Change is in the air. Again. As usual. The climate is changing. The pandemic changes. Technology changes. Our lives change. Once upon a time, change happened more gradually, or so it seems. Now it feels like the pace of change has accelerated. We don’t seem to have the proper decompression chambers in which to adjust, and more changes are coming whether we choose them or not. But we still have myth, and creativity, and our ability to create new myths, as Joseph Campbell discusses in Volume 4 of his Masks of God series, Creative Mythology. Creative myth-making, Campbell says, restores to existence the quality of adventure, at once shattering and reintegrating the fixed, already known, in the sacrificial creative fire of the becoming thing that is nothing at all but life, not as it will be or should be, as it was or as it never will be, but as it is, in depth, in process, here and now, inside out. (7-8) In other words, the myths we make give our present-moment lives back to us with the added thrill of adventure. They help us meet and imagine the changes we face. One recent example of life-giving creative mythology is Sweet Tooth (2021), a Netflix series set in a world where a new species of animal-human hybrids evolves at the same time as a pandemic sweeps the planet. Sweet Tooth happens in a post-TV, post-internet, post-consumer landscape in which the population of humanity has been vastly reduced. But violent remnants of the old controlling, dominion-prone, fear-based culture still cling to existence in the form of an army of Last Men who hunt the child hybrids. The show focuses on the adventures of a hybrid named Gus who was born with the body of a human but the ears, antler nubs, and senses of a deer. In other words, Gus embodies what shamans experience through trance and dance: the joining of human and animal consciousness. Gus grows up in isolation in a remote forested stretch of what used to be Yellowstone National Park. As Gus grows, so do his antlers, and when the time is right, he sets out on an adventure that carries him away from home. Not far into his travels, a band of Last Men corner Gus inside a former park visitors’ center. Little Gus, armed with a homemade slingshot, faces off against a Last Man with a high-powered rifle when, in the open doorway behind Gus, a massive buck appears who is clearly there to protect Gus. With antlers too wide to step through the door, the buck’s presence is utterly arresting. The Last Man seems paralyzed by the same astonishment we feel as viewers because we are suddenly in the presence of the sublime: powers beyond our own, dimensions of life to which we had been oblivious, more beauty and love than we had thought possible. In that moment, Gus, completely unaware of the buck, becomes the child of the buck, and of the antlered Celtic god Cernunnos (Campbell 412), and of the antlered human figure on the wall in the Cave of the Trois-Frères. We feel all those antlers ourselves—their bony anchors in our skulls, the pull of their weight in our necks and backs, the instinctive ability to lower the horns and charge. The sacred buck shows us Gus’s strength and destiny: simultaneously peaceful and powerful, an herbivore-warrior who will fight for what he loves. Here, the buck overwhelms his opponent simply through the force of his presence. Sweet Tooth’s creative myth-making opens other windows onto the sacred as well. In the first episode, Gus learns that rain is “just Mother Nature, washing herself clean.” The show’s Animal Army organizes around the belief that hybrids are a miracle of nature. A character named Dr. Singh sees the divine in Gus thanks to a gift that Singh’s wife gave him, a statue of a Hindu goddess who once appeared as a deer. As an embodiment of sacred nature, Gus’s part-human and part-deer form reminds us of the sacred nature of all animals, human and otherwise. In fact, Gus’s form affirms that we are sacred because of our animal nature, and so is the rest of our extended animal family. Human-animal hybrids remind us that we are in fact animals, and that our souls—our animas, to use the Latin term—are animal souls. The myth-makers of Sweet Tooth also suggest that our physical shapes and psychological shapes change together, and neither is fixed. Our birthright vitality and consciousness, from which the technological world likes to separate us, remain rooted in the adaptability of our bodies and the organic world. External metamorphosis coincides with internal metamorphosis. What’s more, stasis doesn’t actually exist. The universe, which includes our Earth and ourselves, is ever and always in froth and flux. Sweet Tooth is a creative myth about creativity, illustrating new ways of being in response to change. We have already been called upon to make many changes. We can rest assured we will need to make more. Sweet Tooth says we can, and also suggests how and why. Another clue comes from Campbell, who reminds us that mythic images “touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.” (4) We can change creatively and mythically, in order to reclaim and exhilarate our sacred animal lives.

For the rest of the year, we at JCF are highlighting the final volume of Joseph Campbell’s remarkable Masks of God series, The Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology. Many of my friends and acquaintances, particularly those who are writers and artists, say that this is their favorite Joseph Campbell work. In traditional mythology, Campbell says, individuals are supposed to experience certain insights, sentiments, and commitments. In what I am calling “creative” mythology, on the other hand, this order is reversed: the individual has had an experience of his own—of order, horror, beauty, or even mere exhilaration—which he seeks to communicate through signs; and if his realization has been of a certain depth and import, his communication will have the value and force of living myth.[…] Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.(Creative Mythology, 12) I prefer to understand myth more as a mode of thought or a condition of imagining rather than an explicit narrative containing a traditional, historical, or even metaphysical, body of knowledge. As Professor Campbell suggests in the quote above, myth is something more than a vocabulary, and from the perspective of myth as a mode of thought, I understand myth to be something like the grammar of creativity, or the grammar of imagination (as I recall, Hegel mentioned something similar, like grammar being the work of thought). Grammar is not merely about proper tense and usage; grammar includes analyses of narrative structures, letting one be aware of the constraints or limitations of various communications, conventions, and even art forms. The English word, grammar, is related to the Greek phrase, grammatikḕ téchnē, which means the "art of letters," and David Crystal believes that “grammar is the structural foundation of our ability to express ourselves.” Expressing our own experiences—especially the puzzling, ineffable, sublime experiences—are, as Campbell notes, communications that have the value and force of living myth. Myth was taken up (or rediscovered) during the Enlightenment because as a mode of thinking, it was believed to be a key to comprehending history, philosophy, religion, art, linguistics, and creativity itself. Considering myth a master discipline that stimulated a mode of thinking freed it from the vice-like grip of divine revelation and institutional oversight and returned ownership of myth to individual human beings. It freed the mythic imagination to be employed in a wide-ranging, non-linear, exploratory search for the significance of a human life lived in a fundamentally enigmatic world. Thinking mythically frees myth from the world of supernatural intervention and rightfully reclaims for human beings an experience of the sublime directly linked to human passions, changes of fortune, joys and depressions, pathos and elation. Myth is also a mode of thinking that reliably rewards a reader’s attention with an experience of delight, even though the myth itself may address horrific themes or events. John Dryden specifically—and all manner of poets, writers, painters, and classically educated people—have noted this function at work in the mythopoetic genre. The poet is, as the word poesis suggests, a maker and a creator, one who aims at making something beautiful, something that stirs us, not by representing things exactly as they are but by heightening their intensity and deepening their depths, qualities which Dryden termed “lively” and “just.” (Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668)) Mythopoesis is a uniquely human endeavor and delighting in it allows one to, if not exactly remake the world, at least remake our own reality here and now. For there is no fear in delight, no pain, no thought; delight is pure experience, and is in itself, transcendent. Poesis and drama also instruct, writes Dryden, but the function of instruction is secondary in his mind; in his thinking, primacy of place is given to the function of delight. Delight is created by the contemplation of beauty, and the job of the creative person is to create a grammar that highlights beauty and contributes to the pleasures of the soul. The condition of delight taken in every aspect of life—even in its “order, horror, beauty, or even mere exhilaration” as Campbell noted above—allows one to accept one’s all-too-human existence without the slavish and frequently unbecoming need for transcendence which, when it is the only goal of a spiritual practice, is simply a euphemism for escaping the human condition. By following your bliss, Campbell doesn’t mean escaping life or one’s corporeality. Rather, I understand him to mean that bliss is found in the realization that life is often accompanied by inescapable constraints of one kind or another, but in spite of that, we need not respond to any controlling authority other than a deeply felt, inner sense of a central organizing principle—“the dynamism of being,” as Campbell has called it—an inner depth that continually unfolds in proportion to how intensely we approach our own self-becoming. Jung called it individuation, Nietzsche called it Amor Fati, and Keats put it this way: …Though no great minist’ring reason sortsOut the dark mysteries of human soulsTo clear conceiving: yet there ever rollsA vast idea before me, and I gleanTherefrom my liberty…  (Sleep and Poetry) Much like language itself, the language and grammar of myth is capable of absorbing and disturbing us in secret ways and often, to our own excitement or frustration and bewilderment, exposes us to a vast idea. It’s true, isn’t it, that the mythic narratives themselves are not as important as the dialogues we have about myth and meaning? Isn’t that the great inheritance, the great gift of myth: that they immerse us in the existentially puzzling phenomena we’d rather not have to give too much thought to? Phenomena like the mystery of existence, the constant struggle between free will and fate, and all the conditions of life that remain stubbornly resistant to the intellect and reason. Myths expose one to the forces and effects of a complex, often overwhelming world upon a limited human being, but they also suggest to us that if we can only begin to think and imagine more mythically one may not only feel, but actually be, less constrained by the complexities and limitations of human life; that is where liberty truly abides. Imagined and thought of this way, myth offers a closer and truer relationship with life. It certainly doesn’t remove or solve the problems of living, but it can illuminate the subject and that, if nothing else, is something significant and well worth having. Thanks for reading,

Do something, you change. Do nothing, you change. Fight change, you change. Embrace change—well, you get the picture. And while we change, “things” change too. So it seems in the field of relative life, the one unchanging constant is constant change. This being the case, the best we can do is influence the directions of change. One of my favorite parts of mythology (and of story in general) is witnessing the transformations of the characters as a result of their journeys—and all myths are journeys. In fact, what’s not a journey? A journey to the post office, to sleep, through thoughts or even thoughtlessness. The journey is a kind of current that moves us through life. It provides the impetus that keeps one’s narrative in perpetual motion, making change inescapable. Sure, it’s the journey that changes us. But it’s in how we engage the journey—our decisions, actions and reactions—that we are able to exert an influence on it. The good news is that we don’t need to find the “power” to influence change, the journey provides that free of charge. What we need are the skills and tools to steer as best we can in keeping with the general directions that the journey sends us in. This month’s theme attends not to morphosis or objective change, but rather to self-reflective metamorphosis—the kind of change that transpires within. So let’s journey into mythology as a means of tracking psychic transformation through terrains of metaphorical and imaginal narrative. Sure, that’s a lot of abstract, impersonal content, but it holds two key terms that offer us passage out of the impersonal and into something we can call mine: “metaphorical” and “imaginal.” Metaphor is our first big tool because it transcribes mythological narratives (i.e., stories about someone else) into stories about “me.” Or, more specifically, through metaphor, the relationships between mythic characters and the stories they find themselves in are precise correlations to the relationships between me and the stories I find myself in. In Creative Mythology, we are introduced to Immanuel Kant’s formula: a is to b as c is to x. Joseph Campbell then applies this formula to mythic metaphors as a complete resemblance of two relationships. Meaning that it’s “not ‘a somewhat resembles b,’ but rather ‘the relationship of a to b perfectly resembles that of c to x’” (339). The point here is simply to recognize the mechanics of this formula so that we can have it up and running while we read the myths, making their stories metaphorically concurrent to ours. There’s plenty more to say on Kant’s formula—and especially on the mysterious “x” which represents, in Campbell’s words, “a quantity that is not only unknown but absolutely unknowable” (339). And granted, metaphors can correlate all sorts of relationships, but as I’m using it here, xrepresents “my” story (and my myth) as an unknown value, which is precisely why it requires metaphor and not expository explanation to render a sense of what it is. Now let’s look at our other big tool for influencing metamorphosis: Imagination. Being irrational, or non-rational, imagination is a complementary counterbalance to our rational understanding of the mechanics of metaphor. When we are mid-stride in a particular segment of our journey (or, correspondingly, when mythic figures are in mid-stride in a segment of theirs), there is always a level of uncertainty (x) as to which way to go or to what will happen. I suppose that in rational contexts, being in a position of not knowing is bad. In terms of imagination, however, it is highly desirable. The condition of not-knowing is a powerful summons for imagination—it forces its involvement by necessity. We “imagine” into the possibilities of our story to find our way. Furthermore, just as there is a correlation between not knowing and imagination, so there is between not knowing and the journey. After all, the root of the word “question” is quest. We see this relationship in Plato’s Myth of Er, where before entering into life the soul is first dipped in the river of Lethe [forgetfulness] to forget where it’s been and why it’s now here. I can think of a few good reasons for a dip in the Lethe. For one, it provides the mystery that necessitates the quest. And, for two, it provides a metaphor for the origin of a need for imagination. As mentioned earlier, it’s in how we engage the journey that we can influence it. But it’s the experience of the journey that reciprocally changes us. And so we are, to a degree, the authors of our metamorphoses. We become “experienced” in this or that and it shows in our character. Likewise, imagination is entwined with experience. We may argue that it’s only subjectively real and has no influence on outer events. But consider guided meditation, for example. Our guide begins: “Imagine [and it always begins with ‘imagine’] you’re on a quiet beach, a light breeze, the sand cool. . .” and suddenly, your mood is calmed, your body-chemistry changed—perhaps a little more serotonin or dopamine in the bloodstream. And so, where the imagination goes, the experience follows. In describing “aesthetic arrest” Campbell provides the following from Dante’s La Vita Nuova which speaks to the first time Dante perceives his beloved Beatrice: I say that from that time forward Love lorded it over my soul, which had been so speedily wedded to him [‘him’ being a personification of Love and not Beatrice!] and he began to exercise over me such control and such lordship, through the power which my imagination gave to him, that it behooved me to do completely all his pleasure. (68) The key phrase here is “through the power which my imagination gave him.” Likewise, when we imagine into the myths and the metaphors of myths that we read, our involvement is made deep. And a place is opened for the metamorphosis to put in its roots and grow.

If we ever wanted to find a contemporary exemplar of living myth par excellence, we would need to look no further than the UFO phenomenon—especially with the recent video leaks and subsequent Pentagon disclosures on “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” (UAPs). These phenomenal sightings share in the paradoxical nature of mythology proper: they are both real and unreal, immanent (to the universe) and transcendent of this earth; they are here and not-here, manifestly self-evident and suddenly disappeared. In this sense, they are a perfect embodiment of the peculiar ontological status of mythic beings as such, their spectral “otherworldly” plane of reality. In its very elusive aspect, UFOs represent the alternating logic of being and nothingness which structures the process of becoming, the processes of change and metamorphosis. As a modern symbol of transcendence, UFOs stand for the process of total transformation and self-creation in the noumenality of space-time. Unfortunately, the UFO topic has received little attention from contemporary mythologists and historians, respectable academics who would rather operate at a wide girth from such “mass delusions.” Even a maverick like Joseph Campbell, by no means impeded by academic dogmas of respectability, also showed little interest in the topic. When Campbell explores contemporary examples of living myth as he does in Creative Mythology, the fourth volume of the monumental series the Masks of God, the UFO phenomenon finds no place either. Indeed, in the context of Dante, the Bhagavad-Gita, James Joyce, Immanuel Kant and the like, a discussion of UFOs would be grossly out of place. Nevertheless, influenced as he was by Carl Jung, Campbell probably read and took for granted his monograph on UFOs, Flying Saucers: a Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, which is included in the 10th volume of Jung’s Collected Works entitled Civilization in Transition. In the “Preface to the First English Edition” Jung reflects back on the whole “moral of this story” with the realization that “news affirming the existence of Ufos is welcome, but that scepticism seems to be undesirable,”* which is to say that the belief in UFOs “suits the general opinion, whereas disbelief is to be discouraged.” (CW10 page 309) In other words,  it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the UFO myth stands in the place of an ideological fantasy used to maintain status-quo thinking and feeling. Whether they are here or not here, the myth certainly can be used—and has been used—as a tool of state propaganda designed to distract our attention from actual technological developments and experimentation by our secret military. This is perhaps the greatest “revelation” of the recently released four-part docuseries UFO (2021) on Showtime, produced by J.J. Abrams: much of what is mistaken for an Alien presence is indeed our own tech! The fear of stepping into the shadow of our military industrial complex is a big reason we discourage critical thinking on this topic. And we are more than happy to deflect any meaningful criticism into the kennel of a “rationalistic” prejudice. But anyone who would suggest that we live in a much too “rationalistic age”—in the midst of “alternative facts,” “fake news,” viral lies, and campaigns of disinformation— must be distinctly out of touch with our social reality. Swimming in a sea of conspiracy theories and revisionist histories, by no stretch of the imagination can we say our age suffers from a burdensome excess of reason. Quite the contrary, the sorry state of the world every day tells us that we suffer from an egregious lack of it. Nevertheless, I think Campbell would have followed Jung’s approach in reading the UFO phenomenon, both real and unreal, as a symptom of a deeper emotional tension in the collective psyche. From a Jungian perspective, UFOs stand for a certain archetypal content that finds no expression within our accepted frameworks of explanation and worldview. It is indeed a projection of a mythic reality that bears an unborn truth within. The shattering power of this truth is what threatens to “invade” our familiar fields of ideology and mythic fantasy, threatens to “abduct” our rootedness in the collective dream of our social hypnosis. As Jung elaborates further, the need to believe in UFOs, quite apart from the question of their objective presence, indicates a certain degree of collective psychic suffering. It is the “heavenly sign” of a “psychic dissociation” which points to the general “split between the conscious attitude and the unconscious contents opposed to it.”  (CW10: ¶591) Campbell himself called this psychic split a mythic dissociation, as we read with emphasis in Creative Mythology: The Christian is taught that divinity is transcendent: not within himself and his world, but “out there.” I call this mythic dissociation. (528) […] Hence, there has now spread throughout the Christian world a desolating sense not only of no divinity within (mythic dissociation), but also of no participation in divinity without (social identification dissolved): and that, in short, is the mythological base of the Waste Land of the modern soul, or, as it is being called these days, our “alienation.” (529) The UFO phenomenon, both real and unreal, remains an excellent symbol of our own self-alienation, not only at the individual level but at the global level of the collective. Our sense of “divinity” cannot be divorced from a sense of justice and responsibility not only for ourselves individually but for the whole planet—including the entire universe. * Spelling and stylization are preserved from Jung’s original text.

“People often think of the Goddess as a fertility deity only. Not at all—she’s the muse,” Joseph Campbell elucidates in Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine. “She’s the inspirer of poetry. She’s the inspirer of the spirit. So, she has three functions: one, to give us life; two, to be the one who receives us in death; and three, to inspire our spiritual, poetic realization.” (36) As a Lithuanian, I’ve always been fascinated by how one of the country’s most famous exports, Marija Gimbutas, inspired Campbell. It was her studies of the Great Goddess of the Neolithic world of Old Europe that assisted him in perceiving the goddesses roots in later mythologies, rituals and traditions. He quotes Gimbutas: The human legs of the vulture … imply that it is not simply a bird but rather the Goddess in the guise of a vulture. She is Death—She Who Takes Away Life, maleficent twin of She Who Gives Life—ominous in flight on great, outspread wings. Despite the incarnate presence of Death, the vulture scenes of Çatal Hüyük do not convey death’s mournful triumph over life. Rather, they symbolize that death and resurrection are inseparably linked.(31) Many of us long for resurrection, to be called to arise and shepherd the totality of ourselves, including our inner world, out into the external realm. And while the banished and ignored shadow parts of our being may yearn for the light of renewal, it’s only when we orient ourselves to the mysteries of the world of spirit, and to all that speaks to the eternal, that we may find the wisdom, beauty, strength, and rebirth we seek. Symbolically these soul attributes may be pictured as the eternal feminine within us awaiting our attention and foster. (“Das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns hinan.” “The eternal feminine / Draws us on.” Goethe, Faust). The soul’s underworld is the most fertile ground for the psyche’s deep awakening. The resurrection, as Gimbutas describes, illustrates how essential it is to also meet the Goddess as vulture—a rite of passage, which involves a radical surrender. It’s an experiential process that necessitates being picked down to our very bones (as vultures literally do) to expose and unravel the falsities, masks, and personas that we so frequently employ as protective guises in the everyday, surface world. However, as Campbell reminds us, “It is through the Goddess that you enter the world of the spirit. She is the maze, and she is also your guide.” (39) The Goddess, whether we call her Gaia or one of various other names, is also the personification of the energies of nature. “The simplest manifestation of the Goddess in the early Neolithic planting traditions is as Mother Earth,” Campbell states. “The Earth brings forth life, and the Earth nourishes life, and so is analogous to the powers of the woman.” (3) Our soul invites us to house both dormancy (winter) and renewal (spring) by observing what’s disintegrating and rising within us. Again and again we read in the Mystery texts that we must die to our old patterns of behavior and habits of mind so that we may reimagine and refashion ourselves anew. And like the proverbial snake shedding its skin to reveal a new one, death is conquered by the soul’s ongoing regeneration. Too often we forget that the processes of fertility and creativity initially emerge through dissolution and fragmentation. We’re fearful of the darkness that these movements bring, too weary to explore their mission and hidden, yet sacred, poetry. But it’s the womb space of fallowness and gestation in both vegetative life and in our own soul’s regenerative artistry that is to be sensed. Attentiveness to the “tomb as womb” potentiality must precede our future birth. It’s why we’re required to dwell for lengthy periods of time in the Stygian darkness of the underworld—and heed its tutelage: because it takes that much hidden, obsidian power to birth a new “you,” a new “me,” a new “us” in the personal, societal, and cultural realms. And so, the feminine impulse for fertile renewal is central to our future birth. As Campbell explains, “Here, when the gods find they are impotent, they have to give the power back to where it ultimately came from: to the female principle. She is the power of life, which lives in us in both its natural and in its so-called supernatural aspects. And in the Greek world we have the rise, then, of the mystery cults, the goddess Demeter, Persephone, and in Egypt, Isis, Nephthys. These are the guides to rebirth, and it’s their symbology that comes in the symbol of the Virgin Mother as the Madonna.” (227) The myths Campbell references point us to the principles inherent in the cyclical nature of life—the ongoing, agonizing death of the outmoded and resistant old in us in order to prepare for the birth of the new. Gimbutas adds that, “… pre-industrial agricultural rites show a definite mystical connection between the fertility of the soil and the creative force of woman. In all European languages, the Earth is feminine.” (8) For example, the Goddess Persephone is represented visibly as the rebirth of plant life – the seeds of the old crops converging with the new. This dying away and coming into being again is not a singular, once-off event. It’s a continuing, cyclical process and a constant experience. In a sense, it’s the very quintessence of life itself. Indeed, that’s how we meet the Goddess within us.

A passage from the Homeric Hymns tells us of a goddess that stretches out her bow and fires her creation into the world. “The peaks of mountains tremble. The forest in its darkness screams with the clamor of animals, and it’s frightening. The whole earth starts shaking, even the sea,” the Hymn states (The Homeric Hymns, translated by Charles Boer, Putnam, CT: Spring Publications 2003, pp. 4-6). Joseph Campbell spoke about the archetypal role of goddesses as powerful creators, connecting the physical birthing process to the metaphoric role that goddesses embody (Goddesses 21-26). While Artemis was believed to have attended the physical birth of children, the creations of the archetypal goddess transcend the physical realm and encompass creative offspring such as art, storytelling, crafts, and music. Over the summer, the much-anticipated musical album Happier Than Ever from singer Billie Eilish debuted at number one on the American Billboard Top 200 chart. Critics have been trying to define and describe Eilish’s popularity since her viral rise in 2015. Since then, she has become the youngest artist in the history of the Grammy Awards to win all four general field categories in the same year and was named to Time magazine's inaugural Time 100 Next list in 2019. Whenever a figure experiences a meteoric rise in culture, an archetypal influence is often at play. While several archetypes might seem relevant when considering Eilish, the goddess Artemis best intersects with the 19-year-old singer, as it is Artemis whose creation made such a profound impact when she shot into the world. Campbell unpacks the Hymn describing Artemis in Goddesses (109-110). Associations with gold are found in the Homeric Hymn to Artemis, specifically mentioning her solid gold bow. A song titled "Goldwing" on Eilish’s most recent album opens with a harmonized performance of two lines from Gustav Holst’s 1907 translation of the great canonical Hindu text, The Rig Veda. The lines describe a goddess, a golden-winged messenger of the mighty gods, whose smile lifts one to the highest heavens. Eilish’s song goes on to caution a young goddess-like woman about revealing who she is to those who would crave her magic but ignore her divine nature, which could leave her torn apart. The conversation plays like a wiser version of Eilish speaking to her younger self about the pitfalls of fame. The warning is directed in such a way to suggest the woman’s innocence—a quality that was associated with Artemis, as well as a descriptor often used by critics of Eilish. Later in the Hymn, Artemis unstrings her bow and goes to the house of her beloved brother, Apollo. The close relationship between Artemis and Apollo has been explored in a variety of ways by numerous mythologists with varying interpretations. Eilish has also had a famously close relationship with her brother, known mononymously as FINNEAS, who has produced both of her albums and remained her closest creative collaborator. Several of Eilish’s most popular songs were written as the two sat at home together. On Halley’s Comet, she sings of sitting in her brother’s room, unable to sleep, while contemplating her love for someone she’s come to know. Her meticulously minded musical brother is undoubtedly the Apollo to Eilish’s Artemis. In a final interesting turn found in the Hymn, Artemis puts away her arrows and dons a beautiful dress. Campbell tells us that Artemis manifested in several different ways (108). Here, we see the goddess changing from the huntress, clothed in animal skins that were frequently associated with the masculine, to a beautifully dressed feminine dancer. Eilish, who rose to prominence often dressed in age-appropriate, gender-neutral clothes, was criticized after appearing in more feminine and decidedly adult outfits for Vanity Fair earlier this year—a nod to her own coming of age.  Her embrace of the new aesthetic mirrors the transformation of Artemis we see in the Hymn. The photos generated fears that Eilish would begin to exploit her sexuality to further her commercial success. She masterfully navigated the concerns of fans and nay-sayers alike, choosing explanations that honored both her growth and maturity as well as the commitment to her core self that made her so accessible to so many. She continues to embody the murky complexity and the unabashed certainty of the goddess archetype in a manner that somehow seemed reminiscent of Actaeon’s fateful encounter with the bathing Artemis. Campbell describes Acteon’s gaze on Artemis as lustful instead of honoring, a completely improper reaction to such a deity. “Seeing that look in his eye, Artemis simply splashed him with some water and he was turned into a stag, and his own dogs then consumed him.” (Campbell 113) Campbell goes on to say that the dogs represented Actaeon’s lower appetites, which are what actually caused his demise. Billie Eilish continues to create and radiate goddess energy, firing creative arrows into the world, and instead of fighting every potential attack that arises, allowing those that would attempt to tarnish the golden properties of the goddess to be consumed by their own lesser selves.

This month the MythBlast Series is focusing on Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine which is, I think, a tremendously important contribution to the Campbell oeuvre edited by the gifted Safron Rossi (who is also a contributor to the MythBlast Series). This is a text that seems infinitely rewarding in its breadth, its depth, in its treatment of ego and, less explicitly, irony. In her introduction, Dr. Rossi writes of the Campbell lectures that constitute the text: These lectures are investigations of the symbolic, mythological, and archetypal themes of the feminine divine in and of herself, and for Campbell her main themes are initiation into the mysteries of immanence experienced through time and space and the eternal; transformation of life and death; and the energy consciousness that informs and enlivens all life.(ix-x) The reason that this text is so illuminating in its treatment of these three main themes is to be found (and this is true of mythology in general) in its exploration of reality, both material and immaterial, through the use of metaphoric irony. Ironic metaphor is pleasingly effective because it intensifies and subverts reality through resemblance and sharpens the perception, comprehension, and significance of the events and experiences that constitute the human condition. It results in “a sense of reality keen enough to be in excess of the normal sense of reality [and] creates a reality of its own.” (Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and Imagination, 79) As for the ego, its relationship to reality is tenuous. The ego seeks to find itself reflected everywhere, and insists that that reflected ego is itself reality. Additionally, it’s problematic that the ego oscillates between fear and desire, and “reality” is perceived largely within that dialectic: The fear of death is the fear of death to your ego, and the desire that the ego should enjoy the goods that it is interested in—these are what keep you from realizing your immortality. Fear and desire are the clashing rocks that exclude us from the intuition of our own immortal character. Joseph Campbell, Goddesses, 189 The ego’s insistence that its own reflection is really reality is made more complicated by the fact that, simply put, we do not know ourselves. But ignorance of one’s self is a hard thought for the ego to bear, and subsequently the ego finds it too painful to live in the gap between what it wants reality to be and what reality is. Metaphor and irony compellingly explore that gap which, when we more closely examine it, reveals itself to be a seam or a scar that knits together that which we think we know and that which we don't (or can't) know. Living in and exploring the gap necessarily diminishes and distresses the ego, which is forced to become a witness to, rather than the creator of, phenomenality. Because the ego expects to find its own reflection everywhere, the failure to decenter the ego results in reducing myth to an amusement, an inconsequential role-playing diversion whose object is merely to match qualities to archetypes while entirely ignoring the reality, and especially the force, of the archetypal. So how does one “get around” the ego? How can the ego be decentered? One way, and I think it’s an exceptionally effective way, is to cultivate a sense of the ironic. Irony is the pin that pops the ego’s inflation, calms its desires and fears, and allows one to live more enthusiastically, more gallantly, more genuinely, amidst what Wordsworth called “the still, sad, music of life.” Soren Kierkegaard put it this way: Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do. He who does not understand irony and has no ear for its whispering lacks eo ipso what might be called the absolute beginning of the personal life. He lacks what at moments is indispensable for the personal life, lacks both the regeneration and rejuvenation, the cleaning baptism of irony that redeems the soul from having its life in finitude though living boldly and energetically in finitude.Kierkegaard’s Writings, II, Volume II: The Concept of Irony Irony turns things inside out and upside down; it upends and reverses things; irony deconstructs and overthrows, it draws attention to the discrepancy between literal meaning and essential meaning. Myth, properly read, is always ironic. While the ego fears its decentering as a literal death, from the perspective of metaphysical irony, Campbell tells us that the death of the ego heralds the experience of the transcendent. In many traditions the great Goddesses are often found in relationship to darkness and the depths—the telesterions of life where one is exposed to sorrows and fear, even to tragedy. In those dark manifestations She is the Initiatrix who cleanses the doors of perception which open to the transformation of consciousness and the transcendent. But the benefit of those experiences—experiences that "normal," daylight consciousness always fails to understand and would rather pathologize—is that the ego cannot extend itself fully into these dark depths so it is there, in darkness and uncertainty, disabused of the comfort of the ego’s pleasing illusions, that we are confronted with who and what we really are. She, with her dark materials, pushes us along toward individuation and wholeness. “The rapture of the tragedy is the rapture of seeing the form broken for a flowing through of the radiance of the transcendent light.” (Joseph Campbell, Goddesses, 217) Irony is the indispensable attitude for engaging the goddess in her depths and darkness—darkness that places the radiance of transcendence in bold relief. Irony is life’s language; it grants one multiple points of view, it lets one see oneself seeing oneself, and mercifully, irony saves us from sarcasm, cynicism, and desuetude, the demoralized manifestations of broken hearts. Perhaps you’ve looked around and noticed how unforgiving and thoughtless culture is becoming; aesthetic sensibilities wane as we flirt with the neo-brutalism that encroaches upon so many aspects of contemporary life. Is it possible that irony may free us from the conventional constraining literalism of existence? Through irony might we see more deeply into the metaphor that is life, and in so seeing grow wiser, more joyful, humbler, and indeed, more compassionate? Thanks for reading.

“And my understanding of the mythological mode is that deities and even people are to be understood in this sense, as metaphors. It’s a poetic understanding.” Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, p 101 It’s the middle of winter. Bedtime. I hear a thump in the bedroom. I go in to find out what happened. My husband is lying in bed on his back, limbs rigid and shaking, jaw working, his unblinking gaze staring straight up. In the direct light from the ceiling, his wide-open eyes are fathomless emeralds that I’ve never seen before. A rush of adrenaline turns my vision crisp and clear as I dial 911—fire trucks and an ambulance fill the street—pulsing red lights in the dark—EMTs come inside and administer seizure medication—they carry him out on a canvas stretcher. ~ Thousands of years ago, in the labyrinthine caves of southern France, artists drew galleries of stylized horned bulls, majestic and fearsome. The Chauvet Cave has one figure with a man’s body and a bull’s head, arranged so that this early Minotaur overlaps and wraps another image, this one of a woman’s pubic triangle and upper legs. The artist had to have worked by firelight—smoke, flickering honey-colored light, hands brushing the rough stone, as images sprang into being where before there had been only blank rock. ~ It’s the day after my husband’s seizure. The doctors perform emergency surgery. They cross the threshold of his skull, venture into the cave of his brain, and try to release the pressure caused by a mass that appears on the MRI as a blurry zone without clear edges. ~ Around 1400 BCE, on the island of Crete, in a civilization whose bull art dazzles us to this day, a clerk recorded an offering of honey to someone whose name is often translated as The Lady of the Labyrinth. Literally translated, however, her name would be “The Female God of the Labyrinth Who Has Great Power.” (T. Palaima 441, 448) Centuries later, mainland Greeks told a story of their hero Theseus, who sailed to Crete to kill a Minotaur who lived at the center of a labyrinth to end the human sacrifice the monster demands. But Theseus could only succeed with the help of Ariadne, whose name means Most Holy. Ariadne gave Theseus a sacred sword with which to kill the Minotaur, and a divine ball of thread to lead the way back out of the labyrinth. ~ Three weeks after surgery. We sit in the surgeon’s office with more MRI scans. The mass is cancer, the doctor says. A brain tumor. My husband needs more surgery, this time at a specialist center in San Francisco. This time doctors will go in ready to confront the entity inside. ~ The Cretan Minotaur was named Asterios, which means Starry One (C. Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks, 110-11), from the root astro, or star. So Asterios is a brilliant but dangerous being, an animate, cannibalistic star who inhabits the furthest reaches of the circuitous labyrinth. ~ The Minotaur in the center of my husband’s brain has a name, too: Astrocytoma. It is a cancer of the astrocytes, which are star-shaped brain cells that play a supporting role for neurons. Astrocytoma demands the sacrifice of healthy cells to feed its hunger. ~ It’s the day of the second surgery. Along with anesthesia, the specialists administer medication that makes tumor cells glow when bathed in a blue light. Then they open my husband’s head again and reach inside with the aid of a surgical microscope fitted with a blue light. Now they can see the horned cells, the way ancient artists saw beings emerge on the cave walls, the way Theseus saw the brilliant Minotaur. By seeing the cells clearly, by bringing them into the realm of conscious inspection, the neurosurgeon can understand them and deal with them. ~ The center is a pivot point, a discovery, a realization. It’s not the end of the adventure—you still have to make your way back out—but nothing will be the same again after you encounter the star within. ~ With the help of that technological blue thread, the medical team does such incredible work that they send my husband home with no further treatment needed. Miracle-drenched, we enter the new labyrinth of recovery, knowing nothing of what comes next. ~ The labyrinth removes us from linearity. It’s a bubble that pauses the flow of time and reminds us of the limits of logic and planning. Labyrinths derange our routines and teleport us into the present moment to face our inner starry animals, so shockingly similar to ourselves, potentially so dangerous. But Ariadne presides. She stands ready to help. Her thread turns the labyrinth into the simplest possible map. Just follow the path. The labyrinth itself will lead you.

A man stands at the mouth of the Forest Adventurous, “where we meet our adventures when we are ready for them.” (Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Romance, 116) He is ill-prepared; perhaps not prepared at all. Perhaps he has only just enough awareness to realize how absolutely out of his depth he is. Ted Lasso (from the Apple TV+ show of the same name) nearly steps in front of a speeding car on his first day as the manager of a UK football club. He’s looked the wrong way before crossing the street—the correct way, if he was still in the United States, but here he stands on a curb in London, almost struck down before he even meets his new team. “This is the true beginning of the Grail Quest,” says Joseph Campbell in Romance of the Grail (116), referring to Parcival’s own entrance to the forest in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s romantic poem Parzival. “Everything up until this point has taken place in the way of our hero’s nature; [his] character carried him through...” Until now. Coach Ted Lasso a folksy figure, renowned in the United States for carrying his American football team to victory. He’s not only a successful figure, but a beloved one: before we even meet him, we’re introduced to his legacy through a video of a locker room celebration with his team that culminates in a massive, joyful huddle. He is an honorable man, and this label is powerful in the optimistic land of America. Elsewhere, though, it makes him an easy mark. When he’s finally introduced, Ted is on a plane about to take off for London. For reasons as yet unknown, he’s been selected as head coach for AFC Richmond, an English football club. His first dialogue is with a smirking fan who’s come up asking for a photo with him. “I mean, it’s mental,” the young man says with abject glee. “They’re going to murder you.” Ted’s smile doesn’t falter. After the fan returns to his seat, Ted turns to his partner, Coach Beard: “Taking on a challenge is a lot like riding a horse, isn’t it? If you’re comfortable while you’re doin’ it, you’re probably doin’ it wrong.” Parcival, having just run the Red Knight through and put on his armor, has now gotten on the dead knight’s horse and is being helplessly carried along on its back, merely a passenger in its mad dash forward. They’re both comical scenes: a person out of their element almost always is, and a person at the mercy of an unruly beast running full-speed into the unknown has an undeniable majesty in it, too. Brave, or stupid? He brings his full self: he is open to this vast unknown, to adventures he can’t yet fathom. He is vulnerable, and like the awed fan approaching Ted on the plane, we can’t help but admire it. We soon learn that Ted, like Parzival, has been sent on this endeavor by someone who wants him to fail. Parzival’s mother dressed him in fool’s clothes so her son would be shamed, turned away from Arthur’s court and returned to her loving arms. Rebecca, the new owner of AFC Richmond, is equally sure of her subject’s ineptitude but has none of the maternal affection. Instead, Rebecca becomes Ted’s Fisher King, a figure of great power who carries an equally great and crippling wound. She has called him to her court not to heal her, but to expand the Wasteland, bringing everyone who dares care about the club to the depths of despair in which she resides. Throughout the first season of the show, Ted never stops asking Rebecca, “What ails thee?” He doesn’t make the same mistake Parzival does—in fact, he makes the opposite mistake. His nature leads him to ask, repeatedly, the exact wrong question. If Coach Lasso is following Parzival’s methods of entering into adventure, he’s thankfully got the benefit of Sir Gawain’s personality. “Gawain is a charming character in Wolfram’s work. In fact, he’s a delightful character wherever he appears. In the English medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for example, he is a forthright, lovely person, graceful and sensitive, with a wonderful — how to put it? — responsiveness to feminine beauty.”(Romance of the Grail, 124) “Little girls are mysterious, silly, and powerful.”Ted in Ted Lasso, Season 1, Episode 9 One of the reasons Ted Lasso had such an immediate impact on jaded viewers is Ted’s seemingly unflappable optimism. In a world of cynicism, genuineness gives us pause. The most beloved knight, Sir Gawain, is the gentle knight, the “ladies’ knight.” He is not only admired by women and children, but men in and out of court. He stops Parzival from stepping into traffic, so to speak, but does not scold or patronize. Like water wearing away at stone over millennia, Ted’s unadulterated vulnerability wears down the icy, ironic Brits in his company over the first season. He receives all critique, all failure, and even betrayal with a benign smile and perhaps a light, self-deprecating joke, removing the wind from any detractor’s sails. He’s free with his praise and means it genuinely, even as some characters believe it’s a method of manipulation. He’s earnestly answering a rhetorical question, and this earnestness is so true it makes our breath catch in our chest. What does our admiration say about this brand of masculinity? I’ve sat with this question for a long time. The conclusion, I believe, is deceptively simple: To be hurt and remain vulnerable is the ultimate strength. To remain open, to trust, to forgive, is the ultimate honorability. Writer and artist Iain Thomas captures the power of tenderness with this line (which is, fascinatingly, often misattributed to Kurt Vonnegut): “Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.”Iain Thomas, I Wrote This For You After finishing the first season of Ted Lasso, I texted a friend who I knew had already seen it to half-jokingly ask why I was crying over a show about soccer. She replied immediately: “Because Ted Lasso restores our faith in the concept of men.” While we enter into Ted Lasso seeing the main character as the butt of a joke we don’t yet understand, the joke is, ultimately, on us. But it isn’t unkind; in the same way a mother lion will play-fight her cubs to prepare them for more serious battles when they’re grown, it’s an opportunity to create new reactions that will benefit us in the future, individually and collectively. Hey, it says. Here’s your sensitive spot. Here’s your vulnerable place. Use it.

Our featured volume this month in the MythBlast Series is Joseph Campbell’s Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth. There is much to like about this lovely volume as it contains, to quote Zorba the Greek, “everything. The full catastrophe.” But for now, I’m mostly curious to look at the way suffering and healing is treated in the Arthurian Romances and, by extension, in mythology in general. The Arthurian Romances aren’t merely legends or literary works; taken as a whole, they form an entire chivalric age. This age seems increasingly distant or fanciful to contemporary readers, an epic period in which honor and nobility, truthfulness and fidelity, call forth a wondrous, enchanted world. It teems with extravagantly impossible challenges which are, in the end, made possible. Contradiction and confusion are baked into the Grail legends; they operate in this literature much in the same way consciousness itself operates, teaching the reader that what is omitted, what is left out or repressed, always returns to unsettle every settled interpretation, no matter how monolithic it may at first seem. Initial failure is a necessary feature of the grail quest, and that’s why the Grail hero is inevitably a callow, naïve, inexperienced youth; a beginner in over his head. The beginner’s mind is of the utmost importance because for a beginner there are a multitude of possibilities, while for an expert, there are few. Because beginners often fail, they must remain open to constant questioning, improvisation, and revision—qualities that are indispensable when dealing with phenomena that can never be fully known or adequately represented by human—all-too-human—beings. Professor Campbell puts it this way: “The goal of the Grail hero is to heal that wound, but he is to do so without knowing how he is to do so. He is to be a perfect innocent, not to know the rules of the quest, and he is to ask spontaneously, ‘What is the matter?’”Romance of the Grail, 26 The quest begins in earnest only after the hero has failed in his first, unintentional visit to the Grail Castle and commits to returning to it once again in order to, as Jessie Weston puts it, fulfill “the conditions which shall qualify him to obtain a full knowledge of the marvels he has beheld.” (The Quest of the Holy Grail, 45) Epistemological narcissism, unreflected certainty, and dogma snuffs out innocence and provokes the Grail Castle to disappear even farther into the metaphysical mists. Fully immersed in the initiatory situation, the innocent quester is progressively introduced to suffering, his own and that of others. Suffering is among the most important symbols in the Grail Romances. Arthurian Romances and mythology in general are not very prescriptive when it comes to disease and physical suffering. Rather, myth largely focuses on learning to see through our physical suffering to the spiritual malaise that afflicts us. When the soul suffers, the body cries out. The Grail King suffers from a parmi les cuisses, and his suffering is directly related to the wasting away of all that he oversees. This phrase, parmi les cuisses (literally meaning among the thighs), is a euphemism for a wound to the genitals. This association has its roots in a belief, shared by many cultures in antiquity, that semen was produced in several places in the body, including the marrow of the thigh bone, and the thigh’s proximity to the testicles resulted in a close association between thighs and the male genitalia. It is, however, crucial to remember that there are always two orders or levels to consider when reading myth: the lower order deals with the more literal aspects of material existence, the creative principles of fertility and generation, choice and action, and physical birth and death. The higher order deals with the mysteries of spiritual renewal and revivification, and spiritual death and rebirth. A wound to the genitalia is, from this perspective, very different from the cringe-inducing image of a physical wound. For example, both Odysseus and Captain Ahab suffer from parmi les cuisses. Odysseus has a scar on his thigh where he was gored by a boar when he was a boy and in his later life, it revealed his identity. Odysseus’ scarred-over wound symbolically constellates the defenselessness, disarray, and destruction of his home and property by the bivouacked hungry suitors. The thigh scar presages his twenty-year disappearance, the lonely confinement of his wife, and the self-doubting son deprived of a father's instruction. And Ahab didn’t merely lose his leg to Moby Dick; Ishmael tells us: “For it had not been very long prior to the Pequod’s sailing from Nantucket, that he had been found one night lying prone upon the ground, and insensible; by some unknown, and seemingly inexplicable, unimaginable casualty, his ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that it had stake-wise smitten, and all but pierced his groin.” Moby Dick, Chapter 106 In Moby Dick, Ahab’s wound is tied to the scarcity of whale sightings, the frequent tide overs, the onboard mishaps, his own emotional and physical isolation from his young wife, their new child, his crew, and the emptiness of his own heart. Physical wounding in myth is a symbol of spiritual suffering. Compassion is what heals such a wound—not diagnosis, prescriptions for medication, or surgery. The suffering is relieved by asking, in all innocence, a question, the answer to which cannot be known by the questioner: “Uncle, what ails thee?” This healing question is the therapeutic move, the healing application of compassion: You tell me what is wrong because I can’t know, and when you tell me, I will stand in that suffering with you until you discover that you can bear it. Joseph Campbell writes that it is through Parzival’s “integrity in love that he finally becomes the Grail King and heals Anfortas and the land.” (Romance of the Grail 50) What better way to describe compassion than integrity in love? Epistemic certainty defenestrates compassion and throws one out of, not only the mystery of life, but out of relationship as well, because both compassion and relationship require wonder, openness, curiosity, and humanity. If we are to “finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds” as well as heal ourselves, “Compassion alone is the key...,” (90) Campbell writes, and compassion alone unlocks the door to healing—and bliss.

Amidst the tales of chivalrous knights and exciting Arthurian quests that Joseph Campbell unpacks in Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth, he makes an intriguing observation about how the process of so many legends came to be. He states, “One characteristic of medieval storytelling is that the poet didn’t invent the story; he developed it. The bards, troubadours, and minnesingers would take a traditional story and interpret it, giving it new depth and meaning in keeping with the conditions of their particular day and place.” (95) And for reasons I will explain, Campbell’s words have me thinking about The Grateful Dead. The Dead’s music is powerful, not because it originates from a single artist’s genius, but instead because it flows out of the collective genius of the artists involved in the making of the music. Their ability to take a mythic story or motif and “interpret it,” to use Campbell’s language, is one of the reasons the band has remained an enduring presence, even while defying the formulaic tropes commonly found in popular music. Tales of cosmic love, so central to so many of The Dead’s songs, have echoed around the world and been found throughout different cultures in various envelopes of time long before the the band ever took the stage. Campbell notes that The Song of the Cowherd (the Gita Govinda), which celebrates the love of Krishna for Radha, was written around 1172 in India—the same era that also produced the mystic Tristan romances in Europe and The Tale of Genji in Japan. (27) We might say that these mythic motifs move through history in rhythms rather than appearing randomly. It should then be no surprise that those who mastered the mysteries of rhythm sometimes developed a shamanic consciousness. There is no better example of this than Joseph Campbell’s friend Mickey Hart, a drummer for The Grateful Dead as well as a profound thinker and an author with a mythic embrace of music. Hart spoke to the relationship between rhythm and myth in an interview about his album RAMU, where wordsmith Robert Hunter, a frequent collaborator with The Grateful Dead, composed lyrics to intertwine with Hart’s rhythms. “He spins tales, he’s a great mythologist, like all those characters that came to life in Dead songs,” Hart said. The lyrics in mythic music often act as signposts where the rhythm serves as the path, moving us closer and closer toward the great mystery of all that is beyond us. Circling back to the medieval, another metaphor for the great mystery the path leads to is the Holy Grail. Disturbed by the oversimplified cultural assumption that the Grail is a mere cup, Campbell admonishes us: “It is one of the prime mistakes of many interpreters of mythological symbols to read them as references, not to mysteries of the human spirit, but to earthly or unearthly scenes…This aim is basic to the Grail tradition.” (14) These mysteries of the human spirit are communicated powerfully in the language of the drum. Whether words share their space or not, the drum’s rhythm guides us toward those mysteries. Famously, Joseph Campbell attended a Grateful Dead concert after spending time at Mickey Hart’s home. In a lecture Campbell gave later, he reflected on the experience. He admitted his lack of interest in rock music, but called the performance powerful, saying it reminded him of the Dionysian festivals. “This is more than music. It turns something on in here,” Campbell said, pointing to his heart. “And what it turns on is life energy. This is Dionysus talking through these kids.” Several months later Campbell, Hart, and Jerry Garcia came together in a symposium called “Ritual and Rapture, From Dionysus to the Grateful Dead.” Offering evidence of this idea of rhythm providing a path for myth to travel by, Mickey and several collaborators offered a mythic performance called “The African Queen Meets the Holy Ghost.” Rhythm offers a rich metaphor for “the path toward the Grail” for a variety of reasons. One of the most poignant is that rhythm can’t be directly touched. It can’t be seized or snatched. It can only be heard, felt, and experienced. We must surrender ourselves to rhythm’s force. Campbell pointed to one particular legend in which the Grail appears to the knights in Arthur’s court obscured by a shroud. Gawain initiates a quest to behold the Grail without its covering and all the other knights join him (136). The shrouded mystery is an invitation, not necessarily to reveal what lies under its cover, but an invitation to the quest, to the journey itself. Rhythm acts as a similar invitation. It invites us beyond ourselves. It moves us toward the transcendent. It invites us to quest, to journey, to consider the infinity of possibility. What might that quest hold for you? (Mickey Hart is hosting a book club this summer focusing on the work of Joseph Campbell. Several figures involved in the work of Joseph Campbell, Mickey Hart and the Grateful Dead, as well as the Ritual and Rapture event will be participating. For more information, visit the book club's Facebook page. )

That said, let’s turn to Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth, where Joseph Campbell hones in on the distinction between principled honor and honor that is genuine. In his forward, Evans Lansing Smith shares that of all original Arthurian-myth literature, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival is Campbell’s favorite. Being mine as well, I’d like to take a closer look. Parzival is a knight of many quests, one of which is to find the Grail Castle, a place visible only to those who qualify. What determines qualification is a composite of possibilities: sincerity, skill, training, grace, destiny, luck, who knows? Many have ridden through the surrounding terrain, and even inhabited it for years, yet never get a glimpse. The Grail King, also known as the Fisher King, is the keeper of the Grail, which in von Eschenbach’s narrative is a stone (as opposed to a dish or cup in other versions of the myth). The whole kingdom of the Grail has fallen into ruin because the king (who reflects that which he governs) bears a seemingly incurable wound to the groin. And here we can associate aspects of procreation with the Grail, which generates (apparently) anything out of nothing. For his wound (and, correspondingly, the whole kingdom) to be healed, the king need only be asked the one question: “What ails you?” That’s it. No exotic magical potions. No elaborate rituals enacted in twilight under auspicious planetary conjunctions—simply a question. It’s an odd solution, this question. But it is precisely its oddness that invites inquiry. What it means is up for grabs, and there are many opinions. Campbell writes that “[Parzival] has accomplished the worldly adventure . . . and now has come to the spiritual adventure, the one of asking the question, one that involves the Bodhisattva realization of compassion for all suffering beings” (52). I like this interpretation because it extends beyond a simple word-formula and into the emotional terrain of compassion, which implies a certain selflessness (which is, indeed, honorable)—something beyond the ego is at work, something nearer to the heart. However, when Parzival, after years of travail, does finally encounter the suffering Grail King and is compelled to ask what ails him, he does not because he has been instructed that a knight does not ask too many questions. And the quest fails. To this Campbell responds, “His nature prompted him many times to ask the question, but he thought of his knightly honor. He thought of his reputation instead of his true nature. The social ideal interfered with his nature, and the result is desolation” (52-53). And so, ironically, Parzival’s commitment to the principle of honor extinguishes any engagement or enactment of an honor that is genuine. Principles, applied dogmatically, do not acknowledge one’s story—as in “my story.” As mentioned previously, they surely have their value, but not when one applies their generic quality to all specific contexts. We could say that such principles provide a kind of essence, but that essence is removed from the environment in which it thrived—removed from the context that distinguished the phenomenology of its suchness, its character. To a mythologist, this environment is nothing less than its story. Fortunately, Parzival’s story isn’t over yet because he later embraces what Campbell refers to above as his “true nature.” For he manages to return to the Grail Castle a second time, a feat that was hitherto thought impossible—a feat described in the narrative as a “miracle.” But this time, seasoned by life-experience and wholly attentive to his context, he most certainly does ask the question and, yes, the kingdom is healed. To this “miraculous” turn of events, Campbell emphasizes that “through your own integrity, you evoke your destiny, which is a destiny that never existed before” (79). Of all things, be they Grail-specific or not, that one insight is profoundly inspiring: that our destinies (i.e., our stories) are surely not written in stone, and that they can be inflected and redirected at any point if we simply embrace the fact that they are only and ever our own.