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,

Do something, you change. Do nothing, you change. Fight change, you change. Embrace change—well, you get the picture. And while we change, “things” change too. So it seems in the field of relative life, the one unchanging constant is constant change. This being the case, the best we can do is influence the directions of change. One of my favorite parts of mythology (and of story in general) is witnessing the transformations of the characters as a result of their journeys—and all myths are journeys. In fact, what’s not a journey? A journey to the post office, to sleep, through thoughts or even thoughtlessness. The journey is a kind of current that moves us through life. It provides the impetus that keeps one’s narrative in perpetual motion, making change inescapable. Sure, it’s the journey that changes us. But it’s in how we engage the journey—our decisions, actions and reactions—that we are able to exert an influence on it. The good news is that we don’t need to find the “power” to influence change, the journey provides that free of charge. What we need are the skills and tools to steer as best we can in keeping with the general directions that the journey sends us in. This month’s theme attends not to morphosis or objective change, but rather to self-reflective metamorphosis—the kind of change that transpires within. So let’s journey into mythology as a means of tracking psychic transformation through terrains of metaphorical and imaginal narrative. Sure, that’s a lot of abstract, impersonal content, but it holds two key terms that offer us passage out of the impersonal and into something we can call mine: “metaphorical” and “imaginal.” Metaphor is our first big tool because it transcribes mythological narratives (i.e., stories about someone else) into stories about “me.” Or, more specifically, through metaphor, the relationships between mythic characters and the stories they find themselves in are precise correlations to the relationships between me and the stories I find myself in. In Creative Mythology, we are introduced to Immanuel Kant’s formula: a is to b as c is to x. Joseph Campbell then applies this formula to mythic metaphors as a complete resemblance of two relationships. Meaning that it’s “not ‘a somewhat resembles b,’ but rather ‘the relationship of a to b perfectly resembles that of c to x’” (339). The point here is simply to recognize the mechanics of this formula so that we can have it up and running while we read the myths, making their stories metaphorically concurrent to ours. There’s plenty more to say on Kant’s formula—and especially on the mysterious “x” which represents, in Campbell’s words, “a quantity that is not only unknown but absolutely unknowable” (339). And granted, metaphors can correlate all sorts of relationships, but as I’m using it here, xrepresents “my” story (and my myth) as an unknown value, which is precisely why it requires metaphor and not expository explanation to render a sense of what it is. Now let’s look at our other big tool for influencing metamorphosis: Imagination. Being irrational, or non-rational, imagination is a complementary counterbalance to our rational understanding of the mechanics of metaphor. When we are mid-stride in a particular segment of our journey (or, correspondingly, when mythic figures are in mid-stride in a segment of theirs), there is always a level of uncertainty (x) as to which way to go or to what will happen. I suppose that in rational contexts, being in a position of not knowing is bad. In terms of imagination, however, it is highly desirable. The condition of not-knowing is a powerful summons for imagination—it forces its involvement by necessity. We “imagine” into the possibilities of our story to find our way. Furthermore, just as there is a correlation between not knowing and imagination, so there is between not knowing and the journey. After all, the root of the word “question” is quest. We see this relationship in Plato’s Myth of Er, where before entering into life the soul is first dipped in the river of Lethe [forgetfulness] to forget where it’s been and why it’s now here. I can think of a few good reasons for a dip in the Lethe. For one, it provides the mystery that necessitates the quest. And, for two, it provides a metaphor for the origin of a need for imagination. As mentioned earlier, it’s in how we engage the journey that we can influence it. But it’s the experience of the journey that reciprocally changes us. And so we are, to a degree, the authors of our metamorphoses. We become “experienced” in this or that and it shows in our character. Likewise, imagination is entwined with experience. We may argue that it’s only subjectively real and has no influence on outer events. But consider guided meditation, for example. Our guide begins: “Imagine [and it always begins with ‘imagine’] you’re on a quiet beach, a light breeze, the sand cool. . .” and suddenly, your mood is calmed, your body-chemistry changed—perhaps a little more serotonin or dopamine in the bloodstream. And so, where the imagination goes, the experience follows. In describing “aesthetic arrest” Campbell provides the following from Dante’s La Vita Nuova which speaks to the first time Dante perceives his beloved Beatrice: I say that from that time forward Love lorded it over my soul, which had been so speedily wedded to him [‘him’ being a personification of Love and not Beatrice!] and he began to exercise over me such control and such lordship, through the power which my imagination gave to him, that it behooved me to do completely all his pleasure. (68) The key phrase here is “through the power which my imagination gave him.” Likewise, when we imagine into the myths and the metaphors of myths that we read, our involvement is made deep. And a place is opened for the metamorphosis to put in its roots and grow.

“People often think of the Goddess as a fertility deity only. Not at all—she’s the muse,” Joseph Campbell elucidates in Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine. “She’s the inspirer of poetry. She’s the inspirer of the spirit. So, she has three functions: one, to give us life; two, to be the one who receives us in death; and three, to inspire our spiritual, poetic realization.” (36) As a Lithuanian, I’ve always been fascinated by how one of the country’s most famous exports, Marija Gimbutas, inspired Campbell. It was her studies of the Great Goddess of the Neolithic world of Old Europe that assisted him in perceiving the goddesses roots in later mythologies, rituals and traditions. He quotes Gimbutas: The human legs of the vulture … imply that it is not simply a bird but rather the Goddess in the guise of a vulture. She is Death—She Who Takes Away Life, maleficent twin of She Who Gives Life—ominous in flight on great, outspread wings. Despite the incarnate presence of Death, the vulture scenes of Çatal Hüyük do not convey death’s mournful triumph over life. Rather, they symbolize that death and resurrection are inseparably linked.(31) Many of us long for resurrection, to be called to arise and shepherd the totality of ourselves, including our inner world, out into the external realm. And while the banished and ignored shadow parts of our being may yearn for the light of renewal, it’s only when we orient ourselves to the mysteries of the world of spirit, and to all that speaks to the eternal, that we may find the wisdom, beauty, strength, and rebirth we seek. Symbolically these soul attributes may be pictured as the eternal feminine within us awaiting our attention and foster. (“Das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns hinan.” “The eternal feminine / Draws us on.” Goethe, Faust). The soul’s underworld is the most fertile ground for the psyche’s deep awakening. The resurrection, as Gimbutas describes, illustrates how essential it is to also meet the Goddess as vulture—a rite of passage, which involves a radical surrender. It’s an experiential process that necessitates being picked down to our very bones (as vultures literally do) to expose and unravel the falsities, masks, and personas that we so frequently employ as protective guises in the everyday, surface world. However, as Campbell reminds us, “It is through the Goddess that you enter the world of the spirit. She is the maze, and she is also your guide.” (39) The Goddess, whether we call her Gaia or one of various other names, is also the personification of the energies of nature. “The simplest manifestation of the Goddess in the early Neolithic planting traditions is as Mother Earth,” Campbell states. “The Earth brings forth life, and the Earth nourishes life, and so is analogous to the powers of the woman.” (3) Our soul invites us to house both dormancy (winter) and renewal (spring) by observing what’s disintegrating and rising within us. Again and again we read in the Mystery texts that we must die to our old patterns of behavior and habits of mind so that we may reimagine and refashion ourselves anew. And like the proverbial snake shedding its skin to reveal a new one, death is conquered by the soul’s ongoing regeneration. Too often we forget that the processes of fertility and creativity initially emerge through dissolution and fragmentation. We’re fearful of the darkness that these movements bring, too weary to explore their mission and hidden, yet sacred, poetry. But it’s the womb space of fallowness and gestation in both vegetative life and in our own soul’s regenerative artistry that is to be sensed. Attentiveness to the “tomb as womb” potentiality must precede our future birth. It’s why we’re required to dwell for lengthy periods of time in the Stygian darkness of the underworld—and heed its tutelage: because it takes that much hidden, obsidian power to birth a new “you,” a new “me,” a new “us” in the personal, societal, and cultural realms. And so, the feminine impulse for fertile renewal is central to our future birth. As Campbell explains, “Here, when the gods find they are impotent, they have to give the power back to where it ultimately came from: to the female principle. She is the power of life, which lives in us in both its natural and in its so-called supernatural aspects. And in the Greek world we have the rise, then, of the mystery cults, the goddess Demeter, Persephone, and in Egypt, Isis, Nephthys. These are the guides to rebirth, and it’s their symbology that comes in the symbol of the Virgin Mother as the Madonna.” (227) The myths Campbell references point us to the principles inherent in the cyclical nature of life—the ongoing, agonizing death of the outmoded and resistant old in us in order to prepare for the birth of the new. Gimbutas adds that, “… pre-industrial agricultural rites show a definite mystical connection between the fertility of the soil and the creative force of woman. In all European languages, the Earth is feminine.” (8) For example, the Goddess Persephone is represented visibly as the rebirth of plant life – the seeds of the old crops converging with the new. This dying away and coming into being again is not a singular, once-off event. It’s a continuing, cyclical process and a constant experience. In a sense, it’s the very quintessence of life itself. Indeed, that’s how we meet the Goddess within us.

A passage from the Homeric Hymns tells us of a goddess that stretches out her bow and fires her creation into the world. “The peaks of mountains tremble. The forest in its darkness screams with the clamor of animals, and it’s frightening. The whole earth starts shaking, even the sea,” the Hymn states (The Homeric Hymns, translated by Charles Boer, Putnam, CT: Spring Publications 2003, pp. 4-6). Joseph Campbell spoke about the archetypal role of goddesses as powerful creators, connecting the physical birthing process to the metaphoric role that goddesses embody (Goddesses 21-26). While Artemis was believed to have attended the physical birth of children, the creations of the archetypal goddess transcend the physical realm and encompass creative offspring such as art, storytelling, crafts, and music. Over the summer, the much-anticipated musical album Happier Than Ever from singer Billie Eilish debuted at number one on the American Billboard Top 200 chart. Critics have been trying to define and describe Eilish’s popularity since her viral rise in 2015. Since then, she has become the youngest artist in the history of the Grammy Awards to win all four general field categories in the same year and was named to Time magazine's inaugural Time 100 Next list in 2019. Whenever a figure experiences a meteoric rise in culture, an archetypal influence is often at play. While several archetypes might seem relevant when considering Eilish, the goddess Artemis best intersects with the 19-year-old singer, as it is Artemis whose creation made such a profound impact when she shot into the world. Campbell unpacks the Hymn describing Artemis in Goddesses (109-110). Associations with gold are found in the Homeric Hymn to Artemis, specifically mentioning her solid gold bow. A song titled "Goldwing" on Eilish’s most recent album opens with a harmonized performance of two lines from Gustav Holst’s 1907 translation of the great canonical Hindu text, The Rig Veda. The lines describe a goddess, a golden-winged messenger of the mighty gods, whose smile lifts one to the highest heavens. Eilish’s song goes on to caution a young goddess-like woman about revealing who she is to those who would crave her magic but ignore her divine nature, which could leave her torn apart. The conversation plays like a wiser version of Eilish speaking to her younger self about the pitfalls of fame. The warning is directed in such a way to suggest the woman’s innocence—a quality that was associated with Artemis, as well as a descriptor often used by critics of Eilish. Later in the Hymn, Artemis unstrings her bow and goes to the house of her beloved brother, Apollo. The close relationship between Artemis and Apollo has been explored in a variety of ways by numerous mythologists with varying interpretations. Eilish has also had a famously close relationship with her brother, known mononymously as FINNEAS, who has produced both of her albums and remained her closest creative collaborator. Several of Eilish’s most popular songs were written as the two sat at home together. On Halley’s Comet, she sings of sitting in her brother’s room, unable to sleep, while contemplating her love for someone she’s come to know. Her meticulously minded musical brother is undoubtedly the Apollo to Eilish’s Artemis. In a final interesting turn found in the Hymn, Artemis puts away her arrows and dons a beautiful dress. Campbell tells us that Artemis manifested in several different ways (108). Here, we see the goddess changing from the huntress, clothed in animal skins that were frequently associated with the masculine, to a beautifully dressed feminine dancer. Eilish, who rose to prominence often dressed in age-appropriate, gender-neutral clothes, was criticized after appearing in more feminine and decidedly adult outfits for Vanity Fair earlier this year—a nod to her own coming of age.  Her embrace of the new aesthetic mirrors the transformation of Artemis we see in the Hymn. The photos generated fears that Eilish would begin to exploit her sexuality to further her commercial success. She masterfully navigated the concerns of fans and nay-sayers alike, choosing explanations that honored both her growth and maturity as well as the commitment to her core self that made her so accessible to so many. She continues to embody the murky complexity and the unabashed certainty of the goddess archetype in a manner that somehow seemed reminiscent of Actaeon’s fateful encounter with the bathing Artemis. Campbell describes Acteon’s gaze on Artemis as lustful instead of honoring, a completely improper reaction to such a deity. “Seeing that look in his eye, Artemis simply splashed him with some water and he was turned into a stag, and his own dogs then consumed him.” (Campbell 113) Campbell goes on to say that the dogs represented Actaeon’s lower appetites, which are what actually caused his demise. Billie Eilish continues to create and radiate goddess energy, firing creative arrows into the world, and instead of fighting every potential attack that arises, allowing those that would attempt to tarnish the golden properties of the goddess to be consumed by their own lesser selves.

This month the MythBlast Series is focusing on Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine which is, I think, a tremendously important contribution to the Campbell oeuvre edited by the gifted Safron Rossi (who is also a contributor to the MythBlast Series). This is a text that seems infinitely rewarding in its breadth, its depth, in its treatment of ego and, less explicitly, irony. In her introduction, Dr. Rossi writes of the Campbell lectures that constitute the text: These lectures are investigations of the symbolic, mythological, and archetypal themes of the feminine divine in and of herself, and for Campbell her main themes are initiation into the mysteries of immanence experienced through time and space and the eternal; transformation of life and death; and the energy consciousness that informs and enlivens all life.(ix-x) The reason that this text is so illuminating in its treatment of these three main themes is to be found (and this is true of mythology in general) in its exploration of reality, both material and immaterial, through the use of metaphoric irony. Ironic metaphor is pleasingly effective because it intensifies and subverts reality through resemblance and sharpens the perception, comprehension, and significance of the events and experiences that constitute the human condition. It results in “a sense of reality keen enough to be in excess of the normal sense of reality [and] creates a reality of its own.” (Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and Imagination, 79) As for the ego, its relationship to reality is tenuous. The ego seeks to find itself reflected everywhere, and insists that that reflected ego is itself reality. Additionally, it’s problematic that the ego oscillates between fear and desire, and “reality” is perceived largely within that dialectic: The fear of death is the fear of death to your ego, and the desire that the ego should enjoy the goods that it is interested in—these are what keep you from realizing your immortality. Fear and desire are the clashing rocks that exclude us from the intuition of our own immortal character. Joseph Campbell, Goddesses, 189 The ego’s insistence that its own reflection is really reality is made more complicated by the fact that, simply put, we do not know ourselves. But ignorance of one’s self is a hard thought for the ego to bear, and subsequently the ego finds it too painful to live in the gap between what it wants reality to be and what reality is. Metaphor and irony compellingly explore that gap which, when we more closely examine it, reveals itself to be a seam or a scar that knits together that which we think we know and that which we don't (or can't) know. Living in and exploring the gap necessarily diminishes and distresses the ego, which is forced to become a witness to, rather than the creator of, phenomenality. Because the ego expects to find its own reflection everywhere, the failure to decenter the ego results in reducing myth to an amusement, an inconsequential role-playing diversion whose object is merely to match qualities to archetypes while entirely ignoring the reality, and especially the force, of the archetypal. So how does one “get around” the ego? How can the ego be decentered? One way, and I think it’s an exceptionally effective way, is to cultivate a sense of the ironic. Irony is the pin that pops the ego’s inflation, calms its desires and fears, and allows one to live more enthusiastically, more gallantly, more genuinely, amidst what Wordsworth called “the still, sad, music of life.” Soren Kierkegaard put it this way: Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do. He who does not understand irony and has no ear for its whispering lacks eo ipso what might be called the absolute beginning of the personal life. He lacks what at moments is indispensable for the personal life, lacks both the regeneration and rejuvenation, the cleaning baptism of irony that redeems the soul from having its life in finitude though living boldly and energetically in finitude.Kierkegaard’s Writings, II, Volume II: The Concept of Irony Irony turns things inside out and upside down; it upends and reverses things; irony deconstructs and overthrows, it draws attention to the discrepancy between literal meaning and essential meaning. Myth, properly read, is always ironic. While the ego fears its decentering as a literal death, from the perspective of metaphysical irony, Campbell tells us that the death of the ego heralds the experience of the transcendent. In many traditions the great Goddesses are often found in relationship to darkness and the depths—the telesterions of life where one is exposed to sorrows and fear, even to tragedy. In those dark manifestations She is the Initiatrix who cleanses the doors of perception which open to the transformation of consciousness and the transcendent. But the benefit of those experiences—experiences that "normal," daylight consciousness always fails to understand and would rather pathologize—is that the ego cannot extend itself fully into these dark depths so it is there, in darkness and uncertainty, disabused of the comfort of the ego’s pleasing illusions, that we are confronted with who and what we really are. She, with her dark materials, pushes us along toward individuation and wholeness. “The rapture of the tragedy is the rapture of seeing the form broken for a flowing through of the radiance of the transcendent light.” (Joseph Campbell, Goddesses, 217) Irony is the indispensable attitude for engaging the goddess in her depths and darkness—darkness that places the radiance of transcendence in bold relief. Irony is life’s language; it grants one multiple points of view, it lets one see oneself seeing oneself, and mercifully, irony saves us from sarcasm, cynicism, and desuetude, the demoralized manifestations of broken hearts. Perhaps you’ve looked around and noticed how unforgiving and thoughtless culture is becoming; aesthetic sensibilities wane as we flirt with the neo-brutalism that encroaches upon so many aspects of contemporary life. Is it possible that irony may free us from the conventional constraining literalism of existence? Through irony might we see more deeply into the metaphor that is life, and in so seeing grow wiser, more joyful, humbler, and indeed, more compassionate? Thanks for reading.