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

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.

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,

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.”

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,

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.