My grandfather was a farmer in rural Minnesota on land that was homesteaded, probably by my great-grandfather, in the late 19th century. It was a small farm by today’s standards, not much more than 80-120 acres or so. I remember childhood Augusts spent wandering around the fields, along creeks, or through a grove of apple trees. Time on the farm in August moved slowly, languidly, while crops like wheat and corn mellowed into an eye-pleasingly warm, golden color; fruits and berries hung pendulously off branches and vines, grasses were cool, thick and luxurious; even the August air had a voluptuous, distended quality that made life itself seem idly rich, a little insouciant, and blithely serene. Aptly, I think, we at JCF have decided that the theme for the month of August is fullness. As such, I would like to explore some ideas of fullness found in the Mystery Cult at the Sanctuary of Eleusis, a cult established around Demeter and Persephone, which endured for nearly two thousand years and attracted initiates from all over the civilized world (See Carl Kerényi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter). Joseph Campbell points out that, unlike summer on my grandfather’s farm in the North American Midwest, “In the Greek summer, fierce heat dries up the vegetation, so during the summer the grain that was harvested in the spring was stored in silos in the ground. Hence the wealth of the culture is in and under the ground, in the domain of Hades…” (Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Divine Feminine, 191). Because all of the images and symbols in it refer to agricultural technology, the Demeter-Persephone myth makes a great deal more sense when one keeps in mind that times of planting and harvest are reversed in the more northern latitudes from those of the Mediterranean world. It's also important to note that Hades, or Plutus, is not only the god of the underworld, he’s also the god of wealth — and not just the cultural wealth Campbell mentioned, but also the mineral wealth found beneath the earth’s surface. In a sense, the mineral wealth and siloed grain fills the earth in the same way a cornucopia is filled, often to overflowing abundance. The cornucopia is an important symbol in the Eleusinian Mysteries (see figure below) and represents the wealth residing in one’s own psychic potential and the abundant gifts discernable in the midst of living one’s life if one knows how to look, how to see. The entire purpose of the mystery rites at Eleusis was for the initiate to be inducted into a way of seeing, to apprehend a profoundly rapturous, overwhelming vision similar to what theologians in the Middle Ages called the Viso Beatifica. The Viso was the beholding of God, a direct revelation of God from God to the viewer who once having seen, achieved eternal blessedness. The Eleusinian Mysteries also culminated in a seeing, the difference being that while the Viso Beatifica was revelatory, it was still relational; there still remained distance between the seer and the seen, whereas in the Eleusinian rites the seer achieved Epopteia, an ability to see the inner god shining through the human being, to see that (in all senses of the word) one has become One with divinity, that life isn't extinguished by death, that death is nothing to fear. In the kuṇḍalinī yoga, this is the realization at the opening of the seventh and final cakra. Epopteia is consistent with Campbell’s concept of mythic identification in which one realizes that one is oneself the object of religious awe. It’s hard to say exactly what happened at Eleusis, partly because speaking about the ritual was, as Campbell puts it, “a mortal offense." The rituals were a secret “kept by hundreds of thousands of people” (Goddesses, 192). We are given clues to some aspects of the ritual based on drawings and carvings on krators and sarcophagi, the fact that Aeschylus was put on trial and eventually acquitted for violating the omerta around the rituals, and that the notoriously narcissistic, treasonous sot, Alcibiades, is said to have staged scenes from the rites in his home. Later, the Apostolic Fathers, while writing to discredit the Mysteries described aspects of the rites associated with them. The end of the Mysteries came around 400 C.E. when Alaric, King of the Goths, accompanied by his soldiers and black-robed monks, poured through the Pass of Thermopylae and overran Greece. What we do know is that “The initiate possessed a knowledge which conferred blessedness and not only in the hereafter; both knowledge and beatitude became his possession the moment he beheld the vision” (Kerenyi, p. 15), and this epiphany was repeated again and again over a period of nearly two thousand years. Invariably, the initiate was filled with knowledge, blessedness and beauty, and bliss. It was such a satisfying physical and spiritual fullness that it lasted, according to a profusion of accounts, one’s whole life long. Walt Whitman probably never heard of the Eleusinian Mysteries, but he sums them up perfectly in his great poem, “Song of Myself”: The smallest sprout shows there is really no death; And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas’d the moment life appear’d. All goes onward and outward—nothing collapses; And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. (“Song of Myself,” lines 29–32)

For most, the term  revolution  brings to mind matters of nations and politics. We see irruption, violence and wars in which all involved parties incur tremendous loss. However, on a less severe scale, revolutions can simply refer to the emergence of a new attitude within the collective psyche of a culture. Such was the case when Joseph Campbell arrived in India in 1954. In his  Asian Journals — India and Japan , Campbell recounts in diary form his six months of travel there. It was his first time in the country and the collective attitude was fixed on claiming autonomy from Western perspectives and influence. However, it is often the case that when something is shunned with great emphasis by an individual or culture, the very content that is being rejected takes on even greater presence in the awareness. And so, just one week after his arrival, Campbell writes: “I came to India to hear of  brahman , and all I have heard so far is politics and patriotism” ( Asian Journals, 12). It is a fair remark to make seeing that similar attitudes will emerge in all cultures; and that few, if any, are able to escape the age-old pattern of incompatibility between politics and spirituality. All the same, we can imagine Campbell’s disappointment, especially after having devoted tremendous effort to the study of Vedic literature and traditions, not to mention his editing of Indologist Heinrich Zimmer’s voluminous store of notes into several publications, the most popular being  Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization . This abrupt meeting of political climate with the quest for spiritual understanding summoned in Campbell an inner revolution that distinguished the transience of politics from the timelessness of spirit. In keeping with Campbell’s remark on  brahman , consider the following, more applicable, denotation to  revolution : “The rotation of a celestial body on its axis.” Applied metaphorically, this definition lends itself to the dynamics of understanding the relationship between an individual’s sense of self (ego) and  brahman  (the source of one’s existence and, indeed, existence in itself). Granted, it may be a little inflated of me to associate human beings with celestial bodies. But then, on a grander scale, I ask what in the phenomenal universe is not a celestial body? Besides, the perspective is refreshing, and does well to present the sanctity of a human being (for once) in a wholly beautiful and worthy light. That said, what is this  brahman  that Campbell desires to hear more of? What is this mystery from which the ego emerges and around which the senses and intellect revolve? The answer is both simple and complicated—simple in that we have words with which to define it; complicated in that what we are trying to define is transcendent. Nonetheless, we try. We give it names like Pure Being; Pure Existence; Pure Consciousness; The Absolute; The Immanent; The Transcendent; Source; Self, and so on. Traditionally, spiritual seekers strive to “realize” the truth of  brahman— that is, they strive through meditation, devotion, and study to  experience  the ego-sense as none other than  brahman  itself. The full integration of this experience is called “enlightenment”—a permanent and irreversible state of consciousness characterized by oneness and bliss (or so I have read). However informative these definitions and meanings may be, like a celestial object revolving on its axis, they can only circumambulate the truth, but fail to provide the (purportedly) crucial ingredient to knowing  brahman : experience. To this point, I recall the opening quote to  The Power of Myth  where Campbell distinguishes between meaning and experience: People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life . . . I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. ( The Power of Myth, 3) Although the context here is not addressing  brahman  or enlightenment per se , the insights are strikingly relevant. Furthermore, they express Campbell’s affinity for experience over meaning. In similar fashion, I wish to conclude on an experiential note by recounting my first encounter with the term  brahman . Some 25 years ago, I was camped out on a mountain ridge in New England, reading Shankara’s  Crest Jewel of Discrimination ( Vivekacūḍāmaṇi )  In it, he addresses the relationship between the ego-sense and  brahman  thusly: A jar made of clay is not other than clay. . . the form the clay takes has no independent existence. What, then, is a jar? Merely an invented name! The form of the jar can never be perceived apart from the clay. The reality is the clay itself. This universe is an effect of Brahman. (Crest Jewel of Discrimination, verse 190) Surely, these are simply words and descriptions, and fall shy of experience. Nonetheless, I vividly recall a series of—how shall I say it?—inner-events that accompanied those words as I read the same lines over again and again. And whether those events were delusions or real was of no importance to me. Of great importance, however, was that they were irrefutably true, unspeakably profound, profoundly simple, and of the highest order. All I can really say for sure is that it was a fortunate afternoon, that it brought me to a daily practice of meditation, and that I fully agree with Campbell’s valuation of experience and the hearing of  brahman .

“…to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act . . . Joyfully participate in the sorrows of the world and everything changes.” (Joseph Campbell, Sukhavati: Place of Bliss) With Sukhavati, a mesmerizing and spiritual portrait of Campbell emerges, as he challenges us to participate “joyfully in the sorrows of the world.”  Such joyful participation in the sorrows of the world is a truly revolutionary act. Campbell tells us that by following our dream, “it will lead you to the myth world in which you live. The god is in you. It Is not something that happens somewhere else.” This is the truth to which all myths refer; this is the ecstatic song of the Sufi poets, and the mystics. This is the numinous, creative place an artist or an athlete can touch when she surrenders completely to the moment. Dreams are the key. In truth, Campbell tells us, they are self-luminous, they shine of themselves as gods do. Through dreams we create our own mythology related to the archetypes. The dream is the path of our imagination, our capacity for this symbolic movement of the mind toward the eternal, the unfathomable. Myths exist as a reflection of our deep longing for the numinous at the level of culture. Our soul knows what is real, what matters, and what the true nature of Beauty is. When we lie to ourselves, we get sick. Our dreams will tell us so, they will reflect our disconnection, our pain and take us to the brink — the borderland where chaos and order, dark and light, meet. To dare to enter into the adventure is to hold hands with the terrifying wisdom of Psyche; it is saying yes to the hero’s journey. To enter the place of bliss is to enter something greater than yourself and become animated with the fire of the gods living within us all. This experience can be nearly intolerable for those of us whose heart has been calcified by fear and trauma and, honestly, the return to the everyday world from the place of Bliss can be just as difficult. When we get lost, disconnected, or forget the guidance of the dream, as we tend to do, Life generously provides us with what often seems to be a crisis, but in reality is a moment of truth: the loss of a job, the death of a loved one, an illness, an accident, a betrayal. These are the initiatory moments that make us listen more deeply, question our motives, examine the old wounds that are covered over but not healed. These challenges are the portals to stillness and healing, where we can begin again to follow our passion, where we can follow our bliss. Mystery is at the core of life and each of us continues to wrestle with that archetypal principle in our own way. It is often in the most difficult of times that the soul can finally free itself from the tyranny of the ego, and wherein one may “joyfully participate in the sorrows of the world where everything changes.” It sometimes seems the soul guides one into a paradise which exists in the midst of loneliness and despair.  When we have nothing left to lose, when even our very lives no longer seem to belong to us, when all seems lost, these are the moments in which the individuation process begins. In such situations it seems divine intervention is required, at least some unimaginable response that transcends the ego is needed, and that is exactly when the Self may appear, uniting heaven and hell in the same breath, in a revolutionary moment of total surrender to the fact that who I was, I am no longer, and who I am feels less than human, and is yet worthy of divine attendance. Lived as such, life is a revolutionary process. When we can accept the processes of life and death that occur again and again as a part of learning to live a life of soul--a life which has its origins in the underworld, we become free to choose, and we choose to “turn our fall into a voluntary act." This experience presents itself to us in order to illuminate our journey toward an authentic connection with the Self, and extends both inward toward the individual soul and outward toward the world soul (Anima Mundi). It is the dance of life, the dance of Naṭarāja, the lord of creation and destruction.

This month we in the US celebrate the genesis of our country, marked by the signing of a document establishing the sovereignty of 13 colonies and establishing their collective intention to form an entity unlike any seen before: The United States of America. The mythology of the United States is reflected in its establishing documents, including The Declaration of Independence, wherein the first declaration—and arguably the most essential declaration to America’s core values—states: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — Declaration of Independence Our origin story is one of great vision, established on ideals so revolutionary that the United States was considered a beacon of hope for the rest of the world. Once challenged within its own borders, these ideals proved strong enough to sustain the unity of the country through a civil war. And now, over 150 years have passed without internal threats to the existence of the country. Yet, while unimaginable a decade ago, the word “revolution” has recently emerged in American dialogue. Articles by John Ferling and James Schall, entitled “Forget a new civil war. We need a new American revolution” and “On America’s impending revolution” respectively, are just two examples of a shift in the American zeitgeist. What, exactly, does revolution mean? An online dictionary describes it as “a forcible overthrow of a government or social order, in favor of a new system.” Synonyms include rebellion, revolt, insurrection, and riot. This may be our most common understanding of the word, but it is also defined as “an instance of revolving,” with synonyms such as turn, cycle, and rotate. While the deep divisions in American politics, communities, and households could lead us to a revolution in the first sense, perhaps the second definition holds the most promise. America is revolving; it’s on its own monomythic journey that has its people grappling more than ever with the ideals on which it was founded. The exigencies of the world today are challenging our collective mythology in a way we haven’t seen before. We’re questioning how “all men are created equal” applies to women, LGBTQ+ communities, and immigrants. When does Life begin? What is Liberty if your pursuit of Happiness interferes with mine? How are we to move forward if we cannot find common ground on our core ideals? As Joseph Campbell explains in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, “The community today is the planet, not the bounded nation; hence the patterns of projected aggression which formerly served to coordinate the group can only break it into factions” (388). We saw this in play when the USSR faced a similar challenge in 1990. In this context, could we be heading toward a revolution of that kind? As always, Campbell provides a way forward. He foresaw the shift we find ourselves in today, wherein the existing borders are no longer enough to contain the collective: The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice , and sanctified misunderstanding. …It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 391) Today we are called upon to recognize that, individually, we are the change we seek. The power of the individual, not to stand alone but to ignite a web of change, has been a growing mythology throughout the world. Evidence can be seen throughout pop culture; one example is the film Evan Almighty, wherein God asks Evan, “How do we change the world?” Evan replies, “One single act of random kindness at a time.” We see it in the use of social media: one person at a time becomes a catalyst for the creation of global change. The power of the individual can also be seen in emerging forms of old religions, such as Nichiren Buddhism, which was developed in thirteenth-century Japan but took hold there during World War II and has since spread to 192 countries. It holds as its central tenet that not just the ascetic, but each individual has the creative ability within to overcome any obstacle in our lives and unlock our Buddha Nature, a process called “Human Revolution.” While we grapple with our great ideals here in the United States, our mythology has left our borders and has become a global mythology. We are called upon to take our place in a web that encircles the planet, not as citizens of the United States, but as the creative heroes in our own lives and in a movement that honors those rights throughout the world. When we fully embrace the power of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness as a global ideal, we create a revolution of one: one planet.

Somewhere in the middle of my journey with stories of individuation, as Carl Jung and others would term them, I became curious about where the feminine lives in the story of the self’s becoming. Shortly after asking that question, I was gifted the opportunity to teach Parzival for the myth-based not-for-profit Alchemy Inc., and had the chance to return to Joseph Campbell’s work on the Grail Legends. What I found in Campbell’s interpretation gave priority to the feminine and to the idea of the Hieros Gamos, the sacred marriage, as central to our own becoming. Campbell’s take (which can be discovered in Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth) reminded me to understand love, becoming, the self, and the inextricable relationship between these ideas, as lived experiences. Since then, to find my self’s story, I go back again and again to Campbell on the Grail. And what I’ve learned is that without this middle act of the Hieros Gamos, I can’t become. I don’t think we go to the Grail legends looking for fancy terms like Hieros Gamos or the feminine. I think we go into these stories relating, as I did as a young person, with Parzival’s naivete and failure. From the time I left my father’s house to the time I left the symbolic father’s house of graduate school, my first marriages to careers, men, and a series of identities, failure was the dominant metaphor. I’d been clipped on the heel like Parzival’s horse, having gained access to the Grail Castle, but then failing the adventure. I left a piece of myself at a site of wounding in my early 20’s…and there was no finding my way back. It’s a strange realization in retrospect that we can be both Parzival and the Fisher King at the same time, neither alive nor dead. It wasn’t until I taught Campbell’s Parzival and had a chance to put all my analytical skills to the test in mapping Wolfram von Eschenbach’s text that I discovered, in the structure of the tale, that I’d been stuck in Act I of the story. Parzival doesn’t end in failure. What happens is the story of Gawain takes over—and what Gawain’s tale is, first and foremost, is a love story. Gawain’s story is the discovery of where and how he is quests, ultimately, for the love of one woman, Orgeluse. In the utterly charming Romance of the Grail, Campbell says: This is Woman. Gawain has gone from woman to woman, but this one has transfixed him, and he’s going to remain firmly attached to her no matter what. This is the anima image; it’s the image of the woman by the well that is constantly encountered…these women by the well are something to watch out for. And here is Orgeluse, the one he is ready for. This encounter catapults him into another sphere of the feminine altogether. She is his soul, and she’s a toughie! (Romance of the Grail, 67–68). Only when Gawain totally submits can Parzival’s tale resume. Now we are ready for Act III, the meeting with Parzival’s mirror-image brother Feirefez and of course Feirefez falling in love with the Grail Maiden, converting for her, and the healing of the Grail King and his wasteland kingdom. Failure is resolved by love of a higher order. What a revelation! As a woman, as an embodiment of this feminine principle, my sense is that the feminine is a great big symbol for the principle of relatedness. And that what we are being asked to do in our adult journey after each devastating experience of failure is to identify to both relatedness (the feminine), and to power (I define that as a masculine valenced metaphor). My sense is that the Hieros Gamos is a lived experience of total submission to an individual sense of what a sacred marriage is for you. It’s what you bow down to, as Gawain bows down to Orgeluse. My sense of it is that the experience may often feel romantic. But it’s Eros in a spiritual sense. It’s found where the divine is found for you. For Gawain that’s Orgeluse. For Feirefez, it’s the Grail Maiden. For Parzival, it’s Condwuiramurs — but I think it's ultimately found in his experience of seeing the knights when he is a boy, the meeting that sent him on his personal quest. Reading this month’s recommendation in Romance of the Grail affords a luxurious experience for you to imagine your sacred marriages, and ask what exactly does the phrase Hieros Gamos mean for you? These stories, through the eyes of Campbell, never stop giving. They meet you where you are, whether that’s in failure, or at the moment when you are ready to recognize the divinity of the woman (literal or metaphorical) who is standing at your well. These ever generous grail legends might just help you to understand that you yourself are that woman at the well. That to the extent that our eyes are open and we are asking the questions, we ourselves are the mysteries.

In the field and scope of mythology, those of us who think or work in and around myth often discuss the apparent absence of a contemporary mythology. In conversation, Joseph Campbell sometimes noted that we are living in a mythless age. And this mythlessness makes sense primarily, it seems to me, because myths require a very long time to become myths. Individuals, pedagogies, and entire cultures need to be immersed in mythic narrative, they need to soak, steep, and marinate in the symbols of myth; the mythic images and narratives need to be received unquestioningly as omnipresent facets of daily life. Alas, contemporary life moves and changes too fast, and analyses of events and facts are nearly contemporaneous, too expeditious for mythologies to take root and grow. And yet even still, it may be useful to think about love as a present, living mythology influencing contemporary life. And since the theme at the Joseph Campbell Foundation for the month of June is the Hieros Gamos, the sacred marriage, I thought I’d shine a little light on the abstraction of love. The fact that we generally take love to be a kind of literal miracle, or an overwhelming force against which we are powerless, leads me to think that love may well be an important contemporary mythology informing all of our thoughts, behaviors and mores. But first, let’s look a bit more into how a living mythology is experienced. C.G. Jung was, I think, exactly right when he noted that one really cannot experience a living mythology while looking at it analytically from the outside. The psychic life of those living in a mythology, Jung says, “is entirely concretistic and entirely symbolical at once” (The Structure and Dynamic of the Psyche, 47). The myth and its symbolic expressions appear to simply be a fact of the life one is living or of the world one inhabits, and not regarded in any way as myth. And in his book, The Soul’s Logical Life, Wolfgang Giegerich explains that an immanent or lived experience—an “epiphany” as he calls it—of the mythological isn’t something that happens from the perspective of standing outside of a mythological system; rather, the epiphany comes from the literalization of a mythology: “We might even say that under the conditions of a mythic constitution of experience the more intensely man literalized or concretized events, the more deeply he was in touch with their imaginal essence” (Giegrich, 166). To one completely encompassed by a mythology, the world is understood to be a mysterious, often enchanted, fantastical place of wonder—of horror, too—and of supernatural operations attributed to the particular objects of mythological awe. Regarding the mythology of love, there exist common concepts endorsing beliefs like love is magical, love is healing, love is transformative, etc. When one searches Google for “soul mates,” one gets nearly 73 million results. Typical of the results are articles and videos like “The Science of Soulmates,” “4 Types of Soulmates,” “9 Signs You’ve Found Your Soulmate,” “10 Elements of a Soulmate,” and so on, rarely, if ever, doubting that having a soulmate is an established fact of human relationships and of life itself. Rituals of love abound: marriages, sacred days to celebrate love are set aside, and anniversaries of important love events are marked annually. Love, won or lost, is the theme of most popular music and supplies the plot for most cinematic works. If you think, for example, that the Avengers: Endgame movie is about superheroes or good against evil, well, spoiler alert: it’s also all about love. Even the majority of clients entering psychotherapy do so for reasons (often complicated and subtle) that, in some fashion, usually boil down to questions of love. One begins to question the authority of mythologies only when one sees them beginning to break down, failing to fulfill their promises regarding the structure, the ease, and the satisfaction of living. Eventually one finds that love, like other mythologies, never seems to be able to entirely fulfill its promise. The intoxicating novelty and thrillingly passionate promise of love eventually fades, and what at first seems like unconditional regard devolves over time into demands and grievance. The popularity of marriage is declining. Asexuality is on the rise. Startlingly precipitous declines in empathyare nullifying our social contracts. Eventually, it  dawns on all of us that long term committed relationships—in one form or another—are just hard. Still, there is something that brings us together, a force that makes life without intimacy, warmth, attachment, regard, solicitude, and empathy seem a rather shabby and drab proposition. Perhaps the problem is that the language dictated by the mythology of love is itself impoverished, or perhaps too overdetermined, too monolithic or coextensive to capture the nuanced and multivalenced nature of this immense and immensely overwhelming experience that we call, simply, love. Perhaps developing new myths isn’t the point; perhaps we really need a new and more lively, picturesque, vivid language in order to better describe eternal truths, a new language that makes the experience of life more immediate. If that is indeed the case, the new myths will arise organically from the word that bear them.

Let’s pick up some threads from last week, namely “initiation” as we discussed it, and the modern mediation of myths. This week, we will add to that an engagement with the notion of the Sacred Marriage (in Greek, hieros gamos). This concept has an interesting relationship with sacred narratives that modern mythophiles often deem to be  “proper” myths. Sanctified tales of lore from yore, however, might have been recognized by a historian like Herodotus as hieros logos (meaning a sacred tale, discourse, or account). These marked logoi were closely wedded to specific rituals. An example would be the hieroi logoi of the Orphic Mysteries. One may see here how our dear friend Sallustius may have found accord with his idea of mixed myths, as both are intimately tied to initiatory contexts. As I mentioned at the end of last week’s article, this wedding of form with function, story with game, is one of the leading challenges and exciting tasks of game designers in general, and the mission of game writers and narrative designers in particular. On top of that, we have many fine cases of lore-driven games that are celebrated not for laying out their mythologies upfront, but for luring players into the world and leaving room for the mind to puzzle over, wander, and reap wonders. Take, for instance, the worlds of Demon’s Soul (2009) and Dark Souls 1-3 (2011 - 2015) along with their close siblings, Bloodborne (2015) and, most recently, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019)— all video games created by developer FromSoftware. Known for their signature (and controversial) high level of difficulty, the Souls series sends players on perilous adventures to face seemingly insurmountable enemies, share failures, and die frequently, but eventually (with enough grit) triumph. We can relish these tumultuous experiences together via Twitch or YouTube Let’s Play, celebrating as if we’ve been initiated into an echelon of the rare and few who have understood the mind of the game’s developers. No doubt, game developers have found Campbell’s monomythic structure—and mythologies more generally— to be perennial boons for narrative design (See Guyker, "The Mythic Scope of Journey," 2014). The ambient world of Journey (Thatgamecompany, 2012), itself an homage to Campbell, the monomyth, and rites of passage, draws on the synergy of players engaging in a tacit and terpsichorean voyage together anonymously. Both the Souls games and Journey demonstrate the emotive spectrum and range of monomythic gaming while engaging with a common metaphor of the ceaseless life-death cycle on which sacred tales and mysteries were based. And like the Bronze Age Mystery rites, they utilize both the esoteric and exoteric modalities of their mythologies to entice and enchant their players. Myth playing offers many possibilities culturally and creatively. The rapidly expanding culture of indie video games showcase countless outlets and vehicles for engaging players in various story-types, whilst creating a space for lesser known cultures to share their traditional lore. Such cases as the Iñupiaq-informed game Never Alone [Kisima Inŋitchuŋa] (Upper One Games, 2014), and The Mooseman based on ethnic Perm mythology (Morteshka Studio, 2017) are but a couple. These curatorial games offer creative and culture-specific ways for players to learn about and expand their awareness of underrepresented mythologies. The Taiwanese horror game Devotion (Red Candle Games, 2019) features an intimate and unnerving rendering of the visionary initiation ritual of guanluoyin, or “witnessing of the Yin-world.” Though marred by unnerving geopolitical controversies leading to its withdrawal from international markets, Devotion, as enthusiast and writer Khee Hoon Chan argues, has had a profound resonance: “[Devotion’s] very existence is a boon to Asian representation” (“Wot I think: Devotion”). If we learn not only to wed myths to good design and powerful storytelling across popular media, but also to become more deeply aware of the profound social links that bind and bridge cultures, we might have a tremendous opportunity to cultivate a rich tapestry and web of relations. The renowned anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once referred to myths as “bundles of relations,” but I have in mind something more like a web, a nervous system (a la Bringhurst), a network with nodes—mythodes rather than mythemes. As Joseph Campbell put it, they are bound together, mutually illuminating, like Indra’s Net of Gems from the Athar Veda. Myths are poorly understood in isolation, but thrive in ecology of other stories, and are ultimately vehicles and channels for a wider sense of the world, society, and ourselves. Viewing our engagement with the world as a sacred marriage, in the most generous usage of the phrase, engenders a resonance that can emerge from our immediate encounters and those precarious channels of media—however trivial they may seem. As the renowned media theorist Marshall McLuhan once noted in his classic book Understanding Media, “Whenever any new medium or human extension occurs, it creates a new myth for itself” (1994/1964, p. 252).

My first memories of Joseph Campbell are through my dad’s love for him. Dad played Campbell’s lectures on cassette tapes on long, sun drenched drives to visit our family’s patriarch in the desert. Ironically, what I remember was how Campbell’s storytelling made no sense. He’d jump from the myth of Theseus to a fairy tale about a princess and a frog to existential ideas about sacrifice. My young mind couldn’t find the thread. While Campbell and Dad seemed to be “in on” the secret meaning behind the patterns of connection that held the world together, I didn’t understand.  Campbell told so many different kinds of stories, in so many genres, to talk about words whose meanings I couldn’t fathom. What does a kid know about “love,” “death,” and “transcendence?” What I did know was that this knowing that Campbell had and my Dad treasured…it was the thing that I should be after too. Whatever that knowing was, I imagined it was what it meant to be “Enlightened.”  And this word was what my strange name, ‘Neora,’ in an ancient language, meant. I understood “Enlightenment” as a goal, as the Buddha moment.  As if Enlightenment were a miracle that just happened to a person vs. the continuous epiphanies that characterize the dynamic process of becoming. As if that process of becoming were One story, rather than a series of iterative stages each with unique and discrete knowings. In other words, initiations, into the mysteries of Life/Death. These initiations and the mysteries they open up are in fact plural, multiple, iterative, just like Campbell’s storytelling.This is the pattern. As an adult, as a story analyst, I returned to Campbell and finally saw that secret pattern emerge as a total story, in his monomyth. Campbell’s hero’s journey taught me to look at what stories do and how they do what they do, in the form of an Aristotelian three act structure. What a revelation. Stories, when they function mythologically, “INITIATE.” I’ve spent a lifetime defining this word with Campbell’s help. Myth serves an initiatory function in that it provides “a framework for personal growth and transformation.” In Pathways to Blisss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, Campbell names this as his constant motif resounding through his work over time. Simply put: when we read myth, even the myth of our life story, in terms of initiation, we see the framework of our development. This is also a working definition for “enlightenment.” Here is where I find it helpful to think of initiation simply as a movement from one way of knowing, into another way of knowing; it is developmental. From young to old. From naïve to wise. From unknowing to knowing. From unrelated (to the mysteries)  to related (to the mysteries). The key is, initiation isn’t a general thing. It is always utterly specific. We find the specificity of these initiatory mysteries in Campbell’s description in Pathways To Bliss, in the chapter, "Self as Hero," pages 116–119. Campbell’s monomyth telescopes the four types of initiation required in our journey of becoming. Although we find the total pattern of these four initiations in big culture stories from Parizval to Ulysses, the way we live these initiations is as discrete chapters or stages in our development. The pattern is less linear and more iterative. We remember these stages as a time when we were in a particular kind of developmental challenge. The metaphors of these initiations break down into this taxonomy: Hieros Gamos: Mother. The mystery of feminine power, of relatedness to feminine metaphors of consciousness and ways of knowing. Atonement with the Father: Father. The mystery of the masculine, of power, of legacy, of continuity. Apotheosis: Where you realize you are what you are seeking. The mystery of the Self. Prometheus/Fire Theft: The mystery of stealing something from the underworld or the gods. Here there is no reconciling with the underworld. Bringing back this knowing causes a violent reaction from the depths. You can relate to the metaphors in these mysteries by asking yourself: What initiation am I going through in the story that I am living out, right now? What, in the trouble that is front page news for me, am I being asked to relate to in a new way? What kind of knowing, wisdom, lesson, learning, am I coming into by way of this experience? Undoubtedly, one of these four metaphoric frames will help you to characterize the mystery and name the initiation you are in. You will also discover that the mystery of life/death is in fact mysteries. And to tell this story, you, like Campbell, will need multiple genres, stories within stories, and a “zeal” for the sense making that happens when we share stories about our becoming. As Campbell says, What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There’s always the possibility of a fiasco. But there’s also the possibility of bliss. (Pathways to Bliss, p. 133.) My dad likely would have called such a becoming “enlightenment.” My word for this becoming is “wise.”

It is the first day of spring as I sit down to write. The sun has entered Aries, the first sign in the Zodiac, marking the dawning of a new astrological year. The sun is more present in this joyful season: our days grow longer, brighter, and we ourselves open to the promise of new beginnings. In this expanding light, Earth gives way to new growth - the greening of the world - and with it comes a reminder of the eternal cycle of life: birth, death and rebirth. In Myths of Light: Metaphors of the Eternal, Campbell explains, “…the interaction of these two powers—the solar power of sheer light and the lunar power of reflected light, modified to life—is one of the great mythic themes” and these myths of light—of birth, death and rebirth—are present in both the East and the West; however, how they are experienced are very different (Myths of Light, 13). In 1955, Joseph Campbell spent a year of his life “in Orient,” as he called it, exploring the mythologies that emerged in the civilizations of South and East Asia. It was a life-changing journey that deepened Campbell’s understanding of how myths everywhere reflect, like the moon, the deeper truths of our human existence and how they not only profoundly impact our understanding of our existence but also shape our experience of it. He became keenly aware that many in the East had a very different experience of life than we do in the West. Upon his return to America, he gave a series of taped lectures about his newfound understanding of mythology, which emerged during his travels and which has been artfully compiled and edited by David Kudler into Myths of Light, now part of the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell. In it, Campbell takes the reader on a journey through the many myths of the Eastern canon, discussing how they contrast to our Occidental mythologies. In the West, light appears as a central motif in the myths of the many gods of early Greece up through the mono-mythic God of the Abrahamic traditions. In fact, the Bible begins with God’s declaration, “Let there be light!” (Gen. 1:3). God then creates Adam and animals of many kinds. But Adam is lonely. God grants Adam his wish: He creates Eve, but not from Himself; Eve emerges out of Adam. As Campbell points out, this is the first indication in the Biblical tradition that the human condition from that point on is separate from God. Indeed, “… the whole calamity of history goes on over on our side of the footlights with Him out there, observing” (Myths of Light, 10). In the West, we conceive of ourselves as separate from God. In the New Testament, God sends his Son, Jesus, to give us a way out of the darkness. Jesus proclaims: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12). We are reminded that we are not ourselves of God’s light, but we may follow the light of Jesus to our own resurrection. We are reborn through that light, but it is not us. Campbell explains in Myths of Light that while many of the same themes and images of light are present in Eastern mythologies (in fact, in Sanskrit the root for Buddha means “to illuminate”), the many similarities are dwarfed by the profoundly different way in which the transcendent is experienced in Eastern mythologies (Myths of Light, 21). I use the word transcendent here, as in some Eastern traditions there are many gods (Hinduism) and no God (Buddhism); however, in each there is the idea of the transcendent, that which is beyond all thought and understanding. Campbell explains, “In  Occidental theology, the word transcendent is used to mean outside of the world. In the East, it means outside of thought. To imagine that your definitions of your God have anything to do with that ultimate mystery is a form of sheer idolatry from this standpoint.” He further explains that in the East “this mystery that is transcendent of all knowledge is the basis of your own being. It is you; it is immanent within you” (Myths of Light, 6). Tat tvam asi —  “thou art that.” It is the profound insight he gained from his travels, one that directed much of Campbell’s work for the rest of his life. In the East, there is no separation of our inner and outer worlds, no division between the individual and the universe, nor the individual and other individuals. In the Buddhist doctrine of the Flower Wreath, “the whole universe is described as a great net of gems…a gem reflects the light of all the others and is reflected in all the others…” (Myths of Light, 15). That is the light of our lives: it is me, it is you, it is everyone, reflecting one gem from/to another, a great web of illumination. We are the light.

Myths that involve resurrection span cultures from the Pharaohs to the Pagans. We see them appear, be forgotten, and then reappear throughout history. From Passover to the Paschal Mystery, we continue to celebrate them in our modern day. Considerations of death/rebirth myths like those of Adonis, Dionysus, and Persephone cause us to remember our deep need to understand and hope for resurrection in our own lives. Joseph Campbell suggested in Thou Art That, that there was an underlying idea in resurrection narratives – one that often goes overlooked. While acknowledging the superficial connection between religious traditions that celebrate resurrection, Campbell insisted that unless the symbols within the narratives released us from the traditions from which they came, they were incomplete. This principle is especially significant in what Campbell calls “the space age” that we now live in. This “space age” demands that we change our ideas about ourselves. However, according to Campbell, we don’t  surrender those ideas easily, which is why we see a return to old-fashioned orthodoxy in so many areas at the present time. But with space, there are no horizons, and there can be no horizons in our own experience. “We cannot hold on to ourselves and our in-groups as we once did,” Campbell reminds us (Thou Art That, 104). Campbell goes on to point to the dreaded necessity of death in order for resurrection to occur. “What has always been basic to resurrection, or Easter, is crucifixion. If you want to resurrect, you must have crucifixion,” Campbell says (Thou Art That, 112). He goes on to lament the negative connotation we hold for crucifixion, juxtaposing it with the positive view held by St. Augustine, who spoke of going to the cross as a bridegroom to his bride. Campbell mentioned an interest in figures controlled by spirits of the dead and animated from beyond the grave, in the forward to Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. Like most mythological creatures, he saw them as metaphors. Such metaphors remind us of Campbell’s words: Easter and Passover offer the perfect symbols because they mean we are called to new life. This new life is not very well defined: that is why we want to hold on to the past. The journey to this new life – and it is a journey we must all make – cannot be made unless we let go of the past. (Thou Art That, 104-105) Not surprisingly, a great interest in the metaphors of resurrection — but without the difficult embracing of change and new life — has grown in our culture. We’ve seen a fascination with zombie-like creatures develop, particularly in the past few years. Shows such as The Walking Dead explore the idea of a resurrection that lacks new life. Zombies are metaphors that serve as warnings of what we can become when we attempt resurrection without embracing the change and new life that should accompany it. Campbell was clear that our traditions, in and of themselves, were not the problem. Understanding these resurrection symbols in their transcendent spiritual sense, as opposed to literally (as, for example, with zombies) enables us to see and to possess our religious traditions freshly, he tells us (Thou Art That, 104). In a connection that may be surprising to some, Campbell saw resonance between the Easter bunny and this idea of resurrection as well. “Many peoples of the world see a rabbit in the shadows of the moon. The rabbit is associated with the dying and resurrection of the moon. The egg is shelled off by the chick as the shadow of the moon is by the moon reborn, or as slough by the birth of the spirit at Easter,” he states (Thou Art That, 112). Campbell goes on to discuss the moon rabbit and cast-off egg shell as a playful, child-like reading of Easter. But what happens when the egg shell is not cast off, but is instead carried around by the just-born chick? A crippling, rotting, symbol becomes a weighted anchor that prevents flight, simply because it feels so much like home. The signs of spring are just around the corner and Persephone will soon be emerging from the underworld to reunite with Demeter. She will only bring new life for those who have chosen crucifixion – those that have embraced the death necessary for change and cast off the shell that kept them safe for so long. When we willingly and voluntarily participate in the laying down of our egos and our lives for the greater mystery that we all find ourselves a part of, new breath is breathed into our lips and we open our eyes to a new life.

With the 1949 publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell accomplished the rare task of uniting wisdom with mainstream interest, presenting foundational patterns of human experience through the archetypal content embedded in the myths. His insights have inspired readers, writers, filmmakers, psychologists, mythologists and many others to better recognize and navigate the mysterious frontier where outer reality and the human psyche converge. In honor of Campbell’s approaching birthday (March 26), I am happy to address the theme of celebration. However, rather than emphasizing the many obvious and wonderful features that accompany celebration, I feel it is more valuable to address how our precious celebrations may be sustained. In the present age of instant information and immediate gratification, awareness and respect for sustainability has diminished. Foundations have been sundered from the very things they support, buried under an ever-expanding breadth of volume. When asked what new myths may be arising, Campbell remarked that the times are changing too rapidly to sustain new myths, implying that a deceleration or stabilization is needed to establish foundations capable of supporting new mythologies. Similarly, celebration requires a solid foundation if it is to be sustained. Life, with its sundry hardships and losses, isn’t exactly a perpetual celebration, as much as we would like it to be. The time always comes when the party ends and the festive spirit slips into memory, or even beyond memory as T. S. Eliot so aptly expresses in The Waste Land: The nymphs are departed.Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette endsOr other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. And so I ask, how may one keep the nymphs around a little longer—or even permanently? How may one sustain the celebration, albeit in a slightly more subdued capacity, from which fuller joys may rise? To do so, I turn to “The Emblem of Avicenna,” an alchemical image depicting a bird in flight chained to a strange-looking earthbound creature that vaguely resembles a toad. The image addresses the balancing of opposites and the consequent tension that necessarily accompanies such acts. Although tension is generally deemed undesirable, it is important to recognize that even joy and pleasure have their tension. High magnitudes of healthy tension yield excitement and ecstasy, low magnitudes yield calmness, contentedness, and so on. In short, tension is the force (or, at least, the effect of the force) that holds any two bodies or phenomena in relationship with each other. For example, the Earth and the Moon are held in relationship through a subtle tension called gravity. Similarly, contrasting emotions or experiences are held together in an emotional or psychological tension. When the balanced tension of distinct phenomena is finely tuned, the result is resonance—a harmonious vitality and aliveness that moves the soul. We live in the midst of joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, sun and rain. It is the task of the individual to strive for balance within them. Sometimes the balance comes effortlessly, sometimes not. In his Atalanta Fugiens (1617), Michael Maier presents the Emblem of Avicenna with the caption “fixing the volatile,” indicating that it is our responsibility (and privilege) to consciously implement a “fixing” force—a balance—in the field of the opposites. Celebration is volatile in that it is ebullient, effervescent, and exceedingly “up”—a leap into the air and again into the air, wholly disregarding the bothersome intrusions of gravity and logic for as long as it may. Nonetheless, the inevitable fall, the grounding aspect, is hardly a loss. For the likes of patience and thoughtfulness live there. As do empathy, compassion, presence and, dare I say, wisdom. Speaking of which, consider the maxim “No mud, no lotus.” The roots exist in darkness, the flower thrives in light. And their synergy sustains the entire organism. Similarly, sorrow adds depth to joy, summer slowly builds out of winter, the fixed serves to launch the flight and in so doing becomes the sustainer of flight. By no means am I suggesting one should dwell in the mud and hope for flowers. After all, dwelling in mud generally leads to more dwelling in mud. Rather, I am emphasizing the value of embracing both mud and flower simultaneously and holding them in a balanced tension. Generally, a psychological or spiritual practice, like dreamwork or meditation, is required to accomplish this. The following account effectively addresses this point: "When the Buddha had risen to an exceptionally high level of consciousness, his elevated condition naturally attracted its opposite in the form of the terrible demon Māra, who came to thwart the Buddha’s pending enlightenment. But the Buddha achieved his victory by simply “moving his hand to touch the ground with his fingertips, and thus bid the goddess Earth bear witness to his right to be sitting where he was” (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 30). This  literally grounding act  act of literal grounding invited a meeting between the high and the low. And their union was expressed in the silent proclamation of his (and indeed every being’s) supreme and irrefutable status, balanced within and between the opposites—a status which celebrates the self and cannot be expressed more thoroughly or more accurately than in the two simple words: I am.

Searching for the Face of Heroism in the Modern Era Joseph Campbell famously suggested that the hero has a thousand faces. While time and space have molded that hero into a vast number of different visages, we find ourselves constantly on the hunt for the face of heroism in our own moment, in our own village. While what is seen as heroic and who embodies such potentials revolves and morphs throughout time, civil people have tended to agree that there was such an idea as ‘heroism’, and that one had the potential to act in a way that was heroic. More recent shifts and polarizations in Western culture have called these long-held assumptions into question. In a time when simple binaries such as good and bad or truth and lies no longer hold the meaning or general support they once did, we find ourselves wondering if what exactly a hero is can be agreed on, either. Is a hero simply one who stands firm in the face of evil? One who speaks when others are silent? Or is there perhaps more to being a hero in our modern era? Something even more daring? In The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Campbell said that modern heroes were those “questing to bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated soul” (334). Perhaps heroes are those who cause us to keep coming back to the mystery—the mystery within ourselves, within others, and within our universe. Perhaps today’s heroes are those who continue to spark wonder, belief, and even hope at moments when those concepts seem so far away. When logic and skepticism have made cynicism a safe harbor, heroes are those who dare to forge out into the raging waters, whispering, “Yes, but what if…?” Almost a half-century before the invention of the Internet, Campbell wrote of the shift in the instructive wonder of the long-practiced human rituals surrounding the cosmos and nature. He stated, “Today all of these mysteries have lost their force; their symbols no longer interests our psyche” (336). Now, when the answer to nearly any question is available with a few clicks on a plastic box in our pockets, the possibilities for mystery seem even more remote. We often feel more disconnected than ever from the earth, from each other, and from ourselves. In many of our souls, indeed Atlantis has gone dark. Despair has become commonplace. We’ve allowed ourselves to ignore it and occasionally become numb to it. We spend more time in search of the hero that might come along to save us from our boredom, from our apathy, from our depressed state, than we do in considering that the face of heroism might lie within our own mirror. The multi-faced Brahma of Hinduism may be the best embodiment of our modern hero. Heroes in our culture are no longer constrained by the singular faces of gender identity, age, sexual orientation, or economic status. When we hear the hero has a thousand faces, we often immediately think of these faces emerging over long stretches of time throughout vast geographic planes. The truth, however, is that the hero has a thousand faces right now — in our own moment, in our own country. Campbell concludes The Hero With A Thousand Faces with a challenge to us. His words are perhaps even more relevant now than in the moment he penned them. He says, “The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. ‘Live,’ Nietzsche says, ‘as though the day were here.’ It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse” (337). We need those with the face of heroism to emerge, leading us steadfast back into the mystery, questing to bring to light again that lost Atlantis of the human soul.