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

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

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;Deleted: Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is — T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton" This December at JCF, the theme guiding our MythBlast compositions is “The Turning.” In this final month of the year we have a sense of the present turning into the future, of dark turning to light. Contemplating the mythology of Christmas, one must turn from the literal, outwardly religious understanding of the celebration to the inner enterprise of finding “the still point of the turning world.” That phrase, the still point of the turning world, belonged to T.S. Eliot, and Joseph Campbell often quoted it while describing a “state of release” from the delusions, fears, and commitments “by which lives in this world are compelled to their sorrows and pains.” (The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, 106) Achieving a state of release or illumination is achieved by learning to see through the illusions the effort of living creates, learning to see through the numberless obscuring images, beliefs, and ideas to the dynamics of the soul itself, and “The required method to this end,” Campbell teaches, "is known as the turning about of the energy,” a shift in which we bring all our energies to bear on these qualities as they exist within ourselves, and “not outward to the correction of the world” (Inner Reaches, 38. The emphasis is Campbell’s). Such a mechanism for seeing through the ephemera of existence exists innately; it is an archetypal movement belonging to the soul that I have termed “leave-taking.” All things flow, Heraclitus noticed, and nothing remains the same or holds its shape forever. The leavings and the losses, the growing and the groaning, the knowings and the no-ings, altered states of consciousness, birth, death, and change—change, change, change—seem all too often to constitute the greater part of living. I call this movement leave-taking because the soul is always and invariably drawing one away from a place of familiarity, of physical and emotional comfort, and plunging one into situations of confusion, risk, and psychic danger. The soul urges one to leave the known and the familiar for the unknown and undreamt of. We are, on this spinning world, constantly in the situation of turning: turning toward, turning away, turning in, turning out, turning around, and even turning upside down. The poet, Rainer Maria Rilke puts it this way: Who has turned us around like this, so that whatever we do, we find ourselves in the attitude of someone going away? Just as that person on the last hill, which shows him his whole valley one last time, turns, stops, lingers—so we live forever taking our leave. ("Eighth Duino Elegy," The Essential Rilke, 129) Plato writes that within the soul was formed the “corporeal universe, and brought the two together and united them center to center. The soul, interfused everywhere from the center to the circumference of heaven, of which also she is the external envelopment, herself turning in herself…” (Timaeus, 36e. Emphasis is mine). Plato’s answer to Rilke is that it’s the soul that turns us around (and inside out) and bids us say our goodbyes. Leave-taking, at first blush, always seems like a loss; it’s a kind of dying, and it’s a death that’s generally attended by suffering and fear. We often seek to avoid suffering and try to recreate a safe, secure, womb-like existence at the cost, of course, of our own stillborn life. It is as if we are only able to know something as we lose it, as we let go, as we witness its decay and decline. It is as if leave-taking supplies us with the knowledge of what something is in itself. It is in its absence that we find the meaning and importance of what we once beheld. It’s often the case that the separations, losses, and turnings of life are regarded as obstacles to living and misfortunes to be avoided or, if possible, mastered as individual expressions of will. But I think that the archetypal leave-taking movement of the soul is in no small way the soul’s quintessence. Leave-taking is an encompassing psychic reality separate from ego directed activities. If such a distinction is not made, one impulsively undertakes a series of geographic relocations, or ends relationships, and quits jobs, hoping to quiet Psyche’s relentless call to inner movement. I believe that one may not have such an experience of the soul without a sense of grief or loss, but the grief and loss needn’t be understood as tragic, and pit us more strenuously against life. Seen as an expression of the soul, the leave-takings we’re subjected to may even make us more tenderly disposed to life. The paradoxical psychic tensions generated between safety and loss are essential to living and are constituents of the very tensions that sustain life itself. Paradox is the lure that fuels the evanescent, shimmering mystery of existence, and as it vanishes and reappears, it draws one along after. And since leaving is fundamental to living, we should take a cue from Shakespeare, and not be shy about embracing its import: “And let us not be daintie of leave-taking, but shift away” (Macbeth, Scene II, act iii).

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

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

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

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

One of my earliest memories is centered around a lit stage draped in a red velvet curtain, inside a small theater in Colorado, watching a magician named Max Hapner pour a gallon of milk into a rolled-up newspaper. The milk seemingly disappeared into the funnel and completely out of existence. I sat in awe, experiencing my first taste of a certain type of wonder, a wonder which I would spend the rest of my life pursuing. When I discovered myth and the work of Joseph Campbell, I felt a particular connection to that early memory. A definition for magic can be as elusive as the explanations for how certain miraculous activities are executed. Exactly what magic is depends on who is answering the question. A number of mythologists have leaned toward the ritualistic beliefs and activities of various tribes, traditions, and subcultures when discussing magic. Certain groups add the Elizabethan “k” to distinguish their more mythic “magick” from sleights of hand. However, myth also lies at the center of the discipline of magic most associated with stages, lights, and decks of cards. The cosmological aspect of mythology is ritualized in many of the earliest magical effects – out of nothing, something appears. Many of the terms common to magic are the same as those often used in conversations around mythology – illusions, rituals, transformation, tricks and tricksters, to name a few. Campbell discussed magic in a variety of contexts ranging from the anthropological to the work of Thomas Mann to the Tarot. In discussing the symbolism of the Marseilles Deck, Campbell mentions: We notice, first, that the opening card, The Magician, is of a juggler manipulating miniatures of the signs of all four suits: Swords in the form of knives, small cups for the Cups or Chalices, dice and coins for the Coins, and for the Staves or Clubs a wand. He is in control, that is to say, of the symbols of all four social estates, able to play or conjure with them, and so, represents a position common to, or uniting, them all, while leading….beyond their highest grades.  The Magician is holding in his left hand the same wand that the World Dancer holds in hers, while in his right, instead of the conch, there is a coin – of philosophical gold?(Tarot Revelations, foreword, 11, 25) Campbell associated The Magician of the Tarot with a disguised philosophical power capable of bringing transformation across classes. In his 1964 notes for The Masks of God: Creative Mythology (which I found in a fascinating exploration of the New York Public Library’s Joseph Campbell Archive), Campbell unpacks the modes of interpretation for myths. He notes that these interpretations are ways of understanding a myth, as well as attitudes toward symbolic forms. He lists the following modes of interpretation: mythology, theology, philosophy, science, and magic. Beside the word magic, he clarifies his intention with the term by adding the word prestidigitation. This specifies the type of magic that Campbell was exploring on this day – not the ceremonial performances that included humans seemingly demonstrating supernatural powers, which Campbell often dedicates a great deal of attention toward, but sleight of hand performances, not explicitly associated with religious ritual or practice. In The Flight of the Wild Gander, Campbell states that “….each thing , each person, all around us, all the time, each insisting on itself as being that thing which it is and no other thing, is striving with all its might to provide an experience of – itself” (Flight, 150). I was reminded of these words not long ago when I experienced a show, intriguingly titled In and of Itself, by Derek DelGuadio, one of the most profound philosopher/magicians living today. His performance was centered around issues of identity, the nature of narrative, and yes, existence itself. Audiences left with a deeper curiosity about who they really were – which in so many ways is the work of myth. His work on stage felt more like alchemy than showmanship. I experienced a sense of transformation as I walked toward the exit – an interior impact. Later in Flight of the Wild Gander, Campbell describes the understandings we encounter when our sense of existence is fully experienced. When this occurs, he states that “we are awakened to our own reality-beyond-meaning, and we experience an affect that is neither thought nor feeling but an interior impact [….] The phenomenon, disengaged from cosmic references, has disengaged ourselves, by that principle, well known to magic, by which like conjures like. In fact, both the magic of art and the art of magic derive from and are addressed to experiences of this order” (Flight, 150). Magic that demonstrates the impossible in front of me simply pales in comparison to that which suggests what might be possible inside me.

Back in November of last year, an opinion piece in The New York Times entitled “Fighting the Spiritual Void,”  about the challenges faced by returning combat veterans, came to my attention and I was pleasantly surprised to read the following: People who are recovering from trauma often embrace the language of myth, which offers us templates of moral progress. Recently, in New Orleans, I met the founder of a community of vets called Bastion. The men and women there are taught to see their lives as a hero’s journey with three stages: from Separation through Initiation and then back to Return. (David Brooks, 11/19/18) When we see our lives in mythic terms, we can see that life still offers a chance to do something heroic. “Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life,” as Joseph Campbell once wrote (Joseph Campbell and the Power of Mythwith Bill Moyers, 5). One of my responsibilities as the Rights and Permissions Manager for the Joseph Campbell Foundation is to ensure that our intellectual property is protected and properly licensed where appropriate. I contacted Dylan Tete, cofounder of Bastion, for information on the organization’s use of Campbell’s work and he responded: I was first introduced to [Joseph Campbell] via the Moyers series when I returned from Iraq in 2005, but then I picked it up elsewhere, maybe a book I read. Basically, I've incorporated the lesson of the three phases of the Hero’s Journey (Separation, Initiation, and the Return) into support groups with gold star children and veterans, verbally. It has resonated with me so much over these years that I also included it in the introductory paragraph in our resident manual, which is a document we furnish to all new residents who live at Bastion... Dylan shared with me Bastion’s resident orientation manual which opens with this: The renowned scholar and philosopher, Joseph Campbell, published his book in 1949 titled The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In his research Campbell explains the hero’s quest is not only the basis of myth and folklore, but also represents a map of the journeys taken by humans since the beginning of time. By applying the three basic stages of the hero's adventure—departure, initiation, and return—veterans are given a framework with which to process their individual experience. Bastion’s mission is to help veterans with the third stage, explained thusly in the resident manual: The final stage, the Return, is the one often forgotten in popular storytelling but perhaps the most important. By way of returning to his or her community, the hero must now use her newly discovered gift for the good of humanity. While this gift is often a greater understanding of self, it is unclear if anyone else may sympathize or care. Undeniably, the return home can be fraught with peril and so the journey continues even after the transformation. The Bastion Community, according to their website, is a multi-generational housing complex that “supports returning warriors and families through their transition from military service and beyond by providing a healing environment within an intentionally designed neighborhood.” My JCF colleague (New Orleans native Jimmy Maxwell, curator of the Joseph Campbell Audio Collection) and I met Jeremy Brewer at the Bastion Community Center. Jeremy, like his fellow co-founder, Dylan Tete, is himself a veteran who applied the Hero’s Journey model to his own reintegration to civilian life. He took us on a tour of the community as residents were setting up a “Rites of Return" BBQ that included arts tables for kids and adults, a drumming workshop and a story sharing circle. He explained that the layout of the housing was designed to foster connection and community, and showed us plans for future housing where further housing with a new and larger community center. On April 11, 2018, Tete received the Military Service Citation at the George W. Bush Presidential Center for his work establishing Bastion. In his remarks he described plans to establish five more Bastion communities around the country. Joseph Campbell’s work was the initial inspiration for the evolving idea behind the Bastion Community. Dylan and Jeremy don’t rely solely on that work but are deeply informed by it. Indeed, Bastion is the boon brought back from their own heroic adventures, a boon that they offer for the benefit of fellow veterans, veteran's families and, by extension, society as a whole. As the Rights and Permissions Manager for the Joseph Campbell Foundation, I am tasked with the responsibility of ensuring that the Foundation’s intellectual property is protected and granting licenses for the use of Campbell’s work where its application aligns with JCF’s mission and, to the degree we can discern it, Joseph Campbell’s intentions were he still with us today. It is profoundly rewarding to support the endeavors of projects like Bastion, whose sole purpose is to help others. Bastion is joining a select group of organizations with whom the Foundation has established a relationship. The Hero’s Journey model, to name a few examples, helps children with critical illnesses at a summer camp in upstate New York, provides a model for reducing recidivism among youthful offenders in the United Kingdom, and is the basis of a curriculum for teachers helping refugee children in Europe.

What did Joseph Campbell mean when he said, “Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be” (Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, 120)? By way of answer, let me give you an example. Campbell died in October of 1987, and seven months later, Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers—the six-part series created from conversations between Moyers and Campbell over several years—premiered. “The Power of Myth" would become an enormous hit, for years PBS’s most successful series, introducing a wide swath of the general public to Campbell and his ideas, while making his dictum, “Follow your bliss,” a household phrase. An associate editor at Doubleday, then one of the Big 8 publishing companies (it’s now an imprint of Penguin-Random House) who had previously sought to publish books by Campbell was told about the planned series and thought,  This has GOT to be a book! That associate editor contacted Bill Moyers and offered to publish a book that would be a companion to the series. Moyers embraced the idea, and he suggested that his friend and former colleague, Dr. Betty Sue Flowers, be hired to editf the volume. Working from transcripts of the conversations that were simultaneously being edited into the series eventually broadcast on PBS, Dr. Flowers and the associate editor at Doubleday pulled together a complete, enduringly beautiful book—in a few short months. Who was the associate editor at Doubleday who accomplished this publishing miracle? Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. Yes. That Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. Jackie Kennedy. Jackie O. Jackie. Jackie, who first became aware of Campbell when she read his essay, “The Importance of Rites” (Myths to Live By, 1972), in which he explained and interpreted the symbolic elements she had interpolated into John F. Kennedy’s funeral procession. Everyone who remembers her remembers her as President John F. Kennedy’s wife and widow. That’s the person portrayed (to favorable reviews) by Natalie Portman in the 2016 film, Jackie. After Kennedy’s death, however, Jackie went on to live a full and rich life, if a challenging one for one born to wealth and power. From the mid-1970s to her death in 1995, however, she served as an associate editor at Doubleday. There she published dozens of books, including many on history, as well as a number of novels and memoirs. And of course, in 1988, she helped to introduce the concept of following your bliss into the public consciousness. Now the story that Flowers tells that I remember best about the creation of that book is this: They’d managed to pull together the book in a remarkably short time. Flowers had compiled the text (crediting Jackie in the preface), and a small army of photo researchers found images that worked with what Campbell and Moyers were discussing. The one thing they couldn’t agree on was a cover image. They wanted something evocative, but not too literal. They didn’t want to use Greek sculpture, for example, because Campbell’s whole argument was about the universality of myth. Around and around they went, defining just what they were looking for. At a certain point, Jackie looked up at the painted dragon on a vintage Chinese silk coat hanging from a coat rack in her office. “How about that?” she asked. That turned out to be one of the more iconic covers of the 1980s. It managed to convey precisely what the power of mythmight be, while managing to pull the reader in. In a word, the perfect cover. The lessons are many. One is that art takes work—but when something’s perfect, it’s perfect. Another is that people are often much more than what we read about them in books, or see in movies. Another, from my point of view as an editor and publisher, is that the perfect cover doesn’t tell or even show the reader what they’re going to get (though it has to make some clear promises about genre, etc.); it seduces them into wanting to read the book, and puts them in a mood where doing anything else is unthinkable. But mostly, this story is a reminder that sometimes, when you follow your bliss, doors will open. Opportunities and ideas and inspiration will come to you that lead you out of the Wasteland and into the light.

Scars are curious things given an even more curious name: the word scar is derived from the Greek word eschara, meaning “place of fire.” The word does not mean “caused by fire,” nor does it mean that scars are the result of exposing one’s skin to fire, although there is a connection to the Latin word for scab. No, scar means quite literally the place of fire:the fire is found within the scar and the scar is already present in the fire. Perhaps its derivation has to do with the sensation of intense, searing pain, the kind of pain borne by the body at the receipt of a wound, a wound on fire with pain, and deep enough to create scarring. The most familiar English usage defines a scar as a mark left on the skin after a surface injury or wound has healed. Scars commemorate and memorialize. They freeze time, space, and emotion in pale, sometimes jagged and awkwardly knitted lines on the skin, and not infrequently, they leave a jagged signature upon the heart as well. And even though there is no apparent etymological relationship between them, one can’t resist adding an “e” to scar, to create the word scare. A scary encounter leaves scars, even children know that. Intense fear–being scared to death for instance–leaves its deeply etched mark upon the mind even though the frightening event has long since passed. In fact, it is often the scar no one else can see that is the hardest to bear. Scars also serve as a means of identification: if one ever has the misfortune of being booked into jail, one of the questions that will be asked of you is whether you have any birthmarks, tattoos, or scars. Scars are an ancient way of tendering or proffering one’s identity. One of the most poignant accounts of recognition and identification may be found in Book XIX of The Odyssey, when the disguised Odysseus (transfigured to look like an old, decrepit beggar by Athena) is given a bath by his old nursemaid, Eurycleia: as she begins to bath him, she recognizes the scar on his thigh, received as a small boy when he was gored by a boar, and through her recognition of the scar, identifies Odysseus himself. Her eyes fill with tears of mixed grief and joy as she clutches him by his beard and calls him her “dear boy.” For he who was dead is alive again and he, himself lost, is found. For the lover longing for the beloved, the scar is a welcome affirmation of the beloved’s presence. The scar is an inseparable part of the beloved herself, and any sight of it ipso facto incarnates the beloved; so much so, in fact, that the scar may become as much an object of love as the loved one herself. Writing of Christ’s scars in his book, The City of God, St. Augustine expresses a similar sentiment when he says that they (Christ’s scars) will not “be a deformity, but [have] a dignity in them; and a certain kind of beauty will shine in them, in the body, though not of the body" (City of God, Book 22, Ch. 19). This is an essential idea to take note of, and it bears repeating that the body does not manufacture the beauty shining in and through the scars, in fact the body is not, in and of itself, beautiful; the body is a most imperfect vessel. If the body does not produce the beauty, then what does? Beauty is, in fact, created by a powerful alchemy involving a scarring wound, a loving gaze, and a precious foundling, all culminating in a moment of poetry and illumination. Love is transformed from an abstract, vaguely meaningful word into a living, breathing, human experience promising answers to all life’s insoluble riddles (It is worth pointing out that wounds, particularly lacerations, to the body often assume the shape of a mouth. Perhaps the word cannot become flesh without inflicting a wound; in other words, creating a mouth which has something to say.) The scar and its shadow are made deeper and darker by attempts to recoil and hide from them, and one’s anguish is compounded as the attempts to conceal one’s scars inevitably fail, until finally, one wears one’s scars as a symbol of everything corrupted, debauched, perverted, and subverted within. Nothing emanating from such an internal state can help but be grotesquely and tragically flawed, and so, witches, demons, trolls and monsters are frequently described as having ugly, terrifying scars. Whenever two previously unrelated things are joined together a scar, or a seam if you will, is always the result; and when individuals are joined to previously unknown and unconscious aspects of themselves, scarring is the painful and inescapable result. It can only be ever thus: only when one is faced with something overwhelming can the archetype of wholeness be constellated. So do not be ashamed of scars. Valorize them; caress them; trace their course in your skin and in your mind’s eye. Scars are roadways drawn onto maps of flesh, leading always to the beautiful truths buried deep within oneself.

The exploration of death in this MythBlast is not a departure from our theme of Harvest for the month of September; instead, it's an inescapable deepening of the Harvest motif. Harvest time means reaping, and voila, with the smallest prompt to imagination we move from the image of a farmer shearing wheat directly to the shrouded, skeletal image of the Grim Reaper, scythe in hand, similarly severing souls from bodies and guiding them to the afterlife. A persistent theme found running through Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology is that of death. Death is the most enduring, and probably the most dreadful problem that ever faced animals of the genus Homo. In Primitive Mythology, Campbell writes that the “human being is the only animal capable of knowing death as the end inevitable for itself, and the span of old age for this human organism, consciously facing death, is a period of years longer than the whole lifetime of any other primate” (53). Facing death is complicated by circumstances such as ineradicable comas and persistent vegetative states, or the final stages of chronic, debilitating diseases that remove the sufferer's ability to communicate; conditions that make it very difficult to determine the difference between life and death. Early peoples began speculating about what death might be based on the experiences they had in life, particularly the nature of the life they observed in the world around them. As Campbell noted, “Among the hunting tribes, whose life style is based on the art of killing, who live in a world of animals that kill and are killed and hardly know the organic experience of a natural death, all death is a consequence of violence and is generally ascribed not to the natural destiny of temporal beings but to magic” (Primitive Mythology, 106). Magic, he says, became the technology employed, not only to defend oneself against death, but to deliver death to others as well. Understood this way, death is an enemy to be fought off, held at bay, and resisted to the bitter end. “For the planting folk,” however, “death is a natural phase of life, comparable to the moment of the planting of the seed, for rebirth” (Primitive Mythology, 107). Through an agrarian lens, life and death are naturally cyclical, and there was, just beyond physical life and death, a larger ground of being of which one had only glimpses or intuitions. These various intuitions eventually coalesce, and somewhere around the second millennium BCE the notion of immortality is refined, and ideas like eternal rewards or punishments begin to make death arguably the most important part of life. Four thousand years on, one may reasonably insist that we haven’t added significantly to our understanding of death. The people of that distant age seem instantly recognizable to ourselves in that, like them, we still wrestle with the mystery of death, we have the same hopes and fears about life, and the same problems of human nature. Near death experiences and visions described by the dying tell us nothing about death; they speak only to dying, which gives way to the understanding that the important death, the death for which biological death serves as a metaphor, is psychological death. Psychological death, sometimes referred to as the death of the ego, provokes a profound—and a profoundly difficult—transformation of the psyche. All the familiar, comforting ways one routinely thinks about and understands oneself drop away—one’s purpose, identity, rationality, moral fiber, one’s character—and one is left apparently empty, with a self that is a stranger to itself. Coming to consciousness is seldom a serene act, it’s usually terrifying and often accompanied by violence—or at least intimations of violence—and disorientation. One undergoes a form of psychic decline in which trusted inner constructs crumble and logical relationships to thoughts and experiences end. It makes sense, of course, that it should be so; no one makes radical changes when life is comfortable. The psychological death prepares the psychic ground for rebirth and greater growth; it makes untenable the merely performative postures of goodness, success, knowledge, and happiness, and one is forced to confront the entire reality of oneself. It's not likely that one is completely good, or oh so happy, and one’s success may be nothing but an illusion. Any number of harsh truths that are in some way unique to one’s own experience of living and to the community in which one lives will be recognized. “Death fertilizes the imaginal and works to open a poetic space that brings depth and meaning to everyday life” (Stanton Marlan, The Black Sun: The Alchemy and Art of Darkness, 76); death insists upon a deeper, more richly nuanced connection to one's own unconscious, the unfolding of our own lives, and that of life itself.  The psychological death gives rise to patience, humility, empathy, and transcendence of the old self. It is such a radical reconfiguration of the self that one will say, “But I will be a bridegroom in my death, and run into ‘t as a lover’s bed” (Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Act IV).