our own mortality is one of the most influential catalysts in our decision-making. Peering into death’s unknowns evokes fear and we attempt to preserve our lives at all costs. In Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell suggests that the experience of death, and how we as humans conceptualize that experience, is central to the myth-making function. The way in which our ancestors welcomed or resisted death informed the earliest myths, determining the “ultimate structuring of the psyche and its dreams” (The Masks of God, Vol. 1: Primitive Mythology, 120). The threads of this mythology live within the myths we know today. And yet, in the Tarot, we draw the Death card time and again, nudging us to create a deeper relationship to Death in order to understand Death’s connection to life. Furthermore, in the Tarot, the Death card is symbolic. Its appearance heralds a change rather than our impending demise. And while Tarot cards such as the Tower suggest external change as the structures around us crumble, Death is much more personal. It invites a turning inward to something spiritual or psychological that must die in order for something new to be born. In the Rider-Smith-Waite deck, Death is bedecked as a knight, rides a white horse, and in the background the sun rises at the break of dawn. The image displays the cyclic connection between ending and beginning. Each summons the other. And in the Marseille deck, Death wields a scythe, illustrating the dark reality that the harvesting of one life nourishes another. Much like the Reaper’s scythe, the image connects death with new life, the ongoing cycle of death and renewal. Both images capture the mystery of transformation. The Death card dismantles us. It dissolves some aspects of our lives in order to create the space for something new. Sometimes, such change is welcome. Often, it is met with resistance and heartache. Either way, we are left changed. Some new form of life has presented itself to us, and we grow and develop into this new aspect of ourselves. And then the cycle repeats. Tiny deaths happen again and again in our lives, changing and shaping us. From each of these experiences, we learn about letting go. The process of releasing what no longer serves us is essential for expanding into that which does. The image of Death then appears less daunting, for we know how to make our way through these tiny deaths in our lives. We come to a deeper understanding that these tiny deaths are not our literal end but rather, an ending that offers another beginning. Campbell states in Tarot Revelations that we pass through to what he calls the mystery of “the Image of God within us” (25). The pathway to the immovable space within oneself is achieved by living through the painful experiences in life. Each tiny death in our life teaches us how to let go so, finally, when our time comes to an end we can welcome Death as an old friend. In this way, death – how we conceptualize it, our relationship with it, and understanding of it – permeates how we imagine our lives. If we find life holds a linear pattern with a beginning, middle, and end, then death leaves us in stasis, frozen in time. We then have a finite amount of time to prove our worth, to get ourselves together enough to leave a lasting impression. Like a statue atop a tomb, we are solidified, remembered by our greatest accomplishments or our worst deeds. However, if we find life holds a cyclical pattern, continually transforming from birth to death and then rebirth, then death is the next stage in an ongoing cycle. Death is the regeneration of life. We are forever a work in progress. Our ideas about death inform the stories we tell about our lives. The myths we hold dear not only tell us how death transforms us but also how to live, and hopefully live well for the generations after us. In an attempt to relate to the chaotic aspects of the human experience, we create myths that point beyond themselves, into the vast unknown, the ineffable. To stare into such depths unguarded is akin to staring at the sun without solar glasses. We are blinded. Mythology presents pathways to follow, ways in which to live a life, many of which are informed by how we imagine our death. Our myths teach us resistance to death or a willingness to succumb to it, the ways in which a life is transformed, or not. But ultimately, mythology helps the world make sense. Our stories work as protectors, shielding us from the unknown so that when we must approach it, we don’t stare into the abyss alone. Myths hold the mystery but can’t contain the fullness of it. As Campbell explains, “the imagery of myth … can never be a direct presentation of the total secret of the human species, but only the function of an attitude, the reflex of a stance, a life pose, a way of playing the game.” (Primitive Mythology, 121). And death is always a part of the game. Campbell offers an invitation. We are always welcome to change our attitude, take a different stance, or imagine a new way of playing the game. Myths evolve and change, and the invitation of the Death card is to do just that. It beckons us to take off the glasses, stare into the unknown, and imagine differently. I return to the tarot often. When I pull the Death card now, I still sense resistance, and at the same time, I welcome the change. I know it will be uncomfortable, but the process is familiar. New life emerges from that which can no longer be sustained and I have learned how to hold endings. Life has taught me how to play the game.

The problem with towers is that they’re already high up. And then there’s this other problem called gravity, accompanied by its heavyweight siblings grave (as an adjective or as a noun) and gravitas—in short, all things down and that bring us down. So it’s the “high-up” element that sets the stage. Simultaneously, in psychological terms, high-up implies conditions like ambition and egoic inflation, and even  (in milder contexts)  comfort and security. These abstract psychological correlates are good to keep in mind while this inquiry attempts to attend more to the vehicles of the metaphors—that is, to the images per se. As a brief reminder, and I think a good way to emphasize the heart of the matter, metaphors “need” concrete images to summon emotions and concepts from levels of perception that exist in the more intimate strata of the human psyche—namely, imagination, personal association, intuition, and so on. This dynamic is one of the greatest values to the detailed imagery in any of the cards of the Tarot deck. In short, through these channels, the “data” that is prompted by the image is always (and in a deeply human context) more “accurate” than what standard abstract conceptual exposition could ever hope to accomplish. That said, this essay is abundant in abstractions. But this is the only way that can be taken short of writing a poem around the topic, or of the reader simply gazing at the image of the Tower card and leaving it at that. Anyway, without further ado, let’s dive into it (so to speak). Most would agree that getting blasted by lightning from one’s seemingly secure tower (that of course took so much time and work to build) and thence sent plummeting headfirst, and partially on fire, accompanied on all sides by random debris (also partially on fire) down to the cold hard rocks below is bad. We naturally wish to preserve ourselves from such episodes. Banisters, for instance, are a popular architectural feature, preserving us from potential falls. However, to a mythologist, all such content is ambiguous. Whether in a fall or in a thing that preserves us from falling, both contain their positive and negative values. So our tower which preserves us from exposure to dangers also obstructs our contact and involvement with the world. We are safe, but also we are alone, walled in, imprisoned. This can be the case even if our tower is fine and luxurious. Let me add also that the problem is not in the tower per se—we all have them and, indeed, need them. Rather, it is in the kind of towers we build or inhabit, and that we are mindful of inevitable collapses and falls. The presence of the paradoxical (and often ironic) evolutionary values that accompany a fall slowly accrues in the awareness of those who study myth, to whom a fall is an initiation into transformation on behalf of, and upon, the soul. The root mythological metaphor of the soul’s transformation is contained in the underworld motif and in the characters, narratives, and images that inhabit it. Hence, we have so many downward (either physically or conceptually) and death-like initiation-catalysts: baptisms by water (drowning), fasting (starving to death), shamanic initiations that involve illness, deprivation, and psychedelics (physical dilapidation and losing one’s mind), and let’s not forget lightning bolts, which in the case of the Tower card, deals the initiating blow. Most obvious is that our inflation or excessive self-preservation which places us high-up is perhaps precisely what attracts the lightning-stroke. As it is in the natural world, the higher the object, the more likely it is to be struck. And let’s also consider that sometimes it is not we who place ourselves high-up, but rather that we are placed there by an outside agent. As a practical (albeit mild) example, it may have been pleasant being lifted up when you were receiving great praise from the boss at the workplace, but the next day, you may receive some subtle lightning-strikes from all the other smaller towers (i.e., envious coworkers) around you. In his master’s thesis, A Study of the Dolorous Stroke: On Wasteland Imagery in the Arthurian Legends, Joseph Campbell addresses an unusual image that occurs in several Arthurian-literature sources. He quotes: And in the midst of the chamber was a great table, and of very rich silver, placed upon four legs of silver; and upon this table was a great basin of gold, and within this basin stood a lance, perpendicularly, point downward, and any one looking at it would have marveled because it was not inserted, nor supported, nor fastened anywhere. (Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth 173) The lance described above is the object that is used to wound the grail-king through his thighs which, of course, fells him. And then (and quite literally like a tower) the castle magically crumbles in ruin and many are killed or wounded. These events are precipitated by the lance—our metaphoric lightning-bolt counterpart—which, like actual lightning, is neither “supported” nor “fastened” anywhere. Within his thesis, Campbell addresses many different mythologies from around the world in which this theme occurs—sometimes with a sword in place of a lance—and eventually, he refers to the weapon (in its general, archetypal sense) as the “lightning lance.” He also addresses it as a fertility symbol, which is quite fitting to our present inquiry into the Tower card since we could say that the fall, the downward direction, whether it be to the mythological/metaphorical underworld or simply down into the ground, is where fertilization and subsequent rebirth/renewal transpires. Most interesting to me however, is that it is this “dolorous stroke”—via lance, sword or lightning—that in the Arthurian mythology initiates the great quest to heal the wounded king, who by the way is also known as the “Fisher King'' which you may recognize in the substrata of T. S. Eliot’s infamous and notoriously mythic poem “The Waste Land.” I’d like to close with a somewhat negligible solution to managing the tower-lightning problem—although “negligible” is better than the alternative “nothing”—and simply suggest (to myself, perhaps most of all) that one should do well in building towers, in fact plenty of them, but maybe try to keep them small, cozy, and, especially, low to the ground. Thanks for reading!