As we move into the holidays, experiencing the passage of seasons, the weather shifts to a cooler disposition, the world darkens early, and the sun’s transit diminishes, foretelling the coming winter lull. We light the home fires, pull up the covers, and begin to accustom ourselves to the slower pace of things. This period is also marked by gatherings of friends and family in thanksgiving, meaningful celebrations of our various religious traditions, and a toast for the welcoming of a wonderful New Year. Okay, that’s one scenario; the one we imagine in the deeper recesses of our soul.  However, this season is also marked by a crush of holiday marketing filled with trivialized religious symbols that shine a harsh light on our culture’s obsession with consumerism. How did the universal symbol of the Tree become a meaningless altar for an overindulgent mass of presents? How did the deeper meaning behind our religious traditions become so diminished, usurped and enslaved to the excesses of our culture? The literalizing of religious metaphor. Though the move was unconscious, note how the gifts the magi brought to the baby Savior have become a mass of presents bestowed upon our own children. Talk about concretizing religious meaning! In Thou Art That, Joseph Campbell, reminds us, “All of our religious ideas are metaphors for a mystery. It is important to remember that if you mistake the denotation of the metaphor for its connotation, you completely miss the message contained in the symbol,”  and the mystery is lost (48). Our stories and symbols are reduced by the desire to “fix” them historically in space and time or to a single interpretation, thus denying us their awesome power to awaken our imaginations and move us to a transcendent experience. So how do we recover meaning?  Better, how do we recover the experience of meaning in our stories, symbols and traditions? Campbell helps us find our way, showing us how to reframe our approach to the religious metaphor; indeed, Thou Art That is devoted to this call. He states: …the primary purpose of a dynamic mythology, which we may underscore as its properly religious function, is to awaken and maintain in the person an experience of awe, humility, and respect in recognition of that ultimate mystery that transcends every name and form, “from which,” as we read in the Upaniṣads, “words turn back.” (13) The call is to shed ourselves of the need for fixed notions, black and white thinking; to get comfortable with ambiguity, with not knowing; and to open ourselves to the grand mystery that is life. To know that the mystery is us. While Campbell points out that God has become a fixed notion in the Judeo-Christian tradition, in other religious systems the notion of God is a metaphor for “that which we all are” (19). Where is God, he asks? Within you. He points to the Vedic Hindu notion, “Thou art that. Tat tvam asi” (20). This is the path to the transcendent experience. This is the way to move beyond (the meaning of the word “transcendent”) the stilted, concretized religious traditions that have taken hold today. Knowing ourselves as that Great Mystery orients our lives—and those of our fellow humans—to the sublime and calls on us to approach life with awe and reverence. The central idea in the Nichiren Buddhist tradition, which came out of Japan in the thirteenth century, is that Buddha is life itself.  Each of us is a unique expression of Buddhahood, our God-nature. Therefore we—and the entire world—are sacred. We should stand every day in the awesome knowledge of our own transcendent nature.  With this attitude, the bestowing of gifts during the holidays regains some of its original meaning: to honor the sacred divinity in each of us. Let’s approach our tables this Thanksgiving as though we are honoring that which we hold most sacred.  Let us see it in the face of our family and friends, the homeless at the food kitchen, and the children’s glee at the first snow.  For we, indeed, are that.

For every profession, there’s a question people ask that isn’t the real question. When I was an actor, the question audience members asked was, “How do you learn all those lines?” when what they really meant was, “How do you get so far inside of another person’s head that their words come out of your mouth?” When I transitioned to writing fiction, the question became, “Where do you get your ideas?” Now, I understand that readers who ask this think they’re actually asking the real question. But the real question? It’s “Where do stories come from?” It’s a question a lot of folks have thought about a lot — none of them harder than Joseph Campbell. If you wanted to boil Campbell’s life’s work down to a single line of inquiry (something I’m pretty sure he’d have objected to mightily), I think that would be it. Where do stories come from? Campbell would have said that they spring from the same source as myths and dreams — which is to say, the human unconscious. As he said in The Power of Myth, his wonderful interviews with Bill Moyers, They come from the imagination, don’t they? The imagination is grounded in the energy of the organs of the body, and these are the same in all human beings. Since imagination comes out of one biological ground, it is bound to produce certain themes. Dreams are dreams. There are certain characteristics of dreams that can be enumerated, no matter who is dreaming them” (49). So any artistic creation — from painting to poetry to dance to fiction writing — is an act of mythopoesis that brings what is deep within the artist and births it, squalling and screaming, into the light of the everyday world. “For nature, as we know, is at once without and within us. Art is the mirror at the interface. So too is ritual, so also myth. These, too, bring out ‘the grand lines of nature,’ and in doing so, re-establish us in our own deep truth, which is one with that of all being” (Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, 101). It shouldn’t be surprising that Joseph Campbell, someone who spent his life contemplating the origins and lineaments of narrative, should himself have explored the art of fiction writing. Nor should it be a surprise that the stories that he produced were, at their hearts, explicitly mythic explorations of moments when the mortal world met the eternal. During the first four decades of his life, Campbell dedicated himself to creating fiction — almost entirely short stories and novellas. Although only one of his stories was ever accepted for publication, this great student of myth himself engaged in many — probably dozens — of acts of mythopoesis. Unfortunately, only a few of those survive. In 2012, I worked with JCF President Robert Walter (who had served as Campbell’s editor through the last decade of the mythologist’s life) to bring out the seven of Campbell’s stories that still existed in Mythic Imagination: Collected Short Fiction. It was humbling and exciting to work on these explorations of mythic themes in modern settings. In each story, most of which were written in the years preceding the publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a very human protagonist receives a call to adventure, comes into contact with some ineffable force, and is either transformed or destroyed by the experience. A romantic Hawaiian debutante encounters the Buddha. A cynical GI enters an earthly paradise. A young farmhand discovers one of the now-it’s-there-now-it’s-not fairy houses of the sidhe. Metamorphoses for the modern world. As Bob pointed out, the stories eerily anticipated the Magical Realism of Bórges and García-Marquéz with its blending of the metaphysical and the mundane. Mythic Imagination serves as a fascinating porthole into Campbell’s mind as he was exploring the very ideas that would become the basis for his better known non-fiction. The stories are also terrific, thought-provoking tales by a man who was himself a great storyteller. So where do stories come from? With Campbell, I have to say they flow from “the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation” (The Hero with a Thousand Faces,1). And in Mythic Imagination, we get to see Campbell himself tapping into that inexhaustible flow.

For the month of November, we at the Joseph Campbell Foundation are exploring the theme of blessings. The comfortable blessings of bounty, family, and health are certainly likely to spring to mind, but there are difficult blessings, too. And these difficult blessings are often found in the deepest, most fundamental, and most challenging human experiences: the fact that consciousness and self-conflict are invariably bound together, our questions about what constitutes reality, and the unfathomably mysterious connection we have with other human beings. Opening to human connection may inspire a spiritual revelation that Campbell identified as tat tvam asi, Sanskrit for "Thou art that." Campbell’s conversational, engagingly lucid book by the same name, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor, is the text influencing my thoughts just now. In this book Campbell challenges the notion, present in the Judeo-Christian tradition, that individuals are restricted to a relationship with God that is characterized by separateness and otherness. Campbell insists that the god and the human being who is contemplating god are one: “In any of the orthodox biblical traditions, one cannot identify oneself with God. Jesus identified himself with God in this sense. But God is a metaphor, as he also is a metaphor for that which we all are” (Thou Art That, p. 24). In Thou Art That,Campbell places in bold relief the deep mythological and symbolic meanings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and illustrates that the individual and the object of religious awe are one and the same. In its ideal manifestation, the heart of the Christian tradition is compassion. The image of the suffering Christ on the cross—the central image of the entire Christian enterprise, is meant to call forth compassion in the observer, to awaken the metaphysical revelation that the “other” is not some stranger in whom I have no connection and no vested interest, but rather is a person—and here Campbell refers to Arthur Schopenhauer—“in whom I suffer, in spite of the fact that his skin does not enfold my nerves” (Thou Art That, xii). It is, however, overly simplistic to say that because I know what my pain is, I can therefore know the pain of another. Compassion doesn’t rest on the assumption that the pain I feel is the pain of another. That would nullify the other’s experience of pain. Compassion always inspires curiosity, a singularly intimate characteristic of relationship. Where does it hurt? What caused your pain? What can I do? These are the questions curiosity is driven to satisfy once compassion is awakened. Once compassion has ignited curiosity, curiosity is naturally drawn to “whatsoever is grave and constant in human suffering,” and we are compelled to contemplate what Campbell calls “the key to the whole thing: the secret cause” (Thou Art That, p. 34). The secret cause is related to death, but the secret cause is not merely death. The secret cause is not even the manner or circumstance of one’s death, such as a car accident or a heart attack; those are merely the instrumental causes of one’s death. The secret cause of your death is your destiny. Every life has a limitation, and in challenging the limit you are bringing the limit closer to you, and the heroes are the ones who initiate their actions no matter what destiny may result. What happens is, therefore, a function of what the person does. This is true of life all the way through. Here is revealed the secret cause: your own life course is the secret cause of your death (Thou Art That, p. 35). Contemplation of one’s own secret cause necessarily means wrestling with questions of life and death, eternity, transcendence and, following the Christian metaphor of resurrection, the survival of consciousness after death. One discovers one’s “secret cause” retrospectively perhaps, through living a life spent following one’s bliss, a life lived saying yes to compassion, yes to joy, yes to suffering, yes to limitations, yes to the mystery, saying yes to everything one’s life conjures. Lived in this way, life can never be a mistake. Symbols of death and resurrection reflect the ongoing fundamental and fundamentally unremitting demands of human life: we must be constantly dying to the old ways of being and the old ways of thinking. Relinquishing obsolete beliefs, unhelpful habits, distorted perspectives while simultaneously awakening to new possibilities and new understandings is death and resurrection in the most vital sense. The seeds of rebirth are enclosed in catastrophe, they’re carried aloft in the trailing smoke of destruction and nestled in the salted earth of abandoned homesteads. The shattered dreams of the burdened and the broken may constellate a formidable renewal if one can summon a curious, consummate compassion while, simultaneously, living into the secret cause of our lives.

“Who was that Masked Man?" A childhood memory, televised in black and white––yet I still feel chills up my spine in anticipation of the weekly revelation, followed always by the sound of thundering hooves, the strains of the William Tell Overture, and a hearty "Hi Ho Silver, Away!" The power of the mask! We feel it even today, in our un-superstitious age. This ancient vehicle of identities and energies that transcend the individual is still worn among the pantheon populating contemporary childhood tales. The Lone Ranger, Zorro, Batman––each of these characters is more the mask than the man who wears it; individual identity dissolves beneath the disguise. Halloween masks play a similar role: when the doorbell rings and voices cry out "Trick or treat!" it is the monster, ghost, or witch we appease with sweet offerings. This quaint custom is more secular than religious in its observance, but its Celtic origins illustrate how masks have long provided a gateway to other dimensions, other realms beyond the senses. The phrase "the masks of God,” as used by Campbell, refers to the deities of the various mythological systems, whether Zeus, Indra, Isis, Yahweh, etc.et.al., as local manifestations of the divine, transcendent source of being: that which is beyond thought and conception, beyond the personality of particular cultural deities. Through one or another of these local gods, individuals are able to approach the greater Mystery. Campbell maintains that a god should be "transparent to transcendence,” opening up to the radiance behind the mask. For, indeed, in the primitive world, where most of the clues to the origin of mythology must be sought, the gods and demons are not conceived in the way of hard and fast, positive realities. A god can simultaneously be two or more places––like a melody, or like the form of a traditional mask. And whenever he comes, the impact of his presence is the same: it is not reduced through multiplication. (Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume I: Primitive Mythology, p. 21) In most cultures, wearing a mask in a sacred ceremony involves the adoption and channeling of energies that transcend the individual personality. For the space of the ceremony the individual disappears. Moreover, the mask in a primitive festival is revered and experienced as a veritable apparition of the mystical being that it represents––even though everyone knows that a man made a mask and that a man is wearing it. The one wearing it, furthermore, is identified with the god during the time of the ritual of which the mask is a part. He does not merely represent the god; he is the god. (ibid, p.21). From the masked Kachina dancers of the Pueblo peoples or the Hactin of the Apache, to the False Face Society of the Iroquois, the Yu'pik of the Arctic, the masked Duk-duk of New Guinea, and the indigenous tribes in West Africa and the Sudan, the mask serves as a conduit for the community to powers that transcend the individual. And the image still speaks to us today. It's a vital metaphor. In fact, Campbell spins our brains further by proposing the mask as a metaphor for metaphor itself! As he puts it,“[Metaphor] also suggests the actuality that hides behind the visible aspect. The metaphor is the mask of God through which eternity is to be experienced.” (Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, p. 73) And what is metaphor? Well, what isn't? Campbell is fond of quoting Goethe: “Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis” (“Everything transitory [the entire phenomenal world and all its parts] is but a metaphor”). Schopenhauer, another Campbell favorite, expands on this thought: In all these phenomena the inner essence, that which manifests itself, that which appears, is one and the same thing standing out more and more distinctly. Accordingly, that which exhibits itself in a million forms of endless variety and diversity, and thus performs the most variegated and grotesque play without beginning and end is one essence. It is so closely concealed behind all these masks that it does not recognize itself again, and thus often treats itself harshly. (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will and Representation, Volume II, p. 318) Each of us is one of these "million forms of endless variety and diversity"––which places in perspective a phrase mentioned above, introduced to Joseph Campbell by Karlfried Graf von Dürckheim: Deities have to become, as one great German scholar said, "transparent to the transcendent." The transcendent must show and shine through those deities. But it must shine through us, too, and through the spiritual things we are talking about. (Joseph Campbell with Michael Toms, An Open Life, p. 70) Well, what do you know! Turns out that we are the masks of God! Who is that Masked Man, indeed?

Let’s play a game of mental association. I say “Joseph Campbell.” You say, “Hero with a Thousand Faces.” If I ask, “Which of Campbell’s ideas is the most influential?” There’s a good chance you’ll say “the Hero’s Journey.” When I began story doctoring, I thought that too.  But it turns out Campbell’s Masks of God, Volume IV: Creative Mythology is what I actually use in practice. The frames in this book open up the mythic dimension for writers and students like a magic key. The big idea from Creative Mythology is the value of an authentic, individual experience. The method that allows us to put this idea into practice is one of comparative literature: identify how the story you are working to tell, (or the story you are living), is both a relevant mythic model, and a distinct narrative. This method is itself an iteration  of the Hero’s Journey that unlocks the possibility of working with your story in functional ways. Merely question your own story. Like Aladdin’s enchanted incantation, “Open Sesame!,” the conversation unlocks the mythic layer of your narrative. The journey through Campbell’s Creative Mythology is an exquisite unpacking of a moment in time: the medieval Renaissance, when the Western story of the Self emerged. Prior to the Renaissance, divine mysteries were thought to exist only within the confines of traditional theological systems. But with the dawning of this new era, we began to believe that these divine mysteries happen to us through ordinary experiences. When we experience ordinary moments authentically, the extraordinary comes through. Campbell believed that artists capture such irruptions in forms, and express these breakthroughs of the mysteries in understandable, transmissible manifestations carrying the weight of living myth. In this movement, we see the surfacing of the myth of the modern Western man, what we still believe to be the highest ideal in the individuated Self. This is the mythology and value of the idea of the individual, whose penultimate expression is the Artist. What matters to Campbell and the evolving sense of individual value is this: authentic experience as the road into and through the mysteries. For example, do you remember your first moment of falling in love? This is something we’ve all experienced. From a Campbellian perspective, this visceral encounter engages you in the mysteries. Comparatively, recall literary moments: Tristan and Isolde drinking the love/death potion, or Romeo and Juliet, the first moment they lay eyes on one another. In falling in love, we participate in the transpersonal, personally. The process, when we experience it in our depths, re-orders our inner axis. The way we see the world shifts, exposing the heart to the grave and constant. For you it might be that girl or boy you had on a crush on at 14. It’s the way their blue, hazel, or brown eyes light up at that moment they pass you on the street. As they look at you, you quiver in your bones. Butterflies invade your belly. You look up at the night sky, and the blanket of stars that before was mere confusion, is now a constellation of right times and right places; it is fate. You feel your own mystery in them. In a flash, you are different. Re-ordered. Before and after. In between, you are initiated. Now you will know pain. Longing, maybe ecstasy, but for sure suffering. Welcome to the Love/Death club. Something archetypal, something cosmic has happened to you, as it happens to all of us, all throughout time. Throughout Creative Mythology, Campbell reiterates what happens in these ordinary, extraordinary moments. The shattering of belief—about what love is, where or what God is—in the face of an authentic experience that we feel in our bones and in our bellies. It’s not someone else’s idea or ideal. It’s you in an experience that feels real for you. When we are genuinely present in these moments – ordinary moments, through which the extraordinary reveals itself – the great mysteries Campbell writes of open up to us too. Don’t miss out. Pick up Creative Mythology today. Open it to any page. The revelations drip from each one, waiting for you. Let Campbell’s ideas change the way you see your story and your life, revealing the day-to-day mysteries that await all of us. This is living myth.

In this fall season, when masks are donned in the celebration of our collective shadow, we may naturally consider Campbell’s own discussion of divine masks. However, when I revisit Campbell’s Masks of God, vol. III: Occidental Mythology, it is the current discussions surrounding Artificial Intelligence that keep rising in my thoughts. After all, considerations of space and time were recurring themes in the work of Joseph Campbell. His recognition of relationships that intertwined these ideas and the organization of narratives and rituals takes on new and interesting dynamics when we consider their impact in light of the technologies emerging decades after Campbell’s death. While discussing the age of great beliefs, Campbell compares the emphases on external and internal space in the Greek temple with those found in the mosque. He explains that the Greek temple stressed the exterior with its columns, but favored simplicity within its interior. The mosque, Campbell states, was all interior – “an architectural likeness of the world-cavern…the proper symbol of the spiritual form of the universe” (Occidental Mythology, “Introduction”). Virtual Reality similarly attempts to marry our external experiences with the possibilities of the inner cave. VR technology requires us to place a mask over our eyes. But as in the ritualistic experiences involved in the ancient Mysteries, an entirely new world is opened up before us in the darkness of this virtual mask. We move in new landscapes with new narratives. Now, late in the second decade of the 21st century, people don’t just want to be told a story, they want to be placed inside the story. VR offers fulfillment of this ritualistic desire within the digital landscape, serving as a mask that is simultaneously entirely new and incredibly familiar. Use and engagement with AI, of course, brings an entirely new set of considerations and ethical questions for those interested in mythology, as well as anyone concerned with the essential question of what it means to be human in the world. We are reminded, of course, of Prometheus and the punishments that can befall those that use nature-transcending technology to accomplish transhuman feats, which there are entire communities dedicated to (see transhumanism or H+ for more insights). The topic is certainly worthy of a much greater discussion at another time, but for our purposes, remains a lens that must be at least considered within any discussion of the mask of Virtual Reality. After his observations about temples and mosques, Campbell goes on to offer a description of the mythological traditions originating in the eastern part of the Mediterranean that could be a synchronicity for Virtual Reality and the narratives currently being crafted. He says: An awesome, all-pervading sense of bounded space and time, as a kind of Aladdin cave within which light and darkness, good and evil, grace and willfulness, spirit and soul, interplay to create, instead of history, a mighty fairy tale of divinely and diabolically motivated agents, fills all the mythologies of the Levant – whether of Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, Manichaeism, Eastern Christianity, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, the late Classical Mysteries, or Islam. And the cognate view of the individual in this world is not of an individual at all, but of an organ or part of the great organism. (Occidental Mythology, “Introduction”) This final statement made by Campbell is an idea that has been explored deeply within VR communities. Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, based on the novel by Ernest Cline, projects an ideal for Virtual Reality in the form of a virtual world, called the Oasis – a futuristic cave of Aladdin, full of endless possibilities and wonders. Spielberg’s—and thus Cline’s—vision for VR is that amidst all these marvels,VR would curate a view of the individual in the virtual world as not just an individual, but as part of something much greater, as Campbell suggested. Bill Moyers recalled a particular conversation with Campbell in the introduction to The Power of Myth, where Campbell enthusiastically lauded how George Lucas had updated the classic story of the hero in Star Wars. However, he was equally excited that Lucas had been able to communicate what Goethe said in Faust – that our technology would not save us, but we would need something more – something wrapped in a new idiom. Our tools, our machines, our computers are not enough; our intuition, our true being is vital. The same idea can be applied to VR and AI. They, too, are tools to further our communication, enhance experiences, and ideally expand our consciousness. They are not the answers. But they do open up new paths that help us better search for the answers together.

In this, the month of October, we at Joseph Campbell Foundation are celebrating the theme of masks; a theme apropos, I think, for October and Halloween. After all, it is the time of the year when the comfortable infinite space of light diminishes and the obverse–but no less infinite–darkness gathers, conjuring monsters, spirits, bad dreams, and those things that go bump in the night. What time of year could be better, therefore, for turning to Joseph Campbell’s four-volume series The Masks of God, a singular example of his masterly command of story-telling, and of the impressive depth and breadth of his scholarship? The series focuses on Primitive Mythology, Oriental Mythology, Occidental Mythology, and finally, Creative Mythology, and reflects the musings of a writer and a scholar at the top of his game. Campbell's ability as a writer, crafting these volumes in such a way so that an extraordinary aggregate of information is conveyed in as clear and concise a manner as I can imagine, is clearly on display in these volumes. As Campbell notes in Oriental Mythology, there are profoundly different mythologies at work in Eastern and Western cultures, mythologies that create distinctive (and arguably divergent) psychologies in their initiates, as well as vastly different ways of understanding the natural world and its manifestations, both material and immaterial. And yet, at the same time, one must be cautioned that differences among human beings may often be exaggerated, and that we have more (perhaps much more) in common than we realize. In fact, in Campbell’s note on the completion of The Masks of God series, he writes: Looking back today over the twelve delightful years that I spent on this richly rewarding enterprise, I find that its main result for me has been its confirmation of a thought I have long and faithfully entertained: of the unity of the race of man, not only in its biology but also in its spiritual history, which has everywhere unfolded in the manner of a single symphony, with its themes announced, developed, amplified and turned about, distorted, reasserted and today in a grand fortissimo of all sections sounding together, irresistibly advancing to some kind of mighty climax, out of which the next great movement will emerge (Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. II: Oriental Mythology, "On Completion of the Masks of God"). Additionally, I think that it’s fair to note that in the contemporary state of geopolitical and geocultural affairs, many differences between the Western World and Asia are being gradually erased by the process of globalization which is essentially, it seems to me, a process of Westernization and corporate capitalism fueled largely by manufacturing and advances in technology, and cultures that were once remote and largely unfamiliar to one another may now, in some respects, share surprising similarities and values. While mindful of the “single symphony” playing in the background, the most striking of the traditional differences between Asia and the West is their differing conceptualizations of ego. In the Western World, and perhaps particularly here in America, the emphasis has been on developing an individual ego, an individual self, separate from and unique to the millions of other egos and selves in the country. The myth of a lone, rugged, resourceful individual, placed at a specific point on a linear understanding of history, armed with a moral code, a higher truth, or greater skills, and set against the malevolently illiberal, unaware, foolish, or frightened masses, is the story that stirs the American imagination. In Asia, history is circular, the “myth of eternal return” is omnipresent in forms that appear and reappear throughout the course of history: the orbits of the sun, the cycles of the moon, the year, and those cycles of life and death. Individual effort cannot fundamentally alter anything; people are not separate from the world, nor are they merely in the vicinity of god, but rather, the task of the individual in traditional Asian culture is to “order his mind as to identify its consciousness with the inhabiting principle of the whole” (Oriental Mythology, "The Signatures of the Four Great Domains"). Based on his studies of Oriental Mythology, Campbell comes to regard what he calls “mythic identification,” referred to in this volume and also in Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal, as among the most important of concepts. The idea is that individuals are not in a relationship—separate and other in the field of time—to the objects of religious awe, but instead each individual has the potential to experience that the object of religious or mythic awe is themselves! Each one of us has within ourselves all the gods and demons, all the heavens and hells, all the divine mysteries that fascinate, inspire, and menace. As Campbell beautifully ends this volume, the Eastern effort toward mythic identification and its transcendent realization is “the nectar of the fruit of the tree in the garden that Western man, or at least a notable number of his company, failed to eat” (Oriental Mythology, "Tibet: The Buddha and the Great Happiness"). Thanks for reading,

When I was asked to lead the team of academics responsible for fact-checking and updating the archaeological discoveries, anthropological theories and migration patterns presented in the Primitive Mythology, the first volume in Joseph Cambpell’s four-volume opus, The Masks of God, I was humbled and overjoyed by the opportunity, but also a bit worried about how the material would hold up. Would a text about the Paleolithic (originally written in 1959, before the advent of advanced dating and other methods) still be relevant to readers in this modern technological age, a world not only experiencing profound paradigm shifts but also on the verge of environmental, political and economic collapse? Would the old arguments about “pure culture” vs. syncretized mythic structures be so obscure as to render them hopelessly outdated, not only in factual accuracy but in the very paradigms of thought and ways of seeing that were used to consider the research to begin with? What of the recent discoveries in central Europe, Indonesia and the African Savanna which are entirely rewriting our understanding of our earliest human ancestors and their migrations, rituals and systems of belief? “Stuff just keeps getting older,” the author Graham Hancock gleefully reminds us, and this observation has some profound implications for our evolving understanding of the origins of culture and mythology. I worried that Primitive Mythology, at nearly six decades old, might require so much revision that we would need to write an entirely different book. Much to my surprise (and ultimate delight), I found that the text not only holds up but is now, in many ways, more relevant and immediately applicable to the ongoing human project than it was when Campbell first published it. Beyond updating some dates that came from discoveries made after the text was published, the content remains a clarion call for our species to reconnect to its unified spiritual origins before the world is engulfed by the flames of our unyielding ignorance, apathy and jingoistic pride. In the foreword to Primitive Mythology, Campbell reflects on the years he spent developing the series and what it taught him about the unitary nature of consciousness and the overlapping goals, relational structures, and mythopoetic motifs of the world’s great wisdom traditions. He claims that the project confirmed an idea that he had long entertained: a thought that informed his entire body of work and stands as perhaps his most important contribution to the study of myth and human culture. His notion was this: “The unity of the race of man, not only in its biology but also in its spiritual history, which has everywhere unfolded in the manner of a single symphony [...], is irresistibly advancing to some kind of mighty climax, out of which the next great movement will emerge” (Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. I: Primitive Mythology, v). Building on the work of the German anthropologist Adolf Bastian, Campbell noted that the long, winding and often quite diverse pathways of human mythological mapmaking contained some important repeated  patterns. Bastian noted the difference between what he called the “elementary” ideas (foundational meta-structures of association, relationship, and meaning) and the “folk” ideas (the particular cultural “clothing” in which the elementary ideas were shrouded). The distinction is a cornerstone of the way Campbell addressed the various intersections within and among mythological constructs. It served as the basis for his assertions about the ultimate cohesion of the seemingly disparate threads of our species’ spiritual agency. Where do these elementary notions come from, according to Campbell? For this he relied on the work of the psychologist Carl Jung. According to Jung, mythic symbols, characters and motifs are not simply the expression of individual acts of creative consciousness but rather emerge from the collective subconscious, fully formed and imbued with their own teleological force. Myths, to Campbell, are relational algorithms in narrative form that develop in service of deep, fundamental and ultimately unchanging human needs. Who are we? Where do we come from? What is the nature of our relationship to ourselves, to each other, to the natural world, and to transcendence? We do not grow past these questions. We do not evolve or innovate beyond this timeless confrontation with the abyss. In fact, when we reject the reflective contemplation of these mysteries, we become jaundiced, jaded, and cut off from one another. Cast adrift in a dark sea of calloused anonymity and performative identity, we fade away into the very abyss with which we were once engaged in a cosmic co-creative dance of relational mythogenesis. That which once gave us meaning now, cruelly, robs us of it and replaces it with a constant struggle against itself. Like the ancient Hebrews, we become Is-ra-el (Hebrew: the ones who struggle against G-D.) Recent discoveries in the field of quantum physics have, strangely, been lending scientific support to many of Campbell’s theories about the unitary nature of consciousness, the mythic self and the entangled symbolic structures within which it is expressed. In his new book The Quantum Revelation, author Paul Levy states, “Quantum Physics is itself the greatest threat to the underlying metaphysical assumptions of ‘scientific materialism,’ a perspective which assumes that there is an independently existing, objective material world that is separate from the observer” (14). What the new studies are showing in the lab is what folks like Campbell were discovering in the field close to a century ago: a fundamental truth about the nature of the Universe and our place within it that was directly intuited and experienced by our Neolithic and Paleolithic ancestors but which has been lost in the glamour and glitz of the modern world of perpetual distraction. The high-tech materialism of modern civilization has cut us off from the transformative, creative energies that animate all forms and give rise to myths — the narrative construction of individual and cultural identities. God, in this equation, is a technology for accessing and communicating with nonlocal consciousness: a conduit to generating and sustaining communal spaces that foster compassionate, life-affirming and wellness-generating choices. The Torah, the Dao, the Way, the Dharma, the Gospel, the Marga: all are variations on a constant Cosmological theme — harm-reduction writ large in the mytho-cultural milieu of the given society. The world “religion” itself comes from the Latin religio (“to reconnect, to tie together”). What is it that we need to be reconnected to, according to the myths? The answer is always the same: ourselves. Campbell also understood that it was in the Paleolithic that the clues to our mythological origins should be sought. The power of the symbolic activity of the Paleolithic that Campbell explores in Primitive Mythology lies in the images, figurines and ceremonial masks themselves. The images call to us across an impossible chasm of time and space. A mysterious, seemingly insurmountable void sits between us and the people of the Upper Paleolithic and yet, the symbols and artifacts they left behind still speak to us. They trigger the timeless need that springs eternal in the human heart to reach out and touch the infinite. In Primitive Mythology, Campbell engages us in a conversation about the origins of mythological consciousness, the importance of symbolic “play,” and the purpose of putting on, and taking off, the various masks we wear (Jung’s persona/personae matrix) in the course of living a human life filled with human experiences. Campbell explores how the notion of play (intentional and targeted detours into the Otherworld) not only alters the consciousness of the individual but allows them to more easily travel back and forth between the realities of the seen world and those of the shadow world upon which it is built. Primitive Mythology directly introduces the reader to this Cosmic Consciousness at the very moment in our history where it began to shroud itself in the masks of the flesh. The work seeks to rekindle that sense of childlike wonder and infinite creative potentiality expressed in notions like the “imaginative universals” of Giambasta Vico; which suggests that we relate what we don’t understand to things we do have experience with in order to integrate the mystery into our living sense of wonder. In a world that is increasingly fractured by the binary masks and oppositional roles we find ourselves forced into, I can think of no better tonic than this prescient reminder of our original inheritance. Primitive Mythology explores the lived experiences of unified consciousness that are reflected and refracted in the essential forms of the manifested world. “He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it,” George Orwell once noted (Orwell, "Shooting an Elephant"). Campbell shows that this process is at once ancient and modern. And one that can provide a roadmap back to the most essential parts of our human story. Yours, Andrew Gurevich

As we at the Joseph Campbell Foundation wrap up our celebration of the month of September with the theme of Timeless Tales, I want to return to an exploration of the Grail Romances and the relevance these stories have to the challenge of living a contemporary life. In Wolfram’s Parzival, the grail is described as “a stone vessel brought down from heaven by the neutral angels” (Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, 51). Campbell also discusses the symbolic significance of this act in Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth). The neutral angels refused to participate in the heavenly war between God and Lucifer and thus, symbolically, they and their neutrality represent the transcendent principle, the function of which is to reconcile pairs of opposites. Read this way, the grail and its various narratives are seen not simply as the search for a priceless relic, but rather as an effort to move towards a profoundly life-affirming ideal culminating in healing and wholeness, not just limited to the individual, but extending outward to others and to the world itself. It is a union of the spiritual, the psychic, and the physical; it is the phenomenon that C.G. Jung described as the coniunctio. The knights-errant who rode forth seeking the grail didn’t ride under the banner, Amor, as was the habit of the suffering Grail King Amfortas. Amor is a tricky thing: it is often convention masquerading as freedom, infatuation posing as love, a frequently ecstatic projection that leads one unavoidably, at some point, into wounded, impotent grief. Knights-errant striving to attain the grail labor toward an ideal of chivalry which, contrary to the ecstatic rapture of Amor, exposes them to difficulties, trials, and suffering, the very experiences that prepare them to apprehend the sublime. Chivalry may well be the generative, procreative quality of the heart, and it gives birth to individual expressions of courage, nobility, mercy, curiosity, patience, and charity. Chivalry expressed as the action of living lifts the veil of quotidian life to reveal an enchanted world, a world of mystery, of wonder, a world of meaning, a world of soul. There are people mentioned in the grail romances who lack the ethos of chivalry, and thus lacking, lack what the grail represents. They live fine, probably even honorable lives as clergy, merchants, farmers, fishmongers, servants, husbands, wives, and children. They, in all likelihood, are not aware that the world in which they work, play, live, emote, speculate on, laugh about, and die in, is enchanted. All they know of the world are its instinctual pleasures and its unpredictable terrors. For them the world is often harsh, nasty, and short; they commend their souls to God and let fortune do what it must to them, for God and fortune are all they have to rely upon. For them, it's inconceivable to operate in and on the world with anything resembling individual agency because human agency relies upon the qualities of chivalry. Agency knows the value of risk, of effort, of imagination, and dignity; all those qualities that teach us that breathing is not the same thing as living. The only chance one has of finding the grail—or finding that which the grail represents—is through the living of a life predicated on the values of chivalry. Now before you scoff at the notion of chivalry as an antiquated, old-fashioned, straightened notion that contemporary people can disregard, what if I told you that chivalry is not merely a way of life, it is a science? In fact, in his famous paper on phenomenology, Don Quixote and the Problem of Reality, Alfred Schütz calls chivalry “the queen of all sciences.” Chivalry, Schütz argues, encompassed all or most of the sciences in the world at that time: the knight-errant had to be an expert in criminal and civil law, a theologian, a healer: both physician and herbalist, an economist, an astronomer, an athlete, an artisan who could shoe a horse, mend a saddle, or repair weapons and armor as the need arose. Above all the knight-errant had to be a philosopher, one who knew and defended truth, while simultaneously understanding that such a defense might well cost him everything, even his own life. In contemporary life, some will see such individuals and identify them as renaissance hominum, renaissance individuals, while many others will probably call them fools. But, it was said of Don Quixote, and it is no less true of ourselves: that one may live as a fool and yet die wise. Thanks for reading.

In "On the Great Goddess," the introduction to Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, Joseph Campbell addresses “the challenge of the moment” for women, which is to “flower as individuals, neither as biological archetypes nor as personalities imitative of the male” (xiii–xiv). He touches as well on the idea that we are in this together, and must find a way to work it out with compassion. This flowering of the individual feminine — separate from the masculine — is indeed the challenge of the moment as the mushrooming of the #metoo movement seems to demonstrate. I believe women’s psychological development is potentially revolutionary. The discovery of the importance of intimacy, relationships and care, those things which value connection above autonomy and competition, have been familiar to women from the beginning, a legacy or gift of the Goddess. In rediscovering this gift, perhaps both men and women can rediscover the organic flesh and blood of this earth, this divine aspect in a living relationship, as opposed to remaining greedy tenants, hardly aware of their own aliveness, waiting to be serviced, in a soulless building. A new relationship to the divine feminine is an important aspect of the journey to find one’s authentic voice and femalehood, a femalehood separate from the patriarchal identification with the role of women as only nurturer and child bearer, prisoner of biology. In the older view the goddess Universe was alive, herself organically the Earth, the horizon, and the heavens. Now she is dead, and the universe is not an organism, but a building, with gods at rest in it in luxury: not as personifications of the energies in their manners of operation, but as luxury tenants, requiring service. And Man, accordingly, is not as a child born to flower in the knowledge of his own eternal portion but as a robot fashioned to serve. (Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, xxii) Today, dead, (or at least attenuated) goddesses reach us through affliction, through pathology, through the suffering of the Soul and attendant symptoms of the body. Greek goddesses in particular exhibit such divine infirmitas—a wounded or suffering aspect present not just in physical symptoms, but in a psychological view of life as well, in other words, an infirm way of seeing, an infirm psychology. These suffering aspects are reflected in the suffering of contemporary women—such as depression, sexual abuse or sexual dysfunction, and eating disorders. These wounded places in women also have a mythopoetic and psychospiritual perspective, which you can see in the profound resonance between the wounds of woman and the wounds of the Goddess. When a woman journeys inward to retrieve her frozen creativity, she faces Medusa. (In the animated film Moana, the feminine hero finally comes to understand that the sacred heart of the goddess Te Fiti, stolen by Maui, the hero of men, must be returned to her, in order for creativity and life to be restored to both). To face Medusa is to face the prisoner of the depths, the rage of not being able to speak our truth, acknowledge our creativity, our freedom of expression, and our aliveness. It is terrible and terrifying. The Demonic Goddesses in their horrific and fearful aspects have developed from their confrontation with Indo-European patriarchal invaders of Goddess-worshipping cultures. When women cry out about Mother Earth’s suffering, they functioning as priestesses of Gaia, of Mother Earth. From the ancient oracle of Delphi to Joan of Arc, from Rachel Carson to Vandana Shiva, women have spoken out powerfully against greed and the abuses of the patriarchal order, urging people to come back to their senses and listen to the wisdom of the earth which first emerged from the depths in Delphi, so long ago. Women’s voices often illuminate the power of the feminine principle in the world today, and the essential role it must play in bringing back a sense of balance, and harmony to the excesses of an Apollonian driven ethos. The Feminine principle may live, or be suppressed, in both men and women. I believe our future and our well-being, depends upon meaningfully and perhaps even heroically, reconnecting and reengaging the Feminine principle in our everyday encounter with the world around us. Today women are “unlearning not to speak” as poet Marge Piercy says so eloquently in Circles on the Water: She must learn again to speak starting with I starting with We starting as the infant does with her own true hunger and pleasure and rage (97) Thanks for reading.

Six years ago I was literally elbow deep in the Joseph Campbell archives, retrieving dozens of audio cassette tapes on whose delicate ribbons were etched hours of Campbell talking about goddess myths. Between 1972 and 1986 he gave over twenty lectures and workshops on goddesses, and so it was from these tapes that Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine was born. We could say that this volume was incubating for decades, waiting for the right moment to emerge from the archives, and I had the privilege of being able to act as its midwife. For Campbell, the main themes of goddess myths are those that deal with the mysteries of initiation both in terms of how temporal life is animated by eternal mystery, and also in how we experience the great round of life and death. Even though Goddesses itself is a posthumous publication, goddesses figure throughout Campbell’s work. This is because one of Campbell’s favorite themes was the transformation and endurance of the symbolic powers of the feminine divine, even in the face of these last three thousand years of patriarchal and monotheistic religious traditions that have attempted to exclude them. His characteristic brilliance required a large range of discourse, and this is evident in the territory that is covered in the volume. From the one Great Goddess to the many goddesses of the mythic imagination, Campbell traces for us the deep symbolic threads — from the Paleolithic period to Marija Gimbutas’ studies of Neolithic Old Europe, into Sumerian and Egyptian mythology, through Homer's epic The Odyssey, the Greek Eleusinian Mystery cult, the Arthurian legends of the Middle Ages, and into the Neoplatonic Renaissance. While there are many stories and insights from this volume that I love, at this moment I am reminded of what Campbell said at the close of a lecture he gave to an alumni audience at Sarah Lawrence in 1972: I taught at a women’s college for nearly four decades, and as I said to my students, all I can tell you about mythology is what men have said and have experienced, and now women have to tell us from their point of view what the possibilities of the feminine future are. And it is a future—it’s as though the lift-off has taken place, it really has, there’s no doubt about it. And it’s been one of my great pleasures teaching at Sarah Lawrence all these years instead of teaching a classroom of anonymities, to have had these person-to-person conferences with one woman after another. The sense of individuality that I got from that is something that makes all this general talk about women and men mean nothing to me at all. There is something that the world hasn’t really recognized yet in the female, something that we are waiting now to see.  And so, with Goethe’s old line 'the eternal feminine is what draws us on,' (Faust II, having been drawn on for thirty, what is it now, eight years, I watch it to go on its own and go back into a sort of observant rather than teaching role, watching the marvel of this ascent into heaven of the Goddess. Campbell's sensitivity to the need for women to enter this stream of ideas — the mythic images and their psychological significance — on our own terms and in relation to our needs, is a message of profound support. Myth is nutrient-rich material for the psyche; we need these stories and images to help give shape and imaginal depth to our lives. Thank you for reading, Safron Rossi, Ph.D.

The theme for the month of September at the Joseph Campbell Foundation is “Timeless Tales,” and what tales are more timeless than those of the Matter of Britain, the thematic cycle containing the legends and tales relating to King Arthur? In September, the Joseph Campbell Foundation in association with Amazon’s Kindle eBooks is releasing Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth, edited by Evans Lansing Smith. For Campbell, the Grail Legend, and particularly Wolfram’s Parzival, “…is the great mythos of the modern European world” (Romance of the Grail, 23).  But the Arthurian cycle was not the only recognized “cycle” of the middle ages; in fact, two other commonly recognized cycles of the medieval age were called, the Matter of Rome, stories that centered on the life and adventures—adventures that were conflated with the Trojan War—of Alexander the Great, and the Matter of France, which contains the stories of the adventures of Charlemagne and his paladins.  In addition, there were a number of other, non-cyclical romances written by medieval authors such as Robert the Devil, a personal favorite which is a story about a Norman knight (of whom legend says was the father of William the Conqueror) who discovers that he is the son of Satan. One of the things that made Joseph Campbell a remarkable scholar and storyteller was his ability to contextualize and frame his expositions in such a way that the reader (or the listener) is rewarded with deeper and deeper insights. For example, in the first chapter of Romance of the Grail, he notes how Europe formed itself into something entirely new as the result of powerful forces brought to bear upon it from the East: “An Oriental religion swept into Europe with real force at the end of the fourth century—namely, Christianity…” (5). That simple statement delivers the plangent reminder that at one time, Christianity was something strangely alien to a European sensibility, and perhaps it remains unconsciously strange to modern ears (hence its enduring power to fascinate) because, as Campbell goes on to write, “A century or so later [after the establishment of Christianity as the State Religion of the Roman Empire] the European portion of the Roman Empire collapsed and what we called Rome from then on is really Constantinople, which is Byzantium, which is Asia again.” Looking at even the most common of themes in the Arthurian tales — love — forces us to re-contextualize and rethink the stories in this way. In the traditionally Christian European world, until roughly the 12th century and the appearance of troubadours and romance legends like Parzival, essentially two types of love existed: Agapē, which was spiritual love, impersonal and meant for everyone equally, and Eros, also impersonal in the sense that it is largely rooted in biological and instinctual yearning, largely absent of personal, volitional choice. Till that point, love was merely a calcified act of duty: social, political, financial, and legal. Marriage was less an act of love, than an act of reinforcing the status quo: “…when you think of the Provençal and the Latin word for love, amor, and spell it backward, you get Roma. Rome was regarded as representing the exact opposite principle to love—and love was held to be the higher principle” (Ibid, 28). Troubadours and the author-poets of the Arthurian Romances saw love not as an impersonal, social duty to be performed, but as a personal revelation, a revelation of the self in service to something higher, something greater; love reached the level of an ideal, an aesthetic, a calling. No longer could it remain an empty, social convention but instead as the result of a personal quest, a revelation facilitated by an individual heart. Romantic love was something more, too; a dangerous and risky something, a transgression. If marriage was, as Campbell noted, a violation of love then romantic love must be a violation of the conventions of marriage; a trespassing that surpassed all impediments to the marriage of true minds and true hearts. In these timeless tales, therefore, love becomes something both familiar and strange, a curse and a revelation. To be truly human means to test limitations even though the cost of doing so may be very high. Iseult’s nurse said to Tristan, “…in that cup you have drunk not love alone, but love and death together.” Understanding that life can never be one thing or the other, Tristan was simple and resolute: “Well then, come Death” (The Romance of Tristan and Iseult). Tristan’s response conveyed understanding and acceptance as well as another, nearly simultaneous, opportunity to transcend limits, even the limits of death! Amfortas, the suffering Grail King, used the cry, “Amor!” prior to incurring the grievous wound from which he suffered. And in part, he suffered because he was young, callow, and unprepared for the demands, trials, and pain inherent in the revolutionary new force of romantic love. Amfortas imagined Amor within the conventions of Roma. He may have fared better if he, like Tristan, knew and accepted the dangers of love and had quietly, resolutely uttered the cri de coeur, “Well then, come Death.”