How do we know what we know? When does an introduced idea cross that threshold from something encountered to something we now know? In the modern era, we call this pursuit epistemology, but such questions have kept philosophers busy for ages. On the most basic level, we might see the known as that which has been brought into our light and the unknown as that which remains in darkness. In his famous essay “The Symbol Without Meaning,” collected in The Flight of the Wild Gander, Joseph Campbell delved into sorting the known from the unknown, taking time to focus on the nuances of specifically that which is unknown. He begins by bifurcating the unknown into 1) the relatively unknown and 2) the absolutely unknowable. “The relatively unknown may be said to be represented, psychologically, by the contents of the unconscious; sociologically, by the dynamics of history; and cosmologically by the forces of the universe,” Campbell says (Flight, 136). He goes on to associate this type of unknown with the Sanskrit term parokṣa, which translates “beyond or higher than the reach of the eye,” not immediately perceptible to waking consciousness, but sometimes perceived by saints and sages in vision. However, Campbell also suggests that there is also an unknown beyond the highest references of parokṣa. This unknown is referenced by Lao-tzu in the Tao Teh Ching when he states, “The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao.” It is referenced by Thomas Aquinas in Summa contra gentiles, when he states, “For then alone do we know God truly when we believe that he is far above all that man can possibly think of God.” And it is referenced in the Kena Upaniṣad, which states, “It is other, indeed, than the known and moreover, above the unknown.” This unknown, Campbell tells us, is the category towards which all of the high mythologies are ultimately directed. He summarizes his thinking about the pursuit of this unknown in the concluding words of Flight of the Wild Gander. Campbell says, However, not all, even today, are of that supine sort that must have their life values given them, cried at them from the pulpits and other mass media of the day. For there is, in fact, in quiet places, a great deal of deep spiritual quest and finding now in progress in this world, outside the sanctified social centers, beyond their purview and control: in small groups, here and there, and more often, more typically (as anyone who looks about may learn), by ones and twos, there entering the forest at those points which they themselves have chosen, where they see it to be most dark, and there is no beaten way or path. (Flight, "The Secularization of the Sacred," 186) In many of the most unlikely places, outside our sanctified social centers, the pursuit of this unknown is taking place. The pursuit can be observed not only in academic halls, but also in the books of our great thinkers, or in the wonderful corners of the Internet devoted to conversations of a higher order.* The pursuit is also taking place with musicians like Michael Gungor, who, in his book This, discusses these high mythologies, the nature of our realities, and his own movement toward this higher unknown, which he simply calls THIS. The pursuit is taking place with comedians like Pete Holmes, who in his book Comedy Sex God, devotes an entire chapter (charmingly titled Joey Cambs) to Joseph Campbell’s concept of the unknown beyond parokṣa. Holmes humorously imagines using Campbell’s definition for God (a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all categories of human thought, including being and non-being) in practical situations, like Emmy Award speeches. He concludes, suggesting that “the best way we can touch the unfathomable mystery is with a myth.” The pursuit of this unknown is also taking place on movie screens, iPhones, podcasts, and in coffee shop conversations around the world. It transcends our subcultures, cliques, divisions, and Twitterstorms. Perhaps it is not a pursuit at all. Perhaps it is a dance—a dance with ourselves, a dance with THAT which we cannot see, a dance with the “absolutely unknowable.” It is a dance in which we are transformed. It is a dance which we cannot fully understand or often even begin to describe. It is a dance wherein, in rare moments, we can see the essence of beauty and oneness. It is a dance wherein we see ourselves as we truly are, and the stories and myths we’ve adorned this invisible reality with.

In 1987, the Hindu epic The Rāmāyaṇa was serialized for Indian television. It immediately became immensely popular and was treated with ritualistic honor throughout the country when episodes aired. When it was announced that the series would be ending — before the entire 500-chapter, 24,000-verse saga was completed — the entire nation went into an uproar, demanding that the unfinished story continue. Sanitation workers in Jalandhar went on strike to protest the show’s cancellation. The strike spread among other sanitation workers in major cities throughout India, eventually prompting the government to sponsor more episodes of the show in order to prevent a potential health hazard. Unfinished stories have found their place at various points throughout history. Joseph Campbell tells us that the earliest surviving version of the Grail legend is Perceval, le Conte del Graal of Chrétien de Troyes, who insisted he adapted the tale from a book that had been given to him by the Count Philip of Flanders (Romance of the Grail, 165). While it’s understandable that the Grail story’s beginning is shrouded in mystery, it is curious as to why de Troyes left his recounting of the narrative unfinished. Campbell also pondered this mystery, lamenting that “All the great themes are left in the air” (Romance, 165). De Troyes, himself, was not a knight, but rather a court poet to Marie de Champagne, capable of crafting “perfectly turned couplets out of his sleeve” (Romance, 137). Perhaps his leaving the story unfinished was poetic in nature. Journeys such as the Grail quest are, of course, circular and cyclical. We return with the boon, only to eventually embark on a new mission, leaving us to ask if the story really ever does have an ending. Jung went as far as to state that these were the stories of mankind: the unending myth of death and rebirth (Jung on Mythology, 103). Never-ending stories are still all around us. In a questing age such as ours, it is no wonder that streaming episodic content has grown very popular. Amazon Fires, Apple TVs, and Rokus have become thresholds that millions now enter through searching for insights and meaning in their own lives. Storytelling is now more than entertainment, not that it was ever only that. It is a gateway into a land of articulated questions and philosophical investigations that intersect with individual internal journeys. Television content based on mythic ideas and motifs has never been more plentiful for those willing to venture below the technology’s electronic surface. Why has this serialized content become so attractive while traditional movie theaters struggle to find ways to entice audiences to patronize their halls? Aside from the logistical and economic factors, the serialized story of today, like the Grail tale of de Troyes, seems to have no ending. At the conclusion of each episode, new questions are asked and the promise of a continuing story beckons us toward the next stop on the narrative journey. Even at the end of a complete season of television, a new season awaits on the horizon. Stories such as these are structured to be never-ending, only concluding when their creators finally decide to stop providing us a window into the world of the show. This also speaks to our inability to truly know where we are in our own journey. Often signs of the ending of one season only point to the blossoming of another. Just when we feel the Grail slipping from our fingers and the fading of the light, we blink, the Grail remains in our sights, and our eyes are opened to an unexpected renaissance. Our story remains unfinished. Campbell suggested that such moments represent the restorative power of the Grail. He stated that it can “transmute primal filth into gold….the life of the world into the golden life of the spirit….a symbol of the spiritual conduit that carries the inexhaustible of the eternal into the inexhaustible forms of temporal world….It cannot be exhausted. And the Grail is the source through which this comes.” (Romance, 167-168) This word inexhaustible has taken on greater significance in the information age. Be it our own e-mail inboxes, the number of options we now have with which to consume entertainment, or the vast capacity of knowledge that now lives on little devices in our pockets, we can become overwhelmed when we consider the inexhaustible. The term consistently has negative connotations in our world. To be fair, the concept of the endless, from Tantalus to Sisyphus, is usually negative in myth as well. However, Campbell challenges us to consider the inexhaustible in terms of the goodness of the Grail. The restorative too is inexhaustible. When we return to the source of our empowerment, we find no end to its fullness. The story remains thankfully unfinished.

The story of Dame Ragnell and Sir Gawain is one of the most popular tales to come down from late medieval England, and scholars generally attribute it to Geoffrey Chaucer. In “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” King Arthur gets separated from his knights while hunting. He meets Sir Gomer Somer Joure, who harbors a murderous rage for Arthur and wants to kill him, but since Arthur is not dressed for battle, he makes Arthur swear an oath to return in a year with the answer to this question: What do women desire most? If he doesn’t find the answer, Arthur will lose his life. Upon his return to court, Arthur shares his plight with Sir Gawain and they go on a quest to find out, writing down all their answers in a big book. After eleven months they return with many answers, but admittedly the answers seem superficial at best. The hour of meeting his fate is near, and while King Arthur rides out alone to gather his thoughts, he happens upon the ugliest woman he has ever seen. Dame Ragnell is fat, with large pendulous breasts, has a huge nose, with warts and tusks protruding from her lips. Incongruously, she is riding a gloriously outfitted destrier (a knight’s warhorse) and holds herself in a queenly fashion. There is mystery here, and power. She tells Arthur that she not only knows his plight, but also the answer to the question that will ultimately save his life. In return she asks for Sir Gawain in marriage. He believes her but says that he can only ask Gawain, he won’t force him to commit to such a marriage. Dame Ragnell accepts the arrangement and tells him to meet her at the same spot on the day of his meeting with Sir Gomer. Arthur returns to court and confesses to Gawain that he ran into the ugliest hag who told him she had the answer that would save his life, but she would marry a great knight in return for the favor. Gawain, renowned for his chivalry, volunteers and Arthur is greatly relieved. On the fateful day, Arthur rides out and meets Dame Ragnell at the same place. She tells him the answer: First we want to be seen in our essence, In our innocent hearts, as who we truly are. Second what we desire most is sovereignty over own lives. This is still true for women today: being seen for who we truly are and having sovereignty over our own lives is still something to aspire to a thousand years after l’Amour Courtois was born. Sir Gomer Somer loses his right to kill Arthur, since he gave a truthful answer, and Dame Ragnell immediately rides back with Arthur to claim Gawain as her husband. When Arthur suggests a small, quiet wedding, Dame Ragnell insists on a grand occasion, and when Guinevere suggests skipping the reception, Dame Ragnell insists on a grand banquet. All witness her terrible appetite and her manners — closer to that of a pig than a gentle lady. They all feel very sorry for Gawain. As they lie together after the banquet, Dame Ragnell asks for a kiss. Gawain turns to her apprehensively and is amazed at the sight of his bride who has been transformed into an extraordinarily beautiful woman. He’s overcome, and they “made great joy.” Dame Ragnell explains to Gawain that she was cursed by her half-brother Sir Gomer and his mother, and so Gawain must choose to have her beautiful by night and ugly in daylight, when other men can see her, or else beautiful by day and ugliest by night. Gawain feels that this is an impossible decision for him to make and surrenders the choice to his Lady. This is, of course, the correct decision. Gawain has given back to Dame Ragnell sovereignty over her own life. The curse is broken. The two live together for five years during which Dame Ragnell gives birth to a boy who in time will become a fair knight of the Round Table. Then she leaves Gawain to fulfil her own destiny. So the end is not the end. The transformation of the Loathly Lady—from the ugliest into the fairest—is a common theme in fairy tales as well, and it also has its resonance in Parzival where both Chretien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach describe Cundrie, one of the Grail messengers, as an ugly hag. Joseph Campbell points out in Romance of the Grail that her appearance is like that of the great and monstrous goddess Kali (Romance, 47). Dame Ragnell teaches the whole court about deeper truths and inspires them to a new understanding of chivalry. The Feminine is the great spiritual teacher of Medieval Times, the one who reminds the Hero of the importance of compassion, his feeling function, and of love, whether she is as monstrous as Kali, or as sweet as Mary. She reminds the hero to ask the one who suffers, “What ails thee?” and inaugurates psychological inquiry and compassion. This movement is the beginning of change and renewal. May we all have the courage to ask the right question.

One of the definitions of Renaissance is that it is a time of rebirth and revival. The romantic ideal that many have of the notion of Renaissance, however, could just as well be defined as an often excruciating process Joseph Campbell termed the call to adventure. It is frequently a time of terror, loss, and inaugurates a state of unexpected, unplanned, deep depression. And as if that’s not bad enough, it’s absent any guarantee of a positive outcome. It is not fun. There are no maps. You have no idea what your soul is seeking. My call to adventure came when I was blacklisted in Hollywood. I had written and produced a film about the B-movie industry and the men and women who inhabit its archetype. Some Nudity Required, my first full-length feature documentary, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. I toured on the film festival circuit, found a theatrical distributor, and landed on the front page of the LA Times calendar section. And then... I was sued for 7 million dollars. Roger Corman, known as the “King of B Movies,” was enraged because my documentary implied that the mythology behind B-movies is constellated by negative patriarchal control and power, and I apparently exacerbated that wound. All of a sudden, my dreams were smashed. “This is the true beginning of the Grail quest,” says Campbell. “Everything up to this point has taken place in the way of our hero’s nature; [his] character has carried him through, but his desire to achieve fame in the world has cut him down at the high point, and he’s lost both his spiritual and his earthly career. It’s in this condition that he sets forth on his great adventure” (Romance of the Grail, 58). This was not a “great adventure.” I spent my meager savings on my film and was living on food stamps and disability insurance. What I had in abundance was stress, which kept me bedridden with chronic fatigue and various immune illnesses. Although the lawsuit was settled and my film was released, I ultimately succumbed to the humiliation of the low budget kingpin. Unequipped to confront these powerful archetypal forces, I walked away from my own film, heartbroken and in despair. After a decade of stumbling through the “dark woods of the soul,” I decided to attend graduate school. It was my longing for an authentic relationship with myself that led me to the fields of mythology and depth psychology. Finally, clarity came to me. Through the image of the Navajo deity, Changing Woman, I learned that I lost my soul to the archetype of the “devouring” mother. The mythology around the figure of Lilith helped me to accept my mother as she is and to withdraw my own negative projections so that I could embrace the jilted Lilit-Shekkinah and heal her wounds, allowing me to access her power for positive/constructive ends. And Parzival’s trial shed light on my decade-long sojourn in the wasteland. Uncovering the part of my psyche that wanted hierarchical power, rejected my feminine side, did not value it, horrified me. In myth, the wounded King must die, and I saw that my attraction to the Kings of Hollywood had to die as well in order for me to be true to myself. Parzival’s journey begins as his mother, Herzeloyde—whose name means “Heart Sorrow”— sinks into intolerable grief because her husband died in the crusades, a few of her brothers were killed in various futile disputes, and her land has been confiscated. In the midst of her suffering, Parzival tells his mother he is overcome by desire to become a knight himself. She reluctantly agrees to let him go, but not without attempting to sabotage his destiny. She dresses him in fool’s clothes, hoping that people at court will laugh at him and drive him away. Psychologically, she has wrapped him in a mother complex that will take many experiences before he can cast it off. Whether it is to impair Parzival by making him seem ridiculous so as not to get hurt, or whether she’s trying to swaddle him and never let him out of the mother’s cocoon, she hasn’t attended to her own grief, nor come to terms with the dark feminine, and so, in diminishing her son, she is diminishing her own instincts as a woman and mother. The destructive and entangled relationship between Parzival and his mother is “healed” only when she dies. A few weeks into my dissertation studies, my step-father suddenly passed away and I became responsible for my mother’s well being. With each paper I wrote, I seemed to retrieve a part of her soul as well as my own. By the time I completed my dissertation, seven years later, I had healed, for the most part, our very difficult relationship. One week before my defense was scheduled, my mother died. I was at her bedside, helping her transition. In that moment, I had a direct experience of the archetypal journey of the child separating from its mother. I curled up on her stomach and I was literally reborn.

The recent OK, Boomer brouhaha both amused and bemused me, and made me think (surprise!) about Star Wars and Joseph Campbell, not that I needed an excuse. If you managed to miss it, so-called Millennials and members of Generation Z — people born after 1980, essentially — had taken their frustration with perceived condescension by members of the Baby Boom generation (born 1946–1964) and, as is their wont, had turned it into a dismissive meme: OK, Boomer. The flashpoint hit when a 25-year-old member of New Zealand's parliament was heckled during her speech on climate change and dismissed the heckler with a dead-pan "OK, Boomer." Tempers flared on all sides of the issue. Even members of Generation X (1964-1980) smirked that, once again, they were being completely ignored. Nu? What I found myself thinking about, as the silliness played out, was the fandom controversy concerning the current Star Wars sequel trilogy, itself an epically silly conflict. Certain members of the Star Wars fandom hate the new movies; some of that hatred is clearly racially and sexually motivated, but hardly all. Much of it is personal esthetics, to be sure. And some of it, I think, is generationally inspired. Now, me, I'm a very late Baby Boomer — missed the 'Sixties, had schools closing down all around me, came into the workforce during Reagan’s recession. So I've never exactly felt like a part of my generation anyway — the generation famous for slogans like "Never trust anyone over thirty" and "Hope I die before I get old." And I have two daughters: one a late Millennial, the other a cutting-edge Gen Z-er, who like me is a hard-core life-long Star Wars geek. All of which leads me to the question I’d like to discuss: who is the hero of the Star Wars series? Well, for folks my age and a bit older who enjoyed the original trilogy as it came out (now episodes IV, V, and VI), the Campbellian hero of the series — the character onto whom we project our Self (in Campbell's Jungian sense) — is clearly Luke Skywalker. Arguments could be made for Princess Leia or the anti-heroic Han Solo too. Those three are the characters we identify with and root for as we watch A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Return of the Jedi. The prequel series (episodes I, II, and III) came out between 1999 and 2005 and were pretty universally panned as a let-down on just about every level — as art, entertainment, etc. They took place before any of the three heroes of the original trilogy were born — though, of course, one of the central plot threads of the prequels was the coming together of Luke and Leia's parents. So who is the hero of the prequels? You might hear some calls for young Obi Wan or Queen Amidala — but I think it's clear that the protagonist is Anakin Skywalker, who becomes Darth Vader. He's a flawed, tragic figure who undergoes the hero's journey, but ultimately fails every test and is destroyed by the experience. Boomers who watched the movies had no problem with that; it was known from the original trilogy. The disappointment had more to do with how the story was told, not with its essential shape. And it was easy to see Anakin (and Amidala) not as projections of the Self, characters with whom we identify, but as Dad and Mom. Again, never trust anyone over thirty. Hope I die before I get old. Only we were now all well over thirty and getting older. Then came the most recent trilogy, the last installment of which has not (as of this writing) been released. Now many, many people (myself included) have enjoyed the sequels. Perfect? Hardly. But we enjoyed them. However, some folks didn’t. As I said, part of the animus (in the non-Jungian sense) was honestly esthetic — some folks didn’t like where the story went. Part of it was racist and sexist. The part that OK, Boomer got me thinking about was the folks — almost all members of my generation — who were really unhappy that not only didn’t episodes VII, VIII, and IX center around the heroes we had identified with, but they were now the old folks, and the movies slowly killed them off. Han went in The Force Awakens. Luke disappeared into the Force in The Last Jedi. And I can only assume — an assumption reinforced by Carrie Fisher’s sad demise in 2016 — that Leia will go in The Rise of Skywalker. Remember: in this trilogy, they’re the mentors, the magical helpers, not the heroes. But some fans can’t think of them that way. A signal characteristic of the Baby Boom generation has been an unwillingness to age gracefully — or at all. More than any generation, we have held on to our youth, even as the trappings of youth passed us by. We want to be treated as important, relevant — the heroes of the generational narrative. Joseph Campbell talks about how working mythologies help individuals and societies deal with each stage of a person’s development, from childhood to adulthood, from adulthood to age, and from age through “the journey out the dark door” (Pathways to Bliss, 17). Most of the great works of my generation’s culture, of our mythology (such as it is), focus on that first transition: adolescence, romance, rebellion. The last two? Not so much. And that’s a problem. As Campbell puts it: The authorities are the old people. We haven’t learned how to handle them today, but in the old traditional societies they had. The reason they’d learned was that nothing much changed from generation to generation. Things passed in the times of the old people just about as they do in the present. So you could ask the elders how things used to be done, and the answer had some bearing on what should be done now. That’s not true anymore. (Pathways to Bliss, 16–17) Until societies learn how to support people through all of the transitions in life without trying to return us to a non-existent Golden Age, the generations will continue to be at war. And that seems silly. Oh, and who is the hero of the Star Wars series? Not sure, not having yet seen the finale, but I’d guess it’s family — not just the Skywalker family, but the universal family of which everyone (human, Wookie, or droid) is a part. All film stills copyright © 20th Century Fox

As we begin the new year, I express my gratitude to Evans Lansing Smith for so skillfully editing Joseph Campbell’s research and writing on the Grail legend. Lans’s Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth (2015) is a honeycomb of sweet delights and discoveries on this rich, ancient archetypal object. Campbell’s insights on this eternal image attest to how much the human soul needs nourishment from the realm of symbols like the Grail. Symbols aid in our remembrances; they also encourage us in reassessing both our life’s matter and its meaning. As “transport vehicles” (Campbell’s term), symbols help us in our quest to awaken to a fuller consciousness, typified, for instance, by the ring worn by the Pope, the “Ring of the Fisherman.” As Campbell reminds us: “It represents the spiritual principle going down into the unconscious waters to pull souls, or beings, out of the unconscious state into the realm of light” (Romance, 160). To quest for the Grail is a lifetime pilgrimage; it includes seeking not just the after life’s meaning but also its purpose. Campbell goes on to suggest that one of its manifestations is “The Grail as chalice, the body and blood of Christ.” (Romance, 162) Behind this miraculous image is the ancient cyclical pattern of death and renewal, the place we are temporally in now, between the dying off of last year and the scintillating promises of the year to come. Endings and beginnings are rich archetypal situations, not unlike those lyrical moments we pause at repeatedly in life: perhaps we lament for what was not achieved or realized in our past, coupled with a yearning for what is possible to birth or renew in the year before us. In the tension between these two emotional and psychic states is where our personal myth both resides and struggles to evolve. It is a land that includes a host of  re’s: revision, renew, reknow, respond, reflect, reject, recalibrate and resolve. It is equivalent to a sacred time, a temporal temenos, a time to turn about and around. The ancient Roman god Janus appears most poignantly at this juncture. He is “the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages and endings” He was also the patron guide “over the beginning and ending of conflict, and hence war and peace.” Unique to Roman mythology, he had no equivalent in the Greek pantheon. In the Roman cultural imagination,  the time of an old year, an old life passing, and a new one striving to be born is marked by divinity; it is where the divine and human move through a transition together, with complementary energy being more abundant than that of conflict. I see some correspondence here between the time of transition and the Grail cup in our lives. We cannot pass on it if we are to live a full, conscious existence. We are asked to grasp it with both hands as well as drink its content, bitter or sweet, pleasant or putrid; it is indeed the cup of life itself, the cup we are in quest of as we awaken to those parts of our daily journey yet to be lived, yet seeking only us, not another, to live them in the plenitude of being. Our Grail cup may be made of simple clay fired in the kiln of our destiny, or it can assume the shape of a golden, gem-laced work of art with precious stones beyond price. We can ask the question Perceval articulates in order to heal the King: “Who is served by the Grail’? (Romance, 165). But we might also ask this question: “How do I serve the Grail?” as a major advance to healing ourselves, by letting die our impulses of self-serving. I like very much Campbell’s observation that certain legends note, wherein “questing heroes may ride back and forth over the very ground of the Grail without seeing it” (Romance, 167). Questing may be understood as noticing what is beneath one’s feet when one’s eyes are focused on a far horizon; it requires a major effort to turn from the horizon to the wet turf along the side of the road we travel. “That’s what the Grail can do,” Campbell believes (Romance, 168). It is the vessel of plenty, a symbol of the spiritual conduit that causes the inexplicable dimensions of the eternal to turn in towards the inexhaustible forms of the temporal order of being. Just perhaps, the national impulse to exact a series of “New Year’s Resolutions” out of our failures, shortcomings and unachieved potentials as well as our desires for a more meaningful life, are well-meaning secular contrivances at setting our compasses to continue the quest for the coveted Grail, whose search into the New Year defines who and what we are.

Our family had a sacred ritual we practiced every Friday night while I was growing up. We traveled to a video store called Movies and Sounds and paid homage to the higher forces that fired our imagination. The old brick building where the store was located acted as a portal for time travelers in our little community. It allowed you to live in any era, experience any culture, and know the bravery of the most valiant warriors. It was a cave of wonders — a symbol of ultimate possibility. It was a mystical library wherein one could discover truths so deep , they could only be hinted at by the beautiful moving images that danced across our 24-inch television screen. We came to this temple dedicated to the gods of narrative and offered our earnings that we might take home new visions, understandings, and ideas, many of which we have held to throughout the years. It was inside that same video store that I first experienced a magic so ancient I couldn’t describe it, and simply succumbed to its intoxicating power. The transcendent power of story consumed me. It shaped the passions I would follow in my career, and even to this day, I am deeply stirred by the metaphoric power found in stories. Our stories create a space in which we unleash our fears, our anxieties, and our most secret hopes. We embody these concepts in characters that act out dramas, demonstrating how we ourselves can imagine dealing with these inner experiences. The stories we tell, the characters we create, and the worlds we build are all attempts to construct an idealized external reality that reflects  the legends living inside our psyches. Myths speak to us in metaphors, bypassing our brains and communicating directly with our hearts. In The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Joseph Campbell tells us that “Every myth, that is to say, whether or not by intention, is psychologically symbolic. Its narrative and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors” (Inner Reaches, 28) The movies we watch, the books we read, and the stories we digest are not really about the characters we root for, they are about us. More specifically, they are about what goes on inside of us. They are metaphors for the symbols and narratives inside our psyches. Campbell goes on to say: “Temples and the narratives of myth are hermetic fields within which those apparitions known as gods and goddesses, demons, angels, demigods, incarnations, and the like typify in the guise of charismatic personalities the locally recognized vortices of consciousness out of which all aspects of the local theater of life derive their being.” (Inner Reaches, 28) Movies and Sounds housed not only the “local gods” that lived in East Texas and the theater of life that they peopled, but also exotic and unfamiliar “gods” and narratives that I would slowly become acquainted with, and later embrace as true and learn to worship. Like so many of our rituals, the weekly trip to the video store isn’t possible anymore. Portable devices and streaming services have eliminated that ritual for most of us. While more stories are available to us than ever before, the convenience of having them at our fingertips may have cost us much of the sacredness that enveloped the process and thus the stories themselves. Mystery, wonder, ritual, and the old magic that could be discovered inside Movies and Sounds continue to be available to us, in some ways more than they have ever been, though the caves where they can be found are located in different places. Metaphor exists all around us still. It still points towards something that simply can’t always be expressed in words. When the caves where we once found it are no longer available to us, may we look inside ourselves, as Campbell suggested, and find those ever-expanding caverns leading into the inner wonder of the unknown.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;Deleted: Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is — T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton" This December at JCF, the theme guiding our MythBlast compositions is “The Turning.” In this final month of the year we have a sense of the present turning into the future, of dark turning to light. Contemplating the mythology of Christmas, one must turn from the literal, outwardly religious understanding of the celebration to the inner enterprise of finding “the still point of the turning world.” That phrase, the still point of the turning world, belonged to T.S. Eliot, and Joseph Campbell often quoted it while describing a “state of release” from the delusions, fears, and commitments “by which lives in this world are compelled to their sorrows and pains.” (The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, 106) Achieving a state of release or illumination is achieved by learning to see through the illusions the effort of living creates, learning to see through the numberless obscuring images, beliefs, and ideas to the dynamics of the soul itself, and “The required method to this end,” Campbell teaches, "is known as the turning about of the energy,” a shift in which we bring all our energies to bear on these qualities as they exist within ourselves, and “not outward to the correction of the world” (Inner Reaches, 38. The emphasis is Campbell’s). Such a mechanism for seeing through the ephemera of existence exists innately; it is an archetypal movement belonging to the soul that I have termed “leave-taking.” All things flow, Heraclitus noticed, and nothing remains the same or holds its shape forever. The leavings and the losses, the growing and the groaning, the knowings and the no-ings, altered states of consciousness, birth, death, and change—change, change, change—seem all too often to constitute the greater part of living. I call this movement leave-taking because the soul is always and invariably drawing one away from a place of familiarity, of physical and emotional comfort, and plunging one into situations of confusion, risk, and psychic danger. The soul urges one to leave the known and the familiar for the unknown and undreamt of. We are, on this spinning world, constantly in the situation of turning: turning toward, turning away, turning in, turning out, turning around, and even turning upside down. The poet, Rainer Maria Rilke puts it this way: Who has turned us around like this, so that whatever we do, we find ourselves in the attitude of someone going away? Just as that person on the last hill, which shows him his whole valley one last time, turns, stops, lingers—so we live forever taking our leave. ("Eighth Duino Elegy," The Essential Rilke, 129) 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). Plato’s answer to Rilke is that it’s the soul that turns us around (and inside out) and bids us say our goodbyes. Leave-taking, at first blush, always seems like a loss; it’s a kind of dying, and it’s a death that’s generally attended by suffering and fear. We often seek to avoid suffering and try to recreate a safe, secure, womb-like existence at the cost, of course, of our own stillborn life. It is as if we are only able to know something as we lose it, as we let go, as we witness its decay and decline. It is as if leave-taking supplies us with the knowledge of what something is in itself. It is in its absence that we find the meaning and importance of what we once beheld. It’s often the case that the separations, losses, and turnings of life are regarded as obstacles to living and misfortunes to be avoided or, if possible, mastered as individual expressions of will. But I think that the archetypal leave-taking movement of the soul is in no small way the soul’s quintessence. Leave-taking is an encompassing psychic reality separate from ego directed activities. If such a distinction is not made, one impulsively undertakes a series of geographic relocations, or ends relationships, and quits jobs, hoping to quiet Psyche’s relentless call to inner movement. I believe that one may not have such an experience of the soul without a sense of grief or loss, but the grief and loss needn’t be understood as tragic, and pit us more strenuously against life. Seen as an expression of the soul, the leave-takings we’re subjected to may even make us more tenderly disposed to life. The paradoxical psychic tensions generated between safety and loss are essential to living and are constituents of the very tensions that sustain life itself. Paradox is the lure that fuels the evanescent, shimmering mystery of existence, and as it vanishes and reappears, it draws one along after. And since leaving is fundamental to living, we should take a cue from Shakespeare, and not be shy about embracing its import: “And let us not be daintie of leave-taking, but shift away” (Macbeth, Scene II, act iii).

The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti once wrote that he was waiting for the rebirth of wonder (“I am Waiting,” A Coney Island of the Mind, 49). In an age where technology has simultaneously brought us freedom and robbed us of mystery, seasons of wonder often seem elusive, and truncated when they do occur. When was the last time you stood in awe or sat in perfect wonder? Many of us sit waiting with Ferlinghetti for that rebirth of wonder that once seemed such a regular occurrence. We thirst for the transformation that wonder brings when we do finally reach its shores. Wonder was a recurring idea in Joseph Campbell’s writing as well, and a concept he took very seriously. In The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, he lays out this challenge for mythologies looking to assert themselves into our culture: “Indeed, the first and most essential service of a mythology is this one, of opening the mind and heart to the utter wonder of all being.” (Inner Reaches, xx) Perhaps the most powerful phrase in Campbell’s statement here is “the utter wonder of all being.” While so much of his work is articulated with academic detail, Campbell fully recognized that the power of myth defies description, as wonder is an experience. We might search for the words to define the feelings we have when a myth has enraptured us, but it is in the experience itself that wonder is found. In his book Wonder, The Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences, Harvard professor Philip Fisher explores one of the earliest historical mentions of wonder, found in Plato’s Theaetetus, wherein Socrates uses the term in a discussion with the young pupil at the center of the narrative (9-12). Socrates famously says that wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder. He then grounds the idea in mythology noting the genealogical importance of Iris (the messenger of the heavens and goddess of rainbows) being the child of Thaumas (the deity whose name derives from ‘thaumatos’ which means wonder). However, we would also do well to remember that Thaumas is eventually overthrown by Poseidon, who was not only god of the sea but also of storms and earthquakes. It seems that wonder is often overcome by the disruptive forces that demand our attention and distract us from the awe of infinite possibility. Wonder is delicate. It cannot be forced or generated at will. It can, however, be welcomed. While most of us simply hope for the occasional chance encounter with wonder, perhaps it is possible that wonder could be part of our regular practice. Instead of accepting that the violent forces of Poseidon will always carry us away from the place of wonder, could we instead establish an environment in our weekly routine where wonder is made space for? The busyness of life will never clear time for such events without a deliberate plan. A walk through nature on Sunday mornings, a monthly visit to the art museum, five minutes of complete silence every day — all activities that can make intentional space for wonder to be welcomed. So often, we only recognize moments of wonder after they have come and left. We look back fondly on these precious memories. However, wonder can be embodied and appreciated as it’s occurring, as well. It doesn’t have to only occur in our recollections. Do we recognize wonder when it stands before us or only after smelling the aroma of its departure? After some seasons of trial, wonder might have to be rebirthed, as Ferlinghetti suggested. This can be a more difficult process. Rediscovering that wonder still even exists may be part of such a challenging journey — indeed, there is evidence that this may be where we currently stand as a culture. Campbell, however, points us to those that have faced similar circumstances and undertaken such challenges. Later in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Campbell returns to wonder with just such a reminder. He says: James Joyce, in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, like every one of those young artists of his time who, during the century that has now run its course, became masters of the period, put his mind to the problem of reawakening the eye and heart to wonder. (Inner Reaches, 100) We are entering a season when things often slow down for many of us. We are able to reflect on the past year and prepare for what the new year may bring. Perhaps the wonder in our lives is not absent at all. Perhaps it has only fallen asleep and must now be reawakened. Just as so many myths have centered around this idea of waking up, may we also dedicate ourselves to the practice of reawakening wonder in our minds and in our hearts.

Here in America, November marks the celebration of Thanksgiving, and we at JCF have adopted the theme of gratitude for the MythBlasts this month. Gratitude is an interesting assortment of feelings, a complex emotion that I think leads one to experience one of Friedrich Hölderlin’s favorite words, zärtlichkeit, which translates in English to tenderness. When I feel gratitude, I also notice that I feel peaceful, warmhearted, generous, gentle, humane, and kindly disposed to the world and those in it; I feel a sort of pervasive tenderness—what Hannah Arendt called “a palpating tenderness toward the things of the world.” (Arendt and Heidegger, Briefe 1925 bis 1975 und andere Zeugnisse, p. 21) The attitude and emotion of tenderness is a difficult thing to achieve, mostly because a “palpating tenderness” is most reliably awakened while participating in (as Joseph Campbell put it) the sorrows of the world, the understanding of life that exists just beyond one’s grasp. Campbell gives us an example of one such tender moment in a story found in Campbell’s edition of The Thousand and One Nights, when a character in one of the stories, Bedreddin is rebuffed by his son  Agib (both unaware they’re related), for whom he feels an uncanny love: “In thy bright visage is a sign that may not be fulfilled, And there all beauties that incite to tenderness are shown [emphasis mine]. Must I then die of thirst, what while thy lips with nectar flow? Thy face is Paradise to me; must I in hell-fire groan?” (“Noureddin Ali of Cairo and His Son Bedreddin Hassan,” p. 195) Agib’s refusal is a dicey moment for Bedreddin in that he cannot understand his feelings for this beautiful young man, yet he willingly risks his own safety should he offend Agib with his intense pursuit. Bedreddin was inhabiting what Hölderlin would have called, “im zarten Augenblicke,” the tender moments. Acting against one’s own instincts seems to be an important factor in creating tenderness. Speaking of instincts, zärtlichkeit is word often found in the collected works of Sigmund Freud. In Freud’s psychoanalytic writing tenderness may seem at times to be problematic, but in the final analysis, tenderness is awakened when the sexual instinct is sublimated. One cannot help, I think, sensing a larger truth at work, operating in such a way to insist that sexuality is merely a single thread in the totality of psyche (C.G. Jung certainly thought so). It may well be that the successful transformation of any self-interested, instinctual impulse or desire into generosity and benevolence is the gateway to gratitude and, finally, tenderness; one can’t help but be tenderly inclined to the world if one is grateful for existence, grateful for the experience of life on life’s own terms. That is the sentiment, I believe, behind many of Freud's therapeutic desires, such as the transformation of neurotic suffering into common unhappiness. I'm always impressed with how tough and tough-minded Freud had to be in order to make us all aware of how we move through life pretending to ourselves (and often unaware of the pretending) and others to be something we are not. He cast a light on the substantial darkness and inner conflicts arising from instincts and desires within each one of us, showed us that our most cherished notions, our highest ideals, were not entirely free from uncharitable selfishness or other base motives. Moreover, one's inner darkness offers one a non-rational sense of wonder and Plutonic richness, and in my gratitude for Freud’s trailblazing, strenuous effort, I find, not surprisingly, a deep tenderness for the old lion. To achieve gratitude and tenderness one must act with intention; both require a self-aware choice, and that choice is, more often than not, preceded by a struggle within oneself between the avaricious, self-serving and the heartful, noble motives. But the struggle, properly understood, opens the door to gratitude and tenderness—the territory that, by all indications, Joseph Campbell quite naturally inhabited. Perhaps, because Campbell came spontaneously, eagerly, and unpretentiously to self-direction and self-discipline, he was congenitally inclined to attitudes of wonder and awe, particularly in his encounters with the natural world. Astonishingly, while yet in his late 20’s he was developing concepts he would continue to refine over the course of his life: ...an amalgam of Joyce’s ‘aesthetic arrest’ and Campbell’s own unique distillate which he would cite in print some twenty years later as his “first function of any living mythology”: to awaken a sense of awe and wonder in response to the unfathomable mystery of the universe (Larsen and Larsen. Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind: the Authorized Biography. Inner Traditions, 2002, p. 161). I think it was Campbell’s remarkable capacity for awe which allowed him to, in large part, choose to move through life with an easy, generous grace, with conscious gratitude and a consoling, sympathetic tenderness that soothed the sorrows of living.

For me, it has been a challenging privilege to brush shoulders with this month’s theme of gratitude. Gratitude, to me, is simply appreciation, but of a greater magnitude. The kind that spills out of itself and fills the subject with a deep, nurturing experience of emotional and psychological well-being. I prefer the kind of gratitude that accompanies grace (another of life’s finest phenomena). However fond I may be of grace-descended gratitude, it calls for no contribution or effort from myself. Rather, transcending deserved and undeserved, grace comes when she does, and we are simply her fortunate marks on those special occasions. In short, it’s easy (if not automatic) to be grateful when grace showers us with, well, grace. My focus here is on how one might work to meet gratitude midway, so to speak, by developing such an attitude from the foundations up as opposed to boring down from the surface.  As a writer, I strive to practice and live the content I presume to write about. On this occasion, however, my method backfired and I learned all too well the negative consequences of consciously attempting to force a transformation of attitude without attending to the unconscious. After a thorough revision of my approach, I found that any genuine and lasting adaptation of attitude requires the involvement of what Jung calls the “transcendent function.” The following addresses the necessity of this mediating function and its relationship to mythology. In 1971, Joseph Campbell published his edition of The Portable Jung , a compendium of Jung’s writings selected and presented in such a way as to grant lay-readers access to Jung’s work. In his introduction, Campbell addresses Jung’s “transcendent function” as the means by which an individual is capable of “knowing thyself” specifying that “the transcendent function works through symbolization [and] mythologization” (xxvii-xxviii).  Myth and symbol serve as the middle-grounds where the opposing natures of the conscious and unconscious come together. For those not familiar with the terms, “conscious” denotes those psychic contents that we are aware of, namely, persona and ego. Whereas “unconscious” denotes all psychic content that we are unaware of, namely, the shadow, anima and animus, raw archetypal energy, and instincts. A common example of how the conscious and unconscious oppose or compensate for one another can be seen in a person with an arrogant, overly-confident persona compensating for a shadow replete with fears and insecurities. Due to the compensatory nature of the unconscious, someone with much gratitude in their conscious must necessarily have a shadow that is ungrateful, entitled, abusive and mean. Therefore, simply flooding the conscious with the light of gratitude will cast a darker shadow in the unconscious—precisely why we need the transcendent function. Keeping these concepts in mind, let’s return to how one might cultivate a genuine and lasting attitude of increased gratitude in their personality. The first step to unifying conscious and unconscious contents is to proceed consciously into the unconscious. According to Jung, this is accomplished by recording and working with dreams, recognizing one’s fantasy material, creating art, contemplating art, and by catching oneself when taken (i.e. when emotionally triggered) by a complex. The goal here is not to attempt to change the contents of the unconscious—which is hardly possible since the unconscious is not ours to begin with. Rather, the goal is to simply acknowledge said contents. And in so doing, the personality gains greater stability and integration. When aspects of the unconscious are acknowledged, the transcendent function automatically arrives as a sort of psychic dimension in which the conscious and unconscious, or ego and shadow, or (for the more fortunate) ego and anima/animus, are held in relationship and integrated. As Campbell points out above, one of the chief ways the transcendent function works is by mediating through mythology. This is why myths are far more powerful in cultivating a change of attitude than are, say, maxims. Consider the following maxim one might post on a wall: “Ambition is a good servant but a bad master.” The problem with the maxim is that it’s exclusively conscious—a conscious message from the ego to the ego. Now, consider the myth of Icarus whose excessive ambition becomes his master and causes him to fly too close to the sun, melting his wax wings and sending him into the sea.  This myth weaves the theme of over-ambition into a fabric of many familiar experiences: the love between a father and son, the blind and excessive enthusiasm of youth, the dangers of not heeding sound advice, and so forth. Also, the myth is replete with archetypal images, born (as all mythologies) from the collective unconscious as characters, settings, and scenes of action or plot. Because the images are archetypal, they are also symbolic, inviting the consciousness of the reader-ego to interact with the unconscious value of the archetype in ways that are unique to each reader. This is arguably the greatest power of myth and symbol: hosting and precipitating the transcendent function, ensuring that the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious is decidedly personal and integrative. The approach to gratitude and the transcendent function that I provide here is much abridged, and I have merely glossed the main points in the provided space. For readers desirous of delving more deeply into the mechanics of cultivating a genuine change of attitude, a thoughtful reading of Campbell’s Portable Jung will serve to elucidate much that I have glossed, addressing in bold detail the distinction between the superficial, transient act of choosing to adopt a new attitude and the lasting cultivation of an attitude through the intermediation of the transcendent function.

My life long, I’ve loved the relationship between a big mind’s biography and the themes and patterns of their oeuvre. The two mirror one another comparatively, opening up the symbolic dimensions, refracting, reflecting, reiterating the same questions. The patterns of an author’s lived experience, like the patterns worked out in their creative productions is, each one, a road map for the other. Thinking on this mirror, I’m captivated by the relationship between Joseph Campbell and his mentor, Indologist Heinrich Zimmer. I’m interested in this relationship in terms of its symbolic dimensions, as a kind of nutshell of a moment in Campbell’s journey, at mid-life, when Campbell met a literal personification of the kind of fathering and mentoring that frequently appear in Campbell’s writings. Their story is wonderfully strange. When put up against Campbell’s other tales of meetings with remarkable figures of the historical moment, this story resembles the others in its synchronous magic and yet, it remains unique in Campbell’s trajectory. This particular relationship pivots Campbell. The transformational nature of their connection arrests me. It seems to hold a secret, as if ineluctable, in the two men’s fates. Zimmer’s death needs Campbell’s becoming. Campbell’s becoming needed Zimmer’s mentorship. The bare bones of the story go something like this: They meet in 1940. Zimmer introduces Campbell to the founders of the Bollingen Foundation, the publishing platform that will become Campbell’s vehicle. For two years Campbell studies with Zimmer. And then, unexpectedly, in what should have been the prime of Zimmer’s creative career, he dies. It’s pneumonia. Zimmer’s widow asks Campbell to edit Zimmer’s work and guide it toward posthumous publication. The task takes 12 years. I like to think that this labor of love, the editing, voicing, shaping, finding the proper order of Zimmer’s writings, is initiatory for Campbell. What I do know for sure is that on the other end of those 12 years, Campbell’s career is launched. Before Zimmer, Campbell seems to be on a decades-long wanderlust, finding his way through equally grand adventures in reading, in his travels, and remarkable meetings with the minds of his day. I don’t know that Campbell’s voice and vision are quite locked in. During, through, and for sure, after Zimmer, Campbell hits a kind of prime. Campbell is deep in his poetic vision, scholarly work, and incredible synthetic voice. When I read Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, and The King and the Corpse in particular, I am never quite sure where Zimmer ends and Campbell begins. I think of my own experience teaching Campbell, and how each and every voicing for a contemporary audience is a double initiation. I get to go back and through Campbell’s works, curating a journey for an audience who are being exposed, likely for the first time, to Campbell’s ideas, frames, and metaphors. The sharing is inextricable from my vision and version of Campbell. It is always an experience of the themes and threads I pull, because they delight me, or I see them as germane to the teaching. What I wish for my students is that they go and read the original texts. And these days, more and more, that is a rarity. I remind myself that often the only chance these students may have to experience Campbell as a doorway, not only into the great stories of our culture, but a student’s connection into the way in which their own story is great too, is through my voicing of his work. In this role, I believe that I carry a grave responsibility to share Campbell as honestly, and with as much passion as I can. Campbell often remarked how grateful he was to Zimmer. I feel a version of that kind of gratitude for Campbell. Although we never met in reality, I’ve met Campbell a thousand times in my reading, and even in my dreams. Campbell mentored my intellectual becoming and taught me a heck of a lot about reading and teaching. Each and every time I give voice to Campbell’s import, Campbell comes alive for a fresh audience, in such a way that his legacy lives in that conversation anew, right now, in the present. That nutshell of the pivotal relationship between Zimmer and Campbell became an imaginal relationship between Campbell and me. We can imagine our fictive fathers as mentors, initiating our intellectual becoming in remarkable meetings with their texts, which become plot points in the way we shape and see ideas. My sense is that the gratitude for such a rich relationship is actively lived into in our reading, in our thinking, in our writing, and in our conversations. Like the great cultural historian Karl Weintraub—a real mentor for me—used to say, “We stand on the shoulders of giants.” It is the privilege of our life time to give voice to such a legacy.