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,

Anniversaries mark the important events of one’s life; they invite reflection on the past, why it’s mattered, and where we’ve come from. Simultaneously, anniversaries stimulate thinking about the future, where we want to go, and what remains to be done. Anniversaries often find us at a boundary, a border between what we have been, and what we will become. They place us at the edges of ourselves with aspiration pressing against present limitations and, as you will see, the 30th anniversary of the Joseph Campbell Foundation is no exception. Jane Jacobs, a most remarkable woman, wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, that “Often borders are thought of as passive objects, or matter-of-factly just as edges. However, a border exerts an active influence.” (262) At the place of borders, edges, and limits, Psyche exerts its influence as well, and the power of its protean creativity, its appel à l’aventure, awakens a desire for a more fully lived life. It is the call to adventure, and to answer it, one must be dauntless, willing to transgress ostensible limits, especially the inner psychological limits defended by belief, fear, convention, or fiat—the conditions of life to which myth speaks most eloquently. Mythology is indispensable for one engaged in the enterprise of working at the limits or the edges of oneself. Contending with psychic realities, often destabilizing personal and cosmic truths, and the disturbing intuition that, as W.H. Auden wrote, We are lived by powers we pretend to understand: They arrange our love; it is they who direct at the end/ The enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand, are the kinds of challenges one finds at the edges of oneself. The thinking of myth confounds notions of comfort, understanding, and predictability, and makes one confront, to gloss Gershom Scholem, the terrors from which myths are made. In his paper, “At the Edges of the Round Table: Jung, Religion, and Eranos,” David Miller described his experience of attending his first conference at the Eranos Foundation in 1969. Eranos was created in 1933, and its central mission was “to provide time and space for thinking.” Dr. Miller describes his experience this way: I first attended the Eranos Conferences in 1969. Along with Gilles Quispel and James Hillman, the speakers were Helmuth Jacobsohn, Gilbert Durand, Toshihiko Izutsu, Schmuel Sambursky, Henry Corbin, Ernst Benz, Gershom Scholem, and Adolf Portmann. The seats for the auditors at Casa Eranos were reserved, and I was assigned a seat in the fourth row. The aisle and Lago Maggiore were on my right and an elderly British woman was on my left. In the intermission of the initial lecture by Scholem, I turned to my seatmate and, in an attempt to make conversation, I asked her whether there would be a question-and-answer time following the lecture. She said to me: “You must be an American.” I confessed that I was, whereupon she educated me about the spirit of Eranos. “You see,” she said, “the presenters are invited to speak at the very edge of their disciplines. If they manage this edge, they are in no better position than the audience to answer questions. It would be premature. On the other hand,” she concluded decisively, “if they do not manage to speak at the edge, then they are not worth questioning in the first place!” Edges are not ends; rather, edges are the means by which one is launched into a less defined, less mediated, less determined space and, as Dr. Miller points out, edges are rich in questions that have no immediate, authoritative answers. Initial experiences of edginess are often intoxicating, but they quickly become sobering when one discovers that the relationship between edges and meaning has been uncoupled. The loss of meaning inevitably betrays the fear that nothing remains to be discovered but emptiness.  However, Wolfgang Giegerich, a Jungian analyst, calls into question our need for meaning, remarking that “The feeling that there should be a higher meaning of life and it is missing is the illness.” (“The End of Meaning and the Birth of Man,” Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice, 6/1 (2004): 28.) The human-all-too-human insistence on meaning functions as an obstacle that obliterates the edge and reveals the abyss instead. In his 1957 Eranos lecture, Joseph Campbell sought to dislodge the idea of discovering meaning as the central pursuit of living: “What—I ask—is the meaning of a flower? And having no meaning, should the flower then not be?” A bit later Campbell concludes, ” Or, to state the principle in other terms: our meaning is now the meaning that is no meaning; for no fixed term of reference can be drawn. And to support such a temporal situation, each must discover himself…without fear of the open world.” Campbell urges us to “fly to…that seat of experience, simultaneously without and within…where the meaninglessness of the sense of existence and the meaninglessness of the meanings of the world, are one.” (The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension: Selected Essays 1944-1968. 152-155) Unencumbered by our casuistic search for meaning, having cast off the rusty shackles of causality, we are free (or, some have said, condemned) to live in the intense immediacy and protean liminality of edges in “the open world,” to play with and create room for thought and dance joyfully in the existential vacuum. What, then, does the MythBlast series have to do with edges, meaning, and Eranos? The MythBlast series has grown to become one of the central features of the Joseph Campbell Foundation website and its internet presence. The series has published 180 original essays to date that have highlighted and explored particular Campbell texts, they have been written in an accessible, yet intelligent manner that has challenged our readers to be thoughtful and at the same time, whetted appetites for reading more widely in Campbell’s works. In conversations with JCF President, Bob Walter, and a few other colleagues at JCF, we’ve come to believe that the MythBlast series may be capable of functioning something like a digital Eranos, offering a space for thinking and speculative analyses at the edges of critical Campbell texts, as well as the important intellectual, scholarly, and cultural influences that shaped him. The MythBlast series can become a home to creative, intellectually rigorous, and novel explorations of Campbell and mythology by authors attempting to reach beyond the safe, established, often derivative, confines of traditional scholarship (Dr. Norland Tellez is a good example of a MythBlast contributor who is currently working at these edges). With that in mind, we’re working toward opening the MythBlast series to submissions. There are still some logistical issues to work out, but our goal is to create an opportunity for interdisciplinary dialogue among diverse scholars—specialists and non-specialists alike—to consider mythology as it once was, a master discipline whose scope was not limited simply to mythology qua mythology, but also to related disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, religion, and even the sciences. People tend to forget that Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Isaac Newton were also mythologists. My goal is to open the MythBlast series to submissions at the beginning of the coming year, so please watch this space for that announcement! Thanks for reading, and please consider carefully how you might contribute to the MythBlast series,

Throughout the 1950s and 60s, a comic series called Forbidden Worlds made waves on newsstands, at dinner tables, and even in the Halls of Congress. In 1954, a Senate sub-committee holding hearings on the dangers of comic books pressured the publishers of the comic to change the name. The publishers complied, concerned that encouraging children to explore forbidden worlds was morally questionable. The series’ name and emphasis were changed to Young Heroes, however, less than a year later Forbidden Worlds was reinstated, and remained the title of the comic throughout the rest of its run, which ended in 1967. While it was not the only comic to be targeted by the Senate, the motif of the forbidden certainly caught the attention of those charged with upholding the standards of the country, an issue that has occurred throughout history. Mythology is filled with tales of the forbidden. The forbidden love between Cupid and Psyche, the forbidden vision of Artemis’s nudity, and the One Forbidden Road motif found in certain primitive monster-slayer myths, that Joseph Campbell discusses in Occidental Mythology, are just a few examples. The forbidden takes the form of fruit, doors, boxes, keys, and various other seemingly innocuous objects through myth. The idea is so common that The Motif Index of Folk Literature 6.1 has given the subject its own classification (C600-C649). In The Mythic Dimension, while discussing Eve’s encounter with the snake and the apple, Campbell also brings the concept to our attention. “It is based on a folktale-type known to folklorists as ‘the one forbidden thing’— of which ‘Bluebeard’ is a good example (‘You may open all the doors in my castle but one!’). It commences with a scene of pre-dawn peace, quiet, and wondrous solitude, as do many of the world’s delightful early tales if the Earth-Shaper and his giving of life to creatures of his imagination.”(198-199) Of course, after this initial season of peace, chaos of some sort is unleashed when the fruit is eaten, the threshold is crossed, or the latch is turned. Almost without fail, there is some horror waiting on the other side of the door, within the mysterious container, or with the consumption of the fruit. Beyond comics and literature, this mythic moment makes its way into multiple films and television shows. The 2004 show Lost often included forbidden areas, secured behind hatch doors and other barriers. In Ex Machina, a 2015 film directed by Alex Garland, a Bluebeard-like character is projected as a reclusive CEO of a fictional tech company called "Bluebook" who forbids a houseguest from accessing a secret part of his domain. Most recently, a secret door hides the forbidden in the frequently discussed 2019 film, Parasite. There are a number of symbolic and psychological interpretations for motifs of the prohibited. Campbell again offers guidance as we consider myths and legends on the topic. Campbell writes, “One of the most effective ways to rediscover in any myth or legend the spiritual ‘tenor’ of its symbolic ‘vehicles’ is to compare it, across the reaches of space, or of time, with homologous forms from other, even greatly differing traditions.” (The Mythic Dimension 201) In other words, we might ask: what remains consistent with the motif across cultures and throughout history? In many narratives where the forbidden is explored, we see certain common thematic ideas. One such idea is that curiosity almost always prevails over the fear of that which has been prohibited. The box is always opened. The egg is always broken. The curtain is always pulled back. The character that is being restricted always pushes back against their restrictions. Anyone that has raised a child has certainly experienced this firsthand, and knows its universal psychological truth. Another commonality in these stories is that the consequences of crossing the forbidden threshold are always worse than the character imagined them to be. A final thread throughout these narratives is that usually, life goes on. Eve makes a life with Adam outside of Eden. Bluebeard’s wife inherits his fortune, has the dead women in the chamber buried, and remarries. The hero slays the monster on the forbidden road, but learns a valuable lesson, and will likely choose another road next time. Like so many other motifs in myth, the forbidden can be either protective or restrictive. It can be a boon or an albatross. Our relationship with the forbidden is a path where we learn to discern that which may be painful in the short term but eventually gives way to a new world of possibility, from that which will surely destroy us. Whether we determine it to be skillful or annihilating, we must all approach that one forbidden thing and make our choice.

This September marks the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Joseph Campbell Foundation. One of the reasons I am so proud and honored to be a part of this organization is that JCF has never lost sight of its primary mission to protect and disseminate the extraordinary work that Joseph Campbell produced over his lifetime. As an organization, JCF, and particularly its president, Robert Walter, have somehow managed to capture and reflect the spirit of Joseph Campbell, his curiosity, his scholarship, his joyful independence, and his immense capacity for bliss. There are fundamentally, it seems to me, two types of founders. One type of founder is the sort of individual, or individuals, who has a definite, clear, and far-reaching vision of how the world, or at least that part of the world they influence, should look. From the beginning, architects of culture have always seen themselves as founders; they imagine institutions and infrastructures their visions require, and even the roles each of us is to play. Ambitious people with foundational intent see the world as a stage and themselves as consummate directors. They imagine themselves as heroes, not simply of their own lives, but heroes of everyone’s life. Many such individuals court heroism on the geopolitical stage, but their corporate cousins are no less bold and ambitious. Another, and usually unintentional, founder is the individual who resolves to be the hero of their own lives. Such a founder isn’t interested in founding anything, nor are they interested in chasing riches, posthumous memorialization, or basking in the warm, narcissistic glow of self-absorption. Instead the only vision they carry forward is the vision forged by the compelling passions of their own lives. People who live with courage, integrity, independence, and exuberance—people like Joseph Campbell—have foundational influences upon others, and they inspire in them the intention to think and live similarly authentic lives. And in doing so, they become their own heroes. Whether one is the hero of one’s own life may seem an odd question to ask, or at least it’s a question one doesn’t hear asked very often. We all have heroes, but they are heroes to us, they are models of heroism for us, they’re not the heroes of our own lives. We seem to automatically presume that role is meant for ourselves. But it isn’t enough to passively presume that we are the heroes of our own lives; we must understand that becoming the hero of one’s own life is a difficult and challenging path to undertake, and it requires from us a conscious commitment. When one takes on that heroic mantle, “Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth,” (Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Act I, Scene I) and any attitude other than a commitment to amor fati will, when life humiliates us and our passions become an open wound, transform one’s adventure into misadventure. We are protagonists in a collective fiction careening towards a metaphysical conversion, a death that, despite the overwhelming mood of existential dread, is not death at all, but is instead psychological transformation. We will be fundamentally changed, we will relate to our community as different people, and others will have reason to hope they might experience something similar. One’s personal, selfish ego is overcome and pain is no longer felt only as pain, but as labor leading to psychological re-birth. Pain is transformed into understanding, and each instance of hard-won understanding becomes a pleasure. This is how one participates in the suffering of life with joy, and finds bliss, ideas Campbell returns to time and time again throughout his work. For example, in his book, The Mythic Dimension, Campbell writes: Certain patterns, certain principles, a morphology, can be recognized—the kind of situation that I have expounded in my Hero with a Thousand Faces. There is a general pattern to the hero journey—the quest of the hero into unknown realms, the powers that he meets there and overcomes, the stages of his crises of victory, and his return then, with some boon that he has gained, for the founding of a city, religion, dynasty, or whatnot….(P.5, Emphasis is mine) Being a hero in one’s own life leads to a selfless understanding of the world, lends momentum and gravitas to the shared boon that is foundational to a group, a region, or an entire culture. This boon has itself emerged from the “primary springs of human life and thought,” it transforms us, “and teach[es] the lesson […]of life renewed.” (The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Pantheon, 1961, pp. 19-20) This is why the Joseph Campbell Foundation exists; not because Joseph Campbell wanted it to exist, or that he endeavored to create it. Not because he wanted a personal legacy, fame, or wealth. JCF exists because the foundational boon Campbell gave us was his work and teaching itself, and the foundation that bears his name arose organically from the tremendous impact that his elegant words and his graceful life made upon the world.

In Sake and Satori (being the second volume of Asian Journals), Joseph Campbell provides an account of his travels in the Far East during the spring and summer of 1955. Addressing his time in Japan, (which comprises the bulk of his travels), one finds that the romantic notions of an exotic, spiritual, and mysterious culture slowly give way to sobering undercurrents of cultural and political malaise—especially in international matters. I suppose this is the case with all nations to varying degrees; but at the time, with the relatively recent end of World War II, areas of cultural identity and international relations were surely more pronounced in the collective awareness of the country. The following is but a small sampling of the many areas and causes of tension that Campbell names: Communist ideologists, U.S. agencies, Japanese unions, senator junkets, illiteracy among foreign staffs, Christian missionizing masquerading as democracy, U.S. Army personnel, and, of course, a fair share of less-than-optimally-cultured tourists. These factors alone would require decades, if not lifetimes, of work to manage into some sort of balance. However, Campbell dives beneath the turmoil of sociopolitical symptoms to search out more universal sources of these problems. One Wednesday in June, he reflects on how each faction is particular to its specific system and (here I am surmising based on what follows) to the tools of its trade. “Specialization and technology—yes,” writes Campbell, “but—without culture, humanity, civilization, it is identical with the menace that all of mankind despises: Titanism.” (Asian Journals, 532) Following this reflection, he adds, as if storing a platform for later reference: “Discovered theme, then: Titan or God?” More on Titanism in a moment. First, let’s examine the above content more carefully. Within specializations and their accompanying technologies, (whether they be mechanical, psychological, political, etc.), individuals and organizations become experts in their fields; however, such expertise often comes at the expense of recognizing larger, more general contexts—namely, the culture of which they are but a part. To accomplish specialization to a very high degree, one must embrace one’s field whole-heartedly—or, to put it less romantically, one-sidedly. And so, each specialized group or individual runs the risk of becoming a sort of know-it-all whose interpretations and evaluations of universal phenomena are overshadowed by the context of their specialization. That said, specializations and the invention of their subsequent technologies are natural to evolution. The problems arise when one does not consciously incorporate one’s expertise into a more collective scope—in which case, one becomes titanic, and is infected by a certain hubris and thoughtlessness that effaces one’s own foundations from consideration. This pattern is quite popular among corporations and industries who destroy the Earth’s environment for the sake of monetary profit. Now, as the Greek and Roman myths tell us, the Titans rebelled against the gods of Olympus, who in archetypal terms, represent the natural governing order of the cosmos. But the Titans were defeated and imprisoned beneath the earth in Tartarus where their efforts to escape have since been felt above as earthquakes, erupting volcanoes, and so on. In short, because the Titans did not recognize their place in the grander scheme, they were (literally) put in their place. However, the myth of the Titans’ rebellion is far more complex than being a mere demonstration of the laws of cosmological balance, or of the consequences that accompany any challenge to that balance. For their quest, although one-sided, is still one of self-empowerment which, as mentioned above, is natural to the evolution of all beings. So, how are we to manage this conflicting situation? To this question I wish to introduce readers to Glenn Slater’s “Re-Sink the Titanic” (Spring vol. 62, 1998 pp. 104-120). Among many other things, this exceptional essay on the archetypal applications of the Titan-myth suggests a simple solution: sacrifice. And by “sacrifice” I believe what is meant is an offering of conscientiousness and of thoughtfulness to a higher order, whether that order is social, political, environmental, or cosmological. These days, I am compelled to use the word “offering” in place of “sacrifice” simply because my students are regularly put-off by the latter. Whatever the reasons, and regardless of word-choice, either term refers to an action or intention that reunites one, to whatever degree, with the foundations, be they social, environmental, or cosmological. Consider Socrates, who offers (or sacrifices) the recognition that he doesn’t know, and suddenly, his perspective is opened to possibilities, exceptions, and truths that otherwise would have been dismissed in the presumption of knowing. In like fashion, Campbell writes “…there is no point in trying to play the role of God” (which is precisely a Titanic endeavor). Instead, he employs the myth’s lesson, and concludes that being less than God is a healthy and accurate sacrifice or offering: “[W]e just haven’t what it takes for [being God]. But we could be human….” (532) The irony is that while recognizing a position of being less than, one tacitly acknowledges the presence of a more than. And, I would hazard that by doing so, one invites the influence of that more-than into what would otherwise be an isolated endeavor, cut off from its source.

In the Northern Hemisphere, much of July and August is commonly referred to as the “dog days” of summer. Swelteringly hot, heavy, stuffy days tint life with lethargy, ennui, or larghetto. The phrase, dog days, refers to the appearance of Sirius (Canis Majoris—the Dog Star), in the night sky at this time of year. Ancient Greek poets thought the star was responsible for both heat and fever, and considered it an ill-omened time of year. Homer wrote, “Sirius rises late in the dark, liquid sky on summer nights […] Orion’s dog they call it, brightest of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat and fevers to suffering humanity.” (Illiad, Lombardo Tr., Bk. XXII, II. 33-37.) The late summer heat inspires dreams of cooler, more comfortable weather, and the memory of an easy-breezy, lightness of spirit. The heat may also inspire fevered, disturbing dreams depriving one of sleep, and undermining morale. Dreams, from the standpoint of Depth Psychology, are not merely neuro-physiological byproducts of brain activity without apparent benefit, but rather the direct expression of unconscious psychic activity and the inner situation of the dreamer. C.G. Jung said, “We dream of our questions, our difficulties. There is a saying that the bridegroom never dreams of the bride. That is because he has her in reality.” (Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930. Ed. William McGuire, p. 3-4) We dream about what we don’t know, what we don’t understand, what we’re curious about, and often we dream about worlds, people, and experiences which otherwise might remain undiscovered. And yet always, and in all ways, we’re dreaming about ourselves. In Shakespeare’s play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon, the King of the Fairies, magically beleaguers his estranged wife, Titania — along with several guests at a wedding — in order to punish her for not giving him something he wants. One of the actors engaged to perform at the wedding, Nick Bottom, a puffed-up, buffoonish popinjay, discovers that he has been so transformed as to have the head of an ass. The fairy princess, Titania, seeing the ass-headed Bottom, falls deeply and dotingly in love with him; she indulges and pampers him in ways he could never have imagined, and blissfully gratified, he falls asleep. Upon awakening, Bottom says, “I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was.” (Dream, IV-1) But Bottom, overestimating the limits of his own wit, pushes on with the dream analysis, which perhaps causes him to understand the meaning of his dream all too well. Aware of the disturbing self-revelation in the dream, he moves to distance from it, and declares in a fit of synesthetic anger: Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream” because it hath no bottom.(IV-1) Joseph Campbell noted that, in a journal entry as he traveled through India, he had prepared a talk to give at one of his host destinations: My talk had as title A Comparison of Indian Thought and Psychoanalytic Theory. I introduced the talk by pointing to the East-West contrast of gods soaring on rapture with gods soaring on wings: the Oriental experience of vision-rapture and the Occidental interest in mechanics. We have turned to the dream world from the sphere of waking consciousness and see dream as a fact for science to consider; the Orient turns to life from the realm of rapture and sees life as a dream. Asian Journals: India and Japan, p. 205 Reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we watch Bottom correspondingly struggle with the mechanics of the dream—the facts of it—trying to understand and explain it, rather than letting the dream incite him to rapture in waking life. Instead, his rational mind wanted to suppress his irrational insights and articulate instrumental causes of the dream; but ultimately, he could not, and decided to turn it into poetry instead. No self-respecting rational-materialist will concede that life is a dream, for that way madness lies. But perhaps we shouldn’t fear at least a little creative madness, since “Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies that apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends.” (Dream,V-1) If life may be understood to be a dream, its fascination, metaphors, and depth of experience are indeed bottomless, and filled with awe. And rather than be the most serious and rational of men, I would choose to be a patched fool who experiences the magic of life while remembering that, to gloss Aristotle, hope is a waking dream. Thanks for reading.

When Penelope tells her story to the stranger, who is Odysseus in disguise, she reveals how the loom strategy she used to keep the suitors at bay came from a divine source: “A god from the blue it was inspired me….” (Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles, p. 394) So Penelope set up a great loom and for four years wove daily a shroud for Laertes, and each night unraveled what she had woven. Penelope’s weaving, a gift of the goddess Athena, is a motif that bears multivalent meaning in The Odyssey. For one, it can be understood in relation to the poetic narrative of the epic, as any great story is a tale woven into form employing words like threads. We can also think about the weaving motif in relation to Odysseus who is trying to make his way home and is thwarted at various times by Poseidon, and even his own crew, and literally goes backwards, farther away from Ithaca than before — ‘weaving’ his way home. Whereas the epic treats Odysseus’ many adventures on his journey home, Penelope is on her own journey if we look at her weaving in a certain way. Perhaps the current circumstances of our Covid-19 world—confined movements, limited outward excursions and contact with others—give us an insight into Penelope’s style of journeying. Unlike Odysseus who spent years on distant shores, from the battlefield of Troy and Calypso’s sweet scented island, to sailing through foreign seas meeting exotic people and strange creatures, Penelope was home. Her movements were free within the confines of the domestic sphere and her whereabouts familiar—the same faces, same food, same views. Yet, she traveled far. Her weaving was the journey through time to the present moment when Odysseus returns. By going back and forth over the vertical threads with her shuttle she wove her way forward. In undoing those very threads each night, she could weave herself onward again. Undoing and doing, unraveling and raveling, this rhythm carried her on, day after day. Her fingertips traveled a thousand thread leagues. Haven’t these many months allowed us to experience Penelope’s style of journeying? Have we not been pressed to learn something about the uses of confinement and the passage of time? René Guénon’s study on the symbolism of weaving in The Symbolism of the Cross reveals cosmic dimensions of the metaphor. On the loom, the warp refers to the vertical threads that are formed and create the foundation of the weave. The weft (or woof) are the horizontal threads made by the shuttle passing through the warp. In cosmic terms, the warp corresponds to the archetypal or divine principles of the world and the weft is the time, place and conditions in which those archetypal energies manifest. The Hindu concept of Śruti, the vertical warp, corresponds to the transcendent principles of the universe. Smṛti, the horizontal weft, is the human interpretations and applications of those principles in life. Together these threads weave the world as a garment of divinity. In another beautiful metaphor, Śruti is compared to the light of the Sun and Smṛti to the light of the Moon, the two luminaries symbolizing not only the eternal and temporal but also masculine and feminine energies in the universe. In Joseph Campbell’s Asian Journals he describes Śruti as, “harkening to the voice of the living God, the Muse” (p. 176) and notes how these two concepts also communicate the polarity of knowing (Śruti), and seeking (Smṛti), which add another level to the cosmic dimension of the warp and weft. What does this symbol of the loom offer for our contemplation of day to day experience? I would like to have us listen to it in relationship to our inner lives, the life of the psyche grounded in the archetypal patterns of nature. So much of contemporary culture privileges our outer world orientation at the great expense of our interior compass. Penelope’s journey challenges the notion that life happens only in relation to the world out there. It is as if it’s only when we are in an Odyssean epic and dealing with outer life and its collective human activities, that anything of value is going on. In James Hillman’s words: Events are not essential to the soul’s experiencing. It does not need many dreams or many loves or city lights. We have records of great souls that have thrived in a monk’s cell, a prison, or a suburb. But there must be a vision of what is happening, deep ideas to create experience.  Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 122 Those deep ideas are the vertical warp threads of the archetypal imagination, which myths, poetry and art render visible. Penelope’s patient weaving and humble unraveling presents a paradox in terms of journeys. To undo what she has done means to go backward, start again—no forward progress. Yet it is the unraveling that keeps the story moving. The unraveling is what requires the spinning of new threads. In psychological terms the unraveling is a metaphor for old attitudes and habits, frames of mind undone in order for new threads and new patterns to emerge. Penelopean loom work means traveling to interior reaches where the warp and weft meet in such a way that kindle the light of deep experience.