Scars are curious things given an even more curious name: the word scar is derived from the Greek word eschara, meaning “place of fire.” The word does not mean “caused by fire,” nor does it mean that scars are the result of exposing one’s skin to fire, although there is a connection to the Latin word for scab. No, scar means quite literally the place of fire:the fire is found within the scar and the scar is already present in the fire. Perhaps its derivation has to do with the sensation of intense, searing pain, the kind of pain borne by the body at the receipt of a wound, a wound on fire with pain, and deep enough to create scarring. The most familiar English usage defines a scar as a mark left on the skin after a surface injury or wound has healed. Scars commemorate and memorialize. They freeze time, space, and emotion in pale, sometimes jagged and awkwardly knitted lines on the skin, and not infrequently, they leave a jagged signature upon the heart as well. And even though there is no apparent etymological relationship between them, one can’t resist adding an “e” to scar, to create the word scare. A scary encounter leaves scars, even children know that. Intense fear–being scared to death for instance–leaves its deeply etched mark upon the mind even though the frightening event has long since passed. In fact, it is often the scar no one else can see that is the hardest to bear. Scars also serve as a means of identification: if one ever has the misfortune of being booked into jail, one of the questions that will be asked of you is whether you have any birthmarks, tattoos, or scars. Scars are an ancient way of tendering or proffering one’s identity. One of the most poignant accounts of recognition and identification may be found in Book XIX of The Odyssey, when the disguised Odysseus (transfigured to look like an old, decrepit beggar by Athena) is given a bath by his old nursemaid, Eurycleia: as she begins to bath him, she recognizes the scar on his thigh, received as a small boy when he was gored by a boar, and through her recognition of the scar, identifies Odysseus himself. Her eyes fill with tears of mixed grief and joy as she clutches him by his beard and calls him her “dear boy.” For he who was dead is alive again and he, himself lost, is found. For the lover longing for the beloved, the scar is a welcome affirmation of the beloved’s presence. The scar is an inseparable part of the beloved herself, and any sight of it ipso facto incarnates the beloved; so much so, in fact, that the scar may become as much an object of love as the loved one herself. Writing of Christ’s scars in his book, The City of God, St. Augustine expresses a similar sentiment when he says that they (Christ’s scars) will not “be a deformity, but [have] a dignity in them; and a certain kind of beauty will shine in them, in the body, though not of the body" (City of God, Book 22, Ch. 19). This is an essential idea to take note of, and it bears repeating that the body does not manufacture the beauty shining in and through the scars, in fact the body is not, in and of itself, beautiful; the body is a most imperfect vessel. If the body does not produce the beauty, then what does? Beauty is, in fact, created by a powerful alchemy involving a scarring wound, a loving gaze, and a precious foundling, all culminating in a moment of poetry and illumination. Love is transformed from an abstract, vaguely meaningful word into a living, breathing, human experience promising answers to all life’s insoluble riddles (It is worth pointing out that wounds, particularly lacerations, to the body often assume the shape of a mouth. Perhaps the word cannot become flesh without inflicting a wound; in other words, creating a mouth which has something to say.) The scar and its shadow are made deeper and darker by attempts to recoil and hide from them, and one’s anguish is compounded as the attempts to conceal one’s scars inevitably fail, until finally, one wears one’s scars as a symbol of everything corrupted, debauched, perverted, and subverted within. Nothing emanating from such an internal state can help but be grotesquely and tragically flawed, and so, witches, demons, trolls and monsters are frequently described as having ugly, terrifying scars. Whenever two previously unrelated things are joined together a scar, or a seam if you will, is always the result; and when individuals are joined to previously unknown and unconscious aspects of themselves, scarring is the painful and inescapable result. It can only be ever thus: only when one is faced with something overwhelming can the archetype of wholeness be constellated. So do not be ashamed of scars. Valorize them; caress them; trace their course in your skin and in your mind’s eye. Scars are roadways drawn onto maps of flesh, leading always to the beautiful truths buried deep within oneself.

The exploration of death in this MythBlast is not a departure from our theme of Harvest for the month of September; instead, it's an inescapable deepening of the Harvest motif. Harvest time means reaping, and voila, with the smallest prompt to imagination we move from the image of a farmer shearing wheat directly to the shrouded, skeletal image of the Grim Reaper, scythe in hand, similarly severing souls from bodies and guiding them to the afterlife. A persistent theme found running through Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology is that of death. Death is the most enduring, and probably the most dreadful problem that ever faced animals of the genus Homo. In Primitive Mythology, Campbell writes that the “human being is the only animal capable of knowing death as the end inevitable for itself, and the span of old age for this human organism, consciously facing death, is a period of years longer than the whole lifetime of any other primate” (53). Facing death is complicated by circumstances such as ineradicable comas and persistent vegetative states, or the final stages of chronic, debilitating diseases that remove the sufferer's ability to communicate; conditions that make it very difficult to determine the difference between life and death. Early peoples began speculating about what death might be based on the experiences they had in life, particularly the nature of the life they observed in the world around them. As Campbell noted, “Among the hunting tribes, whose life style is based on the art of killing, who live in a world of animals that kill and are killed and hardly know the organic experience of a natural death, all death is a consequence of violence and is generally ascribed not to the natural destiny of temporal beings but to magic” (Primitive Mythology, 106). Magic, he says, became the technology employed, not only to defend oneself against death, but to deliver death to others as well. Understood this way, death is an enemy to be fought off, held at bay, and resisted to the bitter end. “For the planting folk,” however, “death is a natural phase of life, comparable to the moment of the planting of the seed, for rebirth” (Primitive Mythology, 107). Through an agrarian lens, life and death are naturally cyclical, and there was, just beyond physical life and death, a larger ground of being of which one had only glimpses or intuitions. These various intuitions eventually coalesce, and somewhere around the second millennium BCE the notion of immortality is refined, and ideas like eternal rewards or punishments begin to make death arguably the most important part of life. Four thousand years on, one may reasonably insist that we haven’t added significantly to our understanding of death. The people of that distant age seem instantly recognizable to ourselves in that, like them, we still wrestle with the mystery of death, we have the same hopes and fears about life, and the same problems of human nature. Near death experiences and visions described by the dying tell us nothing about death; they speak only to dying, which gives way to the understanding that the important death, the death for which biological death serves as a metaphor, is psychological death. Psychological death, sometimes referred to as the death of the ego, provokes a profound—and a profoundly difficult—transformation of the psyche. All the familiar, comforting ways one routinely thinks about and understands oneself drop away—one’s purpose, identity, rationality, moral fiber, one’s character—and one is left apparently empty, with a self that is a stranger to itself. Coming to consciousness is seldom a serene act, it’s usually terrifying and often accompanied by violence—or at least intimations of violence—and disorientation. One undergoes a form of psychic decline in which trusted inner constructs crumble and logical relationships to thoughts and experiences end. It makes sense, of course, that it should be so; no one makes radical changes when life is comfortable. The psychological death prepares the psychic ground for rebirth and greater growth; it makes untenable the merely performative postures of goodness, success, knowledge, and happiness, and one is forced to confront the entire reality of oneself. It's not likely that one is completely good, or oh so happy, and one’s success may be nothing but an illusion. Any number of harsh truths that are in some way unique to one’s own experience of living and to the community in which one lives will be recognized. “Death fertilizes the imaginal and works to open a poetic space that brings depth and meaning to everyday life” (Stanton Marlan, The Black Sun: The Alchemy and Art of Darkness, 76); death insists upon a deeper, more richly nuanced connection to one's own unconscious, the unfolding of our own lives, and that of life itself.  The psychological death gives rise to patience, humility, empathy, and transcendence of the old self. It is such a radical reconfiguration of the self that one will say, “But I will be a bridegroom in my death, and run into ‘t as a lover’s bed” (Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Act IV).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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