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).

This month at JCF we are entertaining the theme of harvest. I’m not imagining a solely agrarian notion through which to explore that theme, but rather am  also referring to the harvesting of the fruits of human imagination, the bounty of human thought and creative spirit that stretches back even to the “dark... abysm of time” (Shakespeare, The Tempest, Iii). One of the featured texts this month is Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, and alluding to that Shakespearian abysm he writes, “[…] we shall be finding clues to the deepest secrets not only of the high cultures of both the Orient and the Occident, but also of our own most inward expectations, spontaneous responses, and obsessive fears” (Primitive Mythology, 10). Our own most inward expectations, spontaneous responses and obsessive fears have not markedly changed since the dawn of human history; modern Homo sapiens does not think or imagine much differently than our prehistoric ancestors. In fact, the same rational, imaginative abilities invented the atlatl as well as the iPhone. The art of cave painters that Lynn Tucker wrote about in her MythBlast last week remains, in the opinion of many (even Picasso), unsurpassed in any subsequent era. In his delightful, often astonishing book, Out of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came To Think It, Felipe Fernández-Armesto writes, Over the entire history of our species, no evidence of any overall change is discernible, for better or worse, in the skill with which humans think. Maybe there was an era, long before the emergence of Homo Sapiens, when life was ‘poor, nasty, brutish and short’ and hominids scavenged without leisure for ratiocination; but for hundreds of thousands of years thereafter all our ancestors, as far as we know, were relatively leisured foragers rather than relatively harried, hasty scavengers (Out of Our Minds, Chapter 2, "Modern Stone Age: Foraging Minds"). The phrase “harried, hasty scavengers” seems to describe well what many of us have become in contemporary life. People work more jobs and more hours and have more stress, fewer resources, longer lives and worse health. A life of relative leisure sounds pretty good in comparison, and it turns out that in some important ways, modern humans may be more primitive than our prehistoric ancestors were. Which brings us to that problematic word, primitive. Primitive conjures many associations: non-technological, non-literate, small, uncivilized and isolated. If one is honest, there can hardly be an argument that for most, the word primitive is synonymous with inferior, that primitive or savage (another synonym) people are superstitious children ignorant to the nature or structure of the world, of morality, indeed, of life itself. The original copyright date of Primitive Mythology was 1959, a time when the use of the word primitive was common in scholarly papers, textbooks, and as general linguistic currency. But reading this volume of Campbell's work, I find that pejorative sense of the word is lacking. Instead, one finds a persistent sense of wonder and awe attending the seemingly unremitting human project. My reading of Campbell is that he finds no mind literally primitive, but rather sees “…more sophisticated […] visions of the local traditions, wherein those mythologies themselves will be known to be but the masks of a larger […] ‘timeless schema’ that is no schema” (Primitive Mythology, 25). For humans, ideas and images make the world, not impersonal forces or the material exigencies of life. Human imagination and thought respond to life’s circumstance and reimagine the world in a way we then literally try to create. The evolution of culture is grounded in the fundamental idea that individuals change, that they take on qualities that did not ancestrally or congenitally belong to them, they become different than they once were, and together, these individuals may create a world that does not yet exist. Imagination is not fashioned by myths, myths are products of imagination. Human imagination has the capacity to imagine things that aren’t, and to imagine differently the things that are. The power of the human imagination armed with myth is the power to dive deep into the hidden world. I think that Campbell, himself, saw through the dismissive trope of primitivism of the late 1950’s and wanted To make it serve the present hour, […] to assemble—or reassemble—it in its full dimension, scientifically, and then bring it to life as our own, in the way of art: the way of wonder—sympathetic, instructive delight; not judging morally, but participating with our own awakened humanity in the festival of the passing forms” (Primitive Mythology, 25). The mythic images and passing forms are themselves, as Campbell often noted, essentially poetic, and like all poetry, ideally employed in a dialogue with all we know, all we don’t know, and all we’re afraid to know. I think myth begins in, and should always be accompanied by, skepticism. Myths arise because of doubts about the nature of reality and curiosity about that which we cannot quite apprehend. Entertaining doubt moves one closer to the light, closer to truth; skepticism is the hallmark of the arts and sciences, the interdependent domains that make possible the flowering of both individuals and civilizations.

Joseph Campbell wrote about the great painted and engraved Paleolithic "temple caves," as he called them, of southern France and northern Spain. Lascaux in the Dordogne and Les Trois Frères in the Pyrenees are two stunning caves that contain an array of images including animal forms and mysterious signs and figures. This wondrous art is old, much older than the development of cuneiform writing or the wheel. The artists may have created the images at Lascaux around 19,000 to 17,000 years ago, and at Les Trois Frères around 17,000 to 15,000 years ago. About Paleolithic temple caves, Campbell writes: "The fashioning of an image is one thing, the fashioning of a mythological realm another. And the remarkable fact, it seems to me, is that, for all their complication, these caves—or at least a number of them—are conceived as units, with outer and inner chambers of increasing power" (The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, 397). He includes Lascaux and Les Trois Frères as examples of caves that display this increasing power. According to Campbell, the cold and dark temple caves were probably used for the men's rites. He describes the experience inside the Paleolithic caves: "A terrific sense of claustrophobia, and simultaneously of release from every context of the world above, assails the mind impounded in those more than absolutely dark abysses, where darkness no longer is an absence of light but an experienced force" (Primitive Mythology, 66). With light, the art is revealed. The Lascaux cave is spectacular. Animals including bulls, cows, horses, and stags are painted with beautiful lines and colors on the walls of the Hall of the Bulls. On the left is a fascinating figure often called the Unicorn, even though it has two long straight horns. The Upside-Down Horse and the Cow with the Drooping Horn are in the Axial Gallery, which has been called the "Sistine Chapel of Prehistory." The Crossed Bison are in the Nave. Campbell describes some of the images in a lower area called The Shaft: "...there is the picture of a shaman lying on the ground in a shamanistic trance, wearing the mask and costume of a bird. His shaman staff is beside him, bearing on its top the figure of a bird" (The Mythic Dimension, 73). In the cave of Les Trois Frères there are many animal forms engraved on the walls of the grand Sanctuary chamber, "[...] fixing for millenniums the momentary turns, leaps, and flashes of the animal kingdom in a teeming tumult of eternal life. And above them all, predominant—at the far end of the sanctuary, some fifteen feet above the level of the floor, in a craggy, rocky apse—watching, peering at the visitor with penetrating eyes, is the now famous 'Sorcerer of Trois Frères' "  (Campbell, Primitive Mythology, 308-309). Also called an animal master or a shaman, the part human, part animal sorcerer has antlers, a long beard, a tail, and appears to be dancing. This figure is engraved and partially painted in black. Returning to the world above with its fresh air, beautiful animals, bright sun, and transforming moon may have been a rebirth experience. Campbell writes about Paleolithic temple caves, time, and eternity: For these great painted grottoes...wherein all orientation to the quarters of the sky is lost, and time stops—or rather, continues without punctuation of day and night—were never dwelling places, but temples beyond the tick of time...Their herds are the herds, not of time, but of eternity, out of which the animals of the light-world come, and back to which they return for renewal (Historical Atlas of World Mythology, Part I.D, Digital Edition, Kindle Locations 686-689). Many of the Lascaux and Les Trois Frères cave images are recognizable (horses and bison for instance), and yet others are puzzling such as the composite Sorcerer of Trois Frères. But I have a theory: I think the Sorcerer cave figure is an image in the Milky Way located above the tip of Scorpius' tail, and as the earth rotates, the Sorcerer Milky Way image appears to dance across the night sky. Thank you for reading.

What is it that brought you to Joseph Campbell? I remember distinctly what it was for me: In the early 1990s, I stumbled upon The Power of Myth docu-series on television. I don’t know what compelled me to watch; I hadn’t really watched much on PBS prior to this moment, but I was immediately captivated by the conversation Joe was having with Bill Moyers. Captivated is almost an understatement: my mind was lit up! My body was abuzz with excitement and energy! Everything in me said: THIS IS WHAT I’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR! I didn’t even know I was seeking something in my life, but I certainly knew I’d found something important. I felt it throughout my entire being. Joe awakened in me the power of story. His storytelling about story enraptured me. I had to know more. I purchased the series on VHS and added The Hero With A Thousand Faces to my library. I devoured every word and added more of his books to my shelves. Though my career was in entertainment and marketing, the power of story, the idea that story could change lives, never left me. It certainly changed my own life, and the fact that The Power of Myth is still considered one of the most popular shows in PBS’ history leads me to believe it has changed the lives of countless others. For stories not only reveal who we are individually and in our collective manifestations, they also inform us as to how we move through the stages of our lives, how to live dynamically in a dynamic world. Sometimes, however, our stories are not empowering. We can become ensnared by a dark tale and we see the effects in the headlines every day. The news of late has been particularly disturbing, with a spate of mass shootings occurring across the country. It is a difficult subject, but one we must not turn away from if we are to find a way to resolve the complex social challenges we face. As mythologists, we must look at the mythological roots, the stories from our past and present that can give us some context for our pathos. Here I begin that conversation with a look at that dark aspect of our collective story: the growing number of mass shootings in America. Many of the recent shootings have been carried out by young men, and many initial news reports indicate that they have had been exposed to certain extreme ideologies that lead to their actions. In mythological terms, the myth of Actaeon and Artemis came to my mind. In The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, in a chapter entitled “The Imprints of Experience,” Joe describes the Actaeon myth, in which “a hunter, a vigorous youth is in the prime of his manhood,” when stalking a deer comes upon the goddess Diana bathing with her naked nymphs (Primitive Mythology, 62). The goddess, seeing Actaeon watching her, notes he was “not spiritually prepared for such a supernormal image,” so she transforms him into a stag. His own hunting dogs pick up his scent, chase him down and tear him to bits. Joe explains that in the Freudian reading, “this mythical episode represents the prurient anxiety of the small boy discovering Mother.” However, he goes on to say that in “a more sophisticated, ‘sublimated’ vein of reference,” Diana is the manifestation of the Goddess of the World, that ineffable unknown which is too awesome to comprehend: she is “the mystery of life.” In this context, the goddess Diana is the Other that does not allow objectifying. He who looks upon Her in such a manner is destroyed by his own tame-become-wild instincts, represented by his hunting dogs. In the myth, Actaeon is described as both hunter and hunted, an apt description of the men perpetrating mass shootings. They destroy many lives and yet they themselves are also destroyed by their inability to hold the paradoxes and the tensions within our contemporary world mythology. In our collective story, as we grow into a global culture, we are being called upon to confront and accept the Other within our own psyches and in our outer lives. We could say that these men are refusing the call. In The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joe explains this refusal thus: “The divinity itself became his terror; for, obviously if one is oneself one’s god, then God himself, the will of God, the power that would destroy one’s egocentric system, becomes a monster" (The Hero With A Thousand Faces, 49). I offer no simple prescriptions for a solution to this growing problem in our culture, only the beginning of a mythological lens through which to perceive it. I encourage your thoughts and responses, for dialogue is a necessary way forward.

“The Handless Maiden,” collected by the Brothers Grimm, is one of the most complete stories of feminine individuation in fairy tales. It addresses the wounding of the feminine by the patriarchal shadow, but it also allows for a transformative journey of the masculine with a hieros gamos, a sacred wedding, at the end. “The Handless Maiden” reflects a compensatory psychic function present in many fairy tales. As Joseph Campbell shows us, “Where the male comes in, you have division; where the female comes in you have union.” (Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine). The handless maiden’s father, a miller who has fallen into poverty, trades the apple tree in his backyard to an old man in return for great wealth. The Miller fails to recognize the old man as the Devil, and he fails to understand that the apple tree is incidental to what is truly at stake: his daughter who was in the backyard, sweeping. This is the devil’s bargain. As Robert Johnson puts it, “Trickery as attitude always involves getting something and refusing to pay the human, direct price for it.” (The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden: Understanding the Wounded Feeling Function in Masculine and Feminine Psychology, 69). The miller’s wife, despite her grasp of the situation, is unable to protect her daughter. The devil comes to collect his prize, but the maiden has kept herself clean, outwardly and inwardly, and she is so pure the devil cannot touch her. The devil is furious, and the daughter cries so hard into her hands that her hands are washed clean, which is enough to repel the devil again, illustrating the power of tears as a purifying, sanctifying element. In his rage, the Devil demands that the Miller cut off his daughter’s hands, or he will take the Miller. The Miller begs his daughter to trade her hands for his life. To save her father, the daughter agrees to this terrible sacrifice. But again she cries so deeply, that the stumps that were once her hands are purified, and the Devil loses possession of her a third time. The devil leaves, swearing revenge. The Miller, now wealthy, tells his daughter that he’ll take care of her. She refuses. The grief of the handless maiden relates to her understanding that she no longer belongs in the world of her father, her inability to touch the world or be fed by it, her lack of embrace, all reflect a dismemberment of the human feeling, seeing, touching, holding and healing functions. Her loss of a sensual and instinctual life is complete. The fairy tale reveals what is required for the feminine to return to wholeness, to be restored and re-membered. Such a regeneration requires the solitude of the forest, and illuminated by the light of the moon, the handless maiden’s attendant spirit or soul (with her from the moment she made the decision to leave) leads her to a garden, creates a dam on which she crosses the river, and bends a pear tree toward her so she can taste a single pear with her mouth. Perhaps it is the tree itself that bends toward her. In the midst of her loneliness and despair, her soul guides her into a paradise. The shift from ego to Self as the center of the personality has begun. In the garden, the gardener watches the Miller’s daughter, but doesn’t interfere. When the king comes to count his pears and finds one missing, the gardener tells him of the maiden and they return the next night with a priest/magician. The three of them hide and watch her, as she comes with an angel at midnight. The priest believes she must be a spirit, but the king is wise enough to see beyond the handless maiden’s wild appearance. He takes her as his wife and gives her the gift of silver hands. The silver hands, though precious, are only a stage in her transformation. While silver is representative of the alchemical process she is going through, it is metal, not flesh and blood; cold, not the gold of life transfigured, not individuation, not yet. That will take 7 more years. The Devil as a symbol of the shadow often leads us back into the forest, deep into the collective unconscious, especially when we tell ourselves that our work is done. The handless maiden, now with a newborn child, is forced back into the forest in order to escape once more the trickery of the Devil. They live in a cabin “where all who enter dwell free.” There, the handless maiden learns the ways of nature from a wise woman and during this time, her own hands finally grow back. Understanding what it takes to bring the masculine and the feminine back into balance, to return to our feeling nature, to wholeness, are the gifts of this particular fairy tale. When the handless maiden recovered her natural connection to the physical world, the king finds her again and, having undertaken his own heroic journey for the past seven years, a second wedding occurs: a coniunctio, and the shift from the ego to the soul-centered personality is completed. Failing to value the feminine feeling and healing functions, we find that, “The universe is dead, no longer an organism but a building[…] and man, accordingly, is not as a child born to flower in the knowledge of his own eternal portion, but a robot fashioned to serve.” (Goddesses, xxii). Without the inner work, as “The Handless Maiden” illustrates, we all are in danger of becoming robots. This is why the world-wide healing and re-membering of the Feminine is essential to the survival of the planet and of both human and non-human species.

Growing up in East Texas, I was afraid of exactly two things—funerals and poison ivy. I occasionally had nightmares about having to attend the local rituals of the dearly departed. To be fair, many of the customs in our particular area of the county, which sometimes included a bereaved relative pulling a loved one’s body from the coffin in a final act of embrace, could border on the macabre. Equally frightening to me were the little green plants called poison ivy that seemed to surround our home like multiplying monsters, growing stronger with every effort aimed at their destruction. My friends and I called poison ivy the devil’s weeds. It was a symbol of what seemed, at the time, to be eternal suffering and pain. In The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, Campbell, as he often masterfully does in other texts, compares the likenesses and development of various mythological images throughout history. Though his foliage is never mentioned, one particular idea Campbell unpacks is associated with the Christian image of the Devil – a staple of horror films. Poseidon’s trident (which in India is Śiva’s) became thus the Devil’s popular pitchfork; Poseidon’s great bull, sire of the Minotaur (In India, Shiva’s bull Nandi) gave the Devil his cloven foot and horns; the very name, Hades, of the god of the underworld became a designation of that inferno which Heinrich Zimmer once described wittily as ‘Mr. Lucifer’s luxury skyscraper apartment-hotel for lifers, plunged top downward in the abyss’; and the creative life-fire of the netherworld displayed in Persephone’s torch, became a reeking furnace of sin. (Creative Mythology, 21) As Campbell tells us here, though they morph and transform, images of evil continue to appear in our narratives. Specifically, mythological images of evil continue to find their way into the darker avenues of our expressed consciousness through horror films and speculative fiction, a safe playground for us to work with these ideas. In more recent cinematic manifestations, there has been a reassociation of evil imagery with nature, as has been the case at various other points throughout history. The Green Man of the Roman and Celtic traditions is a popular example of a mythic figure connected to nature’s expression of vegetation, and is one that we see variations of in modern horror narratives. The figure’s green, coarse hair and barbaric nature is currently on display in the television adaptation of DC Comics’ Swamp Thing, an anthropomorphized creature composed of vegetable matter. The stories in Swamp Thing are often dark and horror-themed. While the green protagonist is seen by some as the personification of evil, similarly to how Campbell mentions the mythological devil has been viewed, he is actually a much more nuanced and complex figure, protecting the ancient environment he inhabits, though it is often an undesirable place filled with death. Campbell tells us in Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine that “In the Celtic World, the mythology of the Mother Goddess was dominant.” He connects the feminine image in Celtic mythology to the natural world of the fairy hills, stating that “The fairies are the inhabiting nature powers, and the reason they are so fascinating and enchanting is that their nature and your unconscious nature, your deep nature, are the same.” (Goddesses, 230)  Campbell’s insights begin to offer a possible explanation for the connection between death, flowers, and the mythological motifs that frequently appear in horror films. In the speculative fictional world of comics and television, Poison Ivy is a dark character and mythical figure of the feminine, associated with plants. While often known only as an enemy of Batman, in one storyline she received her superpowers and personae while assisting her botany professor with the theft of an Egyptian artifact containing ancient herbs. Poison Ivy is identified by Swamp Thing as having an “elemental mystical component.” He begins to occasionally call her the 'May Queen' giving reference to the psychological image used by other modern horror narratives and discussed in last week’s article. My fears of funerals and poison ivy may well have been on multiple levels of consciousness. Death was certainly an existential fear, even at an early age. However, fears about poison ivy stretched beyond sheer inconvenience and certainly mirrored the fears of the feminine handed to me by the culture I was surrounded by, which often sought to suffocate the great feminine much in the way that poison ivy suffocated the flowers in our backyard. Living in Los Angeles, I don’t often run into poison ivy anymore. The fears I once held both existential and unconscious likely remain with me on some level, but they accompany me as passengers and no longer as navigators in my journey.

An immense billboard looms over Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. On it, a woman appears to be consumed with deep sorrow, hot tears streaming down her cheeks. A crown of flowers rests ironically upon her head, suggesting she should be filled with joy and celebration. Folklorists would quickly recognize the image as that of a May Queen – a personification of May Day and perhaps more generally of springtime. The billboard is an advertisement for a new horror film called Midsommar. The film’s narrative explores the journey of an American woman who travels to Sweden with friends and experiences the country’s Midsommar festival. The twist is that the celebration is hosted by a small rural community that maintains the ancient pagan rituals associated with the festival. Gruesome displays of human sacrifice, sexual rites, and dark ritual make the film far more than many of even the most strong-stomached can endure. However, the film has found a faithful audience, deeply interested in exploring the more profound mysteries that surround the motifs, themes, and mythologies in the film. It has been celebrated as perhaps the first horror film to take place completely in the light and some have suggested that the film feels like a surreal dream in the vein of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Its popularity is a reminder of the enduring power and mystery of myth, as well as the transcendent and complex relationship between the dark and the light. In The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, Campbell contrasts the attitudes of modernist authors James Joyce and Thomas Mann towards what he terms the “night world” and the light. He describes this “night world” as the abyss into which all pairs of opposites disappear and the light as where these pairs of opposites subsist (Creative Mythology, 658). He goes on to discuss what he sees as the disintegration of the waking consciousness into dream found in the work of both of these literary masters, remarking specifically about the presence of supernatural elements like the ones found in horror films such as Midsommar—seances, occult powers, and orgies. Early film theorists Jean Epstein and Ricciotto Canudo both suggested that films have a certain dream-like quality to them. Roland Barthes took the idea even further, stating that, when a film ended, filmgoers experienced a type of drowsiness as though they had just woken up, referring to the state as “para-oneiric.” Horror is a genre specifically engineered to move the audience between the “day world” of consciousness to the “night world” of the unconscious with subtle movements in and out of the liminal space between them. A group of campers within a horror narrative may enjoy a normal day of hiking, eating, and conversation only to happen upon witches, ghosts, or other symbols of the supernatural, within the blink of an eye. Resurrection motifs abound within the genre where a “monster” is thought to have been slain but strangely reanimates. The play between death and resurrection, conscious and unconscious, vacillates constantly in horror films. The mythic relationship between death, resurrection, flowers, and even human sacrifice is particularly central to the image of the May Queen. Her flowered crown, symbolizing the planted seed that has pierced through the soil to express a flower is primal. Campbell discusses in Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine the ancient pedagogical experience of the plant world that originated such patterns, stating, “[T]here you have the planting of the seed in the Earth, the rebirth, and the coming of the new plant. Here the dominant motif is death and resurrection, and it’s in that sphere that human sacrifice predominates. You don’t get human sacrifice in a major way in the realm of the hunters, as they’re doing enough killing and their experiences of the guilt of killing involves them in rites of penance and of compensation to the animal world.” (Goddesses, 183) Western sensibilities around death, sacrifice, and beauty are sometimes sanitized, though we still associate flowers and funerals in a perhaps subconscious nod to the ancient relationship between the two. Films like Midsommar can be hard to watch, but they remind us that some aspects of myth and ritual are not clean, family-friendly, or for the faint of heart. They may not be for every person at every moment. They may be for a season. They may be disturbing. But they change those that experience them and who are in need of what they provide.

Who will tell the stories if not You? Who will tell the story if not Me? Who will tell Our story if not Us? My story begins in the 70’s. A time of dissolution. I grew up in an environment haunted by nostalgia for the authentic energy of the 60’s, when everything was possible. Inadvertently, my dad’s longing for the past, for when he’d felt something magical and real, left me with the feeling that I’d been born into a time of wasteland. The condition was archetypal. Dad’s hunger swallowed the oxygen in our house so that my two sisters and I slipped into the strange underworld of his quest for “the blue diamonds.” Because Dad was on this quest, he pulled his children into the archetypal terrain of the great grail legends. And it wasn’t just our family. It was the culture of the 70’s, from those burning up in drugs and disco, who eventually flamed out, and those drowning, in the cults and spiritual by-passes manifested in obsessions with transcendental meditation, cults, India, gurus. Tune Out. Tune In. Anywhere but here. Anywhere but Home. Shamans, Healers, Artists, Shysters, all of these mythological energies, literally populated my father’s dinner table. They should have been wise. But consistent with the condition of the wasteland that Joseph Campbell explores in Creative Mythology (Masks of God, volume IV), these characters were like the wounded grail king: invested with an inherited function in a role wherein they did not understand the spiritual function of the task at hand. False Fathers… Campbell was never a False Father. He told me that I was like Telemechus, Odysseus’ son. And I grew up in a time that was something like the conditions of Ithaca Homer described: Kingless. Campbell gave me a mythological frame to understand that the curse of the world I’d been born into was really initiatory. The 70’s, a time which was for me, un-parented, was an expression of a mythological theme, and a time that had happened before.  Campbell shows us how the great grail stories can be used as a map to a road through an existential condition. This condition is not a problem. It is the call to the hero’s journey. The messy middle of the story we are born into is, through failure, personified in the Grail King and dramatized in Parzival’s first debacle at the Grail Castle. But the story doesn’t end there. Act II of the grail legend’s hero’s journey, curiously enough, shifts. From Father and Son stories we move into the terrain of a Love Story. Think of Parzival’s Act II in Gawain and Orgeleuse.  Find Love Story again in Tristan and Isolde. In failure, in love, we find individual authentic experiences with the potential to re-order us. Together, these challenges shatter the  daylight world, dropping us into night. Night serves a function. The function isn’t for us to be disillusioned, to tune out, get high, or escape and remain disillusioned. Burning up and drowning are initiatory… The function of these experiences is for us to move through, to the very bottom, like Dante, moving through hell, until we have reached the nadir, and then, begin the ascent. Disillusion, of both the Grail Legends and of the 70’s, serves a mythological function. If gone through without succumbing to the drama of the wound like the Grail King, we find, on the other side….Fullness. Fullness as found in the path of our becoming. Break down via Failure. Break through via Love. The very ordinary experiences of our lives, (who doesn’t fail? who doesn’t experience love?), reveal our living myth when we relate to them at the symbolic dimension of their meaning. Campbell tells us that the question  of meaning, a question to be asked by the young hero of the Grail quest when he beholds the rites of the Grail Castle, is about “the release of the sufferer from his pain and the transfer of the role to the questioner.” At this moment, there is “an experience possible for which the hero’s arrival at the world axis and his readiness to learn, (as demonstrated by his question), have proven him eligible. Will he be able to support it?...The problem of the Grail hero will therefore be: to ask the question relieving the Maimed King in such a way as to inherit his role without the Wound” (Creative Mythology, 424). What that means, as it plays itself out, is that a life looks a lot like the stories Campbell retells in Creative Mythology. We are Parzival. We are Tristan and Isolde. The two stories are merely two acts of our larger journey. Wasteland is about Failure, in the beginning and middle, but further, needs Love to find its way home to Fullness. This is a constant leitmotif resounding through Campbell’s work and message. Through failure, love, suffering, woundedness, all experiences of night, we find our way to the mythological dimension of our lives.