The myths of the Sámi people speak of Beaivi, a sun goddess that brings healing to those whose mental and psychological health has been damaged by the long winter season of darkness. She brings light not only to the physical world, but also to the minds and hearts of the Sámi people with her arrival. Many of us have spent more time in our homes over the past months than we ever thought imaginable. Understandably, for many, a darkness has set in. This darkness has brought depression to some, and feelings of hopelessness to others. In this dark, dark night, we wait for our own Beaivi. We long for an end to the darkness both outside our homes and within our innermost selves. Many of us may also be looking for a pimander. Joseph Campbell mentions the term in Mythic Worlds, Modern Words, his collected thoughts on the art of James Joyce (152-153). While examining the appearance of Mananaun MacLir, an Irish sea god, in Ulysses, Campbell unpacks MacLir’s mention of the word “pimander.” The term is often translated as a title one achieves—Shepherd of Men—and comes from one of the most influential texts of the Corpus Hermeticum, known as The Pymander of Hermes Trismegistus. Of course, shepherds not only care for their flock, they also guide with force when one under their care has gone astray. Campbell goes on to explain that “The Pimander, translated for Cosimo de’ Medici in 1463 by Marsilio Ficino, became a veritable Bible for the poets and painters of the Renaissance.” (153) The artists of that time found a figurative “bringer of the light,” a shepherd, in the pimander. Though the text attributed to Trismegistus only briefly describes this figure, it is clear that the shepherd is a guide through dark times. Death and darkness have become part of our own story. However, we have also always been, and continue to be, part of a much grander story. Storytellers have known for millennia that a key element of every great narrative is a moment where it seems all hope is lost. The individuals facing the impending darkness experience a moment that St. John of the Cross described as the dark night of the soul. It is a moment where our pimanders seem all but lost. It is in this moment those individuals in such circumstances remember who they are. They remember why they are here. The absence of the pimander becomes the ultimate lesson the shepherd has to offer. Amidst the darkness and absence of pimanders, I’ve been thinking about time. Some days, there seems an overabundance of hours. Other days, it feels as though the moments get lost and days begin to mesh together into new, long, messy units of demarcation. Many of us have become deeply acquainted with the dark and mysterious relationship between time and loneliness in the age of social distancing. In a video clip called Life in the Field of Time (which can be found on JCF’s Instagram account), Campbell offers some perspective about time. He says “Where there is time, there is inevitably birth and death. Where there is time, there is inevitably sorrow. The loss of what was valued. And it’s always in terms of pairs of opposites. In the field of time, everything is experienced in terms of opposites. Good and evil, male and female, man and God. That’s a mode of experience.” As we experience time, disrupted by Covid-19, that inevitable sorrow that Campbell mentions has been amplified. The loss of graduation ceremonies, anticipated gatherings, and even an afternoon drink at one’s favorite watering hole has been felt. What we value has become central to our discussions and actions, our thoughts and our plans. Perhaps the darkness we are surrounded by is the pimander we seek. This pimander of this moment has been shepherding me, causing me to redefine key relationships in my life. It has caused me to redefine my relationship with comfort. From toilet paper to my favorite local coffee shop, our creature comforts are not a given. Everything is a privilege. It has caused me to redefine my relationship with control and the present. Our lives, this year, were completely disrupted at a moment’s notice. Our best efforts could not prevent the destruction the virus has inflicted. It has caused me to redefine my relationship with creativity. I was finally granted the time to work on projects I wanted to get to for years – and found I was unable to approach many of them in this moment. Perhaps creativity has less relationship to the time we have to act on it than we had assumed. Finally, it has caused me to redefine gratitude. So many things I previously took for granted, I never will again. For these lessons, and those I am unaware of, I am grateful. To read more about the myths of the Sámi people, see Neil Kent’s The Sámi Peoples of the North.

In his book, The Ecstasy of Being: Mythology and Dance, Joseph Campbell discusses artists who have had monumental impacts on the world of dance. To a person, these artists unflinchingly blazed new trails in their art; they were passionately committed to their visions, determined to follow the inner inducements of their daemons, oblivious to the judgements of the wider world. They are examples of people bold enough to entertain ecstasy and courageous enough to follow their bliss. The English word, ecstasy, is derived from the Greek word, ekstasis, which literally means to be standing outside of oneself, carried beyond individual, rational thought to a psychosomatic state in which rationality and personal volition are suspended. It creates a transcendent state, an experience of the world—the universe, even—as unified, timeless, unbounded, and harmonious. This is, I think, close to what Campbell called bliss. But the word bliss has some etymological problems, descending as it does from Old English and Old Saxon words with meanings like merriment, happiness, grace, and gentleness. These kinds of innocent experiences of earthly happiness are not what Campbell had in mind when he spoke of bliss, or even in his treatment of beauty in The Ecstasy of Being. The familiar anecdote comes to mind in which Campbell remarks, “I should have said, ‘Follow your blisters.’” Ecstasy, bliss, and beauty are not the easy pleasures that our common use of these words suggest, and the way Campbell describes beauty in this volume can help us unpack this issue. Campbell notes that the “effective element” in all proper art is, as James Joyce called it, “the rhythm of beauty” (The Ecstasy of Being, 99) in which each piece of the art is in harmonious relationship to each other piece, as well as each piece to the Whole. That is the challenge for the individual as well, the harmonious relationship to other individuals and each to the Whole, which is not achieved without real suffering in some form. Continuing in this line of thought, Campbell quotes W.B. Yeats who suggested that the ideal dramaturgical model “would synthesize the ‘pulse of life’ with the ‘stillness of death.’” Campbell goes on to write that such “synthesis of opposites is the function of both art and mythology.” (106-107) The action of synthesizing the pulse of life with the stillness of death necessarily exposes one to existential terrors lying outside the more naïve or innocent realms of ecstasy, beauty, and bliss. Perhaps it is helpful to think about what Campbell is pointing to as the sublime (even though the sublime is subject to some of the same naïve linguistic problems as bliss, ecstasy, and beauty). A particular problem is that these words commonly convey an added moral dimension. Think of Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn in which he asserts that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” and perhaps you can sense the moral goodness or virtue adhering to the word beauty. In fact, the words beauty, bliss, ecstasy and sublime are commonly understood as rewards for virtue and morality, and nothing negative may be associated with them. But there is a wealth of generally learned and philosophical literature on beauty’s problematic sibling, the sublime, that helps one understand what’s really in play for one who undertakes to follow one’s bliss. There are three thinkers, Pseudo Longinus, Edmund Burke, and Immanuel Kant who, taken together, have largely articulated the depths and breadth of the sublime. Burke convincingly insists that terror opens one to the sublime, but he doesn’t really demonstrate why the experience of terror is sublime and, like Longinus, he relegates the sublime to the external, natural world. Kant describes the experience of the sublime as more of an inner experience, much closer to what Campbell called bliss: “Thus, instead of the object, it is rather the cast of mind appreciating it that we have to estimate as sublime.” (The Critique of Judgment. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952) For Kant, the sublime has two main dimensions: first, one of power and second, one of magnitude. Sublime encounters are overwhelmingly powerful, and facing them we are compelled to feel our existential fragility and terror and, additionally, the sublime is of a magnitude so vast that we simply cannot wrap our minds around it. But yet, at some point in the confrontation with the sublime we recognize that we are a part of It and this “mental movement,” to use Kant’s phrase, begins to lend comprehension to the incomprehensible. It’s as if, in an attempt to understand it, we reach into the sublime and it likewise reaches into us. Through this mental movement knowledge is generated and we begin to identify with and partake of the power of the sublime object, transcending our terror and sensing that we are ourselves the origin of the power we face. Campbell has elsewhere described this as making oneself transparent to the transcendent, and this is what following your bliss is really about. And following your bliss, as Shelly observed regarding the function of the sublime, persuades us to forsake the easy for the harder pleasures. Thanks for reading,

Recently, I engaged in verbal combat with a friend over whether Joseph Campbell would have liked the TV show Game of Thrones. Imagining great thinkers interacting with the cultural phenomena of contemporary life is not simply a fantasy; such moments have actually occurred in history. Campbell famously attended a Grateful Dead concert near the end of his life and commented about being reminded of Dionysian festivals. These are the historical anecdotes that make conversations about the mythologist dissecting Games of Thrones so fun. Campbell was a man not completely uninterested in what we sometimes term entertainment, but he did always seem to be asking more from art than a mindless baptism. The word entertainment has come to encompass a great number of varied activities. There are a few differing theories as to the etymology of the word. One favorite is that it derives from a combination of Old French and Latin words and loosely translates to “to hold together.” From Doctor Faustus to Dr. Dre, from Hesiod to Harry Potter, from Theseus to The Bachelor – people have been held together by common resonance with characters, narratives, poems, and images for thousands of years. In The Ecstasy of Being, Campbell gives a brief overview of the development of the theatrical arts. Specifically, he traces the movement up through the nineteenth century away from a theatrical interest in mythology and legend towards a historical and biographical interest, and the significant losses that resulted. “The experience and understanding of myth as the language of man’s spiritual life had, in fact, been lost,” Campbell asserts. Campbell then offers a rather curious comment, referring to the common worldview of this myth-less era. He says, “Truly serious theater should deal with existential agonies; adult entertainment, with erotic spectacles and comedies; while the inward, spiritual life was something to be attended to in churches, having to do (it was supposed), not with mythology, but with a true history of incredible (hence spiritual) events, as reported (by God himself) in the Bible.” (The Ecstasy of Being, 92) Campbell goes on to celebrate the return of the import of myth toward the opening of the twentieth century and the impact it had on poets and artists of every stripe. In the twentieth century, theater continued to deal with “existential agonies.” There was no shortage of “erotic spectacles and comedies” even after myth-inspired work again experienced a revival. In short, the “adult entertainment” that Campbell referred to had not disappeared. Instead it had been integrated with the mythological. The theatrical world again embraced that inward spiritual life which had been left to the clergy. Erotic spectacles and comedies were not, and are not, outside the realm of the meaningful. However, those devoid of mythological underpinnings produce momentary titillation, but lack the sort of inner evocative movement which, as those who’ve experienced it know, can be difficult to articulate. Of course, most entertainment is subjective, and as the old saying goes, one person’s trash is another’s treasure. What speaks mythologically to one of us may not speak at all to the next. What may be one person’s “adult entertainment,” however you choose to define that term, is another’s transcendent art. Even today, many are surprised that Campbell resonated with the work of the Grateful Dead. For anyone who has taken the time to explore their lyrics, there is little surprise, of course. Despite having become so associated with Star Wars, Campbell seemingly had little interest in pop culture or popular entertainment. On the other hand, a significant amount of his work centered on art created by others –Joyce, Goethe, and Martha Graham all received attention from Campbell’s pen. The difference was whether the entertainment created by the artist was crafted on the invisible mythological framework Campbell spent so much of his life trying to describe. This is true entertainment — that activity which brings us back to the original intentions of the word. It holds us together. If Campbell was correct and myth is the language of our spiritual lives, when we hear it through stories in any medium, be it in rock music or print or streaming video, we are being spoken to in our most native tongue. We are being brought together – held together – through the narratives and images that have made us one since the beginning.

In his book The Ecstasy of Being: Mythology and Dance, Joseph Campbell demonstrates not only his insatiable curiosity and wide-ranging, omnivorous mind, but also, in his exploration of mythology and dance, I am reminded that mythology itself was once a thought of as a primary subject, “a master field of the first importance.” (Feldman and Richardson, The Rise of Modern Mythology: 1680-1860, xxi) The study of myth was undertaken because it was seen as a key to the proper understanding of not only religion, but of language, history, philosophy, and art (including dance). Identifying mythology as a master discipline was a very different understanding than the contemporary assumption which places mythology within the subset of other disciplines. But the power of myth is still robust; myth is read into just about any subject as a way to support or discredit. This plasticity of myth, coupled with its ubiquity, creates a peculiar sort of double vision that studies the fact that myth exists, but it also has more than a little to say about the human psyche that creates such extraordinary and unusual ideas. The ubiquity, plasticity, and power of myth are rooted in its use of metaphor. Hannah Arendt wrote that “Since Homer the metaphor has borne that element of the poetic which conveys cognition; its use establishes the correspondences between physically most remote things […] Metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about.” (Illuminations: Walter Benjamin Essays and Reflections, p. 14) In TheEcstasy of Being, Campbell spends some time on Isadora Duncan and emphasizes her revelation regarding the way in which the Parthenon reflects some fundamental idea of nature itself, “Not in imitation of the outside forms of nature, but in understanding of nature’s great, secret rules.” (110) Metaphor, meaning to transfer, “enables us to give material form to the invisible…and thus to render it capable of being experienced.” (Arendt) This, experiencing the invisible, is a fine way to define ecstasy. Similarly, the philosopher to whom I am most affectionately disposed, Emil Cioran, wrote that ecstasy’s “object is a god without attributes, an essence of god” (The New Gods, 7), and somehow Isadora managed to spend surprisingly large portions of her life in such a state. In the March 1, 1936 issue of Esquire magazine, nine years after her death, John Dos Passos published an essay (one which I have loved for a very long time) called, Art and Isadora, in which he captures the “divine dancer as a figure of earth leading a flight from materialism in a flutter of Greek robes and unpaid bills.” Consciously or not Dos Passos, in describing Isadora as a figure of earth, affirms her insistence that great art is not an imitation of nature, but is itself Natura expressing in a material form. At some level Dos Passos understood this and remarked, “Art was whatever Isadora did.” In Athens Isadora stood, day after day, awe-struck before the Parthenon and: “…as I stood there my body was as nothing and my soul was scattered; but gradually called by the great inner voice of the Temple, came back the parts of myself to worship it […] and I did not dare move, for I realized that of all the movements my body had made none was worthy to be mad before a Doric Temple. And as I stood thus I realized that I must find a dance whose effort was to be worthy of this Temple—or never dance again” (The Ecstasy of Being, 110). When the daimon seizes one in this manner, one has no choice but to surrender to it or become deadened to life—one’s own and the life of the collective—and suffer an emotional and mental demise which consigns one to the vestibule of hell alongside those others who refused to commit to something more than themselves. But simply committing or surrendering to one’s daimon doesn’t ensure happiness or security, and certainly Isadora was such an example. She and her family were often broke, and Dos Passos notes, “They were never more than one jump ahead of the sheriff, they were always wheedling the tradespeople out of bills, jumping the rent, getting handouts from rich Philistines for art.” Isadora drank too much, she didn’t even try to control her sexual appetites, her relationships generally imploded, and she had more than her share of tragedy and loss. But the beatings we receive from life are often a part of the price we pay for bliss, and no matter how hard she fell she remained, as Campbell put it, “a living image of enraptured spontaneity, Greek in it’s inspiration, earthly and physical in its beauty.” (The Ecstasy of Being, 116) Art was whatever Isadora did, including dying. At the age of 50 she found a handsome, young—of course—mechanic with a sporty car, and one day she artfully threw her long scarf around her neck and bid her friends goodbye saying, “Adieu mes amis je vais à la glorie!” Farewell my friends, I go to glory! They sped away, and Dos Passos describes Isadora’s “heavy trailing scarf caught in a wheel, wound tight. Her head was wrenched against the side of the car. The car stopped instantly, her neck was broken, her nose crushed, Isadora was dead.” Merci d'avoir lu ceci,

Soul seeks a life that is not purely driven by ego centered desires, societal demands, or cultural norms, but a life that is connected to Psyche or Spirit. Spirit lives in the In-Between, it lives in the poetry of mythic imagination. Fairy tales, myths, legends, all remind us of this undeniable truth that often torments us when we see our own lives fall short of our soul’s inner promptings. The realm of the In-Between is also the realm of the call to adventure, as Joseph Campbell demonstrates in the collected fiction of Mythic Imagination. We step into the realm of mystery because of the moonlight, because of a death, perhaps because we cannot bear to function in the day to day anymore: The Moon soared above the clouds. It was a romantic moon. Freddy Bliss had never before   been at large like this, in country moonlight that he could see by almost as well as day. The night odors of the fields were surprisingly strong, and they were kind of wonderful […]. For the first time since his departure from New York he was feeling really happy—really alive. (Mythic Imagination, 7-8) The romance of moonlight lends itself to the geography of the in-between; and it is this intrusion of the archetypal world into our daily life that most surprises us. Without realizing it, we step into or are led, sometimes dragged into the other world, the world of mythic imagination, right at the doorstep of our ordinary life. It is perhaps a collision of beauty and truth, and sometimes an act of violence, a breaking down of boundaries. It is as if imagination requires excess, the courage to break through the safe silence of old ideas, of someone else’s rules. This breaking down of control is the path to which the genius of Myth calls us, it is the deep longing of Soul to become more embodied, more full-bodied. The In-Between is the realm of shamanic travel, of confronting shadow, of death and resurrection. My own experience of such moments has come in different ways but most often as an undeniable intrusion of the natural and supernatural worlds, inextricably connected through Psyche, a herald of a descent, extreme, terrifying and transcendent, dragging me to the underworld, sometimes to Hades, and sometimes to the Elysian Fields. Perhaps one of my more memorable experiences of the realm between the realms, is what happened when my Aunt Adita died. The man she remarried, after her first husband died, was someone I could not bear to be around. I could not bear to even shake his hand. I had a visceral reaction to him, which no one understood, including myself. It made things difficult during family visits. I saw very little of my aunt in the ten years that followed her remarriage. But I couldn’t help it. The sensation was so strong, I could not move against it. It was not a complete surprise when the news came, but still devastating. My intuitive suspicions had done nothing to change the fates. My cousin told me over the phone that my aunt had been murdered by her husband and then he killed himself in their bedroom. I was asked to come and help take care of my aunt’s personal effects. Reluctantly, I walked into the apartment and stood in liminal space, a threshold between ordinary life and violent death. Blood was still on the carpet in the bedroom, I could see it out of the corner of my eye. I dare not move. My cousins told me to take anything I wanted. I wanted nothing. As I stood there like a stony tree in the hallway, I heard a whisper in my mind. It directed me to the bathroom, insistent. I followed its direction to the pink bathroom, my aunt’s realm, and stood in front of the sink staring up at my face in the mirror, so like her own. The soft voice told me to look for the soap dish. I thought it must be a crazy joke. Had I come here, in this place of death, to retrieve a soap dish? But I obeyed and saw indeed a dish, a shell of mother-of-pearl. It looked nice. “Pick it up,” the voice said, “turn it over.” I did and saw something that took my breath away and made me stumble. It was an exquisite carving of the resurrection, or perhaps Lazarus rising out of his coffin. I knew then why I had come, to witness the power of Psyche, of love, to understand the flimsy nature of the veil between the worlds, and to keep listening with all my heart. To know a truth beyond human understanding, in a visceral way, is the power of mythic imagination. It is to be changed forever by simply holding the story inside of us, the shell of mother-of-pearl.

According to Joseph Campbell, how many stages are there in the Hero’s Journey or monomyth — and why does it matter? What is the Hero’s Journey, really? I talk to writers and others about this subject all of the time. Inevitably, when I share the image above (taken from the 2008 edition of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, page 208), I get a lot of anxious questions from some folks, and authoritative statements from others. The latter group will hold forth on the 12/17/25/1001 stages of the monomyth with great certitude. Wait, I ask them, how many stages do you see here? Because, in fact, this diagram isn’t the essential description of the hero’s adventure laid out in Campbell’s magnum opus The Hero with a Thousand Faces and in other works like Pathways to Bliss. Here’s what the stages of the journey look like according to Campbell (Hero, 23): The story has three stages, which Campbell calls Separation (x), Initiation (y), and Return (z). The rest of the events he explores in his wonderful book — the ones enumerated in the chart at the top of this post — are window dressing. The Call to Adventure and Refusal of the Call, the Dragon Struggle, the Sacred Marriage, Apotheosis and the rest are all fascinating variations found in many, many, many myths and stories (going back as far as we have stories). But at its core, the monomyth isn’t a blueprint of a plot outline; it’s a description of a psychological process, one each of us goes through every time we’re challenged and have to change and grow. Separation. Initiation. Return. And it isn’t something a character (or person) goes through just once, necessarily. Campbell said that “a good life” — and, presumably, a good story — was one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There’s always the possibility of a fiasco.But there’s also the possibility of bliss. (Pathways to Bliss, 133) Campbell saw the Hero’s Journey as a map of a psychological landscape that artists and poets and mythographers of every kind could lead folks through, creating transformative experiences. Want an example of a writer doing just that in a series of short stories written up to a decade before the publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949? Check out Joseph Campbell’s collected short fiction, Mythic Imagination. The main body of the collection is made of six short stories and one novella written between 1938 and 1943. Each follows a protagonist — a cynical GI, a bored young woman, a racist politician, a romantic farm hand — as they are separated from the world of the familiar, initiated into a “world of supernatural wonder” (Hero, 23), and then either returned transformed to their former life, the bearer of boons, or destroyed by the experience. Each is a little gem of a Hero’s Journey. And each invites the reader on a journey of discovery and change. And it only matters because I think a lot of my writer and myth friends have gotten hung up on the architecture of the Hero’s Journey schema, and forgotten that Campbell enumerated it as an observation not just of how to write stories but of how stories/myths/rituals affect the reader/audience/participant. The point of a monomyth story is that it leads the protagonist — and therefore the person taking in the story — through a process of personal transformation. So whether the Magical Helpers appear before or after the Call to Adventure, and whether or not the Father/Mother Atonement appears once, three times, or not at all... none of that is essential. The elements that Campbell identified (Resurrection, Night-sea Journey, Elixir Theft, et al.) are, as I said, window dressing — or, if you will, the costumes that the storyteller puts on the myth in order to give it specificity and to make a particular point. But the ultimate structure of the journey — what makes it an effective and affecting way to tell stories — is just that three-part refrain: Separation. Initiation. Return.

In 2015, Time Magazine ran a piece exploring why student athletes struggled to maintain their grades and the numerous factors surrounding the problem. The article was in response to a report from The Chronicle of Higher Education on the NCAA’s investigation into more than twenty schools being probed for academic fraud – allowing players to forgo the same standards as other students in the classroom. As with so many issues we currently face, Joseph Campbell explored this matter years ago. What makes this exploration unique, however, is that Campbell investigated the topic through his fiction in Mythic Imagination, as opposed to the non-fiction writing he has become so well known for. Strictly Platonic, a story Campbell subtitled The Romance of a Bookworm Who Lost His Goat and Found Himself Famous, tells the story of Jim Weston, a former college football player who now teaches at his alma mater. The narrative centers around Weston’s refusal to pass a star athlete in one of his courses, so that the All-American half-back will be eligible to play his final game for the school. Further complicating matters is the fact that Weston and the athlete, Larry Cobb, are both vying for the affections of the same woman, though Weston has kept the relationship non-physical as the title of the story suggests. This complicating factor, of course, has some people questioning Weston’s motives in not curving Cobb’s grades. Campbell makes the narrative’s theme explicit in the words of Weston, stating “We can’t just let these fellows wipe their feet on – on scholarship – on everything Wilton College used to stand for! Now can we? Why have these eligibility rules if we’re not to flunk a football man when he flunks?” (250) Such words might make it easy to forget that Campbell himself was an athlete, who valued experiences that developed the body as well as the mind. However, Campbell was also as committed, as the fictional Weston was, to scholarship. We might even assume scholarship was one of the great loves of his life. Research, reading, and writing filled more of Campbell’s time than perhaps any other activities. Scholarship and sports  rarely receive the same treatment on campuses, however. While money seems to rain from the sky on sports departments at institutions of higher learning, academic departments are constantly being scaled back, if not cut altogether. Sports certainly have their place on college campuses and can be a healthy part of the student experience. However, all too often in our modern setting, scholarship and academics are being treated as a sport. Popular disciplines are viewed like successful competitive teams. Research that may be slow and difficult, but necessary, lacks funding, especially if there is little evidence that the research will lead to capitalistic reward for someone. Some students choose the fields they enter with the same thought process they use choosing the team they will root for. Departments that don’t “win championships” for the school fire their leaders or close their doors. Scholarship may not be a contact sport in the way that football is. However, those dedicating their lives to it don’t hold their pursuits at a platonic distance either. Scholarship is inherently different from sports. It should not be viewed in the same way or held to the same short-term standards built around excitement, spectatorship, and financial possibilities. In typical Campbell fashion, there are a number of nuanced themes and topics at play in Strictly Platonic. Platonic love, the price of fame, and the dark side of well-meaning institutions all come under Campbell’s microscope at different points in the story. However, the central issue that Campbell seems to be dealing with in the narrative is not the ethics of bending grades, the complexity of romantic relationships among all those living life on college campuses, or even the place of organized sports in educational institutions. The real issue for Campbell seems to be finances. Football brings money into campuses. Scholarship usually does not, and thus is viewed with less interest. In Campbell’s story, even the pipe-smoking professor doing his best to convince Weston to look the other way with regards to Cobb’s grades exclaims, “Tickets for this game are going for fifty dollars apiece….” (250) Another character later advises Weston to think of all the advertising for the school, in an attempt to persuade him (254). Campbell seems to be reminding us that there are higher values than those to which we assign a dollar amount, and scholarship falls in that category. There are rewards beyond the financial. A key teaching from Christian mythology says, “…where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” (Matthew 6:21) There are discoveries in scholarship that propel us forward as a society. The values that these treasures hold are beyond monetary gain or the momentary thrill of a game.

Published by New World Library for the Joseph Campbell Foundation in 2012, Mythic Imagination: Collected Short Fiction witnesses many of Campbell’s favorite themes encasing myth spread out through seven stories ranging from 1931 to 1943. Reading the volume, I jotted down a handful of these constants in Campbell’s later writings, including the monumental The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949): seeing anew; being transported from the familiar to the unfamiliar; an ordinary life becoming strange and mysterious; the inspiration to begin a quest; a life transformed and re-mythologized; self-discovery; the presence of the grotesque, the monstrous; entering sacred space and returning to narrate the adventure. I can only make the briefest of comments about so many stories in this limited space. Doing so will reveal to the reader the kinds of stories the young fiction writer gravitated towards. “Moonlight in Vermont” reveals Freddy Bliss from Brooklyn who takes on a new job on a farm. At one point he is led by one of the farmer’s cows across the fields. He is led to Jennifer, the farmer George Waterford’s daughter who loves to pick corn by moonlight. By her guidance Freddy is led to his own interior life and finds his purpose; from there he is transported back to the ordinary reality of farming. What began as a temporary employment becomes a permanent home for him.  In “Moth and Rust: A Story Cycle” (1942-46) Campbell writes four stories under this umbrella. “The Forgotten Man” has a surreal cast. A white president wakes one morning to discover that he has transformed into a black man. His death is feigned, and he travels to the South and connects with the black population; they in turn see him as a savior and label him “the Marvelous Wanderer.” His contact with so many feminine figures contributes to his transformation from the president to a voice for the black community: “Something epochal had happened. He had found himself, come into himself again.” (Mythic Imagination, 48) In “The Belly of the Shark” (1942) George Ambrose Fitzray is on his way by steamer to New Guinea when the ship sinks. In the water with other men, George spies a shark approaching him: “The harsh gullet had yawned; he was gone.” (63) His return is as miraculous as was his disappearance. One of the characters he meets on his journey through the shark tells him: “Food is life and life is food,” (67) echoing one of Campbell’s refrains that life feeds on life. That is a law of life itself that myths reveal repeatedly. “The Lord of Love” (1945), set in a different narrative voice, is the only story with a female hero, Lilian Copeland, twenty-seven, whose sexuality is fiercely attractive to most men. She is attacked by her boss in his office but escapes before he is able to rape her. Lilian begins her own quest, beginning at a Buddhist Temple; she admits to her mother: “I have to look for some. . .something I lost.” (118) On an island in Polynesia she descends into the Palolo Valley; in this serene, solitary landscape she finds  peace and “a simple, direct contact with the untroubled quietude of the elemental dark.” (121) “Voracious” (1945-46) is the most extravagant of all the stories. It depicts the death of Arnold Hopper, severely wounded in combat. Of his death his mother tells a friend: “This loss is honest, the only honest thing in our lives.” (141) Arnold then appears sometime later in his bed at home, where he undergoes a radical physical transformation. In this new guise his appetite is as powerful as the Cyclops Polyphemos in Homer’s Odyssey. He becomes a victim of all human appetites and exhibits intensely sexually aggressive behavior towards a host of women. The story widens to a conflict between two mythologies: that of the Native Americans living in the town of Indian Hat and members of the white population. “Last Paradise” and a story in the Appendix, “Strictly Platonic,” end the collection. The former is one of the most sustained quest narratives in the collection. Tom Waller, a librarian, discovers an island that no one knows about and is called to it. On his journey he is stripped of all vestiges of his previous life, even his glasses that allow him to see.  There, he discovers through Hima, a young native girl, a “lava tube” (228) that runs through a mountain. Tom sees a chance to become wealthy by growing sugar cane by siphoning a water supply through this mountain tube. His quest descends to little more than a trivial pursuit for wealth. The final story is the most tightly written. Joseph Campbell’s own life is most overtly threaded throughout it. Jim Weston is a new college teacher who flunks the most popular and talented football player on the team at Welton College, Larry Cobb. He will not budge when pressured by a wealthy board member to inflate the athlete’s grade. In his classroom, Jim and Larry physically fight and Larry is injured, now incapable of playing his last game at the college. Jim’s moral center remains intact under repeated bombardments to abandon his principles. An admittedly quick overview; nonetheless, many of the themes that occupied Campbell in his subsequent writings are explored in this volume. He tells us that “the hero journey is a night sea journey. . . where the individual is going to bring forth in his life something that was never beheld before.” (The Hero’s Journey, 76) Each of these narratives by a young, developing writer reveals the power of the quest to transform a life into one of deeper meaning through discovering one’s authentic bliss.

“Politics.” It is the word of the moment. One might even say it’s the word that exemplifies the age we live in. With a presidential election just a few months away, we find ourselves in a country divided. Indeed, the entire globe seems at odds with itself, its people split along ideological and geopolitical lines. One could say that we are being pulled apart by warring archetypal forces. Politics is a topic often avoided in casual conversations these days, as it can ignite passions and create conflict that can be difficult to overcome. Today, even marriages are dissolving, and families are feuding over politics! However, we cannot—should not—shy away from this most difficult topic, as it is the story of our time, one we must consider from a mythological perspective. In the recently released book Correspondence, the chapter entitled “Political Matters – Thomas Mann to the Vietnam War 1939 - 1970” reveals Joseph Campbell and his contemporaries were slogging through the complex political waters of their time, a time perhaps even more complex than ours. Campbell’s life spanned the two world wars, the likes of which truly had never been seen before. Though we had already been dealing with issues of globality for centuries, humanity became conscious of its global reality, and nearly all of humanity was divided and at war during this time period. Letters between two of the great thinkers of that age, Campbell and Mann, as well as Campbell’s correspondence with others (see Campbell’s letter to President Richard Nixon on page 242!), remind us that there have been dangerous and complex times in the not so distant past and, like us, people were dealing with their own personal and collective pressures while responding to the challenges they were facing. Campbell was grappling with the eternal/mythological nature of his studies, writing on the subject of “Permanent Human Values” when World War II was still being fought on foreign shores. At the same time, Mann had to flee Germany and was keenly aware that he could not afford to NOT attend to the particulars of his time. This push-pull between broader philosophical considerations and the more immediate exigencies of life are always what politics are about. We are not in a new moment at all, but in the eternal play of humanity’s politics. Merriam-Webster shows many definitions for “politics,” which should not be surprising, as it is a complex word. You can go here to see the full range. However, I was particularly struck by this definition: politics is “the total complex of relations between people living in society.” From this perspective, mythology is politics. Campbell understood this when he wrote about the politics of his time, which now seems remarkably prescient. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, written over 70 years ago, he states that “myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.” (Hero, 3) He also talks about a divided humanity, saying, “The world is full of the resultant mutually contending bands: totem, flag, and party-worshipers.” (Hero, 156) And, though he was concerned always with the eternal, he recognized what was new and changing in that moment, saying, “The community today is the planet, not the bounded nation; hence the patterns of projected aggression which formerly served to co-ordinate the in-group now can only break it into factions.” (Hero, 388) This could certainly be said of the United States, as its citizens are now divided into factions, and the old paradigms that used to unite now seem only to sever. Time and again we face the same mythological struggles, yet always in new ways. We live in a time of new and shifting global realities and archetypal energies. Perhaps that is the best explanation of our time. We are seeing the dissolution of the old patterns because they don’t meet the needs of our times.  One might even say the archetypal energies are in conflict, that we are caught between two different archetypal patterns. One is a hierarchical archetypal pattern supported by power structures and defended by aggression, which served as we were building civilizations and seeking security from nature. However, this old hierarchical paradigm is no longer serving the complexities of an interconnected global community. And something so pervasive in the human psyche, as are its archetypal forces, never go down without a fight. At least not without a psychological, political and mythological fight. That is what we are facing. While we cannot predict how the future unfolds, perhaps we can find our way forward by thinking mythically and imaginatively. As mythologists we are tasked with not only trying to see the archetypal patterns at play on the global stage but also, through our broader vision of how those archetypal patterns manifest, and finding ways to support the “permanent human values” of a planetary community.

Time and again, as artists and writers we come to a point in our development where that proverbial “block” on the road of creativity is thrown our way and we feel stuck, as though abandoned by our creative instinct. It may be after years of study and professional development, having amassed a vast array of knowledge and technical proficiency, or just at the point where we are starting to learn something new; our egos get stuck, imperceptibly swallowed by a black hole in our souls, where that dreaded “negativity” of the unconscious psyche is waiting for us like an old friend. Enveloped in this darkness, our “healthy” ego inflation becomes depressed, the air goes out of our bubble of certainty, and we feel unmotivated to make our mark, unable to say a new word or paint a new image. I wonder what Campbell might say to us given this state of affairs. What advice would he give us in our most depressive hour? In his correspondence with Angela Gregory, a sculptor and dear friend with whom he maintained a correspondence his entire life, Campbell had an occasion to share his thoughts on the matter. After Angela had sculpted her famous bust of a young Campbell in Paris where they met, she returned to the United States and found herself in such a mood, staring at that black hole of the self, or as she put it, “a certain blankness” that engulfed her and sapped all her inspiration. Campbell immediately picked up on his friend’s sad tone and with great affection decided to address her feeling of emptiness: I know that the constant drumming of things around one can upset the pulse of one’s heart. Environment can engulf us in pleasures and pains. But after all it’s inside our own hearts that beauty reposes. Pleasures and pains affect the body; and if our dreamings have never released our souls, then pleasures and pains will upset our mental and emotional tranquility. Aggravations and disappointments—and even a certain blankness can help the soul to grow in understanding, once the soul has learned to feed upon whatever comes its way. Marcus Aurelius was a very wise man, and if you’ll pardon me a moment I should misquote something which he wrote once.— When a flame is young it must be carefully guarded, and fed with things which will help it to grow. But when the flame has reached a certain height, and attained a certain vigor, then everything which comes its way is its food—everything helps it to grow. The soul is like that. (Correspondence, 13) The soul as the flame of creative being is itself all-consuming, unrelenting, and does not shy away from death and destruction or the negativity of the unconscious; quite the contrary, once it has grown to a certain maturity, the soul feeds on the emptiness of pure being as it does from the fullness of life, for it needs both in the process of becoming. Campbell was aware of the fact that the true life of the soul is not to be found in the realm of pain and pleasure alone but in an activity beyond it, where the soul has its true home: the understanding of being itself. Often people underestimate how strong they are in the face of this non-positive darkness of the unconscious, where the creative flame of the cosmos burns on and on. Often under the spell of positivistic jingoisms, we do not have the courage to acknowledge the very existence of the unconscious psyche, the dark continent of our inner lives, as the Other in ourselves. For an awareness of the unknown origin within us implies the negation of our conscious grasp and certainty (the “un” of the unconscious), acknowledging everything that is not under our control. The problem does not reside with the profound negativity of the creative spirit as such but with the childish attitude we take towards it. Campbell’s advice, therefore, is not to “think positive thoughts” in the face of this darkness; positivistic imagery in this realm only helps to obscure the true “negative” nature of the psyche, the fact that it does not exist in a positive sense. But instead of helping us to attune—or atone—our attitude to the psychic negativity of the soul, naive positivism functions as a kind of defense mechanism against the unknown. In this sense, the true purpose of “positive thinking” is to keep the actual soul at bay, to maintain the status quo of ideology within us, without daring to question our own belief systems and their sense of positivity. As Jung has expressed the paradox of true psychological self-awareness: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.” (Alchemical Studies,  paragraph 355). Or as Freud put it even more succinctly (without Latin surrogates): Wo es war, soll Ich werden,or “Where it was, there I shall be” (New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 80). Let us return to Campbell’s letter and his advice for his angelic friend, wherein he ends by encouraging her native ability to brave these depths, advancing the peculiar notion of a plurality of souls living within the nurturing self: Angel, I think that chez-vous [in you] and chez-moi [in me] there are souls which have attained a certain vigor. Our mental attitude—our wisdom should help these souls to grow—to mount with every experience. When we shall have lived this intensely we should have truth in our hearts and beauty—then our work will be great because we shall be great ourselves. (Correspondence, 13)

The art of letter writing has been significantly threatened since e-mails and text messages brought about faster and more efficient ways to communicate with words. Once human relationships depended heavily on written correspondence. This form of communication required a certain commitment. Many of us familiar with letter writing still bear a callous on at least one finger, where the pen had worked its way into our flesh after hours of continuous friction. Joseph Campbell was a man of letters. His written correspondence is of note, not only because of the brilliant ideas and conversations he shared with others, but also thanks to the wide-ranging field of distinguished individuals he corresponded with. Campbell’s Correspondence is a rich volume worth the time of anyone interested in Campbell, mythology, history, or the vast numbers of significant figures he shared letters with. While Campbell traded communiques with a number of artists, one of the most significant to him was Angela Gregory. Near the end of his life, Campbell told Gregory that she “had become, in truth, my child, the golden daughter of my whole life’s quest” (Correspondence, 26). The two met while they were both living in Paris, studying at the Sorbonne. Nancy L. Penrose details the initial encounters between the two in her book, A Dream and a Chisel, as well as the experiences and conversations they shared during the season their lives intersected. Gregory would play a role not only in Campbell’s appreciation of art, but also in his mythological and spiritual journey. She was instrumental in reconnecting Campbell with Jiddu Krishnamurti, an encounter that was also often referenced in their correspondence and would be influential in Campbell’s burgeoning interests in all things Eastern. In one exchange, he would confide to Gregory that at that point in his life “Krishna more than anyone I know, is like the person I have wanted to be” (Correspondence, 8). While a great deal of historical context, information, and influence can be found in Campbell’s correspondence, perhaps the most meaningful aspect of his letters is how they function as a key to unlock the deeper chambers of his humanity – a factor that sometimes gets overlooked when discussing his ideas. In a letter written to Gregory in 1928, Campbell says, “Please don’t be afraid to write me long letters when you want to” (Correspondence, 9). The vulnerability and self-revealing found in such a turn of words tells us a great deal about Campbell and what he valued. He recognized the deep importance of the expression of others. That recognition would be one factor that would motivate him to explore the mythological narratives of people all over the world – some of whom  shared his own ethnic and cultural background, but most of whom did not. Campbell did not want to just “speak” through his own writing. He also wanted to “listen” by consuming the words of others, a discipline he spent a great amount of his time practicing. While we can delight in the beautiful vulnerability of the small details we find in Campbell’s letters, we also become privy to moments just as human but less celebrated – moments where life seems to be impeding the journey that Campbell set out on. But perhaps, even in these, we can find ourselves relating to Campbell on a deeper level. In 1932, Campbell wrote Gregory, expressing discouragement and regret over a season in his life that he felt had not offered the fruit he believed it would. He expresses disappointment in his failure to become successful penning magazine short stories. He expresses disappointment in what he believed he would achieve through studying the work of Krishnamurti. Finally, he states disappointment over the disconnect he senses between the academic pursuits he has been working so hard at and the application of those pursuits in his own life. “Two years plunging after the objective facts of scholarship and the realization that these twinkling objective facts hadn’t had the least bearing on the conduct of my own life!....I wish I could lose myself sometimes in this clear blue sky or in this blue sea or in these green hills so that everything might be gone except whatever intoxications there may be in the present moment,” Campbell states (Correspondence, 21). Ironically, in moments such as these, when I have lost myself in my own journey, I take Campbell’s writings along with me to those intoxicating green hills and stare up into that blue sky. Campbell had no way of seeing what his future would hold in those early days corresponding with Angela Gregory. But then of course, neither do we. May all the joys and unexpected encounters with wonder be waiting for us in the future, just as they were for him.

The text we’re highlighting this month is Correspondence: 1927-1987, which offers selections of Joseph Campbell’s correspondence over the last 60 years of his life. I have long loved reading the correspondence of people who have intrigued, inspired, and awed me; the selected letters of Keats touch me more deeply than his poetry. For me, reading personal letters like these creates an intimate moment with people I’ve never met, yet would have loved to have known. I get to travel back in time and see ideas unfold in situ, how they develop in the minds of the thinkers who think them. Campbell’s ideas, his intellectual development, his spirited exchanges with other remarkable minds and talents of his time, may all be recognized in this fascinating collection. But unlike his work, the man remains strangely inaccessible, a bit alien to me. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and Woolf, for example, all seem to some degree recognizable to me as people, at least as my people. I can feel, somehow, that I know them, that I’m familiar with their “type.” I see that I share elements of their psychology and character—perhaps a kind of existential burden, or a feeling that one must fight to find one’s place in the world—that makes them feel familiar to me. Campbell’s remarkable charisma, self-confidence, self-discipline, and his self-awareness regarding his gifts (both intellectual and physical) set him apart and make him seem to me a bit more remote than I would like, something like the mythic figures he himself writes so compellingly about. He is as strange and wondrous to my sensibilities as are Socrates, Wilde, or Whitman. It seems, as the old saying goes, that the world was his oyster, with an r in every month (a reference to a bygone injunction that one should only eat oysters in months with an r in them, from September to April, to avoid food poisoning). For example, on page 2 of Correspondence, there is a picture of a bronze bust made by Campbell’s close friend and artist, Angela Gregory. How many 23-year olds can say, at that tender age, a bronze bust of their head has been cast? In his letter thanking her, he writes of a “certain vigor,” an energy and an attitude which, I believe, should be understood as archetypal: Angel, I think that chez-vous and chez-moi there are souls which have attained a certain vigor. Our mental attitude—our wisdom should help these souls to grow—to mount with every experience. When we shall have lived this intensely we should have truth in our hearts and beauty—then our work will be great because we shall be great ourselves. (Correspondence, p. 13) Beauty, not only the beauty of the heart, but beauty in the natural world, enchanted him. The 27-year old’s description of the Arizona desert around Phoenix (where I’ve spent the best part of my adult life) has a particularly lovely resonance for me: “…I passed from the grip of the sublime to that of the beautiful. The desert was a good deal more voluptuous, I think, than any girl I’ve ever seen.” (p. 19) The imagery of myth was, for the whole of Campbell’s life, “grounded in nature.” (p. 304) But it wasn’t simply the beauty and mystery of the natural world that captivated Campbell. The beauty and mystery of the inner world—which is itself a part of the natural world and serves to connect us to the external world of nature as well as facilitate a deep connection to others—was equally captivating: […] there are many aspects of the grand lines of nature. One, the world without. Two, the world within. And two aspects of the world within: that which is put upon you by the society as to the mode and field of your life in existence, and that to which you undoubtedly, at this stage in your life, have already become gradually aware. Namely, the peculiar talents, the peculiar possibilities, of your lives, your individual lives. Different from all other lives. And yet, walking along the same grand road with others, so that you will find when you have come to the end of your course, that although you may have lived a life completely yours, looking back you will see that it has been a normal, beautiful standard life of the sort you share with many. (p. 295) I think that human beings are not unlike ideas or facts; we exist, true, but we are too often misunderstood and unrecognized for our real significance. We’re misconstrued, misdiagnosed, misguided, misjudged, misquoted, misread, and often maligned. This, perhaps, is particularly true when the individual in question, like Joseph Campbell, is well known for a body of work that has become so important to so many. Because his work is so well known, because he has been dead for more than 30 years, he has become more an idea rather than a person, and everyone has her own idea of what Campbell is, who he should remain. He has become, as W.H. Auden wrote of Freud, “no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion.”