The Judgment of Paris (ca. 1690) by Lodovico David (1648-after 1709) - Ringling Museum of Art purchase 1998 - Oil on canvas One of Joseph Campbell’s key innovations was mapping his model of a heroic story-cycle onto so-called “rites of passage” as they were so eloquently dubbed by anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (1873–1957). Centuries earlier, however, the Neoplatonist and early myth-theorist Sallustius (c. 4th century CE) suggested a similar germinal notion—a kind of proto-myth-ritual theory. In his treatise, Concerning the Gods and the Universe (In Greek,   Peri theon kai kosmou ), Sallustius outlined five kinds of myths: theological, physical, psychical, material and “blended” or “mixed myths” (Gk. mûthon...miktoi ),. Each type was suited to a different purpose—for instance, “mixed myths” suited mystery rites ( teleteia ) and drew on elements of the other four kinds of myths. Such myths, according to Sallustius, included the Judgement of Paris and the myth of Cybele and Attis. Like most myths of this nature, they were often tied to a specific rite within a specific cultural context. Not all myths function this way, of course, but those pertaining to initiation often guide the aspirant towards an accord with some greater social and cosmic order—even pointing to a divine birthright. A key element was the inclusion of a Paris or an Attis, a familiar figure for whom the initiate could identify with during ritual or ruminations. For Sallustius, “every rite seeks to give us union with the universe and with the gods” (Arthur Darby Nock, Sallvstivs Concerning the Gods and the Universe , 1926). The Greek term used here meaning “union” is synaphe , an evocative term cognate with English “synapse.” Mixed myths fundamentally work like synapses both internally and hermeneutically. Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces is arguably a “synaptic” work insofar that he sought to connect  humanity’s distinct traditions of storied wisdom into a single comprehensible corpus; but it was also a “synoptic” task in that he sought to invite readers to view the similarity of others’ myths as intimately as their own inherited traditions. Campbell’s Good News: humanity’s fund of world mythology belongs to a shared account. Thus, the Monomyth, or Hero’s Journey, is fundamentally a synthetic composite, a “mixed myth,” that the author assembled for resonance across the widest international readership, initiating them into the notion that “each is both” ( Hero , p. 145)— What emerges aesthetically is a mosaic that is both a mirror and window confronting the reader while pointing towards a wider vista of human potentiality sketched across time and accessible in the here-and-now. Many anthropologists, folklorists, and other humanistic scholars outside (and inside) of mythological studies have often criticized Campbell for his mythographic and comparative analysis. In part, this is indeed the case if one has experienced myth-telling traditions first-hand. For as poet and linguist Robert Bringhurst once noted: ...for those who tell and listen to the myths, such metamythical typologies are rarely of importance. ‘Mythicity,’ like humanity or poetry or artistry or social and political equality, is embodied in quite real and local acts or it does not exist at all. ( Everywhere Being is Dancing , 2009, p. 69) A mythology, Bringhurst argues elsewhere ( Dancing, 63-64), belongs to a specific cultural and literary milieu that, which operates much like an ecosystem and nervous system.  But for an ecumenist like Campbell, Myth is the revelation of a plenum of silence within and around every atom of existence. Myth is a directing of the mind and heart, by means of profoundly informed figurations, to that ultimate mystery which fills and surrounds all existences. Even in the most comical and apparently frivolous of its moments, mythology is directing the mind to this unmanifest which is just beyond the eyes. (Hero, p. 228) Would Campbell—or Bringhurst for that matter—be open to include seemingly “frivolous” interactive media and video games with their virtual ecologies? These ephemeral environments seem well suited, at the very least, for presenting a playful modality of myths. Indeed games, like myths and rituals, bring us all together in unsuspecting ways supplying roles, characters, and avatars to embody, or at least empathize with. When players feel fully engaged, immersed, and connected to the avatar and the environment, they are surely entering a realm of experience that is deepened and enriched by the language of myth and ritual. All of these stories (oral, literary, or digital)  begin, however, with the mindful curation of myths, especially the “mixed” kind, as Sallustius observed, that can open pathways to greater mysteries. In my next essay in this series, I will  further consider recent video games and their engagement with aspects of ritual, myth, and their respective cultural domains, and I hope that you will take that journey with me.

Ganesha statue. Public Domain. Joseph Campbell thought a lot about the differences between Eastern and Western mythologies, and one of the key distinctions he identified lies in the degree to which the absolute truths that condition, guide, and can inform our lives, are transcendent – and there are some wrinkles in the way the West defines transcendence.  “In Occidental theology, the word transcendent is used to mean outside of the world. In the East, it means outside of thought.” (Myths of Light, 6) Let’s start with the West. In Myths of Light Campbell recalls an illuminating exchange with Martin Buber who had just finished a lecture on the ineffability and transcendence of the Judeo-Christian God. After the lecture Campbell asked Buber,  “I don’t know what you mean by God. You’re telling us that God has hidden his face. Now, I’m just back from India, where people are experiencing and beholding God all the time.”  This caused some commotion.  Buber apparently “…backed away and then, acting as though it were an inconsequential matter, he said, ‘Everyone must come out of his exile in his own way.’” ( Myths of Light , 2)  Buber finds us wandering in eternal exile, separated from God, from the ground of our spiritual existence. Normally, one might think, religion does the job of bridging this chasm — but no. Campbell was fond of quoting Carl Jung’s observation to the effect that: “the purpose of religion is to keep us from having religious experiences.” In the West, direct experience of God is kept safely locked away from spiritual pilgrims by the fortress walls of divine transcendence. The Gospel of John, which identifies Jesus with the transcendent figure of God the Father, was preferred to the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, which suggests that “the kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the world, but men do not see it.” This stark transcendence shows up most famously, perhaps, in Exodus. Moses wanted to see God. God explains, patiently, that no one can look at His face and live (Exodus 33:20). Moses insists and then almost dies from getting a glimpse of God’s backside (Exodus 33:22).  These are examples of the “official” version. God lies beyond understanding and experience. We are only given a taste of this transcendence through the intermediaries of a sacred text, an assortment of prophets, and the communion wafer. All of these establish a relation to , rather than a possible identification with , the infinite — and with our own spiritual authenticity. We are always in exile — always wandering towards, never quite being with. But there’s a problem here. If transcendence were truly transcendent, how could we know about it at all? If God lies beyond the possibility of thought or understanding, then how can we think about this transcendent G.O.D. at all? Answer: transcendence leaks. By contrast, under most Eastern mythologies — consider Hinduism, Daoism, and Buddhism — we can follow a trail of breadcrumbs toward what we have not yet, but eventually may, experience. These experiences are transcendent to our normal understanding, but only at first. Eventually, with sufficient practice, diligence, and luck, we can come to identify with and experience realities that transcend our mundane, and less authentic, selves. Why?  Because transcendence leaks. In the West this is a problem. In the East it’s a feature. It’s a problem in the West because, the way transcendence has been defined prevents mythology from performing one of its primary functions:  “…to present an image of the universe that connects the transcendent to the world of everyday experience.” (Myths of Light, 5) In the West this connection is still funneled through religious institutions, and anyone who stepped around these officially sanctioned relationships, typically as a result of mystical and direct experience of the divine, wound up in great personal danger. One of my teachers liked to note that whenever the Church ran into a real mystic, they either turned them into a saint or burned them at the stake.   This officially sanctioned definition of transcendence has permeated our culture in the West and, to that degree, cuts people off from making a personal, spiritual quest. It also puts that power in the hands of religious institutions. But people manage to pursue and experience transcendence anyway. How?   Because transcendence leaks. Campbell quotes Schopenhauer who referred to the paradox of leaky transcendence as the “world knot” noting that “If we could understand that, we would understand all, but it cannot be understood.” ( Myths of Light, 38) It’s a knotty knot for sure, but I want to call it a naughty knot because of the tantric implications of kundalini, and because it embodies a kind of flirtation between the infinite and the finite characteristic of the experience. This Gordian Knot is at the heart of how the transcendent and the immanent are intertwined, symbolized by the interlaced upward and downward pointing triangles we find in the west, or in the interlaced arms and legs of Shiva and Shakti in yab yum. Such a knot cannot be untangled but only cut through by experience yoked to raja yoga in the case of kundalini, or to bhakti yoga in the case of, let’s say, praying the Rosary. So, for those of us raised under Western mythological frameworks, how are we supposed to experience transcendent truths when the official definition says we can’t? All we have to do is follow the footsteps of the Buddha — or Jesus, or Mohammed — and quit worrying about definitions.  Our feet are already soaking wet with transcendence. Thanks for musing along.

Echo and Narcissus, John William Waterhouse, 1903. Public Domain. Here on the anniversary of the Joseph Campbell Foundation I got to musing about the service Joseph Campbell’s work has done for our world. My first thought was that bumper sticker. You’ve seen it: “Follow Your Bliss.” A bit hokey, maybe, but this reminder is no small thing in a world increasingly drained of enchantment and meaning. This is not my personal Campbell bumper sticker, however. Mine reads: “Myths Don’t Explain Anything!” Okay, not as catchy, but Campbell’s insight that myths are not explanations, but metaphors and narratives, made much of my later philosophical work possible. Even though it fits on a bumper sticker, it has huge implications. Myths don’t explain anything because myths and explanations perform two distinct, interlocking, functions. Let’s unpack that idea. Explanations provide, classically speaking, “a demonstration from causes.” In other words, when you want to explain something you try to figure out what caused it — and this is where facts come from. Facts are the result of finding good explanations, of figuring out what caused something to happen. By contrast, myths (as metaphors, narratives, and stories) have the function of putting us into relation with those facts. And this is where Campbell lights up the sky for me: it’s only when you’re in relation to the facts that they become meaningful. Meaningfulness, it turns out, depends on combining explanation with myth — of getting the facts and then being in relation to those facts.  In Campbell’s terminology this is the psychological function of mythology: The first function served by a traditional mythology, I would term, then, the mystical, or metaphysical, the second, the cosmological, and the third, the sociological. The fourth, which lies at the root of all three as their base and final support, is the psychological: that, namely, of shaping individuals to the aims and ideals of their various social groups, bearing them on from birth to death through the course of a human life. (The Mythic Dimension, p. 221) Mythology has the function of putting us into relation with the world we live in and the world (as we understand it) anchors the other end of that relationship. Whatever that world is, so too are our governing myths. When the world was a sacred place, our narratives described the means of being in relation to that sacredness — then facts changed. Now the world is understood as scientifically determinable and our mythologies have shifted us into relation with that. As a result, our current conditioning myths are largely economic and political ideologies.  Here’s the tricky part: myth puts us into relation to the world, but the world (as we understand it) is equally conditioned by the lenses through which we understand it, by the relationship we have to it. Our myths, our narratives, condition what we find to be meaningful and, therefore, which facts about the world are meaningful. So, our personal or socially sanctioned narratives, the ones that make life meaningful, will also, alas, allow us to happily ignore any facts that get in the way — even facts that turn out to be true.  And here Campbell has provided a deep insight into why people persist in their beliefs even after the facts are made plain: their relationship to the world, established by their personal or socially sanctioned mythologies, determines what’s meaningful, not the facts — and people seem more willing to accept and act upon what is meaningful to them, than upon what is true. Consider the weight of evidence for evolution, global warming, or — more timely — our current handling of the COVID pandemic. The facts are in, but some people seem able to ignore them. Why? People seem to prefer to define the facts based on what is meaningful to them, rather than finding meaning in the facts as provided by explanation.  What is meaningful, in other words, remains more compelling than what is true. Traditional mythologies were designed to put us into relationship with a cosmos that no longer exists. The earth is no longer the center of the universe and humans are no longer understood to be the highest created thing in a sacred landscape. And so, we find ourselves in a pickle. Life, in both its knowing and its doing, has become today a “free fall,” so to say, into the next minute, into the future. So that, whereas, formerly, those not wishing to hazard the adventure of an individual life could rest within the pale of a comfortably guaranteed social order, today all the walls have burst. It is not left to us to choose to hazard the adventure of an unprecedented life: adventure is upon us, like a tidal wave. (The Mythic Dimension, p. 225) This reminds me of a joke Campbell told in one of his lectures where he said: “If you’re falling — dive.”  This tidal wave can be overwhelming, especially in this age of apparent meaninglessness when we urgently feel the need for new relational narratives, for a new mythology. Today, Campbell might have said something more like this:  “If you’re drowning — surf!”  Fortunately, the Joseph Campbell Foundation continues to provide us with surfboards, and has helped to map the water margins between what is true, what is meaningful, and the mythological shoreline that connects them.    Thanks for musing along.

Forest scenery. Creative commons. “Each entered the forest at that point which he himself had selected, and where there was no trail or path, at its darkest point.”Campbell citing the Grail legend. Romance of the Grail , p. 136 The great path has no gates,Thousands of roads enter it.When one passes through this gateless gateHe walks freely between heaven and earth.Mumonkan (The Gateless Gate): A collection of forty-eight koan. Mumon Ekai (1183-1260) This MythBlast is a little more personal to me than normal.  It is profoundly satisfying to sail the world’s spiritual oceans, fishing for examples of Campbell’s observations about how mythology puts us into relationship to the world, and usually from the safety and comfort of the wheelhouse: the academic point of view. I say “safety” because this theoretical point of view preserves the distance that intellectual rigor, and The Academy, requires. Grasping the objects of study with thought alone prevents us from compromising our objectivity. We are, therefore, generally discouraged from jumping into, much less swimming in, those oceans ourselves. That’s the upside, but there is an inherent tension in this approach to the world: the requirements of intellectual objectivity are not the same as the requirements of the fully lived authentic life. As a wannabe academic, the path laid out before me required a pathos of distance , paraphrasing Nietzsche, to prevent me from accidentally getting lost in the forests of my discipline. But even as I began university, heading down the road to Professorhood and the socially sanctioned role and opportunities that came with it, the entire approach left me restless and edgy. It seemed to put me in the role of a chef who wrote cookbooks but never tasted the ingredients — or, maybe, and I’m quoting Campbell from memory here, like going to a restaurant but only eating the menu. Ideas like this precipitated out of the aethyr when I learned this month’s topic was The Round Table . One quotation, more than any other, has stuck with me across the decades since first studying the Grail legends, and Campbell’s glosses on them: They entered the woods where it was darkest and there was No Path. For me this has always echoed a similar insight from Zen Buddhism: that there is No Gate. These dogmatic symbols from Europe and Asia can sound like Romanticized New Age fluff, but they aren’t ( Hero with a Thousand Faces , 175). They are concise, practical, and occasionally brutal advice about how to manage and endure the challenges that confront us when we go looking for our lives. Here’s what I mean:   I naively took this advice myself — a bit like Phaeton casually picking up the keys to the Solar Chariot — and plunged into the wood where it was darkest and where there was no path. In my case that meant taking a job in what looks, to the outside world, like a backwater campus tucked into the rolling Kettle Moraine of southeastern Wisconsin. Honestly, I still cannot imagine a place anywhere in the world where, with my background and training, the wood was darker than West Bend, Wisconsin (most famous for aluminum pots and electric toaster ovens — yes, that one). From the outside this looked like career suicide even though, exactly as the monomyth predicts, all of my mentors both spiritual and philosophical, my own personal Obi-Wans, rejoiced in and affirmed my choice.  I have to tell you, I was not so sure. Of course now, 30 years later, it is perfectly clear to me that the advice from the Grail legend was correct. At the time, and for some years afterwards, I thought I must have been out of my freaking mind.  “Holy crap!” I’d think, suddenly awake at 2am. “Should I have done this ? I’m off the beaten trail! I’ve lost any path forward!” You’ve probably had this happen too, right?  Well, while this stanza from the Grail legend describes what happened — and what hopefully happens to each of us on life’s adventure — I found in it a comforting, restorative, and empowering truth. One night, for no reason whatsoever and out of the blue — also around 2am — I was catapulted out of my existential dread by the very thing that had caused it: the realization that there was No Path in front of me. There was No Gate to go through. I’ll confess to the cliché that the experience was, sure enough, kind of like getting hit by lightning.  Now, all of that is a nice story, but there’s a terrifically useful and concrete bit of psychological import here. The experience was liberating. It freed me from expectations that had remained brooding beneath the surface of my daily consciousness, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. In that moment, when these expectations were made explicit, I found myself released from their effects, from the chains that kept me from being what I-might-be-but-didn't-know-I-could-be-yet , from the anxiety feeding on what I was “expected” to do — expectations that weren’t even my own.  “Doh!” said my inner Homer Simpson, suddenly realizing that every donut was a eucharist and every beer at Moe’s already the Grail. If expectation is the ground of sorrow, as the Buddha suggested, then an unexpected life, a life where there is No Path, is the true route to what in the West we’d call the Grail.    Thanks for musing along!

The Tower from the Thoth Deck by Aleister Crowley September smuggles us across the Equinox, the border between Summer and The Fall. That phrase, The Fall, does a lot of work when you’re talking about a blasted Tower. And it’s important to consider that borders, all borders, are overseen by the God of War, Mars.  Where there’s a border, there’s a Tower. Sometimes the crossing is easy, sometimes it’s a mess.  Sometimes Border Patrol and Customs won’t let you bring your baggage across, and you have to leave everything behind. Any attempt to storm the gate can mean ruin.  This can be as true metaphorically as it is literally.  If I were paraphrasing T.S. Eliot I’d say something like: … between the mythos and the logos, between practice and theory, between narrative and explanation, between wisdom and understanding, falls the shadow.This is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper.- T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men   Which brings us to The Tower of the Tarot and, naturally, The Tower of Babel.   One unlocks the other. There are some jaw droppingly suggestive paradoxes buried in the rubble of this metaphor.   Let’s jump into the deep end of the debris field. The Tower card in the Tarot references an earlier, more famous Tower—this one: The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. 6 And the LORD said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” 8 ( Genesis 11:6–9 NRSV) In other words: using bricks and a design of their own genius, humans attempt to cross the border between Earth and Heaven, from the temporal to the eternal (to count up, as it were, to infinity), and it blows up, spectacularly, in their face.  They’re cast down, foiled by the presumption of their own engineering, blasted by the Divine Power, and then left dazed and confused.  The word “Babel” itself picks up these themes.  As you’d expect, the word means “confusion” but it also means, etymologically, the “Gate of God”.  How to make sense of this apparent paradox? One obvious metaphor here: when the finite tries, finitely, to reach the infinite we are thrown back in confusion.   Or Whenever you try to build a Gate of God, using bricks created by engineering and science, reason won’t get you there. Or, a bit more subtly, You can’t use the algorithms of normal, rational consciousness to reach a religious understanding any more than you can count up to infinity.  It just doesn’t work like that.  When you try, confusion is all that results. There’s a lot buried in the debris.  I keep two examples in mind. The first one comes from reading the work of both honest-to-goodness mystics as well as the bat-swarm of more contemporary, earnest, spiritually inclined authors.   Have you ever noticed that a lot of mystical literature typically begins by explaining that it’s impossible to comprehend the ineffable and transcendent, consciousness-shattering splendors surrounding the incandescent mystery of God (or samadhi, enlightenment, bliss, ecstasy, take your pick)? And then they’ll remind their readers that, as impossible as it is to comprehend the majesty of Divine Power, it’s even more impossible to describe it in words? — and then they try to describe it anyway ?  For pages.  And pages.  And pages. Yeah, me too.  Look, you can’t say, “This is beyond our ability to think or describe!” and then go ahead and subject the rest of us to volumes of unintelligible (but sacred) word salad as you attempt to describe it. That unintelligibility is the babble of apes who have fallen from the Tower when they try to approach that-which-you-can’t-count-up-to . By the way, you may have had this experience yourself.  I know I have—and over nothing nearly as grand as building a Tower to God. If you’ve ever spent any time in meditative practice, like prayer, yoga, or qigong, you’ve probably had the surprisingly satisfying experience of quieting your mind and getting that burst of endorphin release. Have you ever tried to explain what that’s like to someone who hasn’t had the experience?  You sound like you’re babbling, to them at least.  I learn a lot from student’s faces, for instance, when I’m trying to explain ideas like the categorical imperative or how logic works. And that isn’t even mystical, it’s just difficult. The other example is the metaphor painted into the falling figures in Frieda Harris’ tarot card.  The attempt to build a tower into spiritual, mythological, consciousness using the bricks of reason always causes chaos. The figures cast down from the tower in Harris’ illustration have assumed geometrical forms which has always suggested to me that the ratio nality with which they approached the infinite, now made explicit, was the underlying cause of their own destruction, represented here by fire, just as Noah’s world was overwhelmed by water. The Tower warns us that when we approach the limits of conscious comprehension – as one does both in physics as well as spiritual pilgrimage – our rational constructions are shattered into bits, along with our expectations and conditioning paradigms, and we’re thrown, necessarily, into metaphor: from the language of science and explanation across the border into the language of myth.   P.S. It’s always nice to have a little dessert after a meal like that.  Digging into the literature surrounding the Tower of Babel, I discovered that the philosopher Derrida had, unironically, used it as a metaphor for the impossibility of translation.  But adding deconstruction to Babel put me in mind of my favorite philosophy joke.  This one:  Q: what do you get if you cross a Deconstructionist with a Mafia Hit Man? A: You get an offer, you can’t understand.

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again. – Percy Shelley, The Cloud October is a good month to curl up with a pumpkin spice latte and muse about Death, especially here in the northern hemisphere where autumn is rolling toward winter.  You probably noticed that this year's Mythblasts  have revolved around the symbolic import of trump cards taken from tarot decks, many from different eras and, appropriately enough, this month we’ve been looking at  the tarot card representing “Death.”  Comfy?  Here we go. The Tarot is a wheel of symbols endlessly orbiting in a metaphorical Milky Way with a black hole at the center. A lot of metaphors work like that: circling something you can't see into but still indicating its presence and effects.  Death is a particularly good case study for us here since it is pretty much the ultimate black hole of human existence: we don’t get to experience it ahead of time and therefore we can’t know for certain whether our relational mythologies are… well, relating us properly.  Death is the Great Abyss that doesn’t stare back.  What we see when we look is nothing and, because, in this particular metaphor where light stands in for thought, even our thinking about Death can get sucked into nothing – a nothing we cannot even think about as nothing. It's enough to make one a bit dizzy.  Fortunately, impassable event horizons notwithstanding, here's one thing we do know: the function of myth is to link us to the world in which we live, and to make that world meaningful to us. Campbell is famous for pointing out that a lot of the mythology we live with describes a world that hasn't existed for over a thousand years. That's true. Things are still dying, much as they always have, but our understanding of Death has changed across the centuries.  Have our myths also adjusted? This month is an occasion to re-examine traditional  mythological symbols about Death in light of what we've come to believe and discover over the last few centuries. Let’s have a look:  An original card from the tarot deck of Jean Dodal of Lyon, a "Marseilles" deck. Here’s the Death card from the Marseilles Tarot (c. 15 th  century), Campbell’s favorite deck.  His view, in fact, is that this entire deck follows on the heels of Dante and was designed as a symbolic representation of Dante’s life work.   What we have here is a very traditional symbol of death personified as a skeleton and cutting off life with his scythe.  The imagery itself is taken from Greek representations of either Chronos or Cronus, depending on whether you understand the metaphor as harvesting wheat or castrating your father. (The idea of castration, symbolic and real, is more important than may appear here.  For a real thrill ride, have a look at this month’s text, Masks of God, Vol 1: Primitive Mythology , in which Campbell details the puberty rituals among aboriginal Australians.) While this image worked perfectly well for a few hundred years, one of the most commonly available tarot decks (the Rider-Waite-Smith deck from 1909) updated the symbolic representation. These cards became a hit when US Games bought the rights and sold a gazillion copies starting in the early 70’s. The Death card from the Rider-Waite Tarot Deck by Pamela Colman Smith The Rider-Waite-Smith deck shows Death riding a Pale Horse in concurrence with the description of Death in the Revelation of St. John 6:8 at the end of the New Testament and, as it turns out, the end of the world.  The cards were created by Pamela Colman Smith at the direction of A.E. Waite, and borrows heavily from the Golden Dawn symbolic lexicon. This is a terrific symbol/myth/metaphor for death if (if!) we accept the New Testament’s understanding of Death as the terminal moraine of a Divine glaciation, punctuating all life – and all death to boot. It references the inexorable linear timeline of the Christian tradition: creation – stuff happens – apocalypse . I’d love to make a joke here about Dante never going out of style, but if he  hasn’t gone out of style, his three-story universe (Hell, Earth, Heaven) has been considerably revised.   The universe isn’t what it used to be - Heisenberg and that crowd blew up by physics during the last 100 years -  and our mythology is still trying to catch up. Death isn’t what it used to be either.  If physics became indeterminate, so has Death.  Think of the variations and gradations we have today that didn’t exist 100 years ago.  100 years ago, when you were dead you were dead, but today? Today there’s brain dead and heart dead and stages in between where we still can argue about whether or not someone is “really” dead. Our understanding of Death has had to accommodate changes in technology (respirators and heart bypass machines) and evolve with our rejection of fundamentalist religious certainties.   By contrast Freda Harris's card shows Death, again depicted as Father Time swinging his scythe: this time he isn’t harvesting or castrating the world, but spinning out a helix of interconnected threads, weaving new patterns in a tapestry of time rather than slicing off the ends.  New figures swim in those vortices. Death by Freda Harris from Aleister Crowley Thoth Deck The image suggests that Death is a process of transition rather than an ending.   Death as transitional.  Isn’t that closer to how we understand death today?  We can reinterpret the symbol not only as the death of an individual, but as a representation of how “death” happens all the time as we change.  We become something new when we understand something new, as our ignorance falls away. Parts of our life are taken from us or thrown off; we shed our psychological skins, like the snake in the corner of the card, and arise to unbuild our lives again.  Death in this case can mark the transitional moment when we go from who we thought we were to who we might really be. That transition is always painful and fraught and terrifying. What better metaphor than death? Personally, I think many of us like this particular symbolic death most of all: Grateful Dead Logo by Alton Kelley and Stanley “Mouse” Miller Thanks for musing along! Latest Podcast In this bonus episode, Joseph Campbell answers questions following the lecture that he gave with the same name from EP 26. It was recorded in 1967 at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California and is the second lecture in the series Mystical Experience and the Hero’s Journey. Host Bradley Olson offers an introduction to some of the ideas discussed by Campbell in the Q&A session. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Life is but a mask worn on the face of death. And is death, then, but another mask? ‘How many can say,’ asks the Aztec poet, ‘that there is, or is not, a truth beyond?’" -- Joseph Campbell The Mythic Image (p. 160) Kundalini Yoga: Crown Chakra — Becoming One with the Beloved (see more videos)

Yogi with chakras, Rajasthan, northwest India, early 1800s. © Wellcome Collection, London. Sometimes science can blinker us to what we’ve been myth-ing . How can you know what you already knew? When the now  becomes new , that’s how.  For instance: I’ve enjoyed annoying my colleagues over in psychology for some decades now by reminding them that they are, technically and by definition, engaged in a science (“-ology”) of the soul (“psyche” in ancient Greek).  They don’t always think that’s funny. Sometimes the great success of our scientific approach to the world blinkers us with a set of cultural lenses that can keep us from coming to know what we already knew, and keep us from knowing it in new ways. Like this: when it comes to the psyche  we might feel smugly moderne , but the Indus Valley civilization will always be a few thousand years ahead of the West when it comes to thinking about the soul. What “the West” once understood as superstition comes back to us now as a rather advanced, and useful, description of human psychology. Kundalini yoga. I’ve dipped my toes into contemporary psychology and have a pretty good grasp of Jung and Freud and Skinner, but none of them have ever been more useful to me as a way of understanding my fellow human beings than Campbell’s interpretation of the first three chakras in the kundalini system. If you need a touchstone, imagine these symbolic representations as a prefiguration of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (check out the video of Prof. Campbell’s lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG5Ml82A3vA ). Now, of course, we’re accustomed to hearing New Agers talk about “balancing their chakras,” glowing mystical orbs floating in the candy box of contemporary esoterica, but fixating on the woo woo  of occult glamor can distract us from the useful implications these ancient observations have for real life in the twenty first century West.  What “the West” once understood as superstition comes back to us now as a rather advanced, and useful, description of human psychology. Kundalini yoga. The system starts at the base of the spine with chakra one. This is where we find a concentration of the psychological complexes associated with our instinctive processes : the reflexive clinging to what we believe, rightly or often wrongly, is required for survival. Campbell’s insight is that this can be represented symbolically by the idea of western dragons. Now western dragons are well-known hoarders – unlike Asian dragons which represent the fullness of prosperity in life – and they famously hoard two things in particular: gold and virgins.  Here’s the key: these are two things for which dragons have no use whatsoever . Even as a youngster reading The Hobbit  I remember wondering what it was, exactly, that Smaug found so compelling about hoarding gold. It’s shiny, but you know something else must be going on there.  You know people like this – sometimes it’s ourselves. We cling to things out of reflex, very often things we don’t truly need or even want. And it is possible, for many people, to go through their entire lives at this level. It is a rather wonderful explication of the role tanha , craving or desire, plays in Buddhist analyses of suffering.  If we’re able to resolve or sublimate these impulses, we find ourselves ready to confront chakra two: sex . This encounter typically occurs as we move from childhood into adulthood. After freeing ourselves from the reflexive clinging to what we believe we need for survival, sex is usually the next set of complexes that confront us. While just as psychologically fraught as the fears that characterize life lived purely for survival, sex is a lot more fun. Addictive, even.  I’ll leave you to fill in your own examples of people stuck at this stage of their spiritual or psyche -ological development. I suspect this set of complexes is common to all of us – and we all know people who never quite manage to get further along in life than this but, if you do, you end up immersed in the complexes of chakra three: a fire-in-the-belly for worldly success .  Chakra three is, appropriately, at the level of the belly. Looking back you can trace this developmental pathway in most humans: childish fears about life which, when conquered, allow us to migrate into a time of sexual awakening and preoccupation that in turn eventually gives way to a sense of social responsibility, family life, career, and attention to the financial and political power structures that govern our adult lives. These first three spheres of human development characterize the world of daily experience: navigating the psychological impulses surrounding fear, sex, and social interactions. It’s where most of us live most of the time.  Let’s add one more chakra for some perspective. Chakra four, at the level of the heart, is characterized by compassion  – the ability to experience the suffering of others. Achieving a grasp of chakra four is generally the stated goal of most of the world’s religions and you can find plenty of evidence for the psyche -ological insight this hierarchy of complexes provides, but here’s the easiest way to think about it: as compelling as any one of these psychological complexes might be for someone, they’ll find that the next level up is even more compelling. Fear is trumped by the desire for sex and sex can be trumped by the desire for worldly power – and, most remarkably when you think about it, the desire for worldly power is very often trumped by compassion for others. The wealthy will often walk away from their source of power, wealth, and self-validation to commit themselves to the welfare of others. That’s exactly what history describes as a religious awakening. But at this point we move into rather more rarefied psyche -ological development.  Saints are more difficult to understand than those committed to business. as compelling as any one of these psychological complexes might be for someone, they’ll find that the next level up is even more compelling. Fear is trumped by the desire for sex and sex can be trumped by the desire for worldly power – and, most remarkably when you think about it, the desire for worldly power is very often trumped by compassion for others. But, contributions like these, from what we often characterize merely-as-myth  can help us fill in exactly what we were myth -ing – and makes what we know, (k) new . Thanks for musing along. MythBlast authored by: Mark C.E. Peterson, Ph.D. is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Washington County and past president of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture (ISSRNC.org). Philosopher, gadfly, poet, cook, writing along the watermargins of nature, myth, and culture. A practitioner of taijiquan and kundalini yoga for over 40 years, Dr. Peterson is also a happy member of the Ukulele World Congress. This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 4, and Pathways to Bliss. Latest Podcast Joseph Campbell speaks at the University of Arkansas, in 1973, discussing personal myth and the life of the soul. Host, Brad Olson, offers an introduction and commentary after the talk in this episode of the Pathways podcast. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "What the virgin birth represents is the birth of the spiritual life in the human animal. It has nothing to do mythologically with a biological anomaly. In the Indian kuṇḍalinī system the first three cakras are our animal zeal to life, animal erotics, and animal aggression. Then at the level of the heart there is the birth of a purely human intention, a purely human realization of a possible spiritual life which then puts the others in secondary place. " - Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine , 258. The Radiance Behind All Things (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Red Rose Thorns by Jason Swaby When it comes to love and marriage I have to say that, on a personal level, myth and metaphor have done me more good than anything else and, especially, Campbell’s observation: “Marriage is not a love affair.”  ( The Power of Myth : “Sacrifice and Bliss”) That is still the best advice I ever received, or ever heard, about how to keep a marriage working well.  –but, apart from being a useful reminder that a good marriage depends on a good relationship (e.g. take out the garbage, empty the dishwasher, rub her feet, occasional roses ), love and marriage are a useful bridge to grasping the relationship between myth, metaphor, and real life. Here’s what I mean.   Campbell once noted that understanding life isn’t as important as having the experience of living a life. It is equally true that many myths hover just beyond being fully meaningful–until, that is, you’ve had the experience of whatever the myth, or the metaphor, is pointing to.  I have a favorite example. Early on in life I discovered that one of the best guarantees of a happy long-term relationship was “random acts of flowers.” I confess this is a bit cliché, but there is no doubting the efficacy of random (and persistent) small gestures of love. To this end I would periodically stop by the local grocery store on the way home from work, rummage through the bucket of roses typically found in their refrigerated flower case, pick out a good one, and then leave it somewhere in the house to be discovered later: under a pillow, in the microwave, in her sock drawer. It is always a good idea.  Just saying. And then one day…. I’m on my way home, and I stop in at the grocery store to pick up a single rose. Digging through their selection, I discover that every rose is missing its thorns. I’m sorry, but a rose without thorns on it just doesn’t work.  “Hmm,” I think, “this won’t do. The metaphor requires thorns.” At which point, the fourteen-year-old assigned to stock the flower section comes over. “Can I help you find something?” she asks helpfully. “Yeah, thanks,” I reply. “I can’t find a rose in here that still has thorns on it.” “Don’t worry,” she reassures me. “We always cut the thorns off.” I protest, “I see that, but I’m looking for a rose with  thorns.” Her face squinches up with confusion. “Why would you want thorns on your roses?” “It’s a metaphor,” I answer. “How is a rose a metaphor?” she wonders.  [By the way, as a matter of metacommentary, do you see what an excellent question that was?  Just wait.]  “Well, there’s the beautiful and intoxicating scent of the rose, the delicacy of the petals, and then you have the thorns…you know, to remind you about the rest of it.” “The rest of what?” she persists, still confused. At which point the idiot assistant manager comes over and says, “Uhhh, April? Is there a problem here?” I interrupt him. “No, no problem. She was explaining why there aren’t any thorns on the roses.” “Oh, don’t worry,” he croaks, misunderstanding the situation and turning his assistant manager’s irritability on the fourteen-year-old. “We cut the thorns off right away, you know, for safety–April? did you forget to cut the thorns off??” “No, he wants a rose with the thorns still on it .” Deep furrows appear on the assistant manager’s face. “Why would you want thorns on your roses?” he queries. “It’s a metaphor ,” I insist. “It’s a metaphor for love,” I repeat, as gently and slowly as I can. And then the fourteen-year-old asks the Best. Question. Ever.  “Why would anyone want thorns on their love?” See?  Turns out the fourteen-year-old is a wizard.  The assistant manager scoffs at what he takes to be the ignorance of her question–which probably tells us everything about assistant managers. “Hey, that is exactly the right  question,” I say. “Love has both a flower and thorns, so if you’re looking for a metaphor, you’ll need both of those.” I was going to follow up by quoting something from Campbell on the Grail Romances like “the only thing that can cure the pain of love is the thing that causes it,” but the assistant manager was already too confused. You’re probably ahead of me here, so let me cut to the chase.  Here’s the interesting part: why didn’t the fourteen-year-old know that a rose, if it’s to be a metaphor for romantic love, needed thorns? Answer: because she hadn’t experienced romantic love yet. Only after we’ve had the experience toward which the myth is directing us does the myth become meaningful. What’s required to understand a metaphor is the experience  of whatever the metaphor is a metaphor for . The same is true of myth. Only after we’ve had the experience toward which the myth is directing us does the myth become meaningful.  Before that it’s just an interesting story; once we know what it means , it puts our lives into a new and richer context.  Once you’ve been in love, you know full well why a rose needs thorns to be an accurate, adequate, meaningful metaphor for love. I hope the fourteen-year-old gets the chance. When I go through this example in class I typically finish up with some Shakespeare, who provided a lot of metaphors in poetry I didn’t understand–until I’d fallen in love.  This also taught me just how sophisticated Shakespeare could be and how, like mythology, it is most often an experience that reveals the truth of things. I’ll just leave this here. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138: When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies, That she might think me some untutored youth, Unlearnèd in the world’s false subtleties. Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young, Although she knows my days are past the best, Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue: On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed. But wherefore says she not she is unjust? And wherefore say not I that I am old? Oh, love’s best habit is in seeming trust, And age in love loves not to have years told.  Therefore I lie with her and she with me,  And in our faults by lies we flattered be. Here’s a brilliant walk  through of the sonnet itself and, as a public service, here’s the best ever analysis of Shakespeare’s work from the BBC’s Playing Shakespeare . Thanks for musing along. MythBlast authored by: Mark C.E. Peterson, Ph.D. is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Washington County and past president of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture (ISSRNC.org). Philosopher, gadfly, poet, cook, writing along the watermargins of nature, myth, and culture. A practitioner of taijiquan and kundalini yoga for over 40 years, Dr. Peterson is also a happy member of the Ukulele World Congress. This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 5, and Romance of the Grail Latest Podcast EP 11: Kundalini, The Serpent Power Joseph Campbell speaks at the Asia Society in New York City on November 30, 1967, discussing the kundalini and the relationship between yoga and depth psychology. Host, Brad Olson, offers an introduction and commentary after the talk in this episode of the Pathways podcast. Listen Here This Week's Highlights “But from a psychological standpoint—trying to recognize where  humanity  is, in all of this—one sees everywhere the same symbols, and this becomes then the problem of first concern. And what transforms the consciousness is not the language but the image; it’s the impact of the image that is the initiating experience.” -- Joseph Campbell,   Myth and Meaning, 6 The Great Goddess (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Bumper sticker vs. rabbit hole? You’ve seen the bumper sticker version of Campbell’s famous aphorism: it’s catchy, filled with portents, a sound and a fury signifying … like, something. But like what? Something like, “What, me worry?”   Or, “Don’t worry, be happy”?   Once you start asking these questions, a rabbit hole opens up and a Cheshire Cat begins to smile from the nearest overhead branch. Aphorisms, like metaphors, can be a little slippery. In some ways, the more obvious they look, the less obvious they are. To get to the bottom of what they mean, you have to follow the White Rabbit all the way down. In this case, for instance, fully understanding a phrase like this one requires unpacking and sorting out exactly what “Follow,” “Your,” and “Bliss” all mean.  Whew.   “Follow” by itself would involve being fully conscious of the entire trajectory of the Hero’s magical mystery (mythstery!) tour. “Your”?  That would require fully understanding your own existence. That’s a lot of heavy lifting.   It turns out that the best bet here is to follow Campbell’s own advice and focus on “Bliss.”  Aphorisms, like metaphors, can be a little slippery. In some ways, the more obvious they look, the less obvious they are. Campbell’s advice Here’s what he said originally: Now, I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: sat-chit-ananda. The word "Sat" means being. "Chit" means consciousness. "Ananda" means bliss or rapture. I thought, "I don't know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don't know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.  I think it worked. ( The Power of Myth 149) This is terrifically practical advice. Getting a handle on “proper consciousness” or “proper being” feels like too much all at once, but bliss? That seems like a more promising place to start–even though we still have to follow that rabbit, and the first step is a bit of a doozy.  “Bliss” is the standard translation of the Sanskrit word ananda   [आनन्द]   and denotes the moment of ego dissolution in which the personal jiva  attains to the status of atman  in order to properly engage Brahman –with the proviso that you still want to taste the sugar without being the sugar. Ananda is, therefore, also deeply connected with samadhi , which is its highest form. Yikes. Whenever I run into technical definitions like this my mind races back to the moment in Monty Python’s Holy Grail when Galahad asks, “Is there someone else up there we can talk to?” Translating technical terms from–shoot–from any other   language (German, Chinese, take your pick) into English is rough enough. Even the simplest words defy easy translation. But attempting to translate ideas from ancient languages, across thousands of years, poses even greater hazards. Too often the subtleties of meaning are lost as you shift between forgotten alphabets and lost cultural contexts.  Fortunately, and much closer to home, similar translation issues are discernible in the meaning of “happiness”: specifically in how its definition has devolved from a more robust, ancient Greek understanding into the fuzzy-slippered, hot-chocolate-yummy-satisfaction we attach to it today. Here’s the idea in a nutshell: think about the difference between being happy and feeling  happy. They look the same, but they aren’t. Feeling happy vs. being happy Feeling happy results from satisfying your immediate appetites or emotions. No matter how bad your day has been, for example, the sudden appearance of chocolate ice cream usually puts you in a better mood. Chocolate ice cream by itself, of course, can’t make you be happy, but it sure can make you feel  happy. By contrast, being  happy (being in a state of happiness) describes, for the ancient Greeks at any rate, the experience of flourishing in the life you’ve been given–hitting on all cylinders, so to speak. Their word for this kind of happiness is eudaimonia. You might notice daimon  lurking in there. This is a big hint. A daimon was understood to be a guardian spirit assigned to help you live your life skillfully and with excellence, and that, in turn, is what it truly means to be , rather than merely feel , happy.  So being  happy always has the aftertaste of a bit of divine assistance. To use Campbell’s language, as we move along our life’s journey we eventually come to a place of amor fati , a point where we can embrace our fate, our own authentic nature, and surf the curl of our own karma. No matter the circumstances we find ourselves in, then, we can still claim to be happy.  So, finally, winding our way back to all that technical language in the definition of ananda, think about those times when you found yourself being happy and not just feeling happy. In moments like that, your normal ego-consciousness is suddenly suspended: most often in moments of aesthetic arrest when the art, the poetry, or music sweeps you up and out of yourself.  The “self” you’re being swept out of is the ego-consciousness (your jiva ) and the “Self” that experiences this liberation or relief is the beginning of experiencing your true nature, your atman .  And that’s what characterizes, and what it means, to be in a state of bliss. Here’s a practical example: can you remember the greatest concert you ever attended?  I know there are some Dead Heads out there but, for me, it was Carlos Santana opening for Eric Clapton. At the end of the concert they played an encore, just the two of them, tossing musical ambrosia back and forth and into the audience, lifting the entire stadium up into stratospheres of ecstasy.  And when they finished?   Everyone forgot to applaud. That’s the bliss we need to follow.  Chocolate chip ice cream–and bumper stickers–can help, but they won’t get us there. Thanks for musing along. MythBlast authored by: Mark C.E. Peterson, Ph.D.   is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Washington County and past president of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture ( ISSRNC.org ). Philosopher, gadfly, poet, cook, writing along the watermargins of nature, myth, and culture. A practitioner of taijiquan and kundalini yoga for over 40 years, Dr. Peterson is also a happy member of the Ukulele World Congress. This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 4, and Myth and Meaning Latest Podcast In this episode, Campbell speaks to the relationship of mythology to psychology. He goes through the four functions of myth and emphasizes the fourth function - the psychological. He focuses on why this psychological function is so important in our contemporary world. The lecture was recorded at the Houston Jung Center in 1972. Host Brad Olson introduces the lecture and offers a commentary at the end. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "I think the best thing I can say is to follow your bliss. If your bliss is just your fun and your excitement, you’re on the wrong track. I mean, you need instruction. Know where your bliss is. And that involves coming down to a deep place in yourself." -- Joseph Campbell The Hero's Journey , 253 Psyche & Symbol - Apollonian vs Dionysian Dichotomy (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Bonifacio Bembo, Visconti-Sforza Deck, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons As I sat down to write this article, I delightedly cracked my metaphorical knuckles, savoring the irreverent opportunity to use the Fool as a symbol to push back against our cultural inclinations to embody rational responsibility in the beginnings of a new year.  In most tarot readings, the Fool represents new beginnings and journeys, heroic or otherwise. I think for most of us in modern Western culture, the impulse toward the unknown is almost immediately met by a need to chart a course, to have a plan, and to be mature enough to weigh the risks and potential consequences of starting something new. In the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, often described as the “original tarot” deck, the Fool is a rather feckless, beautiful youth on the edge of a cliff, his purity reflected in the white rose he carries, with a small dog seemingly poised to keep his human from plunging into the abyss. It is simultaneously an image of possibility and constraint. I instinctively want to poke at that staidness, to avoid what Campbell speaks of in his “Jung and the Tarot” lecture (Audio Lecture Series II.3.2 and II.1.6) when describing Jung’s insights into the inferiority complex: “a compulsion throughout one’s life to prove one’s self because one has been given the sense in early life that one is unable to do what one wants to do. Then every endeavor … becomes a field for testing or proving one’s self.”  Instead, I see the Fool as an invitation to leap headlong into wildness and into chaos without that sense of external validation or constraint. As Jungian analyst Sallie Nichols writes in Jung and Tarot, An Archetypal Journey , “It is easy to see how the Fool’s emblem has become the symbol for the unmanifest destiny, from the primal chaos or void from which the cosmos and all its creatures arose.” (39) Oh, yes. But, as it is in the way of myth, be careful what you ask for … As I began to excavate further into the symbolism of the Fool in tarot, I found myself in an unexpectedly chaotic search for the meaning in these symbols: their source, their relative mythic antiquity (or lack thereof), and how that reflects my basic understanding of how we intersect with myths—both how we assign them meaning and value, and how they might come to be. I am, at best, a dabbler in tarot. In my experiences with its use as a divination system, I have earnestly assumed that the symbols artist Pamela Colman Smith embedded in her art were closely reflective of a long tradition of an esoteric, arcane use of such cards as a way to extrapolate meaning. As I listened to Campbell’s lecture “Tarot and the Christian Myth: Four Suits of the Tarot,” in which he described his four-hour musing on tarot as something of a beginner, I was surprised to learn that the cards comprising the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck were the joint creation of early twentieth-century mystics, artist Smith, and her commissioner, Arthur Edward Waite, published by the Rider Company in 1909. The symbolism in these cards was likely predominately hers, in spite of being something of a forgotten partner in the project. (CNN)  Earlier tarot cards were simply playing cards; the oldest surviving cards are the Visconti-Sforza deck, commissioned by the rulers of the Duchy of Milan.  There is no overt link to archaic mystic traditions for these cards prior to the work of Smith and Waite. They extrapolated the symbolism of the imagery in these older decks, but the use of them as a divination tool was their own creation.  Pareidolia I found myself fairly confounded by this. I did not want to be disrespectful of those who find meaning in the use of tarot, but I simultaneously wondered if this was a bit of chicanery that had pulled several generations of seekers into the world of the pseudo-fortune tellers. Were Smith and Waite, and those who have found meaning in the tarot symbology, simply making patterns out of nothing? Was this simply an example of pareidolia, when humans see shapes in random visual patterns? Is this simply what the study of mythology is? (Enter existential crisis moment.) Certainly both Smith and Waite had studied mystic traditions deeply, but this imagery in the deck was the work of an individual artist in her context, her time, pulling from older images but layering meaning on them. It did not arise, fully formed from the collective, the volk . As Marie-Louise von Franz states in Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales : “Fairy tales ‘written’ by an author are not genuine fairy tales.” (99) How, then, could a deck of cards that had been imagined simply as a card game, that was reimagined by two people yearning to push back against modernism and find the magic of what they presumed to be a more mystical age, carry meaning? How could they hold mythic relevance? Paradox Campbell’s dive into the cards didn’t stop with his pointing out the modernity of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. He explored both the Christian iconography and medieval symbolism in the earlier decks, extrapolating meanings that are echoed in Smith and Waite’s work.   Then I looked further into the Fool in the Visconti-Sforza deck: He was a woodwose, dressed in rags with feathers in his hair. As a figure that connects to wildness, he was much closer to the chaotic understanding of the Fool than Smith’s, more outside of cultural expectations. As I recognized my sense of relief at finding this more ancient, more complex understanding of the Fool in the history of the tarot, I became aware of the need for that relief. My yearning for this connection to the essence of this archetype—this validation, even—is the same yearning that inspired two nineteenth-century mystics to create a divination card deck. It’s the yearning that I think most scholars of mythology feel, that Jung felt as he spoke of the collective unconscious. It’s the yearning for the connectivity of humans to our imaginations. And while scholars like von Franz extol the virtues of the idea of fairy tales and mythic images and ideas emerging from the collective, they also exist within our own contemporary context. They reflect our time, place, cultural, and individual experiences.  This paradox is one of the great challenges of the study of myth: the dance of the collective to the personal and back again. One never exists without the other. We lend a sense of moral superiority to the collective, as it keeps us from the inflationary move of seeing ourselves at the center of myth, indeed, as mythic.  At the same time, our mythic lenses are always set in our own glasses. In the way that myth does, this reach for the chaotic, creative drive of the Fool flipped me ass over teacup, gripped by the daimon in my sometimes insouciant love of paradox and chaos and the destabilizing inversions of the trickster and the fool. In that desire for irreverence, I played the fool. And, arguably, was played. And a card game morphed from an example of pareidolia into a tool for finding meaning.

"Man and Woman" Boris Lovet-Lorski; (c. 1930-1935); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966 These days engaging with myth, for me, can be an invitation to poke at sacred cows.  In a month that JCF has dedicated to Campbell’s work on goddesses and what he, and many other mythologists, call the divine feminine, I find myself asking what a divine feminine (or divine masculine, for that matter) actually is. Or why—even if—it should matter to us. What is served when we define qualities of self, soul, or action as gendered? In contemporary Western culture, we are inundated with language and constructs about what are perceived to be inherent differences between female and male, and what we define as feminine and masculine. This binary engulfs us. By way of illustration, I’d like to invite you to look at this cloud of words and note what image pops into your head with each one. Is there gender associated with it? If so, which one? Soft. Caring. Bold. Voluptuous. Direct. Analytical. Rational. Emotional. Nurturing. Silly. Earnest. Ambitious. Light. Strong. Fertile. Discursive. Pierce. Vain. Shrill. Learned. Fierce. Brave. Lead. Heights. Cunning. Embrace. Receive. Depths. Beauty. Power. I’m willing to bet that even if you consciously push back at where you landed with these, most of the connections landed along the lines of feminine being soft, caring, nurturing, silly, light, shrill, embracing, or beautiful. I think that relating archetypal qualities to gender is one of the great failings in the study of mythology to this point, and mythologists and depth psychologists have generally followed this convention and have been an ongoing force in promulgating it. Feminine and masculine energy, strengths, and identities are defined as unique and distinct from one another, and used to justify accepted gender roles in society.  Perhaps most obviously, C. G. Jung’s ideas about the anima and animus purport to open the possibility for women and men to hold qualities not defined by their gender. However, he embeds them within a rigid opposition: men carry “anima,” those so-called feminine qualities that their masculine self doesn’t possess; women carry “animus,” those so-called masculine qualities their feminine Self lacks. Additionally, Jung confessed to a deep suspicion about what he identified as his anima, stating that the voice he heard was of “a patient, a talented psychopath who had a strong transference to me,” and continued on to describe his anima as commanding a “deep cunning” and “twisted” his fantasies “into intrigues” that might have “seduced him” into believing he was an artist. ( Memories, Dreams, Reflections , 221–223)  The narratives that support this separation build on one another and further calcify our sense of what masculine and feminine should be until they have been accepted as archetypal truths. Some examples of these narratives include the following: From the perspective of what might be considered historical truth, Joseph Campbell suggests in Goddesses: Mysteries of the Divine Feminine  that in the earliest hunter-gatherer cultures, men are the hunters and killers and women are the life-givers, perceiving this as the primal beginnings of mythic understanding of masculine and feminine. (38) Offered as a neurological truth, multiple studies have supported the idea that women’s and men’s brains are inherently and largely different. And assumed biological truth includes decades of scientific assumptions which have asserted that humans have two genders that are fixed and immutable.  And these narratives are each wrong.  Recent anthropological research has contradicted the traditional hunter-gatherer separation between women and men, and instead has found that the earliest human cultures did not define tasks along gender lines. For example, in “ Female Hunters of the Early Americas ,” anthropologist Randy Haas writes that, “Analysis of Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene burial practices throughout the Americas situate [this archaeological site] as the earliest and most secure hunter burial in a sample that includes 10 other females in statistical parity with early male hunter burials. The findings are consistent with non-gendered labor practices in which early hunter-gatherer females were big-game hunters.”) In 2021, neuroscientists published results of a metasynthesis of three decades of research, which discovered that brain function differences were not gender driven but were, in fact, much more reflective of place and culture. And, incidentally, those small scale studies that pointed to the differences between female and male brains had created their own cultural narratives, privileging false data to enhance chances of publication. Lead researcher Lise Eliot summarizes the implications  of these biases in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews , stating, "Sex differences are sexy, but this false impression that there is such a thing as a 'male brain' and a 'female brain' has had wide impact on how we treat boys and girls, men and women.”  Finally, DNA research is increasingly clarifying that chromosomes that build gender are both plentiful and nuanced. From an article in Scientific American  entitled “Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic : What’s more, new technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match that of the rest of their body. Some studies even suggest that the sex of each cell drives its behaviour, through a complicated network of molecular interactions. Even when voices call to push against the hierarchies embedded in these definitions of gender and turn them around, they tend only to challenge their definition, not their existence. One luminous example of this is writer/ecologist/mythographer Sophie Strand’s book The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine . She makes an eloquent case to break past our stereotypes regarding what may be encompassed when defining something or someone as masculine. And in doing so, she evokes everything from Merlin to mycelium.  Why does this matter? By embracing this binary, we fail to understand the depth and complexity of what makes humans, of any gender, tick. As mythologists, we are in danger of succumbing to the temptation to define archetypes as narratives that feel comfortable, clean, and well defined, reducing them to stereotypes instead of embracing the superb discomfort of the “both/and” inherent in careful mythological thought. As a culture, we condemn individuals to be marginalized, defining them by roles that serve extant power structures rather than inviting and empowering a deeper comprehension of what they can accomplish and what they may contribute to society.  In closing, I’d like to invite you to reread that cloud of words at the beginning of this piece, consciously imagine them containing the gender that didn’t reflexively ring true, and examine how that feels. And then read them again, this time extracting any sense of gender from them. What changes? As Walt Whitman said in Song of Myself , “I am large. I contain multitudes.”

"Women Playing Music" Giovanni Boccaccio, Early 15th century, Public domain The JCF theme this month of lovers, against the background of Campbell’s early academic work on medieval literature, has provided an opening for me to examine how gaining access to personal and creative autonomy directly invites otherwise marginalized voices to sing. It is in these moments, I believe that mythos  can exist as a breathing, fluid force that moves both individuals and cultures forward, rather than serving as a reductive cultural tool.    Trobairitz  is a medieval Provençal word, the feminine of troubadour , and descends from the root, trobar , meaning “to find.” The trobairitz, women troubadours, lived in Occitania, now known as Provence, at the end of the twelfth century into the beginning of the thirteenth century. There are twenty women known to have been writing during this period in Occitania, from whom twenty-three poems still exist.    Some of the trobairitz were described in the vidas  of the troubadours, a collection of often fanciful biographies written by medieval historians. From such writings, as well as the names and connections of the women, it is evident that they were aristocrats, patronesses of male troubadours, and often closely personally connected to troubadours. Eleanor of Aquitaine, grand patroness of troubadour poetry, was the granddaughter of Guillelm de Poitiers, the first recorded troubadour, and Marie de Champagne, Eleanor's daughter, hosted acclaimed stylized “Courts of Love.” Additionally, trobairit z  Maria de Ventadour was the wife of Viscount Ebles de Ventadour, one in a long family line of troubadours, and Tibors was the sister of Rimbaut d'Orange. In addition, several of the women actually wrote tensons  (arguments in poetic form) in conjunction with male troubadours. It is reasonable to conclude that the trobairitz were more than passingly familiar with the conventions and expectations of troubadour poetry. Unlike the jongleurs, the traveling minstrels of medieval Occitania, the troubadours and trobairitz were both of aristocratic stature, arbiters as well as creators of their culture. They existed in a culture that was emerging from the Dark Ages, with extraordinary wealth and accompanying sophistication, but one that hardly demonstrated open-armed acceptance of women. How then, while the women obviously knew what to write, did it occur to them that they, indeed, could write? While there were other women scattered throughout the Middle Ages whose writings have survived, their works were letters and journals, intended for private use. How then was it possible that a group of women who lived in an area of about a fifty-mile radius within about fifty years of one another could create their own literary tradition?   There are several factors that probably had some effect on both situations. In general, in the Middle Ages women were nonpeople; they “were virtual nonentities who counted only insofar as they were good for bringing sons into the world.” (Bogin, Meg . The Women Troubadours , p. 22) Whether peasant or aristocrat, they had virtually no rights and were wards of either their father, their lord, or the church throughout their lifetimes. Marriages were, largely, economic contracts. Romantic love was far from the epicenter of married life.    Women were rarely allowed to own property, but one of the differentiating aspects of Occitanian culture from the rest of medieval France was the existence of the Theodosian Code. “The Theodosian Code of 394–95 … was brought to Occitania by the Visigoth invaders of the sixth century. This code gave sons and unmarried daughters an equal share in their father's estate.” (ibid, 23) While from contemporary records it is obvious that this code was not followed on a general basis, it still provided some legal background for a certain amount of female autonomy.   By far, however, the single greatest influence on the women of Occitania was the onslaught of the Crusades. The Crusades provided a drain of men to the East, in search of adventure, riches, and religious rewards. “If contemporary records are to be believed, some 60,000 men took part in the first siege of Jerusalem in 1099. The next hundred years would bring four more Crusades: in 1146, 1189, 1204, and 1217.” (ibid, 33) Increasingly, then, women were placed in positions of responsibility and authority out of necessity, for there were gaps to be filled in leadership and governing left by the absent lords of realms. “The most immediate effect of the drastic reduction in the male population was to place women in direct control of fiefs that had been previously run by men” (ibid, 35). With that responsibility came an increased sense of freedom and self-worth, and women in Occitania began to not merely listen to the songs of troubadours and through patronage color the language, concepts, and intent of the poetry, but instead began to write it themselves. This lasted really only as long as the Crusades lasted. Bogin writes, “It is clear … that the women troubadours belonged to a uniquely favored generation. There was no comparable flourishing of women poets in any other areas where troubadour poetry took hold … nor had there been in Occitania before the women troubadours nor was there after them.” (ibid, 36)   While there indeed were similarities in the poetry of men and women in medieval Occitania, of more interest are the differences, which were extensive. Male troubadours wrote of idealized love, of fin amor , and of accompanying idealized ladies, but the women were much more down to earth. They spoke with less abstraction, much more directness. They were speaking intimately and passionately to real, individualized men. One of the most obvious aspects in which that directness materializes is the trobairitz's address of sexuality. While with the men it was either idealized love, even a platonic love for the good of the soul that characterizes fin amor , or ribald wordplay utilized in jeuc d'amor , for the women sexuality was a many-faceted, often harsh reality. Duke Guillelm was willing to play word games with sex in his discussions of the jeuc d'amor  with thinly veiled references to the size of his dice, two of which “were well-squared, valid / but the third was loaded.” ( The Poetry of William VII, Count of Poitiers, IX Duke of Aquitaine . ed and trans, Gerard A. Bond, 55)   Conversely, the Comtessa de Dia cries longingly, “If only I could lie beside you for an hour and embrace you lovingly.  Know this, that I'd give almost anything to have you in my husband's place ...”  Later in the same poem, she bitterly says:   Now I've seen that I've been betrayed  Because I wouldn't sleep with him. Night and day my mind won't rest To think of the mistake I made. (Bogin, 89)   Sex is not a game to the Comtessa, nor a place where she quietly submits to her lord's will.   Equality, both sexual and social, was treated differently by the men and women in medieval poetry. Many of the male troubadours engaged in fulsome flattery of their imaginary perfect ladies within a very feudal form. They positioned themselves as vassals, to be used and/or given away as their lady pleased. This was a mildly humorous and ironic posture for the male troubadours, for they were not in reality subject to any such response from women. For the trobairitz, however, this hit too close to home, and their attitudes differ as a result. Maria de Ventadour, in her tenson  with Gui d'Ussel arguing about equality within a courtly relationship, states:    The lover ought to do her bidding As toward a friend and lover equally, And she should honor him the way  She would a friend, but never as a lord. (Bogin, 101)   A number of the other poets have a yearning for equality, and often merely for a sense of being taken seriously.     Ultimately, the trobairitz emerge as individual, independent women who want to be acknowledged as such, involved in real relationships with all of their inherent joys, frustrations, and pitfalls. They write of joy and desire, heartbreak, and betrayal. Many of the trobairitz’s poems tackle the concept of joy, in many of its colorings; a tradition originating with Guillelm de Poitiers in his discussions of joi e joven , joy and youth, but adding their own sense of immediacy and vibrancy. Additionally, some of the poems, most notably one by Azalais de Porcairagues, have a lyrical natural description, wherein nature itself becomes a player in the relationship. She writes, in perhaps one of the most beautiful moments in the poetry of the trobairitz:   Now we are come to the cold time  When the ice and the snow and the mud And the birds' beaks are mute (For not one inclines to sing;) And the hedge branches are dry - No leaf or bud sprouts up Nor cries the nightingale Whose song awakens me in May .  (Bogin, 95)   These wants and joys, angers and hurts, echo in our perceptions of romantic love today. Women, in a moment of opening into a sense of self-authorship, found a way to articulate the realities of their lives. They reworked their cultural narratives, challenging both medieval and modern patriarchal assumptions about the power and relevance of their voices. In a parallel opening, the power of the trobairitz’s insights were rediscovered by predominantly female scholars after the first stirrings of modern feminism, who broke past the dominant scholarly narrative that this poetry had far less worth than what had been written by men.   The creative work of the trobairitz serves as an invitation to seek out other sidelined voices to better understand how they carry metaphor and myth forward in ways that strengthen individuals and communities. And as we assess our own access—and barriers—to power in our lives, this poetry and the women who found the courage to write it can serve as inspirations to embolden our own individual voices.