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!

Over the coming year, we at the JCF MythBlast Series intend to explore Joseph Campbell’s great work, the four-volume series The Masks of God. The first quarter of 2021 will focus on The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology and some related Campbell texts; the second quarter will focus on Volume 2, Oriental Mythology, and so on to Volume 3, Occidental Mythology and Volume 4, Creative Mythology. The title of Campbell’s Masks of God series is itself immediately engaging. We all want to know what is behind the mask; we want to lift the veil and peer behind the often prosaic, yet uncannily enigmatic façade of life. And if you live somewhere long enough, and pay attention closely enough, you can’t help but discover at least a few of the many rich layers of history submerged (sometimes literally) just below the surface of your daily peregrinations. There is a sense of the immemorial always within reach, and I never fail to be touched by the whispering echoes of ancient voices that spoke, sang, laughed, wept, hoped, and shouted more than a millennium ago in and around the city of Flagstaff, AZ where I live. The earliest habitation of the Southwestern United States dates to before 11,000 BP — an astonishingly ancient date, and these early humans were presumably hunters. (Perhaps even more astonishingly, on December 1, 2020, Smithsonian Magazine ran a story about the discovery of tens of thousands of painted images, dating to around 12,000 BP, along eight miles of cliff walls in the Amazon rainforest.) Eventually, the inhabitants of the Colorado Plateau developed a genius for masonry and agriculture, created impressive architecture and grew crops of maize, beans, squash, and even cotton, by virtue of imagining ingenious irrigation systems that mitigated the harsh growing conditions of the arid climate. Even though the community was permanently abandoned by the early 1200’s C.E., there is something ineffable that remains, some … experience … one may have standing in the reconstructed ball court or peering through a window of a partially collapsed wall at Wupatki. Roaming around such places, a murky pre-history tickles the imagination, and it comes alive with images of families, young men and women, leaders, story tellers, the elderly, all going about their daily lives, their routines, work, and recreations. I imagine that they, like ourselves, hardly gave a thought to the inevitability that one day life as they knew it would end; that their people would disappear, and that what they saw and heard and felt and believed would, in some unimaginably distant time, become the subject of abstract conjecture. Because they were pre-literate, leaving no history, memoire, or cultural criticism, their fate has been consigned to the realm of speculation based on climate data and autochthonous remnants of the excavated communal trash heap. Of course, it’s wrong to say that sometime after the beginning of the 13th century the people who created Wupatki mysteriously disappeared. I’m sure their emigration was no mystery to them, and in fact, they continue to live on in their descendants: thirteen different Native American communities consider Wupatki to be a sacred site, have a significant oral tradition regarding the area, and claim ancestral ties to the site. A lack of a written history should not bamboozle one into believing that the inhabitants of ancient sites like Wupatki were unsophisticated, crude people living in a disorganized, undeveloped society. In fact, they seemed to engage in a sophisticated trade economy. Scarlet Macaw remains have been found on site, and there is also evidence that they traded with other groups from the Pacific Ocean to the Lower Mississippi and Gulf Coast regions. These were smart, cosmopolitan, adventurous, and creative people, and I think that their fundamental concerns about life must have been very similar to our own. However, we don’t often recognize our commonality because we simply don’t reflect upon the antiquity of the ideas (agriculture, wheels, levers, varieties of fire) we live with every day. If we can see these ancients as ourselves, we bring the idea of them “to life as our own,” Campbell writes, “in the way…of wonder — sympathetic, instructive delight; not judging morally, but participating with our own awakened humanity in the festival of the passing forms.” (The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, 25) Contrary to our will or our desire we are, in the first quarter of the 21st Century, often left to wonder what life means and how we should live; our estrangement from the world, from each other, and from ourselves — not to mention our history — has become too deep, and too often malignantly cruel. We’re not separate from the world and we don’t, Alan Watts has said, come into this world, we come out of it. The Earth influences us the same way children are influenced by their parents. How then are we to live, and what is life’s point? Mythologies try to provide answers, but read too literally they only serve to deepen the estrangement. Joseph Campbell often remarked that what we’re really looking for is the experience of being alive. That’s no small thing; it’s not always a simple or pleasant task, because it means saying yes to absolutely all of life. The experience of being alive transcends meanings and purposes, it concentrates the mind and triggers the imagination—the architect of most human behavior, and it connects us to our world, each other, the present, future and the past; who we are, who we will become, and who we have been, as well as to those ancient peoples who inhabit the “dark backward and abysm” of time. If there must be a point to life, then let it be simply this: to participate with one’s full humanity in the festival of passing forms, while somehow continuing to be aware that one of those passing forms is oneself. Thanks for reading.

In “Cosmology and the Mythic Imagination,” from this month’s spotlight volume The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Campbell takes us on a stellar romp through myths of the universe and humankind’s place in it. Tethered by a mytho-numerical umbilical cord, our minds are allowed to spin off into the cosmic mystery, launched among the stars upon an Apollo mission out to the Moon, and into a vision of the universe composed of “billions upon billions of roaring thermonuclear furnaces.” (Inner Reaches, 2) The universe purportedly has “no still point anywhere.” (3) Our modern scientific cosmology, predominantly materialistic and mechanistic, stands in striking contrast to those other conceptions of the universe from traditions both past and present that understand a deeper cosmic order at work and of which we are a part. These traditions include not only the idea of a beautiful composition of the vast array and tableau of the earth and heavens surrounding us, but also of a distinct center. This still point is the source of life. It is the center from which all life emerges and to which all beings are connected. It is thus both a point of active generation and receptive ingathering. The Great Goddess figurines from the European Paleolithic period tell the oldest story of the feminine principle as the source of all life. In these figurines, every part of their body communicates the mystery of nature in its generative and nourishing aspect. The belly button features prominently in both Paleolithic and Neolithic goddesses, marking the fecund still point. In Hindu religion and myth, Vishnu dreams the universe into being as he sleeps on the giant serpent Ananta as they float in the cosmic sea. From Vishnu’s belly button grows a lotus upon which sits Brahma, the lord of light and creator of the visible world. The goddess Lakshmi massages Vishnu’s feet, “stimulating his cosmic dream.” (Campbell, The Mythic Image, 8) Also known as Padma, ‘Lady Lotus,’ she and the lotus represent the mystery of life’s emergence, phenomenal variety and ultimate return to the source. The physician Robert Fludd (1574 -1637) depicted the creation of the universe as an alchemical process. From the fertile blackness of primordial space the four elements arise--fire, air, earth and water. The emergence of the Sun--the celestial center, the cosmic navel, the light around which all life dances--signals the end stage of the genesis of the cosmos. In the modern era, the absence of a still point in the cosmos relates to the loss of meaning that haunts our age. It is the loss of an understanding and relationship to the principles upon which we orient our lives, trusting in their integrity and ability to confer value to our own unfolding. In the cosmological context this is the loss of what Campbell is calling the innerreaches of outer space. The question becomes one of whether we can hold a mythic consciousness. As Campbell quotes Plotinus, “not all who perceive with eyes the sensible products of art are affected alike by the same object, but if they know it for the outward portrayal of an archetype subsisting in intuition, their hearts are shaken and they recapture memory of that Original” (6).

The December theme for the MythBlast series has been “The Still Point,” a reference to T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets. The still point is a poetic image that Joseph Campbell remarks upon several times in his book, “The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and As Religion.” Referenced only four times in The Four Quartets, and only then in “Burnt Norton,” the first of the quartets, this phrase, “still point”— especially when it appears as “the still point of the turning world”— remains inexhaustibly evocative. But first, metaphor, especially since it appears in the title of the volume under consideration, demands our attention. In this highlighted volume, metaphor is itself metaphoring as myth and religion. To understand the necessity of use of the word metaphor in Campbell’s title, one must understand the word in its nonallegorical sense: as metapherein, meaning “to transfer.” Hannah Arendt deftly and beautifully explains this in her editor’s introduction to a collection of Walter Benjamin’s essays: For a metaphor establishes a connection which is sensually perceived in its immediacy and requires no interpretation, while an allegory always proceeds from an abstract notion and then invents something palpable to represent it almost at will. The allegory must be explained before it can become meaningful, a solution must be found to the riddle it presents, so the often laborious interpretation of allegorical figures always unhappily reminds one of the solving of puzzles even when no more ingenuity is demanded than in the allegorical representation of death by a skeleton … Metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about. (Illuminations: Walter Benjamin Essays and Reflections, 13-14. The emphasis is mine.) This rhetorical transference gives the invisible material form and, thereby, "the still point of the turning world” makes itself available to be experienced. “It is there,” Campbell says of the still point, “which is no ‘where,’ that the Eye opens of Transcendent Vision.” (The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, 106) Eliot prefaces his quartets with two quotes from Heraclitus, the last of which is self-evidently paradoxical: “The way upward and the way downward are the same.” What does it mean that so much paradox is present in this particular work? At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.(The Four Quartets, Burnt Norton) The use of paradox as a literary device is a way of disclosing  hidden — perhaps even nonrational — and often unexpected profound truths. Hans Bohr quoted his father saying that there are two sorts of truths: a “profound truth [is] recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth, in contrast to trivialities where opposites are obviously absurd.” (Niels Bohr: His Life and Work, 328) Bohr is touching on an important point; the deep questions life raises, its insoluble mysteries, the unanswerable ontological questions that trouble sleep and keep one staring at the bedroom ceiling at 3:00 a.m., are redolent with the paradoxes of living. When one encounters paradox in literature, especially poetry, one senses art imitating life, for life itself is seldom logical, often paradoxical, and more often than not, unfathomable. Paradox provokes a seizure of the intellect which then pivots one to a more pensive, inquisitive state of mind. Paradox seems to insist upon imaginative, experimental, unconventional thinking and problem solving. At the conclusion of The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Campbell quotes from Romans 11:32 asking, “How far does one’s mercy reach?” He answers his own question saying, “For only so far do the inner and the outer worlds meet.” (117) This is another paradox, yes? The point at which the inner and outer worlds meet would necessarily be neither, or perhaps both, inner or outer. Yet it is here, amid paradox, where once again we find the still point of the turning world. Plato writes that within the soul was formed the “corporeal universe, and brought the two together and united them center to center. The soul, interfused everywhere from the center to the circumference of heaven, of which also she is the external envelopment, herself turning in herself . . . .” (Timaeus, 36e. Emphasis is mine) Thusly the entire Cosmos is ensouled and, as Plato recounts in the Republic, wheels around another image of a still point, the Spindle of Necessity (theMyth of Er describes the spindle and its governess, Necessity, the great goddess whose daughters are the fates). In Plato’s conceptualization, the soul may be thought of as motion made manifest; after all, the Latin word for soul is anima (from which we derive the word animate) and we may conclude that self-motion is a characteristic of anything with a soul, and so infused, the entire universe wheels, centrifugally, out of Soul or, its Greek homonym, psyche (ψυχή). Following Joseph Campbell, one may conclude that mercy inhabits the point at which the inner and outer worlds meet — Plato’s point of singularity at which Soul suffuses the entire corporeal universe and becomes infinite. Again then, how far does mercy reach? Its reach must be regarded as infinite, and thankfully so, because we’ve never needed it more. Thanks for reading,

Geoffrey of Monmouth penned a story in The Life of Merlin (Vita Merlini) that was of interest to Joseph Campbell as he explored the mysteries and motifs in Arthurian tales and the Grail Legend. He writes that Geoffrey’s work is modeled on the concept of the Druid priest, but with certain specific characters of Arthur’s time involved. Campbell writes in Romance of the Grail, “Just as the brahmin in the Hindu caste system is priest-magician to the ksatriya, or warrior, so, too, is Merlin the magician and mystic master of the warrior princes.” (132) Merlin’s story begins similarly to that of many other mystics with a virgin birth. Merlin’s mother was said to have conceived him of a devil, so he had no earthly father. Perhaps, most interestingly, Merlin had the ability to appear as either a boy or a wise old man. Certainly, either appearance had its advantages and particular uses. As a boy, Merlin could gain the upper hand against those who underestimated his astonishingly mature abilities. As an old man, he could surprise those that assumed his feebleness. His chosen form mirrored the necessities of the situation. Throughout the story, Merlin constructs and crafts realities meant to attain a certain end. He arranges Arthur’s conception and birth and builds the framework on which the entire sword and the stone episode, as well as the Grail quest, hangs. However, despite the significance of these acts, he is remembered most significantly as the Mystic Master of Warrior Princes — in the parlance of our time, a mentor. Numerous volumes of Campbell’s work mention the role of mentors in mythology, from mythic characters in the narratives to the tribal guides steering young initiates through rituals and rites of passage. Mentors are still as much needed today as they were when Geoffrey was telling his tales. However, the mentorship process has become complicated in some corners of American culture. Many potential mentors are still focused on pulling their own swords from various stones. Others doubt they have achieved the valuable wisdom they assume necessary to pass on to those further down the path. Many young people have not yet discovered they need mentorship or rebel against the concept altogether. The overabundance of information we are exposed to online and in the media has many convinced that any wisdom that can be acquired is available with only a click of a mouse. In the midst of great progress, we can forget the value of experience and the important role that those who’ve acquired it play. Many mentors-in-waiting have not yet answered the call because they feel they don’t appear to be the type of wisdom-bringer media culture has sculpted for us. Those fortunate enough to have the vocal power of an Obi Wan Kenobi or the exuberant chin follicles of a Gandalf have a leg up on the rest of us whose wisdom takes the embodied form of Quasimodo. We might be encouraged to remember that Merlin didn’t cease his mentorship when he took an atypical form. Campbell tells us that, when as a young boy, Merlin uttered a prophecy to King Vortigern, telling him that his empire was going to collapse, and he described it in the way of an allegory: ‘You are trying to build a tower,’ Merlin tells Vortigern, ‘but the tower won’t stand firm because in the ground underneath are two contending dragons, a white and a red dragon.’ (132) Vortigern doesn’t listen to Merlin’s wise words and is later defeated. This is a story not uncommon to many mentors and mentees. Wise words are spoken but are not always understood or adhered to. This stops some from taking on the mantle of the mentor fearing that those they invest in just won’t listen. This, too, is an aspect of the wisdom tradition and mentor/mentee relationship, and a part of the burden the mentor carries is knowing the wise words given will likely be ignored. Occasionally, the mentor is allowed the privilege of having the mentee return to her or him and recount how the wisdom might have been better taken into account or, better yet, how it was effectively used. However, oftentimes the mentor never sees the fruits of their labors; they may never know if their investment paid off. We must remember that such payoffs are irrelevant when it comes to mythic cycles, principles, and processes. What remains important is the passing of the torch of wisdom. What the warrior prince (or princess) does with the wise words will be a part of their heroic journey, not yours. Our world needs mentors — people willing to walk with those following behind them through the motifs that humankind has traversed for thousands of years.

There are only two references to the Round Table in Campbell’s most comprehensive study of the Grail Romances, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology. There he notes that “It was in Wace’s work that the first literary mention of the Round Table appeared, and in Layamon’s that its shape was explained as designed to avoid such disputes for precedence as were common at Celtic feasts.” (525) Wace’s poem Roman de Brut appeared in 1175, and it was the direct source of a poem called Brut, written in Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse in 1204, by Layamon, an English priest. Layamon introduces the story of a savage fight for precedence at a court feast, which was the immediate cause for fashioning the Round Table. The Celts had a grievous habit of quarrelling about precedence at banquets, probably because it was their custom to bestow the largest portion of meat upon the bravest warrior. It was also their practice to banquet seated in a circle with the most valiant chieftain of the company placed in the middle [….] Layamon’s version so closely parallels early Celtic stories of banquet fights, and has so barbaric a tone, as to make it evident that he is here recounting a folk-tale of pure Celtic origin, which must have been connected with Arthur before his time, and probably before that of Wace. (Eugene Mason, translator. “Excursus II — The Round Table” from Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut. New York: E.P Dutton, 1920, p. xvi) It is not surprising, therefore, to see the myth employed in this secular manner, as a form of political propaganda to support and legitimize the Anglo-Norman monarchy. Campbell, too, would see the image of the Round Table in largely secular terms, when he turned to his favorite Arthurian poem, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. There, he suggests, the Round Table “stands for the social order of the period of which it was the summit and consummation. The young knight’s concern for his reputation as one worthy of that circle was his motive for holding his tongue when his own better nature was actually pressing him to speak,” and it is contrast to the ceremony in the Grail Castle, “which had not been a feature of the normal daylight world visible to all, but dreamlike, visionary, mythic” (Creative Mythology, 454). At the same time, in the first decade of the thirteenth century, more sacred, ecclesiastical views of the Round Table emerged in the works of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Robert de Boron, and the anonymous author of The Quest of the Holy Grail. In those works, Merlin tells us that there were actually three Round Tables: the table of the Last Supper; the table used by Joseph of Arimathea after his escape from prison with the Chalice; and the table built by Merlin for Arthur’s father, Uther Pendragon. Certainly the most spectacular epiphany of the Grail in the ecclesiastical romances occurs in The Quest of the Holy Grail, on Pentecost Sunday, when all the Knights are seated at the Round Table. A spectacular tempest blows through the castle. All the doors slam shut, and angels waft into the room, carrying two candles, and a red silk cloth, which they use to cover the Holy Grail, which they put on the Table, with the bleeding spear of Longinus held up above it. When the Grail disappears, the Knights all vow to go in quest of it, each one — as Campbell was so fond of saying — entering the “forest at that point which he himself had selected, and where there was no trail or path, at its darkest point.” (Romance of the Grail, 136) In our time, the secular and sacred perspectives on the Round Table and the Grail legends have been richly amplified by the psychological views of Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz, in their marvelous book on The Grail Legend, in which they speak of several tables: Wolfram’s garnet hyacinth with 2 ivory supports Chrétien ivory table with ebony supports Charlemagne’s Table for 12 peers with 3 circles Solomon’s Table: a gigantic emerald set with pearls and precious stones Prester John’s emerald table with 2 amethyst uprights The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus The alchemical table of the four elements in an engraving by Mylius The Sun table of Orphic mysteries in Proclus that supports the mixing bowl of Dionysus (the Krater) during initiations The offering tables in the Egyptian Books of the Dead Ezekiel’s sapphire throne with image of man upon it The psychological symbolism of the table is then beautifully distilled: it is the “supporting base” of the human endeavor to synthesize the four functions, with the Grail serving as a symbol of the Self. It is for that reason that one finds a Round Table at Eranos, on the shores of Lago Maggiore, with Jung’s carving of the Grail on a stone in the bushes nearby. Campbell sat there for lunch a couple of times, when he was giving presentations in the 1950s. And I know which seat he would have most enjoyed: the one Merlin called the “Siege Perilous,” and accidentally sat in one occasion — and was thereby catapulted to the other world, departing on a hero’s journey, one that would bridge the secular and the sacred dimensions symbolized by the Round Table.

This month, we at JCF are highlighting Joseph Campbell's Romance of the Grail, and I’m reminded once again of the very careful reader Campbell was, and his love for innovative literature. Medieval romances are certainly one example, and Modernist literature is another. Campbell recognized the genius of Thomas Mann, and Mann’s valorization of hard-won, often bitter experience and the role it played in the achievement of self-realization. In his fiction, Mann displays a gift for exploring the archetypal struggle humans have with “a factor unknown in itself;” or what C.G. Jung called God: To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse. (Jung, C. G., et al. Letters, V.2: 1951-1961, p. 525. Princeton U.P., 1975.) When Campbell wrote about a specific text or a body of literary work, be it mythology or modernist literature, he wrote about it because he loved it, because he found it to offer a valid paradigm for living, and was in some essential way, life affirming. And it isn’t hard to see how much he loved the Grail romances. Nor is it hard to see how much he loved Thomas Mann. He once remarked in a conversation after viewing the original Star Wars trilogy, that he “…thought real art had stopped with Picasso, Joyce, and Mann. Now I know it hasn’t.” (Larsen, Stephen and Robin. Joseph Campbell: a Fire in the Mind: the Authorized Biography) Mann’s novella, A Death in Venice, was on Campbell’s legendary Sarah Lawrence reading list, and he often mentioned The Magic Mountain in his lectures over the years. In the early chapters of The Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp’s Grail Adventure begins when he leaves the flatlands of his Hamburg home for a three-week vacation (which turns into seven years) to visit his consumptive cousin, Joachim, who currently resides in a rather luxurious sanitarium in the Swiss Alps, near Davos. Mann explicitly compared Castorp to Perceval, Gawain, or Galahad, searching for “knowledge, wisdom, consecration, the philosopher's stone, the aurum potabile, the elixir of life.” (Smith, Evans Lansing. The Arthurian Underworld of Modernism: Thomas Mann, Thomas Pynchon, Robertson Davies. Spring, Vol. 4, No. 2. 1990) Dr. Krokowski, one of the treating physicians at the sanitarium, was also it seems, a psychoanalyst — or at least an enthusiast of psychoanalysis, and the first of his weekly lectures Hans attended was titled, “Love as a Force Conducive to Illness.” (Mann, 137) Dr. Krokowski insisted that repressed or “unsanctioned love reappeared in the form of illness! Any symptom of illness was a masked form of love in action…” (ibid. 151) Correspondingly, in Romance of the Grail, Campbell notes that, “The pain of love is the sickness unto death that no doctors can cure.” (p. 101) He goes on to describe the indelible scene in which Tristan and Iseult decide to have a glass of wine together, but rather than wine, they unknowingly drink the love potion that was intended for Iseult and King Mark, her intended husband, so that they would be certain to be in love with one another. Iseult’s nurse tells Tristan, “…you have drunk your death!” He replies, “If by death you mean the pain of my love for Iseult, that’s my life.” (ibid. 102) Meanwhile, back on the magic mountain, Hans surreptitiously takes his skis and goes out onto the mountain. He can see a strong winter storm approaching, but he defiantly ignores it and continues to push himself past his physical limits, and past his ability to orient on the slopes of the mountain. Soon the storm overcomes him, but fortunately, he finds shelter underneath the overhanging roof of a shed. Completely exhausted, he has a vision of a tropical idyll in which its residents are happy, beautiful, young, and innocent. But behind this scene is revealed another, darker, apparently pagan backdrop, in which two wizened, half-naked old women are dismembering and eating an infant. In her wonderfully insightful introduction to this edition of the text, A.S. Byatt remarks of this scene: The lovely order is intimately connected to the mystery of the dismembered god […] the ‘courteous and charming’ people are intimately connected to ‘that horror.’ They are interdependent, health and horror [...] In the snow he sees that neither is right. What matters is his heart-beat, and love. (xii) Reading Campbell and Mann, we are given to understand that all life rests upon a foundation of death; in fact, it’s that deathly foundation that makes life so sweet. Death inhabits us as much as life, it’s always at work in us and on us — unseen, unheard, often undetected; every dysphoric mood intones its looming presence. If there is tragedy related to death, it’s located in the inability to make peace with the necessity of dying. If we can say yes to death — especially our own — we realize, as Campbell so memorably put it, that “We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.” (A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living) Thanks for reading,