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.”

Having read and reread much of Joseph Campbell’s work, The Flight of the Wild Gander remains my favorite due to its attentiveness to symbol and metaphor—not what they are, but rather what they do. The book’s subtitle, “Explorations in the Mythological Dimension,” reveals the theme and spirit of the text, approaching myth not as a thing but as a place. All too often, we approach subjects as if they are somehow contained by our attention, presuming we might hold them in our hands like stones to turn over and over until their secrets are revealed. The purpose (if I could call it that) of studying mythology is not to know its secrets. The purpose, rather, is to encounter its secrets—a very important distinction. By approaching myth as a dimension, our perspective is reversed: we no longer presume to hold the subject. Rather, the subject holds us. And so, we are set down in a vast environment that opens before us and the journey begins. In The Flight of the Wild Gander, Campbell wastes no time, telling us in the first sentence that the twenty-four years of work culminating in  this book were filled with “circling…Striving to interpret the mystery of mythology; to lift the veil…of that Goddess of the ancient temple of Sais who could say with truth…No one has lifted my veil.” And from page one, the paradox of knowing and not knowing is affirmed. If one reaches back through time, through the cultural assimilations, conflations and syncretizations, one finds that the goddess of Sais is Isis—not Isis exclusively, mind you. But Sais is Isis archetypally at least, as source to all her subsequent mythic inflections. It is fitting that Campbell opens alluding to ancient Egypt, the geographic source of alchemy (which, among other things, is the paradoxical work of assimilating the opposites) and to the goddess, a veil in herself, replete with the secrets of nature which are ever unknowable. However, the veil metaphor speaks precisely to the human condition. Consider that we exist in the veil of a body which carries our consciousness through a life, through a veil of whirling atoms that somehow compose the apparent world. Often, the veil motif is treated as an illusory obstacle. In Buddhism and Hinduism, she is called Māyā (again, the feminine gender). And in many spiritual practices, the path of enlightenment involves seeing through her veils to the transcendent source. But what of the life-field, the field of embodiment, per se? In which case, should we not approach Māyā as a creation goddess whose domain is substance, whose work allows us to sensually perceive and experience the mystery of the cosmos? Like the material aspect of the phenomenal universe, the images of mythology and symbol are, in a similar fashion, veils. They function in dreams and art as energies, spirits, individuations that step into the wardrobe of image, our perception of which depends on light even though the images, as all true symbols, hold a darkness behind them. This darkness is precisely a mystery. We can conjecture that the darkness or mystery is Source, as seen in the Void of the cosmogonies of the Abrahamic traditions, or the Emptiness of Buddhism, or the Space of the Tao. Addressing the images of symbols and metaphors, Campbell tells us that “This [darkness] is the category or degree of the unknown to which all of the high mythologies and high religions are ultimately directed. It is recognized, however, to be absolutely ineffable, a plenum of unknowability, inexhaustible in its dark.” (Flight, 137) In dream, visions, memories and the imagination, images (i.e. veils) are visible to the perceiver. I ask, what is the light that makes these images visible in the first place? I suppose it is the light of the consciousness of the observer which shines upon them. Or perhaps it is the image’s own light which shines from within it. Or a combination thereof. In any case, our figurative approach to consciousness as light (e.g. the “light of consciousness,” “enlightenment,” and so on) takes on a tangible value when we see it as an inextricable presence within the environments that images inhabit. However subtle the “substance” of that environment may be, it is substance—call it vibrations, wave-functions, synaptic firings, chemical reactions. Similarly, within this environment, there is light to see by which is no less real or substantial than the dimension it illumines. So when Campbell says that “mythology and the rites through which its imagery is rendered, open the mind . . . to the mystery dimension of being—of nature,” he addresses the interface of light and dark, the known and the unknowable, the tangible images and the intangible mystery behind them. In which case, the “lighted” image as a perceptible veil hardly obscures. It is the open door.

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