Tambako The Tiger Have you heard the one about the tiger and the goats? Joseph Campbell often shared this fable: a young tiger, raised by the herd of goats his mother leapt into hoping to feed herself and her unborn cub before dying in childbirth, grows up believing he is a goat until being instructed by a passing-by adult tiger to eat meat and discover his true self. Campbell borrowed the story from 19th Century Hindu mystic Shri Ramakrishna Paramahansa, calling it his “favorite sort of sew-it-all up” story.  It’s a classic “to thine own self be true” tale, and has been fodder for countless teachers and religious figures across cultures. All the young tiger needed was the teacher to show him who he really was. I want to call out, however, a couple of nuances in Campbell’s retelling of the story in a 1972 interview ( L444: ZBS Interview, 1972, 1:20:00–) , that I think invite us to uncover shadows in being learners in relationship to teachers, and what it means to, in the worlds of my educator father, Eugene Melander, who spent a lifetime imagining how teachers can teach and students can student, learn to “self author.” It’s the difference between seeing who you really are and crafting the story that brings you to that awareness; always ongoing, never static, with ownership of your own story and its telling. In Campbell’s 1972 retelling, he describes the elder tiger’s instructions to the young tiger, who doesn’t even realize that he is being perceived as a student, as he drags him by the scruff of the neck to look at his face in a pond. Campbell says:   The big tiger looks in and he says, "Now, see, you've got the face of a tiger. You're no goat, you don't have a goat's face. You're like me! Be  like me!" And then Campbell, as an aside, adds “ That's the guru-style: "Be like me." Not “be yourself.” The elder tiger then shoves meat down the protesting throat of the young tiger, who gags on it. Campbell adds, “And the text says, ‘as all do on true doctrine.’” What an image! While it’s possible to read this as a nod to the difficulties of losing one’s self and one’s ego to the power of capital “T” Truth in the teaching as delivered by the teacher, it also invites us to question the role of doctrine in our own self-authoring. If we gag on the true doctrine, is it really true? Is the teaching, the exhortation to be just like the guru the point of this story? Or is the actual truth in the experience for the young tiger the moment where the nourishment hits his body with a rightness he viscerally understands, and he becomes tiger in that moment? For doctrines, even when well-meaning, are external to us. And sometimes they are flat wrong.  By way of illustrating this, I want to share a poem I wrote about a piece of doctrine it took me forty years to stop gagging on, and the gagging stopped only when I spat it out: 40 Years Later I had a realization. Reading a poem about how EB White cried when Charlotte died. And how the mother reading the story had cried. And the children who knew nothing of loss laughed at her crying. But I cried. I cried as a small child reading Charlotte’s Web for the first time. And I have cried all the times I have read it since. It is about compassion, not experience. The ability to imagine with empathy into understanding someone else’s sorrow.    And I remember a short story I wrote at 19 about a garden fearing the shears and mowers for a writing class in college.   And I loved the professor. I still do. And I cried when he died.   But he hated the story. It didn’t fall into the canon of serious fictional literature about unhappy people, and plants didn’t have voices or sentience.    It was vapid and childish.  Not his words directly. But what he meant, kindly, pushing me to reach higher to drop that for grownup stuff.   So I tried for what he said I should want. And it was an exercise in learning to cleverly order words and metaphors. And I couldn’t feel anything any more.   And I stopped going to class.   I have always felt shame. It was my fault. I was fucking up.  I cried then, with him. When I gathered the courage to beg for his forgiveness.  And he was kind.    And it’s only now, 40 years later.   That I realize he should have been begging for mine.   That I was begging for forgiveness for abandoning my heart, really. Not his class.    For I still hear the voices of the garden fearing the shears and battle with my husband and insurance companies over lawns gone to meadow at my farm.  It’s not neglect, I say.  But a choice.  To let them live so the birds and caterpillars and snakes and voles who ensure we all can live can as well.    And I realize that is a story that the world did need 40 years ago, not just me.  As we are on the precipice of what happens when humans don’t hear those voices.   And something breaks open for me over this. Finally. I am wrong to wait for permission.  And I need to tell the stories that are my heart. That I still wait for permission. Far too often.  And tell my heart to grow up.    And I wonder how many stories we have lost.  From everyone told they were doing it wrong.  That their hearts didn’t understand. (Melander, 2023, unpublished) How would this fable - and its teachings - empower him differently if the young tiger was invited to find his own taste for what he needed to become all that he was? And what different stories would he be able to tell? About his mother’s sacrifice, his adopted family’s sacrifice, and how both of those were also a part of what made him Tiger?   This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 1, and  The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Latest Podcast In this episode, Roshi Joan Halifax sits down with Bradley Olson of the Joseph Campbell Foundation. Roshi Joan Halifax speaks to Buddhists and non-followers alike on such universal topics as compassion, suffering, and what it is to be human. Influenced by early experiences as an anthropologist-world traveler, passionate end-of-life pioneer, and her work in social and ecological activism, she eloquently teaches the interwoven nature of engaged Buddhism and contemplative practice. She encourages a wholistic approach to life and training the mind, “that we may transform both personal and social suffering into compassion and wisdom.” Roshi Joan’s personal practice includes creative expression through photography, brush painting, and haiku as explorations in “beingness” and joy. As Founder, Abbot, and Head Teacher of Upaya, her vision for the Zen Center embraces comprehensive Buddhist studies, meditation, service, dharma art, and environmental action as integrated paths cultivating peace and interconnectedness. She knew Joseph Campbell very well. In the conversation, she and Brad discuss her life, her work as a teacher and pioneer of end of life care, and her experiences with Joseph Campbell. To learn more about Joan visit https://www.joanhalifax.org/ Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Is the conscientious teacher––concerned for the moral character as well as for the book-learning of his students––to be loyal first to the supporting myths of our civilization or to the "factualized" truths of his science? Are the two, on level, at odds? Or is there not some point of wisdom beyond the conflicts of illusion and truth by which lives can be put back together again?" - Joseph Campbell -Myths to Live By, p.11 Dynamics of the Unconscious (see more videos)

Theatre with cut-out actors, by Thomas Quine. Creative Commons 2.0. One of the things that I find endearing about Joseph Campbell is that frequently in his writing, as well as his lectures, he displays a palpable enthusiasm for certain subjects. When I read Myths of Light , for example, I recognize Campbell’s enthusiasm in its truest sense—enthusiasm as it is derived from the Greek word entheos , which is to be rapt or enthralled, divinely inspired or possessed by a god—when he speaks to the subject of jiva or life force, the animating principle, a principle he called “the deathless soul.” ( Myths of Light , 44) Once, struggling to come up with a metaphor that might more easily facilitate an understanding of the deathless soul, Campbell was inspired by common ceiling lights: Each bulb carries the light. We can think of this totality as many bulbs; this is the lunar world of multiple entities. On the other hand we can focus on the one light that emanates from all the bulbs. This is the solar consciousness. What are we focusing on, the light or the lights? Which way of looking at things is correct? If one bulb breaks, we take it out and put another in—is it the bulb that’s important or is it the light? Then I said to the boys, “Now I look down here and I see all your heads like bulbs and within them is consciousness. What’s important: this particular head or the consciousness that’s in it?”(14) In Western mythologies, and as far as Western thought generally regards human beings, we tend to focus on the importance of individual light bulbs, so to speak, while Eastern Asian mythologies regard the light as the most important thing; it is the élan vital , as Henri Bergson called it, that vital principle that strays, vanishes, returns, and animates each living thing, that is truly worthy of awe. “The idea,” Campbell writes, “of the reincarnating principle is thus of two orders: first, the reincarnating principle that puts on bodies and puts them off as the Moon puts on and puts off its light body; and the other is that principle of sheer light that never dies, the light that is incarnate and immanent in all.” (14) The solar light that never dies, reflected in the lunar cycles of waxing and waning luminosity characterizing the élan vital , can be seen to be involved in a type of play which bestows the aspects of a game to life. In a recent episode of the JCF podcast, Pathways With Joseph Campbell , I commented on Campbell’s remarks regarding the peculiar tendency of the human being to find itself through imitation: children imitate parents, hunting cultures wear animal masks and skins imitating the sacred totem animal, planting cultures bury their dead in the ground as if expecting a new life to sprout. Reflecting on these mimeses Campbell said, “At some point you have to wonder: To what degree is this a game?” Realizing that life is a game or a performance helps us remember that we’re actors who have forgotten we’re in a play. Shakespeare, in As You Like It , says “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his life plays many parts.” (Act II, Scene VII) We star in comedies, tragedies, melodramas, and farce; from one moment to the next we are men, women, or children; heroes, villains, victims, lovers, or fools. The nature of Life reveals itself to us in spiel raum , the realm of play. Eugen Fink put it this way: Play comes to be a “cosmic metaphor” for the total appearance and disappearance of existing things in the time-space of the world. The frothing, intoxicated tide of life, which elevates living beings in the delight in reproducing, is secretly one with the dark surge that drags the living down into death. Life and death, birth and dying, womb and tomb are twinned: it is the same moving force of the totality that brings forth and annihilates, that begets and kills, that unites the highest delight and the deepest grief. (Play as Symbol of the World and Other Writings, 77) Not understanding the rules of the game nor its objective has never been a hindrance to playing it; children often make up rules as they go along, or play by very fluid rules that, contrary to spoiling the game enhance it, and make the game more expressive, more relevant to a particular moment, more delightful. A child-like immersion in the game is indispensable. In Greek, play is paizo , and it’s what a child—a pais , does. Fragment 52 of Heraclitus says, " Aion pais esti paizōn, pesseuōn; paidos hē basilēiē “/ “Lifetime [more properly, Time itself] is a child at play, moving pieces in a game. Kingship belongs to the child.” (Fink, 325) Contemplating this fragment, an awareness begins to dawn that the child may be moving pieces in a game she may not understand, moving the pieces randomly, or making up moves as she goes along, and yet within the context of the game the child is, as Hamlet said, the king of infinite space. Realizing that the universe is at play, and that play is the ground of being humans occupy, we can, as Campbell puts it, achieve an “undifferentiated consciousness while awake.” Viewed as a game, life ceases to be unrelenting drudgery, hard labor, or pointless, because the point is the game itself. At that point of undifferentiated consciousness, Professor Campbell says there are two choices: “You may let the body drop off, close the eyes, as it were, and unite with this central transcendent realization. Or you may open the eyes and take delight in the play of forms, seeing through them the one form. That is the attitude of world affirmation, the affirmation of every single thing, even the monsters.” ( Myths of Light, 79)

Photograph by Flickr Dickson Phua(CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). In this MythBlast year of Decentering the Hero, this month’s theme is Fear. We often don’t seem to think about fear in relation to heroism. The heroic deed has usually been accomplished by the time we’ve heard or read of it, and by then we are more inclined to wonder at the gallantry, the audacity, and the bravery of the hero than to wonder if he was afraid.  I think everyone probably has their own definition of fear and harbors fears that are particular to themselves; particularly those fears that come in the night, the children of the dark goddess, Nix. Even Zeus feared Nix, and Virgil insisted she’s the mother of the Furies. No wonder then, it so often seems that in darkness fear is aroused. Her children, Moros , Thanatos , Oizys , and Momus —doom, death, anxiety, and blame—haunt us in the lonely dark. The Oneiroi open the doors of our dreams to their siblings who bedevil and disturb our sleep, and make us think, Hamlet says, of that other sleep, the sleep of death upon which he ruefully reflects with a sense of foreboding, “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause.” (Act III, Scene I) Everyone fears something. And everyone responds to their fears in their own ways. Fear is many things, but its essence is simply this: fear is everything in us that remains unfinished and unloved. We fear death because we yet feel an abundance of life in us, life yet to be lived, life that is unfinished. We’re often not yet done with the relationships to loved ones, to pets, or to the beauty we find in the world. The desire is always for more, more life, more experience, more joy, more love, more success…until it isn’t; until desire is sated. And we all understand that when it isn’t anymore, when desire for it is extinguished, life is relatively easy to relinquish. True heroism is recognizing, understanding, accepting, and working to transform these fearful impulses and emotions within ourselves; to redefine our relationship to fear, to learn, somehow, to live with fear while at the same time refusing to be lived by it. That person is no hero who attempts to compensate fear with ego-driven status, power and control, making others quake in the presence of his might. That one who seeks to overcome others and the external world by “treasons, stratagems, and spoils,” remains a fear-haunted, self-terrorized individual who never delivers the compassionate boons of true heroism but instead dispenses only chaos, catastrophe, and wide-scale misery.  Every resistance to knowing ourselves is dangerous—explosively so, for the condition of not knowing yourself, of being unconsciously or consciously self-deceptive, avoiding the knowledge that you are not who you have always believed yourself to be, can quite literally destroy your life, and even the lives of others. The way through fear is to allow oneself to move into it rather than avoid it. Undertaking the exploration of how fear lives in me, how it distorts my perceptions of myself, of others, and the world around me; to recognize how it narrows my focus only to the threatening, the harmful, the malign. This is the way through fear: to see compassionately how fear is at work within me, and then to shift to another vantage point which reduces fears paranoia and frenzied, panicked, acting out. The shift to compassion and centering compassion within ourselves is one important key. Rilke wrote to a young poet saying, “Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” Tremendous healing potential is unlocked when we begin to see that the fear we project into the world is really something unfinished, something un-nurtured and unloved in ourselves.  Understanding fear from this perspective is difficult, however, because the cultural message insists that to be heroic, one must be without fear. Heroism is synonymous with fearlessness in much of literature, particularly in the literature of the Medieval romances. In Wolfram's Parzival , for instance, the narrative is that Parzival is fearless: “He weighed his javelin in his hand, saying: ‘What have I heard? Oh, if only the Devil would come now, in his fearful wrath! I would take him on, for sure! My mother talks of his terrors––I believe her courage is daunted.” (52)  And, “God was in a sweet mood for breeding when he wrought Parzival, who feared few terrors.” (63) In fact, the only thing Parzival (and Gawan for that matter) fears is disgrace.  The fear of shame is a common element in martial or chivalric cultures, and shame is not limited to the Western World. Samurai culture, for instance, is likewise deeply shame-based and in it, shame can only be redeemed by a form of ritual suicide, which I’m inclined to see as an unfortunate literalization of the death of the ego; egocide literalized becomes suicide. The attitude of fearless heroism places one in dangerous proximity to what Campbell, in The Hero With a Thousand Faces , referred to as “The inflated ego of the tyrant.” Perhaps what saves Parzival from this ego-dominant stance is his utter naïveté. Likewise, what spares Gawan from that fate is his preternatural humanism coupled with a robust spiritual life.   But accepting fear is merely one part of the equation; there is also the business of Amor Fati , not just the acceptance of, or resignation to, our respective fates, but the actual love of one’s own fate. Professor Campbell writes that fear “... is the emotion that arrests the mind before whatsoever is grave and constant in human suffering and unites it with the secret cause. What does that mean? That is the key to the whole thing: the secret cause.” ( Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor , 35)  What is the “secret cause”? The secret cause is one’s fate, one’s destiny, and as such we may welcome fear as evidence that we are living the life we are destined to live. But that is so difficult to do in practice as there is so much of the unknown in us and around us, so much of life is out of individual control—things the ego hates most. Living consists of being lived by powers that shape our lives, powers that we, as W.H. Auden wrote, pretend to understand, powers that push us up against limits, plunge us into the twists and turns of life, and conjure the unplanned, the unforeseen, the catastrophic, even the joyfully unexpected blessing, too.  All these powers that work on us are the revelations of one’s destiny. They all point to the secret cause, our own destiny, our own fate, and constitute the circumstances of our own individual lives. When we affirm Amor Fati we commit to not only accepting our lives, but loving the very life we have, not wanting it to be different in any way. If we can do that well enough, just that one thing, we set to work finishing all that is yet unfinished within us and from this new perspective, we see everything as a revelation of the Divine. That is the true achievement of heroism. Thanks for reading,

A foggy mountain road full of fall foliage and red and orange leaves on the trees and ground. Original public domain image from Wikimedia Commons. CC0. I have noticed over the years, a characteristic of human beings–not quite a fatal flaw, but a potentially disabling one. It’s best described as the lack of congruence between the life they are living and the life they would like to have, or perhaps the life they think they should have lived. It’s the inconcinnity between who one is and the person one might have been if only things had been different. The unlived life nags at the edges of consciousness; it disquiets us, evokes ennui, it ultimately debilitates and enfeebles the life we must live. The unlived life becomes one’s central preoccupation in life because the life gone missing eventually comes to be seen as the most important life, more important than anything else, more important than even the community or society that makes one’s life possible in the first place. Joseph Campbell took note of this tendency when he wrote: One consideration more, before proceeding to our next concern: that of the fact that in our present day—at least in the leading modern centers of cultural creativity—people have begun to take the existence of their supporting social orders for granted, and instead of aiming to defend and maintain the integrity of the community have begun to place at the center of concern the development and protection of the individual—the individual, moreover, not as an organ of the state but as an end and entity in himself. This marks an extremely important, unprecedented shift of ground...Myths To Live By [ebook], 29 The fantasies of the unlived life prove to be seductive pleasures in that they imagine a more complete, more competent self and usually an even more satisfying life. Maybe such imaginings or fantasies are unconscious attempts at a kind of self cure–the solutions for living which we contrive in our fantasy life tell us what the problems are in the life we are living. Perhaps the fantasies of finding another life are a way to deal with a reality that offers us very little in terms of free will. Whatever one chooses to think about the idea of free will, one cannot but be aware that there is a gap, sometimes a yawning chasm, between what we want and what we have, and that we can’t simply create what we desire. In some important ways, the unlived life is a diagnostic tool, it tells us what is wrong with the life we are currently living. What must our problems be if the fantasized life is the solution? Anxiety and frustration seem to fill the gap between the lived and the unlived life, feelings awakened by the possibility of missing important opportunities or events, missing crucial pieces of information, missing community, or simply missing the joke. A foundational ideal of psychoanalysis is that there is something unsolvable, something outlandish, something irrevocably unfathomable, about living and understanding one’s own life. Psychotherapy helps us develop a more adaptive story about what we can’t seem to understand about our own lives, and what it is, exactly, in our lives that we can’t seem to talk about. There is a danger that without feedback from others, especially those trusted others whom we know have our best interests in mind, we will suffer from the belief that the  stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are unassailable, adamantine facts.  The reality is that our stories of ourselves are fictions that demand to be deliteralized. Surely you’ve had the experience of being at a family reunion, a wake, a wedding or some such thing, telling stories about the past, when an older acquaintance or relative interrupts to say, “it didn’t happen that way at all!” We have no choice but to live our lives forward while at the same time, our history, our biography, is constructed backwards. The stories we tell about our lives are unconsciously meant to mislead--both others and ourselves. We are constantly trying to unknow what we already know about ourselves; we unconsciously create the illusion of a life that makes sense (in either a positive or negative way) so that we won’t have to face the much more complicated and messy truth. And it seems very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to face the truth of ourselves without a support network of caring people invested in our well being. We need fellowship; it helps us to see ourselves more clearly and compassionately. Sometimes people come to know the gap between the unlived life and the lived life as a kind of hell. Were there a hell, this is as good a definition of it as any, for hell is not to be found in some distant place or afterlife, but exists right here and right now, formed by the cast of mind through which we see the world and others and especially, it seems, ourselves. There are only a few ways out of hell; one way is quite common and over-used by many in contemporary life: fail to attend to the hell and become so much a part of it that one no longer sees it. An alternative way, although challenging to be sure, demands that one live seeking out the sublime encounter, a way of living and thinking that attempts to place one, more often than not, uncomfortably outside of one’s self-satisfied, cozy belief systems. This way out of hell requires one to disregard the easy pleasures of self-indulgence, self-certainty, and self-righteousness, and instead be determined to recognize who and what voices, in the midst of hell are not hell, and subjecting them to rigorous examination, supporting them to be recognized and valued, thereby create a space for them. In the creation of such a space, one experiences the extraordinary, the beguiling, and the sublime, rendered all the more wondrous for their difficult acquisition. The voices that are not hell are truly the voices calling us to fellowship.  Forsaking the easy pleasures of the unlived life for the harder pleasures of fully living the life one has is a difficult and daunting challenge. One must be able to see both the lived and the unlived with some degree of hard-won clarity, and move between and among the lived and unlived lives. Much of living consists of embodying the imaginal, seeing what’s possible and living as much as one can, those aspects of the unlived life that bring more significance, more substance, more love, more nobility, into the life one is living.  Reflecting upon, without longing for, the unlived life offers the opportunity to bring more of what Aristotle called eudaimonia –a flourishing, a sense of well-being and nobility regardless of circumstance–into the living of the only life we have. The purpose of living, as I see it at least, is to try and make what is implicit in the imagination explicit in living. This aspiration, this striving, this becoming, is the abiding, one might even say heavenly, gift embedded in the unlived life.

Members of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) striking for better working conditions, c. 1970. CC 2.0. A few weeks ago, on October 25th, we observed St. Crispin’s Day. I recognize that it’s probably an exaggeration to say “we” observed it. This feast day was removed from the Roman Catholic Church's universal liturgical calendar following Vatican II, so it’s probably more accurate to say that there are some Church historians among us that were aware of it, and more to my point, some Shakespeare scholars and enthusiasts as well. But I think it’s a nice jumping off point for a discussion regarding the importance of fellowship, the theme for this month’s MythBlast series. Generally, fellowship is what we call the act of meeting and sharing with others the important events of our lives, offering advice or aid, and pursuing shared goals or aims. Perhaps more importantly, it is a way of being seen, of creating a sense of belonging, of coming to know oneself through one’s relationships to others. And what’s more, the bonds of fellowship are strengthened when one’s group finds itself in the midst of a crisis. Take, for instance, Shakespeare’s King Henry V and the moving speech he makes before the Battle of Agincourt: …Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot, But he’ll remember with advantages What feats he did that day: then shall our names. Familiar in his mouth as household words … Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d. This story shall the good man teach his son; And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remember’d; We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition: And gentlemen in England now a-bed Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day. Henry V, Act IV, Scene iii Shakespeare leaves no doubt that the bonds of love and brotherhood are forged in adversity, and such a love binds us in fellowship, fosters self-respect, and is made stronger for having survived hardships. Similarly, here’s Joseph Campbell remarking in   Myths To Live By  on the brotherhood created by being in extremis  with others: And I have lately had occasion to think frequently of this word of Schopenhauer as I have watched on television newscasts those heroic helicopter rescues, under fire in Vietnam, of young men wounded in enemy territory: their fellows, forgetful of their own safety, putting their young lives in peril as though the lives to be rescued were their own. There, I would say—if we are looking truly for an example in our day —is an authentic rendition of the labor of Love. (138) It’s important to point out that the battle in which one engages in order to form these bonds of fellowship needn’t be waged in a war. It’s enough that we accept the burdens of being human while facing the daily challenges of living and the inescapable struggle for dignity, for freedom, peace, and for understanding. These challenges may arouse and reinforce our bonds of fellowship just as securely as any experience of warfare. The most important battle remains, in fact, the battle within ourselves to overcome the personal ego and recognize that what I traditionally identify as me—a distinct, self-directed, independent self—is a fundamental misunderstanding of existence and being. The primary task of the hero is to overcome the personal ego, and if that can be accomplished, one quite naturally turns to the pursuit of relieving other’s suffering. This may be understood, in Joseph Campbell’s way of thinking, as the boon that the returning hero shares with the community. Such a boon not only relieves the suffering of others but also creates sharing, nurturing relationships—in a word, fellowship. The egoist (one could just as easily use the word Tyrant) approaches others and the world with the question, “What can you give me?” The true hero approaches life armed with the question, “What can I give you?” In ancient Greece, the symbolon  was understood to be the concrete token of a gift and had the function of transmitting the whole history of the giver into the recipient which then continued to live on in the receiver. It is as if through giving, we discover the secret to eternal life! Finally, it seems to be a basic truth that, if human beings are to enjoy good physical and mental health, we need to be in the company of others, we need to feel that we belong to something larger than ourselves. Simply stated, we need fellowship. As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, it is so important to find places where we may be seen. Not to be seen through, which only elicits shame, nor seen with envy or admiration which generally leads to narcissism, but rather, to be seen into, which is a genuinely soulful, heartful experience for both the seer and the seen. Yet no seeing, however deep, can reveal the indisputably real–and whole–individual all at once in any given moment. (by real, I mean a true and authentic version of oneself). But we can see the fragments, the twinklings, the essences, or the dynamics of the real at work in a life, and over time, through the remarkable recombinatory nature of memory we fashion a more and more complete picture of a person, and we eventually come to see and know the whole being. To remain unseen is a terrible wound to the psyche, and may even be a factor in severe mental disorders. Campbell discusses how madness can share in the images of myth: My own had been a work based on a comparative study of the mythologies of mankind, with only here and there passing references to the phenomenology of dream, hysteria, mystic visions, and the like. Mainly, it was an organization of themes and motifs common to all mythologies; and I had had no idea, in bringing these together, of the extent to which they would correspond to the fantasies of madness. According to my thinking, they were the universal, archetypal, psychologically based symbolic themes and motifs of all traditional mythologies; and now from this paper of Dr. Perry I was learning that the same symbolic figures arise spontaneously from the broken-off, tortured state of mind of modern individuals suffering from a complete schizophrenic breakdown: the condition of one who has lost touch with the life and thought of his community and is compulsively fantasizing out of his own completely cut-off base. (283, emphasis is mine) For better or for worse, the multiformity of life in our respective communities inevitably informs and shapes our thoughts and actions. Ideally, the fellowship we keep helps us find and understand ourselves more deeply and extend the boundaries of our concerns beyond our own immediate interests to those of our fellows, and even to the world itself. Anaïs Nin wrote that “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” ( The Diary of Anaïs Nin , Vol. 1: 1931-1934) We must be conscious and intentional in seeking fellowship, because those affiliations will determine the worlds to be born from us, and give form to our own becoming.

This month, the concluding month of the year, our MythBlast Series theme is The Heroism of Failure. Perhaps it’s proper to explore this topic at the end of the year because in some sense, endings and failure are, I think, more inextricably linked to heroism than success. Failure tends to stick with us longer, while success is more chimerical, more of a moment that passes relatively quickly when we do manage to achieve it. On the road to heroism, the prospective hero will fail miserably, and more than once. Failure is an inevitable and, I believe, an invaluable feature of living any life, but most especially the heroic life. When I was a very young, very raw police officer, there was an older officer I looked up to. He grew up in the Bronx, did four tours of duty in Vietnam, liked poetry, movies, and bodybuilding. We became friends, worked out together, and often found ourselves working the nightshift because he—and I, it turned out—loved the energies of darkness. We loved the unpredictability, the excitement, and the flood of adrenaline. Often, when we were reflecting upon situations that had the potential for ending badly, he would say to me, “All the heroes are in cemeteries.” I was never really sure of what, exactly, he meant by that, but I think that because culture commonly sees death as a kind of failure, as an event that shouldn’t have happened, one that is always premature regardless of the deceased’s age, in the final analysis the hero’s death, while heroic, might also be seen as a failure rather than the simple, apt culmination of a life. In my comrade’s declaration, I eventually came to find echoes of Sophocles who, in Antigone, wrote that “One must wait until evening to see how splendid the day has been.” Elsewhere the playwright wrote, “There is an ancient saying, famous among men, that thou shouldst not judge fully of a man's life before he dieth, whether it should be called blest or wretched.” ( Trachiniæ , 1) We human beings have a hard time judging or understanding that which is ongoing, unfolding, or underway, and we are only able to begin to understand that which is finished. Perhaps that’s why it’s somewhat easier to assess heroism when the hero dies in mid-career. That may have something to do with why, since 1941, more than half of the Medals of Honor awarded by U.S. Presidents (in the name of Congress) have been awarded posthumously.  For those who give their lives for a noble cause, some recognition of heroism is more or less assured, and these heroic dead will do nothing further to tarnish their heroism. Nothing more will be asked of them. They are eternally heroic–and, often, eternally young–making their absence from the world all the more poignant, and further burnishing the golden aura of their heroism.  But for us–the still living–life goes on, and living is no easy task as one failure is heaped upon another. The great Chinese novelist and Nobel Laureate, Mo Yan, reminds us that “Dying's easy; it's living that's hard. The harder it gets, the stronger the will to live. And the greater the fear of death, the greater the struggle to keep on living.” ( Big Breasts and Wide Hips ) And, I would add, the greater the struggle to keep on living, the greater our failures become.  But the fact of failure itself shouldn’t be surprising; in fact the only surprises about failure lie in its breathtakingly innovative variations. Nevertheless, one is left with a sense that in American life failure, or the acknowledgement of it, is somehow shameful or improper. But in truth, failure is simply a negotiation with our human-all-too-human limitations, it is the inaequalis magister vitae , life’s unequaled teacher, and for that reason is, I believe, a nearly ubiquitous presence in myth. Every success is itself a form of failure, writes Joyce Carol Oates in her marvelous essay, Notes on Failure . There is always a compromise between what is desired and what is attained:  …after all, there is the example of William Faulkner who considered himself a failed poet; Henry James returning to prose fiction after the conspicuous failure of his playwriting career; Ring Lardner writing his impeccable American prose because he despaired of writing sentimental popular songs; Hans Christian Andersen perfecting his fairy tales since he was clearly a failure in other genres–poetry, playwriting, life. One has only to glance at Chamber Music  to see why James Joyce specialized in prose. I, at least, have to wonder if the hero isn’t also unconsciously in love with failure. There is something all too final about "success," something finite which is relegated to the lifelessness of history. Success really only lives in the past, while failure and its moments of vitalization are always with us. The risks one takes in facing the dangers of living–of following one’s bliss–gives one the sensation of being jaw-droppingly alive.  What else might explain the hero’s penchant for that which exists amid danger, mystery, and intoxicating adrenaline? Why is the hero drawn to extremes? It can only be exhilaration, the frisson of living life as though death itself was of no consequence. It’s the exhilaration one feels from living as though life was a game, or as if one were an actor in a play. Certainly, nothing about life and living is easy, not even games–if they are to continue to engage and entice us. If they were easy, we would quickly tire of them. If one understands that Life is a game that demands perseverance, practice, and the ability to understand death as the apotheosis of life rather than its interruption, one may feel much more unfettered, much less burdened by living. The problem of life is not death, but rather what we believe death to be. Culturally, we’ve decided that death is bad, that death is something abnormal, an anomaly of living, instead of recognizing it as an important developmental milepost that, like any other developmental marker, must be achieved (both C.G. Jung and Sigmund Freud noted that death is as important to human beings as birth).  Engaging life as a game captures what Joseph Campbell called the “aristocratic spirit,” an attitude from which one lives life on life’s own terms and engages life nobly, honestly, and courageously–as play. And there is only one way to play a game, as the catcher, Crash Davis, said in the movie Bull Durham: “You be arrogant, even when you're getting beat. That's the secret. You gotta play this game with fear and arrogance.”  Living this way fear and arrogance cancel each other out, ultimately leaving one with only the serene acceptance of one’s fate– Amor Fati –which is exactly the attitude of the hero unconsciously in love with failure. And of course, it must be love since failure is such a large part of life, and as Joseph Campbell wrote, “Love, for [the hero] is absolute, singlefold, and for life.” ( Flight of the Wild Gander: Selected Essays 1944-1968 , 181) Love always and in all ways is for life, for all of it, in its every manifestation. Even when it manifests in failure. Thanks for reading,

The Fool from the Rider–Waite tarot deck by Pamela Colman Smith via Wikimedia Commons, CCO This year in the MythBlast Series we’re exploring the symbols and archetypal images of the major arcana of the Tarot. A picture is worth a thousand words, or so the old saying goes, and the images of Tarot are laden with archetypal significance — so much so, that those thousand words barely begin to open the symbolic, representational, elements of those images.  This first month of 2023 we’re looking at the image of The Fool, the first (or last) card of the Tarot deck, as it bears the number zero. Zero is not a counting number and, similarly, the Fool cannot be counted on to behave predictably nor conventionally. From a traditional point of view, the Fool is a zero, a nobody; one to be ridiculed and degraded. The Fool is thought to be impulsive, irresponsible, unorthodox, unmannered; an empty-headed, naive simpleton who lacks good judgment. The Fool is often understood to be graceless, senseless, and ugly — sometimes even deformed. He may be a dwarf, crippled, or otherwise deformed. Fools may also be incredibly pompous while simultaneously being shockingly incompetent. But there is another, deeper, side to the Fool, an aspect that is the most important of this multi-faceted, bewildering, disturbing, frustrating, and yet ultimately revitalizing and creative archetype: the Wise Fool. Usage of the word fool  was quite common in 1800, but over the next two hundred years fell out of fashion. By 1980 or so, it was seldom used. Around the year 2000, usage returned to became more common; Now, in 2023, it’s used nearly as often as it was in the year 1800. Why has this word made a comeback, and why now? That’s always the therapeutic question, you know; why this symptom, and why is it expressing now? The forms always emerge before understanding, just as the disease has always progressed before symptoms emerge.  The image of the Fool, like all archetypal images, is timeless. Archetypes are not rigidly bound to any particular time, place, or situation, however they can be constellated and shaped by the energies of a given age and place. The idea of foolishness, and therefore the image of the Fool, seems to be constellated by difficult, dangerous times — eras that may be metaphorically represented by arid and distorted landscapes, Wasteland situations, one might say, in which hearts have become hardened and heads have become empty and addled. In the sociopolitical climate of the early 2000s, when the word fool returned to common use, fear dominated the emotional landscape of the time. Fears of terrorism, of political opponents, fear of the truth, and a new fear much harder to understand: the fear of the mutability — the relativity —of truth. We seem to be living in a time in which conservatism — as an idea, as a psychic perspective or a sociological reflex, as opposed to a political philosophy — is more and more popular. Primarily because the conservative perspective, in its preference for order and rules, stability and traditional values, offers an escape from Modernity and the bewildering uncertainty of Postmodernism. The more rapid the pace of change in a society, the more frangible, malleable, and unfathomable life becomes, the more appealing conservatism becomes. Conservatism, with its hunger for rules and black and white thinking, sets the stage for the appearance of the transmogrifying, chaotic wisdom of the Anarchic Fool (think of Groucho Marx movies with shipboard staterooms filled to overflowing with all sorts of people, the manic comedy of Robin Williams, or the revolutionary satire of Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl). When societies and cultures become too proscribed, too rigid, or too rule bound the Fool, through his militant anarchy, turns institutions and logic upside down and inside out. Jesus himself often occupied the role of the Wise Fool, and in Matthew 20:16 Jesus taught, “So the last shall be first, and the first last…” demonstrating the same foolish ability to invert and subvert the usual order of things, rebelling against the excesses of wealth and privilege and the exercise of grim authoritarianism. Echoing the words of Jesus, the Tarot Fool may also be the first card or the last, which adds a kind of symmetry or circularity to the chaos of subversion.  Since irony is the primary constituent in the language of myth , perhaps the fool is the personification of myth itself, because irony is the language of the fool. Irony intensifies and subverts reality just as the Fool does. Like the fool, irony turns things inside out and upside down. It deconstructs and overthrows. It draws attention to the discrepancy between literal and essential meaning, all the while allowing the Fool to go about his business serenely untroubled, almost as if he’s above it all, like Paul McCartney’s “Fool on the Hill” watching the world spinning ‘round.  The Fool sitting on the hill isn’t really “above it all,” he’s a metaphor for the clarity of perspective–the sense of seeing a big picture while at the same time, deeply engaged in life — that reveals the interdependence of everything, that all existence is harmonious and in accord, even when it appears to be a cruel, chaotic mess. It’s the perspective of the deepest Self, a way of honoring one’s own passions while simultaneously recognizing the limitations of being human; of following one’s own heart and utilizing the wisdom of one’s own mind.  Merriment and sadness are always intertwined, and an undercurrent of melancholy flows through the fool. In the second half of Shakespeare’s career, his fools become more worldly wise, more world-weary and, consequently, more compassionate. Being full of word play, puns, and silly jokes, the gravedigger in Hamlet is one example of a fool. But there is also in him a deep wisdom that accepts the course and nature of life on life’s own terms. He unearths a skull and tells Hamlet it was once Yorick, his father’s (King Hamlet) Fool. Taken aback, Hamlet says: Yorick! I knew him, Horatio—a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times...Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? (Act 5, Scene 1) “He hath bore me on his back a thousand times…Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.” Hearing or reading these lines always makes me think that Yorick, the jester, the fool, must have been the main source of whatever love young Hamlet received. It was Yorick that played with the child, not his father. It was Yorick, not his vain, self-interested mother, whom he showered with kisses.  Even in death, the fool tried to teach Hamlet the simple truth about living: that what survives of us is love. And if we are to become fully fledged, functional adults, the love we must pursue is not that of a parent nor a lover, but a love of the conditions of life itself. These conditions of life are not congenial to human understanding or comfort, and rather than rage against this reality, we must learn to accept, even love, the conditions of life if we are to love others, the world, ourselves and our own lives and stand against hopelessness and the death of the spirit. If we can achieve this, we discover that love really is all around us. Even, perhaps especially, in the company of Fools. Thanks for reading,

The Chariot from the Rider-Waite Deck by Pamela Colman. Public Domain For the month of July we will be looking at what, in most tarot decks, is the seventh trump or major arcana card, the Chariot. In the tarot, the Chariot is largely about overcoming challenges, mastery of oneself and one’s environment, and the journey to achieving one’s goals.    As you might imagine, the invention of the chariot (itself made possible by the invention of the spoked wheel) was revolutionary. Of course, at the bottom of all this technology is the domestication of animals such as horses and oxen. Horses were first domesticated in the Steppes, the southeast region of the Ural Mountains, sometime before 2500 BCE, more than six hundred years after the wheel arrived from the Middle East. Strangely enough, the chariot was in use fifteen hundred years before humans began to regularly mount and ride horses. There are very early drawings of people trying to mount horses, but those attempts must have been largely unsuccessful until selective breeding developed stronger, larger, more accommodating animals.    Almost immediately the chariot became a highly valued instrument of war. It provided a charioteer with an opportunity to cover a great deal of ground at dizzying speed and a stable platform from which one could use a bow and arrows to devastating effect. Around 500 BCE, the use of chariots began to decline because of the increased popularity and mobility of soldiers on horseback, organized cavalries, and improved infantry tactics that deprived chariots of their once novel advantages. Although, it’s worth mentioning that the indomitable Celts were still using chariots against the invading Romans until around the fourth century of the Common Era. For the most part chariots had become the focus of entertainment, and chariot racing became popular for the masses, particularly in Rome.  Plato moved the chariot into the realm of metaphor and myth. In his Phaedrus , we overhear Socrates lecturing on the nature of the soul, which he compared to a team of winged horses and a charioteer. The horses of the gods' souls are good, beautiful, and obedient, but mortals’ souls have one horse that is beautiful and good, and one that is ugly and unruly. In some previous ethereal existence, the souls of mortals followed the gods around the vault of heaven, seeing divine sights and experiencing sacred revelations as initiates in the rites of the gods.  The mortal souls that are able to follow the gods do so just barely. They understand some things but not others, and they have trouble with their horses, constantly rising and falling. Some of these souls are unable to keep up at all, and continue to fall earthward on ever shrinking wings, failing to get any glimpse at all of divine reality. Once incarnate these souls, in their postlapsarian state, are more invested in their own opinions than in any sort of ultimate truth. Any soul that caught sight of even one true thing is granted another circuit where it can see more, but eventually all souls fall back to earth. Those that have been initiated are put into various human incarnations depending on how much they have seen; those made into philosophers have seen the most, with kings, politicians, doctors, prophets, poets, manual laborers, and tyrants, descending accordingly as to their relative ignorance. But what a happy coincidence for Plato that philosophers are deemed to have seen more truth than other stations of life! Chariots are also good metaphors for books (this might be the right place to imagine the record scratch sound effect). Books are capable of transporting us to other places, regions, countries, even other worlds in the few minutes it takes to pick one up and engage it. Books can do for us exactly what Plato described his soul chariot doing; they offer us sublime revelations and truths. They offer us beauty, emotion, and relationships. Books initiate us into the human experience and ultimately teach us to be less parochial and more humane. When we learn to read compassionately, generously, and carefully, we can’t help but incorporate those habits into the living of our own lives, and we may even notice that our own lives seem to have acquired the qualities of well plotted novels.   In a letter to a friend, Franz Kafka wrote that “we need books that affect us … A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” For those of you who regularly read the work of Joseph Campbell or the MythBlast newsletter, or listen to one of the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s MythMaker Podcast Network’s podcasts, we are offering yet another tool, a freshly sharpened ice axe with which one can address that frozen inner sea. This month we’re introducing JCF’s Skeleton Key Study Guides, a new series of study guides for books by Joseph Campbell. These study guides are written by contemporary experts in myth, and may help you further discover the joy of Campbell’s writing and his insights into mythology.  Each Skeleton Key Study Guide focuses on one book by Joseph Campbell. You'll find a chapter summary for each chapter in Campbell's book plus notable quotes, points of interest, reading lists, and ideas for working with the material in that chapter in the form of discussion questions, essay topics, or creative prompts. These study guides are written for teachers and students who study Joseph Campbell, but Skeleton Key Study Guides are also ideal for creatives, psychologists, and any seekers who feel drawn to myth. Our vision is for these guides to open a portal for you into Campbell's work. The first study guide in the series, Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide , is available now in ebook and paperback formats. The study guide accompanies Joseph Campbell's Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine. View the recording of a webinar with two of the authors of Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide , our own Dr. Joanna Gardner in conversation with Dr. Olivia Happel–Block about the study guide on the Joseph Campbell Foundation's YouTube channel

Still from The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers As the editor of the MythBlast Series, I have the privilege of introducing the new year of 2024 MythBlasts. I’m honored and humbled that you, and other readers-subscribers like you, have made the MythBlast Series so popular. Not only does it continue to grow in popularity, but we continue to experiment with themes and ideas that push at the edges of Joseph Campbell’s work in ways that make his thoughts more accessible and more relevant to contemporary culture.   This year our theme for the MythBlast Series is “The Power of Myth.”  The Power of Myth  was filmed over the last years of Campbell’s life, aired in 1988 not long after his death, and remains one of the most popular series in the history of PBS. The series consists of six-hour long episodes, and these episode titles will provide the monthly themes to which our MythBlast authors will write. You will see a few new authors writing for us in 2024, and I think that these authors help constitute our strongest group of contributors yet. Quotes and references to Campbell’s most famous book,   The Hero With A Thousand Faces , first published in 1949, were sprinkled throughout The Power of Myth  series, and it just so happens that this year marks the 75 th  anniversary of Hero’s  publication. This book has inspired millions of readers, and I suspect it may well inspire millions more. For a book that constantly finds itself on lists of the greatest nonfiction books of all time—for example,   The Greatest Books of All Time  website  named Hero  the 348th greatest nonfiction book of all time, it made   Parade Magazine’s  list of The 75 Best Books of the Past 75 Years , and on Time  magazine’s   All-Time 100 Best Nonfiction Books , Hero  clocks in at number 46—this one had a difficult time as a neonate. Reviewers were hard on Campbell and his first offering as a solo author. It seems that the animus toward Campbell’s book was largely related to his reliance on psychoanalytic and Jungian theory. Sigmund Freud, armed with his new theory of psychoanalysis visited the U.S. only once, in 1909 to celebrate Clark University’s twentieth anniversary. America was initially cool toward psychoanalysis. Perhaps cool is putting it mildly; prominent physicians and public intellectuals routinely referred to Freud’s theory as “filth.” By the 1930s, however, psychoanalysis had grown in popularity and was even being taught in medical schools and universities. Jung’s popularity was initially more immediate in America and by the 1940s, the disciplines of art, literature, and comparative religion had embraced his theories. In addition to Campbell, Jackson Pollock, and Martha Graham, even the physicists Wolfgang Paulie and Erwin Schrodinger embraced Jung’s analytical psychology. The old guard, the establishment figures in “institutions” such as some university literature departments or The New York Times, were nevertheless still reluctant to embrace the influences of modernism and the new abstract dialectics of the time. Twenty years earlier Ernest Hemingway, for example, had to endure largely ad hominem, dismissive attacks for The Sun Also Rises. Time  magazine complained that Hemingway’s "interests appear to have grown soggy from too much sitting in cafes in the Latin quarter of Paris," the Chicago Daily Tribune  said the novel is a "bushel of sensationalism and triviality," and The Springfield Republican  lamented that the novel’s "extreme moral sordidness at such length defeats artistic purpose." These sorts of scolding, smug reviews were also leveled at The Hero With A Thousand Faces . On June 26 th , 1949 The New York Times  published a review of Hero  which consisted of mostly snide remarks without making even a grudging attempt to find sympathy with Campbell’s thesis. In that review Max Radin glibly wrote, Mr. Campbell undertakes to reinterpret all mythologies on the basis chiefly, but not exclusively, of Jung's psychoanalytical theories. Freud is cited just as much as Jung, and Geza Roheim, Wilhelm Steckel and Otto Rank are frequently referred to. Adler is not mentioned. Apparently those who tell stories about heroes are not troubled by inferiority complexes, even as a matter of compensation-fantasy. Certainly Mr. Campbell is not troubled by an inferiority complex, since his book is quite consciously a “key to all mythologies.” Mr. Radin seems to have issues with the ambitious nature of Hero, and yet he seems at least a little captivated by it at the same time: [Campbell’s] sweep in space and time is impressively broad, and his boldness is highly commendable…There is so much in this book, and the analogies and comparisons are so interesting and stimulating, that it is too bad that it is all presented in the mystical and pseudo-philosophic fog of Jung. But ultimately, Mr. Radin could not accept Campbell’s idea that mythology has many different purposes and functions. Campbell described myth as “a primitive, fumbling effort to explain the world…,” as misunderstood poetry, as allegorical instructions to help the individual accept his place in the social group, as “a group dream symptomatic of archetypal urges,” as well as being “the traditional vehicle of man’s profoundest metaphysical insights.” Mr. Radin implicitly appealed to authority by quoting Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes when he wrote, “I cannot restrain a lingering doubt.” Finally, Mr. Radin reveals a stunning lack of imagination when he writes that Campbell makes too much out of myth: I fancy that mythology may well be in large measure what those who made the myths—heard them, read them, or saw them depicted in the painting or statuary, apparently thought they were: tales told as tales, without any purpose, other than that of telling them. Radin wraps up his pronouncement against Hero  by penning this piece of mind-numbing nonsense: And when we are asked to believe that the ancient Greeks or other peoples could not…introduce any fact of common experience which was not an allegory of something quite different, I am tempted to exclaim with Andrew Lang: “Who ever heard of such tales!” In its way, I suppose, the Times  was simply trying to stem the symbolist, anti-authoritarian, and potentially revolutionary tide of modernism. Change is always a difficult challenge with which to be faced, and at its core, modernism insisted that the world had to be rethought and reimagined in fundamental ways. Old authorities were no longer recognized by modernism, and its passion for novelty and feeling disposed of hidebound customs and unquestioned orthodoxies while simultaneously opening up and displaying the world’s complexity, nuance, and absurdity, a radical re-visioning that was at the same time reaching across class and economic barriers to be inclusive and uplifting, emboldening and revitalizing. Campbell’s approach to myth was firmly rooted in the thoughts, experiments, and products of modernism, which I must emphasize was not necessarily atheistic, and his finger was on the pulse of a culture increasingly fascinated with new spiritual and metaphysical explorations like Theosophy, Christian Science, spiritualism, and the religious and philosophical systems of Asia. It was into this milieu, this zeitgeist, that Joseph Campbell, with his book The Hero With A Thousand Faces , introduced a reimagined study of mythology, and made the rituals and beliefs of ancient societies relevant to contemporary life. Thanks for reading,   This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 1, and  The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Latest Podcast In episode 4 of The Podcast With A Thousand Faces, initially released in November 2022, Duncan Trussell and John Bucher of the Joseph Campbell Foundation talk about Duncan's work as a comedian, and his interest in religion, mythology, artificial intelligence, and consciousness. Duncan is the host of The Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast and creator of the Netflix show, The Midnight Gospel. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religion, philosphies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth." - Joseph Campbell - The Hero with a Thousand Faces  (p1)

A study by John William Waterhouse for his painting The Decameron, 1916. "If you sow lightly, you reap Lightly. And a good crop Requires the kind of soil Where seeds sprout a hundred- Fold, for even good seed Dries up in dried-up ground. What Chrétien sows—the seeds He scatters—are the start of a story [...]" —Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval: the Story of the Grail, translated by Burton Raffel  We live in a world chock-full of stories. Presumably, each has its merits, and yet some stories are quickly forgotten while others become favorites. As a storyteller, I'm intrigued by our attraction to certain stories and curious about how we make them our own. There are certain fairy tales, "The Prince Lindworm" for example, that maintain a haunting sense of significance for me. I've mused over this tale many times, drawn to the moment in which a queen "forgets" the advice of a mysterious crone and eats both of the magical roses. She later gives birth to a dragon. Oops.  One of Joseph Campbell's favorite stories was the Arthurian legend of the Grail quest and the wounded Fisher King. This was the topic of his master's thesis at Columbia University and a touchstone for his later ideas. The image of the solitary knight following a pathless path is emblematic of the hero's adventure, and Campbell's vision of the modern individual on a personal quest for fulfillment. You may recognize this oft-quoted line from the moment the grail magically appeared to the Knights of the Round Table: "Further, they decided that each should go on this quest alone and enter the forest at the point of his own choosing, where it was darkest, because it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group." ( The Flight of the Wild Gander: Selected Essays 1944 - 1968 , 222) Perceval, the Story of the Grail  was written in the 12th century by the French Romantic poet Chrétien de Troyes, who reworked Celtic legends and British history to create the young knight Perceval and the image of the grail. He describes the adventures of a naive young man who acquires the trappings and skills of a seasoned knight, and finds himself at the mysterious castle of the Fisher King. There he beholds the grail, and although he is filled with wonder, he asks no questions. The following morning, he awakens to find himself alone in an empty castle. Perceval eventually rejoins King Arthur's court and is welcomed as a hero. In the midst of the celebration, a loathly lady appears and castigates him for his silence at the Grail Castle. She tells him that his failure to ask a question will bring continued suffering to the kingdom. Filled with remorse, Perceval vows to rectify his error and begins his search for the grail.  At this point in his story, de Troyes shifts the action to the knight Gawain. Perceval has a few more adventures and then boom--the story abruptly stops mid-sentence. de Troyes abandoned his story and Perceval's quest.  He died without finishing his tale, however, the seeds that he sowed undeniably sprouted.   Percival's quest and the image of the grail inspired other poets, who refashioned some of the elements and brought the story to a successful conclusion. In Parzival , for example, the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach has Parzival discover that he has a brother, a Moslem named Feirefiz. When they put down their swords, the loathly lady (Cundrie) declares Parzival the Grail King. The two brothers find the Grail Castle and all ends well. Campbell often told von Eschenbach's version of the story. He developed an elegant exegesis on the meaning of the symbols, and the significance of this new story at this point in history. According to Campbell, the appearance of the grail quest story in the Middle Ages signals a shift in authority, away from the well codified and corrupt religious order, toward personal experience, and the emergence of a new vision of the individual. In Flight of the Wild Gander  he writes:  The Grail is housed not in a church but in a castle; its guardian is not a priest but a king. It is carried not by an assortment of questionable males but by twenty-five young woman, whose virtue must be unsullied, and the knight who achieves the quest, and so restores the Waste Land to bounty, succeeds through integrity of character, in the service of a singly focused love, amor. (219) Like many others, I feel the invitation to pick up where he left off implicit in de Troyes’ unfinished tale. I'd begin with the moment the loathly lady departs, leaving Perceval and King Arthur's court in a state of shocked dismay. A younger me, like that brave knight, would put on her suit of armor and ride off to the rescue without a backward glance. Today, that impulse to fix and set things right feels like an evasion of the real challenge. I see Perceval sitting alone in the empty hall after all of the guests have gone, absorbing the implications of his failure.  Was a search for the grail necessary, I wonder, or had it already been found? What if Perceval laid down his sword, chastened by his new awareness of the limits of his understanding? What if he went back to his beautiful lady and became a devoted husband and father, a good and honest neighbor? What if he was tested by marriage, parenthood, illness, and heartbreak, rather than the enemy's sword and the solitude of the dark forest? If he posed the right question to his daughter, perched on his knee, and she  changed the world?  No one knows why Chrétien de Troyes didn't complete his Perceval. Maybe he lost interest in the story or didn't realize its significance, as Campbell suggests ( Flight of the Wild Gander , 218). Maybe the expectations of his royal patron, Count Philip of Flanders and Alsace, limited his ability to tell the story that he imagined. Maybe the image of the grail catapulted him to a place beyond words and a feeling that he couldn't share. Maybe he told the part of the story that was his to tell. We have inherited many tales of adventure, and yet the possibilities in our storied lives are not exhausted. Each of us can enter the forest of story and begin the quest of our own devising, following the trail our imagination sets down. You may find that the ground around your favorite tales is well trod, but you can still make the story your own. Start where you will. Scatter some seeds and see what sprouts.

Sculpture of a fallen warrior from the temple of Aphaia at Aegina, 6th century BC Before we get to my MythBlast for the week, I want to draw your attention to our new Joseph Campbell Essentials Series . The first two volumes— Joseph Campbell on Bliss  and Joseph Campbell on The Hero’s Journey —launch a collection of beautifully designed pocket gift books that bring together Campbell’s most inspiring reflections. In these pages, the world-renowned mythologist illuminates the mystical joy of following one’s passion and the universal path of adventure, transformation, and return. Portable and elegant, these little volumes are perfect for carrying everywhere, savoring as bedside reading, or giving as meaningful gifts—an invitation to live fully and courageously. These little books make a big impression; they are indispensable, beautiful, and for those who value sage wisdom for living, truly essential. In honor of our Joseph Campbell Essentials book series, and since our highlighted text this month is Joseph Campbell’s classic The Hero With A Thousand Faces , it might be interesting to look at this business of heroing  and perhaps think a little about some of the tacit difficulties of this subject;   it’s not all parades and laurels. All heroism flirts with failure. Death, refusal of the return, an unsuccessful quest—these are not exceptions to the heroic journey but its constant companions. Joseph Campbell, in The Hero With a Thousand Faces , shows us that what looks like failure from one angle is often from another, the very unfolding of destiny. it’s not all parades and laurels. All heroism flirts with failure. The hero, from Campbell’s perspective, seeks not the gods, but what they represent. This is the key to understanding Campbell: the understanding that, in his conception of myth, the two worlds—divine and human—are really one world. Discovering the transcendent reality that runs beneath the material world re-enchants and re-ensouls it, and the hero revels in that discovery. The challenges of the journey There are, however, two points of extreme difficulty in Campbell's Heroic Journey: the first lies in separating from the ordinary world, and the second in returning from the strange, new one. Leaving the comfort of the familiar and predictable—the very domesticity the ego clings to—is accomplished either willingly or unwillingly. As the saying goes, fate leads the willing and drags the unwilling. And once the hero achieves separation, obstacles and tests are met, the strange new world of adventure begins to reveal itself as a kind of transcendent paradise.  The transcendent reality has become the hero’s reality—Utopia. But the roots of the word utopos  mean “no place.” Like enlightenment itself, utopia is not a condition that living, breathing humans can inhabit indefinitely. Those heroes who remain in that utopia are by definition failed heroes and no longer human; they must either have died or undergone a kind of apotheosis, shedding the mortal husk and taking on the radiance of a god.  To leave behind the bliss of profound growth, wisdom, and skill that the strange new world has granted is to face the necessity of return, to fall back into the familiar world. That fall should not be considered a failure but instead, a fortunate fall, a felix lapsus , the achievement of a deeper  understanding and acceptance of mortal life in which one is more fully and profoundly human. Odysseus’ greatness lies not in his wanderings but in his homecoming; Gilgamesh returns to Uruk with a deeper vision of humanity and the value of a mortal life; Psyche endures her trials and reenters the world transfigured by love. To fall back is to pick up once more the weight of time and limitation, yet carry within oneself the seed of what was seen beyond it. And return one must, for without the hero doing so,  the journey is incomplete. Essentially, only the human being can act heroically, for the hero’s task is never to become a god, but to bring what the gods symbolize back into human life. Yet we humans envy the gods—their immortality, their power. But the gods, in turn, seem to envy us. They fall in love with humans (if not love, at least lust), they weave suffering into our lives, Aeschylus says, so we may suffer our way into truth.  And the truth, as Horace reminds us, is that we are only dust and shadow, pulvis et umbra sumus, and only we mortals know despair, only we mortals strive to overcome, and in that striving our mortal natures discover beauty, meaning, and gratitude—emotions known only vicariously to the gods, for those gifts bloom only in the humus of mortal flesh. To be human is to fall and to rise again, and in that cycle, not in an unbroken ascent, the fullness of life reveals itself.  Understanding failure From this perspective, we may be tempted to look at the failure of the hero—whether by death, refusal of the return, or an unsuccessful quest—as a defeat, as something lamentable or worthless. Yet failure is not only inevitable but, I believe, essential to life, especially to the heroic life. To recognize this, however, one must see past the corporeal to the soulful. That task is difficult, and as Virginia Woolf observed : “With the hook of life still in us still we must wriggle. Left to ourselves we speculate thus carnally. We need the poets to imagine for us.” That poetic imagination is precisely what myth offers—the poetry of the unconscious, which reveals failure not as an end, but as the garden in which achievement grows. For every success is itself a form of failure; desire always exceeds what can be attained. In this sense, we do not triumph over failure—we fail our way into success. In The Hero With A Thousand Faces , Joseph Campbell writes:  As Freud has shown, blunders are not the merest chance. They are the result of suppressed desires and conflicts. They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. And these may be very deep - as deep as the soul itself. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny. (42) I have to wonder if the “opening to destiny” that blunder creates explains why the hero may unconsciously be in love with failure. There is something all too final about success, something finite, relegated to the lifelessness of history. Success really only lives in the past, while the pain of failure and its L'esprit d'escalier, thoughts about what we might have done differently,   always remain  with us. Myths never tire of illustrating the point that failure in this journey is only apparent, that it is not what it seems. What from one perspective appears to be crushing defeat and violent death is from another perspective a willing sacrifice. The myths do not deny the agony (in the Greek sense of the word, which means struggle) of existence but rather see through it to the essential peace and harmony of the universe. Finally, as Campbell wrote in Hero , “It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse” (337). And I would add that each of us, in our own private struggles, our imperfections, sallies forth in the image of the hero—not in our victories, but in the silences of our failures, in our determination to live humanely in an often inhumane world—armed with imperfect skills and the longing to make gentle the life of this world.  Thanks for reading. MythBlast authored by: Bradley Olson, PhD  is an author, speaker, and a psychotherapist. He serves as the Publications Director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and the host of JCF's flagship podcast, Pathways With Joseph Campbell. Dr. Olson holds a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Dr. OIson is also a depth psychologist in private practice in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he has lived since 1995. Dr. Olson has graduate degrees in psychology from the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Olson offers mythic life coaching at What's Mything in Your Life ( bradleyolsonphd.com ) This MythBlast was inspired by The Hero With a Thousand Faces and the archetype of The Magician. Latest Podcast In this episode of The Podcast with a Thousand Faces, we’re joined by Dr. Stephen Larsen , psychologist, mythologist, author, and longtime student and friend of Joseph Campbell. Together with his wife Robin, Stephen co-authored Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind, the definitive biography of Campbell. As close personal friends of Campbell for over two decades, the Larsens were uniquely positioned to offer an intimate, multidimensional portrait of the man behind the myths. Their book, written with exclusive access to Campbell’s journals, papers, and inner circle, brings both the public and private facets of his life vividly to light. Stephen served on the founding board of the Joseph Campbell Foundation and co-founded the Center for Symbolic Studies, where he has spent decades exploring the intersection of myth, psychology, and human transformation. Trained by Edward Whitmont, Stanislav Grof, and Campbell himself, Stephen has also been a pioneering figure in the field of neurofeedback and consciousness research. In this conversation with JCF’s John Bucher, Stephen reflects on his relationship with Campbell, the writing of A Fire in the Mind, and why mythology still matters—perhaps more than ever—in a world aching for meaning. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There’s always the possibility of a fiasco. But there’s also the possibility of bliss." -- Joseph Campbell Pathways to Bliss , 135 Joseph Campbell - Jung, the Self and Myth See More Videos Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Wizards © 20th Century Fox 1977. All Rights Reserved. With September we shift our focus to the magician archetype, which shows itself in many guises: wizards, witches, warlocks, shamans, alchemists and, even, our contemporary street-magicians, to name only a few. What exactly is magic? Well, that’s a complex inquiry, ranging anywhere from tactful trickery to genuine miracles, from subjective experience to so-called objective fact. We do know it has a lot to do with perspective—with what Jung would call “psychic reality” or “the conscious attitude,” or what Heisenberg might call “the uncertainty principle.”  Let me start the bidding by saying we’re all magicians in our ways, capable of influencing matter from afar. By merely uttering a spell of encouragement (aka: some thoughtful words),   we can lift the spirits of a friend (along with the corners of their mouth). We can even activate their supposedly autonomous parasympathetic nervous system, have it send some much-needed serotonin into the bloodstream. Conversely, we can spoil the taste of food—can summon in others the physical sensations of nausea through an all-too-graphic description of some nasty thing at the dinner table. While instances of magic more powerful than these are forthcoming, this inquiry examines the consequences of how we align or misalign ourselves with the “magical” powers we  possess  and, especially, with those far-greater powers that we are given  on loan, as it were, like life.   we’re all magicians in our ways T he “apparent” power imbalance Within the realm of magician-figures, one pattern is certain: that the immediate (and apparently, greater ) power keeps going to the “bad guys”—to those who work to deceive, conquer, destroy. These dark magicians are always highly intelligent and very clever. But like the sudden conflagration of some highly combustible thing thrown onto a fire, their dominating power burns away with naught but the mess left in its wake (and we could say the same for their souls). But then, destruction is easy compared to the work one must undertake to heal, repair and sustain. This deeper power-source is rooted in a wisdom that transcends cleverness and isolated, egoic gain. It requires not only an ability to recognize the value of being in relationship with the cosmos, but also a willingness (if not eagerness) to contribute to  its designs. On this note, consider some of Joseph Campbell’s poignant insights on the matter:   It has been customary to describe the seasonal festivals of so-called native peoples as efforts to control nature. This is a misrepresentation. There is much of the will to control in every act of man, and particularly in those magical ceremonies that are thought to bring rain clouds, cure sickness, or stay the flood; nevertheless, the dominant motive in all truly religious (as opposed to black-magical) ceremonial is that of submission to the inevitables of destiny. No tribal rite has yet been recorded which attempts to keep winter from descending; on the contrary: the rites prepare the community to endure, together with the rest of nature, the season of the terrible cold. And in the spring, the rites do not seek to compel nature to pour forth immediately corn, beans, and squash for the lean community; on the contrary: the rites dedicate the whole people to the work of nature's season . ( The Hero with a Thousand Faces ,  384) With these pieces in place, let’s dive into this week’s film. Wizards   (1977) is an animated, post-apocalyptic fantasy film written and directed by Ralph Bakshi that made its debut just a few months before Star Wars  (which also has its version of the magician archetype: the Jedi). Of note, Bakshi employs a rather magical technique called rotoscoping which blends live-action footage with animation, rendering a strange sort of “interworld” effect that appeals to both the realistic and imaginal sensibilities, simultaneously.  In brief, the tale concerns two wizards born as (very non-identical) twins: Avatar (the hero) and Blackwolf (the nemesis) who, together, personify the archetypal duality of the relative  (no pun intended) that we see in other myths like the Egyptian Osiris and Seth and the biblical Cain and Abel. Avatar’s domain comprises the nature-regions that have escaped destruction or have begun to heal, inhabited by fairies, elves and humans. Whereas Blackwolf’s domain, the land of Scorch (which is as it sounds), is inhabited by mutant-monsters who emerged after the war. Within this setting, a conflict unfolds between nature-oriented, old-world wisdom and technology-oriented, modern-world intelligence.  Media mythologized Blackwolf possesses two key technological weapons in his quest to (of course) dominate the world. The first is Necron 99 (an assassin-robot engineered by Blackwolf himself), who rides the land searching for victims. The second is a 1930s-era film-projector Blackwolf has salvaged and restored, powered by two sad-but-lovely, finger-sized fairies tied to a crank they’re forced to turn.  I’ll leave Necron 99 to wander off (although the narrative provides both positive and negative aspects to this figure, making it a fitting analogue to AI). The projector-weapon, however, merits more consideration as it aptly addresses the high volume of abuse (i.e., evil spells) of audio/visual media we are witnessing today. It’s amusing (in a synchronistic way) that the weapon is literally a “projector,” making the psychological notion of projection  inescapable—and reminding us that the phenomenon itself is also inescapable. So the story unfolds, enacting the dangers and destruction that accompany malicious projection and the absence of thoughtful reflection. Rationally problematic is that there’s no actual screen upon which Blackwolf’s terrifying and debilitating imagery is cast. Rather the content somehow fills the atmosphere (a premonition of wifi?) and saturates the minds and moods of all in its field. But the message is clear, revealing the adverse psychological effects inflicted by aggressive, cleverly engineered propaganda. In short, the targets believe  what they see. And by capturing the subjective reality, Blackwolf captures the subjects. According to French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (author of the germinal The Savage Mind ), this is a significant aspect to magic that emphasizes intelligence, cleverness, sleight-of-hand (and of-mind)   techniques, and very much the assistance of technology to accomplish these ends ( Structural Anthropology , 167-69). While we might categorize such magic as “tricks,” their effects remain real to the psyche. And so, what counter-spells might we cast to mitigate such reckless power? Well, if it’s not too awkward, let’s consult with Dungeons & Dragons. Dungeons & Dragons got it right! At an early age, I was won over by this role-playing game. Call it my introduction to myth—and a very effective one, in my opinion. Not surprisingly, I wanted to play a character capable of powerful magic. I naturally presumed that to play a mighty wizard (“magic-user” in D&D) one would need wisdom. So I allocated my highest abilities-scores to that attribute only to learn later that the really cool spells required a higher intelligence  score—and by “really cool” I mean the kind that exerted power over the natural order—essentially, Blackwolf stuff.   Fortunately (though not to me at the time), the Dungeon Master held me to my choice, and so I was forced into one of the few classes that do benefit from a high wisdom score: the Druid, who (unlike the solitary magic-user) functions in service to the natural order of the cosmos. But the spells they cast were far less exciting as they pertained “merely” to healing, nurturing and tending, whereas I (being twelve) simply wanted to kick ass.  These recipes and allocations of two very different kinds of magical power are not arbitrary. In fact, the dynamics of service and contribution that Campbell addresses above just may be the chief feature that distinguishes wisdom from intelligence (in the present context). Granted, I’m not suggesting we do away with intelligence (however one-sidedly I may have contextualized it here). But we might do well to attend to Dungeons & Dragons’ take on wisdom so that we might incorporate more of it. A sacrifice We’ve all seen how easily and unconsciously one can fall into the trap of dark magic and self-serving power like Blackwolf (and like you perhaps might have at twelve). The wisdom of Avatar was surely a thing earned not by smarts but through decades of contact with the cosmos— fashioned , as it were, and tempered with a thoughtfulness and appreciation for the miracle of things as they are. But our wisdom has never kept up with our intelligence or our technology. Not even close. A simple survey of the history of industry and politics, its wars and threats of wars—not to mention, the sheer volume of damages (even in times of peace) wrought upon the flora and fauna and earth, itself (cf. “Scorch”). We say we’ve “inherited” this place, but that invites notions of possession. Maybe we’d do better to say we’ve been “given” a window to participate in all the magic that’s already here? And with that, roll up our sleeves and get on with the work of contributing? Thanks for reading! MythBlast authored by: Craig Deininger  has been writing for the JCF Mythblast series since 2018. He has taught at Naropa University, Studio Film School in Los Angeles and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where he earned an MFA in poetry. He also earned an MA and PhD in Mythology and Jungian Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. He has counterbalanced his studies with manual work in fields like big ag farming, landscaping, commercial fishing, trail-building, framing houses and so on. He is grateful to have somehow made it to later life after too many outdoor misadventures in backpacking, rock climbing, hiking and, especially, trying to get too close to wildlife that doesn’t want to be gotten-too-close-to. His poetry has appeared in several literary magazines including The Iowa Review , and his first book of poetry Leaves from the World Tree was co-authored with mythologist Dennis Patrick Slattery and published by Mandorla Books. This MythBlast was inspired by The Hero With a Thousand Faces and the archetype of The Magician. Latest Podcast This lecture, “Mythology – The Path (Part 2),” was recorded in 1980 at Yellow Springs, Pennsylvania. In it, Joseph Campbell continues the discussion from Part 1, presenting mythology as a path of discovery. Here, he focuses on the search for “the self,” drawing on Jungian language and archetypes. The recording also includes a brief Q&A following the lecture. Please note: around the 42-minute mark, the original tape speeds up slightly. While this affects the sound quality, the content of Campbell’s talk remains intact. Host Bradley Olson introduces the lecture and offers commentary at its conclusion. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "It has been customary to describe the seasonal festivals of so-called native peoples as efforts to control nature. This is a misrepresentation. . . . No tribal rite has yet been recorded which attempts to keep winter from descending; on the contrary: the rites prepare the community to endure, together with the rest of nature, the season of the terrible cold. And in the spring, the rites do not seek to compel nature to pour forth immediately corn, beans, and squash for the lean community; on the contrary: the rites dedicate the whole people to the work of nature's season." -- Joseph Campbell The Hero with a Thousand Faces , 384 Living in Accord with Nature See More Videos Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter