For years I have been intrigued with what I perceive as a particularly Celtic sensibility, an ability to dance on the knife's edge between insight and nonsense, tragedy and comedy, sacred and profane. Not to say that only those of Celtic antecedents have this ability, of course, but there seems to be a profound and specific love for this dance in Celtic myth, story, and literature. This month, the Joseph Campbell Foundation is celebrating that uniquely Celtic voice, James Joyce, and his intersections with Campbell's work and thought. Campbell viewed Joyce as a core inspiration for his work (indeed, this is where the famous - or perhaps infamous -  'monomyth' sprang from for Campbell), and lectured and wrote extensively on Joyce throughout his career. As I open the proverbial door for a series of essays from various myth and Campbell writers on this Joycean thought play this month, I am struck by how interwoven not only the thought on Joyce's writings have been with that knife's edge, but how the personalities and relationships have been as well, and how they brush up lightly against my own landing place and fascination with how people and ideas connect. I live in the Catskills, just down the road from Woodstock, where Campbell holed up for several years reading voraciously after deciding that a doctorate at Columbia wasn't of interest, and where he ran into Henry Morton Robinson, whom he had known while he was getting his master's degree when Robinson was teaching at Columbia. Robinson grew up in the heady creative radicalism of the Maverick artist's colony, a rebellion not only against polite society of an America in a new century, but a rebellion against the lingering politeness of the Byrdcliffe artist's colony efforts at rebellion against polite society. Its founder, Hervey White, co-founded the latter, but recast his vision into something simultaneously more sacred and profane with the Maverick. In a superbly Joycean move, he underwrote most of the prosaic expenses for food, heat, and supplies for a free-thinking artist's colony by producing an ever-wilder festival every year, where people (as many as 6000 at a time) would flock to shatter their proprieties into wildness. By the time Campbell landed in Woodstock, the Maverick had subsided into an ongoing, fairly decorous concert series that continue today in White's exquisite concert hall, but that wildness lingered in the area's imagination. (And was reborn decades later in the Woodstock Festival, which, of course, in a superbly nonsensical way, didn't actually happen there, but instead, almost 60 miles and two counties away in Bethel, NY. This hasn't kept the town of Woodstock from cashing in on its imaginary history as the epicenter of tie dye hippy culture, with little memory of its antecedents in the mavericks who actually lived there several decades earlier.) Both Joyce enthusiasts, Campbell and Robinson decided that they could, as a mythologist and writer, respectively, write a 'key' to the seemingly impenetrable Finnegans Wake after its 1939 release. Their efforts were met with disinterest by publishers until Campbell and Robinson reacted to Thornton Wilder's hit play, By the Skin of Our Teeth, with two articles imbued with a fair amount of outrage, seeing it as a cheap trick light-fingering of Finnegan's Wake by Wilder, in a creative and financially opportunistic move. ...Campbell and Robinson were offended by what they saw as an attempt to profit from Joyce’s work at a time when Finnegans Wake itself had been remaindered, and when the Joyce family was in financial difficulties; the war had frozen British and American royalty payments, thereby preventing money from reaching Nora and Giorgio in Switzerland. (A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, xv) These articles gotten snapped up by the Saturday Review, and suddenly publishers were interested in seeing more from Campbell and Robinson on Joyce. Together, they wrote A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, which has lasted as the bedrock unlocking of Joyce's profanely sacred nonsensical insights for generations of scholars and readers. What delights me about this is the earnestness of their desire to assist the world to begin to understand what Joyce had to offer, which was dismissed as having importance until they rose to his defense at the expense of another writer. The ideas themselves weren't as juicy as outrage. Highbrow intellectual thought about controversial writing became interesting when the artists themselves became controversial. Campbell and Robinson both shouldered their own bits of controversy - Campbell with accusations of being a pop culture guru himself, and Robinson, who served as a senior editor for that most polite society of publications, Reader's Digest, and then wrote The Cardinal, which took on assumptions about the Catholic priesthood. And Campbell and Robinson's outrage, whether they were right about Wilder's use of Joyce as a plagiarized source (which they make an eloquent case for, but as you can imagine, scholarly arguments still echo on this), was from a distance. Neither of them knew Joyce personally. Ironically, Thornton Wilder did, wrote a biography on him, and in fact was working hard to bring financial resources to Joyce and his wife in this era. Wilder spoke of his inspiration from Joyce's work not unlike how Joyce spoke of his inspiration from Homer for his version of Ulysses. To me, this swirl of place, of people, of the complexity of alliances and ideas, with all of their good intentions and emotional tiger traps, feels like something what Joyce could have written. And it feels, ultimately, deeply mythic, filled with the same dance between what is most and least true, what is most sacred and most profane, and most ridiculous and most heartbreaking.

Today, May 29, 2018, the date of the first full moon in May, is the day of celebration for the birth of the Buddha called Vesak. Mythology has it that on the night the Buddha was conceived, his mother, Maya, dreamt a white elephant with six white tusks entered her right side, and ten months later the Buddha was born, miraculously, from his mother’s side. Deities attended him, received him on a golden cloth and laid him gently, very gently, on the ground. The infant promptly got to his feet and took seven steps, pointed up, pointed down, and said in a thunderous voice, “Worlds above, worlds beneath—there is no one in the world like me” (Campbell, Myths of Light, 137). D.T. Suzuki once remarked, “You know, they tell me when a baby is born, the baby cries. What does the baby say when the baby cries? The baby says, ‘Worlds above, worlds beneath—there is no one in the world like me’” (p. 138). So, all babies are Buddhas! What’s the difference between Queen Maya’s baby and all the other babies? Siddhartha knew from the beginning that he was Buddha; all the other babies are caught in the illusion of materiality and the worlds of perception and sensation, but not him. Buddha means “The Awakened One” or “The Illuminated One,” and what brings one to illumination other than a deep, penetrating, attention to life, life exactly as it is, an attention to life that allows one to realize that the forces of nature, the pulse of the cosmos, course through and pulse in you, too. The nature of the Universe is your nature as well. So how does one celebrate Vesak; how does one pay homage to the Buddha? Make a sacrifice or an offering? Meditate in a shrine, chanting, hoping to be transformed? The story goes that when the Buddha was dying, he noticed his most beloved disciple, Ananda, weeping. Buddha gently instructed Ananda not to weep, but rather focus on the eternal Dhamma (teachings of the Buddha) for that is what will become Ananda’s teacher once the Buddha has passed; that’s how you honor Buddha. The Buddha doesn’t have to be present for one to find Buddhahood within one’s self; one may discover for oneself by following the Dhamma that one is indistinguishable from the eternal, inseparable from the source. We celebrate the Buddha by placing his teachings, and most importantly the living into them, at the center of daily life. Every day, but particularly on Vesak one might think how one might bring happiness into the lives of others through actions of loving-kindness, philanthropic generosity, comforting the sick and afflicted, or any other way one might think of, as Aeschylus put it, to “Tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” Thanks for reading,

I have been rediscovering Campbell's collection of essays on Asian mythology, Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal, as the Joseph Campbell Foundation and publishing partners have preparing to release it as an audio book and eBook.These are some of Campbell's most accessible writings, I think: exploring his understandings of the complex intersections between Eastern and Western ways of approaching the world with his uniquely brilliant storytelling. Paradoxically, though, these essays remind me of my own uncertainties as someone who studies mythology. While I am fascinated by the great Asian religious and mythic traditions, I am deeply aware of the distance between my cultural contexts and theirs. Campbell writes: In the great mythic world of the Bodhisattvas and the Buddhas, whose grace and mercy and compassion yield the energy that enables us to release ourselves from the bonds of illusion, on the other hand, you have the way of outside power. This is the way to myth. A mythic image is an outside power that comes to help you; through it you can achieve release from the bounds of the mundane world. (96) This idea of a mythic image as an outside power is so potent; capturing what I think is one of the key differences between our own internal, personal stories, and the innate scale and 'otherness' of myth. Myth draws us outwards, helping us to perceive our experiences within a context that is larger than our own individual experience. It connects us to a sense of the largeness of the stories that resonate in us, but with a reminder that those stories are larger than we are. Simultaneously, this idea of the mythic image becomes a reference point for one of my ongoing tensions about the study of myth: when is 'outside' too outside? To study mythologies outside of our own experiences, cultures, and geography is compelling. And, I think, if we are to find points of commonalty in our human experience, imperative. Yet, it is not without inherent dangers. The fields of anthropology, archaeology, comparative religion, and mythology have an uncomfortable history of colonializing thought. The eye that regards does so through its own lens, and even when we make conscious efforts to see and note those lenses, we cannot lose them. It is difficult - and I would argue, in many ways impossible - to remove ourselves from the deep stories that we live within, and step away from either passing judgment on other stories or grabbing at them with the indiscriminate enthusiasm of an adolescent, trying on identities. How, then, can we, as students of myth, remember to hold the 'outsideness' of myth, particularly if it is one springing from a culture different than our own? As we seek to find meaning and points of connection in the image, I think that we need to hold a deep sense of discipline, and remember that it is never our image. We cannot claim it as our own, even if we fall in love with it, and we cannot dismiss its relevance even if we do not. Perhaps one way to do this is imbedded in Campbell's thought above - 'a mythic image is an outside power that comes to help you.' It comes to help us (impersonally, and often indifferently), whether we understand it or not. And if it comes to us via a culture very different than our own, it is, indeed, a gift worthy of respect. And, paradoxically, a gift that will always remain in some way, outside of us.

The Joseph Campbell Foundation will soon be releasing an ebook publication of Campbell’s Myths of Light, an utterly charming little book in which the attentive reader will be able to discern Campbell’s joy and exuberance in exploring Asian mythology. In this work he recounts many of the myths of Asian traditions in an accessible, conversational manner, and one may clearly see what a pleasure it must have been to be a student in one of Campbell’s classes. Throughout the book Campbell often references the correspondences and disparities in Western thought and traditions as a way of describing and clarifying important points. The symbology of light is familiar in the study of myth, particularly in the images and mythologies of “solar deities” which have, throughout most of recorded history been found in one tradition or another. Plutarch used the analogy of the visible light spectrum to highlight the relationship of myth and truth when he wrote in De Iside: And as mathematicians do assert the rainbow to be an appearance of the sun so variegated by reflection of its rays in a cloud, so likewise the fable here related is the appearance of some doctrine whose meaning is transferred by reflection to some other matter; as is plainly suggested […] by the forms and makes of their temples, which sometimes run out themselves into wings, and into open and airy circs, and at other times again have underground certain private cells, resembling vaults and tombs. In the psychology of C.G. Jung, consciousness itself is associated with the color yellow at the center of the visible light spectrum. The red “end” of the spectrum, he associated with the body and its biological processes, and the blue end of the spectrum with spiritual ideas and archetypes. So, lest the associational process draw me too far away, I want to return to Campbell and this delightful volume in which he describes two kinds of light, sunlight and moonlight, and the modes of mythological thought emanating from each. The light from the sun is an intense, incandescent, fiery light that never dies; wherever the sun goes, the light goes with it. A direct experience of the transcendent truths this light symbolizes burns out life, Campbell says, the way “the sun burns out vegetation” (p. 13). The moon gives us a reflected light somewhat more congenial to life; its light waxes and wanes, eventually dies and then is reborn. “So the interaction of these two powers—the solar power of sheer light and the lunar power of reflected light, modified to life—is one of the great mythic themes.” These mythic themes, Campbell reflects, are the expressions of two kinds of immortality: the lunar kind of cyclic immortality in which one dies and is reborn, and the solar kind of immortality in which the human shell is burned away and one’s essence—one’s soul, if you will—has passed beyond, has achieved the transcendence of becoming one with “the eternal source of being” and will not return. As Dr. Van Helsing tells Mina in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, “There are darknesses in life, and there are lights. You are one of the lights.” In Myths of Light so, too, Joseph Campbell urges us to discover the light within us, burning brightly and intensely at the core of our being, transcendent.

This month, in honor of the re-releases of Mythic Dimension and Primitive Mythology in eBook and audiobook forms, the Joseph Campbell Foundation is celebrating how we use mythology in our lives. As a form of knowing that is deeply based in metaphor, myth holds hands with poetry. This week, we'd like to share a piece by poet and mythologist, Stephanie Pope. We asked her how she would respond to the challenge of a poem that captured a sense of using mythology, and she responded with this new poem, not yet published. Enjoy. And we invite you to roll it around on your tongue and see what it brings up for you as April begins to green the world in the Northern hemisphere. . . . MARTIAL SPIRIT AND NOBLE GREENNESS O most noble greenness rooted in the soul  - Hildegard von Bingen, Also, Of The Maids A saturnalia is the blackening of a star a star buried in Saturn Here beauty streams from the eyes of women noble and green Drain the swamp and hole becomes shithole how low must one go? Well-being does not exist at the top where one might think Buried deep where a low is lit; down there a secret fire (in the hole of workers, high schooled students, and the mass generation not inviolate where enough is enough) gathers a viable massa confusa gnawing at its own rootedness in an ars requirit Let that sink in a bit.  Evil is without autonomy having served its role in holeness. Joined is high and low in the head of state; something more passive in matters consoled sharpens our discernment for what is real in what merely simulates shit. Tears cleanse our words, our cloudy ears our eyes; our throats adorned in crystal. About Stephanie Cultural mythologer, poet-essayist, Stephanie Pope, MA, publishes Mythopoetry Scholar Ezine and Mythopoetry Blog. Her latest poetry volume, Monsters & Bugs, can be found on Amazon.

This week I want to continue the exploration of what, in her MythBlast last week, Dr. Melander called "the use of myth." The uses of myth are as various as they are abundant, and exert influences in every aspect of human life, “galvanizing populations, creating civilizations, each with a beauty and self-compelling destiny of its own” (Campbell, Primitive Mythology, 4). Mythology and mythologies are very powerful things indeed. Myth has the power to acquaint one with the vastness and complexity of the universe, to inspire transcendent awareness, but it also has the power to shrink the universe and domesticate it—reduce it to a familiar, bounded space in which human beings live comfortably and, perhaps, smugly in the knowledge that the universe needs human beings (and special, chosen ones at that) in order for itself to exist. Campbell recognized the dangers of literalizing myth and believing in it as though it were incontestable fact: “Clearly mythology is no toy for children. […] For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations.” He goes on to say, “For surely it is folly to preach to children who will be riding rockets to the moon a morality and a cosmology based on concepts of the Good Society and of man’s place in nature that were coined before the harnessing of the horse! And the world is now far too small, and men’s stake in sanity too great, for any more of these old games of chosen folk […]by which tribesmen were sustained against their enemies in the days when the serpent still could talk” (ibid, 12). In his brilliant, provocative book Mythologies Roland Barthes, influenced by the semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure, argued that myth is “a system of communication, that it is a message. This allows one to perceive that myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a form” (109). For Barthes the message of myth consists of material (oral or written narrative, art, photography, cinema, musical, etc.) that has already been worked on, sometimes over many centuries, to make an incredibly effective communication. The message of myth signifies a particular state of consciousness with which one may explore, discuss, enter into, or dissect without attending to its substance (to be clear, that is not the same as saying the substance of a myth is unimportant). On this particular point, at least, Barthes seems to be in accord with Campbell in the sense that the form of myth insists upon metaphor, a communication more plastic, more flexible, more mercurial than literal, factual objects can be. Myth is, for me at least, most meaningful when one explores the deeper messages the myths point to or suggest. Those messages don’t lend themselves to literal or factual understanding and we always end up by saying what they are like. This is not a shortcoming at all, and the immersion into the message is itself participation in the powerfully primal rhythms of life, our own as well as the life of the world. Ludwig Wittgenstein suggested that the limits of one's world are defined by the limits of one's language, and I sense that at one’s limits or edges, a protean potential for change and the realization of meaning is present. It’s the struggle of working at the limits or the edges of oneself, and one's limited ability to speak about it, that unearths important awareness and deep truths. To discover the true power of myth it must not, I believe, be worked within the confines of that which one finds comfortable, concrete, or understandable; those qualities never move us closer to boundaries or limits. It is difficult, however, to prevent the exploration of myth from lapsing into the literal and the comfortable, from becoming nothing more than a comforting fantasy. I think there should be an element of danger as one works with metaphor and myth. Not physical danger, obviously, but rather an element of psychological danger in the sense that one is courting awarenesses that once realized, may bring one to one's knees, subvert one's ego and its perceptions of the self, and perhaps even radically change one’s life. No, myth is certainly not a tool for children, nor is it for childish adults. To quote Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust: “The very best that thou dost know/Thou dar’st not to the striplings show.” Thanks for reading,

In the month of April, the Joseph Campbell Foundation is celebrating the impending release of several new editions of two Campbell classics, The Mythic Dimension and Primitive Mythology, both coming soon as eBooks and audio books. Both works delve deeply into one of the most enduring questions about myth: how do we use it? Inspired by this, JCF will be focusing our musings this month on this question, sharing thoughts from our community, and inviting you to dive deep into your own ideas about how we collectively and personally use myth in our cultures and our individual lives. As an opening salvo for this month’s conversation, I’d like to share an idea from  Campbell’s prologue to Primitive Mythology, the first title in his series, The Masks of God. In this articulation of mythology’s abiding role in the human– and as he suggests a few paragraphs later, even beyond human – experience and life, what intrigues me most is that he quantifies the study of this role as a science. This prologue is entitled, “The Lineaments of a New Science.” While I think that perceiving the study of myth as a scientific one versus other disciplines is an opening point for a grand argument (lots of grand arguments, actually), what it has opened for me, and I’m hoping that it might open for you, is the broader idea of one of mythology’s uses as an invitation to think. Often, I find, we can use mythology to shore up our own assumptions about ourselves, our values, and our cultures. It is one of the dangers of embracing what we define as archetypal or mythic too literally and closely, so it justifies beliefs rather than opening them. I think one of myth’s highest and best uses, to borrow a phrase from the prosaic world of real estate development, is to understand that its deepest beauty isn’t in building the metaphorical high rise, but instead allowing the ground to lay somewhat fallow, in terms of our own certainty, and instead use it as an invitation to invite us to the uncertainties it offers, so we can think, and think hard. One of the most evocative invitations I know to do that, particularly in conjunction with Campbell’s ideas, is a rather splendid paper entitled “The Fire is in the Mind” from myth and religious studies scholar (and former Joseph Campbell Foundation Board member) David Miller. He explores Campbell’s work as a scholar in this paper, celebrating his insight – and, particularly in its failures – the ‘drips and leaks’ in his thinking – and works how mythology is both challenged and challenging in careful thought. Miller writes, If someone assigns a so-called "meaning" to a myth, it then serves to engage energy and consciousness to itself (mythoduly, idolatry of myth and the study of myth).  For myth to work properly, "meaning" must be withdrawn, deferred, itself a catapult into the unknown and the unknowable and to be left behind.  Myth is like a bow disengaging an arrow. ("The Fire is in the Mind") May your arrows be disengaged!

Mythology and the Hero’s Journey became pervasive throughout film culture and history as generation after generation turned to Joseph Campbell and The Hero with a Thousand Faces. With his guidance, countless filmmakers have come to see image as symbolic, character as archetypal, and narrative as mythic. In addition to deepening entertaining stories into profound narratives, this has helped filmmakers translate inner psychological experience into something a camera can see. We are fortunate today that the Joseph Campbell Foundation has partnered with Studio Institute Global in Los Angeles to bring the depths of this master’s insights into the hands of students and filmmakers within the community. Fifty years have followed since Stanley Kubrick gave his book to Arthur C. Clarke while writing 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the last two years alone, his name has been mentioned in Snowden and La La Land while his words have appeared on Wonder Woman’s sword, Superman’s cape, and in key moments of 13 Hours. Most famously, George Lucas came to see Campbell as “his Yoda” after The Hero with a Thousand Faces inspired revisions of Star Wars that enhanced the archetypal qualities of its characters, the symbolic depth of its imagery, and the mythic structure of its narrative. As John Williams said, “Until Campbell told us what Star Wars meant […] we regarded it as a Saturday morning space movie” (starwars.com). The mythic structure he learned from Campbell, famously called The Hero’s Journey, has gone from Lucas’ secret weapon to an industry standard that can be seen in a majority of studios and franchises. Having studied hero myths from around the world, Campbell came to recognize a relatively consistent sequence: from the world of common day, the hero is called to adventure, which they—or a loved one—resist. This is followed by some kind of aid from beyond their normal experience, the crossing of the threshold from known reality to an unknown world, an initiatory road of trials through the unknown, a big ordeal that results in ego-death and a new elixir, a return journey, struggle at the return threshold, resurrection of a new self, and the eventual delivery of the life renewing elixir, which redeems a wasteland. Where many have used this as a simple outline with varying degrees of success, the real power of the Hero’s Journey is that it turns a process of inner transformation into something the camera can see—it makes thoughts invisible to the camera by nature, visible. What Campbell did was help great storytellers translate major psychological experiences and philosophical transformations—as in myth and dream—into visual stories. For example, one of the core qualities of the Hero’s Journey (and Jungian Individuation) is the death and deconstruction of walls around ego—the part of the self we identify with—which enables the expansion of consciousness. Symbolically, this can be expressed by the bringing down of shields, the opening of locked doors, the removal of armor, and the rescue of a sleeping figure. In Star Wars, this is seen as the powering down of the Death Star’s shields and Luke’s removal of his helmet while he rescues and awakens Leia in her prison. The rescue of Leia by a team of male characters is also consistent with myths and dreams of male consciousness coming to integrate what it perceives as feminine and has thus far repressed. When the ensemble of heroes adds Leia, it doesn’t just symbolize a rebalancing of team dynamics. It represents the rebalancing of the protagonist’s own psyche, which suggests a rebalancing in personal and collective psyche to its audience. Leia wasn’t just an exciting female character because of her strength. It is also exciting—then and now—to see a dramaintegrating the excluded and repressed feminine. Those who continue to work with the Hero’s Journey in new and advanced ways have pushed this kind of narrative healing to new heights. Mad Max: Fury Road, for example,  featured a diverse cast of female archetypes—from Furiosa the warrior, to milk maids, lovers, and crones with seeds. Another favorite narrative motif of Campbell’s was the redemption of the wasteland, which he associated with the ego or tyrant’s repression/oppression of something that’s being excluded. This exclusion is resulting in an imbalance, and this imbalance perpetuates the wasteland. When a mind or a society excludes women—or anyone else—this is what’s going on. The redemption of the wasteland represents the widespread uprising and integration of the repressed, which, in this film, gives focus to the feminine. As in a dream, characters exist within the minds of storytellers and their audiences. This is expressed in the quote of Campbell’s on Superman’s suit, “… where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence....” Or as it’s said in 13 hours, "All the gods, all the Heavens, all the Hells are within you." This perspective has had a major impact on character development in Hollywood. It has resulted in an emphasis on the creation of characters whose qualities already exist within audiences. To find these characters, Campbell and others studied the recurring figures in myth and dream that have resonated with audiences around the world and across time. Among these figures are goddesses, whose recurring motifs are described in his book Goddess: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine. Wonder Woman’s sword includes a quote from this book: "Life is killing life all the time and so the goddess kills herself in the sacrifice of her own animal." By reading this and working on Wonder Woman, the storytellers were able to construct an archetypal character that resonates with goddess figures around the world and across human thought. And it worked; the character resonated with the goddess warrior within millions of hearts and minds. A specific example of how the character was tweaked to evoke these associations can be seen in her use of a bow and arrow throughout the training sequence. This required the storytellers to work it in, as the bow isn’t Diana’s weapon. However, it is the weapon of the Roman Diana, goddess of the hunt, her Greek counterpart known as Artemis, and the Amazons. The storytellers gave her a bow for the same reason Hannah and Katniss from The Hunger Games are archers—this motif recurs throughout examples of the archetypal woman-warrior these filmmakers are trying to evoke. This is encouraged by studios because archetypal character qualities that recur throughout world mythology tend to resonate with global audiences. In an effort to stimulate an ongoing dialogue between the study of myth and the culture of storytelling, The Joseph Campbell Foundation and Studio Institute Global have opened The Joseph Campbell Writers’ Room (JCWR) at Studio School Los Angeles. Open to both students and the community, the JCWR is a place where Studio School students, filmmakers, and screenwriters can go to collaborate, get advice from Campbell experts, learn ways to develop their stories as it relates to myth,and continue to explore new ways to interpret his theories. The Joseph Campbell Writers’ Room will work to continue the legacy of Campbell and his impact on the next generation of filmmakers. . Best regards, Will Linn WILL LINN is the Executive Director of the Joseph Campbell Writers’ Room, Chair of the Studio School General Education Department and Editorial Director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s global grassroots network of Mythological RoundTable® groups. He also teaches courses on storytelling and co-hosts a radio series for the Santa Barbara News-Press called Mythosophia.

Today, March 20th, is the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere! Here in Flagstaff spring will arrive at exactly 9:15 AM, in accordance with a common tradition in the Northern Hemisphere of placing the start of Spring at the vernal equinox (Summer is marked by the summer solstice later in June). Familiar springtime celebrations, religious and secular, based on the symbolism of renewed life are numerous and found in cultures (both ancient and extant) throughout this hemisphere. “The snow has not yet left the earth, but spring is already asking to enter your heart. If you have ever recovered from a serious illness, you will be familiar with the blessed state when you are in a delicious state of anticipation, and are liable to smile without any obvious reason. Evidently that is what nature is experiencing just now” (The Exclamation Mark, Anton Chekhov). Chekhov’s image comparing spring to one’s recovery from serious illness conjures the nuanced admixture of joy, relief, tenuous hope, and deep gratitude of life having returned, barely, from the wintry realm of death. Of course, this metaphorical invocation of spring, this cyclical image of recovery and return, unites the inner world of individuals and the outer world of nature. This is one of the main points Joseph Campbell makes in The Hero With A Thousand Faces, that all is one: “…the perilous journey was a labor not of attainment but reattainment, not discovery but rediscovery. The godly powers sought and dangerously won are revealed to have been within the heart of the hero all the time” (Hero, 39). The physical and the metaphysical realms become one and the mythic identification is complete. Campbell’s emphasis “not on attainment but reattainment, not discovery but rediscovery,” is tremendously important because, like the seasonal return of spring, the heroic life and perspective must be achieved over and over and over again; one doesn’t reach a “goal” or an end simply by achieving it once. To be meaningful, life must continue to be lived in contact with and through the heartful depths of the hero whether it be long or short, abundant or impoverished, pleasant or purgatorial. This heroic movement lives in Friedrich Nietzsche’s writing as well. Rather than finding the hero within, Nietzsche writes about achieving a self—becoming who one is, but these two constructs—hero and self—are remarkably similar. Nietzsche’s self, much like Campbell’s hero, is a perspective that has to be achieved over and over again. The Campbellian hero is often naïve and inexperienced, uncertain at first, even overwhelmed (Parzival is a good example). An individual inabiting this confused, novel state is the perfect candidate for discovering a Nietzschean self: “Becoming what you are presupposes that you have not the slightest inkling what you are.” And in fact, “…nosce te ipsum [know yourself] would be the recipe for decline, [and] forgetting yourself, misunderstanding yourself, […] becomes good sense itself.” One mustn’t think to understand oneself too soon because “Meanwhile, in the depths, the organizing ‘idea’ grows and grows [and] it slowly leads you back out of byways and detours, it prepares individualqualities and skills which will one day be indispensable to the whole…” (Ecce Homo, 31-32). Poets have a way of comprehending and communicating difficult truths beautifully, and Theodore Roethke, in The Stony Garden, put it like this: “Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.” And the light that has been held, deeply rooted all winter long may burst free as though for the first time in deliciously new and powerful ways. Thank you for reading,

Skating away --- skating away --- skating away on the thin ice of the new day." - Ian Anderson, "Skating Away (On the Thin Ice of a New Day)" War Child March in the Catskill Mountains where I live is storm-tossed, fingers stubbornly reaching back towards a flaccid February and making its point that we anticipate warm spring at our own peril. Three feet of snow a few days ago, neighbors who stand still without power, and another foot coming tomorrow. And yet, light is changing. The sap is rising. In spite of a spiteful last bite of winter, the red-winged blackbirds have arrived again, and the fire of spring is uncurling. It is a time of beginnings, this thin ice of a new day. I feel its invitation to let my own sense of fire emerge as the year shifts, and am aware of my balance on that ice, easily shattered. "Well, do you ever get the feeling that the story'stoo damn real and in the present tense?" ( Ian Anderson, "Skating Away (On the Thin Ice of a New Day)" War Child Beginnings have such promise, but can be so painful. More often than not, something must break before we can build anew - whether its the filial ties between the Titans and Zeus and his Olympians; or the divine trust for Prometheus, fire-stealer; or our own sense of what we have been. "We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come." (Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living) Maybe this is why March, with its contradictions, its sense of possibility, and its unique way of making us uncomfortable in our own skins, is such a perfect time of this transition.  Its damn realness invites us into the gloriously difficult beginnings of spring. May you enjoy your new skin!

Last week JCF made available a new digital edition of Joseph Campbell’s The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension. As I have remarked recently in this very space, Flight remains, perhaps, my most favorite collection of Campbell's essays because in this volume the vast extent of his reading, combined with his deep comprehension and dazzling intellect are fully on display, and it is genuinely thrilling to read. The last chapter of this volume is titled, “The Secularization of the Sacred,” and is essential reading if one’s aim is to deeply understand Campbell’s understanding of mythology. By the “secularization of the sacred,” Campbell means “…the opening of the sense of religious awe to some sphere of secular experience…” (157), in other words “religious awe” isn’t bound to some deity or reality “somewhere out there,” but in fact” The ultimate goal […] is, accordingly, the realization of one’s own identity with this reality and a recognition of its presence in all things” (158). Such a transcendent realization is what Campbell calls “The Mythic Identification.” The ultimate truth or reality of all things is beyond the capacity of the human mind to apprehend (i.e. transcendent), and to then frame the contemplation of ultimate reality in terms of a god or creator and what that particular deity intends and wants, is to create an absurd anthropomorphic projection. “But now,” Campbell writes, “on the other hand (and here is the great point): that which is thus ultimately transcendent of all definition, categories, names, and forms, is the very substance, energy, being, and support, of all things, including ourselves: the reality of each and all of us. Transcendent of definition, transcendent of enclosure, it is yet immanent in each” (160). We are the very thing we are trying to, and cannot, comprehend. But the “me” that’s implied in this teaching isn’t the me I normally think about when I think about me: an individual among other individuals, finite, mortal, and no matter how humane or inclusive I may be, still separate in a fundamentally existential way from other human beings. Well, not so fast. Campbell was embracing panpychism long before contemporary philosophy created a word for it, and deploys Erwin Schrödinger for additional support in the matter: “And as the great physicist, Erwin Schrödinger, states in his book, My View of the World: ‘To divide or multiply consciousness is something meaningless. In all the world, there is no kind of framework within which we can find consciousness in the plural; this is simply something we construct because of the spatio-temporal plurality of individuals, but it is a false conception.’” There is only one consciousness according to Schrödinger, and we all share it; more precisely, we all are it, except that the “it” we are can’t be apprehended or grasped in its entirety all at once. We are not “in relationship” to some divine or sacred reality, we are always, and in all ways, It. Without the mythic identification, myth remains the mythology of relationship; relationship to something outside of and necessarily different from the individual. Mythology read literally is fundamentally a socially conservative message, a tool used for social control and order, supporting socio-political institutions in “suppressing the manifestations of individualism” (130)—people identifying with and valuing their own interests, experiences, and freedoms—and instead inculcating and maintaining modes of behavior and thought consistent with the dominant beliefs and institutions of society. The mythologies of relationship then, are inherently and congenitally conservative because they allow no acts of seeing past or through the literal narrative. Campbell noted (185) that as recently as the 19th century, Pope Pius IX insisted that we reject rationalism, the separation of church and state, freedom of the press and religion, and “… not be reconciled and come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.” In truth, progress, liberalism, and modern civilization is created in the revolutionary act of Mythic Identification, a seeing through and past of manifest forms and literal narrative structures to the sacred individual who is myself and yet not myself alone, to that single consciousness that remains, after all, all of us. Thanks for taking the time to read this MythBlast.

A few days ago, I came across this sentence from Joseph Campbell in his essay "Symbol Without Meaning" in The Flight of the Wild Gander. The highest concern of all the mythologies, ceremonials, ethical systems, and social organizations of the agriculturally based societies has ever been that of suppressing the manifestations of individualism; and this has been generally achieved by compelling or persuading people to identify themselves not with their own interests, intuitions, or modes of experience, but with archetypes of behavior and systems of sentiment developed and maintained in the public domain. (130) I had an instinctive, instant, articulate 'nuh huh' response as I read this. While I agree that systems and organizations are about the collective, of course, for me, mythology's greatest power lies in what I see as an invitation to understand ourselves against the backdrop of the cultures and constructs around us. Yes, the stories that we tell, as I regularly repeat at the beginning of a radio show on myth and culture I host, are the stories that also tell us. We are made by the stories we tell, as much as we make them. But in the moment that we understand them as narratives outside of ourselves, something changes: we can begin to see where they have overtaken us, and why, and begin to parse out where our own individuality stands against the archetype. This month, the Joseph Campbell Foundation is celebrating inspired teaching. I think that myths are, themselves, inspired teachers. And I think that the most inspired teaching invites challenge. While it can be seductive to relax into the perceived wisdom of a great teacher, truly inspired teaching demands inspired learners, who aren't content to soak in the assumptions of the teacher, but instead work to break open whether that teaching resonates for us, and find the spaces in our own intuition, our own experiences, and our own thought that stand apart from culture's expectations. The word inspire emerges from the Pre-Indo European "to breathe." Ultimately, inspired teaching and learning breathes life into the questions that we ask, rather than the answers, and into our own very individual understanding of ourselves and the world around us.