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.”

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

Campbell was fond of talking about dualities and how getting beyond them forms a critical part of the hero’s journey: dualities like finite and infinite, transcendent and immanent, sacred and profane. The blooms of April provide us with an excellent opportunity to talk about these dualities and a lesson, a pollen path, to help us navigate between them. The lesson is about a famous flower. Aum maṇi padme hūṃ. The jewel is in the lotus. You’ve probably heard this before. Let’s start with Campbell. “‘The jewel (maṇi) in the lotus (padme),’ signifies, on one level: the immanence of nirvāṇa (the jewel) in saṁsāra (the lotus); another: the arrival of the mind (the jewel) in nirvāṇa (the lotus).” (Masks of God, Volume 2: Oriental Mythology 484) The lotus sinks its roots deep in the muck of the river bottom while the leaves float on the surface. The flower sticks up out of the water entirely and, strangely, it’s one of the only plants that produces seeds and flowers at the same time. Reaching for the sky, sunk in the mud, and numinous beauty nourished in the filth of the world, “the jewel in the lotus” represents the simultaneous presence of the infinite in the finite and of the transcendent made immanent. It represents the experience of moving beyond the dualities that condition our normal mode of thinking. But how do we do that? The first thing is to acknowledge the conditioning frameworks by which society has taught us to understand the world and ourselves, to recognize the cultural cognitive bifocals strapped on at birth that encourage us to see the world in black-and-white. Black-and-white has certain advantages: it’s easy, it satisfies our need to believe we’ve understood something, and we can take refuge from the complexities of life by reducing the often incomprehensible indeterminacies of ethics, politics, and love to easily digestible categories. Like all fast food, these interpretive frames provide a delicious and satisfying psychological meal – but provide little nutritional value. Dining on the simplistic, if yummy, world of black-and-white we find ourselves prone to the threat of spiritual heart disease. “Shut up, I don’t care!” my ego hollers. “I want more fries! And pass the ketchup!” The trick, as always, is not merely identifying the truth – that the world and our lives are tessellated with complex, overlapping shades of gray. Nope. Everybody knows that already. The trick is finding a way to put us into relationship with this truth and for that you need a metaphor; for that, you need a myth. That’s what the jewel in the lotus does. I mentioned transcendence and immanence in a previous Mythblast, and how they look leaky. But leaky is only how they look through the bifocals of duality. Once you recognize the conditioning frames of your understanding, once you take off the bifocals, transcendence and immanence can be seen as simultaneously present in the same moment – everywhere and everywhen as the transcendent unfolds into the field of time and space. In the West, William Blake probably said this best: To see a World in a Grain of SandAnd a Heaven in a Wild FlowerHold Infinity in the palm of your handAnd Eternity in an hour – but wait a sec: something can be transcendent and immanent at the same time? Yep. “But isn’t that just a dumb contradiction?” demands my logical brain. It might look like a contradiction, but it’s not. It’s a paradox. Let’s take a quick detour. Contradiction is the technical term for how your understanding interprets the conjunction of two mutually exclusive statements. Typically we assume one must be true while the other one is false: black and white, finite and infinite, Bears or Packers, etc. So far, so good. In a paradox you are once again confronted by the conjunction of two, mutually exclusive statements but, in this case, both are true. This suggests that embracing paradox is required to move beyond the dualities that lock us into black-and-white thinking and that dualities are dissolved by paradox but thrive in contradiction. Back to the flowers. “The jewel in the lotus” does not represent transcendence and immanence taking turns but the paradoxical simultaneity characterized in Campbell’s description of apotheosis from the Hero’s Journey. It is the recognition of eternity concealed in the forms of the finite and the temporal. At first glance it is tempting to believe that apotheosis marks the end of a mythic journey, that the jewel in the lotus marks the end of our pilgrimage. Aha! Enlightenment! (I mean, c’mon. Apotheosis literally means to “make into a god.” You’d think that’d be plenty.) Alas, no. This experience of seeing the transcendent as immanent and immanence as transcendent is not the end of the journey, but confirmation that we have endured, embraced, and transited the dualities of daily life – a life in which (for most of us, most of the time) the transcendent plays peekaboo, interrupting the finitudes of daily life with disruptive glimpses of the eternal. But those transitory glimpses are bait on the hook of our authentic lives. I might note in passing, since this year’s April included Easter, that this is a useful way to access the mythological import of Jesus nailed on the Cross. In that moment He represents both the finite sacrificed to the infinite and the infinite sacrificed for the sake of the finite: two mutually exclusive statements, both of which are true. There’s a jewel in the lotus for sure. But, as Campbell noted, myth leans toward the comic and away from the tragic mood and I’m compelled now to imagine what would happen if we translated this into Norse mythology. We’d have to expand the symbol to include that rascally squirrel Ratatoskr, maybe as a fish, swimming from root to lotus and lying to the jewel about what the muck has been saying. Thanks for musing along,

Edgar Allan Poe once wrote a little piece called “The Imp of the Perverse,” and I do believe that there must be in the fashioners of piously held beliefs, all over the world, an exceptionally strong strain of the faculty and impulse that he there describes; for it cannot be that they do not know what they are doing. Neither can it be that they regard themselves as deceivers. Nevertheless, they are seldom satisfied merely to brew for the moral nourishment of mankind an amusing little beer of what they know to be their own apocryphal fantasy, but they must needs present their intoxicant with deliberately pompous mien as the ambrosia of some well of truth to which they, in their state of soul, have been given access. It is exactly as my author, Poe, has said. “All metaphysicianism,” as he terms such work, “has been concocted a priori. The intellectual or logical man, rather than the understanding or observant man, set himself to imagine designs —to dictate purposes to God. Having thus fathomed, to his satisfaction, the intentions of Jehovah, out of these intentions he built his innumerable systems of mind.” And with a curious strain of the same perversion by which the sages teach their designs, both vulgar and the learned everywhere have been forever loath to see any such facts brought to light as might tend to inform them of the true nature of the brews by which they live, dream, and regulate our lives. (The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology 518-519) Although we tend to think of the Campbellian enterprise of Mythological Studies as providing honey-sweet “positive” content for our lives, passages like the ones above tell a slightly different story, more critical of the positivity of mythic ideology. As a consequence of this double task, both affirmative and critical, any piece of mythological studies issues a call to confront the traumatic truths of our mythic past, the composition of the brew of our national ideology, forcing us to come face to face with the imp of the perversity of mythic consciousness. In "The Imp of the Perverse," Poe anticipates such notions of depth psychology, later developed by Freud and Jung, as the Id (The Thing) and the Shadow. With this level of psychoanalytic insight, Campbell can easily explain to himself the “curious strain of the same perversion by which the sages teach their designs,” and the great resistance of “both vulgar and the learned everywhere” to “forever loathe […] any such facts brought to light as might tend to inform them of the true nature of the brews by which they live, dream, and regulate our lives” – Namely, the true nature of what we adopt as our “personal mythology": the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves which are mostly lies. For it is generally acknowledged that if we want to get to know someone, we cannot base our judgement solely on what this individual thinks about herself; Instead, we must turn to the content of this person’s actions in order to know their true character. Sometimes these self-serving fantasies are crushingly belittling, sometimes narcissistically self-aggrandizing, but any sympathetic observer and listener would recognize at once the perversity of such “personal mythology.” What is true of the individual is also true of entire nations and their mythic pasts. We all have to deal with the imp of perversion at the heart of our founding narratives. For without this shadow work, without this making conscious of the unconscious lie, the true blooming of mythology cannot come to pass. As with the psychotherapy of the individual so it is with entire nations; the problem is not so much the "creation of a new myth" but the elimination of repressive elements that block the spontaneous outpouring of mytho-historic truth. This is the reason that a well-trained psychotherapist will refrain from providing “answers'' or assigning “meaning” to an individual’s life, no matter how much they may beg for it. A significant part of working through the transference, the spontaneous co-dependence of the patient to the analyst, is to free the individual from this delusion. For it is taken for granted that delusions are never good for the life of the soul. “Truth is the ultimate repressed,” as Wolfgang Giegerich states in The Soul’s Logical Life (217). What is ultimately repressed in the depths of the psyche is not some mysterious “self“ waiting in the wings, nor is it the intensity of sexuality, but a painful truth that speaks at the place where the psyche must enter the flesh. For there is the existential rub, the irrepressible edge of the symptom, where the unconscious mind forces itself upon the conscious ego and breaks down all its defense mechanisms. So when we advocate for the “non-binary” logic of myth as the logic of both/and over against either/or, we should not forget the full implication of this proposition: that the logic of both/and must include either/or as its internal complementary opposition. Otherwise we remain caught in the literal split of external opposites. True myth thus operates through the logic of both/and and either/or, following the paradoxical logos of the soul, as an upsurge of the mythic imagination into the material light of history. Hence, we would do myth a disservice were we to relegate it to the purely metaphoric or personal realm of make-believe and wish-fulfillment—where we can have everything both ways and speak out of both corners of our mouths. No, that is not the true nature of myth but the work of the imp Campbell and Poe warned us about. If we believe that myth truly matters, on the other hand, we must turn to the material truth of its existential mystery. It is when myth is allowed to bloom in truth that it becomes living history.

There is a story from the ancient Hebrew tradition in II Samuel 12 where a king spots the beautiful wife of a young warrior bathing on her roof. He sends for her and the two sleep together shortly thereafter. Upon learning the woman has become pregnant, the king sends the woman’s husband to the frontlines of a nearby battle where the fighting is most fierce, and therefore ensures his death.  A prophet travels to see the king and rather than rebuke his morals in the way that prophets were prone to do in those days, the prophet instead tells the king a story. The story is about two men, one rich and one poor. While the rich man had a plethora of sheep and cattle, the poor man had but one little ewe lamb. The poor man cherished the lamb, sharing his food with the animal and even sleeping with it in his arms, like a child. One day, when the rich man had a visitor arrive from out of town, rather than taking one of his own sheep to slaughter for a meal, he took the poor man’s lamb. Hearing this story, the king exploded in anger, demanding to know the identity of the rich man. Of course, the irony of the king’s inability to recognize the biographical nature of the story is lost on no one…except the king. The prophet used a story to bypass the king’s head and go straight to his heart. The story acted as a mirror, allowing the king to see his true self. Stories have long been one of the most powerful forces in the human experience. Study after study reveals that human behavior is less motivated by logic than we would prefer to believe, but instead relies on the narratives we create for our lives. Statistics and physical proof of something rarely changes our behavior, but stories seem to succeed where facts and figures do not. The role of the storyteller cannot be underestimated in the Hebrew story. His use of art to spark self-examination in the mind of the king is a testimony to how significant narrative is and how essential it can be in making meaning for us. From storytelling prophets to warrior poets, the sword falls under the might of the pen and a powerful potentate is no match for a well-told story. Recently I was invited into a conversation about what differentiated Joseph Campbell’s work around the hero’s adventure from that of his predecessors, who offered stages of initiation that resemble aspects of the monomyth. The most significant factor that has caused Campbell’s work to resonate so deeply where so many others have not: story. He took the patterns that many had seen previously in human rituals and practices and applied them to our speculative fiction. He recognized that our stories said as much about who we are as our behavior did. At this year’s Golden Globe Awards, Jane Fonda expanded on the essential role of story in our humanity: [I]n turbulent crisis-torn times like these, storytelling has always been essential. You see, stories ... can change our hearts and our minds. They can help us see each other in a new light, to have empathy, to recognize that for all our diversity, we are humans first. [...] That’s why all of the great conduits of perception, Buddha, Mohammad, Jesus, Lao Tzu, I would say all of them spoke to us in stories and poetry and metaphor because the nonlinear non-cerebral forms that are art speak on a different frequency, may generate a new energy that can jolt us open and penetrate our defenses. So that we can see and hear, what we may have been afraid of seeing and hearing. […] Stories, they really can change people. Campbell’s recognition of the fundamental role of story in myth caused his work to resonate with people in ways they weren’t always able to put into language, as myths are stories not always told in words but also in images, in motifs, and in food. In The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology, Campbell speaks of the priestcraft of art. He explains the lore of the greatest Capital city of Old Egypt can only be understood properly by recognizing that “those that developed it were a priesthood of practicing creative artists.” (91-92) Here, Campbell links the greatness of a society with the artistry of its creators, suggesting that the artists were not simply tradesmen but people of a divine calling, whose work and leadership transcended the lines between that which is beyond and the here and now. We live in a world in need of new stories – in need of better stories. We also need storytellers that understand the power of the tool they wield. An impactful story can cause oppressors to turn from their harmful ways. It can also unite people around a tyrant. It can end a season of torment and cause new life to bloom forth from stony ground. Our stories matter, and those gifted with the ability to tell them well hold great authority, they are part of a priesthood of practicing creative artists, and they have the skills to craft the lore of our culture or completely destroy it.

Once, a very long time ago, the Buddha preached a sermon to his followers by saying nothing at all. Instead of speaking, he held up a single flower. Only one listener, a monk named Mahakasyapa, heard what that flower had to say and smiled with joy. (Joseph Campbell. The Masks of God, Vol. II: Oriental Mythology, 608) Everyone else seems to have missed the point of what has since come to be called the Flower Sermon, no doubt returning to their chores and meditation with some chagrin. Because, come on—a flower? What could Mahakasyapa possibly have seen in a single blossom? Or heard? Or...whatever? The question is still worth asking today. One possibility is that he perceived something related to the intricate Buddhist teaching of the Flower Garland, which Campbell summarizes succinctly: “one is all and all are one” (679). In other words, we are inseparable from each other; and I do mean “we” in the broadest possible sense. The Flower Garland goes far beyond the platitude “we are all connected.” This teaching asserts that we all arise from and remain one with a single, indivisible continuity. All existence—meaning all energy, all matter, all beings, all consciousness—is defined by inseparability, which is another way of saying we are defined by our unity, and there is no such thing as a separate self. In other words, “I” don’t exist without “you,” and neither of “us” exists without the All that gives rise to our experience of illusory and temporary separateness. Beneath what we normally think of as our “selves” exists the vibrant, continuous All, an energy field that imagines us up the same way it imagines up a flower out of stems, leaves, seeds, soil, and all the lives that fed that churning loam throughout the ages, leading up to that singe bloom. On the other hand, maybe Mahakasyapa saw an archetypal Blossom, meaning the larger-than-life “force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” as the poet Dylan Thomas calls it. Maybe the Buddha’s flower became transparent to the divine Flowering that moves through us all, that power beyond our own that can make us smile no matter what in spite of ourselves. That Smile, like Mahakasyapa’s, brings us directly to the lotus throne of the goddess who Campbell calls “the most prominent single figure in the ornamentation of all the early Buddhist monuments,” Lakshmi, whose imagery of beauty and wealth overflows with lotus flowers. (Oriental Mythology, 415) Lakshmi is, in effect, the great Bloom: she is the soul of the lotus, the love of blooming, the ability to blossom. She brightens, lightens, en-lightens. She is the consciousness of flowering, and she is the flowering of consciousness. Lakshmi is the flowers that fountain around her. She is the profligate abundance of the universe, dispensing glories of many kinds. Hearkening back to the teaching of the Flower Garland, Lakshmi reminds us of our own lotus-essence, because if we really are all one, then our consciousness is inseparable from hers. Perhaps when the Buddha held her aloft for all to see, she smiled directly into and through Mahakasyapa. Beyond mythic images and religious teachings, isn’t every bloom a blessing in and of itself? A flower is a gift, a grace, a healing. A blossom is an epiphanic reminder of beauty’s inevitability. Simultaneously tiny and profound, each flower holds a revelation. Before that flower, its blossom was impossible to imagine. But when those petals unfurled, the world changed. Where there had been nothing, now exists a rose, or an orchid, or a lotus, or new hope. Maybe Mahakasyapa marveled: how could this miracle exist? And yet it so manifestly is, how could it not exist? Then the flower’s presence could have opened his heart by collapsing the binaries of being and non-being, reminding him of his own miraculous presence and the presence of all things. Flowers tend to appear in the moments when our hearts are most full: first dates, apologies, weddings, hospital rooms, springtime. Flowers might not speak, but they most certainly proclaim. They herald spring’s return to a frozen landscape, peace to the battlefield, beauty to bleakness, healing to illness and injury. Flowers trumpet the news of the soul’s open heart, the world’s open heart, and the open heart of the cosmos itself. A single flower changed Mahakasyapa’s consciousness, and then, the consciousness of the entire tradition of Buddhism, and therefore the world. Like Lakshmi, his flower consciousness blossomed out of the mud and into the flamboyant generosity of nectar and fragrance that draws pollinators from miles around, and then, like Lakshmi’s, his smile became the truth of beauty and the beauty of truth.

This month in the MythBlast Series, we’re focusing on Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God, Vol II: Oriental Mythology. On page 490 of that volume, Campbell quotes from “The Song of the Cowherd” by the poet Jayadeva: “Oh may this poem…delight all lover’s hearts.” The poet and artist Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who delighted the hearts of all lovers (and delighted the lovers of great hearts, too), died on February 22, 2021. He’s already been eulogized in a multitude of ways, and with language that far exceed any bon mots that I might muster, but I do want to consider something he said in The New York Times “Last Word” feature of the online obituaries section because when I heard it, it rang in my soul like a bell. “Last Word” is a series of short on-camera interviews featuring prominent figures reflecting upon their own lives that are only released with the individual’s obituary. Ferlinghetti’s piece was extraordinarily intimate, and allows one to witness the intelligence, the heartfulness, the passions, and the sensitivities of a man who managed to forge his life in the flames of creativity and courage. In this video, Ferlinghetti tells us his early life was “unhappy,” and remarks, “so I escaped by lyricism.” He goes on to say, “When present day life gets too awful, there’s the lyric escape.” Ferlinghetti follows up with a few examples of the lyric escape, such as writing a poem, looking at the moon, or even “shacking up with your best girlfriend,” but what I hear resounding in his words is that the lyric escape is a flight into beauty. And it’s not just any beauty, it’s the beauty found within. As Campbell puts it: “[T]he sphere of eternity, beyond the veil of time and space, where there is no duality, they are at one; death and life are at one; all is peace.” (Oriental Mythology 121) It is an “enchanted mood,” Herman Melville insists, in which “thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.” (Moby Dick 251) (As an aside, Melville is referring to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, who was ordered by Queen Mary to be put to death on March 21, 1556 by burning.) Both Campbell’s sphere of eternity and Melville’s enchanted mood refer to the aesthetic arrest by which one is overcome in the presence of deep beauty. That aesthetic arrest is Ferlinghetti’s lyric escape. Ferlinghetti seems to know that lyric beauty—the goal of the lyric escape, is the antidote to life’s pain. Readers of Joseph Campbell will be familiar with his discussions regarding James Joyce’s theory of art, in which proper art induces in the beholder a seizure of the heart, an aesthetic arrest. I’ve always thought Joyce’s seizure of the heart to involve at least some small degree of pain, a cardiac event induced by an intense psychological experience. People end up in ER exam rooms for similar reasons all the time. Perhaps, because we discover some modicum of pain in the experience of it, beauty has a salutary, restorative effect when we find ourselves in the grip of life’s pain. Beauty functions as a homeopathic remedy for the pain of living; it’s the healing alchemy of like curing like. Beauty, as Rilke puts it, is “the beginning of terror;” we know we must eventually take our leave of “this earth of majesty, this blessed plot,” this place where piercing beauty makes its home, and either it or ourselves will eventually turn to ashes. In his beguilingly titled book Essays in Idleness, the 14th century Zen monk-poet Yoshida Kenko captures the essential impermanence of beauty in a poignant, elegant meditation: If we lived forever, never to vanish like the dews of Adashino, never to fade like the crematory smoke on Toribeyama, men would scarcely feel the beauty of things. Containing both gratification and pain, beauty transcends dualities and remains, not only beyond the veil of time and space, but beyond pleasure and pain, beyond joy and sorrow, beyond life and death, within the sphere of eternity. The lyric escape transformed Dante’s pain of exile into the Divina Commedia, the Divine Comedy. The same year he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, Keats’ lyric escape created “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” a lyric flight that allowed him to live for a precious while within a timeless, ever-green scene etched on an ancient urn where young lovers loved forever, leaves never fell from trees, and he remained “the foster child of silence and slow time.” In bed after yet another bout with influenza and brittle mental health, Virginia Woolf’s lyric escape writes herself out of infirmity with an archly beautiful essay, “On Being Ill.” Lying there, she imagines herself a deserter from “the army of the upright,” looking up to see the “extraordinary” and “strangely overcoming” spectacle of the “divinely beautiful” and “also divinely heartless” sky that healthy, perpendicular people seldom notice. “With the hook of life still in us still we must wriggle,” Woolf writes. “Left to ourselves we speculate thus carnally. We need the poets to imagine for us. The duty of Heaven-making should be attached to the office of Poet Laureate.” Perhaps so; I’d like to think I’d feel at home in Billy Collins’ or Elizabeth Bishop’s heaven. But the duty of heaven making unfailingly falls to each one of us, and it’s a duty made lighter if we learn the art of the lyric escape.  After all, as Ferlinghetti wrote in Poetry as Insurgent Art, “the greatest poem is lyric life itself.”

Some have confused a mythology as nothing more than an elegantly-packaged ideology. Not so. Nor is it true to say that mythic figures are to be read as literal facts. The confusion commonly stems, as Campbell often repeated in his writings, from assuming that something or someone is literal, not metaphorical of another reality that invites the imagination into a world of multiple possibilities. Such a move towards literalism belittles the universal appeal and power of the mythic images to no more than “prosaic reification” (The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, xxiv). Making the shift from literal to figural alters one’s entire perception of the phenomenal world, to say nothing of its opening one to the symbolic power of dreams. I can only speculate here as to why this confusion arises. I think one answer may be found in Adolf Bastian’s brilliant understanding of “elementary ideas” and “ethnic ideas.” The former transports us into the rich arena of archetypal images and situations; the latter into the particular  historical and specific ways that such universal realities are embedded in and flourish in a particular culture of a people. A brief example may suffice to unfold such a distinction. In their book Your Mythic Journey, Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox offer that “a myth can make a cow sacred in one culture and hamburger meat in another” (xi). Same animal. One cultural myth perceives it as sacred, the other reaches for it in an act of consumption. The animal’s universality is bent to conform or to support a local ethnic belief. Beef as belief. Animal as anima. Billions of burgers served. Campbell was keen to see that myths provide a dual vision: the transcendent and universal, but rooted firmly in history’s particularity. Such a belief allowed him to retrieve an ancient idea that it was the human body itself,  “in miniature a duplicate of that macrocosmic form,” (13) which conveyed a sense of unity through the great chain of being’s diversity. Correspondence and correlation are the lenses through which to uncover and further this ancient wisdom of analogies linking all diverse parts of creation. Such connective tissue is heightened when we are invited to gaze at a photo of the Earthrise taken from the moon’s surface (Inner Reaches, 19) to reveal that a new cosmological perspective insists on and incites a revisioned mythology. I believe such a miraculous image accelerated our concern for saving the planet by seeing it with all the boundaries of countries removed. Such a dramatic photo struck Campbell as a vision of a new myth. It also reveals his own mythopoetic way of discovering analogies that reveal relationships we might miss or ignore without his acute insights. He explores patterns closer to home–for example, between native American people and those of India–sensing “equivalences” in their images and beliefs. His method is “to identify these universals. . . archetypes of the unconscious and as far as possible, to interpret them” (69). Let’s pause to suggest here that the act of interpretation is a mythic move of imagination. Hermes is the god-guide in this human activity and hermeneutics therefore is a god-inspired talent. Without this rich act of being human, and Campbell is one of the most cogent minds in such an uncovering, we would stack up event-after-event with no cohering sense growing from such a futile performance. Interpretation is a fundamental act in learning. As he creates a unique form of such meaning-making, Campbell uncovers “an implicit connotation through all its metaphorical imagery of a sense of identity of some kind, transcendent of appearances, which unites behind the scenes the opposed actors on the world stage” (81). Life itself is dramatic, but to miss the experience because of an obsession with meaning is to miss the action that is before us and within us. Art in all of its guises becomes the delivery system by which myth, history and aesthetics congeal on the same stage. But as is his habitus of finding correlations between worlds, he suggests that “the mystic and the way of the proper artist are related” (111). I do not think it is too much to proclaim that all art is metaphorical to a large degree; Campbell’s own language is that the figural realities on the stage of artistic creation can succeed in opening us to “ a transformation of perspective” (109). Like that magnificent image of the Earthrise, the power of aesthesis, a showing forth or an unveiling, is the artist’s sacred inspiration for expression. The artist’s creation provides us with a mimetic reality, a way to activate our sense of analogy to recover our own mythic imagining, to see “with two eyes, and alone to him is the center revealed: that still point. . . (117). Draw a circle around the still point. Now you are at the center of it all.

Art, among other things, is image-making. As a teacher of creative writing, I often emphasize the power of images due to their effectiveness in rendering experiences in our readers. Concrete language, which communicates to (and through) the senses, is what drives the written image. Concrete language is direct, visceral, and needs no explanation to work its magic. Abstract language, on the other hand, is conceptual. Like the image, it too renders experience, though in a different way. I ask, then: Is the experience-rendering value of abstract language any less potent or significant due to this difference? And even more to the point, is not abstract language, in its own way, concrete? After all, a concept or emotion or experience is, in fact, something. And by “something” I mean to say some thing. This idea is applicable not just to creative writing but to all genres of art whose works extend into this kind of subtler “stuff.” This MythBlast aims to highlight the experience-numinosity connection by attending to the attributes of our experiences—be they emotions, sensations, or insights—as concrete or material phenomena, each unique and wholly its own. In the third chapter of his Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Joseph Campbell opens with a wonderful quote from his wife, Jean Erdman, whose art (and profession) was dance. She says, “The way of the mystic and the way of the artist are related, except that the mystic doesn’t have a craft” (89). Indeed. Whereas the artist attends more to making, the mystic’s focus attends more to matters of experience. And where the artist produces a tangible work, the mystic produces an experience that is (in our approach) very much less tangible. Nonetheless, the world of the artist and the world of the mystic both lean into that numinous, mysterious realm that we thinkers circumambulate with terms like Source, the Transcendent, God, etc. But if we apply our concrete approach, we could say that the mystic does in fact work with and upon “stuff.” In the supplies cache of the artist we find clay, paint, and so on—all overtly substantial. Ask a mystic what he’s packing and, if we’re lucky, he’ll pull out a few of those less-substantial things for display: “Well, here’s a mantra, that thing there’s a breathing technique. Oh, and here’s a twenty-eight-day fast I picked up at a shop in one of my visions.” So, along this scale of substantiality, the dancer’s body spills into movement, the musician’s instrument sheds its sound waves, and the meagre wisps of the poet’s ink seep into meaning. Each of these evoke experiences of particular flavors—i.e., attributes—depending on the art and on the consciousness of the observer. For all the known reasons I could suggest (and even moreso, for all the unknown reasons I cannot!), the works of the artist and mystic reach into the numinous–but I think they also invite it. In our approach, we see that both have their “objects” of transmission—“stuff” with attributes. Whether it’s the cold depth of a statue’s empty gaze or the beaming crescendos of those van Gogh sunflowers, radiant and riotous like a choir of—well, sunflowers!—the experience pours through and saturates the psyche with (in this case) warmth, vitality, and celebration through paint, whose attributes are colors, whose attributes are pleasant, whose attributes are a kind of experience. That’s one direction. The other direction is simply that the numinosity infuses all of these stages with, uh, itself. Whether we approach the direction from left to right or right to left, inner to outer or outer to inner, the substance of the attributes–regardless of where they fall on our materiality scale–both transmit and buffer the numinous force, which in its undiluted status must be, from the perspective of an embodied human, annihilatory in either a very good or very bad way. Campbell addresses this dynamic when he refers to the many characters in Ovid’s Metamorphoses who were “unfavorably transformed by encounters with divinities, the full blast of whose light they were unready to absorb.” And he later writes that “in contrast, the mystic deliberately offers himself to the blast.” (91) The divinities of mythology are archetypal (which we perceive and experience as attributes of forms that are nearer to the numinous, or more infused by it). Like a work of art or a mystic’s subtle medium, they take on this ambiguous function of pipelining numinous energy through their form. Or, with their form, they preserve us from the blast. Speaking of blasts, even if this MythBlast is naught but guesswork, there may be some accurate content herein—or, at least, some moments where the guesswork brushes shoulders with truth. And if so, then it is encouraging to me to reflect on the business of engaging art as creations of our own making, and of our own being, that roam the frontier of the numinous, transmitting and receiving, to and fro, the missives of human to Source and of Source to human, composed in a language for which there can be no name.

One of Campbell’s last projects, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, was developed from a series of lectures delivered in San Francisco. The series included a symposium at the Palace of Fine Arts with astronaut Rusty Schweickart, who flew on Apollo 9 in March of 1969. Schweickart spent over 241 hours in space and performed the first extravehicular activity (EVA) of the Apollo program. During a five-minute pause tethered outside his spacecraft, Schweickart underwent a metaphysical experience as he stared at the Earth, contemplating its place in the universe, while listening to the unfathomable depths of cosmic silence. I vividly remember when, in these lectures, Campbell compared this moment to the song of the Sirens in the Odyssey. This was somewhat startling to me since I had inherited the mistaken notion that Homer’s Sirens were seductive, erotic mermaids—a misreading of the text widely disseminated by European Art, especially during the 19th century, and as exemplified in the painting Ulysses and the Sirens by Herbert Draper (above). There is no description of the appearance of the Sirens in Homer, nor is there any trace of sexual enticement. There is however an association with music and death: the Sirens sing a “high, thrilling” song, “lolling there in their meadow, round them heaps of corpses.” Those passing by who hear their “honeyed voices” will be made “wiser” by their omniscience, for the Sirens “know all the pains that Achaeans and Trojans once endured on the spreading plain of Troy,” and indeed, “all that comes to pass on the fertile earth, we know it all!” Nor do we find an exclusive emphasis on sexuality and temptation in the Platonic commentaries that emerged in the centuries after the poem was composed. Instead, we find something much more akin to Campbell’s implication that Rusty Schweikart had heard the Song of the Sirens while hovering there in the abyss of the universe, looking down on our inconsequential little speck of dust. For Campbell, the Siren song that he heard was that of the infinitude of cosmic silence and the oblivion which is the fate of all creation. It is the same song of space that Campbell often spoke of during his lectures when he evoked the ancient wisdom of an Arctic shaman, who advised us “not to be afraid of the universe.” Rather than representations of the lure of the flesh and the material world, Campbell’s Sirens represent an archaic tradition associating the Sirens with the heavens and the spiritual wisdom of the Musers. These views are rooted in Plato’s Republic: In the famous myth of Er, eight concentric circles revolve around the spindle of Necessity representing the fixed stars and planets, with a Siren standing on top of each ring “singing a single sound, a single note, but from all eight of them there sounded in concord a single harmony” (Music of the Sirens, 23). Elsewhere, in the Cratylus, Socrates speaks of “the Sirens in the underworld, which they are unwilling to leave, so charmed are even they by Pluto’s conversations” (23)—an observation that associates the Sirens with death. It is true that in Plutarch’s reading the Sirens may represent false and trivial forms of degenerate music, to be countered by the Muses, but he also states that “the music of Homer’s Sirens imparted to departed souls a love of the heavenly world, from which a faint echo reached us on earth that only the more refined soul perceived” (Sirens, 23). Later, near the end of the Roman Empire, Macrobius, in his commentary on Cicero , suggested that “‘Siren’ was Greek for ‘singing to God’” (23). Taking us one step further away from the terrestrial temptations of the material world, Theon of Smyrna and Philo Judaeus equate the Sirens with stars, or planets, “either as blazing bright or as generating music with their motions” (23). This tradition brings us much closer to Campbell’s notion that the Sirens in the Odyssey represent the “allure of the beatitude of paradise” (The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology, 172)—a notion consistent with the Pythagorean view that the Sirens represent the music of spheres calling souls in life and after death to rise above physical world. It was that song of silence, Campbell was suggesting, that Rusty Schweikart heard while floating along in outer space, a transcendental experience of the metaphysical ground of the universe—of the deep silence between the repetitions of the “mystic syllable AUM” recited during meditation—a silence pregnant with the wisdom that surpasses all understanding, so often communicated during Campbell’s lectures on the subject, when he evoked the “SILENCE before, after, and around AUM,” signifying nothing, “that absolute, unqualified, unconditioned state-that-is-no state of ‘consciousness in itself’” (Masks of God: Creative Mythology, 647).