Myths do not ground, they open. (James Hillman) In The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Campbell revealed the myth of the hero's transformation and invited us to locate our lives in this myth. When you enter the metaphor of the hero's adventure, you discover new possibilities and meaning. Stories have the power to transform a wide range of life situations. Your response to a story can provide insight into the story, your culture, and yourself. Are we willing to be transformed by our myths? The fairytale "The Frog King" can be an experiment. Like Campbell, we'll approach this story as a hero's adventure. Here's the story in brief: A beautiful young princess has a prized possession, a golden ball. She often sits by a deep spring in the woods, where she tosses the ball up into the air and catches it. One day the ball falls into the spring and is lost. She begins to weep. A frog comes up from the spring and asks about her troubles. He proposes to retrieve her golden ball if she will let him be her companion. "Let me eat from your plate, sip from your cup, and sleep on your pillow," he says. The princess can't imagine any such thing and yet she outwardly agrees to this bargain. She wants her ball. The frog dives down and brings up the golden ball. The princess takes it and runs back to the palace, leaving the frog behind. The following evening at suppertime, the frog appears on the doorstep. He insists that the princess keep her promise. Now the king learns of the agreement and takes the side of the frog. She is compelled to follow through. Barely concealing her disgust, the princess lifts the frog to her plate on the table. She finds this revolting enough, but when they are alone in her room the frog presses her further. "Put me in your bed," he says, and threatens to call upon the king if she refuses. Pushed to her limit, the princess angrily throws the frog against the wall. Splat. A handsome prince emerges from the wreckage. Marriage follows. The happy couple return to the prince's kingdom, which brings great joy to his loyal coachman. Who is the hero? Maybe the frog is the hero. The story's title steers us in this direction, and the princess seems like a brat: self-absorbed, ill-tempered, and deceitful. She obeys her father but her compliance is superficial. Worst of all, she tries to murder the frog in a fit of violent anger. She is not nice. And some of us actually like frogs. At first blush, the frog is more likable and possesses more heroic potential. He's helpful and fulfills his end of the deal in good faith. His appeal to the king's authority may be a bit slimy, yet what other options did the poor guy have, given her refusal to behave as agreed? Granted, the princess was especially vulnerable when he found her weeping. She was desperate. His dive down to the bottom of the spring didn't cost him much, but what might their bargain cost her? Flipping over the lily pads, so to speak, makes the initial character assessment a bit more complex. Maybe the frog was a bit of a creep. But does a hero have to be likable? And is this view of the princess or the frog definitive? It's easy to spin this story to cast aspersions on the princess or question the integrity of the frog. The characters are simple. They don't even have names, for example, and very little inner life. The relative lack of emotion and descriptive details allows us to provide them. What we attribute to the characters and their actions reveals our biases and fantasies. We can see ourselves. Much of this is unconscious. Some of the spinning is intentional. The simple scaffold of a fairy tale leaves it open to manipulation. The history of this form reveals the propensity to tweak these stories in service to a particular worldview. In the case of "The Frog King," the violent splat in the story may have come as a surprise to you. In the more recent, popular version of this fairy tale, the princess transforms the frog with a kiss. Love is powerful, but is it a woman's sole power in the world? And does the kiss distort the story's structure? The princess may have had a spiritual awakening. Compassion is frequently the result of such a transformation. Does the action in the story support this conclusion? Is the kiss part of the story's logic or symbolic of a collective preference for peaceful women? What is the significance of your preference? Where is the transformation in this story? The frog undergoes a dramatic metamorphosis. What about the princess? The most common interpretation is "she got married." Campbell takes this approach in Pathways to Bliss. (124-126) Marriage in the outer world is often transformative. Here, marriage is between two aspects of the psyche. In Pathways to Bliss, Campbell employs the Jungian terms animus and anima, the inner masculine and feminine, to describe this event. The inner marriage of feminine and masculine is essential to Jungian individuation. In this story, Campbell explains, it's part of growing up. "Marriage" is a common metaphor for the union of opposites. I also read this story as a description of internal psychic process, but I have a difficult time separating "marriage" from the cultural ideas that have defined it—the belief that a woman needs a man and marriage to fulfill her destiny, for example. As for the transformation, I think it's the splat. The splat. The moment that the princess acts in spontaneous accord with her nature, as Campbell would say. That moment of power. The splat reveals the true nature of the frog and the princess, two interlocked aspects of her psyche. The girl that refuses to act with decisive, even violent authority slides down the wall with him and there's no taking it back. The subsequent marriage would be confirmation of a lasting transformation. This brings us to the final stage of the hero's adventure, the return. At the end of this story, the newlyweds are on their way back to the prince's kingdom. The coachman's joy swells his heart and breaks the iron bands that bound it. The marriage will be important to the renewed life of the community, as well as the individual. But what will come next? We are left with the task of imagining the particular shape of the "happily ever after" that belongs to this story. What might this kingdom need? Many of us long for a renewal of the kingdom these days. We feel limited by the dominant stories and yet, we unconsciously perpetuate them when we turn to myth for validation of our existing beliefs, and overlook their power to unsettle and open us. The co-evolution of myth, culture, and human needs is always and already underway, and we are all participants. The golden ball has fallen into the spring. How will you respond?

Heroism and Adventure, the theme of this month’s MythBlast Series essays, seem to me to be a linked pair. Reflexively, I think, we imagine adventure as a going out, an extension into the world, a leaving of the known, familiar world of domestic routines for the unknown, unpredictable, unmanageable world. This, doubtless, constitutes the often invasive bearing of the hero. But the word adventure has its roots in the Latin word advenire, which means to arrive, to come to, a perspective that can be understood to be a bit more aligned with those who experience the arrival of the hero and the effects of the hero’s exploits upon them and their communities. One of my most beloved books is a first edition copy of The King Who Saved Himself From Being Saved. It’s a poem written by John Ciardi that was first published in the November 14, 1964 edition of The Saturday Review, and published as a book in 1965, charmingly illustrated by the marvelous Edward Gorey. To get a sense of this satiric poem’s chiding of heroism, let me quote from the inside of the book jacket: The King was dozing and thinking about his money. The Queen was pampering a cold with aspirin pies. The Princess was safely in her tower listening to a lark. The Giant, a gentle creature, being at the moment unoccupied, was sprawling beside the brook smelling a flower. The castle, the Royal Family, and the Kingdom were at peace. And then the Hero arrived, sheathed in armor, breathing flame, looking for a villain and a castle to save. He scared the lark. He woke the King. The Princess cried and the Giant hid in the closet. But the Hero went on stamping around and making heroic noises. The Hero, who in this case mistook a noble calling for a mere career, was making a general nuisance of himself and creating big problems in a place where before his arrival, there were none. “All over his head was his helmet,” Ciardi writes, “and in his head was, of course, a fight.” The King warned the Hero that he should move on, that he doesn’t want his Kingdom “saved in two,” and gave him to the count of ten to leave or be subjected to the business end of a cannon the King deployed to emphasize his seriousness. The Hero persisted, the cannoneer fired, and the King remarked, “Well, I tried to tell him. But I guess Heroes are hard to tell.” Ciardi writes, “The Kingdom was saved from being saved. The Giant was saved from a fight. The King was afraid that he had behaved in ways not entirely right.” Reflecting on the Hero’s demise the King went on to say, “As Heroes go he was brave enough, but I’m not sure he was bright.” Moving out of one’s familiar sphere of existence and into situations, people, and environs with which one is not familiar, while at the same time stubbornly clinging to familiar values, mores, and dogmatisms, almost always results in catastrophic misadventures, as Ciardi’s intrepid, yet fatuous, Hero demonstrated. In myths, however, the movement from the known into the unknown is what Joseph Campbell called “crossing the threshold. This is the crossing from the conscious into the unconscious world, but the unconscious world is represented in many, many, many different images, depending on the cultural surroundings of the mythos.” This threshold crossing is, Campbell goes on to say, “simply a journey beyond the pairs of opposites, where you go beyond good and evil.” (Pathways To Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, 114-115) We are commonly given to the understanding that space is wide and time is deep. We too often associate adventure and the heroic with space—it happens here, across these territories, at those places, etc. So where are we going when we go “beyond good and evil?” We are going, I think, to a place that feels entirely foreign to us, beyond distinctions between space and time, a place beyond individual will, where conceptual faculties like logic, reason, and differentiation are rendered powerless and we, perforce, achieve awareness of the fact we are an aspect, an artifact, of the dynamism of life. It's not simply going beyond good and evil, beyond concepts. It is nothing less than, as Fredrich Nietzsche said, a revaluation of all values. “Crossing the threshold” means the achievement of a psychophysical awareness in which one experiences a transcendent overfullness. I imagine that the sensation is akin to William Blake’s sublime vision: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand/ And Heaven in a Wild Flower/ Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/ And Eternity in an hour.” Crossing the threshold means using one’s imagination as a vessel to explore the universe without and within. I’m reminded of the pre-Socratic philosopher, Parmenides, who insisted that that which is not cannot be thought about. Conversely, anything that can exist and be thought about must exist. In other words, if something can be thought about, it actually does exist. The ungenerous reader may call this nonsense, but I would prefer to call this an example of mythic thinking, mythopoesis even, which expands and opens the universe rather than diminishes it. Isn’t the capacity to abstractly imagine a universe beyond concepts and oppositions—beyond good and evil—enough to encourage us to at least try to rethink, redefine, and reconsider what it is to be a self, what nature is, and who others are in the field of experience? Of course, the Sufi poet Rumi got there a long time ago and, I think, got it exactly right when he said (as translated by Coleman Barks): Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn't make any sense. Isn’t the real adventure to attempt to be so present, so attuned to life, as to experience the overwhelming fullness of the world, the self, the world-self even, with all dogmas, illusions, and oppositions dropping away? In this way, the heroic adventure is always at hand. Anytime is the right time for threshold crossing if you simply say yes to the conditions of life and to imagination, making the effort to affirm things just as they are in each of the moments you happen to occupy. Thanks for reading,

Jean Marion Erdman (Feb. 20, 1916 – May 4, 2020) was a dancer and avant-garde theatrical artist who was married to Joseph Campbell for 49 years until his death in 1987. In celebration of Erdman’s birthday, we can examine the unfolding and fulfillment of her artistic career. Throughout her life, Erdman accessed the collective unconscious and manifested its attitudes, memories, and impulses into stunning new images for the 20th century stage. Her most complex and memorable work was Coach of the Six Insides (1962), an interpretation of James Joyce’s literary masterpiece, Finnegans Wake. While Campbell, with Henry Morton Robinson, opened the treasures of Finnegans Wake for readers with A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Erdman daringly translated it into a production of total theatre. She returned art to art through a presentation of dramatic action, dance, mime, and multi-layers of Joycean meaning illuminated by the capacities of myth. The main character, danced by Erdman, was Anna Livia Plurabelle. The character transmuted into many forms, most commonly Ireland’s River Liffey, which represented the female psyche and archetypal woman, and we can compare Erdman’s life to this river. The Genesis of Jean Erdman began in the Garden of Eden on the Island of Oahu, Territory of Hawaii. She was a fifth generation islander. Erdman had a charming personality and retained the distinct family values of humility, honesty, and full commitment to ethical ideals. A sense of adventure was surely in Erdman’s blood, and her passion for the theatrical arts began with her family. A natural spring was significant to Hawaiian mythology and Honolulu’s Punahou School, which Erdman attended as a child. At the school, Erdman received dance instruction in the free and natural modern style of Isadora Duncan. Erdman also studied American tap and centuries-old Japanese odori. At ten, she witnessed a performance of the great classical Chinese dan actor Mei Lan Fang. Jean stated, “I know that experience actually shaped my creative imagination.”(Jean Erdman Papers, New York Public Library, 5:6) Erdman learned ancient sacred hula, its rituals, and chanted poetic texts (mele). She attended to the prohibitions (kapu) delineated for performers because, it is believed, performers may be possessed by Pele, god spirit and hula patroness. Erdman had association with one of Hawaii’s most noted authorities of ancestral knowledge (kapuna), Mary Kawena Pūku’i. At age 18, Erdman and Pūku’i made two sound recordings of ancient mele of the ‘āla’apapa domain, thereby preserving repertoire of the Kamehameha dynasty. (Stillman, A. K.  Sacred Hula: The Historical Hula ‘Āla’apapa, 63, 70) From the Punahou bubbling spring, Erdman carried her wisdom and dance expressions to foreign realms. She “took herself” to a New England prep school, where she encountered a puritanical attitude toward the hula. Upon graduation in 1934, Erdman sought the open-minded and welcoming climate of Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY. Erdman “followed her bliss” by studying theatre, dance, religions, and aesthetics. She also encountered mighty forces that further molded the “river course” of her curiosities. Young Erdman was receptive to advice offered by respected authorities, especially tutor and professor Joseph Campbell and dance pioneer Martha Graham. Erdman flowed through life in a way that mimicked the Liffey traveling between the guardian Wicklow Mountains. Erdman left college to tour the world with her parents in 1937-38. At each port, Erdman beheld the authentic dances, which made an indelible impression upon the young artist’s sensibilities. Erdman’s time away from New York proved difficult for Campbell. The lovely Jean charmed him in a way he had not expected. The arrangement of the two lives was soon to be intertwined in a plan that only the universe could contrive. Upon her return she married Joseph Campbell, on May 5, 1938. She subsequently edited drafts of his work, and he would often carry her suitcases on performance tours. She was soon dancing professionally with Graham’s group. Graham cast Erdman in roles that utilized Erdman’s unique vocal, acting, and dancing abilities, which were necessary for parts in Every Soul is a Circus (1939) and the 1941 masterpiece Letter to the World. During summers, Erdman studied with modern dance pioneers at the Bennington College School of the Dance in Vermont. There she experienced the strengths and contradictions of various dance training methods. Although Graham strictly stressed contraction and release of the muscles, Erdman also appreciated Hanya Holm’s focus on inner motivation and Doris Humphrey’s “fall and rise” sequences. This was a period of discernment. Instead of a technique invented to honor a personality, Erdman desired to select movements that corresponded to choreographic intent and stirred the senses of the viewer. During the late 1940s, Erdman joined the New Dance Group, a collective dedicated to social justice. Ultimately, Erdman broke away from both Graham and the New Dance Group with a commitment to create her own work. Erdman’s calling seemed to embrace the prophetic words of poet William Blake: “I must create a system, or be enslav’d by another man’s. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” (Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion) The River Liffey is iconic to Dublin and likewise Erdman was central to the development of the American modern dance movement. Beginning with her earliest dances, the “River Erdman” carried travelers into streams of pervasive primordial connections, inspirations, and explorations of feminine principles presented with contemporary aesthetic sensibilities, as shown in The Transformations of Medusa (1942), Daughters of the Lonesome Isle (1945), Passage (1946), Hamadryad (1948), and Changing Woman (1954). Solstice (1950) incorporated masks, marking a step toward a total theatre concept. With correspondences to Campbell’s work, Erdman frequently highlighted aspects of the monomythic cycle. She continued to integrate dance and theatre with Pierrot the Moon (1954), using mime and props. Both Twenty Poems of e.e. cummings (1950) and Fearful Symmetry (1957) utilized voice. In early 1955, Erdman toured as a soloist to Japan and India. Audiences deeply appreciated and understood her art; they were enamored with her. Her artistic diplomacy paved the way for other American artists to follow. Erdman was drawn to the transcendent in dance and life. While in the East, she was spiritually stirred to the extent that Joe suggested to his wife: “We should take a kind of Vow of Bodhisattvahood, which will compel us to live in a world of radiance…” (Larsen, S. and R. A Fire in the Mind, 392) Late in the 1950’s, Erdman conducted tours across the U.S. while maintaining a school in New York City. Her dream-like dances reflected the influences of places and friends throughout the years, from the Swiss Eranos conferences, caves of France, and Native American pueblos to theories of Carl Jung, experimental filmmaking of Maya Deren, and Zen masters Daisetz Suzuki and Alan Watts. The “River Erdman” swirled these philosophies within the intricacies of her mind. Using the entire range of human movement possibilities, she aimed her work to an aesthetic end. With her life and work, Erdman demonstrated a proto-feminist stance, showing us a new mythology for the modern times. Erdman remained a dramatic artist of exquisite beauty and brilliant virtuosity throughout the 1960s. Receiving critical acclaim, Coach of the Six Insides twice toured the major cities of the world. Subsequently, she and Campbell founded the experimental Theatre of the Open Eye, encouraging others to be creative. Through the remaining years, Erdman continued to produce shows, including reconstructions of earlier dances. Upon the passing of her husband, Erdman served as founding president of the Joseph Campbell Foundation. With a Joycean twist in the final stages of her life, the fluid and feminine “River Erdman” made its final course to the sea, circulating back to her homeland, where she lived out her days near the source of the Punahou spring.

In a crisis our life often feels out of control, as if we have lost our quintessentially human dignity of character. But how can we retain our dignity while also building the courage to move forward without first experiencing oblivion? We all blunder into the Grail Castle, exactly as Parzival did, before we can even hope to formulate and ask the question that ends the exile. Along the way we travel through realms of wilderness, and it’s this very experience that allows us to develop an active interest in the soul lives of other people. “For Parzival it is to be an ordeal of five lonely years, as he searches through the forests,” Joseph Campbell writes in Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth. For, like the fairy hills of Ireland, the lake with its two fishermen and the castle of sorrowful knights and ladies lie hidden, though everywhere there is a haunting sense of their presence. This is the Forest Adventurous, where we meet our adventures when we are ready for them. The forest brings forth our own world, and here, in this attitude of hatred, rejection, ego, and pride, Parzival rides. And something becomes ready in him during this time. (58) In the forest thickets of our lives, a harrowing introspection of our psyche’s distress is required. All our apparently immutable, enduring reference points vanish or are rendered totally inadequate. “The world’s become a desert through him [Parzival], and he himself has become a desert in quest of regeneration,” Campbell states. [58] This wasteland is stark and extreme so as to strip us of any sense of false identity and ego inflation. Only when the dark gets seemingly impregnable, and the familiar known and safely habitual are sacrificed, may we navigate the new terrain of soul ... even though its realms and rules are foreign to us. There’s no guide, no instruction manual, and we feel as naïve and pure a fool as young Parzival did. In this we must teach ourselves, or we are not taught at all. Essentially, it’s a heuristic path of initiation. It’s common in this experience to feel abandoned, especially if we believe that our primary caregivers did not place us on the “‘right”’ path in our formative years. While orphaned in the forest, however, we’re never actually alone. Something... a hidden, inner presence, as it were, walks with us. We sense its protectorship, promptings, and guidance. Campbell reminds us that “there is a Buddhist saying: This world with all its ills, with all its horrors, with all its stupidities, with all its darkness, is the golden lotus world.’ This is the golden lotus world, right now as it is. And if you cannot see it as such, it is not the world’s fault. What must be corrected is not the world, but your own perspective. And so we find in the Grail legend that everything needed is all there, only it is not being seen. And what the hero is to do is to clarify the situation. (154) The wandering of our soul in its quest for clarity and authenticity seems endless and without resolution. Grasping at our lost yesterdays, we recognize some paths that we’ve walked are now closed to us. But we haven’t necessarily missed our destined path. It’s crucial to relinquish the thought that if we didn’t make a correct decision in the past, that it’s all over now. Nothing is ever lost. While we might not be able to undo the past, we can bring greater experience and awareness to our present choices. The fruits of this journey are earned through effort. They are not freely given. And in the silent shelter of our deeper soul, we accept this. It’s why it’s essential to first develop knowledge of ourselves and of the world around us, before we can expand beyond the force of social opinion and return to the instinctive and intuitive self. It’s in this liminal space where we come to realize that there’s always more to be revealed, and the potentiality for a new soul disposition and direction can emerge, and moreover, awaken in us the Bodhisattva realization of compassion for all suffering beings. His [Parzival’s] nature prompted him many times to ask the question, but he thought of his knightly honor. He thought of his reputation instead of his true nature. The social ideal interfered with his nature, and the result is desolation. The bald woman says, "You are a curse on the face of the earth, and you have cursed the earth; it has lost its fertility and the whole world is desolate; the castle has disappeared, and you will not find it again!" He says, "I will repair this." But she says, "You can’t. No one can ever visit the castle a second time." (53) But he does. Parzival teaches us that what appears as a misstep, may actually be the very necessary step of destiny. Everything can be redeemed. Every new moment offers the possibility of a new beginning. Previously we didn’t have the soul maturity and consequent awareness to make different choices in the earlier episodes of our lives (whether it was two decades ago or last week). And while we may want to blame others like Parzival’s mother, who kept us innocent in the hope of protecting us, or the old knight Gurnemanz and his misguided instructions—“Don’t do this, don’t do that, and above all, don’t ask too many questions"—we eventually move into the growing light of hard-won insight. A genuine compassion then touches our heart, together with an acceptance that everything occurs in its own divine time. He [Trevrizent] says, "This is a miracle that you [Parzival] have worked. Through your own will you have caused the Trinity to change its mind, to change its rules." [...] He is saying, that is, through your own integrity, you evoke your destiny, which is a destiny that never existed before. (79) And in this, our freshly won selfhood is a new creation for the world.

At first glance, the frivolous dilettante seems an unlikely aspect of the archetypal hero. In the outcome-driven culture that most of us inhabit, dilettantes are creatures of a certain derision: we see them as dabblers, superficial and affected, interested in things that don’t really matter. Hardly the serious mien of a hero with a big job to do. But by assuming that the hero must both create and reflect the gravitas of the culture they benefit, we have lost the serious magic of lightness. We have forgotten the delight of the dilettante, unfurling from the Latin delectare, “to allure, to delight, to charm.” At its heart, the dilettante is enchanted by the enticement of delight. When Parzival arrives at King Arthur’s court early in his bumbling quest to become a knight, foolish, innocent, and so very earnest, he is greeted by laughter. The Lady Cunneware de Lalant laughs at the sight of him. It’s one of those moments that feels like an anxiety dream: we’ve shown up somewhere ill-dressed, unprepared, and utterly vulnerable, only to have the polished people around us burst into laughter at our absurdity. Parzival is the everyman in this moment, defenseless against the brutal judgment of an elegant court well aware of its role as the best reflection of civility and accomplishment. But Cunneware’s laughter is sweet. Delighted. It is not the laughter of superiority, but instead, it’s what philosophers of humor define as the laughter of incongruity; that moment when what we perceive is not what we expected. A young man, little more than a child, dressed absurdly, announcing that he has come to be Arthur’s knight; the epitome of absurdity. In Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant writes: In everything that is to excite a lively convulsive laugh there must be something absurd (in which the understanding, therefore, can find no satisfaction). Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing. This transformation, which is certainly not enjoyable to the understanding, yet indirectly gives it very active enjoyment for a moment. Therefore its cause must consist in the influence of the representation upon the body, and the reflex effect of this upon the mind. (First Part, sec. 54) Kant continues, though, insisting that as the absurdity resolves, our expectation is transformed into nothing. He insists, “We must note well, that it [our expectation] does not transform itself into the positive opposite of an expected object… but it must be transformed into nothing.” He suggests that this laughter does nothing for our reason. In this insistence, he finds the delight of the dilettante, but consigns that delight literally to a pleasurable physical response; it feels good to belly laugh, but there is nothing else to be gained by it. It is simply an enjoyable diversion. The exquisiteness of this moment in Parzival’s hero’s journey is that Kant is totally wrong about meaning. Cunneware’s delighted laughter is the antithesis of a silly girl laughing at a silly boy that just feels good. It is, instead, the moment in which Parzival’s destiny is realized. Her laughter is prophetic, as she has vowed to never laugh until she sees the finest knight that ever will be. Rather than shaming Parzival, Cunneware anoints him with her laughter: And the maiden Kunnewaaré she sat there, the fair and proud,And never, that man might wot of, had she laughed or low or loud.For never she vowed, an she died first, would she laugh ere her eyes might seeThat knight, who of knights the bravest or was, or henceforth should be.As the lad rode beneath the window she brake into laughter sweet. (Eschenbach, Wolfram von. Parzival: A Knightly Epic. Translated by Jessie L. Weston. Lines 686-690) Cunneware “sees through” Parzival in a deeply mythic way. Which in itself is compelling, but I think what happens next underscores the importance of this lightness in understanding the hero. Sir Kei, Arthur’s seneschal (who has, incidentally, already been extremely scornful of Parzival and urged Arthur to send him to fairly certain death against the Red Knight), is outraged by her laughter, and publicly beats her for what he perceives as her insult to the court: For I wot well unto King Arthur, to his court and his palace hallMany gallant men have ridden, yet hast thou despised them all,And ne'er hast thou smiled upon them—And now doth thy laughter ringFor one knowing naught of knighthood! Unseemly I deem this thing! The seneschal in a medieval court is charged with administrating the court, holding the center of the community and the institution. Kei is within his rights to punish transgressors who break the rules of courtly behavior, but he is heavy-handed and heavy-minded. He does not “see through,” as Cunneware does, and is only capable of perceiving what is in front of him. His attack on Cunneware is distressing to those who watch it, but no one lifts a hand or voice to protect her, with one exception. Sir Antanor the Silent, thought a fool because he does not speak, is, like Cunneware, moved for the first time to break his silence as he watches Kei’s violence. He turns on Kei and announces his own prophecy: Parzival himself will destroy Kei’s joy in his self-righteousness. Kei, of course, responds by beating Antanor as well. No one in the court protests on his behalf. These two marginalized members of the court—a young lady, without protective brothers around, and the knight seen as a fool – not only recognize Parzival’s destiny as a great chivalric knight, but set his quest truly in motion. Their lightness, their lack of power, moved by enticement, all like the dilettante, become the strength that pushes against what threatens to be the stale, self-satisfied heaviness of both Kei and Arthur’s court as a whole. Parzival is horror-struck by what they suffer on his behalf, and even in his own marginalized inexperience, sees through the rigidity of how the knightly code of honor is being lived. He understands that his greatest quest is to find what medievalist Marcus Stock has called “mutual compassionate recognition” rather than dominance. This sets Parzival on the path to becoming the Grail King, in what Sebastian Coxon, of University College London, describes as Parzival’s first instance of “privileged status as the object of laughter.” He has learned, in this first moment of interaction with what he has most desired—to become a knight of King Arthur—that the soul of this desire lies in the deepest and most pure understandings of what a great knight must be. The point is not the constructs of civilization’s expectations and failings, but instead, an unfailing commitment to doing what is most right, most compassionate. In Romance of the Grail, Campbell writes, “In Parzival, you are to follow your own nature, your own inspiration; following someone else will lead you only to ruin. That is the sense of Parzival’s journey…” This is the way of the dilettante hero: to follow the enticement of delight, in this case, moved by the lightness of laughter, to what enchants you most deeply. That is the pathway to the boon.

Welcome to another New Year, still in its childhood—a toddler beginning its adventure. Popular culture routinely portrays the New Year this way, as a Child watched over by a kindly and fatherly Old Year, usually in the form of an Old Man with a flowing white robe and wielding a razor-sharp sickle or scythe. It looks so innocent. Sweet, even. “Look there, it’s Old Man Time handing off the year to the cherubic little New Kid on the Block, barely on its feet but ready to take over.” Sure—but to my eye, Old Man Time looks suspiciously like the Greek Titan Cronus (or, in the Roman version, Saturn). He’s always shown carrying a scythe with which, we assume, he’ll sweep away the old to bring in the new. Again, I can’t help but remember the rest of that story. Remember this?: Cronus ate his children. Suddenly not so innocent, eh? Of course, he didn’t eat all of them. Zeus was saved when his mother swapped him out for a stone wrapped in swaddling. Eventually the boy-god grew up, snuck his father an emetic (causing his dad to upchuck the swallowed siblings), and then imprisoned him in the bottomless pit of Tartarus. In one story he eventually pardoned his father and put him in charge of the Elysian fields. Well, you can probably already see the mythological punchlines from here: It’s important for the New Year not to be consumed by the Old Year. Following the story line, we might also imagine that the New Year must then rescue any siblings, any other lives, the Old Year has already swallowed. We’ll come back to this in a sec. The mythology has a few wrinkles worth mentioning because it demonstrates the overlapping and interweaving of origin stories, how they evolved and co-evolved over time. There are two Greek deities with names close enough to give one pause: Chronos (Xronos) and Cronus (Kronos). The first is associated with the harvest and, explicitly, with time. (You can see the root of chronometer in his name.) He is usually shown carrying a sickle. The second one is Cronus the Titan, who also carries a sickle—the one he used to castrate his father, Ouranos/Uranus. Tracking down whether Chronos and Cronus are different, or the same deity in different eras and areas, is as tricky as following the ongoing revision of origin stories in the modern superhero universes. Even in the ancient world, scholars like Petrarch weighed in to suggest that these were one and the same. At any rate, as you can see above, their names are spelled closely enough in Greek for the purposes of today’s musings. Back to the New Year. The theme of the old eating the young shows up in myths from around the Mediterranean basin and it does a lot of work for us here in terms of hinting at how any New Year is related to the Old, or how any new phase of our lives is related to what has passed. It suggests that the Old Year always threatens to consume the New Year: that old habits, loitering inclinations, and lingering desires are more inclined to kill off or absorb new projects, or any new life, than move on. I think we’re all having this issue with the pandemic right now: will the past year eat us alive in the New Year? Or can we get past it? We also just passed the anniversary of the January 6th riots at the US Capitol. Will the politics of the past continue to eat us up in the coming year? These are the kind of provocative, but fruitful, questions each of us must consider. Right now, for instance, I’m just getting over a terrible cold, one that started a few days before New Year’s and one that looked exactly like the omicron variant of COVID. Turns out it was just a lousy cold, but my concerns about spreading COVID prior to testing negative ate me alive, day and night, for a week. Then I remembered this handy bit of mythological New Year’s narrative and started thinking about how to avoid being chewed on by the past year. I confess I’m at a loss regarding how this myth helps us avoid being consumed by the Old Year. Typically you can follow out the story line to see where it goes, but in this case it runs smack dab into a couple of opaque metaphors. The story of Cronus and Zeus seems to say that in order to avoid being eaten by the Old Year, we’d have to feed it a stone as a substitute for ourselves (whatever that would be) and force it to release the mythological siblings in our lives (whatever in the world those would be). You could argue that this is why our culture encourages getting stoned at New Year's Eve parties. Or why we tune in to watch Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin' Eve. I’d even like to say that these ideas are obviously anachronistic, but with Chronos hiding there in plain sight, both of ‘em seem a bit too obvious. Maybe the solution is simply not to let the Old Year catch you in the first place and, instead of handing yourself over to a past that wants to consume you, smack it upside the head with a rock—direct, but doesn’t strike me as a terribly sophisticated interpretation. One solution, however, is clear from this story: you cannot confront the Old Year as a child, even though that is how we meet it. Like Zeus, the Child needs to be nurtured and set on the path of its adventure, its trek toward authenticity, in order to acquire the strength, insight, and experience necessary to confront a past that wants to devour it.  Maybe the idea is that, in our own lives, we have to find that Inner Child and put it on the road to finding itself. But maybe you’ve seen something here that pulls all these pieces together more clearly. Let’s tag team The Old Year!

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.