As we celebrate Joseph Campbell’s birthday this month, we can use the occasion to consider the mythological roots of our rituals of celebration. Sometimes we celebrate a one-time occasion, like a college graduation, getting a new job or promotion, or the victory of one’s favorite sports team. Nothing mythical there. But our more important celebrations take the form of our seasonal holidays, most of which have ancient mythical roots. New Year’s Day, for example, is ultimately based on ancient creation myths—what we celebrate is the re-creation. Easter is based on the mythical motif of death and rebirth, as also reflected in the transition from winter to spring, an event that has spawned its own myths. Christmas celebrates the mythical figure of the divine child, and also the return of the sun beginning at the winter solstice, hence Christ being in part a solar hero who is forever reborn. Groundhog Day derives from the mythology of hibernating bears, holding the promise of spring and rebirth. You get the picture. Most of our festivals originated either as a part of religion or in connection with the annual cycle of nature and its effect on human activities. In Northern Europe, May Day/Beltane marked the beginning of summer, when livestock were sent out to pasture. On the eve of that holiday, the veils between the ordinary world and the supernatural Otherworld were thin, and potentially troublesome mythological divine beings were active, so bonfire and other rituals were held to protect households, livestock, and crops. These days, however, people don’t live as close to nature and are not so concerned about it, so holidays based on nature such as May Day have understandably faded. Similarly, with the decline of traditional religion, religious holidays (or at least their religious aspects) have either become less important, or have been transformed partly into something else and have been commercialized. Holidays used to be communal affairs that strengthened human bonds within what Campbell called the “mythologically instructed community,” and socialized people into sharing community values and responsibilities, leading to what the anthropologist Victor Turner called communitas. In turn, this process supported the individual. Formerly the important communities were villages and church congregations, which often amounted to the same thing. In today’s urbanized society where we hardly know our next-door neighbor and most of our acquaintances are from the workplace—usually a commercial organization with commercialized values in which employees are disposable and come and go—we lack this former sense of community, meaning that holidays no longer serve this communal function, except within the family. Nevertheless, even in our modern secular culture, our holiday celebrations remain a refuge, because they are just about the only occasions on which we all drop our everyday routines in order to live, albeit briefly, in sacred time. What are we to do with it? What, for example, to do with Christmas now that virtually all scholars outside the fundamentalist/evangelical orbit recognize that the stories of the birth of Jesus in Matthew and Luke never happened that way? In the final chapter of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell addresses this situation where the mysteries associated with the old myths have been lost. Unlike ancient people, we no longer view animals with reverence, nor is the reappearance of vegetation in the spring or the growth of crops a divine process. Even that last refuge of the divine mystery, the heavens, has been found to be susceptible to explanation by science. These trends affect our holidays and how we can celebrate them. The communities in which holidays used to be celebrated and given meaning either no longer exist or are declining. Essentially, we are left only with the human community of the whole planet on the one hand, and the individual on the other. While it is important for the entire human community to come together as one for many purposes, when it comes to celebrating sacred time on holidays the individual is paramount. Campbell recognized that the human psyche is both our most important remaining mystery and the realm in which one can experience the divine in sacred time and space, even in the conditions of contemporary society. Easter, for example, can inspire us to crucify our egos and so resurrect our self. Groundhog Day can be similar, as we learned from the Bill Murray film. On Christmas we should experience the incarnation of the “divine” within ourselves, and the divine child within us. When we do this, we can transform ourselves. It is a hero’s quest. And thus transformed, we can return from a holiday to the everyday world as heroes and better help transform it, too. So let’s make the most of our celebrations.

One of my favorite quotes by Joseph Campbell, in Myths to Live By, refers to Love as the burning point of life. When he elaborates, what we come to understand is that life is sorrowful, and so is love. And there you have it, the essence of romantic love is found in its duality as both fiery passion and sorrowful experience. Campbell tells us that in order to understand love, we must turn to the Troubadours of the twelfth century who sang and practiced l’amour courtois or courtly love, which is to say romantic love, the meeting of the eyes between two people. In Medieval Europe, marriage was a political and familial affair under strict oversight by the church. Women were commodities, property to be used in exchange for power or land or higher status in the society. But in the twelfth century, one woman endeavored to change that. Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204 ce) wanted women to be treated with respect, not as property. She wanted change for herself and for other women. I believe l’amour courtois (courtly love) and chivalry were born out of this desire. The love of your beloved was akin to spiritual love. A man was meant to devote all of his most daring and chivalrous deeds to her who was not his wife, but the romantic ideal of his heart. That is what made him truly a knight. Eleanor herself was a remarkable woman who chose her destiny, becoming queen of France, then had her marriage annulled (unheard of in those times, as women were either gotten rid of by poison, or sent off to a convent), and helped Henri de Plantagenet, Duke of Normandy, become king of England, and she his queen. She brought the ideal of romantic love to both courts, and outlived both her husbands and most of her sons. She was a woman for the ages. She was a transgressor on behalf of women and in the name of love. In a story from the same period, Joe Campbell saw the romance of Tristan and Iseult as one of the great archetypal stories of romantic love. It is also, however, a story of transgression. When Tristan came to fetch Iseult to be married to King Mark, the two fell in love. Their love was considered treason, blasphemous and punishable by death. Tristan’s reaction when he learned his fate was to say, “This agony of love is my life and I accept death, I accept burning in the eternal fires of Hell if need be for that love” (Gottfried of Strassburg, Tristan, 165) Taking this lesson one step further, when we choose to love the one we were taught to hate, we change the world. How about an Irish Catholic loving a Protestant or a Palestinian loving an Israeli? How about a black man loving a white woman in the South in the sixties or an Orthodox Jew loving a Muslim? One of my own students, a beautiful and smart young woman is the result of such a love. Love is the greatest agent of change, it is the heart of change, and it often represents a betrayal of the old order. Fairy tales often refer to this transgression as “opening the forbidden door.” From the abolition of slavery to the civil rights movements to LGBTQ+ rights, if men did not love each other, if women did not love each other, if people of different races did not fall in love with each other, change would not happen. Couples throughout history have broken down barriers and changed the laws that oppressed groups of people.  Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter Loving were such a couple. They wanted to marry and live in their home state of Virginia. The case of Loving ( what a perfect last name!) v. the State of Virginia (1967) is a landmark civil rights decision of the United States Supreme Court which invalidates laws prohibiting interracial marriage. To me, it represents the heart of the civil rights movement and the need to transgress against laws and rules that violate the rights of human beings. Love has contributed to change in all areas of our lives. Parents fighting for their disabled children’s rights changed things. Catholic and Protestant mothers marching together, out of love for their sons and daughters in Ireland, changed things.  People loving the Earth have changed things. When we dare to love, we expand our field of awareness to encompass something other than ourselves. We grow as human beings. When we love another enough to remind them of who they truly are, we shine a light that can heal the world. As Norwegian novelist Arne Garborg put it, “To love someone is to learn the song of their heart and sing it to them when they have forgotten.”

In Creative Mythology (Masks of God, Vol. IV), Joseph Campbell’s exquisite musings on love offer a palliative to the Hallmark-style simulacrum of Valentine’s Day love drenching this month in heart-shaped candies, teddy bears, and flowers. Why not gift your love Campbell’s Creative Mythology, (CM), open up the text to any of the stories, and have a deep conversation? What Campbell give us is the larger story of the archetypal love story as inextricably connected to the story of our becoming. He offers us the Nietszchean ideal of amor fati, the love of our own fate, a strategy with which to face the Hellenic idea of fate as given and unchangeable. Amor fati is a deep acceptance in the face of the irresistible experience of falling in love, and Campbell sees this love of fate emerging in the Grail legends of the twelfth century. These ideas are heavy. They quite literally organize the understanding of our identities as they unfold through time. The big idea is that our unfolding relationship to love organizes our identity and shows us who we are in light of the choices that we make. Thus we find our story of becoming by witnessing how we behave in the face of the experience of falling in love. In this way our love story becomes our story of becoming. What we discover in this process shows us what is in our hearts vs. who we’ve been told to be. If we can fall in love with what is in our hearts and live out of that truth we have amor fati as opposed to a fate given to us by the gods or society. Our story emerges from within rather than being forced upon us from without. The stories Campbell tells are the great Grail legends, Tristan and Isolde and Parzival. They road map the relationship to how we find beauty, love, and the divine. The stories model what happens when we experience love and how it can go wrong in Tristan and Isolde, and right in Parzival. The difference lies in whether or not we are true to what we find in the experience of love. “Love is born of the eyes,” says Campbell, “in the world of day, in a moment of aesthetic arrest, but opens within to a mystery of night” (CM, 186). This is the love story in a nutshell. We all know Act I of this story. It’s the experience we’ve all already had in our first crush, with butterflies in the belly and a racing heart beat the moment “the One” walks into the room. Yet we focus overly on Act I, as if falling in love is the whole story, when it is merely the call to adventure. What happens next, says Campbell, is an opening “within to the mystery of night.” So love is never just love. Love is an experience of liebestod, love-death and its consequences. Creative Mythology helps us to unpack what this inextricable binding of love and death is all about. The scene where Tristan and Isolde accidently drink a love potion embodies this idea, the moment when Act II begins. Before they were not in love, and now they are. They will never be the same. Tristan and Isolde have become become Tristan-Isolde. In an instant they are re-ordered in their relationship to one another, revolving around the axis of one-another. The shift is not just on the outside. It is at every level of their being and their biographies. Past, present, and future, re-organized. Now begins the death part. The magical middle of the love story. In Tristan and Isolde, you, me, being re-ordered, we have to deal with having the world we knew shattered. Our relationship to the past is changed. All of our assumptions about what’s true and real are now up for debate. What follows is a line of questioning: who am I going to be in light of this experience? What values am I going to live from? What can I take responsibility for? It is in this way that the two acts of the love story, the love-death, reveal the character within us, first by fate and next by choice. Campbell explains: “Love is born of the eyes and heart…it opens inward towards the mystery of character, destiny, and worth, and at the same time outward, toward the world and the wonder of beauty, where it sets the lover at odds, however, with the moral order” (CM, 187). Can we shift out of focusing on our origin stories of falling in love to ask ourselves about Act II? Not just love. But love-death? What did we discover about who we are in the face of the experience of falling in love? What was shattered? And what truth emerged? How are we living out of this noble heart? I promise Creative Mythology will help you understand this larger story of living myth.

The theme for the month of February at JCF is love, and February, with Valentine’s Day at its heart, is certainly the month to celebrate love. But there is another event every February that Americans love with an unrivaled intensity: The Super Bowl®. It is anticipated that somewhere around 115 million Americans, nearly one out of three, will watch as the Patriots and the Rams face each other on the field of battle this Sunday, the third of February. How mythically laden was that last, apparently innocuous sentence? The associations constellated by the idea of Patriots, those who fight nobly and fiercely to defend and preserve their society and its ideals, its way of life, arise almost reflexively. Then there are the Rams, an animal familiar to many mythologies. The agile, sure-footed, powerful, even explosive creatures were the models for the battering ram which, Pliny tells us, was first used at Troy.  And finally, it all takes place on a Sunday, the day traditionally set aside for religious worship in this predominantly Christian nation. We ignore the archetypal influence the names of things have at our peril; could the ship christened the Titanic have suffered any other fate than the one invited by a name that Greek mythology associates with hubris, short-sightedness, and eventual consignment to a deep abyss (Tartarus)? Likewise, it's hard to imagine the Tennessee Titans ever being know as "America's Team," or establishing a winning Super Bowl record. The NFL insists, by the way, on calling the championship game Super Bowl LIII because Roman numerals call to mind the Olympic Games, thereby aligning the American football championship with a more venerable and myth-laden event; such a linking to tradition is one of the central functions of ritual. Another function of a ritual is its ability to transcend the mundane, prosaic world and transport one—through actions, words, images, or sounds—to a contained, metaphorical world which makes intuitive sense, has discernible order and rules, and offers up its delights. Still another quality of a ritual is its power to draw people together, creating a sense of community and shared purpose. There can be no doubt the Super Bowl is a powerful, wildly popular secular ritual. I think that it isn’t too much of a reach to compare American football to warfare. Football has air attacks, ground attacks, blitzes, long bombs and bullet passes, and defensive and offensive linemen battle each other in the trenches. Teams wear distinctive uniforms augmented with a kind of armor, they enter the field to stimulating music and partisan encouragement, and they publish weekly casualty reports identifying their fallen comrades. Developed in the late Victorian age, American football — especially college football — was seen as a way of maintaining in young American men a military readiness in times of peace. It was also the case in the 19th Century, that war itself was often treated as a spectator sport. While it may seem strange to modern sensibilities, during the Civil War it was a popular activity for people to pack enough food and drink for the day and venture near to the battlefield, find a comfortable spot with a reasonable view, and take in the battle as though one was witnessing an athletic event. Heraclitus noted that Polemos, War, is the father of all things, and in that formulation we find our fascination with it. Heraclitus knew that war makes some individuals free and others slaves, constitutes individual and national identities and alliances, restructures economic realities, and demythologizes and destroys some cultures while reinvigorating and enshrining others. Distinguishing oneself on the field of battle was once a time-honored pathway to success and glory in public life, especially for those not lucky enough to be born aristocrats. War has a strong appeal to the atavistic and tribal aspect of the human unconscious, and the ritual of warfare has so far been impossible for humans to dispense with. It's influence expresses in sport, albeit in an attenuated and domesticated form, yet it still possesses the power to excite shadowy and pitilessly brutal impulses. In contemporary life the paths to success, social distinction, fame, and wealth are still far too few for far too many, and risking one’s health and later cognitive function playing a punishing sport may seem to be a reasonable wager.  Gruesome damage to the body and the brain (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) remains disconcertingly frequent in football. Despite the fact that sometimes shocking violence has not been entirely eliminated from the game—deaths, regularly numbering in the double digits during the years of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, are unlikely now—it’s hard to imagine what ambitious first-round draft pick, young and soon to be wealthy, hungry for success in the NFL, would pass up a chance at glory. They would, I am sure, understand Achilles’ reasoning on the plain of Troy: “If I hold out here and lay siege to Troy my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies” (Book 9, The lliad). Thanks for reading,

In his 1944 preface to A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Joseph Campbell calls Joyce’s book “…a kind of terminal moraine in which lie buried all the myths, programs, slogans, hopes, prayers, tools, educational theories, and theological bric-a-brac of the past millennium” (xxiii). It’s apropos, then, that Joyce’s main character in Finnegan’s Wake is named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, HCE, or as Joyce refers to him, Here Comes Everyone. HCE is, himself, a terminal moraine in human form. When Finnegans Wake was published in 1939 (you can see what an early enthusiast Campbell was) many critics didn’t know what to make of it. Vladimir Nabokov, for instance, thought Ulysses to be the finest book of the 20th century, but found Finnegans Wake to be “formless and dull,” “a tragic failure,” and “a frightful bore.” I think that Nabokov may have been wrong in his assessment of Wake, though absolutely right in his admiration for Ulysses. In Finnegans Wake, it might seem that Joyce abandons any regard for his readers. It’s hard to find any narrative traction, and while Wake may be wrought from the English language, it is certainly not written in English, but rather in some strange, “Nichtian glossery which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues”; as Joyce writes, “ this is nat language in any sinse of the world” (Finnegans Wake, 83). But Campbell found traction, and boy, did he ever: “Underneath the verbal ambiguities and philologic traps of the Wake, deep speaks to deep about such everyday matters as marital discord, sibling strife, military slaughter, racial violence, theological differences and financial thimblerigging—fascinating material that academicians (at their peril) fail to discuss or continue to ignore” (Skeleton Key, xxvi). What’s more, Campbell sensed the profound influence the work of Friedrich Nietzsche exerted upon Joyce: “Nietzsche’s description of his own creative struggle, 'I write in blood, I will be read in blood,' is applicable tenfold to Joyce” (Skeleton Key, 360). But I’ll return to that “Nichtian”  influence in a moment. Perhaps it may seem odd, then, that the only thing approaching a ritual that I’ve associated with the arrival of the new year in the past two decades or so is reading from Finnegans Wake. At some point, near the end of December or the beginning of January, I read the last lines of Wake and let it bear me serenely along like the Liffey, “So soft this morning, ours” and a bit later, “End here. Us then. Finn, again!” And finally, Joyce tells me I have the key to the whole thing: “A way a lone a last a loved a long the” and thus endeth Finnegans Wake. But in this book, as it almost certainly is in life, the end is not really the end. This understanding is the key to life that Joyce offers his readers. That last sentence of the book is the first part of the sentence that begins the novel: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs” (Finnegans Wake, 3). That is the nature of mythic time: circular, recurring, non-linear. There are no beginnings or endings, only the eternally recurring flow. Circling back to Nietzsche’s influence on Joyce, we arrive at the notion of eternal recurrence, an idea central to Nietzsche’s philosophy. Eternal recurrence suggests that since time is infinite, while the things in time (atoms and events) are finite, events—your life, exactly as you have lived it—will recur again and again and again, innumerable times. As Nietzsche remarked, how well disposed to oneself one would have to be to crave nothing more than this and be able to say, “and never have I heard anything more divine” (The Gay Science, section 341)! This is radical self-acceptance; not merely bearing the circumstances of one’s life because it is necessary that one does, but to love it! That’s the move Nietzsche called Amor Fati, the love of one’s own fate, perhaps the most burdensome, the most awesome, of our responsibilities to ourselves. Saying—no, shouting—yes! to life is the primal response to life. The eternal yes is not a call to reformation or redemption, but rather a response to life exactly as it is, embracing the creative, sustaining, destructive nature of life itself. It’s Molly Bloom’s Yes at the end of Ulysses, and likewise, in Finnegans Wake, Anna Livia Plurabelle is, as Campbell notes, “the carrier of the Eternal Yes; […] Men, cities, empires, and whole systems bubble and burst in her river of time” (Skeleton Key, 362). As it is with dreams, the more we live with them, reflect upon them, marvel at the symbols and puzzles of them, the more meaningful to us they become. And so it is with Joyce's dream of a book, Finnegans Wake.And, as I find with most symbolic puzzles, Campbell stands alongside, enthusiastically pointing the way.

The Role of Story in Crafting New Beginnings for Our Lives Most attribute the foundations of Western story structure to Aristotle. His simple idea that stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an end has long served as the template for how narratives have been communicated. Joseph Campbell, by contrast, wisely popularized the idea that the narrative journey was actually a cycle — that every ending brought forth new beginnings, that every death brought forth resurrection and new life. Growing up in East Texas, our family participated in the cultural ritual of composting. For the uninitiated, composting involves the return of food scraps and other organic disposables to the earth. Compost piles look disgusting to the untrained eye. They are a mass of rot and decay covered by insects and scavengers that manage to find something useful from what has been discarded. While the process of composting is the very picture of death, it is also essential to bringing forth and maintaining the ecosystem of life. The insects that feed on the rotting food become food themselves for birds and other animals who become food for other creatures further up the food chain. The cycle of death and resurrection continues. What is not consumed by the animals becomes fertilizer for other plants, which also becomes food for animals and humans alike. From death comes life. From what has passed, a new story emerges. Many of us are considering new beginnings in this first month of 2019. Too often, we imagine these beginnings as emerging from a blank slate. Most frequently, however, new beginnings are actually the reemergence of seeds that had long ago fallen to their death and been buried beneath the surface. Similarly, our stories move from ending celebrations to new initiations, eventually directing us toward a final ending for our own stories . . . Or is it? In the introduction to Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: Joseph Campbell on the Art of James Joyce, Campbell considers a curious Latin phrase that Joyce opens with from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “et ignotas animum dimittit in artes.” The phrase refers to Daedalus and is taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book 8, Line 188). Campbell tells us it is translated, “. . . and he turns his mind to unknown arts” (Mythic Worlds, 11). He goes on to remind us that Daedalus was the master craftsman that fashioned the labyrinth. In Metamorphoses, we learn he turned his mind to unknown arts and crafted wax wings that allowed him to fly away from Crete and the firm hand of King Minos. Theorists have offered a number of different ideas about what Ovid might have been getting at with the phrase “unknown arts.” Does unknown, in this case, refer to Daedalus’ choice to learn a new artform he wasn’t already proficient at? He learned a craft unknown to him in order to construct his wings. We could say, he learned to tell a new story. Campbell laments the fact that most conversations about the flight of the artist tend to center on Daedalus’s son, Icarus, and ignore him altogether, since in many ways, where Icarus failed, Daedalus succeeded. Campbell concludes by theorizing that Joyce referenced the Latin phrase because at heart he was an optimist who believed in “the capacity of a competent artist to achieve release” (Mythic Worlds, 11). We find story at the core of every art form, both known and unknown to us. Storytelling empowers us to charge into the cyclical patterns of our own life, believing that a better chapter may be waiting on the other side of the darkness. Where a previous year might have brought struggle, heartbreak, or even tragedy, an inherent drive within us draws our eyes toward the horizon and causes us to consider the possibilities that may lie beyond the horizon if we can stir up the courage to craft new wings and fly towards it. Perhaps there is new release waiting, as Campbell and Joyce believed. Perhaps there are unseen allies, mentors, and strategic partners just around the bend in our journey, if we only turn our mind to unknown arts and rise to believe what might be possible in the new beginning we just collectively experienced. Many of us long for a new story— a better story—in this new year. May we rise together, finding fresh narratives, enchanting opportunities, and the tools to craft new wings. Thank you for reading,

I recently had the pleasure of reading Michelle Obama’s Becoming—a story, eponymously, about Michelle’s “becoming,” grateful for the accessibility of an autobiography that models the unfolding nature of finding one’s purpose. I think how different the experience of this text is from the one my father gave me as a teenager: James Joyce’s Ulysses. Nothing was accessible about Ulysses. It took me until I was Odysseus’ age to finally understand that Ulysses, like Michelle’s story, is also about becoming. Except the metaphor Ulysses employs is the familiar motif of western becoming stories, popular since the Hebrew Bible and the Homeric epics: fathers and sons. Sons become fathers. And fathers, midway through life, when they have forgotten their younger selves, need sons, so that they can become mentors. My key to understanding Ulysses lay in Joseph Campbell’s explications, primarily in his lectures. I began to see that perhaps the whole point of wrestling with Joyce was learning how to read comparatively. That the difficulty of the text was in fact the test of my initiation into an artist-as-intellectual. This ideal was instilled in me by my genius composer of a father. It was to be achieved through a reading of the greats: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Joyce. I’d slept in Dad’s floor-to-ceiling library as a teenager dreaming that one day, I’d be as well-read. In retrospect, all that reading was about me looking to connect to my father, Fred Myrow — just like Stephen Daedalus and Telemachus before me. But Ulysses held a special place for Dad. Two decades before I took on Joyce, Jim Morrison, the rock icon of the 1960’s, also sought to connect to my father, and did so through Ulysses. In 1969, Jim was on the top of the rock world and Dad on the top of classical world as composer in residence at the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein. When they met, Jim told Dad that if he didn’t “find some way to transform, all he’d be good for was nostalgia.” Both Jim and my dad were inhabiting a kind of a wasteland fashioned from somebody else’s vision of success, causing them to suffer like the Grail King. Seeing in one another the living myth of the artist-as-intellectual, they decided to collaborate. Jim and Dad dreamed up a Wagnerian vision of the Gesamptwerke, the total art work, in a rock opera. But first Jim had to read up, in order to catch up to my Dad. When Dad left for Ireland for 6 months to score a film, Jim sublet Dad’s house to read through his library. At the end of it, Jim came to Dad with Ulysses. They would tell the story again for our time: a Vietnam Vet travels through a night-time Los Angeles odyssey. Jim’s last meeting in the States was with Dad on this project, before he left for Paris, right before he died. The unfinished project haunted Dad. I picked up writing the libretto with Dad just before he, like Jim, unexpectedly died. The difference between Dad and Jim wielding a revisioning of Ulysses and me was that I used Campbell’s tools and tricks as a way in.  Through Campbell I understood that the theme Jim and Dad wanted to take on was really about their own becoming and getting stuck along the way. My surprising insight into my father and Jim was that they didn’t seem to have understood the myth they were living. And I wondered if you need to see the patterns of your myth to tell your story. I didn’t know anything back then about what it feels like to be in the middle of your life and lost. When I finally did hit that point, I knew exactly what it was because I’d read about it and even tried to write about it for Dad and Jim. That’s when the metaphors of ten-year odysseys, shipwrecks on islands of shadow lives where the only thing you can do is story-tell about past adventures, became my living myth. That’s when I discovered the only way through the crises at the center of our lives is to tell our stories so that our past experiences make sense. This is the story Michelle tells, Joyce tells and Campbell explicates. It is the story of living myth that you, too are living, as you go about your becoming You.

This month, the first month of the new year, we begin again; and beginning again is, in fact, our theme for January at JCF. No doubt we’ll soon be inundated by numberless lists extolling the best and worst of the year just past, predictions for the coming year, and resolutions for change that will become causes of fleeting and somewhat rueful) self-judgment by March. The new year arrives, as it always does, its monthly waves beating against the shoals of our lives, and we collectively carry on, content to limit the erosion and not to be entirely washed away. Generally, people don’t ask why they live as they do—at least they don’t ask why with genuine curiosity. Why, if it is uttered at all, is uttered as a lament. In the play The Man of La Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes says the men he saw die, …died despairing. No glory, no brave last words, only their eyes, filled with confusion, questioning ‘Why?’ I don’t think they were asking why they were dying, but why they had ever lived. When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams—this may be madness. (The Man of La Mancha). Perhaps “Why?” is entirely the wrong question to be asking. The important question to ask is, “Who?” Who am I? Who am I told to be? Who will I be tomorrow, ten years from now, or who will I be when I die? Who do I want to be? Who is it within me that aspires, dreams, creates, laughs, weeps, and loves? Searching for answers to similar questions, C.G. Jung once asked himself, “But then what is your myth—the myth in which you do live?” (Memories, Dreams and Reflections) Joseph Campbell said that Jung regarded the discovery of the answer to this question as the task of all tasks, and the exploration of that question is why Campbell liked to spend his birthdays at the Esalen Institute in California, once remarking, “That’s what a birthday is for, and that’s what Esalen is about” (jcforg.kinsta.cloud). After his death, his friends continued to gather at Esalen for what they called “Campbell Week,” a tradition that has since evolved into a “play shop” called Revisioning Your Hero’s Journey®: A Mythological Toolbox, which will be held this year at Esalen the week of March 24-29, 2019. The play shop is led by Joseph Campbell Foundation President, Bob Walter. Bob is a theatrical playwright and director, an educator, a publisher, and he was Joseph Campbell’s friend and editor for over a decade. Through a range of deceptively playful exercises, participants remember and explore significant life events, and discover how the mythologizing of those events organize one’s own life narrative. Bob’s masterly facilitation of the exercises he’s honed over years of practice allows one to realize that one’s life isn’t accidental, it isn’t the result of some sort of supernaturally assigned destiny. Rather, he self is formed from a mythologized narrative woven together from the constellations of biological and environmental manifestations, social learning, and personal perspectives. Inescapably, we are the protagonists in our own narratives, the heroes of our own, personal mythology. The hero is the metaphor of self-discovery, struggling with inner demons and monsters, bringing the light of consciousness to inner darkness, trying to understand the forces that shaped and made one a self, a whole human being. Engaging with such a task, the larger realization always begins to dawn on us that in order to be truly heroic, the rewards of heroism—its boons, its knowledge, its gifts—must somehow be shared with one’s larger community. True heroism does not result simply in personal gain, it generates communitas, a transformative cultural moment that elevates and values community members equally. Communitas is a powerful force that, as Aeschylus put it, makes gentle the life of this world. As the Toolbox week progresses one realizes that one’s group has been transformed into a communitas, a small, supportive, transformative commonwealth that serves to connect one not only to others in the group, but to one’s deeper values and ideals, to our humanity itself. We have it in our power to begin our world again; we have the power to recreate, to gleefully, heedless of the old order and convention, rewrite the mythology of ourselves. This is what one may find in the Mythological Toolbox, a new world and a new self, hiding in plain sight, and just waiting for the emerging, experienced craftsman of the self, with the proper vision and tools to set it in bold and beautiful relief.

The winter solstice approaches and soon the sun’s course will reach its lowest noon altitude and its shortest day, marking both the end and beginning of another solar year. Hence, this day aligns itself with transmutation, with endings and beginnings, with death and rebirth, both metaphorically and physically. Among other things, the sun is a symbol for consciousness because its light reveals what otherwise would not come to be known. Jungian psychology holds that the conscious attitude which the ego adopts toward life is arguably the chief component to psychological adaptation. And so I sat for some time, considering what would be a valuable direction or attitude through which to point the light of one’s conscious attention—and especially during a time when the process of new beginnings is being supported and enacted by the local cosmos. I eventually concluded that quality of life is a worthy direction—simply to live life well. Not so long ago I’d have called this the goal. But then I encountered Chogyam Trungpa’s liberating insight “The path is the goal.” This simple reminder steers one away from the future—from a concept which, true to its name, remains ever in the future. Whereas this very uncomplicated phrase speaks to training one’s attention on the constant (and indeed, inescapable) realm of the present—the eternal moment which is hardly a moment but rather a field in which the expressions of existence emerge, dissolve, and reemerge in a play of apparently ceaseless transmutation.  In this context, time can be defined as a conceptual invention that tracks transmutation through the field of the now. Living well is therefore a practice which can be accomplished at this very moment and only at this very moment. To the point at hand, the winter solstice is a relatively consistent event that rises and dissolves in a transmutation we label December 21st. The metaphysical nature and value of this event is aptly addressed in Joseph Campbell’s The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion. In brief, “outer space” denotes the dimension of matter—the tangible environment of physical reality we naturally perceive as outside ourselves; whereas “inner space” denotes the dimension of psyche—the subjective reality of interior experiences like gnosis, emotion, and meaning. Their interplay lays the foundations of human experience. Depending on one’s method of approach—that is, the hermeneutic and attitude one chooses to employ—personal and collective experience take on different levels of value and depth. Metaphor is a highly effective hermeneutic — a tool for unlocking communication and understanding — because it brings the outer and inner into relationship, translating outer phenomena into inner experience while simultaneously substantiating inner experience in the form of images. Or, to put it another way, image is the wardrobe of the immaterial—of energies, concepts, archetypes, emotions, psychological structures, and so forth. It is therefore fitting that Campbell opens his book with descriptive macrocosmic imagery: the stars and galaxies in which we somehow find ourselves, the Big Bang which brought forth, from infinite energetic density, substance. And all these are describing, through metaphor, the depth and vastness of the interior of the human psyche. The first observation in alchemical literature describes this relationship and comes to us from Hermes Trismegistus’ Tabula Smaragdina (The Emerald Tablet): “That which is below is like to that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing.” Surely, Campbell’s description of the universe addresses a much larger scale than does the winter solstice, but the metaphors remain consistent and true. Of course some readers may have better ideas for transmutations that are more valuable or appropriate than the one I came up with. For that is a matter of personal preference. What is of greatest importance is that there is a macrocosmic event that can help to precipitate and support through metaphor and natural law whatever it is one wishes to transmute in their own life. And for this author, living life well sounds like a worthwhile endeavor, to be lifted through a joint effort between personal consciousness and the sun, into rebirth, and into the new year.

1986 saw the publication of three seminal books: The Society of Mind by MIT cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky, On the Plurality of Worlds by philosopher David Lewis, and The Inner Reaches of Outer Space by mythologist Joseph Campbell. In their respective fields, each was grappling with what is commonly referred to as the problem of the One and the Many. Minsky, on the one hand, turned inward to come away with the theory that intelligence emerges from the cooperation of basic units, or agents, working in concert but also propagating a myth of a centralized Self: But if there is no single, central, ruling Self inside the mind, what makes us feel so sure that one exists? What gives that myth its force and strength? A paradox: perhaps it's because there are no persons in our heads to make us do the things we want—nor even ones to make us want to want—that we construct the myth that we're inside ourselves. (Minsky, The Society of Mind 4.2) Lewis, on the other hand, looked outward and posited, “There are so many other worlds, in fact, that absolutely every way that a world could possibly be is a way that some world is” (On the Plurality of Worlds, 2). Last but not least, Joseph Campbell attempted a more holistic, Heracleitian approach, considering seemingly conflicting opposites—the inner and the outer—as sharing in a deeper harmony communing in Soul and in Myth: There is a beautiful saying of Novalis: “The seat of the soul is there, where the outer and the inner worlds meet.” That is the wonderland of myth. From the outer world the senses carry images to the mind, which do not become myth, however, until there transformed by the fusion with accordant insights, awakened as imagination from the inner world of the body. (Campbell, Inner Reaches 5) Campbell placed a unique emphasis on the role of this “inner world of the body” in the production of myths: “For myths and dreams...are motivated from a single psychophysiological source—namely, the human imagination moved by the conflicting urgencies of the organs (including the brain) of the human body” (Inner Reaches, xiv). In the thirty-two years since these ambitious books were published, we have become increasingly influenced by advanced technologies able to model and mime our minds, bodies, and myths—not to mention our notions of Self. When Campbell sought a primary mythic image for future neo-mythology (i.e. a “global” mythology), he looked no further than those first images from NASA of an Earthrise on the Moon’s horizon (Inner Reaches, 18, see Figure 2). Centuries prior, Cicero related in book six of his De re publica the account of Scipio’s celestial journey in which he looks back at Earth as a sphere. In our time, we have not only that same photo, but also an interactive model produced from satellite imagery assembled in the form of Google Earth. With the added bonus of recent breakthroughs in virtual reality technology, one can even walk the globe with VR headsets via Google Earth VR, experiencing a mundane mystic mirage marketed as a virtual apotheosis (Adario Strange, “Google Earth VR is the godlike virtual reality experience we’ve been waiting for”). Technocrats, technicians, and designers are our mythmakers. Today we live with an abundance of possible worlds and cosmologies. Our pluralistic era hosts fervent devotees espousing a flat earth on the one hand and philosophers like Nick Bostrom presenting a 1/3 probability that we are living in a simulated construct on the other. The fragmentation of a single world has given rise to pixeled worlds and partisan myths. To the mythologist, these are simply mutharia, mini-myths, looking for germinal material from which to grow. And yet the world itself, according to some traditions, was once fashioned from the body of an ancestral deity or primordial being. Ancient cultures mapped Mundi with divine matter. The Apostle Paul spoke of the cosmic body of Christ, “For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another” (Romans 12:4-5). During the month of December the ancient Romans celebrated Saturnalia, replete with merriment and societal role-reversal to mark, perhaps, a brief restoration of Saturn’s Golden Age: an abundant and blissful era when gods and humans mingled. Today, our Silicon Age promises a singular salvation via ensoulment in cyberspace. But we risk mistaking parts for wholes. We’re beyond metaphor and meeting metonymy. We can still heed Campbell’s words: ...consciousness thinks it’s running the shop. But it’s a secondary organ of a total human being, and it must not put itself in control. It must submit and serve the humanity of the body. (Campbell, Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, 181)

There is a saying attributed to Hermes Trismegistus: “As above, so below; as within, so without” (The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean, p. 47). This means that whatever happens on any level of reality also happens on every other level—that the individual and the world (indeed, the universe), are holistically linked in the sense that each lies within the other.Through understanding one, we can understand the other. Such an understanding is one of the central themes in Joseph Campbell’s  The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, an utterly fascinating volume put together from lectures delivered in San Francisco over the years 1981-1984. These lectures explore the relationships between such subjects as myth, dreams, science, religion and metaphor, and human experiences in these domains. As Campbell puts it, “In other words […], outer space is within inasmuch as the laws of space are within us; outer and inner space are the same” (Inner Reaches, p. 2). This particular work of Campbell’s is fascinating because he passionately argues that literalism in the study of myth cannot account for anything remotely like an accurate understanding of the universe and the energies it contains, nor can it accurately account for why human beings experience the world as we do. One may read Campbell’s indictment of literalness in the study of myth as an indictment of a far more wide-ranging, hegemonic materialism, one that dogmatically pervades contemporary thought, offering the promise of definitive answers topped with certainty, served up in a generous container of self-satisfaction and reductionism, reifying what Erwin Schrodinger called the “spatio-temporal plurality of individuals.” Schrodinger finishes this comment by saying, “but it [the spatio-temporal plurality] is a false construction” (My View of the World, p. 30, ). In his exoteric discussion of scientific thought, Schrodinger asserts that all consciousness is one and cannot be spoken of in the plural. Campbell, however, turns to Arthur Schopenhauer to cite the influence of the same apparently single consciousness to which Schrodinger referred. Campbell likely preferred Schopenhauer for the simple fact that Schopenhauer “had established the prerequisites for a correlation of oriental and occidental metaphysical terms” (Inner Reaches, p. 82). The dart thrown by Asian mythology landed closest to the center of the great mythological message Campbell most valued, the transcendent experience he called “mythic identification.” It is a concept he returns to time and again in his work (he writes at length about it in his book, Myths of Light). Simply stated, the idea of mythic identification is that one understands oneself and the objects of religious awe, i.e. the gods, to be one and the same. In mythic identification, one directly identifies with the single consciousness giving rise to the spatio-temporal plurality of things and the accompanying illusion that there are many forms of consciousness. I’d like to think Campbell would have enjoyed the philosopher Thomas Nagel and his book, Mind & Cosmos. In this work, Nagel explores the possibility of imagining a “conception of the natural order very different from materialism—one that makes mind central, rather than a side effect of physical law” (Nagel, p. 13). In other words, consciousness itself may be the central organizing principle of the universe! As Nagel explains, it is consciousness, “rather than physical law, [which] provides the fundamental level of explanation of everything, including the explanation of the basic and universal physical laws themselves” (Nagel, p.21). What I like about Nagel’s book is his willingness to question the logical foundations of accepted facts and beliefs regarding human consciousness. An unquestioning acceptance of materialism is a logical mistake, as is its mirror opposite, theism. These poles of thought are both severely reductionistic in nature; they restrict and canalize thinking at the cost of creativity and novelty, insisting that there is only one form, only one way of understanding human existence, specifically, and universal existence, generally. Here Nagel and Campbell overlap: what Nagel calls reductionism, Campbell speaks to as literalization and concretization. When one can let go of reductionisms (or any kind of comforting attachments) and forsake the easy pleasures of epistemological certainty—that “which when seen pleases” (Inner Reaches, p. 101)—the ultimate consequence is that one is initiated into a radically reorienting, reordering experience of the sublime. By my lights, this is what Campbell was all about, the opening of oneself to the sublime, and this move makes Campbell’s work perpetually exciting and relevant. Joseph Campbell’s work, and in this instance, Nagel’s as well, reminds me of what Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his Tractatus: “We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.” The answers to the problems of life lie beyond science and theology, the livable answers await discovery in one’s experience of the sublime. And Joseph Campbell was truly a virtuoso of the sublime.

W.H. Auden once remarked that a real book reads us, an observation that seems right enough to me, and certainly seems right to apply to the work of Joseph Campbell. After all, Campbell spent his life in conversation with the narratives—myths—that read and reflect us to ourselves, narratives that remind us that we are more than we realize, and that we all have access to the transcendent if we only remember that our thinking and language are metaphorical—remember that we, ourselves, are metaphors. Metaphors may be thought of as living things, active and animated; they are, in some enigmatic way, sentient. Metaphors are the figures of movement and of carrying across, of transport; public buses in Athens are called metaphora. The influence of metaphor is the métier of Campbell’s work. The importance of understanding metaphor simply cannot, to my mind, be overstated. In its absence a tyrannical literalness and concreteness overtakes language and living. To this point, I’m reminded of a couplet from a poem by W.B. Yeats: “We had fed the heart on fantasies/The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.” The hardened brutality of the heart is the result of taking the fantasies literally, since understood literally, they can only bring disappointment, heartache, and an inevitably hardened heart. Certainly, anyone reading this MythBlast has at least a passing familiarity with Joseph Campbell the mythologist, but it may surprise you to learn that, as a young man, Campbell wrote fiction and nursed the desire for a literary life. In a volume titled The Mythic Imagination, the Joseph Campbell Foundation has published a collection of seven short stories written by Campbell himself that experiment with different styles of writing and tackle a variety of themes, both modern and eternal. In fact, this essay takes its title from a single, offset sentence in an intriguing, strange, futuristic fantasy of a story, “The Forgotten Man.” Upon reflection, it shouldn’t be surprising that Campbell tried his hand at writing literature. It’s easy to see how much he loved it, and surely he understood that, as Lionel Trilling wrote, “anyone who thinks about modern literature in a systematic way takes for granted the great part played in it by myth, and especially by those examples of myth which tell about gods dying and being reborn […]” (“On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent). I wonder if the young Campbell, struggling to publish his stories, recognized the great part myth played in them, and was therefore compelled to fully turn his attention to mythology. When you read this collection of short stories, you’ll find no shortage of mythic images and figures; you’ll also recognize the smart, meticulous writing of the Modernist era as well as the influences of Modernist masters like Joyce and Steinbeck. I believe that Campbell’s enduring popularity and influence continues because he was primarily focused on human potential, particularly the innate potential human beings have to glimpse the transcendent realm of existence (a realization which I wrote about in an earlier MythBlast this month called Tat Tvam Asi, or "Thou Art That"). Mythology was simply the vehicle (the metaphor, if you will) that got him there. More than literature alone could, myth itself provided Campbell with the material—historical, artistic, humanistic, philosophical, literary—and to no small degree (in his hands, anyway), the scientific means by which he could describe in great detail the incipient human capacity for transcendent experiences. Through his extensive research and analysis, he assured himself that the transcendence he wrote of was something more than mere self-delusion or personal fantasy. In the short fiction comprising The Mythic Imagination, one sees Campbell already wrestling with the larger issues and challenges of living a human life, the same issues he tackles more successfully in his later work in mythology. But always in his writing, whether in fiction or mythology, Campbell is searching for something original, something novel, and something sublime. Martin Amis asserts that “all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart” (The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000, xv). In his writings on myth, Campbell successfully waged an ongoing war against cliché in all three of the theaters Amis identified: pen, mind, and heart. In fact, I still find myself in bewildered awe when I read him, and I never fail to be moved by his humanity, his compassion, curiosity, generosity of spirit and intellect, and his ability to clearly render with grace, with humor, and patient understanding, cogent critiques of the (mis)uses of mythology in addition to the splendidly noble, creative, and deeply beautiful rewards of being human.