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

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

Joseph Campbell’s volume Asian Journals includes an essay called “Hinduism,” in which Campbell shares a mythological overview of this ancient Indian religious tradition. In one Hindu creation myth, the god Viṣṇu sleeps on the back of a great serpent named Ananta, or Endless, who floats on the waves of a primordial sea (Asian Journals, 314). According to a medieval version of the myth, during Viṣṇu’s divine rest “there arose in play from his navel a pure lotus, wondrous and divine.... Spreading out 100 leagues, bright as the morning sun, it had a heavenly fragrance.” (Dimmitt and van Buitenen, Classical Hindu Mythology: A Reader in the Sanskrit Purāṇas, 30) This is the brilliant, playful, perfumed flower upon which the creator Brahmā will meditate before making the world. David R. Kinsley sees this lotus as an “effortless reflex of a god who creates the entire universe while asleep; he dreams the universe into existence.” (The Divine Player: A Study of Kṛṣṇa Līlā, 2) So Viṣṇu’s creativity requires no efforting, as we say these days. It only needs REM sleep, or the complete opposite of work. Others see the lotus as “a masculine image of bodily reproduction,” (van Buitenen and Dimmit, 17) and truly, Brahmā does emerge from this lotus and its umbilical stem. But the scholar of gender and religion June Campbell (no relation to Joseph) cites Joseph Campbell’s observation that the lotus represents the goddess Padma, whose name means “lotus” and whose body is the universe. Because umbilical energy flows from the mother to the child’s navel, this maternal lotus must nourish Viṣṇu, not the other way around (June Campbell, Traveller in Space: In Search of Female Identity in Tibetan Buddhism, 58). I think the lotus gracefully holds both views. Dreamer and dream effortlessly sustain each other. In a sense, they create each other, because without the dreamer, there is no dream, and without his dream, Viṣṇu could not be a dreamer. The lotus also illustrates the gifts of dreams. Creative people in just about every sphere of endeavor report new ideas and creative breakthroughs in the content of their dreams, and the culture of India is particularly comfortable with the possibility of goddesses and gods sending guidance through dreams. The lotus rising from Viṣṇu’s navel, the navel representing the core of his being, is a mythological example of a creative idea that arrives in a dream, with a feeling of miracle, magic, and divine grace. The lotus is an image of an inspired dream. Joseph Campbell sees Viṣṇu, the serpent, and the ocean as three expressions of the same “subtle substance that the wind of the mind stirs into action,” giving rise to the dream of the world (Asian Journals, 314). Campbell continues, “just as, in your dreams, all the images that you behold and all the people who appear are really manifestations of your own dreaming power, so are we all manifestations of Viṣṇu’s dreaming power.... Hence, we are all one in Viṣṇu: manifestations, inflections, of this dreaming power.” (314) In other words, we might seem to be separate, but actually you, I, and the universal lotus are all the same. We are divine creativity. Campbell’s creative approach to myth is on full display in these passages. He practiced a form of mythopoesis, except that instead of expressing myths themselves poetically, in the way of the Odyssey for example, he writes poetically about myth. His poetic myth-ologizing, meaning his poetic study of myth, was attuned to metaphor, meaning, beauty, and wonder. In Asian Journals, Campbell himself reflects on what he sees as two primary positions in the Hindu tradition: one that focuses on unchangeable truths, and another position that “harken[s] to the voice of the living God, the Muse.” (176) I can practically see him leaning in to receive that divine inspiration in order to write about divine inspiration. He goes on: “I tend, therefore, to associate the work of the creative genius in art, literature, science and mathematics with the living, creative aspect of my subject,” meaning he associates creativity with myth. He was a creative mythologist and a mythological creator. His mythological creativity inspires us to build on his work through our own. Dreams arrive in our consciousness much in the same way as creative breakthroughs, like surprise guests bearing gifts. Myths, too, come into being through creativity. Myth and dream arise from the same source, the same font of imagination from which all creativity flows. So if Viṣṇu dreams a world dream, and Campbell dreams a myth dream, what dream arises effortlessly from the core of your being? What lotus creates and feeds your inner Viṣṇu? Viṣṇu always reclines on the muscular coils of the eternal serpent, rocking on the waves of the cosmic sea. The fragrant lotus blossoms on, lighting up that mythic landscape, sustaining Viṣṇu and supporting Brahmā. Creator goddesses and gods represent creativity each in their own way, but they all remind us that creativity is sacred, and the sacred is creative.

This is a very strange time we find ourselves in. Many mythologists are taking on the myths and meaning behind our sudden isolation and how it has driven us into our homes and away from the things of the world. I had just moved from Los Angeles to Joshua Tree and was struggling to adjust to my new environment when the pandemic took hold. I was already feeling isolated out here in the desert, its vast expanses so different from the crowded concrete world of the city. Strangely, the pandemic has made me feel far less isolated and more connected than ever. I am now able to attend events in LA through Zoom. I was elated at first by my new-found ability to reconnect with the life I had, until this week when I came face to face with my fate. I was participating in an event called Myth Salon, which I often attended monthly when I lived in Los Angeles. However, they’ve moved online due to our current circumstances, allowing me to attend from the comfort of my new home. This week, one of my myth colleagues was presenting on the mythology of our isolation. He and the panelists were brilliant, weaving story and emotion into the conversation. Yet, even with this brilliance before me, I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper into despair. I wondered why this presentation on what I love — mythology — had me feeling so dark. I had discovered myth through Joseph Campbell’s conversation  with Bill Moyers in “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth” so long ago. While watching the PBS series on TV, I experienced that “aha!” moment; I found a spark of the divine that would carry me far, including years of studying Campbell’s works, and finally to a graduate program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. So what was different now? I had lost that spark, that bliss that had carried me so far. I turned inside, and I also turned to Campbell’s work to see if I could rediscover my bliss. Can we simply summon up that feeling of awe? I wasn’t feeling it at all. However, synchronously, at this moment my closest friend, who is isolating with family in Montana, happened to be watching the Power of Myth for the first time. She texted the word “nihilism” and that Campbell said we must embrace all of life, the good and the bad. I had just turned to page 88 in Myths of Light, where Campbell mentions “this glorious approach to life,” Nietzsche’s “amor fati.” Quoting Seneca, Campbell says, “‘He who goes with fate the fates lead; he who resists fate the fates pull’ [...] In coming into this world at this time, you wanted it at this time. It’s a big, great thing you decided to do – don’t lose your nerve. Go through and play the game.” Amor fati. Love your fate. This concept has come up several times over the last two weeks: first in a blog I follow, then in a friend’s presentation to a group in India, and now here it was again. It appears as though fate is intervening in my life, reminding me to embrace my own fate, my circumstances. It is a Buddhist concept as well: to be happy even with your struggles, for you are strong and becoming stronger. In Myths of Light, Campbell describes Jiva, and viva, “the living force that keeps putting bodies on,” the being who reincarnates to experience and learn (45). He says, “if you will realize that this (life here and now) is nirvana, you will lose that will to get loose and you will be loose while alive.” Nirvana, bliss, awe, rapture, the sublime; Campbell has used all these words to describe the indescribable. Mythology helps us to connect with the mystery behind all of life, “to help us realize that that being which is transcendent of definition is our own being.” (71) For me, the experience of this is that “aha” moment when consciousness dissolves into the mystery. Last year at this time, I witnessed the defense of a dissertation by Devon Deimler, entitled "Ultraviolet Concrete: Dionysos and the Ecstatic Play of Aesthetic Experience." I highly recommend it.  It is about this ecstasy, this Dionysian experience of being beyond the conscious world. I FELT this throughout her defense. Talking about it IS my bliss. And while it may seem a frivolous endeavor during unstable times like these, I would encourage you to find that which moves you in that deep, indescribable way and bring it into the world, for it may be the most worthy endeavor of your life. Campbell states, “There is not a power in the world greater than a fulfilled, noble human being.” (19) Give that gift to the world and let that spread like a virus, so that we all may stand in awe of our existence on this planet, no matter what life brings.

Joseph Campbell often told a story that he recounts near the end of his book, Myths of Light. In the fable, a baby tiger’s mother is killed while hunting goats. The young tiger is raised by the goats his mother was hunting, and he never realized that he was different from his bleating peers. Eventually, the child meets an adult tiger who makes numerous attempts to show the little one what he really is. He shows the tiny tiger his reflection in a quiet pond and explains that he’s a tiger, not a goat. Finally, the elder tiger shoves the flesh of a gazelle at the younger, who after initially claiming to be a vegetarian, gags on the meat as he swallows it. Campbell tells us that the young tiger begins to feel a buzz inside him — something he had never felt before. All of the sudden, without even knowing it, the child lets loose with something that is not quite a roar, but enough so that the older tiger, who knew roars, recognized it as a possibility. (Myths of Light, 138-140) Our initial inclination with the story is to examine ourselves in terms of the baby tiger. We might consider our own awakening. We might recount the gagging we experienced when we first tasted the food that was right for us. While this story holds a number of lenses that we can benefit from, perhaps one of the more underappreciated aspects of the tale is the persistence of the elder tiger. Putting ourselves in that character’s noble position is a bit harder to romanticize. Being the elder tiger in the story requires patience, maturity, and the ability to see something in someone else that they may not see in themselves. It requires being willing to watch the younger tiger choke on the food that you know to be delicious, and then preparing a second course. Being the elder tiger requires vision. It requires humility. It requires an advanced death of the ego that many of us never achieve. The younger tiger experiences the excitement of transformation and often gets all the publicity and acclaim. The elder tiger must watch from behind with a smile, recognizing their role that was played in the transformation, even when no one else is aware. Netflix had a hit series a few months ago called Tiger King. It centered on a gargantuan battle of egos. The natural swagger of the animals featured throughout the series seemed to reflect the hubris of the human characters in the story. It’s no coincidence that the animals present in Campbell’s story are tigers, either. The insights required to unpack the ego-related issues in the symbolism of the tiger give the narrative rich layers. While often awarded the title of “king” in various corners of culture, lions live together in prides, whereas tigers prefer to be alone. An investment in someone else becomes an even greater challenge for the symbolically solitary tiger. It requires a greater deflation of the ego — something the characters in Tiger King never seem to fully grasp. All of us can point to elder tigers that have been formative in our lives. They are those who offered well-timed words of wisdom. They are those who introduced us to new food, food which we might have initially rejected, but later came to love. They are those who helped us see who we really were and returned to remind us when we began to lose sight of it. One of the unintended ironies of Campbell telling this story, of course, is that he has served as the elder tiger for so many. Scores of seekers have come to understand who they are a result of his words. I never got the opportunity to meet Joseph Campbell in person, though he has influenced me greatly. I have been fortunate enough to meet people who knew him, and who have dedicated themselves to seeing his work sustained. One of those men has invested in me over the past year. He has been that elder tiger — a Tiger King of sorts — more interested in my maturation than his own ego. He has seen things in me that I was unable to see in myself, and I am forever grateful. He knows who he is, and I am confident he will read this. I’ve tried to take every opportunity I can to let him know about my appreciation of his investment because we live in a world where people tend to hear plenty about what others dislike about them and far too little about what they do. It’s crucial that we honor our elder tigers, and that eventually we, too, take the time to guide younger cubs that we encounter to that quiet lake and invite them to see who they really are.

“Can you make no use of nothing, Nuncle?” (Shakespeare, King Lear, 1.4.658) Lear may not have been able to make use of nothing, but Joseph Campbell certainly did. In Campbell’s book, Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal, the idea of nothingness—nothing, no-thingness—is one of the important concepts to grasp: What can we say of this strange thing that happens between here and here, so that here there is nothing? You cannot say a thing either is or is not. The things are no things, there is nothing there. (Myths of Light, 73) Nothing is a difficult notion to work with; it is antithetical to the sort of materialistic, dualistic thinking to which most of us are accustomed. The nothingness that Campbell refers to is not merely the negation of being, but rather it is the ground of everything, the ground of grounds, “since it throws all beings into their limits.” (Martin Heidegger, The Principles of Reason) In this volume Campbell tells a delightful story about a young student who is stymied in his attempt to see his guru who lives on the other side of an overflowing, flooded river. The student says, “My teacher is the vehicle of truth to me, he is my god, he is my oracle, I will think about my teacher and I’ll walk across the water, and so I did. I thought, Guru, guru, guru,” and he successfully walked across the flooded river atop its engorged waters. Well, the guru was a bit gob smacked by his student’s disclosure, and Campbell tells us: When the student goes, the teacher thinks this was in him. He says, “I’ll go to try this thing. I’ve got to see how this works.” So he looks around to see if anybody’s watching. When he is sure he is alone, he goes down to the water and looks at the rushing torrent. He thinks, I’m going to do it. He thinks, I, I, I. He steps out onto the river. . .and he sinks like a stone.The only reason one can walk across water is that there is nobody there; one is pure spirit, spiritus, wind. In Sanskrit, this is pråna. That teacher in the student’s mind was a communicator of truth. In his own mind, he was an “I,” and an “I” has weight and sinks. (Myths of Light, 113-114) The “I,” the ego, can be a problematic psychic organ largely because it is so intransigently subjective and not particularly prone to mindful reflection. Ego psychologists tended to describe ego as the subjective experience we have of ourselves, which is certainly the idea of ego that generally permeates the West, certainly the U.S. Generally speaking, one’s ego provides a way of thinking of oneself as a being in the world and holding a general perspective of life—a sense of self-familiarity, continuity, and individuality. As Campbell puts it, “an ‘I’ has weight and sinks.” It is as if one’s being is a precipitate that falls into the world. Martin Heidegger had doubts about the efficacy of the concept of ego, pointing out that, contra Descartes, there are more ways of being than simply thinking. The idea of ego wasn’t enough for Heidegger, it didn’t adequately capture the totality of the being that experiences the world. Therefore, he used the word Dasein, which literally means “there-being.” Dasein is “that entity in its Being which we know of as human life; […] the entity that we each ourselves are, which each of us finds in the fundamental assertion: I am.” (The Concept of Time, 6/112) Heidegger describes Dasein as accompanied by a sense of “Throwness,” of being thrown into the world regardless of whether we want to be in the world or not. It’s rather like Campbell’s guru sinking like a stone; it’s what happened to guru, and was going to happen to him, despite his fondest wishes. From where do we sink? From where are we thrown? Campbell says that Being is a great mystery, “beyond which you cannot look.” (Myths of Light, 135) At least for me, this is very similar to Heidegger’s nothingness, which is the ground of everything; everything is contained in It, and It projects Being or Dasein into the world whether we want to be in the world or not. No-thingness, as Campbell’s guru will attest, is not something we can master, we only respond to it. For Heidegger, Dasein is not, in itself, an actuality but is rather the disclosure of no-thingness. As Campbell put it, You are it and it is nothing. It is a very difficult thing to tell anyone about because the words themselves suggest that there is a meaning here, but the thing is just to get it, and that is why you can’t communicate or teach [it]: you can only bring a person up to it. (Myths of Light, 135) Asian mythologies are remarkably compatible with Heidegger’s philosophy. In each, Nothing and no-thingness are not negations, but the language they use is often hard to grasp. But it is “awfully easy,” Campbell says, “to sympathize with and go with because anything you are doing is it […] and you realize that the whole mystery and void is shining through at you, you are there.” (136) Thanks for reading,

As I write, the globe remains in the grip of the pandemic. There is so much that is unknown about the novel coronavirus––and what is unknown breeds fear. Within that bubble of uncertainty events continue to morph so fast we hardly have time to catch our breath; an apt metaphor, as the one thing we do know about Covid-19 is that it steals your breath away. The first principle of life is the breath: Greek pneuma, Sanskrit prana, Latin spiritus––what God breathed into Adam to give him life . . . (Joseph Campbell, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: Joseph Campbell on the Art of James Joyce, 152) Life outside the womb for every human begins with that first breath. Every breath thereafter marks our existence as a separate, individual being growing into our own conscious awareness of the world around us. The association of breath to spirit is reflected in our language. The Hebrew word for soul in Genesis is naphesh: “a breathing creature.” Corresponding terms in Indo-European tongues parallel this derivation: in Latin, for example, anima means “breath” and “soul” (etymologically then, an animal is a being “having a soul,” or “a being which breathes”). Similarly, atman, in Sanskrit––often translated “soul” or the “divine Self”—comes from the root an (“to breathe”), and is related to the German Atmen (“breath”) and the English atmosphere. The Greek terms pneuma (spirit) and psyche (soul, mind) are also related to wind or breath; similarly, prana, chi, and ki are, respectively, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Japanese terms for the subtle breath, spirit, or energy that infuses the universe. In English we find the term spirit itself embedded in respiration, inspiration, expiration, and other breath-related terms; clearly a common thread, no matter the language or culture. But the metaphor of breath extends beyond the individual to the world we share. Earth’s atmosphere provides the context for all life. The air we breathe is the same air our fellow creatures breathe. Even the plants and trees mirror this dance, breathing out as we breathe in. Air, Wind, and Breath are subtle expressions of a universal archetype common not just to preliterate cultures, but a source of imagery found across all mythologies. It’s no surprise that Creation Myths often open with the wind stirring the waters. In Genesis 1:2 we read that “the Wind [or “Spirit”: ruach, in Hebrew] of God moved across the face of the waters”; among the Dine’ (or Navaho), n’ilch’i—the Holy Wind—existed first; in Babylonian myth Anu begets the four winds on the surface waters of Tiamat, disturbing this Dragon Goddess of Chaos whose Being forms the substance of all that is; and, Joseph Campbell often points to Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, which likens the forms of the phenomenal world (as experienced through the senses and the organ of mind) to the surface of a pond rippled by the breeze. This is an essential image. The wind is air, the highest holy power of the universe, Brahman, the life-force of the world; for the wind persists in its blowing when all the other powers of the body of the universe have temporarily ceased to exist . . . (Heinrich Zimmer, Myths & Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, ed. Joseph Campbell, 171) Covid-19 kills by blocking an individual’s ability to take in the oxygen needed to survive, focusing the whole world’s attention on the importance of breath. Beneath waking world concerns––infection rates, PPE shortages, stay at home orders, death counts, efforts to “flatten the curve,” re-opening the economy, and so much more––this core mythic image simmers in the collective psyche. But there is another unanticipated consequence to this pandemic: the economies of China, India, Europe, the United States and, indeed, the whole industrial world, have been offline for months. Factories, automobiles, jet planes, cruise ships and more have taken a break from spewing hydrocarbons into the atmosphere––and the whole world has noticed. Skies have cleared, long murky waters now sparkle, and, whether they want to or not, every nation has been meeting its carbon reduction targets. By the beginning of April, Los Angeles, legendary for its pollution, ranked number two on the World Air Quality Index, enjoying its longest stretch of clean air in a quarter of a century. And residents of Jalandhar, in India, have discovered the snow-capped Himalayas, over 200 kilometers away, visible for the first time in decades (many have lived their whole lives without ever before catching sight of the mountain range from their own homes). Epiphany! Is there a resonance between what Covid-19 does to our lungs and what human activity is doing to the atmosphere? Metaphorically, the answer would seem to be yes––and now the entire population of Earth has together witnessed that impact with their own eyes. There are several takeaways here related to that other global existential crisis, climate change. One is that it really is possible to reverse course. Already we are learning that society can change; as we power back up, we have the opportunity, and the means, to consciously and intentionally embrace new approaches to the ways we travel, work, and live. Another realization, brought to my attention by a friend, mythologist Catherine Svehla, Ph.D., is that it does not take long for the Earth to heal when given the chance. And then we are learning that individual action, multiplied a billion times over, can make a difference. These realizations come at a high human cost––which is why it’s important we not waste this mythogenetic moment. Could this be the boon we bring back from our collective death-and-rebirth experience on this worldwide Hero’s Journey? Only time will tell.

Each month, we explore a theme through weekly MythBlasts, curated works, quotations, etc. This month's theme is Our Global Community. It’s hard to ignore the fact that human life on this planet has been changed by COVID-19, but of course we all know it is not for the first time, nor is it the last. In a January 27th, 1920 letter to Oskar Pfister, Sigmund Freud wrote: “This afternoon we received the news that our sweet Sophie in Hamburg had been snatched away by influenza pneumonia, snatched away in the midst of glowing health, from a full and active life as a competent mother and loving wife, all in four or five days, as though she had never existed.” Freud went on to say that even though they had been worried about Sophie, “it is so difficult to judge from a distance. And this distance must remain distance; we were not able to travel at once, as we had intended, after the first alarming news; there was no train, not even for an emergency. The undisguised brutality of our time is weighing heavily upon us.” What compassion and sympathy Freud’s words evoke in me, not just for Freud, but for those of us experiencing similar losses in the present. In his book, Thou Art That, Joseph Campbell writes, “What is central to our considerations is found at that level that rises above that of mere self-preservation. There arises the awakening of compassion, the opening of the human quality in our relationships with both friends and strangers.” (21) Compassion is among the most important resources we have right now. Campbell invokes the Waste Land of the “hideously wounded” Grail King to speak to the circumstances of living that inspire compassion: “The Waste Land is that territory of wounded people—that is, of people living inauthentic lives, broken lives, who have never found the basic energy for living, and they live, therefore, in this blighted landscape.” (23) The virus-blighted landscapes of contemporary life present us with a powerful invitation to explore our own inauthentic, broken, or desperate lives as our sources of distraction and entertainment are curtailed and while our illusions of safety and invincibility are shattered by a global pandemic. I am reminded of the line in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland: “A crowd flowed over the London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.” Moving on, getting back to normal, opening up the economy, recovery, are diversions that avoid the scarcely answerable existential and philosophical questions raised by terror and loss. We want answers, we want to understand the causality at work, we want to find the expressway leading away from the Waste Land. We want to deal with the instrumental causes of the pandemic because we are too shaken, too appalled, to accept its secret cause. We say the cause of the threat to humans is the novel coronavirus, infected bats or pangolins in Wuhan, the pneumonia it causes, or underlying health conditions in its victims; these are certainly instrumental causes, but Campbell advocated for exploring the “secret cause” of things. Articulating his thoughts on this, Campbell suggests that terror “is the emotion that arrests the mind before whatsoever is grave and constant in human suffering and unites it with the secret cause. What does that mean? That is the key to the whole thing: the secret cause.” (Thou Art That, 31) So, what then, is the secret cause? Campbell goes on to explain that The secret cause of your death is your destiny. Every life has a limitation, and in challenging the limit you are bringing the limit closer to you, and the heroes are the ones who initiate their actions no matter what destiny may result. What happens is, therefore, a function of what the person does. This is true of life all the way through. Here is revealed the secret cause: your own life course is the secret cause of your death.(Thou Art That, 35) Death is really a secondary matter to Campbell, primarily because we all are destined to die and how we die is not as important as how we live. When you decide to say yes to your life, yes to everything that animates you, yes to what you’re passionate about, yes to what drives you and makes your life significant, when you say yes to all that, careless of how much resistance or push-back you get from the world, you’re following your bliss. Campbell isn’t suggesting that one be reckless, ignore accepted science, or court danger needlessly; he is simply acknowledging that following one’s bliss necessarily exposes one to some sort of suffering. It’s not really that complicated: no suffering, no bliss. In fact, Aeschylus teaches us about the relationship between pathos and mathos, suffering and learning, and tells us that we must “suffer, suffer into truth.” (Agamemnon, 98) When we accept life’s invitation to live this way, walking the pathway to bliss, Campbell convincingly declares that death “is understood as a fulfillment of our life’s direction and purpose.” (Thou Art That, 35) Perhaps it’s not the virus that frightens us; perhaps it’s the chilling realization that we could die having never really lived that terrifies us. And if so, it’s an important realization to have because it’s never too late to heed the call to adventure, especially those adventures awaiting us within. It’s a question of “do I dare?” Like the J. Alfred Prufrock of another T.S. Eliot poem, do I dare disturb the Universe?

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

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

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

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