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.

The pathways that guide people to the land of myth are many. For me, it was a path called art. Growing up in a small town in East Texas, storytelling was in the very air we breathed. However, I was never content with just any story. I was always looking for something just under the surface of the narrative. I always wanted…something…something I couldn’t quite put words to in the stories I experienced. This ineffable magic always ran in the DNA of the stories I loved most. I sometimes wondered why I enjoyed stories of King Arthur’s quests as much as I enjoyed Star Wars and if one day, I would need to declare an allegiance in order to fully be accepted into one of those tribes. While I was raised in a hotbed of religious fervor, it was these other sorts of stories, this type of art, that brought me to consider the big questions, like what it meant to be fully human and alive. Perhaps it was my religious upbringing, but I was always drawn to stories about the supernatural and other worlds, including worlds that my faith tradition had given me a framework for: heaven and hell. I suppose the land of myth was a distant homeland I was always destined to be drawn to. In Myths of Light, Joseph Campbell says that “The realms of the gods and demons—heaven, purgatory, hell – are of the substance of dreams. Myth, in this view, is the dream of the world. If we accept gods as objective realities, then they are the counterpoint of your dream – this is a very important point – dream and myth are of the same logic” (70). This mystic relationship between myth and dream always felt true to me, even before I had the language to articulate it. This might be because so many of the stories that I would later learn were mythic were ones I first experienced in the dark, as though I was asleep and the myth I was experiencing was my dream. I devoured mythic narratives in the darkness of the movie theater and in my bed at night, reading only by the illumination of a flashlight. A couple of years ago I had another dream-like mythic experience, again in the darkness, this time in the darkness of a Broadway theater. Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown intertwines two mythic stories — that of the young dreamers Orpheus and Eurydice, and that of King Hades and his wife Persephone. The musical had opened to critical acclaim and received numerous awards and nominations, including a total of 14 nominations at the 73rd Tony Awards — the most for the evening — and eight wins, including Best Musical and Best Original Score. Set in a Great Depression-era inspired post-apocalyptic world and narrated by the god Hermes, Hadestown manages to accomplish the rare feat of dealing directly with well-known myths, yet still managing to communicate something fresh about the mythic state of our current world. I sat in the theater that night thinking that it had happened again: art had again transported me to that land of myth that felt like home since I was young. Watching Orpheus, Eurydice, Hades, and Persephone come to life before my eyes on that stage caused me to once again think of Campbell’s words as I lay in bed that night. Further discussing the deities and their domains, he said, “All the heavens and gods are within you and are identical with aspects of your own consciousness on the dream level” (70). My dreams were initiated that evening with considerations of the figures, Orpheus and Persephone, that both lived inside of me. I was challenged by thoughts of the Hades and Eurydice that I knew existed within my own psyche. This sacred work carried out by myth, and in my case by the artistic expressions of myth, have reshaped who I am and remind me of who I could yet be. They have renewed me, again and again. I’m honored to announce that the Joseph Campbell Foundation is partnering in two new endeavors with musical artist Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Radio. The station will be featuring episodes from podcasts on JCF’s MythMaker Podcast Network in May – a project they are calling MythMaker May. Another forthcoming endeavor will be a recorded audio conversation between Bob Walter, President of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, Anaïs Mitchell, creator of Hadestown, Rachel Chavkin, director of Hadestown, and Ani DiFranco, owner of Righteous Babe Records and the voice of Persephone on the Hadestown album released on Righteous Babe in 2010, about the intersection of music and myth in Hadestown. Support MythMaker May on Righteous Babe Radio and keep an eye on JCF.org and follow JCF’s social media channels for more information on our future mythic endeavors.

“Read myths as newspaper reports by reporters who were there and it doesn’t work. Reread them as poems and they become luminous,” [(9) writes Joseph Campbell in Myths of Light as he invites us to cultivate faithful, imaginal thinking and intuitive perception, a subjective process that’s neither fanciful nor misguided. We often don’t have the language, or indeed the mental syntax, for the intuited unknown and so we’re obliged to reach into and employ the poetic mind. This mind enables us to better explore nascent truths that aren’t yet tangibly manifested. These truths are emergent and exist on the growing edge of our soul’s horizon. One of the motivating forces for our pursuit of deep learning is our longing for universality, which includes the integral coherence of the Kosmos within the psyche. A poetic and symbolic sensibility assists this endeavor because many of the most important lessons of life are expressed through pictorial narratives. Indeed, eternal truths are usually best conveyed through myth, parable, allegory, and metaphor. Unfortunately, though, when we solely exercise intellectuality, the proclivity of this faculty to commission rigid thinking and mechanization brings a disjunctive force into ourselves and into our surroundings. By engaging in pictorial thinking – and its imaginative fluency – we invigorate the spirit and nature realms together with the physical world. In Myths of Light, Campbell nourishes us with such vivid, descriptive visual thoughts and wealth of imagery that we’re virtually initiated into their rich, imaginative tones and textures. For example, the stories “The Tigers and the Goats” and “The Cry of the Buddha Child” provide a glimpse into an inner understanding of the world, and ourselves, because they are interior chronicles of who we are. “So this is what the story tells us: we are all tigers living among these goats. So go into the forest, and in the forest of the night, find the tiger burning bright in your own profound depths.” (140) Frequently, it’s necessary to wrestle with the pictures of a narrative in our minds and souls to arrive at their deeper truths. The over-intellectualized mind struggles to apprehend these truths. And far too readily our nervous system becomes depleted if it’s engaged in constant, mental abstraction devoid of any iconographic content. It’s why, in this era of “fake news,” we desperately crave the poetic and mythological narratives with their vast, lyrical, pictorial palettes. And when we merely inhabit the mental analytics of our existence, we begin to lose the essential patterns, textures and tones of the whole. We then struggle to find even the simplest pattern, no matter how much effort of will or intelligence we apply. The mind depleted of an imaginal capacity cannot solve our inmost anguishes or commune with our higher longings. To be creatively fertile is life’s true survival. It’s why Novalis wrote, “Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.” And it’s also why Campbell reminds us, “To see life as a poem and yourself participating in that poem is what the myth does for you.” Campbell describes the rebirth of the sun, moon, lion, bull, eagle, serpent, and the figures of the early mythologies across cultures in respect to the vegetal rebirth of life. He does it in such an engaging and poetic way that his words themselves become alive, a pictorial creation. The language of metaphor and imagery leads us towards the existence of deeper meanings and truths because such imagery connects, while the intellect, roaming on its own, has the inevitable inclination to only see and seek separation. Its tendency is to divide the world into parts and demand fixity of them. A famous statement of Campbell’s advises, “If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.” And all too often we’re trying to change the world through a linear mind, when in reality, it can only (ultimately) be transformed through the non-linear – metaphors, myths, dreams, symbols – and cultivated affectionately through a caressing, inner knowing. It’s our duty to honor the inner life through accepting and respecting the fluidity and flexibility of the psyche – to not over-prioritize the literal and material to the detriment of the imaginative and spiritual. This book serves as a reminder to reconnect with the Kosmos because it inspires us to seek the light, to dwell in the divine mysteries, and to develop a fruitful, archetypal eye in the process. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, “He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.” So how today can we evoke both the visible artistic and the invisible, yet felt, mytho-poetic forces, which weave in and around us awaiting our recognition? In exactly the same way that many folk songs and stories are encoded with meaningful messages through their purposeful marrying of the illumined mythic with quotidian life. For when we reach for something far more metaphorical, more imaginal, more poetic and indeed, more luminously mythic in the everyday, and within ourselves, we may truly embrace these words of Campbell’s. “The message of the Buddha is simple but profound: we are to seek joyful participation in the suffering of the world.” (125). And perhaps, we could also add, “participation in the deep telos of the world.”