Campbell was fond of talking about dualities and how getting beyond them forms a critical part of the hero’s journey: dualities like finite and infinite, transcendent and immanent, sacred and profane. The blooms of April provide us with an excellent opportunity to talk about these dualities and a lesson, a pollen path, to help us navigate between them. The lesson is about a famous flower. Aum maṇi padme hūṃ. The jewel is in the lotus. You’ve probably heard this before. Let’s start with Campbell. “‘The jewel (maṇi) in the lotus (padme),’ signifies, on one level: the immanence of nirvāṇa (the jewel) in saṁsāra (the lotus); another: the arrival of the mind (the jewel) in nirvāṇa (the lotus).” (Masks of God, Volume 2: Oriental Mythology 484) The lotus sinks its roots deep in the muck of the river bottom while the leaves float on the surface. The flower sticks up out of the water entirely and, strangely, it’s one of the only plants that produces seeds and flowers at the same time. Reaching for the sky, sunk in the mud, and numinous beauty nourished in the filth of the world, “the jewel in the lotus” represents the simultaneous presence of the infinite in the finite and of the transcendent made immanent. It represents the experience of moving beyond the dualities that condition our normal mode of thinking. But how do we do that? The first thing is to acknowledge the conditioning frameworks by which society has taught us to understand the world and ourselves, to recognize the cultural cognitive bifocals strapped on at birth that encourage us to see the world in black-and-white. Black-and-white has certain advantages: it’s easy, it satisfies our need to believe we’ve understood something, and we can take refuge from the complexities of life by reducing the often incomprehensible indeterminacies of ethics, politics, and love to easily digestible categories. Like all fast food, these interpretive frames provide a delicious and satisfying psychological meal – but provide little nutritional value. Dining on the simplistic, if yummy, world of black-and-white we find ourselves prone to the threat of spiritual heart disease. “Shut up, I don’t care!” my ego hollers. “I want more fries! And pass the ketchup!” The trick, as always, is not merely identifying the truth – that the world and our lives are tessellated with complex, overlapping shades of gray. Nope. Everybody knows that already. The trick is finding a way to put us into relationship with this truth and for that you need a metaphor; for that, you need a myth. That’s what the jewel in the lotus does. I mentioned transcendence and immanence in a previous Mythblast, and how they look leaky. But leaky is only how they look through the bifocals of duality. Once you recognize the conditioning frames of your understanding, once you take off the bifocals, transcendence and immanence can be seen as simultaneously present in the same moment – everywhere and everywhen as the transcendent unfolds into the field of time and space. In the West, William Blake probably said this best: To see a World in a Grain of SandAnd a Heaven in a Wild FlowerHold Infinity in the palm of your handAnd Eternity in an hour – but wait a sec: something can be transcendent and immanent at the same time? Yep. “But isn’t that just a dumb contradiction?” demands my logical brain. It might look like a contradiction, but it’s not. It’s a paradox. Let’s take a quick detour. Contradiction is the technical term for how your understanding interprets the conjunction of two mutually exclusive statements. Typically we assume one must be true while the other one is false: black and white, finite and infinite, Bears or Packers, etc. So far, so good. In a paradox you are once again confronted by the conjunction of two, mutually exclusive statements but, in this case, both are true. This suggests that embracing paradox is required to move beyond the dualities that lock us into black-and-white thinking and that dualities are dissolved by paradox but thrive in contradiction. Back to the flowers. “The jewel in the lotus” does not represent transcendence and immanence taking turns but the paradoxical simultaneity characterized in Campbell’s description of apotheosis from the Hero’s Journey. It is the recognition of eternity concealed in the forms of the finite and the temporal. At first glance it is tempting to believe that apotheosis marks the end of a mythic journey, that the jewel in the lotus marks the end of our pilgrimage. Aha! Enlightenment! (I mean, c’mon. Apotheosis literally means to “make into a god.” You’d think that’d be plenty.) Alas, no. This experience of seeing the transcendent as immanent and immanence as transcendent is not the end of the journey, but confirmation that we have endured, embraced, and transited the dualities of daily life – a life in which (for most of us, most of the time) the transcendent plays peekaboo, interrupting the finitudes of daily life with disruptive glimpses of the eternal. But those transitory glimpses are bait on the hook of our authentic lives. I might note in passing, since this year’s April included Easter, that this is a useful way to access the mythological import of Jesus nailed on the Cross. In that moment He represents both the finite sacrificed to the infinite and the infinite sacrificed for the sake of the finite: two mutually exclusive statements, both of which are true. There’s a jewel in the lotus for sure. But, as Campbell noted, myth leans toward the comic and away from the tragic mood and I’m compelled now to imagine what would happen if we translated this into Norse mythology. We’d have to expand the symbol to include that rascally squirrel Ratatoskr, maybe as a fish, swimming from root to lotus and lying to the jewel about what the muck has been saying. Thanks for musing along,

There is a story from the ancient Hebrew tradition in II Samuel 12 where a king spots the beautiful wife of a young warrior bathing on her roof. He sends for her and the two sleep together shortly thereafter. Upon learning the woman has become pregnant, the king sends the woman’s husband to the frontlines of a nearby battle where the fighting is most fierce, and therefore ensures his death.  A prophet travels to see the king and rather than rebuke his morals in the way that prophets were prone to do in those days, the prophet instead tells the king a story. The story is about two men, one rich and one poor. While the rich man had a plethora of sheep and cattle, the poor man had but one little ewe lamb. The poor man cherished the lamb, sharing his food with the animal and even sleeping with it in his arms, like a child. One day, when the rich man had a visitor arrive from out of town, rather than taking one of his own sheep to slaughter for a meal, he took the poor man’s lamb. Hearing this story, the king exploded in anger, demanding to know the identity of the rich man. Of course, the irony of the king’s inability to recognize the biographical nature of the story is lost on no one…except the king. The prophet used a story to bypass the king’s head and go straight to his heart. The story acted as a mirror, allowing the king to see his true self. Stories have long been one of the most powerful forces in the human experience. Study after study reveals that human behavior is less motivated by logic than we would prefer to believe, but instead relies on the narratives we create for our lives. Statistics and physical proof of something rarely changes our behavior, but stories seem to succeed where facts and figures do not. The role of the storyteller cannot be underestimated in the Hebrew story. His use of art to spark self-examination in the mind of the king is a testimony to how significant narrative is and how essential it can be in making meaning for us. From storytelling prophets to warrior poets, the sword falls under the might of the pen and a powerful potentate is no match for a well-told story. Recently I was invited into a conversation about what differentiated Joseph Campbell’s work around the hero’s adventure from that of his predecessors, who offered stages of initiation that resemble aspects of the monomyth. The most significant factor that has caused Campbell’s work to resonate so deeply where so many others have not: story. He took the patterns that many had seen previously in human rituals and practices and applied them to our speculative fiction. He recognized that our stories said as much about who we are as our behavior did. At this year’s Golden Globe Awards, Jane Fonda expanded on the essential role of story in our humanity: [I]n turbulent crisis-torn times like these, storytelling has always been essential. You see, stories ... can change our hearts and our minds. They can help us see each other in a new light, to have empathy, to recognize that for all our diversity, we are humans first. [...] That’s why all of the great conduits of perception, Buddha, Mohammad, Jesus, Lao Tzu, I would say all of them spoke to us in stories and poetry and metaphor because the nonlinear non-cerebral forms that are art speak on a different frequency, may generate a new energy that can jolt us open and penetrate our defenses. So that we can see and hear, what we may have been afraid of seeing and hearing. […] Stories, they really can change people. Campbell’s recognition of the fundamental role of story in myth caused his work to resonate with people in ways they weren’t always able to put into language, as myths are stories not always told in words but also in images, in motifs, and in food. In The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology, Campbell speaks of the priestcraft of art. He explains the lore of the greatest Capital city of Old Egypt can only be understood properly by recognizing that “those that developed it were a priesthood of practicing creative artists.” (91-92) Here, Campbell links the greatness of a society with the artistry of its creators, suggesting that the artists were not simply tradesmen but people of a divine calling, whose work and leadership transcended the lines between that which is beyond and the here and now. We live in a world in need of new stories – in need of better stories. We also need storytellers that understand the power of the tool they wield. An impactful story can cause oppressors to turn from their harmful ways. It can also unite people around a tyrant. It can end a season of torment and cause new life to bloom forth from stony ground. Our stories matter, and those gifted with the ability to tell them well hold great authority, they are part of a priesthood of practicing creative artists, and they have the skills to craft the lore of our culture or completely destroy it.

Once, a very long time ago, the Buddha preached a sermon to his followers by saying nothing at all. Instead of speaking, he held up a single flower. Only one listener, a monk named Mahakasyapa, heard what that flower had to say and smiled with joy. (Joseph Campbell. The Masks of God, Vol. II: Oriental Mythology, 608) Everyone else seems to have missed the point of what has since come to be called the Flower Sermon, no doubt returning to their chores and meditation with some chagrin. Because, come on—a flower? What could Mahakasyapa possibly have seen in a single blossom? Or heard? Or...whatever? The question is still worth asking today. One possibility is that he perceived something related to the intricate Buddhist teaching of the Flower Garland, which Campbell summarizes succinctly: “one is all and all are one” (679). In other words, we are inseparable from each other; and I do mean “we” in the broadest possible sense. The Flower Garland goes far beyond the platitude “we are all connected.” This teaching asserts that we all arise from and remain one with a single, indivisible continuity. All existence—meaning all energy, all matter, all beings, all consciousness—is defined by inseparability, which is another way of saying we are defined by our unity, and there is no such thing as a separate self. In other words, “I” don’t exist without “you,” and neither of “us” exists without the All that gives rise to our experience of illusory and temporary separateness. Beneath what we normally think of as our “selves” exists the vibrant, continuous All, an energy field that imagines us up the same way it imagines up a flower out of stems, leaves, seeds, soil, and all the lives that fed that churning loam throughout the ages, leading up to that singe bloom. On the other hand, maybe Mahakasyapa saw an archetypal Blossom, meaning the larger-than-life “force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” as the poet Dylan Thomas calls it. Maybe the Buddha’s flower became transparent to the divine Flowering that moves through us all, that power beyond our own that can make us smile no matter what in spite of ourselves. That Smile, like Mahakasyapa’s, brings us directly to the lotus throne of the goddess who Campbell calls “the most prominent single figure in the ornamentation of all the early Buddhist monuments,” Lakshmi, whose imagery of beauty and wealth overflows with lotus flowers. (Oriental Mythology, 415) Lakshmi is, in effect, the great Bloom: she is the soul of the lotus, the love of blooming, the ability to blossom. She brightens, lightens, en-lightens. She is the consciousness of flowering, and she is the flowering of consciousness. Lakshmi is the flowers that fountain around her. She is the profligate abundance of the universe, dispensing glories of many kinds. Hearkening back to the teaching of the Flower Garland, Lakshmi reminds us of our own lotus-essence, because if we really are all one, then our consciousness is inseparable from hers. Perhaps when the Buddha held her aloft for all to see, she smiled directly into and through Mahakasyapa. Beyond mythic images and religious teachings, isn’t every bloom a blessing in and of itself? A flower is a gift, a grace, a healing. A blossom is an epiphanic reminder of beauty’s inevitability. Simultaneously tiny and profound, each flower holds a revelation. Before that flower, its blossom was impossible to imagine. But when those petals unfurled, the world changed. Where there had been nothing, now exists a rose, or an orchid, or a lotus, or new hope. Maybe Mahakasyapa marveled: how could this miracle exist? And yet it so manifestly is, how could it not exist? Then the flower’s presence could have opened his heart by collapsing the binaries of being and non-being, reminding him of his own miraculous presence and the presence of all things. Flowers tend to appear in the moments when our hearts are most full: first dates, apologies, weddings, hospital rooms, springtime. Flowers might not speak, but they most certainly proclaim. They herald spring’s return to a frozen landscape, peace to the battlefield, beauty to bleakness, healing to illness and injury. Flowers trumpet the news of the soul’s open heart, the world’s open heart, and the open heart of the cosmos itself. A single flower changed Mahakasyapa’s consciousness, and then, the consciousness of the entire tradition of Buddhism, and therefore the world. Like Lakshmi, his flower consciousness blossomed out of the mud and into the flamboyant generosity of nectar and fragrance that draws pollinators from miles around, and then, like Lakshmi’s, his smile became the truth of beauty and the beauty of truth.

This month in the MythBlast Series, we’re focusing on Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God, Vol II: Oriental Mythology. On page 490 of that volume, Campbell quotes from “The Song of the Cowherd” by the poet Jayadeva: “Oh may this poem…delight all lover’s hearts.” The poet and artist Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who delighted the hearts of all lovers (and delighted the lovers of great hearts, too), died on February 22, 2021. He’s already been eulogized in a multitude of ways, and with language that far exceed any bon mots that I might muster, but I do want to consider something he said in The New York Times “Last Word” feature of the online obituaries section because when I heard it, it rang in my soul like a bell. “Last Word” is a series of short on-camera interviews featuring prominent figures reflecting upon their own lives that are only released with the individual’s obituary. Ferlinghetti’s piece was extraordinarily intimate, and allows one to witness the intelligence, the heartfulness, the passions, and the sensitivities of a man who managed to forge his life in the flames of creativity and courage. In this video, Ferlinghetti tells us his early life was “unhappy,” and remarks, “so I escaped by lyricism.” He goes on to say, “When present day life gets too awful, there’s the lyric escape.” Ferlinghetti follows up with a few examples of the lyric escape, such as writing a poem, looking at the moon, or even “shacking up with your best girlfriend,” but what I hear resounding in his words is that the lyric escape is a flight into beauty. And it’s not just any beauty, it’s the beauty found within. As Campbell puts it: “[T]he sphere of eternity, beyond the veil of time and space, where there is no duality, they are at one; death and life are at one; all is peace.” (Oriental Mythology 121) It is an “enchanted mood,” Herman Melville insists, in which “thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.” (Moby Dick 251) (As an aside, Melville is referring to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, who was ordered by Queen Mary to be put to death on March 21, 1556 by burning.) Both Campbell’s sphere of eternity and Melville’s enchanted mood refer to the aesthetic arrest by which one is overcome in the presence of deep beauty. That aesthetic arrest is Ferlinghetti’s lyric escape. Ferlinghetti seems to know that lyric beauty—the goal of the lyric escape, is the antidote to life’s pain. Readers of Joseph Campbell will be familiar with his discussions regarding James Joyce’s theory of art, in which proper art induces in the beholder a seizure of the heart, an aesthetic arrest. I’ve always thought Joyce’s seizure of the heart to involve at least some small degree of pain, a cardiac event induced by an intense psychological experience. People end up in ER exam rooms for similar reasons all the time. Perhaps, because we discover some modicum of pain in the experience of it, beauty has a salutary, restorative effect when we find ourselves in the grip of life’s pain. Beauty functions as a homeopathic remedy for the pain of living; it’s the healing alchemy of like curing like. Beauty, as Rilke puts it, is “the beginning of terror;” we know we must eventually take our leave of “this earth of majesty, this blessed plot,” this place where piercing beauty makes its home, and either it or ourselves will eventually turn to ashes. In his beguilingly titled book Essays in Idleness, the 14th century Zen monk-poet Yoshida Kenko captures the essential impermanence of beauty in a poignant, elegant meditation: If we lived forever, never to vanish like the dews of Adashino, never to fade like the crematory smoke on Toribeyama, men would scarcely feel the beauty of things. Containing both gratification and pain, beauty transcends dualities and remains, not only beyond the veil of time and space, but beyond pleasure and pain, beyond joy and sorrow, beyond life and death, within the sphere of eternity. The lyric escape transformed Dante’s pain of exile into the Divina Commedia, the Divine Comedy. The same year he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, Keats’ lyric escape created “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” a lyric flight that allowed him to live for a precious while within a timeless, ever-green scene etched on an ancient urn where young lovers loved forever, leaves never fell from trees, and he remained “the foster child of silence and slow time.” In bed after yet another bout with influenza and brittle mental health, Virginia Woolf’s lyric escape writes herself out of infirmity with an archly beautiful essay, “On Being Ill.” Lying there, she imagines herself a deserter from “the army of the upright,” looking up to see the “extraordinary” and “strangely overcoming” spectacle of the “divinely beautiful” and “also divinely heartless” sky that healthy, perpendicular people seldom notice. “With the hook of life still in us still we must wriggle,” Woolf writes. “Left to ourselves we speculate thus carnally. We need the poets to imagine for us. The duty of Heaven-making should be attached to the office of Poet Laureate.” Perhaps so; I’d like to think I’d feel at home in Billy Collins’ or Elizabeth Bishop’s heaven. But the duty of heaven making unfailingly falls to each one of us, and it’s a duty made lighter if we learn the art of the lyric escape.  After all, as Ferlinghetti wrote in Poetry as Insurgent Art, “the greatest poem is lyric life itself.”

Some have confused a mythology as nothing more than an elegantly-packaged ideology. Not so. Nor is it true to say that mythic figures are to be read as literal facts. The confusion commonly stems, as Campbell often repeated in his writings, from assuming that something or someone is literal, not metaphorical of another reality that invites the imagination into a world of multiple possibilities. Such a move towards literalism belittles the universal appeal and power of the mythic images to no more than “prosaic reification” (The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, xxiv). Making the shift from literal to figural alters one’s entire perception of the phenomenal world, to say nothing of its opening one to the symbolic power of dreams. I can only speculate here as to why this confusion arises. I think one answer may be found in Adolf Bastian’s brilliant understanding of “elementary ideas” and “ethnic ideas.” The former transports us into the rich arena of archetypal images and situations; the latter into the particular  historical and specific ways that such universal realities are embedded in and flourish in a particular culture of a people. A brief example may suffice to unfold such a distinction. In their book Your Mythic Journey, Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox offer that “a myth can make a cow sacred in one culture and hamburger meat in another” (xi). Same animal. One cultural myth perceives it as sacred, the other reaches for it in an act of consumption. The animal’s universality is bent to conform or to support a local ethnic belief. Beef as belief. Animal as anima. Billions of burgers served. Campbell was keen to see that myths provide a dual vision: the transcendent and universal, but rooted firmly in history’s particularity. Such a belief allowed him to retrieve an ancient idea that it was the human body itself,  “in miniature a duplicate of that macrocosmic form,” (13) which conveyed a sense of unity through the great chain of being’s diversity. Correspondence and correlation are the lenses through which to uncover and further this ancient wisdom of analogies linking all diverse parts of creation. Such connective tissue is heightened when we are invited to gaze at a photo of the Earthrise taken from the moon’s surface (Inner Reaches, 19) to reveal that a new cosmological perspective insists on and incites a revisioned mythology. I believe such a miraculous image accelerated our concern for saving the planet by seeing it with all the boundaries of countries removed. Such a dramatic photo struck Campbell as a vision of a new myth. It also reveals his own mythopoetic way of discovering analogies that reveal relationships we might miss or ignore without his acute insights. He explores patterns closer to home–for example, between native American people and those of India–sensing “equivalences” in their images and beliefs. His method is “to identify these universals. . . archetypes of the unconscious and as far as possible, to interpret them” (69). Let’s pause to suggest here that the act of interpretation is a mythic move of imagination. Hermes is the god-guide in this human activity and hermeneutics therefore is a god-inspired talent. Without this rich act of being human, and Campbell is one of the most cogent minds in such an uncovering, we would stack up event-after-event with no cohering sense growing from such a futile performance. Interpretation is a fundamental act in learning. As he creates a unique form of such meaning-making, Campbell uncovers “an implicit connotation through all its metaphorical imagery of a sense of identity of some kind, transcendent of appearances, which unites behind the scenes the opposed actors on the world stage” (81). Life itself is dramatic, but to miss the experience because of an obsession with meaning is to miss the action that is before us and within us. Art in all of its guises becomes the delivery system by which myth, history and aesthetics congeal on the same stage. But as is his habitus of finding correlations between worlds, he suggests that “the mystic and the way of the proper artist are related” (111). I do not think it is too much to proclaim that all art is metaphorical to a large degree; Campbell’s own language is that the figural realities on the stage of artistic creation can succeed in opening us to “ a transformation of perspective” (109). Like that magnificent image of the Earthrise, the power of aesthesis, a showing forth or an unveiling, is the artist’s sacred inspiration for expression. The artist’s creation provides us with a mimetic reality, a way to activate our sense of analogy to recover our own mythic imagining, to see “with two eyes, and alone to him is the center revealed: that still point. . . (117). Draw a circle around the still point. Now you are at the center of it all.

Art, among other things, is image-making. As a teacher of creative writing, I often emphasize the power of images due to their effectiveness in rendering experiences in our readers. Concrete language, which communicates to (and through) the senses, is what drives the written image. Concrete language is direct, visceral, and needs no explanation to work its magic. Abstract language, on the other hand, is conceptual. Like the image, it too renders experience, though in a different way. I ask, then: Is the experience-rendering value of abstract language any less potent or significant due to this difference? And even more to the point, is not abstract language, in its own way, concrete? After all, a concept or emotion or experience is, in fact, something. And by “something” I mean to say some thing .  This idea is applicable not just to creative writing but to all genres of art whose works extend into this kind of subtler “stuff.” This MythBlast aims to highlight the experience-numinosity connection by attending to the attributes of our experiences—be they emotions, sensations, or insights—as concrete or material phenomena, each unique and wholly its own.  In the third chapter of his Inner Reaches of Outer Space , Joseph Campbell opens with a wonderful quote from his wife, Jean Erdman, whose art (and profession) was dance. She says, “The way of the mystic and the way of the artist are related, except that the mystic doesn’t have a craft” (89). Indeed. Whereas the artist attends more to making, the mystic’s focus attends more to matters of experience. And where the artist produces a tangible work, the mystic produces an experience that is (in our approach) very much less tangible. Nonetheless, the world of the artist and the world of the mystic both lean into that numinous, mysterious realm that we thinkers circumambulate with terms like Source, the Transcendent, God, etc. But if we apply our concrete approach, we could say that the mystic does in fact work with and upon “stuff.” In the supplies cache of the artist we find clay, paint, and so on—all overtly substantial. Ask a mystic what he’s packing and, if we’re lucky, he’ll pull out a few of those less-substantial things for display: “Well, here’s a mantra, that thing there’s a breathing technique. Oh, and here’s a twenty-eight-day fast I picked up at a shop in one of my visions.” So, along this scale of substantiality, the dancer’s body spills into movement, the musician’s instrument sheds its sound waves, and the meagre wisps of the poet’s ink seep into meaning. Each of these evoke experiences of particular flavors—i.e., attributes—depending on the art and on the consciousness of the observer.  For all the known reasons I could suggest (and even moreso, for all the unknown reasons I cannot!), the works of the artist and mystic reach into the numinous–but I think they also invite it. In our approach, we see that both have their “objects” of transmission—“stuff” with attributes. Whether it’s the cold depth of a statue’s empty gaze or the beaming crescendos of those van Gogh sunflowers, radiant and riotous like a choir of—well, sunflowers!—the experience pours through and saturates the psyche with (in this case) warmth, vitality, and celebration through paint, whose attributes are colors, whose attributes are pleasant, whose attributes are a kind of experience.  That’s one direction. The other direction is simply that the numinosity infuses all of these stages with, uh, itself. Whether we approach the direction from left to right or right to left, inner to outer or outer to inner, the substance of the attributes–regardless of where they fall on our materiality scale–both transmit and buffer the numinous force, which in its undiluted status must be, from the perspective of an embodied human, annihilatory in either a very good or very bad way. Campbell addresses this dynamic when he refers to the many characters in Ovid’s Metamorphoses who were “unfavorably transformed by encounters with divinities, the full blast of whose light they were unready to absorb.” And he later writes that “in contrast, the mystic deliberately offers himself to the blast.” (91) The divinities of mythology are archetypal (which we perceive and experience as attributes of forms that are nearer to the numinous, or more infused by it). Like a work of art or a mystic’s subtle medium, they take on this ambiguous function of pipelining numinous energy through their form. Or, with their form, they preserve us from the blast.  Speaking of blasts, even if this MythBlast is naught but guesswork, there may be some accurate content herein—or, at least, some moments where the guesswork brushes shoulders with truth. And if so, then it is encouraging to me to reflect on the business of engaging art as creations of our own making, and of our own being, that roam the frontier of the numinous, transmitting and receiving, to and fro, the missives of human to Source and of Source to human, composed in a language for which there can be no name.

One of Campbell’s last projects, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, was developed from a series of lectures delivered in San Francisco. The series included a symposium at the Palace of Fine Arts with astronaut Rusty Schweickart, who flew on Apollo 9 in March of 1969. Schweickart spent over 241 hours in space and performed the first extravehicular activity (EVA) of the Apollo program. During a five-minute pause tethered outside his spacecraft, Schweickart underwent a metaphysical experience as he stared at the Earth, contemplating its place in the universe, while listening to the unfathomable depths of cosmic silence. I vividly remember when, in these lectures, Campbell compared this moment to the song of the Sirens in the Odyssey. This was somewhat startling to me since I had inherited the mistaken notion that Homer’s Sirens were seductive, erotic mermaids—a misreading of the text widely disseminated by European Art, especially during the 19th century, and as exemplified in the painting Ulysses and the Sirens by Herbert Draper (above). There is no description of the appearance of the Sirens in Homer, nor is there any trace of sexual enticement. There is however an association with music and death: the Sirens sing a “high, thrilling” song, “lolling there in their meadow, round them heaps of corpses.” Those passing by who hear their “honeyed voices” will be made “wiser” by their omniscience, for the Sirens “know all the pains that Achaeans and Trojans once endured on the spreading plain of Troy,” and indeed, “all that comes to pass on the fertile earth, we know it all!” Nor do we find an exclusive emphasis on sexuality and temptation in the Platonic commentaries that emerged in the centuries after the poem was composed. Instead, we find something much more akin to Campbell’s implication that Rusty Schweikart had heard the Song of the Sirens while hovering there in the abyss of the universe, looking down on our inconsequential little speck of dust. For Campbell, the Siren song that he heard was that of the infinitude of cosmic silence and the oblivion which is the fate of all creation. It is the same song of space that Campbell often spoke of during his lectures when he evoked the ancient wisdom of an Arctic shaman, who advised us “not to be afraid of the universe.” Rather than representations of the lure of the flesh and the material world, Campbell’s Sirens represent an archaic tradition associating the Sirens with the heavens and the spiritual wisdom of the Musers. These views are rooted in Plato’s Republic: In the famous myth of Er, eight concentric circles revolve around the spindle of Necessity representing the fixed stars and planets, with a Siren standing on top of each ring “singing a single sound, a single note, but from all eight of them there sounded in concord a single harmony” (Music of the Sirens, 23). Elsewhere, in the Cratylus, Socrates speaks of “the Sirens in the underworld, which they are unwilling to leave, so charmed are even they by Pluto’s conversations” (23)—an observation that associates the Sirens with death. It is true that in Plutarch’s reading the Sirens may represent false and trivial forms of degenerate music, to be countered by the Muses, but he also states that “the music of Homer’s Sirens imparted to departed souls a love of the heavenly world, from which a faint echo reached us on earth that only the more refined soul perceived” (Sirens, 23). Later, near the end of the Roman Empire, Macrobius, in his commentary on Cicero , suggested that “‘Siren’ was Greek for ‘singing to God’” (23). Taking us one step further away from the terrestrial temptations of the material world, Theon of Smyrna and Philo Judaeus equate the Sirens with stars, or planets, “either as blazing bright or as generating music with their motions” (23). This tradition brings us much closer to Campbell’s notion that the Sirens in the Odyssey represent the “allure of the beatitude of paradise” (The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology, 172)—a notion consistent with the Pythagorean view that the Sirens represent the music of spheres calling souls in life and after death to rise above physical world. It was that song of silence, Campbell was suggesting, that Rusty Schweikart heard while floating along in outer space, a transcendental experience of the metaphysical ground of the universe—of the deep silence between the repetitions of the “mystic syllable AUM” recited during meditation—a silence pregnant with the wisdom that surpasses all understanding, so often communicated during Campbell’s lectures on the subject, when he evoked the “SILENCE before, after, and around AUM,” signifying nothing, “that absolute, unqualified, unconditioned state-that-is-no state of ‘consciousness in itself’” (Masks of God: Creative Mythology, 647).

In The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and Religion, Joseph Campbell writes that the mythic metaphor, the mythic image, “is necessarily physical and thus apparently of outer space. The inherent connotation is always, however, psychological and metaphysical, which is to say, of inner space.” (5) Psychologically, then, what are we to make of the chilling mythological rituals and images of human—or animal, for that matter—sacrifice? In a 1971 Sarah Lawrence lecture, Professor Campbell described what he called the basic myth of the Neolithic culture, which is that there was “a time when there was no time, a mythological age” in which beings were “neither human nor animal, nor plant; a kind of mixing of forms.” There was no death or birth, and this age came to an end with the “Mythological Event,” the killing of one of these beings. Campbell is pointing to the idea that when this generous understanding of existence as being simply one more thing among the vast, untold number of things—of one thing being no more important than another, of experiencing absolutely no separation from the natural world at all—when that is betrayed, then death and hunger enter the world. One of those beings was cut up and buried, and from the buried parts the food plant emerged. Therefore, what you’re eating is your relative, something very close to you, something of which you were once a part until the psychological development of the individual, subjective ego—a state of consciousness that emphasizes separateness and inescapable subjectivity—is undertaken. Professor Campbell points out that the gruesome rituals of human sacrifice belonging to some planting cultures are literal reenactments of the primal murder and the subsequent boon of a dietary staple. The sacrificial victim is to be understood as the god or goddess who, by offering itself to death, functions as a somewhat more literal Eucharist, ensuring the continued well-being of the community. Additionally, the ritual killing seems to function as atonement, at-one-ment, with the nature of things both immanent and transcendent, indeed, with the energies of the cosmos itself. Campbell writes that “if the witness is prepared, there ensues a transfer of self-identification from the temporal, reflecting body to the…eternal source, and one then knows oneself as consubstantial with what is of no time or place but universal and beyond death, yet incarnate in all beings everywhere and forever.” (Inner Reaches, 32) Such a sacrifice inculcates, theoretically at least, no individual or cultural guilt. These rituals created a temenos, a sacred space, within which one is through the act of sacrifice, returned to the mythic age, which is not located in some distant, murky past, but exists right here in the present. What is clear, whether we discuss sacrifice in literal or symbolic, mythic terms, is that we are discussing an act of violence. However, sacred violence is different than, shall we say, random or profane violence. Sacrifice “makes sacred” an act of violence, which in a different setting, a setting devoid of the traditionally, intentionally and historically constructed temenos, would simply be a violation of law or taboo. Another quality that a sacrifice must possess is that of “meaningfulness.” Events like the Vietnam War, 9/11, or the ongoing pandemic weigh heavily upon cultural consciousness because so many people died for no apparent good or just cause. It is the case that the way in which we talk about sacrifice matters, and a fair amount of categorical debate often surrounds the framing of a sacrificial act. For example: Did Jesus offer himself as a willing sacrifice, or was he executed by the State as a criminal? Indeed, both narratives may be, and have been, argued. But I want to return to Joseph Campbell’s notion that the mythic image, the mythological act of sacrifice, even though it may be described as a physical, material, and external act, is also necessarily psychological and metaphysical, lest we become fixated on the ethics and morality of the mythological act without understanding the psychological impact. What is, then, the psychological impact of the mythological motif of sacrifice? C.G. Jung suggests that what we’re sacrificing is a self-interested, physicalist perspective; a perspective of the ego that compels one to think that I am only this material form, beyond which lies only oblivion: What I sacrifice is my own selfish claim, and by doing this I give up myself. Every sacrifice is therefore, to a greater or lesser degree, a self-sacrifice. The degree to which it is so depends on the significance of the gift. If it is of great value to me and touches my most personal feelings, I can be sure that in giving up my egoistic claim I shall challenge my ego personality to revolt. I can also be sure that the power which suppresses this claim, and thus suppresses me, must be the self. Hence it is the self that causes me to make the sacrifice; nay more, it compels me to make it. The self is the sacrificer, and I am the sacrificed gift, the human sacrifice. (Transformation Symbolism in the Mass, Psychology and Religion: West and East. CW Vol 11, p. 261. Emphasis is mine.) When an individual compels the sacrifice of another–say, as Abraham compels Isaac–one must at some level, Jung points out, “feel the knife [enter] into his own breast” and become “at the same time the sacrificer and the sacrificed.” (262) What good do we get from it? What we gain from the sacrifice is ourselves, resurrected and renewed, newly possessed of all the things in us that were previously scattered, never properly related, or objectively witnessed–and as Campbell has often remarked, we become transparent to the transcendent. The sacrifice facilitates the transformation of suffering into a creative force. To gloss the poet Wendell Berry: We get to have love in our hearts. Thanks for reading,

“Mythology is the womb of mankind’s initiation to life and death,” states Joseph Campbell in his collection of essays titled, The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension. (34) Death and rebirth myths exist in various forms in all cultures, and symbolically and experientially the descent and ascent cycle is a continuous, and universal, theme within the context of the soul’s overall developmental journey. For example, in the Greek myth of Persephone and Hades, Persephone comes to realize that eternity doesn’t manifest from living on the surface of life – and only in life’s times of spring – but through traversing winter’s stillborn time of death. Persephone’s rescue comes from surrendering to the seasons and to nature’s annual rhythms of rise and decline, of flourishing and decay, and from sensitizing her psyche to the inner seasons of the soul. Persephone knows that the steadfast eternal may only be touched through the cyclical process of death and rebirth, in both outer nature and within the soul’s very depths. In the essay "The Symbol without Meaning," Campbell writes, “As the researches and writings of Dr. Jung have shown us, the deep aim and problem of the maturing psyche today is to recover wholeness.” (154) Only when the impulse for inner renewal, for psychological and spiritual wholeness, becomes more preferable to the unbalanced and misguided sense of perfection that once satisfied us, do we move towards the more fully rounded and integrated self. By necessity this brings an encounter with the underworld of our psyche, a descent that often involves the grief of separation, an unravelling or a deconstruction of the old patterned self, and both a breaking down and a breaking open. One of the purposes of myth (whether the myth be of self-narrative or of the collective) is to help us to truly feel our lives. And for those who have experienced lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic with consequent, extended lengths of time in solitude–or felt a sense of internal emptiness or vacuum of soul–the invitation has been extended to more deeply sense into ourselves, while also feeling into the entire beingness of the planet, and indeed, of the cosmos. In the same essay Campbell writes, “Among the Buriat, the animal or bird that protects the shaman is called khubilgan, meaning 'metamorphosis,' from the verb khubilku, 'to change oneself, to take another form.’” (133) The underworld is the most fertile ground for our metamorphosis. Acting as an alchemical vessel, times of solitude and inner desolation invite us to explore what it is that must change in us and take another form. So much depends on our capacity to relinquish harmful and obsolete patterns and behaviors, for we know that every attempt to deal with challenges in outmoded ways will, ultimately, fail us. Without engaging ritually with this realm, the psyche remains flat and one-dimensional. This is why we must travel to the nethermost regions of the soul. Only from the underworld may we begin to emerge anew, for mature, soulful wisdom and self-knowledge don’t typically lie in the maidenly, pure fields of poppies and narcissi, but rather in the bleak vale of winter’s death. Wisdom, beauty and strength are often only found when we orientate ourselves to the part of us that partakes in eternity. And more often than not, it’s an encounter with Hades that awakens us to the abiding eternal within. In the essay "Primitive Man as Metaphysician," Campbell states, “Hovering Hawk, for example, when asked how his people made their songs, replied: ‘We dreamed them. When a man would go away by himself–off into solitude then he would dream a song.’” (55) As we unravel the old to rebirth a new and more nourishing human experience, we do so not only for our own soul, but for the anima mundi–the great world soul–for these songs, when newly born in us, are not for ourselves alone. We shape-shift, metamorphose and transform so that we are able to co-create new songs, and in strength and sweetness, together sing them for the entire world. Our cyclical descents into the fertile void of the beckoning unknown empower us to dream these emerging songs into our being and embrace what these liminal times demand of us. We must shine our light into the darker recesses of our psyche to hear the emerging harmonies of soul and spirit that will assist us, metaphorically, to die to our old selves and to lives that no longer serve us sufficiently (individually and collectively) or honor the earth. “For myself,” Campbell writes, “I believe that we owe both the imagery and the poetical insights of myth to the genius of the tender-minded; to the tough-minded only their reduction to religion.” (55) And so I raise my glass to you, the fellow tender-minded! May we meet again soon in community and sing the burgeoning, collective songs of the fraternity of all humankind as we, to paraphrase Campbell, align our heartbeat to match the beat of the universe and match our nature with Nature.

Anytime I read, and especially reread, Joseph Campbell’s books, I feel like I am in a personal conversation with a priest or a confessor, one who understands the need for the transcendent in our lives and is prepared to point me in the right direction. I think this feeling emerges because Campbell’s storytelling gene is a part of all of his utterances, but especially when he works a concept by morphing it into a narrative. In this collection of essays he states his purpose as shaman and guide: “to lift the veil, so to say, of that Goddess of the ancient temple of Sais,” who affirmed for all time, “no one has lifted my veil.” (xi) This metaphor is one of the constants of Campbell’s own heroic writer’s journey: to enter that terrain where the veil thinly separates the phenomenal world from the treasures of the mythic structures that support it. Bird and Goddess, flight and veil, oscillate and communicate throughout the essays. The wild gander is a rich metaphor for “Hindu master yogis,” who in their trance states, go beyond all boundaries of thought and are best known as “hamsas and paramhamsas: “’wild ganders’ and “’supreme wild ganders.’” (The Flight of the Wild Gander: Selected Essays 1944-1968, 134) This, and other comments like it, brought me years ago to write a piece on “Joseph Campbell: Irish Mystic.” Such an image serves as a still point in a rotating circle of themes, but the one I find most captivating is that of “brahman-atman, the ultimate transcendent yet immanent ground of all being” which makes possible the yogi “passing from the sphere of waking consciousness. . .to the unconditioned, nondual state ‘between two thoughts,’ where the subject-object polarity is completely transcended. . .” (135) The mythic motif Campbell spirals back to repeatedly is the quest for the crack, the gap, the thin membrane that allows him to glimpse and discern the symbolic, transcendent nature of the world winking back at us with not a little seduction, through the mask of the sensate realms of the human- and world-body in their fragility and mystery. Such is one of the many masks of gods that reveal the yearned-for archetypal compost of myth. Following Campbell’s thought like one starving for nutrients, would track the thin line of bread crumbs that if followed with humility and curiosity, leads one to the realm of mystery, while feeding one’s soul in the process. One of his favorite nutritious repasts consisted of the belief that myths allow us to move as if in a transport vehicle from the sensate order to one where we become transparent to transcendence. The veil lifts ever-so-slightly in this moment of meaning, but not before having the rich human experience, of which the residue or after-burn is meaning-making. I have sensed, as have other lovers of Campbell’s work, that his rich mythodology is syncretistic, gathering and clustering, then ultimately clarifying the connective tissue between disciplines to uncover the vast complexity of the human and world psyche on their arc towards unity. He is both hunter and gatherer, spanning centuries of development in human evolution. Which persuades us to glance with double vision at both myth and history, one inside the other, one connecting and transforming the other. We might, in Campbellian fashion, play with our own metaphor here at the end. Here is my image: the invisible lining of a jacket or coat is what I would call history’s inner myth; it gives shape and contour to the outer sleeve, which is history itself. Yes, the sleeve can be turned inside-out to reveal the hidden myth, and that is part of Campbell’s mode of excavation: he turns the sleeve inside-out in order to explore the mystery shaping history. Ok, not quite a veil, but certainly another form of fabric-ation. Nor can myths be divorced from the inventions and discoveries of the time in which they surface. Indeed, I sense in Campbell that myths survive by accommodating such discoveries, especially those of science. This discipline has knocked down the walls “from around all mythologies—every single one of them—by the findings and works of modern scientific discovery.” (81) And then the wild gander takes flight once again to accommodate the new mythic template. Let it not land too quickly.

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child. ” Pablo Picasso What do we suppose Picasso meant by the above quote? How, exactly, does one “paint like a child”? Likely, this isn’t a statement about technique, but perspective; an observation regarding the qualitative relationship between self and other that renders both “transparent to transcendence,” as Joseph Campbell would put it. The English art critic John Bergerobserved, “A drawing of a tree shows not a tree, but a tree being looked at.” Picasso is aware of this. He is searching for a way to encounter the image, fully formed, as it is. A way for the image not to be drawn, not represented, but to be fully present. To spring from the canvas alive and engaged in a dynamic, fluid, and transformative exchange with the self; a never-ending cosmic dance of co-creative, generative emergence. A relationship directly experienced before it is ever named and, tragically, one that begins to fade once we become “aware” of ourselves as finite beings, separate from that which is beheld. A Coptic Christian monk in the order of St. Antony once observed that all spiritual practice is a quest to overcome the self. The world’s wisdom traditions teach that it is this disorienting knowledge of the private self which casts us, fractured and diminished, into the word of “either/or” that must be transcended. The Undifferentiated Self, on the other hand—the Self we were before learning from culture, family, trauma, and memory to trust the spaces between ourselves and the Other more than anything else—must somehow be recovered from the wreckage of the dis-enchanted adult. We do this primarily by unlearning, and then relearning, to see with eyes that are both innocent and wise. This is the task of all living mythology: to assist the adult in recovering a childlike wonder of the world without sacrificing their adult wisdom and regressing into childish versions of their broken, fearful selves. To recover the child, and integrate the adult, by re-enchanting the world. In The Masks of God, Volume 1:Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell explores the winding tributaries of myth, ritual, and ceremony to discover their unique attributes and likely common origins in the vast mythic ocean of the collective unconscious. “The mystery of the universe and the wonder of the temple of the world are what speak to us through all myths and rites,” Campbell reminds us, “as well as the great effort of man to bring his individual life into concord with the whole.” (109) But what is it about children that allows them to more easily “see” the world in the mythic frames Campbell articulates? In Primitive Mythology, Campbell follows Piaget in asserting that children are able to directly engage the other before the concretization of “I.” This, according to Campbell, is what affords them the fluidity and permeability of perception that Picasso desires. A way of encountering the world that amounts to what Campbell called “a level of immediate experience, antecedent to all thought, where there is neither hope nor fear, but only the rapture of a sheer–and mere–consciousness of being.” (109) Through the immersive, childlike wonder of direct experience of the world as it is, the consciousness of the universe is able to know itself, without the distortions of ego. Mythology, according to Campbell, contains the many masks of God: masks which simultaneously reveal and conceal that which they represent. A pageant play of sacred images emerge from thousands of years of sensing, of beholding, of unlearning the doctrines of separateness– doctrines children have not yet fully learned. Masks, according to Campbell, begin as points of departure into the mythos of the culture and end up as points of arrival into the deepest parts of our psyches. Engaging myth allows us to step outside of time, as it were, and examine the moment for all of its artistic fullness. Mythology can assist us in the ongoing process of becoming– a process that looks both outward and inward, forward and backward. All in service of transformation. Of integration. Campbell claims, A mythology is an organization of images conceived as a rendition of the sense of life, and this sense is to be apprehended in two ways, namely: 1) the way of thought, and 2) the way of experience. As thought mythology approaches—or is a prelude to—science; and as experience it is precisely art. Furthermore, the mythological image, the mythological formula, is rendered present, here and now, in the rite. So likewise are the motifs of the rite experienced not as references but as presences. They render visible the mythological age itself. (179, emphasis is mine.) In other words, through each attempt to render the mysteries of life intelligible, we have collectively produced the great mythological narratives, rituals, ceremonies, and transformative algorithms that serve as the points of departure and arrival into the mystery of our emergent selves. The beauty of myth is that it can freeze a sacred moment in ways that makes it both timeless and utterly timely at once. Myth provides experiential, artistic avenues into, and out of, the paradox of being. To be alive is to be forever transforming into the other. To be captured, completely, in a moment in time is to succumb to death. To be final. To no longer be. This is the grotesque knowing that mythological awareness offers the mind. This is the stark arrival into the world of forms, the world the child comes to know through experience. A world that helps the child to know what it is. Which is to say, to understand all of the ways it is not the other. But there is also, as we have seen, another way of engaging the other. This way does not focus on the apparent differences in manifested forms but moves beyond them to the foundational essence of being they share. This, perhaps, was the authenticity of which Picasso spoke. Mythology, as art, reminds us that appearances are always constructions with a subjective history. Our aspirations towards objectivity can only proceed from the admission of a primary subjectivity. This is the “art” of mythology as reflective experience that Campbell explores. But it is not experience born from the secondary awareness, the awareness of one’s own subjectivity and thus one’s mortality, one’s isolation, one’s futility in the quest to forever exist as an “I.” But, rather, it is an awareness that precedes the knowledge of the private self yet also somehow includes it. The great teachings of the enduring wisdom traditions speak of a reality beyond these limiting binaries, which is the source of their essential natures as well as of all that lies between them; a consciousness that is the ground of being itself. When one is able to regain, through the regenerative power of myth, the ability to “paint like a child,” to unlearn the tragedy of their separateness and once again fully embrace the awe-inspiring mystery of being, they can safely reenter the open space of awareness which allows this moment to be entirely as it is– and it allows for the self to recognize its home in the other. Engaging the emancipatory power of myth as a process of artistic reclamation helps us to unlearn the concrete categories of perceived difference. To “paint like a child” is to forever be the witness of our own shared mythological becoming. Discovering the object only when–and this is essential–the subject is no longer able to see itself as wholly apart from that which it beholds. “All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart,” the poet and activist Maya Angelou reminds us, “which tells us that we are all more alike than we are unalike.”

The mystery of the universe and the wonder of the temple of the world are what speak to us through all myths and rites—as well as the great effort of man to bring his individual life into concord with the whole. (Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology, 109) Myths are the masks of God, the personae, the mediations that connect us to experiences both obvious and mysterious. When I was younger everything seemed pretty obvious but, as time has gone by, everything has become increasingly mysterious: love, spaghetti squash, ostriches. “Mystery,” etymologically, refers to the initiates and secret rites of the “mystery” cults in ancient Greece. Petitioners were led into the darkness of a deep cavern and, as they approached the altar, the figure of the deity would be revealed by degrees as the torchlight fell upon it. This idea of “holding a light up to slowly” resonates with the Greek idea that truth – including all the truths we take to be obvious, even in the caverns of our daily lives — is always mysterious and is only disclosed or revealed over time. The light we hold up, the one that allows us to relate ourselves to and find meaning in these truths, that firelight is mythological language. So not only has the truth become increasingly mysterious, it’s become increasingly mythsterious as well. In addition to relatively obvious truths, (about, say, ostriches), say, this includes the more mysterious truths connected to religious and spiritual life, the meaning of which is revealed to us through the firelight of our own mythological relational understanding. It seems like nothing can be truly meaningful without recognizing its mythsterious nature. Even myth is a bit mysterious. “Myth” is a term of unknown origin and, when academics talk about it, they usually pair mythos with its more respectable cousin, logos. Logos refers to the rational, discursive, explanatory kind of thinking we do when we try to figure out how the world fits together. Mythos is… well, a bunch of stories told around ancient campfires? Charming frosting for the cake of understanding? “Primitive” attempts at science? Like any academic question, you can chase this one around all day like a greased pig. Fortunately, Robert Zaslavsky has done some of the legwork for us by looking at how Plato actually used the term. Plato indicated when he was using logos and when he was using mythos. “…what clearly marks off a mythos from a logos is that a mythos is first and foremost an account of the genesis of the phenomenon." (Platonic Myth and Platonic Writing by Robert Zaslavsky. University Press of America. Washington DC. 1981, 15) Mythos describes the kind of language Plato uses when he talks about the genesis of things — and genesis gets us back to origins. Mythical language is related to origin stories. Origins turn out to be both mysterious and mythsterious. Here are two handy examples, one cosmic and one personal. Once astronomers noticed that the universe seemed to be expanding, they began to work out the math tracing the movement of stars, galaxies, and galactic superclusters backwards toward a single point. So far, the math provides a glimpse into what the universe was like a few nanoseconds after creation — but they haven’t been able to get all the way back to the beginning yet, and this is where things get mythsterious. What do physicists call the creation event they know must’ve happened but can’t describe mathematically yet? “The Big Bang.” You’ll notice that "Big Bang" is not a technical term. It’s mythological language, a narrative or metaphor (a myth!) designed to put us into relationship with an event we haven't been able to fully explain. That’s the cosmic example. Here’s the personal and even more mythsterious one: you. Personal origins seem pretty obvious, at first.  Like the universe, your birth is a well-established fact with plenty of corroborating evidence, even if you don’t happen to remember it yourself.  I don’t know about you but my mom, especially on my birthday, is fond of reminding me that she was there at the time.  So, the fact of my origin, my birth, is readily disclosed by documentation (birth certificate), by the evidence of my senses (I’m here now) and, of course, by my mom. But here’s where it seems to get muddy: How do I put myself into relationship with something I cannot remember, of which I've had no experience? You do it the same way you put yourself into relationship with any facts, whether obvious or mysterious: you need an origin story. You need a myth about your beginning. What works for cosmic origins also works for yours. This matters. Finding meaning in your life depends, to some extent, on finding meaning in your origin, in where you came from, even if you don’t remember it yourself. And the gap between the easy certainty that we were born and the uneasy absence of any memory of the event, that is the mythstery — a mystery disclosed and made meaningful by the firelight of myth. So it’s fascinating to think that the origin of myth is tied not only to cosmic creation stories, but to our own, personal, origins: origins we know occurred but cannot recall and on which the meaning of our lives most urgently depends. Our lives are, in this way, the most mythsterious things of all. Thanks for musing along!