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  • Laughing Heroes

    The classic characters and narratives of Greek mythology sculpted in stone throughout antiquity display a wide range of human emotions and psychological motifs. One particular expression, however, is often curiously absent – laughter. While laughing Buddhas and images of a jovial Kālī are common in Eastern mythology, most images of Dionysus show barely a hint of a smile. In his Republic , Plato warns that “if anyone represents men of worth as overpowered by laughter we must not accept it, much less if gods” (Book III, lines 388e9-389a1). Even many statues of Gelos, the divine personification of laughter in Greek mythology, are themselves without mirth. While there are likely simple cultural and logistical explanations for this, Joseph Campbell spoke to the romanticisation of the stoic and painful in The Hero with a Thousand Faces . He states: “Modern literature is devoted, in great measure, to a courageous, open-eyed observation of the sickeningly broken figurations that abound before us, around us, and within . . . Hence we are not disposed to assign to comedy the high rank of tragedy” ( The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 20). Campbell goes on to deconstruct the rejection, in some corners of society, of stories with happy endings. He laments the misunderstanding of these myths, fairy tales, and divine comedies, stating that in the ancient world such narratives were “regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete” ( The Hero with a Thousand Faces,  21). Our era has had its share of tragedies, some of which have rivaled other historically profound devastations, and others whose profundity is amplified because of their accessibility through technology. The commodification of outrage and voyeurism has often clouded our current vision of what tragedy might truly be. Sensing this same issue in his own time, Campbell suggested that tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms ; but that comedy is “the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life and experience which includes them both and which they bound: the down-going and the up-coming” ( The Hero with a Thousand Faces,  21). This definition of tragedy seems especially pertinent with the recent fire at Notre Dame, which demolished the church’s iconic spire. Tragically, that familiar form was lost, and many of us experienced an attachment to that form that we were unaware we even had. While the bulb was shattered, the light emitting from those destructive flames reminds us that the mythological light within the form continues to shine even as the form gives way. The spire fell in its down-going, but those that recognize mythic patterns and seasons, understand that an up-coming is inevitable. In such moments, Campbell offers the words of Ovid in Metamorphoses , stating “All things are changing; nothing dies. The spirit wanders, comes now here, now there, and occupies whatever frame it pleases…For that which existed is no more, and that which was not has come to be; and so the whole round of motion is gone through again” ( The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 21). Are we capable of experiencing the joy of the up-comings with the same intensity we experience in the despair of our down-goings?  Have we afforded greater significance to our stories with tragic endings than those with happy endings? Mythic understanding helps us to recognize that the most profound narratives transcend endings altogether. In his concluding thoughts on the issue, Campbell suggests that it is the business of mythology and fairy tales, to reveal the specific dangers and techniques of the dark interior way from tragedy to comedy. In a strange reverse play on the Persephone myth, some of us have taken up residence in the comforts of the darkness of tragedy, only maintaining a summer home in the world of comedy. May our heroic faces be those of laughter and smiles as often as they are of despondency and agony. For this is the way of the mythic life.

  • From Abstract Knowledge to Embodied Wisdom

    Joseph Campbell pondered his future in 1932 in a letter to a friend and mentor that he met while studying in Europe: The thought of growing into a professor gives me the creeps. A lifetime to be spent trying to kid myself and my pupils into believing that the thing that we are looking for is in books! I don’t know where it is – but I feel just now pretty sure that it isn’t in books (Letter to H.K. Stone, January 22, 1932, Grampus Journals). What Campbell is speaking about here is often called ‘book knowledge.’ We could assume that on this occasion, Campbell is not disparaging the worth of books as containers and interpreters of facts, information, and knowledge. Rather, he’s reminding us that there’s a ‘felt reality’ around us – and perhaps also permeating us – transcending the capacities of books to articulate. This may be so, even if the book is  written by a sophisticated, proficient scholar. The reality around and within us is just too expansive and too subtle to be captured by books and their words (which is why the poetic mode is sometimes most fit for purpose in this respect). However, having said this it’s possible that Campbell is also  referring to ‘book knowledge’ in another sense. Meaning that we may have conceptual knowledge of a subject while not yet having internalized it yet in our heart and soul. Even if we’re  polymaths, and even if our abstract knowledge is vast, if we’ve not internalized it to the extent that we’ve made the book’s material entirely our own, then it remains at a distance from us. But if we do fully assimilate the knowledge, and wholly interiorize it within our own souls, then there’s no longer any duality between ourselves and it. The knower and the knowledge breathe together. Metaphorically, when such rich assimilation has occurred, the ‘scroll’ has been eaten: “So I went to the angel [and he told me] ‘take it, and eat it’” (KJV Bible, Revelation, 10:9). A popular way of expressing this is by picturing a car and its driver. Most drivers, however proficient they might be as drivers, merely have a dashboard understanding of their car. They’re familiar with the settings on the dashboard, whilst having almost no knowledge of the inner workings of the motor. The dashboard understanding is sufficient for most occasions, but there may come a time when – usually during a crisis – a more thorough understanding of the motor would be helpful. And in a way, it’s disrespecting the full potential of the vehicle, if we don’t also appreciate its deep mechanisms.  Through this allegory, I recognize in my own experience that much of my conceptual and abstract knowledge hasn’t deepened or translated into assimilated understanding. As such, I’ve been a consumer of information that hasn’t been soul-incorporated, and so therefore, it’s not transformed into embodied wisdom deep in my bones.     In public speaking, if we’ve not fully embraced our subject, then only concepts wrought from instrumentalist words can be conveyed to the audience. But if in our speaking we’ve been able to embody our subject, then our words come alive and transmit both a life and an energy. When an alignment occurs between the speaker’s words and their integrated, lived experience, they’ve moved beyond mere words and concepts. There’s no alienation of the subject material from the communicator. As such, an inner knowing is conveyed to the audience because the subject has become ‘beloved’ by its bearer. The intellect and the heart have combined and the audience is touched accordingly. It’s as if we’ve encountered something of the living essence of the subject. And it’s this ‘aliveness’ that induces a change in the feeling field of the audience because a heightened sense of the topic presents itself.  One reason I believe that the documentary Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers  became so popular is because Campbell and Moyers, for all their erudite scholarship, were well aware that their research and analysis doesn’t, on its own, enable an audience to experience and embody myths as mighty pictures of the human experience. (Just like detailed footnotes to a thesis won’t assist a reader in meeting the transcendental mysteries of the mythological landscape.) Only when the lecturer or writer has soul-absorbed their material can we glimpse the endless depths of a topic.   We can witness this enfleshed wisdom in the conversation between Campbell and Moyers in The Power of Myth, Episode 5: Love and the Goddess . The subject being discussed is the Grail and its mysteries. Moyers postulates to Campbell at 15 minutes, 58 seconds,   And the Grail that these romantic legends were searching for is the union once again of what had been divided?” [Although Moyers and Campbell in this conversation were alluding to a different kind of union, in respect to my topic for this MythBlast, I’m focusing more on the union of the outer concept with the inner life that they both demonstrate.] And though I can’t fully explore this now within the word limits of this essay, it can be posited that with early humanity there was no firm divide between speech and the inner soul. All consisted of one spontaneous flow, springing from the womb of the human being. Later in the same discussion Moyers encapsulates this by saying, “ Well, that’s why I’m not so sure that the future of the race and the salvation of the journey is in space. I think it is well right here on earth in the body, in the womb of all of our being. So how might we arrive at such a fluent union between our outer words and inner lives like the masters, Campbell and Moyers? Lectio divina  (divine reading) was  – and still is –  a monastic practice involving the reading of sacred text, accompanied by prayer and meditation. This, the senior monks and nuns claimed, assisted the more junior monks and nuns to enter into a communion with the text and indeed, with God. I’m suggesting that, where possible and with similar modalities, we too could choose to engage with our subjects of study much more contemplatively. We’d then meet the subject with minds and hearts in unison and cultivate the possibility for embodied wisdom.  For myself, I’m attempting to read and think more slowly. Much, much more slowly. (A New Year’s resolution!) And with more mindful and heartful reverie, too! By decelerating the speed of this reflective process, I refrain from degrading or soiling the subject I’m studying with a consumerist or superficially expedient attitude. Rather, the subject requires – and receives – my genuine, loving attention.  Only then will it disclose its inner truths.     MythBlast authored by: Kristina Dryža is an ex-futurist, author, TEDx speaker, archetypal consultant, one of the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Editorial Advisory Group, and a steward for The Fifth Direction. Based between Australia and Lithuania, her work focuses less on the future and more on the unknown. Presence. Not prediction. What’s sacred? Not only what’s next. Kristina is passionate about helping people to perceive mythically and sense archetypally to better understand our shared humanity, yet honor the diverse ways we all live and make meaning. To learn more about Kristina, you can view her TEDx talk: Archetypes and Mythology. Why They Matter Even More So Today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o4PYNroZBY&t=525s This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 5, and Romance of the Grail Latest Podcast In this episode which originally aired in March 2023, John Bucher of the Joseph Campbell Foundation and Satya Doyle Byock discuss her book Quaterlife, and how her life and work have been influenced by Joseph Campbell. Satya is a psychotherapist in private practice in Portland, Oregon, and the founding director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies, where she teaches and hosts other speakers online. Her book “Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood,” was published in July 2022. Her articles have been published in Psychological Perspectives, The Utne Reader, goop, and elsewhere, and she is the co-host of the podcast on Carl Jung’s Red Book. Satya’s clinical work, teaching, and writing draw influences from a few primary areas, including Jungian psychology, trauma research, and social justice advocacy. She holds a Master’s in Counseling, with an emphasis on Depth Psychology, and a Bachelor’s in History. Find out more about Satya and her work at https://satyabyock.com/ Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Change the focus of the eye. When you have done that, then the end of the world as you formerly knew it will have occurred, and you will experience the radiance of the divine presence everywhere, here and now." -- Joseph Campbell,  Mythos I, Episode 3: “On Being Human"  The Virgin Birth (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

  • The Transformative Feminine: An Unending Journey Home to the Self

    The Hero enters the forest. He doubts, struggles, sacrifices, and overcomes. He fights the dragon, gathers treasure, and returns home forever changed.  The Heroine lingers at the crossroads. Her doubts knit themselves around her heart, entwining more quickly than she can unwind them. After some struggle, she begins to suspect that the unwinding may not be the point. In fact, if she stops pulling at these threads in vain, she can pull at others—larger ones, older ones. She unwinds what she can, knowing she’ll never finish: her journey is perpetual. Joseph Campbell’s hero cycle was drawn from his observation of parallels in mythologies across cultures, but immediately became a lens through which to examine our own lives. While people of any gender can find themselves on a “Hero’s journey,” it’s an undoubtedly masculine cycle—a linear, often physical march through ego to conquest—that represents only a corner of human experience. It lends itself so well to the concept of masculine  transformation, though, that it’s been co-opted for decades by conmen who sell the elixir of “ideal” manhood to wounded and vulnerable men as a means of quashing perceived weakness and actual ambiguity. Rather, the male  and female  associations are purely archetypal: far from being a gender essentialist concept, the Hero and Heroine are representative of the masculine and feminine in us all—that is, Jung’s animus and anima, respectively—and our quest for balance between the two. In her 1990 book The Heroine’s Journey , Maureen Murdoch explains the heroine cycle this way: “The model I am presenting does not necessarily fit the experience of women of all ages, and I have found that neither is it limited only to women [ . . . ] It describes the experience of many people who strive to be active and make a contribution in the world, but who also fear what our progress-oriented society has done to the human psyche and to the ecological balance of the planet.” (4) Murdoch drew her own analysis directly from her experience as a therapist working mainly with women, adapting her observations to mirror Campbell’s hero cycle as a means of filling in what many perceive as a gap in his work. She writes that while the hero cycle is illuminating, “it did not address the deep wounding of the feminine on a personal or cultural level.”  I mention this not to dismiss or devalue Campbell’s assertions of the hero’s journey, but to raise up its yin. Campbell was clear that the basis of his own philosophy was softness, kindness, and shared understanding. “The fundamental human experience,” he writes in an essay collected in A Hero’s Journey ,  “is that of compassion” (219).  For at least 50% of the planet’s population, the journey cannot begin with a Call to Adventure: something else has to happen first. Rejection of the feminine Consider for a moment the now-ubiquitous Strong Female Character. While some live up to the concept (with varying levels of nuance), “likable” female characters must walk a fine line. Popular Strong Female Characters tend to satisfy the demands of a masculine culture by being physically strong, outspoken, rejecting formality and fuss, but still conform to the incredibly narrow definition of acceptable femininity by being slim, pretty, fragile. Failing to stay in bounds lands them in a sea of other labels, where they drown as a Shrew, a Tease, a Nag. In Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel Gone Girl, titular girl (and antagonist) Amy famously excoriates the “cool girl,” a type of woman that she believes suppresses her feminine self in order to appeal to the men around her. She sees this rejection of femininity as itself the weakness, a coward’s path out of navigating feminine ambiguity—and masculine pushback—to endear themselves to men. The truth is that in a world where masculinity is loud, fast, physically powerful, individualistic, definitive, and lacking in nuance, praise can signal protection. Being sensitive, thoughtful, questioning, and gentle is an existential risk. Optimism and kindness is perceived as naivete, a liability in a masculine culture. Initial rejection of the feminine isn’t a choice so much as a compulsory protective stance in a crush-or-be-crushed world, the only way to survive long enough to pick it back up down the road. While women and those outside the gender binary are most clearly in the crosshairs, even men who have always identified as straight and cisgender have been harmed by the indiscriminate shrapnel of patriarchy, friendly fire from a world that still alleges to have been built for them. Like the deep, unhealing wound Anfortas takes to his literal manhood in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal , it’s not damage that can be healed by the hard science of medicine but requires an approach so obvious as to be almost insulting: compassion. The road beyond survival While the Heroine’s initial rejection of the feminine is most often shown as critical to her survival, the pattern can play out even in the safest utopia. Becky Chambers’s 2021 novella A Psalm for the Wild-Built takes place in an idealized future world that has learned from our own: humans, having narrowly avoided disaster centuries before, now live in closer harmony with one another and the natural world. A nonbinary monk named Sibling Dex wakes up to realize they’ve reached their goal, but they still feel unhappy. Dex, whose doctrine is based in brewing tea and offering comfort, feels a deep, inescapable feeling that something is missing. Immediately, they berate themself: “Something is missing. Something is off. So, how fucking spoiled am I, then? How fucking broken? What is wrong with me that I can have everything I could ever want and have ever asked for and still wake up in the morning feeling like every day is a slog?” Dex’s life sounds so peaceful, so kind, that some readers may be tempted to agree with their self-assessment. Even so, Dex decides to leave the comfort of their home and career to set off on a dangerous journey, completely alone and without a concrete goal. This feels like the beginning of a Hero’s journey, but no—Dex did that already, before this story even began: they left their childhood home, found their grail, settled down in a new world of their own making. What Dex is actually doing here is rejecting the feminine—their quiet life of studies, tea, and compassion—to fill the emptiness in the most masculine way possible. They must find the Thing that will make them whole.  A foolhardy journey into the woods may have been the last thing they ever did if not for a chance encounter with a strange, wild creature—a robot, of all things, named Mosscap. Just as Parzifal approaches the Grail King, Mosscap asks Dex what the trouble is. And Dex, in their struggle to make Mosscap understand, is forced to interrogate their own need for meaning.  Mosscap offers a deceptively simple reframing, one which becomes the thesis for this novella and its sequel: “You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is.” Participating in the joys and sorrows of the world isn’t one quest with a reward but a lifelong wandering, an evolution with many deaths and rebirths. This is a hopeful, freeing, radical realization. Dex’s journey is, like all Heroine’s journeys, unending. Participating in the joys and sorrows of the world isn’t one quest with a reward but a lifelong wandering, an evolution with many deaths and rebirths: you don’t leave your mark on the world, but on other people. Recognizing this interconnectedness is the heart of the Heroine’s strength: while the Hero alters his own perception of the world through one epic quest, the Heroine’s infinite waves of influence, like water against stone, can alter its reality. Maybe all Hero’s journeys are followed by a Heroine’s journey, and if we push past “happily ever after” we’ll always find “what now?”  MythBlast authored by: Gabrielle Basha is a writer, illustrator, and educator based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is a working associate for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and a member of the executive communications team at the Wikimedia Foundation. In addition to an informal yet life-long study of where pop culture meets folklore, Gabrielle holds a BFA in art history and illustration and an MFA in creative writing, both from Lesley University. This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 6, and The Hero with a Thousand Faces Latest Podcast In this bonus lecture to Episode 32: "Mythologies of Quest and Illumination", Campbell discusses the mythology of the Buddha, and gives a comparison of the Buddha's "Tree of Illumination" to the Bible's "Tree of Immortal Life". Listen Here This Week's Highlights All of the great mythologies and much of the myth storytelling of the world is from the man’s point of view. When I was writing The Hero with a Thousand Faces and wanted to bring in female heroes, I had to go to the fairy tales. These are told by women to children, you know, and you get a sense of the woman’s journey. There is a feminine counterpart to the trials and the difficulties, but it certainly is in a different mode. I don’t know the counterpart—the real counterpart, not the woman pretending to be male, but the normal feminine archetypology of this experience. I wouldn’t know what that would be. -- Joseph Campbell Myth and Meaning , 148 The Adventure of Being Alive (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

  • Cowboys and Archetypes

    “This first stage of the mythological journey—which we have designated the “call to adventure”—signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown.” ( Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces , 48). The conditions under which destiny summons the hero are reconfigured and recast in every time, every place, and every generation.   How about you? What was it like when you heard the “call to adventure?” I’ll bet many of our readers experienced a moment of vocational clarity and gave up one life to pursue another. That’s classic. Eligibility for that sweet moment of mystical awakening is not reserved for Buddhas and Brahmins but extends even to common laborers. I speak of my grandfather.  I come from a long line of such heroes beginning with my namesake, John Bonaduce, born in the lovely Abruzzi region of Eastern Italy by the shores of the Adriatic in 1902. As a teen he dug ditches while his father became a carrettieri, or freight handler, driving two decrepit mules across several Italian provinces.  This was the time just after the end of World War I when Nonno (the Italian familiar for “grandfather”) and his myth found one another.  At the time, Nonno was angry because he felt his father had betrayed the family. Instead of purchasing a new four-cylinder truck to replace the mules he’d worked to death, the paterfamilias  returned to Abruzzi with two more mules.   The little Italian boy had visions of a technological future—internal combustion engines, electricity, telephones—but simultaneously, he was gripped by images of a romantic past, a non-Italian past, indeed, he yearned to embrace what was then arguably the greatest myth of the Americas. He wanted to be a cowboy.  He told his father that very night that he was leaving for America. It was not a sensible decision. It was not grounded in any of the pressing necessities of life.  He had the kind of single-hearted madness which Campbell notes in artists, but certainly applies to my Italian forebear in particular.   “Survival, security, personal relationships, prestige, self-development—in my experience, those are exactly the values that a mythically inspired person doesn’t live for. They have to do with the primary biological mode as understood by human consciousness. Mythology begins where madness starts. A person who is truly gripped by a calling, a dedication, by a belief, by a zeal, will sacrifice his security, will sacrifice even his life, will sacrifice personal relationships, will sacrifice prestige, and will think nothing of personal development; he will give himself entirely to his myth. ( Pathways to Bliss , 138) Blame it on the movies. Campbell’s monomyth translates very well to celluloid and the Westerns of the day not only tended toward depictions of the hero’s journey but also inspired the desire to live that adventure in the hearts of impressionable peasants.  Destiny summoned my grandfather that day in the new medium of motion pictures and his plan came into sharp relief at exactly 26 minutes into a full-length silent film, The Squaw Man, when he saw a close up of a man’s finger pointing to a map. It was a map of Wyoming in letters that spanned twenty feet of silver screen. From this point, the narrative seemed to speak to him not so much as an entertainment, but a prefigurement of the rest of his life.  In DeMille’s epic, the hero crosses a wine dark sea to seek his fortune and escape from his European circumstances. He experienced Campbell’s “road of trials” as surely as any Argonaut, slipping the clashing rocks of competing cultures to find his singular path. There were many dangers at every turn but there were also unseen hands helping him in the form of a Native American woman who would save his life, and whom he would marry.  Racists call it miscegenation. Mythologists call it the heiros gamos, the sacred marriage. America, already saturated in its own mythology, triggered some innate releasing mechanism in my grandfather who saw his own future projected at 24 frames per second, demonstrating that a European can wear a Stetson, strap on a six-shooter, and who knows, marry a Native American and live happily ever after (although the Native American love interest called “Nat-U-Rich,” a member of the Ute tribe, dies at the end of the movie).  The transAtlantic passage was brutal on a teenager whose experience of the sea was limited to the gentle lapping of the Adriatic where he had grown up.  Ellis Island was the crossing of the threshold for generations of displaced Europeans and here he met his first threshold guardians, the ones whose job it is to screen aliens for Typhus and misspell their names—this is where Berkowitz becomes Burk and Rossini, Ross. ( Nonno stubbornly clung to every vowel of his noble surname).  Remember what Campbell said about the “blunder” as oftentimes key to the ongoing quest. “A blunder—the merest chance—reveals an unsuspected world.” The mistake upon which the subsequent family fortune rests took place the second night in the New World. When Nonno got to the train station in Philadelphia he had the word W-Y-O-M-I-N-G block printed on a piece of paper just as he had seen it in the DeMille silent film. Overland passage by train cost far less than he imagined and after boarding, the scruffy Italian wayfarer slid his front-snap Gatsby cap over his eyes and tried to sleep…  “Wyoming!” shouted the conductor. Really? How long had he been asleep? It seemed that even with his rudimentary grasp of geography, a trip to Wyoming should have taken much longer. He got off the train. Thus, would my grandfather spend the next twenty-two years digging for anthracite in the mines of Wyoming, Pennsylvania alongside other men who had made similar journeys, whose dreams slowly died in the daily katabasis into the mines.  I will resist the temptation to check all the boxes of the monomyth because the value is diminished if too rigidly applied. However, we could make the case for Nonno’s “meeting of the goddess,” resulting in the heiros gamos (his marriage to the beautiful Michaelina Minicozzi) or the atonement with the father ( Nonno’s eldest son, Joseph, returned to Italy after the war to keep his father’s promise only to arrive two weeks after the old freight handler had passed away).  Long before Star Wars turned our attention to the hidden framework of the hero’s adventure, there were the Westerns with Wyoming, Montana, Utah, and the whole American southwest standing in for the eternal void of space, and populated by the same cast of archetypes, albeit armed with Colt .45’s instead of lightsabers. Campbell’s insights are great by virtue of their astonishing universality, equally applicable to an Achaean mariner washed up naked on a Phaeacian shore or an Italian laborer asleep in a Philadelphia lumber yard dreaming of Wyoming. MythBlast authored by: John Bonaduce, PhD , a seasoned writer for Norman Lear and for most of the major Hollywood studios (Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros, et al.) developed a profound interest in story structure beyond the commercial objectives of the industry. His exploration led him to conclude that much of what we call myth derives from a biological origin. This insight inspired his pursuit of deeper relationships between biology and narrative through his theory of Mythobiogenesis, which he explored in his dissertation at Pacifica Graduate Institute and was recognized as a “discovery” in the field of prenatal psychology by Dr. Thomas Verny. John was recently appointed to the editorial board of the Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health (JOPPPAH) where he advocates for an unrecognized level of human consciousness which exists at the border of biology and mythology. As a featured writer for the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s MythBlast, he passionately showcases Joseph Campbell’s enduring relevance to a modern audience. This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 4, and Pathways to Bliss. Latest Podcast In this episode we welcome Ben Katt. Ben has been helping people experience deep transformation and access lives of greater joy, compassion, and purpose for the past twenty years. His first book, The Way Home: Discovering the Hero’s Journey to Wholeness at Midlife, is a guidebook and memoir about the inner journey we all must embark on in order to live our fullest lives. He writes regularly about identity, purpose, creativity, and belonging in his STILL newsletter on Substack. He is a certified advanced meditation teacher with 1 Giant Mind, holds a Master of Divinity degree, and was an ordained minister for over a decade. Previously, he led The On Being Project’s work in supporting religious and spiritual leaders in social healing. In the conversation, Ben and Tyler Lapkin of the Joseph Campbell Foundation speak about Ben’s life, why he based his book around Campbell’s hero’s journey, what it means to have your heart, the necessity of following your weird, and why midlife is such an important crossroads for us all. To learn more about Ben and his book, visit https://www.benjaminkatt.com/ Listen Here This Week's Highlights "The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding . . . It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal — carries the cross of the redeemer — not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair." - The Hero With A Thousand Faces , 337 Kundalini Yoga: Solar & Lunar Energy Pathways (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

  • Through The Looking Glass

    I myself have been traveling around quite a bit, these years, from one college campus to another, and everywhere the first question asked me is, "Under what sign were you born?" The mysteries of the Tarot pack, the I Ching, and Transcendental Meditation . . . Well, all this is just the beginning, the first signaling of a dawning realization of the immanence of the occult, and of this as something important for our living.  ( Joseph Campbell , The Mythic Dimension , “The Occult in Myth & Literature," 260-261) "The occult": an emotionally charged term that evokes sinister associations, everything from fraudulent and greedy fortune tellers to satanic rituals, images reinforced in pulpits and on movie screens across the country . . . but is this the reality? Is the practice of occult arts––particularly popular forms of divination, including astrology, Tarot, and the I Ching––simply ignorant superstition? Do such arts represent an exercise in futility, an abdication of responsibility for one's own life? Can we make use of these forms of divination without feeling like we've been cast in a really bad, low-budget horror flick? Forms of divination have been practiced in all cultures. Whether a Roman auger examining the liver and entrails of a sacrificial ox, a Chaldean priest charting the stars, an Iroquois shaman taking note of a sudden shift in the flight of a bird, or Delphi's Pythia inhaling the fumes emanating from a cleft in the earth, each seeks information from elsewhere, a realm beyond the confines of one’s limited, waking consciousness. Oracles differ in many ways from the prophetic pronouncements of biblical traditions. They are often ambiguous––no clear direction in the "this is the way, walk ye therefore in it" sense of scripture. Nor does the outcome hinge on obedience or disobedience to the decrees of a specific deity.  I'll never forget the experience of going to Delphi in Greece … That is where the oracle, the prophetess, received inspiration in the fumes, the smoke coming up from the abyss, and she prophesied and gave statements of destiny. (Campbell, The Hero's Journey , 12) Not jeremiads delivered on behalf of a wrathful god, but statements of destiny. The future so conceived is not then determined by some external agency, but arises out of one's own inner nature, a reflection of the larger patterns present in nature itself. The word "occult" means "hidden" (sharing the same root as "occluded"); from this perspective oracles open a window on the "hidden unity beyond or informing the world of multiplicity and its phenomena" ( The Mythic Dimension , 262). They require not blind obedience, but open-minded reflection. This "hidden unity" is depicted differently depending on what form the oracle takes:  The seeker is supposed to look for some sort of correspondence between all this and his own case, the method of thought throughout being that of a broadly flung association of ideas. One has to feel, not think one's way into these secrets, letting each symbol grow into a cosmos of associated themes . . . (Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. II: Oriental Mythology , 413) Two people look at the same cloud but see different images, depending on how their individual imaginations engage that cloud; you see a unicorn, I see a castle. Neither is more right than the other––underneath it's still a cloud, after all. Similarly, in a Rorschach inkblot you may see a butterfly where I see a bat––again, no right or wrong answer, but the image one perceives offers clues as to how each engages reality. This especially holds for oracles.  Most forms of divination practiced today––whether consulting the stars, the Tarot, or the I Ching––offer a series of mythic images in combinations that mirror the present moment and correspond to those patterns in the human psyche that Jung terms "archetypes of the collective unconscious." These motifs are symbolic of experiences common to all humanity (birth, love, death, etc.). At their best, methods of divination provide a portal into the mythic imagination. In the words of Novalis, "The seat of the soul is there, where the outer and the inner worlds meet." As with any mythological system, we are presented with metaphor––but remember, metaphor does not mean false: myth as metaphor is a set of living symbols that pitch the individual past the confines of the personal ego into an experience of the transcendent.  Regardless of whether or not one is drawn to one or another of the many colorful forms of divination still practiced today, Joseph Campbell suggests the dramatic increase of interest in the oracular arts points to a growing recognition of the relationship between one's own inner hidden "occult" nature, and the world of nature outside oneself: We are now observing throughout our cultural world a resurgence of the cult of the immanence of the occult, within ourselves and within nature. The old Bronze Age realization of a micro-macrocosmic unity is returning, and everywhere all the old arts that were banished are coming back. ( The Mythic Dimension, " The Occult in Myth & Literature" 260) Joseph Campbell isn't proselytizing for "the occult," nor is he recommending we surrender reason and base all decision-making on tea leaves and the Tarot––but he does note that these means of divination can be valuable tools, like meditation, like dream work, like myth itself. Apart from the broad sweep of mythos, Campbell suggests this is "something important for our living" on a personal level. I suspect the real value of the experience lies in the opportunity afforded to re-imagine and mythologize one's own life. We live in a storied universe. Whether we know it or not, we are, indeed, the figures of myth.

  • Entering the Mythscape of Pan’s Labyrinth

    Spoiler alert and content warning: This MythBlast discusses details of the film Pan’s Labyrinth, a movie that contains great beauty and graphic violence. Pan’s Labyrinth is rated R. If I could wave a magic wand and invite Joseph Campbell over for dinner tonight, the instant he walked in the door I would sit him down to watch Guillermo del Toro’s film Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). No pleasantries, no chit-chat, no snacks except popcorn and soda, not until he sees the movie. I can already imagine the look on his face when young Ofelia circles down the spiral stone staircase into the realm of the Underground, when the woodland faun first shudders awake, when Ofelia sets out to complete harrowing fairytale tasks to prove her true identity. Set in rural Spain in 1944, Pan’s Labyrinth weaves imagery of wonder with images from history, recreating the early years of Franco’s fascist rule after the Spanish Civil War. The main character, Ofelia, hovers on the brink of adolescence. Her father died in the war, and her mother remarried a cold-blooded captain in Franco’s army who embodies the patriarchal brutality of the regime. Ofelia and her mother, who is pregnant with the stepfather’s child, move to a remote mill where the captain runs a command post dedicated to wiping out “underground” resistance rebels in the forested hills. But the forest holds a mythic Underground as well as a human one. Ofelia's initiation in Pan's Labyrinth Near the end of his life, in the companion book to his conversations with Bill Moyers, Campbell mused that movies might function as substitutes for the ritual re-enactments of myth that serve as initiation rites in other cultures, “except that we don’t have the same kind of thinking going into the production of a movie that goes into the production of an initiation ritual” (The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers 102). Maybe that was the case in the 1980s when Campbell and Moyers created The Power of Myth, but Pan’s Labyrinth presents exactly what Campbell describes: a young woman’s passage into adulthood as a mythic initiation into maturity. When Ofelia first arrives at the mill, she is an innocent with a free spirit and a fixation on fairy tales. Wearing a green dress, green coat, and green leather shoes, she follows a flying bug into the forest and then down into the Underground, where she meets the faun and undertakes the terrifying tasks that pit her against monsters of many kinds: a giant toad, a cadaverous child-killer with eyes in his hands, and worst of all, her own stepfather. From the toad she learns the power of trickery, from the cadaver she learns to follow her intuition, and from her stepfather she learns who she isn’t: she isn’t him. She is, instead, someone who will bleed and die to protect those who are weaker, rather than hurting them for her own supposed benefit. Pan’s Labyrinth presents exactly what Campbell describes: a young woman’s passage into adulthood as a mythic initiation into maturity. None of these tasks is easy. Initiation never is. But each task teaches Ofelia something vital, something imperative. By learning these lessons in emotionally charged, dangerous situations, she changes forever. She is initiated into a new way of being. In this context, the terms learning, initiation, and transformation are nearly interchangeable. The final scene makes this point by showing the new Ofelia now wearing blood-red: red coat, red shoes, and a dress embroidered with red flowers. Having sacrificed her innocence in her initiation out of virginal, vegetal, unconscious childhood, she steps into her true identity. The cool greenery of leaves blossoms into the brilliant flowers of her authentic, mature, passionate self. Relocating the sacred toward greater equality I grew up in a religion that valued purity, obedience, heaven, and men. Women were literally and spiritually subordinate, a word that means “below ordination.” Only men were ordained to religious authority, which meant there were no women in the room when men decided how to run things—from the smallest congregation all the way up to church headquarters—and for guidance, the men consulted scriptures full of overt and covert misogyny. Pan’s Labyrinth, on the other hand, values dirt, disobedience, earth, and women. For example, Ofelia gets covered in mud in her confrontation with the toad, while the most well-groomed person in the film is the fastidious, hollow-hearted captain. Ofelia learns to follow her intuition and conscience rather than blindly obeying outside forces. Instead of a distant heaven, the movie presents a majestic Underground Realm, an earth-centered image of the divinity beneath the everyday world containing a trinity of Father, Mother, and Holy Daughter. “You are not born of man,” the faun pointedly tells Ofelia (0:23:17), in a clear revision of the sexist Biblical phrase, “son of man.” Pan’s Labyrinth relocates the sacred away from patriarchy, thereby initiating the viewer into a spiritualized, co-creative vision of gender equality. Ofelia learns to follow her intuition and conscience rather than blindly obeying outside forces. Joseph Campbell taught at a progressive women’s college for thirty-eight years, from 1934-1972. Year after year, from the Great Depression through World War II, the post-war years, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War, Campbell inspired classrooms full of young women with the transformational possibilities of myth in a time when society hadn’t yet allowed them the right to hold credit cards. “All I can tell you about mythology,” he would say, “is what men have said and have experienced, and now women have to tell us from their point of view what the possibilities of the feminine future are” (Goddesses 263). Many women have accepted that challenge, before and after Campbell issued it, but what gives me even more hope for gender equality is when men imagine into and champion the experience of women, as del Toro does in Pan’s Labyrinth. With empathy and affection, the film portrays complex female characters, exposes the soul-violence of patriarchal oppression, and shows male characters who treat women as honored, beloved equals. Pan's Labyrinth and Campbell's four functions of myth In his interviews with Bill Moyers, Campbell said that the artist’s task is “the mythologization of the environment” (The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers 107). For Campbell, that would mean shaping some aspect of the world into a narrative, Spanish fascism under Franco for example, imbuing the narrative with wonder and awe, showing how to cope psychologically with the situation, and pointing to the mystery that lies just behind it. In other words, illustrating Campbell’s four functions of myth. Pan’s Labyrinth accomplishes exactly that. Sociologically, the film reveals the brutality of fascist oppression and the possibility of gender equality. Psychologically, Ofelia develops her intuition and conscience. Cosmologically, an ensouled natural world of beauty and vitality encompasses the built world. Metaphysically, everything springs from the animating source of the Underground Realm, an enchanted font of earth energy that gives rise to all and imbues the world with magic. The faun embodies an especially poignant image of sacred, animate earth. With woody limbs and curving horns, he serves as an earthen-animal-human shaman-priest, facilitating Ofelia’s initiation. Del Toro plays a similar role, facilitating the initiation viewers experience. Everything springs from the animating source of the Underground Realm, an enchanted font of earth energy that gives rise to all and imbues the world with magic. When the movie ends, my imaginary dinner party would move to the kitchen table. Because I have a magic wand, I might as well invite del Toro over as well. I’d conjure spaghetti with homemade tomato sauce, fresh bread, olive oil for dipping, and wine to wash it all down. For dessert, walnut brownies with a glossy frosting of melted chocolate and butter—anything to keep my guests talking. So much has happened since The Power of Myth and Pan’s Labyrinth were released. I’d love to hear what the creators of these works have to say about our current mythic moment. MythBlast authored by: Joanna Gardner, PhD, is a writer, mythologist, and magical realist whose research and teaching focus on creativity, goddesses, and wonder tales. Joanna serves as director of marketing and communications for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and is the lead author of the Foundation's book Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide. She is also an adjunct professor in Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Mythological Studies program, and a co-founder of the Fates and Graces, hosting webinars and workshops for mythic readers and writers. To read Joanna's blog and additional publications, you are most cordially invited to visit her website at joannagardner.com. This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 3, and Goddesses. Latest Podcast Joseph Campbell speaks at Cooper Union in New York in 1967 on the many images of the divine mystery -- a topic he famously wrote about in his book series, The Masks of God. Host, Brad Olson, offers an introduction and commentary after the talk in this pilot episode of the Pathways podcast. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "What we are taught today mainly has to do with economics and politics. We are not nurturing our spiritual side. So we are left with this void. It's the job of the artist to create these new myths. Myths come from the artists." -Joseph Campbell - Myth and Meaning, 177 Living in Accord With Nature (see more videos)

  • Monstrous Weather: Meeting the Sublime in the Sky

    I will never forget the feelings of anticipation I experienced as I was growing up in Florida when June approached every year. Any given summer day would give a chance for nature to unleash thunderstorms. The Florida peninsula’s geography creates bicoastal sea breezes that, combined with high humidity, regularly spawn intense tropical deluges. Never mind that summer also signals the official hurricane season, generating huge cyclones in the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean; these localized storms, with frequent lightning, slashing and heavy downpours, and even occasional hail and tornadoes, force residents to always “keep a weather eye out.” So much was I entranced by the power of these sky phenomena that I seriously considered a career in meteorology—that is, until I began the study of physics and found out we didn’t get along well. My love affair with extreme weather lasted far beyond my decision about college major and career. As the technology to track and predict storms improved, so did the number of people with video equipment recording them passively—or actively chasing them. I couldn’t get enough of watching both hurricane and tornado footage, at first in documentaries, then on The Weather Channel, and later via YouTube. But I never quite understood my fascination with and attraction for them, especially given the destructive consequences of these storms in terms of both lives and property…until I learned about “the sublime.” The sublime evolution The concept of the sublime has morphed over the years since its first major introduction in the Greek work On the Sublime, written around the first century C.E. by an unknown author referred to as Pseudo-Longinus. In its most general definition, the sublime is the quality ascribed to something that induces feelings of grandeur or elevation. From the 18th century onward, the sublime evolved to be more descriptive of natural phenomena. It also became distinct from mere beauty in that it included feelings of terror and awe. Beauty, though wonderful, seems more possessable and comforting; the sublime cannot be controlled and thus invokes some fear. In his The Power of Myth conversation with Bill Moyers called “Masks of Eternity,” Joseph Campbell discusses the relationship between epiphanies of the Divine and our aesthetic encounters. Moyers contends that this must be a beautiful experience, but Campbell counters, “I tell you, there’s another emotion associated with art which is not of the beautiful, but of the sublime. And what we call monsters can be seen as sublime. And they represent powers too great for the mere forms of life to survive” (36:57-37:22). Moyers wrestles in this moment between the ethical judgment of beauty as good and the monstrous as bad. Shouldn’t the Eternal (behind the “mask”) be only good? Shouldn’t the Eternal (behind the “mask”) be only good? The word sublime still evokes the connotations of both allure and excellence, and the way in which Campbell elucidates it—drawn primarily from Arthur Schopenhauer—seems jarring at first. However, just as in Robert Fagles’ translation of The Iliad the old chiefs of Troy describe Helen oxymoronically as, “Beauty! Terrible beauty!” (3.190), I began to appreciate this more complex and even paradoxical definition of sublime when I began to contemplate my love of storms. If someone were to say, “The weather is beautiful,” most people not only normally think of pleasing qualities (comfortable temperatures, clear skies, etc.) but also a sense of calm, i.e. no ominous displays of the overwhelming power of nature. In its deeper, philosophical sense, saying “The weather is sublime” would have to include not just unpleasant qualities but forces that would be dangerous. In fact, when we call someone “a force of nature,” we mean having a relentless and unstoppable character. And sustained, intense power often becomes life-threatening. Fear and wonder in the wind Witnessing a thunderstorm, a tornado, or a hurricane that instills this realization of how helpless we are in the face of nature can foster a sense of the overwhelming power of Divinity. Moreover, it can deflate our exaggerated sense of self. “Somehow with the diminishment of your own ego,” Campell further explains to Moyers, “the consciousness expands. This is the experience of the sublime…of tremendous power and energy” (37:51-38:08). When the ego senses a threat to survival, the most common human reaction is fear, and anything fear-invoking is labeled as bad. But don’t humans also seek out fear—from horror films to roller coasters? Something in that feeling of ego diminishment and the contact with uncontrollable energy beckons us, and Campbell affirms that it can give us a peek behind one of the masks of eternity. So despite my moral misgivings about enjoying (and sometimes even wishing for) weather events that may cause losses of property and life, this rapture at the sublime is, as Campbell offers, “transcendent of ethics, no didactics.” The very fact that nature can and does destroy helps convey the sublime feeling. Likewise, the dozens of amateur videos I have watched of people filming tornadoes, some within hundreds of yards (which many commenters decry as suicidal and foolish), further indicates the compelling influence of the sublime on people. In these types of phenomena, Campbell suggests in “Masks of Eternity” that “the monster comes through,” something that “breaks all your standards for harmony and ethical conduct” (38:42-38:54), including self-preservation and -protection. I sometimes look back on the twists and turns of my life and wonder what kind of career I might have enjoyed had I pushed through my fear of the study of physics to become a meteorologist. Naturally, the job of storm chaser comes to mind, gathering data on severe weather from the closest of perspectives—on the ground, at least. And while the idea of that activity being “in the name of science” assuages my need for the lost career path to be logical, I can’t help but feel deep down that chasing storms for me would also be chasing the sublime. That realization makes me feel much more connected to humanity than having a purely rational reason. MythBlast authored by: Scott Neumeister is a literary scholar, author, TEDx speaker, and mythic pathfinder from Tampa, Florida, where he earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of South Florida in 2018. His specialization in multiethnic American literature and mythology comes after careers as an information technology systems engineer and a teacher of English and mythology at the middle school and college levels. Scott coauthored Let Love Lead: On a Course to Freedom with Gary L. Lemons and Susie Hoeller, and he has served as a facilitator for the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Myth and Meaning book club at Literati. This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 6, and The Hero's Journey Latest Podcast In this episode, we welcome Dr. Ben Rogers. Dr. Rogers is an Assistant Professor of Management & Organization at Boston College. He the author of a groundbreaking research paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which reveals how framing our own lives a Hero’s Journey is associated with psychological benefits such as enhanced well-being, greater life satisfaction, a sense of flourishing, and reduced depression. “The way that people tell their life story shapes how meaningful their lives feel,” he says. “And you don’t have to live a super heroic life or be a person of adventure—virtually anyone can rewrite their story as a Hero’s Journey.” In the episode, JCF'S John Bucher speaks with Ben about Ben’s research, why Campbell’s Hero’s Journey structure is such a powerful context for storytelling, and how adopting the narrative structure of the hero's journey can enrich our lives with greater meaning and sense of fulfillment. Listen Here This Week's Highlights " Cosmic space and great distances may be experienced as sublime; also, detonations of prodigious power. If beauty so heightens our sense of life that esthetics may be termed “applied physiology,” the sublime, transcending physical definitions, suggests magnitudes exceeding life; not refuting, but augmenting life." -- Joseph Campbell The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, 92 The Heavenly Moment (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

  • The Hour Yields

    I don’t remember who called with the news that my father had died. I don’t remember the conversation. All I remember is the daze in which I found myself putting on a coat, driving to a trailhead, hiking to a cold lookout over the Rio Grande valley. On the far side of that vast earthen bowl, the slump-shouldered Sangre de Christo mountain range seemed to gaze down into the valley, too. The river etched across the bottom of the bowl as a distant line of bare cottonwood trees, their leaves fallen for winter. Afternoon light tinted the landscape ocher and rose. I sat down on a flat tuff rock formed ages ago from volcanic ash. The mountains were still. The mesas, still. The rock, still. My body, still, for the first time since I received the call — But stillness is not a literal, factual thing. In The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Joseph Campbell reminds us that the notion of a “still point” doesn’t exist in the physical universe (3). In the field of time and space, there is no cessation of energy, nor any literal, irreducible point. And yet, the cosmos has contrived to create creatures who experience stillness and pointness. The still point is a subjective event, not an objective reality. And so, as Campbell says, anywhere can be a still point (4). I would add that any-when can be a still point, too. We conjure it ourselves. Psyche and imagination collaborate to create still points in our lives — and in myth. Speaking of Pysche, remember that moment when Psyche first sees her husband by the light of the lamp? She gasps, time stretches, and Pysche falls forever in love with Love, as one does when one marries Eros. Then the sizzling lamp oil lands on Eros’s shoulder and the action resumes. Remember the moment when the Minotaur and Theseus catch sight of each other in the torchlit center of the labyrinth? The shock of the other’s muscular presence, the instant sizing up, the mutual rush of adrenaline right before they spring at each other to kill or be killed. Demeter realizing that Persephone is gone — gone, leaving the Great Mother without her child. These mythic still points burst with so much emotion that time cannot contain them. The clock stops, the moment opens, the hour yields to make way for hearts that swell past the edges of anything they’d felt or known before into experience so new that their souls must rearrange to make room. The still point follows the last thing and precedes the next thing. It is the aperture of perception when past and future both hold the baton of our awareness. It reverberates with memory and foreknowledge, echoing into eternity. In this imaginal when-where, the tyranny of duality relaxes its grip. The still point exists between, outside, and all around our paired modes of consciousness like, for example, past and future, hidden and revealed, life and death. The still point happens when modes of knowing meet and mingle. They amaze each other, change each other. Both of them realize that they aren’t separate at all but instead, they exist within each other. Then a new thing emerges and consciousness expands, growing its field of possibility to include more than it was able to before. So the still point turns out to be more verb than noun, more spiral than dot, more flow than stasis, more experience than object, more awareness than location. But what is the point of this elusive point? The still point is the when-where in which we notice. Love. Fury. Awe. Campbell cites Novalis: “The seat of the soul is there, where the outer and inner worlds meet.” (Inner Reaches, 5) The still point happens when we occupy the seat of the soul. Every moment of existence offers our consciousness and imagination a new point of view, a new vantage. The ever-present, ever-available still point is the when-where in which relationship happens. — And so, when your father dies, you hover in the still point between his life and his death. Between your family’s past and future. Between your life before and your life to come. You float at the threshold between farewell and regret. You mourn what never was but might have been. You become the silent sky that blankets the desert valley. You become the valley. You become the rock that reaches down into earth, its back to the sky. You sense the ease with which earth and air welcome him back into themselves, no matter how he might or might not have lived, no matter how you might or might not have responded or understood. All of it was a gift — all of it, and you gather him into yourself at the exact same moment that you let him go.

  • Myth Comes for the Archbishop

    Joseph Campbell liked to say that mythology may be defined as “other people's religion,” a way of dismissing foreign orthodoxies as fiction while recognizing our own as truth. For Archbishop Juan de Zumárraga, the gods and goddesses of 16th Century Mexico were mere fictions, mythology at its most pernicious. Though he seemed to have exercised genuine pastoral concern for his illiterate flock, Zumárraga would not have gained his high rank by being soft on paganism. Indeed, as a former inquisitor, he demanded strict obedience from his native Nahua congregations and once even ordered the execution of a heretic. Most people have some familiarity with the historical and a-historical events associated with Our Lady of Guadalupe but may have forgotten Zumárraga’s role in the story: A peasant named Juan Diego starts tripping on a vision of Mary, mother of Christ, who appears uncharacteristically dressed as a native of Juan’s own Nahuatl tribe, whose skin is dark, like his, and who speaks in his indigenous language. But the archbishop, Zumárraga, demands proof that a miracle has taken place in the desert. The proof, as many will recall, comes in the nature of a two-part miracle. First, Our Lady produces fresh Spanish roses, a clear impossibility since it is the dead of winter. The second part of the miracle has sustained the cult for the last half-millennium. Contravening the laws of nature, an image of mysterious origin appears on the rough maguey cloth of the peasant tilma worn by Juan that day, a visual reproduction of the very woman Juan encountered at the top of the hill. The image is rich in mythological symbolism but, at its core, it appears to be a kind of self-portrait of Mary, the mother of God. Thus, the Archbishop is convinced of the supramundane provenance of the picture and the rest is the History of Mexico. So goes the story. The problem is this: The Archbishop never publicly endorsed the devotion of Our Lady of Guadalupe, never openly recalled his December encounter with a peasant named Juan Diego and seems to have had nothing but disdain for popular devotions based on miracle accounts. His words, years after the “miracle:” You ought not, brethren, give way to the thoughts and blasphemies of the world, which tempts souls with the desire to see by marvel and miracles what they believe by faith...The redeemer of the world no longer wants miracles to be worked because they are not necessary, because our holy faith is so well established by so many thousands of miracles we have in the old and New Testaments. (Pool, qt. Zumárraga, 35) Zumárraga would have probably been reluctant to recognize the validity of the apparition because of its problematic location. Tepeyac wasn’t just a grassy knoll outside Mexico City. It was the holy precinct of Tonantzin, the Great Mother, the snake woman, a deity sometimes called Coatlicue (serpent skirt), sometimes Cihuacoatl (woman serpent). Called by any name, one stands out: Goddess. She takes the pronoun thou. Tonantzin is a Goddess and belongs to that sacred sorority which Campbell had reduced to a familiar litany, one he loved to recite: “In Classical myths, she appears as Aphrodite, Artemis, Demeter, Persephone, Athena, Hera, Hecate, the Three Graces, the Nine Muses, the Furies, and so on. In Egypt she appears as Isis, in old Babylon as Ishtar, in Sumeria as Inanna; among the western Semites she’s Astarte. It’s the same goddess, and the first thing to realize is that she is a total goddess and as such has associations over the whole field of the culture system” (Goddess: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, p. 22). Patriarchies often seem to be natural-born goddess hunters and Western civilization has waged an on-again, off-again war against the Goddess—by whatever name—for at least 4000 years. One thinks of Marduk dethroning his own grandmother, Tiamat, so that a panel of male deities might run the Babylonian heavens as they see fit. Or the Indo-European warlords subjugating peaceful, Neolithic villages of Old Europe and eliminating its goddess cults as they encounter them. Or Israel, fighting a war against the “Abomination,” their preferred title for the goddess. Campbell notes that “when the Semites moved in as conquerors, then, they dislodged deities to make way for their own…” (The Power of Myth, p. 55). By the 1200’s, the centuries-long push to eliminate the feminine aspect of the divine throughout Europe had resulted in a kind of sacred subterfuge. The Goddess wasn’t gone. Not at all. She was just hunkering down in her somewhat reduced role as the mother of Jesus. “The goddess comes back into the Christian, anti-Goddess tradition by way of Mary, Mother of God, and there has been, particularly in Catholicism, a steady magnification of the Virgin from the fifth century A.D. to the present” (Goddesses, 350). Despite the sentimental role history has assigned to him, Zumárraga probably had doubts about Guadalupe for the rest of his life suspecting that this “Mary” was nothing more than Tonantzin in disguise. Here is a report which probably came across his desk which he probably endorsed. Near the mountains are three or four places where they used to offer very solemn sacrifices, and they would come to them from very distant lands. One of these is here in Mexico [City], where there is a hill that is called Tepeyacac [sic] and the Spaniards call Tepeaquilla and is now called Our Lady of Guadalupe. In this place they used to have a temple dedicated to the mother of the gods, whom they called Tonantzin, which means “our mother.” …Now that the church of Our Lady of Guadalupe has been built there, they also call her [or it] Tonantzin… It is something that should be remedied because the proper name for the Mother of God, Our Lady, is not Tonantzin but Dios inantzin. This appears to be an invention of the devil to cover over idolatry under the ambiguity of this name Tonantzin” (Stafford Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797, p. 78). Mythology is other people’s religion. It is always an archbishop’s job to know the difference and so, just in case there was any ambiguity, a 1694 episcopal edict was read publicly at the church of Guadalupe forbidding all associations with former religious practices at the site so that “no remnant of heresy or error should remain in the land… not even superstition of the former heathenism that had its adoration on the hill of Guadalupe” (Poole, 155). Five centuries later, history has rendered its verdict. Tonantzin is virtually unknown, all former rites are forgotten, and meanwhile some twenty million pilgrims have annually visited the shrine at Guadalupe for the merest glimpse of the famous pictograph hanging in a frame above the altar outside of Mexico City. Goddess or not, the woman who brought roses to a recent convert to Catholicism accomplished for the natives of Mexico what Yahweh accomplished for the people of Israel at Sinai.  The Hebrew God conferred upon his chosen people an historical identity in the form of ten written principles or commandments by which they were to define themselves as a culture. Our Lady of Guadalupe arrived on Tepeyac one brisk December morning in 1531 for the same purpose, leaving behind neither treatise nor tract, conveying the birth of a new people wordlessly in the language of pictograph--the textile as text. In the pursuit of truth over fiction, the inescapable theme of Tepeyac is sometimes overlooked or ignored altogether. Quite simply, “The lesson taught by Guadalupe was the value of the natives as persons” (Poole, 165). The message falls short of the miraculous but must have appeared so to Juan Diego when he was admitted seeing the Archbishop of Mexico without an appointment. The Virgin had made herself visible to Juan. In doing so, an indigenous people became visible to those who preferred not to see them. MythBlast authored by: John Bonaduce, PhD, a seasoned writer for Norman Lear and for most of the major Hollywood studios (Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros, et al.) developed a profound interest in story structure beyond the commercial objectives of the industry. His exploration led him to conclude that much of what we call myth derives from a biological origin. This insight inspired his pursuit of deeper relationships between biology and narrative through his theory of Mythobiogenesis, which he explored in his dissertation at Pacifica Graduate Institute and was recognized as a “discovery” in the field of prenatal psychology by Dr. Thomas Verny. John was recently appointed to the editorial board of the Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health (JOPPPAH) where he advocates for an unrecognized level of human consciousness which exists at the border of biology and mythology. As a featured writer for the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s MythBlast, he passionately showcases Joseph Campbell’s enduring relevance to a modern audience. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to John J. Bonaduce, 12437 Sylvan St., No. Hollywood, CA 91606 or jbonaduce52@gmail.com This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 3, and Goddesses. Latest Podcast In this episode, we are joined by Trudy Goodman. One of the earliest teachers of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Trudy taught with its creator, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn at the MBSR clinic at University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1983. In 1995 she co-founded, and is still the Guiding Teacher at the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, the first center in the world dedicated to exploring the synergy of these two disciplines. She was an early adopter and now smiles seeing mindfulness everywhere. After becoming a mother, Trudy was fascinated by human development, and studied w Jean Piaget in Geneva, Carol Gilligan, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Jerome Bruner at Harvard. Trudy co-founded a school for distressed children, practicing mindfulness-based psychotherapy with children, parents, teenagers, couples and individuals. She enjoys the company of kids of all ages and has kept her own child-like wonder and curiosity about the world she loves. Since 1974, Trudy has devoted much of her life to practicing Buddhist meditation with great Asian and Western teachers in the Zen and Theravada traditions. From 1991 to 1998, Trudy was a resident Zen teacher at the Cambridge Buddhist Association. She then moved to Los Angeles and founded InsightLA, the first center in the world to combine training in both Buddhist Insight (Vipassana) Meditation and non-sectarian mindfulness and compassion practices. Trudy has always been a connector of people, spiritual traditions, cultures, and communities, carrying her Zen delight across the divides. Trudy has trained a new generation of teachers, mindfulness humanitarians who make mindfulness and meditation classes available for professional caregivers, social justice and environmental activists, first responders, teachers, and unsung individuals working on the front lines of suffering – all done with tenderness, courage and a simple commitment to holding hands together. Trudy conducts retreats and workshops worldwide – from the hallowed halls of Mazu Daoyi’s Ch’an monastery in China, to leading trainings on the ground in the intense heat of Darfuri refugee camps in Eastern Chad on the Sudanese border. She has loved it all. Trudy is still creating new projects and good trouble wherever she can. Details to be found in her forthcoming memoir! In the conversation today we discuss her life, meditation, mindfulness, and her perspective on the famous Campbell quote, "Participate Joyfully in the sorrows of the world". To learn more about Trudy, visit: https://www.trudygoodman.com/ Listen Here This Week's Highlights "In Classical myths, she appears as Aphrodite, Artemis, Demeter, Persephone, Athena, Hera, Hecate, the Three Graces, the Nine Muses, the Furies, and so on. In Egypt she appears as Isis, in old Babylon as Ishtar, in Sumer as Inanna; among the western Semites she’s Astarte. It’s the same goddess, and the first thing to realize is that she is a total goddess and as such has associations over the whole field of the culture system. In later periods these different associations became specified and separated off into various specialized goddesses." -Joseph Campbell - Goddesses, 22 Psyche & Symbol: The Origin of Elementary Ideas (see more videos)

  • Rewilding the Waste Land

    Emerging from his castle in search of a quest, the young king Amfortas—shouting his war cry, “Amour!”—sees another knight, a pagan, emerging from the forest. The two immediately level their lances and charge: the pagan knight is killed, but his lance slips, castrating Amfortas. The injury is so grievous that the king’s impotence soon spreads to the land around his castle, creating a Waste Land where nothing will thrive. In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell tells Bill Moyers this version of the Grail King legend, as written by Wolfram von Eschenbach in his 13th century poem, Parzifal. Campbell offers some guidance to understanding von Eschenbach’s telling, most notably including the distinction of the second knight’s pagan identity: He was a person from the suburbs of Eden. He was regarded as a nature man, and on the head of his lance was written the word “Grail.” That is to say, nature intends the grail. Spiritual life is the bouquet of natural life, not a supernatural thing imposed upon it. And so the impulses of nature are what give authenticity to life, not obeying rules [that] come from a supernatural authority—that’s the sense of the Grail. (15:20-15:57) Medieval Christians saw spirit and nature as inherently at odds; to triumph over nature was to triumph spiritually. Von Eschenbach’s version of the Grail King legend claims that this division, rather than strengthening the spiritual, has damned both. The king and the land need a savior—although he may not look like a hero, that savior is Parzifal, the compassionate fool, who heals by asking the right question: “What ails thee, Uncle?” This simple act of compassion begins closing that severing wound. “The key to the Grail,” Campbell once wrote, “is compassion, suffering with, feeling another’s sorrow as if it were your own. The one who finds the dynamo of compassion is the one who’s found the Grail” (A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living 53). Authenticity can only come from the realignment of spirit and nature. Campbell often uses the concept of “authenticity” to describe humanity’s balanced and ideal state. Authenticity can only come from the realignment of spirit and nature. Without it, he says, we are left with this “enchantment of sterility”: The Waste Land. “In the Waste Land,” he writes, “life is a fake. People are living in a manner that is not that of their nature; they are living according to a system of rules.” A pall, cast over society as a whole; a spell that needs breaking. The Waste Land, then, is the land of people living inauthentic lives, doing what they think they must do to live, not spontaneously in the affirmation of life, but dutifully, obediently, and even grudgingly, because that is the way people are living. That is what T. S. Eliot saw in the Waste Land of the twentieth century; and that is what Wolfram von Eschenbach—Eliot’s model—saw in the Waste Land of the thirteenth. (The Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth 169-70) In another essay, “Our Notions of God,” Campbell connects this concept to the most fundamental of human experiences, and one at the core of the Grail legend: love. What, we may ask, is an authentic marriage? It is a mystery in which two bodies become one flesh; it is not a negotiation in which two bank accounts merge into one. (Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor 23) Parzifal was written at a time when troubadours of early medieval Europe were beginning to weave an image of courtly love and drive a return to the romantic. This distinction between a marriage of love and compassion—an authentic one—and a marriage of business for convenience, strategy, or material gain, nevertheless resonates today. This type of authentic marriage has been out of reach for most of humanity for nearly all of history, and remains so for many. In the West, “spirit” has long been synonymous with “the Church,” our own limiting wound still in need of healing. The concept of two people marrying for love alone remains a revolutionary one, even centuries later, because it hinges on the wild idea of compassionate and egalitarian partnership. In cultures that are examining their collective view of marriage, things are changing: Young people are waiting longer to get married, but also stay married at a higher rate. Wedding ceremonies themselves have become more secular and more varied, taking place not only in churches but on beaches and backyards. Couples may keep the old traditions that resonate, then add new traditions alongside them, reflecting an organic ebb and flow as they mold their ritual to resemble the life they want to lead together. The secret to rewilding marriage lies in returning it to the lovers. The spiritual and the natural, given space and compassion, are entwining again. Successful marriage is leading innovative lives together, being open, non-programmed. It’s a free fall: how you handle each new thing as it comes along. As a drop of oil on the sea, you must float, using intellect and compassion to ride the waves. (A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living 47) MythBlast authored by: Gabrielle Basha is a writer, illustrator, and educator based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is a working associate for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and a member of the executive communications team at the Wikimedia Foundation. In addition to an informal yet life-long study of where pop culture meets folklore, Gabrielle holds a BFA in art history and illustration and an MFA in creative writing, both from Lesley University. This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 5, and Romance of the Grail Latest Podcast In this episode we welcome Chris Vogler. Chris is a Hollywood development executive, screenwriter, author and educator. He is best known for working with Disney and for his screenwriting guide, The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers. Chris was inspired by the writings of Joseph Campbell, particularly The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He used Campbell's work to create a 7-page company memo for Hollywood screenwriters, A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces which he later developed into The Writer's Journey. He has since spun off his techniques into worldwide masterclasses. In the conversation, John Bucher of the Joseph Campbell Foundation speaks with Chris about his life, his work, the Hero’s Journey, the art of storytelling, and Joseph Campbell. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "What, we may ask, is an authentic marriage? It is a mystery in which two bodies become one flesh; it is not a negotiation in which two bank accounts merge into one.' -- Joseph Campbell,  Thou Art That, 23 The Goddess Embodied (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

  • Each Enters the Forest on Their Own Terms

    On a journey to a cave in the midst of the Belizean forest, I lost my way. Mesmerized by the lush surroundings, I fell behind the procession. I looked ahead, and no one was in front of me. Alone, my heart started racing in fear. I did not know where I was or how to find my way out. In myth, the forest is an unknown terrain that is both dangerous and transformative. Adventures lead heroines and heroes into the forest, and few leave unchanged. In Wolfram Von Eschenbach’s Parzival, one could argue that the forest is itself a character in the story. Parzival spends his childhood in the forest, born to a mother who has renounced society. And once Parzival establishes himself as a knight, he returns to the forest in search of his mother, which leads him to the Grail Castle—the adventure that is his destiny. The Grail Castle is hidden in the forest. Others could walk right past it and never know it was there. Thus, one must gain the perception to see that which the forest hides. This magical space presents itself when the seeker is ready. Parzival, proving himself a worthy knight, is granted the ability not only to see the Grail Castle but to cross the threshold into its magical domain. Within its walls, the Holy Grail nourishes all inhabitants with the sustenance they desire. However, Parzival soon realizes that the Grail King is wounded, and so too is the land he presides over. The pinnacle of Parzival's quest is saving the wounded Grail King and the wasteland. When the grande procession brings Parzival to the Grail King, he is moved by the king’s suffering. His intuition tells him to ask about the king’s ailment, but he has been told by his mentor that it is improper to ask such questions. Parzival has to choose between his inner knowing and society’s expectation of him as an honorable knight. Maintaining his societal image wins the debate, and Parzival remains silent. This decision is a grave omission, and the Grail Castle, with all its bounty, disappears. In failing to ask about the Grail King's ailment, Parzival fails his quest. He offends the Grail King, and, more importantly, he betrays his own soul. Because of his neglect to follow his intuition, Parzival is shunned from King Arthur’s court. Eschenbach’s story then shows a connection between one’s societal duty to the community and one’s inner duty to the soul. When one is sacrificed, the other suffers as well. It is as if we lose everything when we lose our own integrity, even our status in society. Parzival is driven solely by societal expectations of him, and thus, he is out of alignment with who he truly is. The Forest Adventurous Failing the quest enrages Parzival, and he expresses his hatred of the cultural systems that have guided him to this moment. Determined to right this wrong, he returns to the forest. In Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth, Joseph Campbell refers to Parzival’s return to the forest as the Forest Adventurous (58). This adventure is not merely walking into a wooded area; it is the act of entering a space of not knowing with the openness necessary for personal transformation. Each person enters the forest on their own terms. It is a magical space where Parzival searches within himself for his own answers, not the ones he has been told. Having found societal success, he is now embarking on a spiritual quest, what Campbell calls the “dark woods of the soul” (63). Social opinions and societal norms often compromise and limit the authenticity that drives one's life. The spiritual adventure requires that Parzival determine for himself the driving force in his life. Campbell states that the “forest brings forth our own world” (58). All the things we find therein are of our own making, so “If you hate, hate is going to come to you. If you love, love is going to come to you” (62). The forest reflects Parzival’s inner world. His contempt for the societal ideals that shaped him shows up as other knights whom he engages in combat. Eventually, he realizes that he is fighting his own blood. He is fighting himself. Society taught Parzival some of his greatest strengths: the fearlessness with which he enters a fight, his prioritization of his duty to society above all else, and his refusal to allow desires to consume him. And yet, Parzival lacks the knowledge of when to release these societal ideals for the greater power of his inner authenticity. The Power of Love For Parzival and the Arthurian romances, love binds all things together. It is the life force that animates the world. The forest teaches Parzival to trust this life force. He learns that to heal the land, his actions need to be grounded in love. Parzival spends five years wandering through the forest to earn a second chance to prove himself to the Grail King, a feat he was told was impossible. But, as Campbell tells us, “Through your own integrity, you evoke your destiny, which is a destiny that never existed before” (79). Driven by the force of love, Parzival now knows his purpose, both socially and spiritually, and therefore evokes his destiny without fear. Now that he is ready, figures begin to appear in the forest to guide Parzival back to the Grail Castle. Upon his presentation to the Grail King for a second time, Parzival asks, “What ails thee?” And this seemingly simple question, asked from a source of love, heals the Grail King and the land. It is such a compelling idea—curiosity centered in compassion heals. Eschenbach’s Parzival shows how vital curiosity is to the human endeavor, in our societies and in our own psychology. From a centered space of compassionate listening, asking someone what ails them can be a transformational question. The text seems to tell us that conscious curiosity is capable of healing not only those we love but also the world in which we live. As for my own journey into the Belizean forest, I reunited with my group—eventually. And while I observed a multitude of sites that day, one of the most profound takeaways at the time was to get comfortable with feeling lost. Life’s unknown terrain, the Forest Adventurous, is terrifying and transformative. Getting lost is an essential part of finding our way. Life’s unknown terrain, the Forest Adventurous, is terrifying and transformative. Getting lost is an essential part of finding our way. If the path before us is clear, someone else has paved the path. This is completely counterintuitive to my own sense of stability. I want everything laid out before me, with mile markers corresponding to the map in my hands. But to evoke one’s destiny and feel the heartbeat of the life force—the love that animates all things—I find that not knowing what comes next is essential. Self-discovery outside the bounds of social constructions means we are in uncharted territory, wandering until a path presents itself. Developing the capacity to step into unknown terrain and consciously maintain a space of not knowing is a muscle I continue to stretch and grow. Eventually, the love that binds all things pulls me into its animating force, and another journey begins on the path less traveled. MythBlast authored by: Stephanie Zajchowski, PhD is a mythologist and writer based in Texas. She serves as the Director of Operations for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and is a contributing author of Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide. Stephanie is also a co-founder of the Fates and Graces, hosting webinars and workshops for mythic readers and writers. Her work focuses on the intersection of mythology, religion, and women’s studies. For more information, visit stephaniezajchowski.com This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 5, and Romance of the Grail Latest Podcast In this episode, originally released in May 2023, JCF's John Bucher speaks with Elise Loehnen. Elise is a writer, editor, and podcast host who lives in Los Angeles. She is the host of Pulling the Thread, a podcast focused on pulling apart the stories we tell about who we are—and then putting those threads back together. Ultimately Elise is a seeker and synthesizer, pulling together wisdom traditions, cultural history, and a deep knowledge of healing modalities to unlock new ways to contextualize who we are and why we’re here. She’s also the author of the upcoming, On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good (May ‘23, Dial Press/PRH). In this conversation, John and Elise discuss consciousness, what it means to be good, and of course...Joseph Campbell. To find out more about Elise visit: https://www.eliseloehnen.com/ Listen Here This Week's Highlights "You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there's a way or path, it is someone else's path; each human being is a unique phenomenon." -- Joseph Campbell,  Pathways to Bliss, xxvi Parzival: A Tale with Many Tellings (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

  • Meditation in a Former Chapel

    On my first day of graduate school I became aware that the auditorium in which we gathered had formerly been a church. Despite efforts to secularize the place, a clear liturgical signature remained: a recessed marble basin for holy water, dry now; a choir loft, this day serving as a station for a PowerPoint projector and a spot light; three marble steps leading to an elevated stage where an altar used to be; and, if memory serves, an emptied tabernacle. God’s house minus God. It reminds me of Joseph Campbell. He loved sacred space. But he very much resisted the idea that any one version of divinity should take up residence in it. In The Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living we meet the professor as he presented himself at Esalen in a series of workshops, drawing upon a lifetime of observations about the nature of the sacred. Cathedrals and stupas were of equal interest to him and he found value in traditions outwardly opposed, even antagonistic to one another. That’s his offense actually. Orthodoxy prefers you do not favorably compare its praxis to some other praxis. Orthodoxy recoils at the camaraderie of faiths and prefers you come after them, guns blazing. Campbell, genial and wise, would never do that. Campbell’s instinct is not to desecrate but rather to expand the temple precinct until it includes the world. This instinct, present from the beginning of his career on some level, found lyrical expression the night he turned his eyes to the heavens and saw Apollo—not the god, the rocket. The moon landing did not change Campbell, it changed us. Campbell merely noticed. Having soared beyond thought into boundless space, circled many times the arid moon, and begun their long return: how welcome a sight, [the astronauts] said, was the beauty of their goal, this planet Earth, “like an oasis in the desert of infinite space!” Now there is a telling image: this earth—the one oasis in all space, an extraordinary kind of sacred grove, as it were, set apart for the rituals of life; and not simply one part or section of this earth, but the entire globe now a sanctuary, a set-apart Blessed Place. (293) When Mohammed cleansed the Ka’bah of idols he was expressing a distrust of all representations of the divine. Campbell’s like that but in reverse. He loves all the images. If you had the good fortune to attend one of Campbell’s public lectures or if you have seen them in video format, you know that he relied heavily on accompanying slides to augment his lectures. Imagery brought his presentations alive but each came with a warning worthy of Mohammed. “Beholding God—God with characteristics—is the final wisp of ignorance,” he wrote. (114) The idea is to disengage from representations, to shun visual shorthand of the ineffable. The idea that one “beholds” God is actually a disaster in Campbell’s thinking. It is the “final barrier” encountered by the kundalini who has reached the sixth cakra. Any god you have been meditating on or have been taught to revere is the god that will be seen here. This is the highest obstacle for the complete yogi… On the brink of illumination, the old ways are very seductive and liable to pull you back. (114) Campbell never claimed to be a mystic. Quite the reverse. He once said that he practiced no austerities and that his only meditation was underlining sentences in books he found interesting. We want to believe him. It is difficult. His approach to the seven cakras in chapter three makes him sound like a mystic or at least a believer on some level. This is more than explication: it is invitation. Specifically, he points us toward a path where “Brahman with characteristics” yields in favor of the higher principle, “Brahman without characteristics.” We find ourselves in the realm of the invisible or, as this month’s MythBlast Series theme would have it, “unseen aid.” There’s a difference. The Catholic Church, finding itself with too much time on its hands after two thousand years, took up the editorial question regarding “seen and unseen” versus “visible and invisible.”  It was decided to change the Creed so that the faithful would no longer testify that God was the creator of all that was “seen and unseen,” a nuanced phrasing which allowed for a sly materialism to find comfort in dogma. “Materialists and rationalists of every age,” said Pope John Paul II in a lively General Audience in 1986, have rejected the possibility of “purely spiritual beings.” The Pope’s bias, and Campbell’s, is toward the truly invisible, the formless archetype or facultates praeformandi, which, as explained by C.G. Jung, is nothing more than a “possibility of representation which is given a priori.” (CW 9 I, para.155)  No, the Pope, the Professor and the Depth Psychologist are fighting for the higher principle. (The Church went with “visible and invisible” and, let it be noted, Vatican emendations are not inexpensive. Congregations threw out  millions of dollars’ worth of hymnals and sacramentaries.) Campbell, on the trail of the reality beyond image, guides us past cakra VII, Sahasrāra, into the realm of the invisible, realizing with Meister Eckhart that “the ultimate leave-taking is the leaving of God for God.” Consciousness at this level requires no tabernacles in which to stow its gear nor icons to explicate its ideas. Joseph Campbell says he identified as Catholic until the age of 25, a point at which he felt he had satisfactorily deciphered the vocabulary and iconography of his childhood faith. What remained in its place? It’s complicated. Once, on his way to a luncheon in Manhattan, he was confronted by a street corner evangelist who asked him if he believed in God. Giving it a moment’s thought, Campbell replied, “I don’t think you have time for my answer.” Campbell had long ago outgrown the solemn orthodoxies of Christianity. Perhaps that is why I am reminded of the former Catholic while seated in a former Catholic chapel, its idols removed, now transparent to transcendence.

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