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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.