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.

This month we turn to Campbell’s volume Occidental Mythology. For most of us raised in the West, Western mythology is where we get our start investigating myth, and that means the Greeks. For me, the Yellow Brick Road of mythology began with Athena, Goddess of Wisdom. Technically speaking, as a philosopher, I was in school to go to work for her. She was the symbol that began to teach me to look beyond the metaphor, to see through it to what it was pointing toward— in Campbell’s language, to make the metaphor “transparent to transcendence.” Having read through Campbell at this point, my thought process went something like this: “Surely Athena must be pointing toward a specific experience I already have access to, but have yet to connect back to the symbol.” This was a lucky guess, but a standard Campbell approach to any myth, so I started thinking it through. You’ve all seen Athena: sprung fully grown from the brow of Zeus, armed with a spear, a shield, a helmet, and accompanied by an owl. I knew all of this already and it didn’t help a damned bit. But I kept coming back to the front of her shield and the severed, angry, snake-covered head of Medusa. You know that story, too. It seems that Perseus was tricked into promising to get the head of Medusa for King Polydectes of Seriphus, who was lusting after Perseus’ mother. Oh, those Greeks. The danger here was that anyone who looked directly at Medusa would be turned to stone. A lot of heroes had tried and failed. Fortunately, Hermes and Athena came to his aid, directing him to the Graiai, those three sisters who shared the one eye. Perseus was able to grab their eye, and refused to return it until they had told him how to slay Medusa.  They did—and then provided him with the power to fly, become invisible, and even gave him a bag for Medusa’s head after he chopped it off. For symbolic purposes, it’s important to add that Athena loaned him her shield. That shield turned out to be the key. Perseus caught up with Medusa, waited until she was asleep, and using the polished inside of Athena’s shield as a mirror, was able to cut off Medusa’s head without looking directly at her. He grabbed up the head, snakes and all, shoved it in the bag, and headed for home. On his way home he ran into Andromeda as she was about to be sacrificed to a sea monster, fell in love, held up the head to turn the monster to stone, saved Andromeda, etc. At the end of the story, Athena took back her shield and stuck the head of the Medusa on the front as an aegis. Those are the details. Now, if myths are metaphors, then what is this metaphor for? If Athena is the Goddess of Wisdom, then she is a metaphor for Wisdom, and if that’s the case—you have to say it—it’s a little weird. Why would the Goddess of Wisdom be represented with the head of Medusa on the front of her shield? Taken at face value, wouldn’t this mean something like “anyone who approaches Wisdom risks being turned to stone”? Hmmm. So I started to ask myself this question: what is the experience of approaching Wisdom? Could I remember any experiences where approaching Wisdom turned me to stone? Between us chickens, I will confess attempting to approach Wisdom by getting stoned as a college student during the 1970s, but—and trust me on this one—this doesn't really work. Sorry. However, when I wondered about approaching Wisdom and being turned to stone metaphorically, everything started to click. Here’s the beauty of it: everyone has had this experience. Do you remember sitting down to do homework and gazing at a sprawling math problem you had to solve? A monstrous equation so big you wanted to give up and die? And do you remember becoming utterly immobilized in that moment? That’s the experience of being turned into stone by attempting to approach Wisdom without proper technique. This still happens to me all the time. It happened the first time I tried to read Hegel—actually, it happens to everybody the first time they try to read Hegel—and the first time I tried to program my VCR, back when they made VCRs. You know what I’m talking about now, right? Being frozen, turned to stone, when you try to figure something out that’s too big for you at that moment? That thing. So how in the world are you supposed to approach Wisdom if, at the first glance in Her direction, you get turned to stone? Here is one of the characteristics of analyzing symbols I’ve become intimately acquainted with over the last 50 years: the answer is always a horrible pun. Here's the pun: The solution to the problem of approaching Wisdom, of getting past the head of Medusa staring back at you, is provided right there in the myth itself. The trick, of course, is to follow Perseus’s example and not approach Medusa, or Wisdom, directly. You can only approach her through… are you ready?… “reflection.” Told you it was terrible. And suddenly, Athena made sense to me. Wisdom, which (for Socrates, at any rate) means recognizing your own ignorance, must only be approached after careful reflection. If you confront it directly, you’ll be immobilized. You can see this in yourself, of course, in all those situations where you dig your heels in and refuse to admit you don’t know something you thought you did and, especially, in those who identify with beliefs – whether philosophical, religious, or political – that cannot endure a closer look. People like that are petrified by their own convictions, forever frozen in their understanding of themselves. The same fate threatens all of us who by-pass reflection in our attempt to become wise. Technically, I still work for Athena but our relationship is now “mirrored” in the myth. Grin. Thanks for musing along. Yours, Mark

However, one has to recognize a distinction between the ends and means of devotion and of science; and in relation to the latter there is no reason to fear a demonstration of the derivation of local [mythic figures] from more general [archetypal] forms [of myth]. It is simply a fact—deal with it how you will—that the mythology of the mother of the dead and resurrected god has been known for millenniums to the Neolithic and post-neolithic Levant. (Masks of God: Occidental Mythology , 56-57) Reading the third volume of Masks of God: Occidental Mythology is a formidable endeavor, especially as it touches the mythic roots of our own historic consciousness. It is for this reason that Campbell highlights the difference between a devotional attitude towards myth—the attitude of the believer—and a “scientific” or phenomenological approach. Drawing a line between being contained in myth and a genuine independent outlook, the project of a “New Science” of myth was always beating in the heart of Campbell’s writings. This is most evident in the encyclopedic scope and historic depth of The Masks of God series. And Campbell is absolutely right in stating “there is no reason to fear a demonstration of the derivation of local [mythic figures] from more general [archetypal] forms.” (56-57) But given Campbell’s own emphasis on the stuff of personal experience, neither should we fear the predominance of historic content over an empty generic form. For it is our own history that matters to our soul, providing as it does the material ground of our ecstatic experience of being in the world. In the same way, across the ages of our mythic history, the human experiment carries the hope of a possibility forward—through detours, regressions, side-steppings and meanderings—moving towards an unknown destination with the vehemence of mortal finality. Such is the journey through the eons, which has taken us to the precipice of this very moment in time, the present state of our mythic history. Convinced as Campbell was of “the unity of the race of man, not only in its biology but also in its spiritual history,” (8) let us then raise the question of where we have come thus far. What is the spiritual situation and interpretive horizon of our own times? Without giving way to harsh value judgments, we can say at least this much: the solution to all our present problems with the Judeo-Christian tradition must be worked out from within this tradition—that is, our tradition here in the West. On this point, I cannot help but agree with C. G. Jung when he writes in Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious: I am convinced that the growing impoverishment of symbols has a meaning. It is a development that has an inner consistency. Everything that we have not thought about, and that has therefore been deprived of a meaningful connection with our developing consciousness, has got lost. If we now try to cover our nakedness with the gorgeous trappings of the East, as the theosophists do, we would be playing our own history false. A man does not sink down to beggary only to pose afterwards as an Indian potentate. It seems to me that it would be far better stoutly to avow our spiritual poverty, our "symbollessness," instead of feigning a legacy to which we are not the legitimate heirs at all. We are, surely, the rightful heirs of Christian symbolism, but somehow we have squandered this heritage. We have let the house our fathers built fall into decay, and now we try to break into Oriental palaces that our fathers never knew. (CW9i ¶28) What Jung is trying to express here touches upon what is precisely unique and historic about our own spiritual situation and times. Any way you slice it, the point at which we have arrived is unthinkable without the transformations and reiterations of the Judeo-Christian tradition. For it is precisely this tradition that has paved the way for the spiritual poverty that Jung finds so horrible and unacceptable. But rather than wishing to sidestep or “go beyond” the Christian myth, Jung intimates the fact that our present “symbollessness” or spiritual poverty may be, on the contrary, the good news of the Gospels! If we follow the Christian myth to its logical end, we may rediscover a dying and resurrecting God unlike any other! For rather than adorning oneself with the riches of puffed spirit or material wealth, it bids us cast aside all pretense and “spiritual” ostentation, accepting our metaphysical nakedness in the face of the Divine. After all, we are all familiar with the well-known adage of Christ the Savior: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:3)

Games have long been a compelling presence in mythology. The origins of the Kurukshetra War between Kauravas and Pandavas in the epic poem The Mahābhārata begin over a game of dice. Mythologist David L. Miller explored Joseph Campbell’s approach to myth and its intersection with games in his book Gods and Games. Then, of course, there is the strange game that serves as the catalyst for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Arthurian tale based on the 14th century epic poem. For those unfamiliar with the myth: It’s a curious story, where a Green Knight appears in Arthur’s court and proposes an intriguing game. He challenges any man to strike him with his axe and then meet him one year later at the Green Chapel, where he will return the favor. Sir Gawain steps forward, wields the axe, and promptly removes the mysterious knight’s head. Gawain’s journey to the Green Chapel and his climactic confrontation with the knight is filled with mythic motifs and moments of symbolic challenge. Resisting definitive explanation, as good myths usually do, interpretations and retellings of the tale have continued through to our present day. A new rendering, aptly titled The Green Knight, hits movie theaters in a few days. The story of the Green Knight was of interest to Joseph Campbell as well. In Masks of God: Occidental Mythology, he mentions the Dolorous Stroke, a key element woven into the fabric of Arthurian legends such as The Green Knight. Campbell aficionados will recall that the Dolorous Stroke was also the subject of his Master’s dissertation, the full text of which is made available as an appendix in Romance of the Grail as part of Campbell’s Collected Works. It’s a motif he was fascinated by. Discussing the Arthurian tradition, Campbell says “the legend refers to the restoration of a land laid waste through a Dolorous Stroke dealt to its king, by an unworthy hand, that took possession of a sacred lance, that in later versions of the legend is identified with the lance that pierced Christ’s side.” (508) Competing ideologies such as these from the Christian and Pagan traditions spiral their way through all of Arthurian mythology. As Campbell suggests, Gawain’s world is defined by wounding. It’s a world where institutions have come under indictment, yet matters of life and death are sometimes treated as a game. One doesn’t need to look very hard to see our own allegorical reflection in the story. In the new cinematic iteration of the tale, Gawain is a man searching to redefine himself. He’s looking for a new story, a story where he’s not simply known as a relative of Arthur. The other knights at the table all have stories of adventure and chivalry, but not him. “The concept of chivalry in relation to a young person figuring out what type of man he’s going to be was the root of this story for me,” says The Green Knight’s director, David Lowery. “The subject is present in the original text but it’s something that makes this story incredibly timely. Gawain is on an epic quest towards realizing the value of personal integrity.” We might say that Gawain is a wounded man, trying to determine what it means to be honorable and find meaning, in his world of wounding. The game that the Green Knight proposes to Gawain seems to offer a path towards healing his own wound. Even today, we see individuals drawn to games that might offer a salve for their woundings. These games take varied forms in our culture: politics, social media, or sports, to name only a few. Like Gawain, we jump at the opportunity to engage in any game that offers a balm for our wounds. In bringing the myth of the Green Knight into our modern context, Lowery continues: I didn’t truly understand why this poem has stood the test of time until I was well into the process of making it, by which point I realized what a daunting task I’d set out upon. The original text is so rich, so overflowing with meaning and symbolism, that one could make a dozen adaptations of it and still not quite capture what makes it so vital. This adaptation is an interpretation of the text, but it is also in conversation with it. It is a reflection of the values contained in the original poem, and also an inquiry as to how to contextualize those values and make them resonate at this moment in our culture. Lowery’s comments speak to the power of myth, inviting us into a conversation around the ideas contained in the text, rather than positioning it as an equation to be solved, or a game to be won. In Romance of the Grail, Campbell goes on to explore the many challenges in the game Gawain engages and how they intersect with those values Lowery mentions. “It concerns the two great temptations of lust for life and fear of death. Those are the same temptations faced by the Buddha. What you have here in these knightly adventures are spiritual adventures, and the tests are those of lust and fear. Gawain has not succumbed to the temptation of Kāma, the god of Desire, and he had felt just a bit of fear at the brink of death (the god Māra). He was fearless, but not without fault. He was human, after all, and this is what keeps him in the world, you might say,” Campbell says. (145) One might suggest that what Sir Gawain finds at the conclusion of the game, in his final confrontation with the Green Knight, is... himself. The holy grail that waits at the end of so many mythic tales is, as Campbell has so often said, a reference to oneself, as all mythological symbols point to spiritual potentialities within the individual. The Green Knight interrupts us time and again throughout our life’s journey. He proposes a game that we may choose to play or refuse. It is a game of death and resurrection, a game of discovery, and a game that offers us the opportunity to unearth hidden treasure buried deep inside ourselves.

This month, the MythBlast Series is centered on Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God, Vol. 3: Occidental Mythology.Given that we in America are celebrating the Fourth of July on the day this MythBlast is published, and given that the health of Democracy around the world seems to be ailing, it might be interesting to explore what Occidental mythology—and Greek thought in particular—might say to us about this aspect of contemporary life. In a 2010 White House speech, President Obama remarked: And so it was that the democratic example of a small group of city states more than 2,000 years ago could inspire the founding generation of this country, that led one early American to imagine that “the days of Greece may be revived in the woods of America.”It’s the sense of nobility and morality written in the pages of those timeless Greek texts, which have instructed students…down the ages, in every corner of the world. That same sense of nobility and morality also instructed Thomas Jefferson and inspired his humanism, as well as his belief that the human goal of happiness could be achieved through the cultivation of virtue, particularly nobility and reason, which the Greeks called arete. Joseph Campbell defines arete as ”pride in excellence, which has been called the very soul of the Homeric hero—as it is the soul, also, of the Celtic and Germanic; or, indeed, everywhere, of the unbroken [individual].” (The Masks of God, Vol. 3: Occidental Mythology, 194) Jefferson believed that Natural Rights, emphasizing reason rather than divine providence, are the claim of humankind. The “rational study of the world as a field of facts'' contributes to the understanding that humankind is not a product of, and therefore not subject to, some particular god, but is rather a product of nature and as such, is limited only by nature itself and fate, which may simply be the word we assign to the perennially enshrouded, stubbornly incomprehensible operations of nature. And yet, despite some profound limitations, a startling degree of freedom waits to be discovered through an empirical engagement with the world. As Joseph Campbell put it in his beautifully poetic way: The rational study of the world as a field of facts to be observed began, as we all know, with the Greeks. For when they kissed their fingers at the moon, or at rosy-fingered dawn, they did not fall on their faces before it, but approached it, man to man, or man to goddess—and what they found was already what we have found: that all is indeed wonderful, yet submissive to examination. (222) Jefferson acquired much of his personal philosophy from the Greek Stoics. From the Latin historians, he derived much of his political philosophy. Those influences continue to shape the country which he helped to create; contemporary America to me seems in structure and temperament much like ancient Rome (especially the late Imperial Rome), yet her aspirational ideals always seem to lean towards Athens. Clearly, Jefferson disliked the idea of what he termed an “artificial aristocracy,” but he did subscribe to the notion of a “natural aristocracy.” In an 1813 letter to John Adams he writes, “…there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue [arete] and talents.” Greek democracy in the classical age lasted a surprisingly short time, from around 507 BCE to 404 BCE when Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War and installed an oligarchy of wealthy collaborationist Athenians to rule Athens. The Thirty Tyrants were overthrown in 403 BCE and an attenuated democracy was restored until finally, in 338 when Alexander and his father Phillip II conquered Athens, it was destroyed. There is no single reason for the collapse of Athenian democracy, but I think the self-righteous thrill of the egoic hunger for power present, for example, in the execution of Socrates in 399 BCE, played no small part. There is little doubt that a significant factor in the arrest and execution of Socrates was that he had become, in his own words (according to Plato) a gadfly, an exasperating pain in the...neck, whose self-identified purpose was to stir the “noble steed” of Athens to life. Socrates was generally critical of Athenian politicians and power brokers, and indeed, of democracy itself (he had close relationships with at least a few of the Thirty Tyrants). For decades, it had been his habit to expose pompous or powerful Athenians who claimed to possess special knowledge as poseurs, publicly exposing and humiliating them, thereby inspiring deep, burning resentments compensating feelings of profound shame and inferiority. In turn, the powerful naturally looked for opportunities to remove agitators and limit speech, eroding democratic ideals and practices. Aristophanes, a comic playwright, lampooned Socrates in his play The Clouds as the trivial, eccentric headmaster of a sophist academy called, “The Thinkery.” But Socrates isn’t the play’s only target of satire; Strepsiades, a character reminiscent of the Gleasonesque Ralph Kramden-like self-saboteur, always looking for an edge or advantage or a way to get something for nothing, is Aristophanes’ caricature of the average dull, entitled, lazy, Athenian. After Strepsiades' scheme—aided by what his son learns at The Thinkery—backfires, Strepsiades burns the school down. The exposure of casually corrupt and malignantly narcissistic self-interests, paired with the force multiplier of public humiliation, has throughout history been the match that touches off the most destructive conflagrations of societies. In a culture where individuals are only interested in themselves, the cultivation of power and acts of violence remain the only bases for human relationships, and its most precious freedoms are forfeited along with the ideals of democracy. In the Delphi Complete Works of Plato introduction to Phaedo, Simmias is quoted, saying that we have a duty to face the truth and follow it wherever it leads us even if, perhaps especially if, we don’t like it: “And if truth divine and inspired is not to be had, then let a man take the best of human notions, and upon this frail bark let him sail through life.” So perhaps, on this 245th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, we can take a moment to relish the novel, ambitious, and demanding idea of Jeffersonian democracy and resolve to sail upon its frail bark toward the best human notions of genuine freedom, civility, and compassion. Thanks for reading,

When I was invited by Dr. Mary Watkins, director of Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Liberation Psychology program, to volunteer to teach a correspondence course with inmates from a California state prison, I responded to her request with a course on personal mythology using Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Now, some 18 months later, I am so grateful that I did not refuse her call. In their respective essays, I discovered that one shared experience the inmates wrote about is that Campbell’s mythic narratives as well as his own reflections in Hero gave them a story in which they could place their woundedness within a larger frame. One student was attracted to Campbell before we began working together through the Bill Moyers’ series, The Power of Myth. My course offering, he said, created an opportunity to explore Campbell further with guidance from the course structure and my writing meditations. But more importantly, many wrote that what they sought was a purpose in prison that the Hero, as well as other courses, encouraged and helped shape within them. Resentment, hostility, a sustained anger and feeling out of control—all emotions that initially placed some of my students in prison—yielded to a search for meaning through rekindling a spiritual life they had left behind, or exploring the practice of Buddhism, or attending programs on addiction. In their essays they expressed how Campbell’s stages in the hero’s journey illuminated their own histories wherein they either refused an earlier calling or had accepted their calling within the confines of prison life. Readings in the Hero volume validated many of their choices. One student in particular wrote of how his inability to forgive himself and others who misled him in life resulted in his imprisonment. He used the metaphor of being turned into a monster by his unforgiving attitude. Reading Campbell, he saw his life’s path with increased clarity and realized that he could re-author the plot of his own story by using the stages of the hero’s journey. This template tempered his behavior and moderated his outbursts in prison. Most dramatically, however, was that several inmates acknowledged Campbell’s authentic and compassionate prose had softened them and taught them to speak more deeply about their own self-annihilation and recovery. They also found meaningful parallels between 12-Step programs of recovery and Campbell’s stages of the hero’s journey. One student phrased it this way: “Working with the 12-Step program and Buddhist teachings, along with Campbell’s insights, helped me understand myself better and to live in a peaceful, healthy direction.” On one assignment I asked, “Where in your own life have you found yourself following the pattern Campbell lays out in ‘Departure, Initiation, Return?’” (Hero 23-31) Their profound, insightful and authentic responses to this mythical pattern opened each of them to their own personal myth. In a word that Campbell uses often in his writing, they discovered “correspondences” with their own story. I in turn realized more fully how myths can be aspirational by offering students a mythic narrative that they grasp as universal, and yet live out with great personal particularity. Two of them wrote that initially they reluctantly attended an AA meeting. Now, they host them. One discovered that he had talents as an artist; he sent me one of his paintings to share this newly-found form of personal expression. I should also mention that they found Campbell’s writing accessible, and filled with vitality and encouragement. From this rich set of experiences, assisted directly by Campbell’s classic work, I became more aware of the power of myth to incite explorations into their own adventure. I have also noticed that, yes, they are incarcerated—some for life—but they are no longer imprisoned. By this I mean that imprisonment feeds the victim archetype, but by understanding themselves as incarcerated they locate a level of freedom that sustains them. Incarceration is physical, while imprisonment is psychological and mythic. Through reading and writing on sections of the Hero image, they envisioned their own narratives in a different, more complex light. Some remarked that in prison they have found a level of freedom never experienced before, in part because they felt they had reclaimed parts of themselves heretofore buried. The act of reclamation and self-affirmation is exactly the psychological move Campbell describes in The Masks of God, Vol. 3: Occidental Mythology: “The virtue of heroism must lie, therefore… not in the will to reform, but in the courage to affirm, the nature of the universe.” (319) While meditating on their personal myth, prompted by Campbell’s insights, they expressed how they discovered their basic goodness: that the mistakes they made, often accompanied by substance abuse, no longer defined them. They ceased conflating their identity with their crime.  Several admitted that assisting others in prison has gifted their lives with joy and a more generous orientation to life. The Hero’s journey affirmed and further supported their own life’s direction, a greater self-awareness, and the value of being in service to others. Incarcerated, they nonetheless stepped out of their angry, resentful cocoon of self-imprisonment. One student admitted that he began once more to love who he is and to connect with others in similar compassionate ways. This latter may be the most valuable consequence of their development and the various faces of the hero played an instrumental part in achieving such self-acceptance.

One more idea: mythology as the second womb—it must be constructed of the stuff of modern life. The tendency of the clergy is to hold to the past and therefore reject, not redeem, the contemporary world. A variant of this is the romantic exoticism of the American devotees of the swamis. In my visit to India I have found myself more interested in the relationship of the West to the East than in the East itself. (Asian Journals 237) As we moved into Campbell’s Asian Journals this month, I was reminded of his famous aphorism not to “get stuck on the metaphor.” One of the dangers implicit in treating Asian mythology—and the technical vocabulary of Asian spiritual practice—with the kind of exotic romanticism he mentions here is that the metaphors can get sticky…and stickier. It’s easy enough to get stuck on the metaphors of one’s own mythological inheritance, but adding myths and metaphors from outside the bubblewrap of your own culture makes this even easier—and more tempting. But wait a sec: getting “stuck on the metaphor” keeps us from engaging the very experiences the metaphor is for, and we need to connect with those experiences in order to continue along the pilgrimage toward our authentic selves. How could that be tempting? Well, cotton candy is tempting too, so let’s stick (ha!) with that metaphor. Metaphors can be sticky for a number of reasons. Sometimes it feels as if assimilating the mythical vocabulary from other cultures, by itself, is satisfying. Rattling off the names of deities, or meditative states, or arcane Taoist practices, and being able to describe how they’re related to each other can make us almost feel as if we've experienced these states, even when we haven’t. Example: “Here is your moment of Zen.” I love John Stewart but… uh, no. Eating cotton candy can be satisfying (if not nutritionally) all on its own. Stickiness is part of the fun. Sometimes, a bit more generously, the terms have to suffice on their own because the experience they point to might require years of difficult practice. Example: qi flow, satori, or wu wei. Even Master Ma Yueliang, a major figure in the development and popularity of Wu-style taijiquan, insisted that it had taken him a decade or two to really get the hang of his own qi. I suspect many of us know long term Zen or yoga practitioners who are, at this point, well acquainted with satori and dhyarna and who will smile, somewhat indulgently, when you ask them to explain these ideas. They require practice and experience, not simply memorizing phrases in books. Even if you’re hungry, you might have to make do with cotton candy until you get home for dinner, and real food.  Real food is nutritious, but it takes preparation. Sometimes—and this one stings a bit—we cling to the metaphors because we prefer the superficial mystique and cachet they bring to our speech while avoiding the difficulties involved in actually understanding them: it makes you look cool.  Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School philosopher, called this the Jargon of Authenticity. Being able to sling snazzy jargon saves us the trouble of having to experience, or understand, the concepts the jargon is referring to. Appropriating the unfamiliar vocabulary and metaphysical or religious concepts from other cultures makes it easy to hide our ignorance inside the ambiguity these terms present to western ears. This is how the romanticism and appropriation of foreign culture begins. It’s easy to hide inside a technical vocabulary, especially when we’re translating across not only formidable linguistic barriers, but cultural ones as well. Example: This is what Campbell was describing above when he mentioned over-earnest devotees of sacred texts from outside their own traditions.  More often than not, they seem to have become enthralled by the will-o’-the-wisp romanticized exoticism in the metaphors they’ve embraced— and being able to sling this jargon in social circumstances is both appealing to our egos and infinitely preferable to the difficult work of practicing. In the old martial arts axiom, you must “eat bitter” and in good humor to taste the sweet. Sticking (!) with our cotton candy metaphor here, most people (and this includes all of us from time to time) prefer to eat sweet—and to be seen eating sweet. But I can think of one more even more tempting reason to get stuck: Sometimes we get complacent, comfortable, and determined to remain stuck on these metaphors because, consciously or unconsciously, we don’t want to go where they’re directing us. Sometimes we don't want an authentic life.  Sometimes we don't want wisdom. Sometimes it is deeply satisfying to spend time sucking on the cotton candy of our own ego gratification. In the context of the Hero’s Journey, we might say that The Refusal of the Call conceals itself inside the yummy frosting of sticky metaphors. Maybe sticky metaphors are among the threshold guardians we must confront to embark on that journey toward ourselves. Thanks for musing along, Mark

While in Tokyo on Wednesday, April 20, 1955, Joseph Campbell wrote in his journal about an item he read in the morning paper: Einstein’s formula for success: A = XYZ. A is success in life. X is work, Y is play, and Z is keeping your mouth shut. If it weren’t for the fact that I seem to have a much lower resistance to silence than most people I might be able to add Z to my mixture. Meditation for the acquisition of Z: a. Ok, nobody’s talking: so what! and b. Formulate a question (Asian Journals 428) It’s easy to quickly breeze past Campbell’s anecdote without considering a few thoughts. First, Campbell’s candor suggests that, like many of us, he wrestled with silence. Of course, most of us are glad that Campbell chose not to be silent when given the opportunity to speak, as his words have been meaningful to us. However, silence seemed to be a discipline he recognized the value of yet struggled to practice, at least in public venues at this point in his journey. Second, Campbell’s almost comic solution for dealing with silence is to break it: to formulate a question instead, and invite others to do the talking. A few months after Campbell’s April comments on silence, he returns to the subject on Monday, July 4. He states, “In Zen, it seems, the great road and chief exercise is sitting in meditation; reading and study are also strenuously practiced – in spite of all the sayings which would seem to suggest precisely the opposite” (567). Again Campbell seems to be exploring the silent traditions and customs surrounding him while simultaneously pointing to the difficulties in the practice. I’ve sometimes wondered how a young Joseph Campbell might have maneuvered in our modern world of social media. Ours is an age where silence has become a rare commodity. We are constantly spoken to (and many times shouted at), both with visuals and audio, through televisions, phones, computers, and any number of communication and entertainment devices. In a world where individuals are more often treated as consumers than humans, multi-billion-dollar industries work around the clock to assure we are never afforded a moment of silence. It seems that precious silent moments are only granted to honor significant deaths or sacrifices, speaking to the enduring sacredness of such acts. One evening this week, a car blazed through my neighborhood and careered into a wooden pole that carried electricity, phone service, and internet access from home to home. All the devices and appliances that normally keep me from silence were struck mute in an instant. My cell phone couldn’t connect to Wi-Fi. My television gave up the ghost. Even the hum of my refrigerator was struck with a sudden case of laryngitis. I spent the next two hours in utter silence. It was divine. It was refreshing. It was also frightening. It was lonely. Like Campbell, I wrestled with the silence. I recognized that noise had become a conversation partner that was constantly speaking to me yet never listening. Comforting me by continually assuring me that it was there. I wondered if this was actually preferable to the abandonment of silence. Questions kept rising to meet me from the nothingness: When was the last time I remembered my life being this quiet? Why can’t I hear airplanes, crickets, or something? Why does quietness sound so... loud? After a few moments, I began to hear something subtlety traversing the silence. It was my body—my own heartbeat.  It was when I was surrounded by silence, that I began speaking to myself. The messages I spoke to myself were soft, accented with low bass notes of the bodily beat that accompanied them. They were messages beyond words or language. Even in the midst of sound, there seemed to be something desirable in the pursuit of silence. Later in the summer of 1955, on Wednesday, August 17, Campbell seems to have discovered a new framework around silence, one that seems to resonate more deeply with him. After becoming fascinated with Tea, he writes, “The essence of Tea…is activity and calm together: form and ecstasis” (629). Campbell’s words describe perfectly the experience of sitting alone in the darkness of my home, my heartbeat the only partner to the silence. It was indeed activity and calm together: form and ecstasis—a silence that was also a journey.

The journey into the mythic imagination which opens the abyss of the collective unconscious is not some fixed track devoid of reason. It is not a dead end for the creative intellect; it provides stores of food for speculative thinking and metaphysical imagination. The way in which Campbell constantly engages in the philosophical dimension of myth is a testimony to the way the logos of mytho-logy is obviously not an externality to myth, let alone an enemy of the “poetic.” Reason belongs to myth’s inner ring, expressing as it does the fundamental archetypal role Mind plays in the mythopoetic imagination. In this regard, Campbell uses the philosophies of India to make a personal confession. When he learned that “the great division between the religious and social patterns of India and West derives from the period of a.d. 1400‒1550” (Asian Journals 165-166), Campbell reflected on his own spiritual journey for […] that is the period in Europe of the Italian Renaissance, with its breakthrough into psychological adulthood from the religious formulae of the Middle Ages, India at that time, overwhelmed by Islam, stressed the folk-religion of bhakti. This was the period of Rāmānanda, Kabīr, Nānak—the founders of modern Hinduism: anti-Sanskrit, anti-brahmin, in a sense. There was a stress on the childlike attitude of refuge in a personal God (kitten-monkey differentiation; yet both remain childlike). Contrast to this the attitude of the vīra [“hero”], rendered in the medieval temples. The stress now is on the Mother and Father images, as found in the approach to Catholicism in its paśu [“herd animal”] formulae. Whereas in the period of the dynasties India’s religion was heroic and that of Europe largely childlike, after A.D. 1400 ‒1550 the contrast was reversed. / This explains to me why all the patterns of Indian life and religion now seem to me to be precisely what I left behind when I broke with the Church, whereas the philosophies of India suggested a bold adulthood even surpassing that of the European-American ideal.(Asian Journals 166) Campbell underlines a fundamental contrast or order of development between philosophy and institutional religion; a contrast, one could say, between the grown-up culture of the logos and the innocence of the “beautiful soul” in pure mythos. Campbell understands very well that as long as we are in myth, looking up to metaphysical parents, we remain spiritually infantile. Despite the freudening facts of adult life, we remain in the womb of myth forever young. The point of true myth, on the contrary, is to be born out of this sac of inherited ideology. To become a true self we must step into a spiritual adulthood, in the clearing of reason, that has put childish things behind. No longer a spiritual toy or aesthetic play thing, myth becomes instead an existential vehicle of truth—not only the “Truth” of a personal life but the truth of the life which is common to all. As Heraclitus put it with respect to the universality of the logos: “Therefore it is necessary to follow the common; but although the logos is common the many live as though they had a private understanding.” (The Presocratic Philosophers. Ed. Kirk and Raven, 188 fr. 198). This “private understanding” is what we call ideology, the thing that keeps us from growing up in the spirit of truth. For ideology is, by definition, a generator of a false consciousness. Elsewhere, Campbell is quite explicit about the need to transcend mythic ideology in a movement of true spiritual growth and transformation: In India, the objective is to be born from the womb of myth, not to remain in it, and the one who has attained to this “second birth” is truly the “twice born,” freed from the pedagogical devices of society, the lures and threats of myth, the local mores, the usual hopes of benefits and rewards.(The Flight of the Wild Gander 38) Stillborn in the imaginal womb of myth, we remain “pagan,” so to speak, while caught in the spiritual childhood of the herd animal who still needs to “believe.” The fully rebirthed adulthood of the twice-born no longer needs myth as an object of belief; we see through its imaginal garbs and are no longer affected by its “lures and threats,” as Campbell put it. Growing up in the reflective mirror of philosophy we become reborn in the light of reason as the mytho-historic consciousness of the truth. Famously, it was Aristotle long ago who pointed to the basic link between philosophy and myth in a mutual state of wonder at being itself: For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize […] whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of Wisdom [or a philosopher], for the myth is composed of wonders.(Aristotle, Metaphysics; The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon, p. 692) Elevated on the seat of philosophic wonder, the full concept of mytho-logy gives form and expression to an intertwining movement of thinking-being, a transcending motion of the conscious spirit that binds logos and mythos into a single chain of being. Far from a desperate retreat of one into the other, it is the mysterious conjunction of both that enthralls us, blowing our minds and lifting our hearts to the life of the infinite! Primordial Images are indeed brilliant ciphers that speak in their own chords—provided our ears have been attuned to hear their silent tones—with the willingness to decipher their visual music in so many words. To the psychoanalytic ear, the so-called “irrational” factors that appear in myth and manifest dream have long been demonstrated to have “latent” reasons of their own—reasons that are not without Reason in the capital metaphysical sense of the word. In a way, that is the whole point of psychoanalysis: to discover a hidden working order—or logos—in the chaos of the psyche. Its “crazy” psycho Logic. Rather than reducing human reason to some kind of ridiculous narrow-mindedness as if it were some ideological fantasy among others, depth mythologists like Campbell help us recognize the greater archetypal logos of the psyche in the inner workings of myth and dream. Reason is indeed a sign of the divine spark of the human soul in the unfathomable history of the cosmos, not some oppressive mechanizing procedure or rationalistic creed. In the order of true myth (vera narratio), Reason assumes its proper “equiprimordial” role and archetypal status; it becomes, like the Heraclitean fire of becoming, constitutive of the universal order of the world, the fiery spark of a cosmic consciousness of being and time: This world-order [cosmos] (the same of all) did none of gods or men make, but it always was and shall be: an everlasting fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures.(The Presocratic Philosophers. Ed. Kirk and Raven, 199 fr. 220)

In Chapter IV of The Masks of God, Vol. 2: Oriental Mythology, Joseph Campbell supplies his readers with a quote from the Buddha’s Fire Sermon, a dharma talk focused on renunciation and developing an “aversion” to the material world, including expressions of the self in body, mind, and imagination: And in conceiving this aversion, he becomes divested of passion, and by the absence of passion he becomes free, and when he is free he becomes aware that he is free; and he knows that rebirth is exhausted, that he has lived the holy life, that he has done what it behooved him to do, and that he is no more for this world.(295) One gets the sense that “this sorrowful world,” as Campbell refers to it, “will go on forever,” (323) and as a result, there appears to be a powerful religious instinct to escape suffering by leaving the world and physical, biological life entirely. Lifetime after lifetime of ascetic practice is designed to burn off karma and blow out the flame of life, ending the cycles of death and rebirth by reaching nirvana (which literally means blowing out, or quenching). The negation of earthly life isn’t unique to Asian religious traditions; Christianity similarly disparages the material world and worldly existence, and looks beyond it to an eternal life in heaven spent in the presence of God. In a very, very broad sense, the main difference between the two is that Christianity, lacking the eternally recurring and reincarnating life monad, limits rebirth to a transformation of consciousness. I can’t help but conclude that the life negating reflex exhibited in most religions is evoked by a literalization of mythology because, if one participates completely, wholly, in religious life, the narratives and symbols of the religion must be understood to be literally true, historically real, and ultimately irrefutable. In such a cast of mind, the world and worldliness is bad, fallen, a prison. The world is often problematic for human beings, it is true, but it is also true that the world's ubiquitous beauty, its inexhaustible stores of wonder, dazzles the soul and confounds the understanding. I sometimes find myself longing for a re-engagement with the Renaissance ideals of Giambattista Vico’s humanism, with Ficino’s explorations of consciousness, enthusiastic, even joyful, textual criticism, and the re-emergence of the primacy of aesthetic ideals. I still yearn for what Lionel Trilling called, “the old classical culture, that wonderful imagined culture of the ancient world which no one but school boys, schoolmasters, scholars, and poets believe in.” (Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning, 112) Having said that, I know full well that my romanticized fantasy of classical life never existed in reality in the way in which it lives in my imagination. Certainly there exists a middle way between a hopeless, passive resignation to life, and Sallekhana, a means of self-destruction that simultaneously destroys karma and the possibility of rebirth by suppressing, and ultimately abandoning, all physical and mental activities. It’s not that I can’t see logic at work in the practice of Sallekhana; in fact, I do. The deliberate negation of life suggests that there is at least a modicum of humanity beyond the reach of institutional and cultural control, and that this residue of unadulterated, incorruptible humanity, small and unappreciated though it may be, serves as a critique of culture, a criticism of life itself, and prevents life lived in the agora from becoming all-consuming, over-determining, and imperiously monolithic. The horrifying sight of Buddhist monks self-immolating during the Vietnam War remains, perhaps, the most poignant of examples. However, living outside of these religious traditions, this ultimate self-abnegation seems so extreme as to contradict religious tenets of ahimsa, prohibitions against causing injury or death to any living creature. But there is an argument to be made from within the tradition that this severity is a part of one’s ethical and moral effort to know what is real—to seize reality from the powerful grip of illusion and desire. But I fail to be persuaded by these arguments because, at the heart of the matter, self-annihilation necessarily prohibits transformation of the self, and by extension, the world. One who is truly spiritually awakened shares their gifts with others who, in turn, are transformed, and eventually their transformation transforms the world. In his novel Howard’s End, E.M. Forster wrote “Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.” It is the idea of death, not actual death itself, which is redemptive. The idea of death saves one from the loss of self demanded by the dehumanized activities institutions and the materialistic beliefs of a culture or society precisely because it concentrates the mind on what is most significant about human existence—its loves, its passions, its triumphs, as well as its beautiful failures, and its human—all-too-human—frailties. Samuel Taylor Coleridge believed that the willing suspension of disbelief constitutes poetic faith; incidentally, it also constitutes scientific methodology, technological innovation, and especially mythological thought. Suspending disbelief means that we set aside our own beliefs and consider possibilities that previously, we had been unable to imagine. Thinking in the metaphors of myth rather than the reified literalisms of religious dogma reveals, not mere arguments from authority or appeals to faith, but rather, the activated symbols, clues, and the personal intuitions that can take one to the brink of transcendent states. The truths we receive from mythology are revelations about what it means to be a human being, they are revelations of life itself. To make use of those truths, we must remain engaged in life as it is. If we negate or manage to escape life, we forfeit those truths. Rainer Maria Rilke, in his Ninth Duino Elegy, put it this way: But because truly being here is so much; because everything hereapparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange waykeeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,just once. And never again. But to have beenthis once, completely, even if only once:to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing. Thanks for reading,

Life is hard; it wears us out. We are worn down by the tooth of time as well as luckless circumstances that are well beyond our personal control. We are worn down by people, especially those closest to us, as well as by medical conditions. The world overwhelms us and makes us feel small; we are afraid, and in the grip of an anxiety that will not let us rest, even in sleep. And yet, despite our sleeplessness and weariness, life presses on. Through death and destruction, this life force, which is identical with Spirit, continues to beat on, seeking its birth and renewal through new forms of creation. The élan vital which the French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote so eloquently about in his book Creative Evolution (1907) is an archetypal idea that has been around from time immemorial—going back to the esoteric teachings of the ancients all the way down to the Star Wars saga. Every culture and people have had a mythic concept for a kind of universal life force or generative power that pervades all things, including so-called inanimate matter. Indistinguishable from Heraclitus’ “everlasting fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures” (The Presocratic Philosophers. Ed. Kirk and Raven, p. 199 fr. 220), this life-force is both mortal and immortal, creative and destructive, at the same time. What the ancient Maya called itz, embodied in the image of Kukulkan (Feathered Serpent), and what the Hindus called Shakti, embodied in the image of Kuṇḍalinī  (Coiled Serpent), is a philosophic notion of all-encompassing “cosmic” psychic energy. This is the archetypal dragon of the libido, which was also known to the Hermetic tradition as the uroboros. Such a revolving snake principle expresses a certain revolutionary movement of the deep psyche and its self-transcending creative energy. The snake that gives birth to itself also incestuously makes love to itself, putting its own tail in its mouth; it is the seminal member and womb of creation in one. It represents the source and origin of all life and the place where it comes to renew itself in time. The uroboros is both alpha and omega, an image of death drive and sexuality intertwined; both self-fertilization and rebirth come to be as one. The notion of this life force or “cosmic” sexual energy is always found at the heart of mythology. It is perhaps for this reason that Campbell’s enthusiasm was most palpable just here, when speaking of this life force. As Bradley Olson writes quoting Campbell in his latest MythBlast, this is “the animating principle, a principle [Campbell] called ‘the deathless soul.’” (Myths of Light, 44) It is here that Campbell’s passion for myth truly lights up. Like Jung before him, he was endlessly fascinated by the mythology of India (given the fact both men were schooled on the subject by the same master, Heinrich Zimmer). Yet these great minds, deeply appreciative of Indian lore, were quick to recognize how yoga in the West can become distorted and hollowed out as a commodified form of exercise and relaxation which in no way interferes with the ruling order of the status quo. A staple of the wellness industry, this sort of “Western yoga” seems far removed from the complete inward turning the ancient yogis had in mind. As Campbell writes: The irony is that most of the yoga that is taught to people in the West is this sort of yogic calisthenics. You have probably seen the books on how to practice yoga at home—something like doing athletic warm-ups—it’s teaching a setting-up exercise. But here we think of haṭha as the thing itself rather than a form of preparation. (38) This haṭha yoga is a preparatory “Yoga of the Body” which here takes the place of the ultimate in the popular consciousness of the West. As Jung also recognized, this purely physical yoga may “delude the physiologically minded European into the false hope that the spirit can be obtained by just sitting and breathing.” (CW11 §907) Involved as we are in the West in the pursuit of “obtaining spirit” as a commodified experience, Yoga simply feeds the already deepened channels of capitalistic ideology. For this reason kuṇḍalinī yoga in the West became a form of “experience seeking” little different than a drug trip or psychedelic experience. Rather than the profound transformation of the psyche as a whole, both conscious and unconscious, the practice of yoga becomes another ephemeral hedonistic pleasure. Rather than a revolution of consciousness in a new dawn of creation, yoga becomes another psychotropic technique for the smooth functioning of the status quo and its hierarchies of power. Every guru acknowledges the fact that this supreme form of yoga—and the kuṇḍalinī serpent itself—is indeed the most dangerous and profound. It has the potential to wreck your life or to regenerate it—or perhaps both at once! For the awakening of primordial creative energy requires the strongest container or vessel to integrate it within a frame of culture. In kuṇḍalinī yoga the journey begins with the awakening of the serpent energy that lies “coiled” or dormant at the base of the spine. As Campbell explains: “The goal of this yoga is to bring this serpent power up the spine to the head so that our whole being will be animated by the serpent power, so that our psyche is drawn up to full flowering” (Myths of Light 27). Already inclined to view things from psychoanalytic angles, Campbell was fascinated by the parallels that can be drawn between yoga and certain psychotic and schizophrenic states. It fascinated me long, long ago to realize how close yoga experiences were to those described by Freud, Adler, and Jung in their discussions of the deeper regions of the psyche into which people fall. (28) Placed in the same phenomenological order, kuṇḍalinī yoga becomes a powerful visualization of the individuation process as a profound transformation of our whole being in time. This is what makes yoga relevant to the West. Rather than pertaining solely to a subjective experience, kuṇḍalinī can become an authentic mythic perspective into the objective archetypal processes and structures of the encompassing psyche, the so-called collective unconscious, into which every individual consciousness is embedded. The road to enlightenment as the ascent of the kuṇḍalinī serpent through the chakras of the human spine works as the activation of the “transcendent function,” which is the beginning of the individuation process, as a process of rebirth and regeneration in time. Culminating in a certain state of [un]consciousness—indeed, the highest mystical experience!—we become as One with the Divine. This famous unio mystica is a theme that Campbell returns to again and again throughout his work and life: follow your blissful state of identity with the One.