In circles where myth is a topic of discussion, the name Disney has sometimes brought about unsympathetic commentary, and often for justifiable reasons. The perceived bastardization of the stories of Hans Christian Anderson and others has usually served as the launching pad for most critiques. Sanitizing the harsh realities found in early versions of folk narratives for family-friendly financial gain has been viewed as a disservice to organic human development, and there have been compelling cases made that seem to affirm such. The reality, as is often the case, can’t be quantified in binary terms. For every problematic vision of maturation that Disney might have created, there is another child who came to love fairy tales and was drawn to the rich source materials that Disney’s films were based on. Most of Disney’s coarsest critics, when it comes to fairy tales and myth, grew up worshipping their films. While Disney’s stories have been low hanging fruit for critical mythologists and folklorists to pick on, that position became more difficult to sustain in 2006, when Disney bought a Silicon Valley company originally founded by George Lucas. The company was called Pixar, and they have had more impact on the way individuals consume story than most entertainment companies combined. Most professional storytellers have embraced at least one of the major lessons that Pixar has taught to the culture at large. Pixar specialized in creating stories that could be enjoyed by people of all ages, just as Disney had aimed to. However, they also were deliberate about presenting complex psychological truths that could be understood by children yet still resonate profoundly with adults, often on an even deeper level. While Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces has become known as a seminal exploration of myth, it also has a great deal to say about fairy tales and folklore. And while heroes often conjure images of young strapping males, Campbell actually defined heroes much more broadly. “The hero, whether a god or goddess, man or woman, the figure in a myth or the dreamer of a dream, discovers and assimilates his opposite (his own unsuspected self) either by swallowing it or by being swallowed…Then he finds that he and his opposite are not differing species, but one flesh.” (89) It’s easy to get caught up in Campbell’s 1949 choice of pronouns, and Campbell’s work is far from recent acknowledgements when it comes to issues of gender identity. However, it is important to recognize that when he discusses the hero in the book, he’s looking at a psychological archetype that can be embodied by anyone—even a child. While Disney historically relied on more patriarchally defined heroes, heroines, princes, and princesses, Pixar has chosen protagonists that subvert many of those traditional cultural expectations that constitute the heroic, especially regarding children. Brave, Coco, and Onward are just a few of the Pixar stories of children acting as heroic protagonists. Most recently, Pixar has offered Luca, the story of a young boy and his friendship with a sea monster disguised as a human, and Turning Red, a tale about a 13-year-old girl who suddenly “poofs” into a giant red panda when she feels certain emotions. Both films tell stories of children who encounter unusual creatures, one within his community, and the other within herself. Both stories also offer mythic lessons about conditions of “otherness” that we encounter in our world and within ourselves. Campbell tells of a myth about a young Arapaho girl from the North American plains who encounters an unusual creature in her world: a porcupine. (45) She desires the animal’s quills, and eventually chases the animal up a tree. The tree, playing the divine role of nature, extends its trunk higher and higher, giving the porcupine more and more distance to run. The girl looks down and sees how high she has climbed. She sees her friends below beckoning her to come down. However, the little girl becomes wonderfully enchanted by the creature and eventually ascends into the sky with the porcupine. She achieved something which was within herself, made possible only by accepting and, eventually, embracing what the “other” had to offer. Without spoiling Luca or Turning Red, these stories offer this same precise theme. Is it any wonder such stories resonate across age differences, gender identities, and cultural geography? As the mythic so often depicts, the mysteries explored in these stories are universal across time and space and we see ourselves in them. Myth and fairy tales are filled with stories of magic and divine children that teach us a great deal about who we are and who we could be. Marie Louise Von Franz, a Jungian scholar whose voice Joseph Campbell valued, described the child found in mythic stories this way: “The child is thus an apt symbol of the Self—of an inner future totality and, at the same time, of underdeveloped facets of one’s individuality. The child signifies a piece of innocence and wonder surviving in us from the remote past, both that part of our personal childishness which has been by-passed and the new, early form of the future individuality.” (Von Franz, Marie Louise. Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Spring Publications, Dallas, Tx. 1970. pp. 144-145) We see ourselves in the myths of the young Arapaho girl and in the stories of Pixar. We see that which is still developing inside us. We see the potential of the heroic and our relationship to the community. We see the innocence and wonder that survives in us from the most remote reaches of our past—and who we may become in the future.

In 2022, the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s MythBlast Series will take an in-depth, year-long look at the Hero. However, this exploration of heroism will be more than a simple reification of the themes Professor Campbell outlined in his influential and perennially popular 1949 book The Hero With a Thousand Faces. A book which, by the way, appears at number twenty-eight on Time Magazine’s list of the 100 all-time best nonfiction books. For the month of January, we’ve decided to explore the subject of the child and its relationship to Heroism. The Child Hero is certainly an archetype familiar to Jungians, but beyond that, most of us can see how childhood itself often requires acts of courage that are, from the child’s perspective, heroic: wobbling, wallowing, and veering up the sidewalk on your bike for the first time is, for a child, a heroic act. In order to reveal a contemporary picture of heroism, MythBlast writers will work to decenter the hero and some of its traditional assumptions in order to reveal how the archetype may be expressing itself in contemporary life. Childhood is a time of uncomplicated heroes. When I recall my early childhood, I remember enthusiastically awaiting the next grainy, black and white rerun of Superman or the Lone Ranger TV series, which I watched with a bath towel tied around my neck as a cape, or a dime-store mask secured by a rubber band to my face, plastic six-gun by my side. My childhood heroes held no ambiguity, no nuance, and certainly no trace of corruption or impropriety. Villains were always apprehended by the hero without deadly force or personal animus. The mid-twentieth century hero unambiguously personified “the best” of humanity, and such a hero is, to disillusioned modern eyes, a farcical, one-dimensional anachronism. Heroism as a concept evolves as societies and cultures evolve. For example, in the first decade of the 21st century one begins to see the ascent of the anti-hero reflected in television shows like The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad. Finding ourselves rooting for these deeply flawed, often ignoble and selfish, even psychopathic characters may give one pause, compelling a closer look at one’s own shadowy inner world replete with its sordid desires and unscrupulous strivings for power. This is the shadow of the hero archetype and cannot be removed or separated from the archetype. The shadow of heroism is essential, it completes the hero archetype; it’s the shadow cast by the sun, the far side of the moon, the unknown, the illusory, and a powerful, chthonic psychic presence. Jung noted that the shadow is irrational, instinctual, and prone to projections and delusions, exactly like the anti-heroes possessed by it. The shadow of heroism is emerging more and more in contemporary life and the archetype is acquiring a darker, psychologically defensive quality, becoming an essentially unexamined caricature—perhaps even a banality—used to avoid examining complex contemporary cultural phenomena–particularly warfare and other forms of violence. With the ascendency of shadow heroism, having the unmitigated bad luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time or being ground up in the gears of the machinery of living while simply going about one’s daily routine is enough to qualify as heroism. Another prevalent quality of the anti-hero may be found in the tendency of onlookers to misidentify outrageous, reckless, greedy, self-interested behavior as heroic. Indeed, if there is anything like courage to be found in such behaviors, it is simply the sheer audacity to nullify social contracts and conventions while callously dismissing any concern for the well-being of society. But it isn’t hard to understand why such behavior seductively appeals to those who feel they have been cheated by life or prevented from finding success due to the interventions of conspiratorial, hegemonic forces. These characteristics of shadow heroism possess a viral character and root themselves in contemporary life to such a degree that le beau idéal of heroism—selflessness, humility, courage, and principled ethical conduct—are recherché, and have little left in common with contemporary ideas of heroism. The childhood fascination with heroes is undoubtedly rooted in a child’s experience of sweeping powerlessness and vexing dependence, experiences that generally evoke one of two fantasies: that of being rescued and saved, or, conversely, to become so skillful, smart, and physically unmatched that one dominates every eventuality, creating safety and protection while simultaneously freeing one to live an unfettered life. But what happens if, for some reason, we are unable to free ourselves from the conditions of powerlessness and dependence? All that’s left to us is the improbable hope that a hero will appear to save us. Eventually resignation turns to bitterness and those humiliating feelings are compounded by even more humiliating acts of subordination to bullies, officials and institutions, and other power brokers in the often brutal arena of social dominance. In response to this humiliation, the shadow of heroism grows deep and viciously strong. At the same time we’re crying out for traditional heroism, the shadow of heroism works against it, upending its familiar ideals and values. We’ve all heard comments about how American culture loves to build up heroes, and equally loves the sport of tearing them down. We tear them down because inevitably the hero we have is not the one we want, not the perfect one we deserve—the hero who reflects the fantasy of our perfect selves back to us. When the shadow hero—the anti-hero—is in ascendence, one reverts to simplistic thinking, unable to see the complexities and nuances of the archetype. We’re blind to the shadowy elements of heroism at work within ourselves because the shadow has malformed heroism into a dark parody of itself, insisting that overcoming our own powerlessness and need is its greatest and only justification. Far from inspiring nobility and grace, such contemporary misconceptions of heroism have freed the squalid meanness of our lives to dominate public discourse. “The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast,” as Joseph Campbell so beautifully writes in The Hero With a Thousand Faces (2), may indeed be standing on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, but they no longer wait patiently for the light to change; blind and helpless, they’re bolting angrily into Gotham City traffic with no other intention than to create confusion, chaos, and fear. Meanwhile, the traditional, mid-twentieth century hero of my childhood seems nowhere to be found. Perhaps that is all as it should be; perhaps in the long run, we’re better off without obsolete notions of heroism. Perhaps the anti-hero, having vanquished the conventional, classical hero, has done us the favor of forcing us to discover we don’t need heroes “out there” in the world. We need to find heroism within ourselves, we need to discover that we already are the heroes for which we’ve been hoping. That is the truly heroic turn: to attempt to consciously reach beyond the archetype in an effort to become unflinchingly empathetic, mercifully humane and entirely human human beings.

A theme behind Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology is the release of the mind to freedom through the creation of a living mythology. Artful dance is a superb example of a living mythology realized in both the choreographer and dance spectator. Campbell’s theories influenced the direction of modern dance in America, and especially the work of his wife, choreographer and dancer, Jean Erdman. In the closing pages of his book, Campbell advocates for the human’s unique position in history and the individual’s capacity to “activate within himself the centers of his own creative imagination, out of which his own myth and life-building” evolves. (677) Creative expressions may challenge dogma and set values, yet it may reveal the authentic nature of the self, tat tvam asi. Campbell emphasized the role of the artist for prompting awakenings of recollection (92), which are transmitted through signs, metaphors, and mythologically-related symbols. For the spectator, such transmissions “exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.” (4) Jean Erdman’s influence, from earliest dances to later avant-garde theatre, spanned more than half of the twentieth century. She trained under dance pioneering masters and joined Martha Graham’s group in 1938. Erdman subsequently expanded the conceptual boundaries of dance-making through several initiatives before launching a solo career. First, she began experimenting with mythological archetypes as thematic dance material. Erdman and Merce Cunningham then confronted concert tradition by employing improvisation in performance. Additionally, Erdman deeply analyzed numerous cultural dance styles. Erdman’s efforts were intended to better portray the realm of human experience, and thereafter, she crafted a unique aesthetic for each dance. Campbell and Erdman frequently discussed choreographic processes and themes, and he regularly wrote for the publication Dance Observer. Erdman employed Campbell’s concepts but translated them for the stage. She complemented Campbell’s patriarchal viewpoint by focusing on the inward nature of women. Erdman’s choreographies examined psychological and emotional journeys, sometimes targeting a sliver of the circular monomyth. Magnificently, Erdman’s choreographic examples hearkened to Campbell’s discussions on the historical and archetypal goddess as a living source. Erdman remarked, “The dancer so speaks of potentialities and aspects that are antecedent to words, antecedent even to the spheres of personal reflections, and constitute the primary heritage of the human spirit.” (Jean Erdman Papers, 18(2:2):4, New York City Public Library collection) We can hear Erdman and Campbell echoing each other. Campbell’s impact was so important to the whole development of modern dance that by 1985, Anna Kisselgoff, critic for The New York Times, wrote that “his influence on dancers deserved a study in itself”. Innovative choreographers, such as Erdman, are adventurers at heart. The dance-making process usually requires somatic exploration with an intimate journey into the mind. Campbell’s criterion for this “life-creative adventure” is to “let go of the past…, die to the world, and to come to birth from within.” (678) From this emerges the birth of the creative idea. Both conscious and unconscious realms must be accessed and subsequently, the images must be rendered into non-verbal language. Musical aspects of a dance are felt rhythmically and through tonal vibrating phenomena; these subtleties have access to influence levels of consciousness. Split-second shape transformations and the dynamics of force lend meaning through kinesthetic empathy. These combined effects can circumvent the clutching ego and give rise to past and present associations. To have true significance, Erdman stated, “This nonform must be expressed with the aesthetic emphasis not magical or religious.” (Jean Erdman Papers, 18(2:2):5)  The choreographer’s journey ends when the living myth of dance is given to the community. Much like DNA code, a choreographer’s work bears marks of mythological roots, psychological archetypes, and personal truths. Erdman’s dances were not created to forward political or social agendas. She did not relinquish her creative power to mathematical chance or indeterminacy, as Cunningham had done. Instead, Erdman relied on established connections, such as primordial forces, somatic sources, mythology, archetypes, kinesthetic empathy, feelings, and subliminal impressions stored from all human history. Consequently, Erdman forever altered the aesthetic of concert dance. It is possible to envision transmissions from choreographer to spectator like those occurring from one brain neuron to another. In both examples, communication occurs across a shared void.  But this middle way, the between, cannot be void because it is filled, paradoxically, with transmissions of form, yet no form. (333) Curiously, when the choreographer signals to the spectator, as with neural transmissions, each perceived message may access what was previously unattainable or mysterious. Thus, a new identity of the Self is manifested as a consequence of relationship. Erdman’s dances transcended time and space to access meanings within the spectator without dictating results outright. The individual freedom to determine associations operated as an independent and democratic process by producing a living mythology in each, the choreographer and the spectator.

I should probably warn you about bad puns and purple prose inbound this week. This month's theme is Return and Campbell spent a lot of time thinking about this topic, specifically in his analysis of James Joyce's masterpiece (or monsterpiece, depending on who you are) Finnegans Wake. The title itself is a crazy pun in a book littered/lit-raptured with crazy grammars/grimoires, designed to insure/assure that the text cannot be read/red as historical/hysterical or literal/light-aerial truth/tooth, but only as alley-gorical or myth-oh!-logical. Some context: the novel begins with the second half of a sentence, the first half of which is the last sentence in the book and so, literally/lit-airily in this book/case, the book ends at the beginning and begins at the end.  The book bookends itself. You can see where we’re headed. In the conclusion to his A Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake, Campbell reflects on the experience of reading this book: Like a millrace it sweeps down and out of sight, to strike again the paddle wheel of revolving time. As the dark torrent disappears from view, we are left standing on the bank, bewildered, yet strangely refreshed by the passage of these miraculous waters. (p. 355) I mention all this as a skeleton key to the topic more closely at hand: the turning of the year, the re-turning of light at the Solstice, and how our own lives can turn and/but never really re-turn in a widening gyre. Frankly, Campbell’s description looks like a pretty accurate historical/hysterical chronicle/carbuncle of the last few/phew! plague-filled years—although I’m not sure anyone is feeling refreshed yet. The primary pun is already present in the title of the book. It is the Irish hero, Finn, coming again/egan. What Joyce has in mind here, Campbell believes, is that as the world cycles through its stages of renaissance, decadence, and slime, resurrection awaits: brooding intently at the end, waiting to start the whole mess over again—after the wake and burial. In this case, as is the case with every funereal wake, the battlefield mess is a place set aside for supper. That means resurrection is both the Last Supper and breakfast and bookends the paddling wheel of time. Getting back to whacky re-turns, breakfast makes me think about the greatest breakfast of my life: a saffron cinnamon roll–infused, hot chocolate–saturated vision of a candle-lit goddess familiar to most children of Scandinavian descent: Santa Lucia Day. On Santa Lucia Day across Scandinavia, the oldest daughter or woman of the house, crowned with candles and wearing a white angelic gown, wakes everyone in the house with the aforementioned breakfast. It’s magical. I can still see the glow of candles in my room. The smell of hot chocolate and cardamom woke me up.  And then: Mmmmmmmmmsaffroncinnamonbuns. How’s that for a great way, a great ritual, to remind children that the light will always return to the world? You can see the previous paragraph is heavily metaphorical as well as nostalgic. So what’s the re-turn part again? Santa Lucia is another one of those religious observances mapped into the astronomical cycles of the year—and into the seasons of our lives. Santa Lucia Day, December 13th, ostensibly celebrates an early saint who received divine protection of her virginity but, more meadowphorically and lighterally, she is a little light (Latin: Lucius -> Lucy) and happens to be the Little Light that precedes and hints at the re-turning Big Light celebrated at the Solstice. It turns out that while days begin to get longer again after the Winter Solstice, sunrise and sunset don’t move at the same pace. While the sun keeps rising later until December 21st or so, the sun stops setting earlier about a week before the solstice. Astronomically that correlates with December 13th, Santa Lucia Day. Scandinavians are good at celebrating the return of light to the world since they live in a place where there is a considerable amount of darkness and Santa Lucia is a great metaphor for the re-turn to a brighter world out of the darkness of our trials, travails, and the difficult initiations that turn us on the lathe of life. So where does all this strike the paddle wheel of our revolving lives? T.S. Eliot put it this way in his poem Little Gidding: Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, Every poem an epitaph. And any action Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start. (Eliot sec. V) Although he may have been Gidding around. The Winter Solstice is a great time of year to muse about the illegible stones and paddle wheels on life’s way. The Big Wheel turns and one stage of life transitions into the next. We’ve lived through plague and division and unwelcome tribal schism, but we’re promised the light will return. That’s the good news in the burning travel log of Yuletide. Still, we have to be careful about the illegibility in a stony life. A moment of grammatical clarity, like the icy clarity of a deep December night when the starlight makes a twinkling tinkling sound as it strikes the pines, can be handy here. To turn is never to re-turn. To turn again never re-turns us to where we started. I watched the V’s of geese go by and gather for their migration on Barton Pond this week, just as I did last year—but a year of plague has called up different geese, created in me a different goose-watcher, and of Barton Pond a different epitaph. Will the hero return to the work of a hero carrying the boon of their trials? Santa Lucia Day is a good day to go walk in the woods, find the tree, listen to the starlight land, and light a candle to mark another turning of the wheel. Oh, and hot chocolate. That might summer-ize the season. Thanks for musing along.

Mythology is filled with riddles. These questions and turns of phrase were an important literary form in the Greek-speaking world. The most famous riddle is the Riddle of the Sphinx, a mysterious question about a multi-legged creature, uttered by a guardian at the entrance to the Greek city of Thebes. Oedipus solves the riddle, correctly guessing that it refers to the basic stages of human life, from birth to death. In explaining the riddle, he avoids the mortal fate of those that had been unable to correctly answer. While modern riddles are centered on fun and games, ancient riddles apparently had much higher stakes. However, the presence of riddles throughout mythic stories suggests that perhaps something beyond a clever literary device might be at work. Folklorist Elli-Kaija Köngäs-Maranda suggested that where myths work to encode and establish social norms, riddles make a point of playing with conceptual boundaries and crossing them for the intellectual pleasure of showing that things are not quite as stable as they seem. (Riddles and Riddling: An Introduction", The Journal of American Folklore, 89, p. 131) We might say that riddles are tricksters in mythological literature. There is also an inherent framework within riddles meant to keep some out. In the subtext of a riddle lies a challenge—and a reward. Where myth expands the inflexible boundaries found in other disciplines like history, riddles further stretch the bounds of myth lest we become too rigid in our interpretations and succumb to the temptation to form dogma around the ideas within our myths. Joseph Campbell was intrigued by riddles both in ancient mythology and in modern mythic literature. In A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Campbell approaches the entirety of James Joyce’s masterwork as a riddle in and of itself. In addition to approaching the totality of the novel, he also deals with specific riddles found in the text – riddles that without Campbell’s assistance would likely soar right past the minds of the uninitiated (like myself). For example, at one point in Finnegans Wake, the character Yawn riddles another character with the question, “Are you Roman Patrick, 432?” Campbell offers possibilities on the peculiar phrasing of the query, suggesting that 432 also refers to the supposed date that St. Patrick arrived in Ireland and that Yawn is dropping hints about his family. (295) To be honest, without Campbell, this reader would have never even realized this was a riddle. However, now with the proper lighting, I can see the playful game in which Joyce was engaging. In Campbell’s unearthing of the treasures buried beneath Joyce’s prose, we see the ways in which riddles are a metaphor for mythology itself – and also the ways that they defy our mythological understandings. Like myths, riddles allow us to talk about an idea without dealing directly and explicitly with that idea. They allow our minds to explore possibilities around an idea without getting trapped in unyielding structures. However, where myths leave themselves open to multiple expressions and interpretations, riddles are different in that they often point toward a singular truth or interpretation. They can easily resemble other storytelling forms like fables or parables, acting as a “solution” to a posed “problem,” instead of the open-ended interpretations we find in myths. When The Riddler uses the phrase “Riddle Me This” while taunting Batman, the word “riddle” is a substitute for the word “answer.”  “Answer me this” is what we usually mean when posing a riddle to someone. In essence, riddles demand answers. Of course, myths can be similar—though often myths don’t all lead to the same answers, but more questions. Part of the brilliance found in A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake is that Campbell resists the urge to “answer” the meaning of the riddle but remains committed to shining light on the many mythic paths, allowing the reader to make their own discoveries in the light he shines. A character named Taff, in Joyce’s source text, requests of another character, Butt, the meaning of an H.C. Earwicker riddle. Butt’s response? “Bim-bam-bom-bumb.” (219-220) Somehow, I imagine Campbell offering a similar response when a curious student would ask him about the meaning behind the notoriously cryptic Finnegans Wake. Then, Campbell being Campbell, he would likely walk the student through the numerous possibilities around the individual riddles found throughout the text, leaving the student further along in their journey, but also with the responsibility of discovering their own revelation. Like so many other mythic paths, riddles are about the journey toward their meaning for the individual traveler. The riddle of Finnegans Wake is not one to be solved. It is one to be worked through, to be explored, to be enjoyed. Campbell’s deep understanding of this is what allowed him to craft such a meaningful analysis with Henry Morton Robinson. He somehow knew that this exploration would offer a profound meaning for us as the reader, but that we might need a little help, a skeleton key. I, for one, am so glad he did. Whether we discover meaning for ourselves or not, we are left with something more than with what we began.

Readers of the MythBlast Series will, no doubt, detect a Joycean flavor to this month’s offerings not only from the highlighted text, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: Unlocking James Joyce’s Masterwork, but also from the monthly theme of Return. Finnegans Wake is a novel that eternally returns—quite literally in terms of its composition (“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s…”), and more phantasmically, like a recurring, haunting dream of life. Finnegans Wake also suggests the return to consciousness of repressed multiplicities of me-ness, awareness of which is generally sacrificed for the sake of a more orderly, logical sense of selfhood, or relational continuity and social harmony. Ending a letter to his son, George, James Joyce wrote: “Here I conclude. My eyes are tired. For over half a century they have gazed into nullity, where they have found a lovely nothing.” Lionel Trilling goes on to remark on Joyce’s observation: “…Joyce can be understood to say that human existence is nullity right enough, yet if it is looked into with a vision such as his, the nothing that can be perceived really is lovely, though the maintenance of the vision is fatiguing work.” (The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews, 1965-75) What is it that Joyce and Trilling understand about human existence that they can declare the nothingness to be lovely? Nothingness perpetually encompasses us, inhabits us in the form of the unrecoverable memories and phenomena transformed by consciousness into vague intuitions or unanswerable questions of what we were before we were born and where we’re headed when we die. When we speak of nothingness, of no-thingness, we’re not speaking of emptiness, we’re not speaking of oblivion—and we know we’re not because we feel the disturbing presence of nothing attending our every mood. Nothingness is analogous to Chaos in its archaic Greek sense: the primordial source from which all order comes, and by which it is maintained. Joseph Campbell tells us that “The self is void, the world is void; heaven, earth, and the space between are void: in this rapture, there is neither virtue nor sin.” (The Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology, 88. Emphasis is mine.) Rapture is a quality of the void, of the lovely nothing which constellates the energetic rivers of life running in and around and through us, creating and sustaining life everywhere, circulating back around into the void from which it simultaneously arises. When we inquire into nothingness as an absence of something, or as an alternative to or lack of something, we’re asking the wrong question. Shadows and holes have locations and even qualities of temporality, but they don’t consist of matter. Nothing is not a negativity contingent on some positive something. Joyce’s nullity is a reality so unimaginably rich, so pregnant with inconceivable possibility, that only surreal, lyrical, dream-like language such as that of Finnegans Wake can come close to capturing it. Silence, for instance, is often thought of as nothing, but silence is not merely the opposite of sound. Silence surrounds language, it’s a place where reason, logic, and even time itself cannot intrude. What we hear as silence a dog hears as noise, John Cage heard silence as music, and Cage himself said that “These sounds (which are called silence only because they do not form part of a musical intention) may be depended upon to exist. The world teems with them, and is, in fact, at no point free of them.” (Alex Ross,Searching for Silence, The New Yorker, October 4, 2010) Martin Heidegger insists that human existence is fundamentally a revelation of Nothingness. Jean-Paul Sartre went so far as to say that Being IS nothingness. Nothingness belongs to essence itself, and it issues forth Being. But logic tends to break down in the face of Nothingness because logic exists in relationship to matter and time, qualities that bear no relationship to the unimaginable, the unthinkable, or to no-thingness. Transcendence and nothingness are, I believe, synonymous. Experiencing the transcendent essence of being, we instantly become aware of Nothingness as the ground of being, an entirely unanthropomorphic world in which a human being is simply another thing existing alongside all other things. Freud once remarked of his own theories that they tended to, like the theories of Copernicus or Darwin, diminish man’s pride. While that may be one of the greatest humblebrags ever uttered, the lovely nullity has a similar power to absorb and disturb us in secret ways, diminish our pride; it puts us human beings in our place in the world, and in the order of things. And as I read it, this is one of the aims of Joyce’s bewildering Finnegans Wake. Similarly, that is the aim of myth: myths are, to my way of thinking, the disclosures of Nothingness that otherwise remain frustratingly enigmatic allow us to explore, or at least wonder about, humanity’s place in the world and that which lay beyond the last thought and the final cause. Myths are projections of Being much in the same way that Being is a projection of Nothingness. Human existence and the Nothingness from which it’s projected can’t be grasped by the logical, reasoning mind, but myth gives form to the void, and in a manner of speaking, it nullifies the appearance of nullity and perhaps most importantly, myth offers a consoling embrace that allows one to, at least emotionally, grasp the fecundity and freedom of Joyce’s lovely nullity. How many times have we, disheartened, muttered, “nothing matters?” It turns out that nothing matters a great deal, in fact, nothing is everything! Nothing is always, and in all ways, mattering! Nothingness contains within itself all the constituent elements of life: birth and death, astonishment and possibility, fulfillment and pain, potentiality and pathos. That lovely nothing upon which Joyce gazed, is nothing less than the dynamism of life. “Finally,” writes Campbell, “the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization transcending all experiences of form—all symbolizations, all divinities: a realization of the ineluctable void.” (The Hero With A Thousand Faces, 163) Thanks for reading.

“We all know the myth of the four ages—of gold, silver, bronze, and iron—where the world is represented as declining from its golden age, growing ever worse. It will disintegrate, presently, in chaos—only to burst forth again, however, fresh as a flower, and to recommence spontaneously the inevitable course,” Joseph Campbell writes in The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959 – 1987. [20] It’s familiar, but unhelpful, to believe that chaos exists only outside of us, “out there” somewhere. And that this chaos “out there” presses in upon our internal lives in an intrusive and disruptive manner. Yet referencing chaos as solely occurring outside of ourselves positions us as passive victims. If we could only trust the grace, beauty, flow and fluidity, which can potentially arise out of chaos, we’d then touch into the boundless possibilities that exist beyond our commonly held misconceptions. From our observed, direct experience we learn that 99.9% of creative processes happen at the border’s edge between order and chaos. For anything truly original to be born in the world, chaos must first precede it. Nothing new can emerge until we’re ready to reach into the chaos—willingly—and pull it out. Only out of chaos can a new order emanate, be this order within one’s own personal psyche or in the collective. In the apparent void, which chaos leaves behind in its wake, life renews itself. And this renewal of life occurs through the alternate filling and emptying of consciousness. Too often, though, we attempt to prevent the appearance of chaos. To avoid it we try to imagine it in advance and rush ahead of it. Or when we’re in the throes of chaos, we prematurely try to organize it and instill conceptual frameworks on it. But we usually get burnt in the process because chaos, although meaningful, is non-rational. We can never halt it. We can only accept it and heed its instructions. There’s an aspect of our psyche that “knows” chaos is the condition of potential before manifestation—the progenitor of all progress—but how do we trust this recognition when we’re facing our own personal pandemonium? And when it appears that our external order is threatened with disarray, how do we maintain faith that a divine reordering of our internal life is simultaneously occurring? How do we find the inner compass within ourselves to even locate metaphoric north when there’s seemingly a swirling, catastrophic mess surrounding us? How do we establish our center and poise in the eye of the storm? Campbell states, “Those who have identified themselves with the body and its affections will necessarily find that all is painful, since everything—for them—must end. But for those who have found the still point of eternity, around which all—including themselves—revolves, everything is glorious and wonderful just as it is.” (20) To find our bearings, it’s crucial we focus on guiding our soul into present time and reconnect with that deeper part of ourselves that “knows” and can move in concordance with the chaos. Given that we’ll always be in a dance between order and disorder, being and becoming, can we discover a way to cultivate wu wei, a state where our actions are effortlessly in alignment with the flow of life? And can we also learn to be quiet and still in the river of life and actually listen to what it requests of us? Campbell reminds us: “The first duty of man, consequently, is to play his given role—as do the sun, the moon, the various animal and plant species, the waters, the rocks, and the stars—without fault; and then, if possible, so to order his mind as to identify it with the inhabiting essence of the whole.” (20) However, as C. G. Jung said, “In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.” We often confuse self-sabotage with the chaos that births universes. The latter chaos is certainly cosmic, while the former most definitely puts us out of commission. There’s always chaos when we move into new paradigms of power, potential, creativity, and influence, but we must first question whether we’re indulging in the type of self-generated, fracturing, and distracting chaos that keeps us trapped in our obsolete and dysfunctional patterns. Here we must break the old order to create a new order—and do it consciously. Once chaos has fulfilled its task of rearranging what needs reordering, it will begin to dissipate, step aside, and allow us to gradually take the next steps towards the higher reordering that’s presented itself. Yet a note of caution here: transformation isn’t linear and the spiral of evolution will eventually bring another form of chaos to test our courage, resilience, and self-awareness because everything—whether it’s spiritual insights gained or physical challenges overcome—will return to be repeated at higher iterations of themselves. The position from which we engage the chaos also matters. It affects its alchemy. That’s why we’re continually invited to remember that our minds can’t ever leap ahead of the chaos. Only an open, assenting, non-judgmental heart can meet and accept its inevitable phases. “There is but one way to say yea in love,” Campbell writes, “and that is to affirm what is there. That is true love; and, as Paul says, ‘Love bears all things.’” (289) And we never have more light, love and inspiration available to us than when we’re in those frightening, disorienting, helter-skelter places. Sometimes it takes an overwhelming breakdown of the mind to have an undeniable breakthrough of the heart. And because chaos is the genesis of all things sui generis, the nine Muses and three Graces are far easier to access during this time. Campbell states: “This number (9) is the number, moreover, of the great goddess Aphrodite, as the personification of love, and of whom the nine Muses and three Graces are the specialized manifestations. There is a beautiful harmony to be recognized in these mythological images; and this harmony is a reference to the hidden, the occult, which sits within the universe and all things.” (255) And for emphasis, I would add the recognition of the beautiful, hidden harmony, which exists within chaos.

One of the many magical qualities of stories is that we can go to them again and again, discovering something new with each return. As we mature and grow, we find new lenses for a story that may previously have become all too familiar to us. We now resonate more closely with different characters than we did previously. We understand possibilities in the story with new, yet older, eyes. Joseph Campbell’s classic story about the tiger raised by goats (The Mythic Dimension 264-266) is a narrative that has resonated with me since the first time I heard it. I wrote about it previously through the lens of mentorship (see The Tiger King). However, I recently read the story again and was drawn not to the perspective of the tiger, but of the goats. In Campbell’s narrative, the goats are not central characters. The young tiger and the elder tiger take center stage. The goats find a young, orphaned tiger cub and raise him as a goat, which is all they know. After all, they are goats. When an elder tiger finds the young tiger cub, the goats conveniently exit the story altogether. The elder tiger spends the rest of the story trying to help the young cub see who he truly is: a tiger. It’s easy to quickly gloss over the fact that these admirable goats raised the son of a tiger that died trying to kill them. They taught him all they knew. They tried their best. They adopted and loved a creature completely unlike them, who bore the face of their mortal enemy, and made him one of their own. I can’t help but feel some empathy towards the goats in the story. Their character is inspiring. I’ve been considering what else we could learn from these noble goats—they who took in one not of their own kind. Though the earliest versions of Campbell’s tale originated in India, similar stories appeared throughout history in different geographic regions. Campbell tells us, “One of the most effective ways to rediscover in any myth or legend the spiritual ‘tenor’ of its symbolic ‘vehicles’ is to compare it, across the reaches of space, or of time, with homologous forms of other, even greatly differing traditions.”(201)  An amalgam of similar Nordic myths and folktales about parents raising a creature not of their own kind recently appeared in the world of cinema. Lamb, directed by Valdimar Jóhannsson, is the story of a childless couple in rural Iceland that make an alarming discovery one day in their sheep barn: a newborn unlike anything they've seen before, a baby creature with human qualities. They decide to raise the girl, Ada, as their own, but sinister forces—including one very angry ewe—seem determined to return Ada to the wilderness that birthed her. The couple soon faces the consequences of defying the will of nature. Enchanted by myths and folklore from an early age, the filmmaker claims his film is sui generis, its own rough beast. “Lamb takes elements from different folktales but is not rooted in one particular story,”Jóhannsson said. “Icelandic folklore is firmly rooted in our culture and mentality.” The motifs, questions, and themes in the film, however, have been wrestled with by similar myths around the world for centuries. Lamb subverts the mythic story of the tiger cub by forcing the tiger parent to witness her child being raised by the goats (or in this case, humans). The story also subverts Christian mythology, where lambs are symbological motifs. Early on in the film, the radio tells us it's Christmas before a quick cut to an image of a pregnant sheep, in a stable no less. Since Christ is represented in Christian mythology as the lamb of God (John 1:29) and his birth is celebrated on Christmas Day, when he was said to have been born in a manger in a stable, Jóhannsson is setting the table for a mythic feast early on in the film with Christ symbolism. Of course, the story of Christ is one of many from a long line of stories about magic or supernatural children born to earthly parents, like the lamb in the film. Often the child in these stories, like Christ, becomes the “sacrificial lamb” and is killed. Lamb concludes by again subverting every mythic assumption we might have while still honoring the undergirding fabric of the story of the tiger cub that Campbell was so fond of. I find it tempting to favor the perspective of either the goats or the tigers in Campbell’s story. I am equally drawn to side with either the sheep or the humans in Lamb. The tension created by the subtle resistance to do so, and instead look for a third perspective, is characteristic of mythic stories of the past and those that arise in our midst now. Myths avoid the simplistic moral conclusions of other story forms, like fables, which is why we need stories like Lamb more than ever in our world. The ability to hold conflicting ideas in close quarters, much less inside oneself, is becoming increasingly rare in our culture of binary thinking. It is this third way approach offered by myth that can lead us to return to our own stories, again and again, with new lenses and a different perspective.

There is something about existence that has been puzzling to human beings, it seems to me, since the beginning of our species: a nagging intuition, an impression—an apprehension, really—that there is much more to life, that something is going on behind the material experience of the world as we understand it. Life is, in its cool objectivity, inherently baffling and stubbornly impenetrable. This quality of inscrutability may certainly inspire curiosity and delight, adventurousness and investigation, but the same impenetrability that inspires such optimism may awaken, in equal amounts, dread and fear. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (and, more recently, Emil Cioran and Eugene Thacker) have persistently questioned the perspective of optimism. To dismiss these philosophers as merely nihilistic is to misunderstand their deep connection to life, their magnificent empathy for vulnerability which gives rise to apprehensions about the “normal” sunny orientation to life, and questions conventional thoughts regarding how we “should” feel about it. They have created philosophies that, in important ways, seem to stand against philosophy itself, against epistemological certainty and unfailing optimism, and work to disconcert and disquiet the anthropocentrism that has characterized humanity’s view of the world—a view which has continually seemed to frustrate humanity’s attempts to live in harmony with the conditions of life. Conditions, by the way, that were established long, long before human beings were a presence in the world to bear witness to them, and are sufficiently dark that they must be seen through a poetic lens lest one lapse into complete despair. Cioran used to refer to himself as “un homme de fragment,” a fragmented man. Life is often a fragmenting force, and one of the principle means of our fragmentation is finding oneself torn between the beguiling charms of Plato’s metaphysical ideal forms which exist in an abstract imaginal  state, and the immediate experience of mind, matter, and consciousness, which we generally refer to as “real.” So, what does one make of this fragmentation, of having one’s mind simultaneously in the real while longing for the ideal? How does one refrain from waging war on life and manage to, as Nietzsche put it, affirm not only oneself, but all existence? The natural impulse is to devote oneself to one and dismiss the other categorically, thereby avoiding the dissonance of having to entertain two competing psychic realities. Once we’ve dispelled one of these possibilities, we set about trying to perfect the real or, conversely, intensify our investment in, and longing for, the ideal. In The Mythic Dimension, Joseph Campbell notes that the function of art is not “annihilation [of one condition or the other], but celebration.” (275) We are better served by thinking yes/and rather than either/or, privileging the type of thinking reflected in “the true poetry of the poet,” rather than “the poetry overdone of the prophet, and the poetry done to death of the priest.” (Campbell, 26) The prophets and the priests tend towards literal, concrete interpretations of mythopoesis; they tend to use substantive language when speaking or writing about God and from that frequent and customary usage, they assume that every substantive idea or expression has an actual, substantial something behind it. Through this overdetermined presumption, they degrade a poetic notion to prosaic pronouncements and come to understand God as an actual thing or being, instead of a metaphor for some ineffable truth. The word god loses its metaphorical nature and is subsequently related to and relied upon as though God is a real entity. Campbell puts it this way: For if it is true that “God is not like anything: hence no one can understand him by means of an image,”...then it must be conceded, as a basic principle of our natural history of the gods and heroes, that whenever a myth has been taken literally its sense has been perverted; but also, reciprocally, that whenever it has been dismissed as a mere priestly fraud or a sign of inferior intelligence, truth has slipped out the other door. (36) Mythopoesis, true poetry, is the foundation of religious thought; regrettably, the poetry of religion is, as Campbell noted, “done to death” by the clergy and rendered unimaginative, uninspired, concretized dogma. The poetic impulse inspires what William James described as the potential for the “ontological wonder” and “cosmic emotion” conveyed by religion, and similarly, it lives in the heart of the first function of myth which, Campbell says, is to “waken and maintain in the individual an experience of awe, humility, and respect, in recognition of that ultimate mystery, transcending names and forms, ‘from which,’ as we read in the Upaniṣads, ‘words turn back.’” (Masks of God, Vol. IV: Creative Mythology, 830) Poetry allows us to glimpse the ideal while still rooted in the real. It gives us the double vision we need to make sense of this terrifying and fascinating mystery of existence—mysterium tremendum et fascinans, as Rudolph Otto put it—and see in it an attitude of play, the divine play of spirit, the play of the élan vital, the dynamism of life itself. Nobility of spirit, the supremely aristocratic point of view, Campbell says, is “the ability to play, whether in heaven or on earth,” (The Mythic Dimension, 36) and always accompanying play are its daughters, laughter and delight. Play clarifies and unburdens; it lightens the load and often transforms judgement into appreciation. For example, Samuel Taylor Coleridge affectionately called Plato’s philosophy “dear, gorgeous nonsense,” and Lionel Trilling called Finnegans Wake“transcendent genial silliness…” that in its way, “keeps the world in its right course…” (The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews 1965-75, 33) Humans come and go. Of course we are mortal, of that there can be no pretending, and as such, we must perish. But play itself is immortal, constantly refreshing itself with new players, and one can sense how, if we stand with one foot in the real and one foot in the ideal—the posture of divine play—we may glimpse the transcendent truth. It’s understandable, isn’t it, that this two-footed standpoint, the double-vision that mythopoesis confers, allows us to revel and play in and among both of these realms? The poetry of myth is such that we can embrace the immanence of the transcendent, Platonic vision without sacrificing empirical reality, and with affectionate good humor say, I love this dear, gorgeous nonsense of life!

October is metamorphosis month. Dropping back a few thousand years, as human experience of the world changed, so too did the mythology that puts us into relationship with that world. Campbell notes that mythology seems to have evolved from framing our relationship 1) to the gods (Thor, Indra, Jehovah), then 2) to the exploits of the children of gods (Perseus, Herakles), and finally 3) to where we find ourselves today: a mythology that reflects and conditions our relationships to other human beings. A compelling example of this transition to a “creative” mythology is expressed in Plato’s account of love, the Symposium. I would be remiss not to alert the reader to one of the key initiations connected with the discipline of philosophy: that the term “symposium” literally means a “drinking party,” which goes a long way toward explaining why people go into academic careers. First the story, and then the reveal. The Symposium takes place at the end of a banquet thrown to celebrate the poet Agathon’s victory in a big competition. One of the guests suggests they amuse themselves by giving speeches in praise of Love (Eros). The action famously concludes with Socrates’ description of Diotima’s “ladder of love,” the origin of what is now thought of as “Platonic love,” and a drunken Alcibiades hilariously crashing the party. A million sparkly details are scattered throughout these panegyrics, a usual feature of Plato’s dialogues, and well worth the reader’s time and effort; but I want to focus on the speech of Aristophanes, the comedian. He tells a strange tale describing the origins of humankind and why Love compels us to find our lovers. Human beings were not always as they appear to us today, he begins. Originally, humans were created in pairs: as a pair of conjoined males, a pair of conjoined females, and a pair composed of a male and a female. Each of these beings had four arms and four legs, two faces on one head, and all the other appropriate pieces we see today. They moved by walking or by cartwheeling around at terrific speeds. They were powerful, twice as strong as modern humans, so much so that they threatened to challenge even the gods. Of course, the gods saw this coming and argued about what to do. The smart money was simply to destroy these beings but the gods figured out that, were they to do so, they’d no longer receive devotions and sacrifices and, obviously, gods need devotions and sacrifices. Pretty typical Greek god stuff. So Zeus comes up with an answer: cut them in half. He separated the male-male beings into two men, the female-female beings into two women, and the androgynous beings into a male and a female. A bit of surgery followed to stitch together the seams where they had been divided – and here we are, as we are, today. You’ve probably figured out where this is going. Aristophanes concludes that love attracts us to each other because we are missing our other half and, obviously, this is why love is so compelling: it begins with longing for what is lacking and ends in the ecstasy of recovering what was lost. One of the subtler details in this story is that Aristophanes borrows heavily from Hippocrates’ medical terminology to describe the surgical techniques Zeus employed while sewing humans into their present form. While the function of the story is mythological, the semantics are scientific. In a sense, Aristophanes puts science in service to mythological narrative. Something to think about. We could leave this here as another amusing and suggestive piece of Greek mythology, a relational narrative which metaphorically describes an experience common to most humans in love. This places Aristophanes’ story squarely into Campbell’s category of “creative” mythology – but, for our MythBlast-y purposes, there is a hidden gem in this story, obscured by the veils of translation. Here it is. When Aristophanes comes to the climax of his account, the English translation can read: “Each of us, then, is but a tally of a man, since everyone shows like a flat-fish the traces of having been sliced in two; and each is ever searching for the tally that will fit him.” Or sometimes this: “Each of us, separated from each other, is but the indenture of a man…”. Huh? Tally? Indenture? What in the world does that mean? If I can stay within the metaphors of erotic love, we have to cast aside these veils to get at the … well, to the truth. The Greek word translated here as tally, or indenture, is the word σύμβολον, symbolon. A symbolon was a die or a coin cut in half, usually with a zigzag pattern (hence, indenture or tooth-like), between two friends – to show that one is completed by the other. We often see this today in pendants exchanged between friends and lovers – heart shaped, divided down the middle, with one name on each piece. The implication is that the heart is only, truly, completed by the joining of two into one. And this is exactly what symbols do: they are one half of a coin that points beyond itself to the part that is missing; they express a truth that is only comprehended when both halves are matched and rejoined. This is a beautiful expression of relationships governed by Eros but doesn’t  it give us a deeper insight into the psychological functions of symbols in mythology? They express the longing for completeness, for reuniting the stories that frame our lives with the experience of living.

Change is in the air. Again. As usual. The climate is changing. The pandemic changes. Technology changes. Our lives change. Once upon a time, change happened more gradually, or so it seems. Now it feels like the pace of change has accelerated. We don’t seem to have the proper decompression chambers in which to adjust, and more changes are coming whether we choose them or not. But we still have myth, and creativity, and our ability to create new myths, as Joseph Campbell discusses in Volume 4 of his Masks of God series, Creative Mythology. Creative myth-making, Campbell says, restores to existence the quality of adventure, at once shattering and reintegrating the fixed, already known, in the sacrificial creative fire of the becoming thing that is nothing at all but life, not as it will be or should be, as it was or as it never will be, but as it is, in depth, in process, here and now, inside out. (7-8) In other words, the myths we make give our present-moment lives back to us with the added thrill of adventure. They help us meet and imagine the changes we face. One recent example of life-giving creative mythology is Sweet Tooth (2021), a Netflix series set in a world where a new species of animal-human hybrids evolves at the same time as a pandemic sweeps the planet. Sweet Tooth happens in a post-TV, post-internet, post-consumer landscape in which the population of humanity has been vastly reduced. But violent remnants of the old controlling, dominion-prone, fear-based culture still cling to existence in the form of an army of Last Men who hunt the child hybrids. The show focuses on the adventures of a hybrid named Gus who was born with the body of a human but the ears, antler nubs, and senses of a deer. In other words, Gus embodies what shamans experience through trance and dance: the joining of human and animal consciousness. Gus grows up in isolation in a remote forested stretch of what used to be Yellowstone National Park. As Gus grows, so do his antlers, and when the time is right, he sets out on an adventure that carries him away from home. Not far into his travels, a band of Last Men corner Gus inside a former park visitors’ center. Little Gus, armed with a homemade slingshot, faces off against a Last Man with a high-powered rifle when, in the open doorway behind Gus, a massive buck appears who is clearly there to protect Gus. With antlers too wide to step through the door, the buck’s presence is utterly arresting. The Last Man seems paralyzed by the same astonishment we feel as viewers because we are suddenly in the presence of the sublime: powers beyond our own, dimensions of life to which we had been oblivious, more beauty and love than we had thought possible. In that moment, Gus, completely unaware of the buck, becomes the child of the buck, and of the antlered Celtic god Cernunnos (Campbell 412), and of the antlered human figure on the wall in the Cave of the Trois-Frères. We feel all those antlers ourselves—their bony anchors in our skulls, the pull of their weight in our necks and backs, the instinctive ability to lower the horns and charge. The sacred buck shows us Gus’s strength and destiny: simultaneously peaceful and powerful, an herbivore-warrior who will fight for what he loves. Here, the buck overwhelms his opponent simply through the force of his presence. Sweet Tooth’s creative myth-making opens other windows onto the sacred as well. In the first episode, Gus learns that rain is “just Mother Nature, washing herself clean.” The show’s Animal Army organizes around the belief that hybrids are a miracle of nature. A character named Dr. Singh sees the divine in Gus thanks to a gift that Singh’s wife gave him, a statue of a Hindu goddess who once appeared as a deer. As an embodiment of sacred nature, Gus’s part-human and part-deer form reminds us of the sacred nature of all animals, human and otherwise. In fact, Gus’s form affirms that we are sacred because of our animal nature, and so is the rest of our extended animal family. Human-animal hybrids remind us that we are in fact animals, and that our souls—our animas, to use the Latin term—are animal souls. The myth-makers of Sweet Tooth also suggest that our physical shapes and psychological shapes change together, and neither is fixed. Our birthright vitality and consciousness, from which the technological world likes to separate us, remain rooted in the adaptability of our bodies and the organic world. External metamorphosis coincides with internal metamorphosis. What’s more, stasis doesn’t actually exist. The universe, which includes our Earth and ourselves, is ever and always in froth and flux. Sweet Tooth is a creative myth about creativity, illustrating new ways of being in response to change. We have already been called upon to make many changes. We can rest assured we will need to make more. Sweet Tooth says we can, and also suggests how and why. Another clue comes from Campbell, who reminds us that mythic images “touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.” (4) We can change creatively and mythically, in order to reclaim and exhilarate our sacred animal lives.

For the rest of the year, we at JCF are highlighting the final volume of Joseph Campbell’s remarkable Masks of God series, The Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology. Many of my friends and acquaintances, particularly those who are writers and artists, say that this is their favorite Joseph Campbell work. In traditional mythology, Campbell says, individuals are supposed to experience certain insights, sentiments, and commitments. In what I am calling “creative” mythology, on the other hand, this order is reversed: the individual has had an experience of his own—of order, horror, beauty, or even mere exhilaration—which he seeks to communicate through signs; and if his realization has been of a certain depth and import, his communication will have the value and force of living myth.[…] Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.(Creative Mythology, 12) I prefer to understand myth more as a mode of thought or a condition of imagining rather than an explicit narrative containing a traditional, historical, or even metaphysical, body of knowledge. As Professor Campbell suggests in the quote above, myth is something more than a vocabulary, and from the perspective of myth as a mode of thought, I understand myth to be something like the grammar of creativity, or the grammar of imagination (as I recall, Hegel mentioned something similar, like grammar being the work of thought). Grammar is not merely about proper tense and usage; grammar includes analyses of narrative structures, letting one be aware of the constraints or limitations of various communications, conventions, and even art forms. The English word, grammar, is related to the Greek phrase, grammatikḕ téchnē, which means the "art of letters," and David Crystal believes that “grammar is the structural foundation of our ability to express ourselves.” Expressing our own experiences—especially the puzzling, ineffable, sublime experiences—are, as Campbell notes, communications that have the value and force of living myth. Myth was taken up (or rediscovered) during the Enlightenment because as a mode of thinking, it was believed to be a key to comprehending history, philosophy, religion, art, linguistics, and creativity itself. Considering myth a master discipline that stimulated a mode of thinking freed it from the vice-like grip of divine revelation and institutional oversight and returned ownership of myth to individual human beings. It freed the mythic imagination to be employed in a wide-ranging, non-linear, exploratory search for the significance of a human life lived in a fundamentally enigmatic world. Thinking mythically frees myth from the world of supernatural intervention and rightfully reclaims for human beings an experience of the sublime directly linked to human passions, changes of fortune, joys and depressions, pathos and elation. Myth is also a mode of thinking that reliably rewards a reader’s attention with an experience of delight, even though the myth itself may address horrific themes or events. John Dryden specifically—and all manner of poets, writers, painters, and classically educated people—have noted this function at work in the mythopoetic genre. The poet is, as the word poesis suggests, a maker and a creator, one who aims at making something beautiful, something that stirs us, not by representing things exactly as they are but by heightening their intensity and deepening their depths, qualities which Dryden termed “lively” and “just.” (Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668)) Mythopoesis is a uniquely human endeavor and delighting in it allows one to, if not exactly remake the world, at least remake our own reality here and now. For there is no fear in delight, no pain, no thought; delight is pure experience, and is in itself, transcendent. Poesis and drama also instruct, writes Dryden, but the function of instruction is secondary in his mind; in his thinking, primacy of place is given to the function of delight. Delight is created by the contemplation of beauty, and the job of the creative person is to create a grammar that highlights beauty and contributes to the pleasures of the soul. The condition of delight taken in every aspect of life—even in its “order, horror, beauty, or even mere exhilaration” as Campbell noted above—allows one to accept one’s all-too-human existence without the slavish and frequently unbecoming need for transcendence which, when it is the only goal of a spiritual practice, is simply a euphemism for escaping the human condition. By following your bliss, Campbell doesn’t mean escaping life or one’s corporeality. Rather, I understand him to mean that bliss is found in the realization that life is often accompanied by inescapable constraints of one kind or another, but in spite of that, we need not respond to any controlling authority other than a deeply felt, inner sense of a central organizing principle—“the dynamism of being,” as Campbell has called it—an inner depth that continually unfolds in proportion to how intensely we approach our own self-becoming. Jung called it individuation, Nietzsche called it Amor Fati, and Keats put it this way: …Though no great minist’ring reason sortsOut the dark mysteries of human soulsTo clear conceiving: yet there ever rollsA vast idea before me, and I gleanTherefrom my liberty…  (Sleep and Poetry) Much like language itself, the language and grammar of myth is capable of absorbing and disturbing us in secret ways and often, to our own excitement or frustration and bewilderment, exposes us to a vast idea. It’s true, isn’t it, that the mythic narratives themselves are not as important as the dialogues we have about myth and meaning? Isn’t that the great inheritance, the great gift of myth: that they immerse us in the existentially puzzling phenomena we’d rather not have to give too much thought to? Phenomena like the mystery of existence, the constant struggle between free will and fate, and all the conditions of life that remain stubbornly resistant to the intellect and reason. Myths expose one to the forces and effects of a complex, often overwhelming world upon a limited human being, but they also suggest to us that if we can only begin to think and imagine more mythically one may not only feel, but actually be, less constrained by the complexities and limitations of human life; that is where liberty truly abides. Imagined and thought of this way, myth offers a closer and truer relationship with life. It certainly doesn’t remove or solve the problems of living, but it can illuminate the subject and that, if nothing else, is something significant and well worth having. Thanks for reading,