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“The Magician in Film” is our topic this month, and between Harry Potter , The Lord of the Rings , and Marvel’s Dr. Strange , we’ve seen a lot of them on screen over the last few years. This set me to wondering how these versions stack up against what the “Magician” means, myth-wise and not just movie-wise. Symbolically speaking, the Magician, or Magus, (typically in the guise of an ancient Wise One) initiates a transformational, alchemical process in the world or, more to our purposes here, in the psyche of someone on their pilgrimage to a more “heroic” or authentic life. They do this by articulating the Word, the Logos,  that manifests those alchemical processes in the world, or in the consciousness of everyday life — and sometimes even in the form of “the word made flesh.” That summarizes it pretty well. We’re not just talking about Abracadabra  here although, in a terrifying way, Voldemort’s using the Cruciatus Curse on Harry (by “crucifying” him…too obvious?) certainly causes an alchemical transformation. There are happier versions, of course. My first thought for this month was to return to the figure of Willy Wonka, especially Gene Wilder's, who transforms the bitterness of life into chocolate gold. You can probably sort out a dozen or so on your own, but as I got to thinking about magicians I've known in the movies, my mind kept going back to my  first movie magician: Merlin in the cartoon version of The Sword In The Stone . Today, it’s a small world (mythology) after all That particularly cute version of Merlin-as-Magus got me thinking about “Disneyized’ versions of magicians, legends, myths, and symbols in general; this, in turn, got me wondering what happens when we myth-understand these figures, when a metaphor like Merlin gets co-opted as mere entertainment, as a commodity: an attractively flickering puppet show that reduces us from participants in our lives to an audience of consumers.  Consider the difference between the mythologically meaningful “Magician” we’re talking about from showbiz “magicians,” the Penn and Tellers of the world who perform amazing sleight of hand tricks and delightful illusions that provide an audience with the happy satisfaction of being safely fooled or surprised.  “Safely” is the key word here: it means enjoying the spell they cast without having to undergo the kind of life altering ordeals (and anxieties!) found in initiations of the sort required for an alchemical transformation of the psyche. It’s way easier, and more fun, to watch somebody else go through all that. Looking through the prism of showbiz magic versus mythologically meaningful magic provides some interesting details in the otherwise blinding electric Edison sideshow of “The Movies.” Like this: what happens when mythology is turned into an industry? What happens when myths, or mythic figures, are turned into commodities?  Merlin is a good example of what I mean. Here’s an AI generated version of “Merlin,” one I asked for in order to duck Disney’s copyright.  Cute, right? what happens when mythology is turned into an industry? Rumplestiltskin: now brought to you by the Bawndo Corporation And maybe this is a perfect example: the Disney version of Merlin is owned by The Disney Corporation. It’s a product designed for the purpose of entertainment-derived   profit. At the end of the day, the purpose of movies, whatever the artistic merit, is to make money and the story lines – more often than not these days derived from traditional mythological themes (I’m looking at you, Star Wars ) – are designed as entertainments to separate us from our wallets and, only incidentally, as initiations into a more authentic life. Movies spin straw, or whatever else is at hand, into gold — but not the metaphorical gold myths are supposed to provide. Nope. Literal gold. Lucre.  And so, and this is a bummer I confess, the function of magicians in film is not always to transform our souls, but to bolster studio profit margins. What we’re seeing (as the Frankfurt School did in the last century) is that our most important mythologies have been co-opted, swamped, overwritten, infected, and redefined by the money-making-impulse, a paradigmatic disorder that has redefined all values as economic ones.  Campbell expressed this clearly at the end of The Hero With A Thousand Faces   when he says,  [T]he democratic ideal of the self-determining individual, the invention of the power-driven machine, and the development of the scientific method of research have so transformed human life that the long-inherited, timeless universe of symbols has collapsed … The social unit is not a carrier of religious content, but an economic-political organization. Its ideals are not those of the hieratic pantomime, making visible on earth the forms of heaven, but of the secular state, in hard and unremitting competition for material supremacy and resources. (333-334) Alchemy: it ain’t what it used to be This is exactly what Nietzsche had in mind with his phrase, transvaluation of all values. In his case, this meant noticing the initial symptoms of the process by which our civilization’s mythological immune system was blasted into nothing by the advent of science. Bounded in a nutshell, that means replacing meaningful narrative with cold-blooded explanations. Once that bit of humanity was erased, he thought, we’d been left open and empty, ready for whatever set of stem cells or borrowed bone marrow might first take root to reprogram our relationship to the world. And arguably that’s what happened. The timing was perfect: the Gilded Age in which greed was removed from the list of capital sins, and capital itself became the measure of all things. And so the Media itself, not unlike Medea, is now the Magus speaking the word of our aeon: that Word is the Golden Calf, and the word has been made flesh. Yikes! Sorry about that, but thanks for musing along! MythBlast authored by: Mark C.E. Peterson, Ph.D .  is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Washington County and past president of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture (ISSRNC.org). Philosopher, gadfly, poet, cook, writing along the watermargins of nature, myth, and culture. A practitioner of taijiquan and kundalini yoga for over 40 years, Dr. Peterson is also a happy member of the Ukulele World Congress. 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 "If what you are following, however, is your own true adventure, if it is something appropriate to your deep spiritual need or readiness, then magical guides will appear to help you." -- Joseph Campbell A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living , 78 Myth and Ritual - Q&A See More Videos Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Still from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) Years ago I was lucky enough to get to know that anthropologist and Native American faith keeper, Dr. Bill Hawk. I’d had a run of bad luck and was complaining to Bill about it. He perked up and said “sounds like Coyote.” I knew that Coyote was a central trickster figure in Native American mythology. “Well, damn it, Bill,” I asked. “What do I do about it?” He smiled and said, “Don’t feed him.” Pretty classic stuff. Strangely enough, that took care of my bad luck–but what if the Trickster is feeding you ? And what if they’re feeding you something delicious? Like chocolate. You might have noticed an abundance of Trickster figures out there lately, from traditional versions like Loki to the anti-hero’s own anti-hero, Deadpool. These figures perform an important mythological function: they embody the disruptions that fracture “the normal course of events.” Their stories put us into relation with the occasional cataclysmic events which, for good or ill, break us loose from well-established, but often fossilized, socially sanctioned norms. Now, socially sanctioned norms do provide the useful service of keeping the world running, but they can also shackle us to a version of the world that no longer exists: a world that changed while we were “busy making other plans.” Considering the increasing chaos in our current social/cultural/political situation–as traditional moral and political structures erode and we find our society experiencing a kind of extinction burst in reaction to these inevitable changes–we shouldn’t be surprised to find these Tricksters appearing in our popular media culture, in the stories we tell about ourselves. I already mentioned a couple of obvious examples. However, while I was sorting through my Rolodex (do they still make those?) of likely Tricksters, I kept hearing the voice of Gene Wilder, the original Willy Wonka in the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory , in his sarcastic monotone, warning the kids: “Stop. Don’t. Come back.” Trick or treat Wonka is not an immediately obvious Trickster, but consider: he’s a mysterious figure who hands out Golden Tickets , inviting some lucky guests inside his Mysterious Factory to win the most desirable of all treasures:  the best chocolate in the world! Now that’s a call to adventure if there ever was and includes, appropriately, both promise and threat that a great treasure can be yours if you survive the ordeals to come .  Like any Trickster figure, Wonka is characterized by mischief, misdirection, and apparent cruelty, and, in the context of the hero’s adventure, Tricksters seem to embody the entire process of Initiation. They provide tests and temptations that typically involve exacerbating, or feeding (ahem), and exposing weakness in your character: weaknesses like gluttony, greed, pride, or vanity, say. But a Trickster isn’t your typical Initiator. As a rule, when you’re neck deep in an initiatory process, you know you’re being tested. In normal life, for instance, you might sigh, “Great, another freaking growth experience”…but at least you know you’re going through it. When the Trickster is at work, you don’t always know you were being tested until it’s too late. Willy Wonka, for instance, never just walks up to Charlie Bucket and says: “Charlie, you must learn the ways of the Force.” The initiations are, well…tricky. When the Trickster is at work, you don’t always know you were being tested until it’s too late. Charlie survives all this, but each of the other Golden Ticket holders suffers a poetically and spectacularly appropriate failure as Wonka feeds, and then reveals, their character flaws. Roald Dahl, the original author, signals these flaws in the names of the kids he cooked up for this mythstery  play. They are deliberately and consciously symbolic. Here’s a quick recap of the failed adventures, in order of excision: Augustus Gloop is the kid who can't stop stuffing his face. He’s the first one to go when he falls into and is carried away by the chocolate river. It might be useful to notice how much the language itself tells us: he’s carried away by his favorite weakness. Violet Beauregarde has the perfect nose-in-the-air name for a snotty, compulsively competitive and obnoxious world-record gum-chewer. She meets her end by snatching and chewing up an experimental blueberry gum which turns her into a giant blueberry. Veruca Salt is the quintessential spoiled brat who only “found” a Golden Ticket because her father bought a gazillion candy bars and lucked into the right one. She wants everything she sees–and is accustomed to getting everything she wants. Different productions use different approaches to her failure, but all work out about the same: in the book and the 2015 adaptation, she meets her end in Wonka’s Nut Testing room where specially trained squirrels sort good nuts from bad nuts. She demands her father buy her one of the squirrels, and when Wonka refuses to sell, she tries to grab one herself. The squirrels determine she’s a “Bad Nut” and throw her down a garbage chute. (And here, a moment of etymological musing: her name, like the others, is hilariously appropriate since ‘verruca’ is Latin for ‘wart’ and ‘salt’... well, at the end of the day, she wasn’t worth her salt. Even the squirrels figured that out.) And finally there’s “little” Mike Teavee, who embodies the kind of vidiocy  we might associate with the entitled distractedness found in today’s doom-scrolling, phone-addicted children (and adults). His fate, literally stepping into the media he’s obsessed with and being shrunk to fit inside a TV screen, is also poetically associated with his name. In each case, their failure follows directly from their own unreflective compulsions and desires and one of the classic techniques you find in the Trickster’s bag of tricks involves simply giving people what they want–at which point they discover they’ve wanted the wrong things. In this case, one rich with metaphor, they all wanted the candy more than the factory. Something to think about. Trick and  treat All of which leaves wonderful little Charlie Bucket. He’s the only good kid in the bunch and displayed the virtues needed to pass the Trickster’s tests: humility and kindness. Like the other children, however, Charlie too is surprised by the initiation he’s undergone–amazed to be found worthy to inherit the true prize of the Golden Ticket, surviving the sticky, candy coated–and Tricky–initiations of a life’s adventure. Thanks for musing along! MythBlast authored by: Mark C.E. Peterson, Ph.D .  is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Washington County and past president of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture (ISSRNC.org). Philosopher, gadfly, poet, cook, writing along the watermargins of nature, myth, and culture. A practitioner of taijiquan and kundalini yoga for over 40 years, Dr. Peterson is also a happy member of the Ukulele World Congress. This MythBlast was inspired by Creative Mythology and the archetype of The Trickster . Latest Podcast Enuma Okoro , is a Nigerian-American author, essayist, curator and lecturer. She is a weekend columnist for The Financial Times where she writes the column, “The Art of Life,” about art, culture and how we live. And is the curator of the 2024 group exhibition, “The Flesh of the Earth,” at Hauser & Wirth gallery in Chelsea, New York. Her broader research and writing interests reflect how the intersection of the arts and critical theory, philosophy and contemplative spirituality, and ecology and non-traditional knowledge systems can speak to the human condition and interrogate how we live with ourselves and others. Her fiction and poetry are published in anthologies, and her nonfiction essays and articles have been featured in The New York Times, The Financial Times, Aeon, Vogue, The Erotic Review, The Cut, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Bazaar, NYU Washington Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and more. Her Substack, "A Little Heart to Heart" is a labyrinth towards interiority, exploring the fine line between the sacred and the ordinary in our daily lives. Find it at Enuma.substack.com and learn more about Enuma at www.enumaokoro.com . In this conversation, we explore Enuma’s journey, the ways myth, art, and storytelling shape us, and how we can use them as tools to reimagine both our personal and collective realities. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "An initiation is a shock. Birth is a shock. Rebirth is a shock. All that is transformative must be experienced as if for the first time." -- Joseph Campbell An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms , 39 Adventure into Depths - Q&A Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

The deeper my relationship with Joseph Campbell, the more I see him everywhere—and not just what I come across for the  Campbell in Culture  posts I help curate. The references we hear about, the overt mentions, are just the surface. By now his ideas are so built into the education of artists, storytellers, entrepreneurs and academics, seekers and healers, they’ve become part of our culture’s fabric—his words are literally on Superman’s cape and Wonder Woman’s sword . But as much as Campbell and the Hero’s Journey can be seen in the stories we share, for many of us, it’s on our own journeys that he appears as a mentor with supernatural aid.  With this brief opportunity to celebrate his birthday on March 26, I’d like to honor him with names, numbers and representations before sharing a personal journey in which he’s currently guiding my perceptions of meaning. NAMES:  Barack Obama ,  Satya Nadella (Microsoft CEO) ,  Ed Catmull (President of Pixar) ,  Brian Chesky (Air BnB CEO) ,  Ray Dahlio ,  George Lucas ,  Stephen Spielberg ,  Kanye ,  Colbert ,  Oprah ,  Jeff Bridges ,  Russel Brand ,  Woody Harrelson ,  Dan Harmon ,  David Fincher ,  Ron Howard ,  John Boorman ,  Francis Coppola ,  George Miller ,  Zach Snyder ,  Chris Vogler, Christopher Nolan ,  Jim Morrison ,  Bob Weir ,  Bob Dylan ,  Wynton Marsalis ,  Keanu Reeves ,  Molly Ringwald ,  Joe Rogan ,  Paulo Cuehlo ,  Daniel Wallace ,  Dan Brown ,  Robert Bly ,  Viola Davis ,  Sally Fields ,  Susan Surandon,   Drew Carey ,  Tony Hawk,   Bill Moyers,   Hugh Jackman, Sylvester Stallone … These are but a fraction of the world leaders, business tycoons and creative titans who have publicly discussed their appreciation of Campbell or the utilization of his ideas. NAMESAKES:  There are two academic chairs in his name (at  Sarah Lawrence  and the  USC film school ), a  Joseph Campbell Library at Pacifica Graduate Institute ,  Joseph Campbell Writers’ Room at Studio School , and five scholarships ( undergraduate  and  graduate ) named for Campbell and his wife. NUMBERS:  According to OpenSyllabusExplorer,  The Hero with a Thousand Faces is one of the 500 most assigned texts throughout English-speaking schools. Seventy years since its publication, tens of thousands of new readers still pick up  The Hero with a Thousand Faces  for the first time every year. Thirty-one years after its debut,  The Power of Myth remains one of the most popular series in the history of public television, and in 2018, it spent time as the most viewed documentary series on Netflix. On March 26th, Campbell would be one hundred and fifteen years old. REPRESENTATIONS:   The cup runeth over with direct references and appearances. His name comes up in a  La La Land  conversation about LA culture. In  Snowden , he’s referenced as the title character's intellectual inspiration. George Lucas associated Campbell with the elder Dr. Jones while he inspired Spielberg’s vision of Indiana. Dan Brown describes him as an inspiration for his symbologist hero Robert Langdon. And in addition to appearing on Superman’s suit and Wonder Woman’s sword, his words recur throughout  13 Hours . And for every time he appears  in  the work of a storyteller, he’s cited by hundreds more—from George Lucas to Dan Harmon. And for every storyteller who cites him or his thoughts, he’s inspired a thousand others. By now anyone who watches movies, listens to music or plays video games has loved stories he’s touched. We are immersed in a cultural imagination informed by his ideas. PERSONAL EXPERIENCE:  As proud as I am to see Campbell inspire the art of my young students, it’s equally rewarding when they describe how their personal journeys have been supported. There’s no counting how many times and ways I’ve experienced this myself, and I’m experiencing it right now. As I write, Leela, my part-wolf-part-Rhodesian-sweetheart, is in the doggie hospital. She ate the excrement of a drug user as we walked past a construction site; and in the morning, vets found meth, MDMA and opiates in her system. Her fever was 105. Dogs don’t metabolize these drugs. She was out of her mind if not out of her body. Worried about Leela, I could only hope that beneath her near-death fever was some kind of shamanic journey—that the excrement in the story was there to symbolize, as in Egypt, the starting point of transmutation, that her  abduction  was a response to some deeper call—a smell—towards new growth. Tonight I got to see her. And on the way out the door, I saw the moon—the huge moon. Because she’s part wolf, I couldn’t help but inquire on its fullness. Not only did I find it to be full, but to my astonishment, I learned it was the spring equinox. As some of you may know, this was the first full moon on a Spring Equinox in nineteen years and the first supermoon equinox since 1905. It’s known as a “worm” or “sap” moon. As wolves are associated with the full moon, the spring equinox is associated with new life—with resurrection. Campbell associates all of the above with the crossing of the return threshold and delivery of elixir. As he points out, the return threshold is often a physical barrier—like the surface of the earth—that must be crossed. I teach this. It’s on my mind all the time. So when I read that the “worm” moon relates to the defrosting of earth, the softening of its threshold and its crossing by worms, on one level I recognized its resonance with Leela’s re-awakening, and on another I was stunned by this exquisite demonstration of Campbell’s return threshold.  When I read about the “sap” moon, this experience repeated. It’s a sap moon because sap pours through its bark when it waxes to full. Resurrection, delivery of the elixir, and the return threshold are indivisible from one another, and I couldn’t have been happier to encounter their cluster. I can’t know if her journey was entangled with the psychles of nature, but I know my relationship with Campbell’s work brought hope and meaning to a devastating experience. Leela is OK. Tomorrow she will open new eyes with the first spring morning. Happy Birthday, Joseph Campbell. Thank you for inspiring our art and aiding our journeys. Seventy years of  The Hero with a Thousand Faces , and we see it all around us. What we don’t see, what we hear only as echoes, are the inner journeys to which it brings aid, guidance and mentorship.

Tiburon Mariposa Lily (© 2005, Julia Kudler. Used with permission.) “We speak of the symbolism and metaphor of myth – but why? Why do myths have to use symbols to communicate? Can’t they just be clear about what they mean?” This frustration was voiced three months ago during a presentation before an audience of university freshmen on the Hero’s Journey – a big question! The best response I could come up with in the moment was to point students to the following passage, from Joseph Campbell’s introduction to The Flight of the Wild Gander: What is the ‘meaning’ of a tree? Of a flower? Of a butterfly? Of the birth of a child? Or of the universe? What is the ‘meaning’ of a rushing stream? Such wonders simply are. They are antecedent to meaning, though ‘meanings’ may be read into them. . . So, likewise, are the images of myth, which open like flowers to the conscious mind’s amazement and may then be searched to the root for ‘meaning,’ as well as arranged to serve practical ends. (Flight, xii) Meaning is a function of the western mind; we tend to favor definition over experience. We crave a verbal context, and so are driven to frame everything with words, which is difficult when what we are discussing is beyond words. Dream, legend, myth, literature, the arts—all communicate on a deep, powerful, pre-verbal level. For example, as infants we experienced joy, terror, desire, fear, pleasure, anger, frustration, and a whole range of complex longings and emotions before we ever uttered our first word. An appropriate symbol can touch us there, in the places words don’t reach, with densely packed personal and collective associations conveying a broad range of meanings, at once complementary and contradictory. Carl Jung opens Symbols of Transformation  (the volume that precipitated his break with Freud in 1912) with an essay entitled "Two Kinds of Thinking." Here Jung contrasts linear, directed thinking (concentration, thinking in words, what we generally think of as "thinking") with associational thinking (the world of daydreams and woolgathering where we mentally spend most of our time, even when focused on a specific task). Jung suggests associational thinking is phylogenetically older than directed thinking. It's our default setting — that nexus of tangentially related images drifting through our mind, morphing one into another at lightning speed. Dozens of images and associated thoughts and memories flit through our head at any given moment, each grasped complete, rather than dissected through words. All symbols are also essentially images, with a multitude of associations, personal and collective, compressed into each one; symbols are thus versatile and multidimensional, intersecting with experience to create an immediate sense of reality. Images work on us both directly and indirectly. For example, if I read in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer how the air outside Aunt Polly's house is heavy with the scent of honeysuckle, I can smell the honeysuckle and, for one brief moment, am transported back to the lazy days of childhood when life unfolded oh, so leisurely, and I had time to relish the sweet scent of spring — essentially adding an experiential layer in harmony with that of the characters in the story. Symbols transcend words. Someone you care for hands you a fresh-cut red rose, drops of dew clinging to the petals, redolent fragrance floating in the air — doesn't matter if one of you speaks German and the other Spanish, you get it. Taken literally, it's simply foliage, but as a symbol, the rose touches your soul. A thousand-word essay on love can't compete with the volumes contained in this single, simple gesture. Words are limited: they’re ideal for conveying directions, but have difficulty transmitting a feeling tone, unless the words are used to create an image (as in poetry and literature) or evoke a symbol. At the same time, while symbols are wonderful for conveying what transcends words, we have developed linear thinking for functional reasons: if I have to undergo quadruple bypass surgery, I sincerely hope my cardiologist isn't using Rumi as a guide to the heart. Though we often think of signs and symbols as interchangeable, Campbell does distinguish between the two in “ The Symbol Without Meaning ” (which can be found in The Flight of the Wild Gander ), one of his most intense essays, dense with concepts and insights that tickle the brain. The abbreviated version would be that for Campbell, following Jung, a sign refers to something contained within the field of waking consciousness, this mundane world we inhabit wherein Aristotle's axiom " A is not not-A " predominates. Symbols, on the other hand, use something that exists in this phenomenal " a is not not-a " universe to refer past the material world to what transcends consensus reality – which brings us back around to those “images of myth, which open like flowers to the conscious mind’s amazement.” And so our wild gander minds take flight . . .

There is no doubt that Joseph Campbell’s words sing – and not just his prose, but the titles he chooses as well: The Hero with a Thousand Faces , The Masks of God, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, all have a poetic quality that convey each work’s theme with uncanny precision. Campbell has observed that the title of The Hero with a Thousand Faces came to him  “about two pages before the end of the book”; one has to wonder if his masterpiece would be the consistent bestseller it remains today if he had kept the original title, “How to Read a Myth.” (“An Interview with the Master of Mythology,” The Bloomsbury Review, April/May 1984) But what of The Flight of the Wild Gander, a collection of essays first published in 1969 that explore the natural, biological, cultural, historical, and psychological underpinnings of mythology? Why that image, which appears in but a single chapter? Multiple figurines of flying geese have been found from the Mal’ta culture, centered west of Lake Baikal in Siberia, some 22,000 years ago––a motif that subsequently appears in the mythologies of myriad cultures.  Wild geese are migratory birds with no fixed home, flying thousands of miles to follow the sun. In ancient Egypt the goose – associated with Amun, the Sun and Creator God – lays the World Egg. In early China geese were viewed as mediators between heaven and earth, a theme echoed in the Celtic world, where they were considered messengers of the Gods. Geese also serve as a favorite mount of mythic beings. In Greek mythology Aphrodite is known to ride a goose; some have traced the cycle of Mother Goose nursery rhymes back to Aphrodite in her Mother Goddess aspect. Shamans in the Altai Mountains ascended in trance to the heavens on the back of a goose. In India Lord Brahmā, the mythic embodiment of the creative principle, rides a wild gander.  And so did Joseph Campbell, who in the late sixties and early seventies drove a little red VW he called “The Gander.”  The significance of the gander as a mythic image is best stated by Joseph Campbell’s friend and mentor, Heinrich Zimmer, in Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization (a posthumous work edited by Campbell). Zimmer observes that a wandering monk in India is often referred to as Haṃsa (“gander” or “swan”) or Paramahaṃsa (“supreme gander”):  “The wild gander (haṃsa) strikingly exhibits in its mode of life the twofold nature of all beings. It swims on the surface of the water, but is not bound to it. Withdrawing from the watery realm, it wings into the pure and stainless air, where it is as much at home as in the world below. . . . On the one hand earth-bound, limited in life-strength, in virtues, and in consciousness, but on the other hand a manifestation of the divine essence, which is unlimited, immortal, virtually omniscient and all- powerful, we, like the wild goose, are citizens of the two spheres. We are mortal individuals bearing within ourselves an immortal, supra-individual nucleus. . . . The macrocosmic gander, the Divine Self in the body of the universe, manifests itself through a song.” (Zimmer, 48)   This is a song we all sing. If you focus on your breath, you’ll hear the sound “ham,” just barely audible, every time you inhale—and the syllable “sa” sounds with every exhale. “Ham-sa, ham-sa,” sings our breath all day, all night, all one’s life, making known the inner presence of this wild gander to all with the ears to hear.  But the song, like the image of the wild gander, is twofold. Not only does our breath sing “Haṃsa, haṃsa” but also “sa-‘haṃ, sa-‘haṃ.”  “Sa means ‘this’ and ‘haṃ means ‘I’; the lesson is, ‘This am I.’ I, the human individual of limited consciousness, steeped in delusion, spellbound by Maya, actually and fundamentally am This, or He, namely the Atman or Self, the Highest Being of unlimited consciousness and existence. I am not to be identified with the perishable individual, who accepts as utterly real and fatal the processes and happenings of the psyche and the body. ‘I am He who is free and divine.’ That is the lesson sung to every man by every movement of inhalation and exhalation, asserting the divine nature of Him in whom breath abides.” (Zimmer, 49-50) Mythic symbols, for Campbell, are more than just words on a page. Embodied in pictures, figurines, a car’s nickname, a book’s title, or even one’s own breath, they serve as touchstones that pitch the mind past the material world, to that which transcends.

Pygmalion and Galatea by Jean-Léon Gérôme, circa 1890. A love of wonder: according to Aristotle, this is what brought the lover of wisdom (Greek, philosophos ) and the lover of myth (Greek, philomuthos ) together. For Socrates, love was that most ancient of gods, Eros. For lovers and students of myth, mythologies of love are legion. Perhaps no one played with these notions more than the first-century bc Roman poet Ovid who wrote, among many other works, an infamous handbook on seduction ( Ars Amatoria ) and his celebrated mythological poem The Metamorphoses , cascading with the protean nature of love between diverse pairs: human to human, human to nonhuman, and nonhuman to nonhuman. Our own love of myth stares back at us on a daily basis through our countless devices. Consider Amazon’s Echo tapping our dormant Narcissus. The myth of Pygmalion and his love for his statue is indicative of our tendency to fall in love with our creations—under the auspice of Venus, no less. Over time though, myths evolve, shift, and undergo countless variations to keep things interesting. Eighteenth-century writers decided to name Pygmalion’s statue Galatea. But is she that same Galatea that the Cyclops Polyphemus set his heart and eye on? In some versions, he succeeded, in others (the more common) he lost to the shepherd Acis. In his 1935 short story, “ Pygmalion’s Spectacles ,” Stanley G. Weinbaum gave one of our earliest literary imaginings of what would become today’s virtual and mixed-reality technology. Indeed, we’re still trying to catch up with Weinbaum’s tech. As the title suggests, Weinbaum clearly had the Pygmalion myth in mind. In the story our protagonist, Dan Berk becomes the guinea pig of the gnome-like, elfin Professor Ludwig. Equipped with Ludwig’s magical spectacles, Dan experiences first-hand the operations of these multisensory goggles which are able to hack the senses and induce dreamlike visions via a “liquid positive” fully immersive storyworld. He finds himself in Paracosma (Greek, .a land-beyond-the-world ). There, he meets and falls in love with Galatea who perceives him as a visitor from the other side, the shadowy world. Their love grows, but the pair is faced with a curious predicament: How can substance love shadow? Few residents of Paracosma had dared to transgress this seemingly immutable law. Galatea’s mother, however, did at her own peril. No more spoilers. I leave the rest of this remarkable story to you. Suffice it to say, Weinbaum’s story has had tremendous influence on a tech industry set on realizing the dream of virtual reality, inspiring the very name of VR companies . The passion of Pygmalion has continued to influence modern mythic inflections across our science fiction. Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) re-visions the myth in a most exquisite fashion as an amorous parable about the emergence of love between humans and AIs (or OSs as they are affectionately called), and the emotional entanglements, havoc, and wounds that could occur—on the human user’s end. Likewise, in Blade Runner (1982) and its 2017 sequel Blade Runner: 2049 , we are privy to a posthuman condition in which humans fall in love with synthetic replicants and, in the case of 2049 , replicants seek some form of love with AI holograms—literal personalized projections conjured by a manipulative corporation. But we are creatures wired for love, even when it leads us to new dimensions of holographic matrimony . Maybe the love between substance and shadow is not so vacant. Indeed, love has many shades. In a 1967 talk delivered at Cooper Union titled “The Mythology of Love,” Joseph Campbell recalls the birth (or recognition) of a form of love championed by the eleventh-century troubadours: Amor . As a tertium quid between eros (passion) and agapē (charity), amor arose from the noble, gentle heart. There, Campbell discerned The beloved to [the troubadours] was a woman, not the manifestation of some divine principle; and specifically, that woman. The love of her. And the fact that the union can never be absolutely realized on this earth. Love’s joy is in its savor of eternity; love’s pain, the passage of time... ( Myths to Live By , p. 159) Reality and myth continue their love affair afforded by advancing technologies and our playfully ecstatic selves. In her book Other Peoples’ Myths (1995/1988), mythologist Wendy Doniger argues, “To the extent that myth arises out of reality and has an effect on reality, there can be no particular starting point or end point; it is a cycle. Myth and reality are caught up in a complex folie à deux ” (p. 156).  When we love other peoples’ myths (and myths about others) we needn’t abandon our own nor settle in the roundhouse of myths or the cave of echoes and archetypes. Love and let live, for we live in Ovidian times.

The Judgment of Paris (ca. 1690) by Lodovico David (1648-after 1709) - Ringling Museum of Art purchase 1998 - Oil on canvas One of Joseph Campbell’s key innovations was mapping his model of a heroic story-cycle onto so-called “rites of passage” as they were so eloquently dubbed by anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (1873–1957). Centuries earlier, however, the Neoplatonist and early myth-theorist Sallustius (c. 4th century CE) suggested a similar germinal notion—a kind of proto-myth-ritual theory. In his treatise, Concerning the Gods and the Universe (In Greek,   Peri theon kai kosmou ), Sallustius outlined five kinds of myths: theological, physical, psychical, material and “blended” or “mixed myths” (Gk. mûthon...miktoi ),. Each type was suited to a different purpose—for instance, “mixed myths” suited mystery rites ( teleteia ) and drew on elements of the other four kinds of myths. Such myths, according to Sallustius, included the Judgement of Paris and the myth of Cybele and Attis. Like most myths of this nature, they were often tied to a specific rite within a specific cultural context. Not all myths function this way, of course, but those pertaining to initiation often guide the aspirant towards an accord with some greater social and cosmic order—even pointing to a divine birthright. A key element was the inclusion of a Paris or an Attis, a familiar figure for whom the initiate could identify with during ritual or ruminations. For Sallustius, “every rite seeks to give us union with the universe and with the gods” (Arthur Darby Nock, Sallvstivs Concerning the Gods and the Universe , 1926). The Greek term used here meaning “union” is synaphe , an evocative term cognate with English “synapse.” Mixed myths fundamentally work like synapses both internally and hermeneutically. Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces is arguably a “synaptic” work insofar that he sought to connect  humanity’s distinct traditions of storied wisdom into a single comprehensible corpus; but it was also a “synoptic” task in that he sought to invite readers to view the similarity of others’ myths as intimately as their own inherited traditions. Campbell’s Good News: humanity’s fund of world mythology belongs to a shared account. Thus, the Monomyth, or Hero’s Journey, is fundamentally a synthetic composite, a “mixed myth,” that the author assembled for resonance across the widest international readership, initiating them into the notion that “each is both” ( Hero , p. 145)— What emerges aesthetically is a mosaic that is both a mirror and window confronting the reader while pointing towards a wider vista of human potentiality sketched across time and accessible in the here-and-now. Many anthropologists, folklorists, and other humanistic scholars outside (and inside) of mythological studies have often criticized Campbell for his mythographic and comparative analysis. In part, this is indeed the case if one has experienced myth-telling traditions first-hand. For as poet and linguist Robert Bringhurst once noted: ...for those who tell and listen to the myths, such metamythical typologies are rarely of importance. ‘Mythicity,’ like humanity or poetry or artistry or social and political equality, is embodied in quite real and local acts or it does not exist at all. ( Everywhere Being is Dancing , 2009, p. 69) A mythology, Bringhurst argues elsewhere ( Dancing, 63-64), belongs to a specific cultural and literary milieu that, which operates much like an ecosystem and nervous system.  But for an ecumenist like Campbell, Myth is the revelation of a plenum of silence within and around every atom of existence. Myth is a directing of the mind and heart, by means of profoundly informed figurations, to that ultimate mystery which fills and surrounds all existences. Even in the most comical and apparently frivolous of its moments, mythology is directing the mind to this unmanifest which is just beyond the eyes. (Hero, p. 228) Would Campbell—or Bringhurst for that matter—be open to include seemingly “frivolous” interactive media and video games with their virtual ecologies? These ephemeral environments seem well suited, at the very least, for presenting a playful modality of myths. Indeed games, like myths and rituals, bring us all together in unsuspecting ways supplying roles, characters, and avatars to embody, or at least empathize with. When players feel fully engaged, immersed, and connected to the avatar and the environment, they are surely entering a realm of experience that is deepened and enriched by the language of myth and ritual. All of these stories (oral, literary, or digital)  begin, however, with the mindful curation of myths, especially the “mixed” kind, as Sallustius observed, that can open pathways to greater mysteries. In my next essay in this series, I will  further consider recent video games and their engagement with aspects of ritual, myth, and their respective cultural domains, and I hope that you will take that journey with me.

Ganesha statue. Public Domain. Joseph Campbell thought a lot about the differences between Eastern and Western mythologies, and one of the key distinctions he identified lies in the degree to which the absolute truths that condition, guide, and can inform our lives, are transcendent – and there are some wrinkles in the way the West defines transcendence.  “In Occidental theology, the word transcendent is used to mean outside of the world. In the East, it means outside of thought.” (Myths of Light, 6) Let’s start with the West. In Myths of Light Campbell recalls an illuminating exchange with Martin Buber who had just finished a lecture on the ineffability and transcendence of the Judeo-Christian God. After the lecture Campbell asked Buber,  “I don’t know what you mean by God. You’re telling us that God has hidden his face. Now, I’m just back from India, where people are experiencing and beholding God all the time.”  This caused some commotion.  Buber apparently “…backed away and then, acting as though it were an inconsequential matter, he said, ‘Everyone must come out of his exile in his own way.’” ( Myths of Light , 2)  Buber finds us wandering in eternal exile, separated from God, from the ground of our spiritual existence. Normally, one might think, religion does the job of bridging this chasm — but no. Campbell was fond of quoting Carl Jung’s observation to the effect that: “the purpose of religion is to keep us from having religious experiences.” In the West, direct experience of God is kept safely locked away from spiritual pilgrims by the fortress walls of divine transcendence. The Gospel of John, which identifies Jesus with the transcendent figure of God the Father, was preferred to the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, which suggests that “the kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the world, but men do not see it.” This stark transcendence shows up most famously, perhaps, in Exodus. Moses wanted to see God. God explains, patiently, that no one can look at His face and live (Exodus 33:20). Moses insists and then almost dies from getting a glimpse of God’s backside (Exodus 33:22).  These are examples of the “official” version. God lies beyond understanding and experience. We are only given a taste of this transcendence through the intermediaries of a sacred text, an assortment of prophets, and the communion wafer. All of these establish a relation to , rather than a possible identification with , the infinite — and with our own spiritual authenticity. We are always in exile — always wandering towards, never quite being with. But there’s a problem here. If transcendence were truly transcendent, how could we know about it at all? If God lies beyond the possibility of thought or understanding, then how can we think about this transcendent G.O.D. at all? Answer: transcendence leaks. By contrast, under most Eastern mythologies — consider Hinduism, Daoism, and Buddhism — we can follow a trail of breadcrumbs toward what we have not yet, but eventually may, experience. These experiences are transcendent to our normal understanding, but only at first. Eventually, with sufficient practice, diligence, and luck, we can come to identify with and experience realities that transcend our mundane, and less authentic, selves. Why?  Because transcendence leaks. In the West this is a problem. In the East it’s a feature. It’s a problem in the West because, the way transcendence has been defined prevents mythology from performing one of its primary functions:  “…to present an image of the universe that connects the transcendent to the world of everyday experience.” (Myths of Light, 5) In the West this connection is still funneled through religious institutions, and anyone who stepped around these officially sanctioned relationships, typically as a result of mystical and direct experience of the divine, wound up in great personal danger. One of my teachers liked to note that whenever the Church ran into a real mystic, they either turned them into a saint or burned them at the stake.   This officially sanctioned definition of transcendence has permeated our culture in the West and, to that degree, cuts people off from making a personal, spiritual quest. It also puts that power in the hands of religious institutions. But people manage to pursue and experience transcendence anyway. How?   Because transcendence leaks. Campbell quotes Schopenhauer who referred to the paradox of leaky transcendence as the “world knot” noting that “If we could understand that, we would understand all, but it cannot be understood.” ( Myths of Light, 38) It’s a knotty knot for sure, but I want to call it a naughty knot because of the tantric implications of kundalini, and because it embodies a kind of flirtation between the infinite and the finite characteristic of the experience. This Gordian Knot is at the heart of how the transcendent and the immanent are intertwined, symbolized by the interlaced upward and downward pointing triangles we find in the west, or in the interlaced arms and legs of Shiva and Shakti in yab yum. Such a knot cannot be untangled but only cut through by experience yoked to raja yoga in the case of kundalini, or to bhakti yoga in the case of, let’s say, praying the Rosary. So, for those of us raised under Western mythological frameworks, how are we supposed to experience transcendent truths when the official definition says we can’t? All we have to do is follow the footsteps of the Buddha — or Jesus, or Mohammed — and quit worrying about definitions.  Our feet are already soaking wet with transcendence. Thanks for musing along.

Echo and Narcissus, John William Waterhouse, 1903. Public Domain. Here on the anniversary of the Joseph Campbell Foundation I got to musing about the service Joseph Campbell’s work has done for our world. My first thought was that bumper sticker. You’ve seen it: “Follow Your Bliss.” A bit hokey, maybe, but this reminder is no small thing in a world increasingly drained of enchantment and meaning. This is not my personal Campbell bumper sticker, however. Mine reads: “Myths Don’t Explain Anything!” Okay, not as catchy, but Campbell’s insight that myths are not explanations, but metaphors and narratives, made much of my later philosophical work possible. Even though it fits on a bumper sticker, it has huge implications. Myths don’t explain anything because myths and explanations perform two distinct, interlocking, functions. Let’s unpack that idea. Explanations provide, classically speaking, “a demonstration from causes.” In other words, when you want to explain something you try to figure out what caused it — and this is where facts come from. Facts are the result of finding good explanations, of figuring out what caused something to happen. By contrast, myths (as metaphors, narratives, and stories) have the function of putting us into relation with those facts. And this is where Campbell lights up the sky for me: it’s only when you’re in relation to the facts that they become meaningful. Meaningfulness, it turns out, depends on combining explanation with myth — of getting the facts and then being in relation to those facts.  In Campbell’s terminology this is the psychological function of mythology: The first function served by a traditional mythology, I would term, then, the mystical, or metaphysical, the second, the cosmological, and the third, the sociological. The fourth, which lies at the root of all three as their base and final support, is the psychological: that, namely, of shaping individuals to the aims and ideals of their various social groups, bearing them on from birth to death through the course of a human life. (The Mythic Dimension, p. 221) Mythology has the function of putting us into relation with the world we live in and the world (as we understand it) anchors the other end of that relationship. Whatever that world is, so too are our governing myths. When the world was a sacred place, our narratives described the means of being in relation to that sacredness — then facts changed. Now the world is understood as scientifically determinable and our mythologies have shifted us into relation with that. As a result, our current conditioning myths are largely economic and political ideologies.  Here’s the tricky part: myth puts us into relation to the world, but the world (as we understand it) is equally conditioned by the lenses through which we understand it, by the relationship we have to it. Our myths, our narratives, condition what we find to be meaningful and, therefore, which facts about the world are meaningful. So, our personal or socially sanctioned narratives, the ones that make life meaningful, will also, alas, allow us to happily ignore any facts that get in the way — even facts that turn out to be true.  And here Campbell has provided a deep insight into why people persist in their beliefs even after the facts are made plain: their relationship to the world, established by their personal or socially sanctioned mythologies, determines what’s meaningful, not the facts — and people seem more willing to accept and act upon what is meaningful to them, than upon what is true. Consider the weight of evidence for evolution, global warming, or — more timely — our current handling of the COVID pandemic. The facts are in, but some people seem able to ignore them. Why? People seem to prefer to define the facts based on what is meaningful to them, rather than finding meaning in the facts as provided by explanation.  What is meaningful, in other words, remains more compelling than what is true. Traditional mythologies were designed to put us into relationship with a cosmos that no longer exists. The earth is no longer the center of the universe and humans are no longer understood to be the highest created thing in a sacred landscape. And so, we find ourselves in a pickle. Life, in both its knowing and its doing, has become today a “free fall,” so to say, into the next minute, into the future. So that, whereas, formerly, those not wishing to hazard the adventure of an individual life could rest within the pale of a comfortably guaranteed social order, today all the walls have burst. It is not left to us to choose to hazard the adventure of an unprecedented life: adventure is upon us, like a tidal wave. (The Mythic Dimension, p. 225) This reminds me of a joke Campbell told in one of his lectures where he said: “If you’re falling — dive.”  This tidal wave can be overwhelming, especially in this age of apparent meaninglessness when we urgently feel the need for new relational narratives, for a new mythology. Today, Campbell might have said something more like this:  “If you’re drowning — surf!”  Fortunately, the Joseph Campbell Foundation continues to provide us with surfboards, and has helped to map the water margins between what is true, what is meaningful, and the mythological shoreline that connects them.    Thanks for musing along.

Forest scenery. Creative commons. “Each entered the forest at that point which he himself had selected, and where there was no trail or path, at its darkest point.”Campbell citing the Grail legend. Romance of the Grail , p. 136 The great path has no gates,Thousands of roads enter it.When one passes through this gateless gateHe walks freely between heaven and earth.Mumonkan (The Gateless Gate): A collection of forty-eight koan. Mumon Ekai (1183-1260) This MythBlast is a little more personal to me than normal.  It is profoundly satisfying to sail the world’s spiritual oceans, fishing for examples of Campbell’s observations about how mythology puts us into relationship to the world, and usually from the safety and comfort of the wheelhouse: the academic point of view. I say “safety” because this theoretical point of view preserves the distance that intellectual rigor, and The Academy, requires. Grasping the objects of study with thought alone prevents us from compromising our objectivity. We are, therefore, generally discouraged from jumping into, much less swimming in, those oceans ourselves. That’s the upside, but there is an inherent tension in this approach to the world: the requirements of intellectual objectivity are not the same as the requirements of the fully lived authentic life. As a wannabe academic, the path laid out before me required a pathos of distance , paraphrasing Nietzsche, to prevent me from accidentally getting lost in the forests of my discipline. But even as I began university, heading down the road to Professorhood and the socially sanctioned role and opportunities that came with it, the entire approach left me restless and edgy. It seemed to put me in the role of a chef who wrote cookbooks but never tasted the ingredients — or, maybe, and I’m quoting Campbell from memory here, like going to a restaurant but only eating the menu. Ideas like this precipitated out of the aethyr when I learned this month’s topic was The Round Table . One quotation, more than any other, has stuck with me across the decades since first studying the Grail legends, and Campbell’s glosses on them: They entered the woods where it was darkest and there was No Path. For me this has always echoed a similar insight from Zen Buddhism: that there is No Gate. These dogmatic symbols from Europe and Asia can sound like Romanticized New Age fluff, but they aren’t ( Hero with a Thousand Faces , 175). They are concise, practical, and occasionally brutal advice about how to manage and endure the challenges that confront us when we go looking for our lives. Here’s what I mean:   I naively took this advice myself — a bit like Phaeton casually picking up the keys to the Solar Chariot — and plunged into the wood where it was darkest and where there was no path. In my case that meant taking a job in what looks, to the outside world, like a backwater campus tucked into the rolling Kettle Moraine of southeastern Wisconsin. Honestly, I still cannot imagine a place anywhere in the world where, with my background and training, the wood was darker than West Bend, Wisconsin (most famous for aluminum pots and electric toaster ovens — yes, that one). From the outside this looked like career suicide even though, exactly as the monomyth predicts, all of my mentors both spiritual and philosophical, my own personal Obi-Wans, rejoiced in and affirmed my choice.  I have to tell you, I was not so sure. Of course now, 30 years later, it is perfectly clear to me that the advice from the Grail legend was correct. At the time, and for some years afterwards, I thought I must have been out of my freaking mind.  “Holy crap!” I’d think, suddenly awake at 2am. “Should I have done this ? I’m off the beaten trail! I’ve lost any path forward!” You’ve probably had this happen too, right?  Well, while this stanza from the Grail legend describes what happened — and what hopefully happens to each of us on life’s adventure — I found in it a comforting, restorative, and empowering truth. One night, for no reason whatsoever and out of the blue — also around 2am — I was catapulted out of my existential dread by the very thing that had caused it: the realization that there was No Path in front of me. There was No Gate to go through. I’ll confess to the cliché that the experience was, sure enough, kind of like getting hit by lightning.  Now, all of that is a nice story, but there’s a terrifically useful and concrete bit of psychological import here. The experience was liberating. It freed me from expectations that had remained brooding beneath the surface of my daily consciousness, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. In that moment, when these expectations were made explicit, I found myself released from their effects, from the chains that kept me from being what I-might-be-but-didn't-know-I-could-be-yet , from the anxiety feeding on what I was “expected” to do — expectations that weren’t even my own.  “Doh!” said my inner Homer Simpson, suddenly realizing that every donut was a eucharist and every beer at Moe’s already the Grail. If expectation is the ground of sorrow, as the Buddha suggested, then an unexpected life, a life where there is No Path, is the true route to what in the West we’d call the Grail.    Thanks for musing along!

The Tower from the Thoth Deck by Aleister Crowley September smuggles us across the Equinox, the border between Summer and The Fall. That phrase, The Fall, does a lot of work when you’re talking about a blasted Tower. And it’s important to consider that borders, all borders, are overseen by the God of War, Mars.  Where there’s a border, there’s a Tower. Sometimes the crossing is easy, sometimes it’s a mess.  Sometimes Border Patrol and Customs won’t let you bring your baggage across, and you have to leave everything behind. Any attempt to storm the gate can mean ruin.  This can be as true metaphorically as it is literally.  If I were paraphrasing T.S. Eliot I’d say something like: … between the mythos and the logos, between practice and theory, between narrative and explanation, between wisdom and understanding, falls the shadow.This is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper.- T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men   Which brings us to The Tower of the Tarot and, naturally, The Tower of Babel.   One unlocks the other. There are some jaw droppingly suggestive paradoxes buried in the rubble of this metaphor.   Let’s jump into the deep end of the debris field. The Tower card in the Tarot references an earlier, more famous Tower—this one: The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. 6 And the LORD said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” 8 ( Genesis 11:6–9 NRSV) In other words: using bricks and a design of their own genius, humans attempt to cross the border between Earth and Heaven, from the temporal to the eternal (to count up, as it were, to infinity), and it blows up, spectacularly, in their face.  They’re cast down, foiled by the presumption of their own engineering, blasted by the Divine Power, and then left dazed and confused.  The word “Babel” itself picks up these themes.  As you’d expect, the word means “confusion” but it also means, etymologically, the “Gate of God”.  How to make sense of this apparent paradox? One obvious metaphor here: when the finite tries, finitely, to reach the infinite we are thrown back in confusion.   Or Whenever you try to build a Gate of God, using bricks created by engineering and science, reason won’t get you there. Or, a bit more subtly, You can’t use the algorithms of normal, rational consciousness to reach a religious understanding any more than you can count up to infinity.  It just doesn’t work like that.  When you try, confusion is all that results. There’s a lot buried in the debris.  I keep two examples in mind. The first one comes from reading the work of both honest-to-goodness mystics as well as the bat-swarm of more contemporary, earnest, spiritually inclined authors.   Have you ever noticed that a lot of mystical literature typically begins by explaining that it’s impossible to comprehend the ineffable and transcendent, consciousness-shattering splendors surrounding the incandescent mystery of God (or samadhi, enlightenment, bliss, ecstasy, take your pick)? And then they’ll remind their readers that, as impossible as it is to comprehend the majesty of Divine Power, it’s even more impossible to describe it in words? — and then they try to describe it anyway ?  For pages.  And pages.  And pages. Yeah, me too.  Look, you can’t say, “This is beyond our ability to think or describe!” and then go ahead and subject the rest of us to volumes of unintelligible (but sacred) word salad as you attempt to describe it. That unintelligibility is the babble of apes who have fallen from the Tower when they try to approach that-which-you-can’t-count-up-to . By the way, you may have had this experience yourself.  I know I have—and over nothing nearly as grand as building a Tower to God. If you’ve ever spent any time in meditative practice, like prayer, yoga, or qigong, you’ve probably had the surprisingly satisfying experience of quieting your mind and getting that burst of endorphin release. Have you ever tried to explain what that’s like to someone who hasn’t had the experience?  You sound like you’re babbling, to them at least.  I learn a lot from student’s faces, for instance, when I’m trying to explain ideas like the categorical imperative or how logic works. And that isn’t even mystical, it’s just difficult. The other example is the metaphor painted into the falling figures in Frieda Harris’ tarot card.  The attempt to build a tower into spiritual, mythological, consciousness using the bricks of reason always causes chaos. The figures cast down from the tower in Harris’ illustration have assumed geometrical forms which has always suggested to me that the ratio nality with which they approached the infinite, now made explicit, was the underlying cause of their own destruction, represented here by fire, just as Noah’s world was overwhelmed by water. The Tower warns us that when we approach the limits of conscious comprehension – as one does both in physics as well as spiritual pilgrimage – our rational constructions are shattered into bits, along with our expectations and conditioning paradigms, and we’re thrown, necessarily, into metaphor: from the language of science and explanation across the border into the language of myth.   P.S. It’s always nice to have a little dessert after a meal like that.  Digging into the literature surrounding the Tower of Babel, I discovered that the philosopher Derrida had, unironically, used it as a metaphor for the impossibility of translation.  But adding deconstruction to Babel put me in mind of my favorite philosophy joke.  This one:  Q: what do you get if you cross a Deconstructionist with a Mafia Hit Man? A: You get an offer, you can’t understand.

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again. – Percy Shelley, The Cloud October is a good month to curl up with a pumpkin spice latte and muse about Death, especially here in the northern hemisphere where autumn is rolling toward winter.  You probably noticed that this year's Mythblasts  have revolved around the symbolic import of trump cards taken from tarot decks, many from different eras and, appropriately enough, this month we’ve been looking at  the tarot card representing “Death.”  Comfy?  Here we go. The Tarot is a wheel of symbols endlessly orbiting in a metaphorical Milky Way with a black hole at the center. A lot of metaphors work like that: circling something you can't see into but still indicating its presence and effects.  Death is a particularly good case study for us here since it is pretty much the ultimate black hole of human existence: we don’t get to experience it ahead of time and therefore we can’t know for certain whether our relational mythologies are… well, relating us properly.  Death is the Great Abyss that doesn’t stare back.  What we see when we look is nothing and, because, in this particular metaphor where light stands in for thought, even our thinking about Death can get sucked into nothing – a nothing we cannot even think about as nothing. It's enough to make one a bit dizzy.  Fortunately, impassable event horizons notwithstanding, here's one thing we do know: the function of myth is to link us to the world in which we live, and to make that world meaningful to us. Campbell is famous for pointing out that a lot of the mythology we live with describes a world that hasn't existed for over a thousand years. That's true. Things are still dying, much as they always have, but our understanding of Death has changed across the centuries.  Have our myths also adjusted? This month is an occasion to re-examine traditional  mythological symbols about Death in light of what we've come to believe and discover over the last few centuries. Let’s have a look:  An original card from the tarot deck of Jean Dodal of Lyon, a "Marseilles" deck. Here’s the Death card from the Marseilles Tarot (c. 15 th  century), Campbell’s favorite deck.  His view, in fact, is that this entire deck follows on the heels of Dante and was designed as a symbolic representation of Dante’s life work.   What we have here is a very traditional symbol of death personified as a skeleton and cutting off life with his scythe.  The imagery itself is taken from Greek representations of either Chronos or Cronus, depending on whether you understand the metaphor as harvesting wheat or castrating your father. (The idea of castration, symbolic and real, is more important than may appear here.  For a real thrill ride, have a look at this month’s text, Masks of God, Vol 1: Primitive Mythology , in which Campbell details the puberty rituals among aboriginal Australians.) While this image worked perfectly well for a few hundred years, one of the most commonly available tarot decks (the Rider-Waite-Smith deck from 1909) updated the symbolic representation. These cards became a hit when US Games bought the rights and sold a gazillion copies starting in the early 70’s. The Death card from the Rider-Waite Tarot Deck by Pamela Colman Smith The Rider-Waite-Smith deck shows Death riding a Pale Horse in concurrence with the description of Death in the Revelation of St. John 6:8 at the end of the New Testament and, as it turns out, the end of the world.  The cards were created by Pamela Colman Smith at the direction of A.E. Waite, and borrows heavily from the Golden Dawn symbolic lexicon. This is a terrific symbol/myth/metaphor for death if (if!) we accept the New Testament’s understanding of Death as the terminal moraine of a Divine glaciation, punctuating all life – and all death to boot. It references the inexorable linear timeline of the Christian tradition: creation – stuff happens – apocalypse . I’d love to make a joke here about Dante never going out of style, but if he  hasn’t gone out of style, his three-story universe (Hell, Earth, Heaven) has been considerably revised.   The universe isn’t what it used to be - Heisenberg and that crowd blew up by physics during the last 100 years -  and our mythology is still trying to catch up. Death isn’t what it used to be either.  If physics became indeterminate, so has Death.  Think of the variations and gradations we have today that didn’t exist 100 years ago.  100 years ago, when you were dead you were dead, but today? Today there’s brain dead and heart dead and stages in between where we still can argue about whether or not someone is “really” dead. Our understanding of Death has had to accommodate changes in technology (respirators and heart bypass machines) and evolve with our rejection of fundamentalist religious certainties.   By contrast Freda Harris's card shows Death, again depicted as Father Time swinging his scythe: this time he isn’t harvesting or castrating the world, but spinning out a helix of interconnected threads, weaving new patterns in a tapestry of time rather than slicing off the ends.  New figures swim in those vortices. Death by Freda Harris from Aleister Crowley Thoth Deck The image suggests that Death is a process of transition rather than an ending.   Death as transitional.  Isn’t that closer to how we understand death today?  We can reinterpret the symbol not only as the death of an individual, but as a representation of how “death” happens all the time as we change.  We become something new when we understand something new, as our ignorance falls away. Parts of our life are taken from us or thrown off; we shed our psychological skins, like the snake in the corner of the card, and arise to unbuild our lives again.  Death in this case can mark the transitional moment when we go from who we thought we were to who we might really be. That transition is always painful and fraught and terrifying. What better metaphor than death? Personally, I think many of us like this particular symbolic death most of all: Grateful Dead Logo by Alton Kelley and Stanley “Mouse” Miller Thanks for musing along! Latest Podcast In this bonus episode, Joseph Campbell answers questions following the lecture that he gave with the same name from EP 26. It was recorded in 1967 at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California and is the second lecture in the series Mystical Experience and the Hero’s Journey. Host Bradley Olson offers an introduction to some of the ideas discussed by Campbell in the Q&A session. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Life is but a mask worn on the face of death. And is death, then, but another mask? ‘How many can say,’ asks the Aztec poet, ‘that there is, or is not, a truth beyond?’" -- Joseph Campbell The Mythic Image (p. 160) Kundalini Yoga: Crown Chakra — Becoming One with the Beloved (see more videos)