“Tell me your myth that the whole world may turn to myth.” Nikos Kazantzakis The Talking Heads were right. We can’t truly know where we are going without reflecting upon where we have been. We look backwards to understand ourselves today and to prepare ourselves for the future.This spiraling, paradoxical movement is inherent within the logic of myth and, as Wolfgang Geigerich would phrase it, the logic of the soul.  In The Soul’s Logical Life , he concludes, “The subject matter of psychology, the soul, is the contradiction and difference .” (38) The soul is the place of paradox. We must go back to move forward, go down to come up, be consumed to be whole. As we tell each other our myths, we step outside the action for a moment to hear the story. And in that outsider moment, we can catch our breath and begin to see our big stories as constructs that live larger than we do, architecture that can help us reflect into and back out from what we understand not only about ourselves and the world around us. We rarely learn when we are in the heat of the experience; we need distance to see. Myth can exquisitely give us that distance. It’s very tempting, as we try to climb into these big stories, to want them for our own. To talk about one or more of them as our ‘personal myth’ and settle into the idea that it belongs to us as an individual. “I am Persephone,” we say, for example, “always stepping into the underworld…” It’s a sexy idea, this image of the personal myth, offering us a glimpse into patterns and meanings larger than our generally work-a-day lives, and, if we grab it literally, offering us a dose of mythic mojo to bolster our sense of mattering in the world. It’s far more fun to be Persephone in all of her divine tragedy than just someone who hasn’t figured out how to climb out of feeling trapped in our own dark corners. I think this is a dangerous move, seductive but ultimately reductive. In order to see the small, we look to the large. And while we can see the large in the small – the mythos in our own lives – to begin to see ourselves as somehow mythic loses the paradox and point of myth. Myths are inherently vaster than we will ever be, and while we may have deep insights that emerge when we find stories that resonate in and for us, if we believe we can claim them, we have lost them.  If we decide that this myth is the story of our lives, we have weakened both stories: by presuming to believe that a collective mythos could be claimed by one person, we deflate the meta-story, and by broadening our exquisitely complex human-scale lives into the stroke of a mythic arc, we lose our nuance. To know ourselves, we must hear the stories of others.  To know those around us, we must see our reflections within them, and to know ourselves, we must see their reflections in us. So, perhaps the personal myth is simply the myth that we have, today, chosen to tell.

This past week, from Sunday, July 23rd through Friday, July 28th, Joseph Campbell Foundation President Bob Walter led a workshop called,  Your Hero’s Journey® Redux: A Mythological ToolBox® PlayShop . Bob is a theatrical playwright and director, an educator, a publisher, and he was Joseph Campbell’s friend and editor for a decade or more. Through a range of deceptively playful exercises, participants in the workshop remember and explore significant life events and by recognizing the tendency to mythologize aspects of their own lives, they gain a deeper understanding of the similar ways in which myth grows, evolves, and often coalesces into one singular narrative. Participating in this workshop, one sees that the way one became oneself—how one was shaped and the patterns one’s life formed—isn’t accidental or a kind of supernaturally assigned destiny. The “self” is formed by a narrative woven together from a unique constellation of biological manifestations and personalized perspectives. Throughout the workshop the theme of questing, a crucial element of the hero’s journey, is ever-present, and at first the quest is merely a personal one—a quest to discover oneself, to attempt to understand why I am who I am, and transmute that understanding into greater self-mastery. But a larger realization grows that in order to be truly heroic, the discoveries one makes, the boons one receives on the journey, must be shared somehow with the larger community; the hero’s journey culminates not in personal gain, but in the melioration of an entire  civitas .  Research suggests  that through service to others one finds a stronger realization of purpose, meaning, and significance in one’s own life. In the universe of the Grail Legends it seems that everything and everyone is connected, and in Wolfram’s  Parzival  this is particularly so, and through recognizing those connections, Parzival receives help at every turn. In the beginning, Parzival is utterly helpless, it’s true, but it is precisely that helplessness which becomes the greatest tool in his toolbox; helplessness inspires magic—another way to say this may be to say that helplessness catalyzes creativity—and is the activator of enchantment. Perhaps it is helplessness itself that desires and searches for the Grail. Helplessness is also the spring from which morality flows, it helps us recognize the good, the just, and even love. In his book,  The Future of an Illusion , Sigmund Freud saw helplessness as “…the primal source of all moral motives” and we learn through the experience of helplessness that what’s good for us is often good for others. I need to be clear that I’m speaking of a particular kind of helplessness, a generative helplessness, a helplessness that is curious and determined to learn, helplessness that is anxious without panicking, earnest without being innocent, a helplessness born of the awe one feels standing uncertainly, smack in the middle of an impenetrably sublime mystery. Neurotic helplessness is needy, desperate, dependent, grasping, and greedy; the wrong sort of helplessness repels and nullifies love, but generative helplessness inspires love, perhaps that’s why the grail stories spend so much time describing romantic love and the helplessness and vulnerability that attend it. If we refuse helplessness, if we simply recant or disclaim our helplessness, we are simultaneously refusing bliss. No helplessness, no bliss. It really is that simple. The hero simply cannot find herself in a strange new world without feeling helpless. Without her helplessness she could never attain the Grail because it’s helplessness itself that seeks the promise of wholeness which the Grail offers. The hero’s journey is not about discovering a new world or finding a new life, it is instead about plumbing the depths and the mysteries of the only world and the only life we have. The French poet, Paul Eluard, wrote, “There is another world, but it is in this one.” We may say the same of our own lives—we have another life, and it is in this one. And the more radically we can accept ourselves and the world, the more enchanting we are, and the more enchanted it becomes. Thanks for reading, and thanks to my new friends for a very special week!

Every year in Northeastern Arizona, around July, the Hopi Tribe celebrates the Niman Kachina Festival. The word “Hopi” is shortened from  Hopituh Shi-Nu-Mu , a Hopi word meaning “The Peaceful People.” An important use of the word  Hopi  is to describe one who behaves with civility, manners, respect for all things, and being at peace with those things. Historically the Hopi lived along the Mogollon Rim of present day Arizona in large villages, often in apartment house-like structures built into cliff sides overlooking canyons prevalent during the 12th to 14th centuries, after which time these large villages were, for reasons not entirely clear, abandoned. Today, the Hopi live in villages spread out across northeastern Arizona on ancestral land surrounded by the Navajo Indian Reservation. The two nations used to share what was called the Navajo-Hopi Joint Use Area, but a great deal of controversy was generated by this arrangement and the area was partitioned by an act of Congress, also controversial, in 1974. The Hopi city of Oraibi is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, continuously inhabited city within the present boundaries of the United States, dating back to before the 12th century. The Niman Kachina Festival is an important part of the Hopi tradition; it is also known as The Going Home Ceremony. Kachinas, the central feature of the ceremony, are the ancestral spirits of the Hopi and, in the Hopi tradition, the personifications of all things. Everything has a spirit which may be personified by a Kachina: people, animals, plants, minerals, the elements, features of the landscape such as mountains, water, and sky, all have a Kachina. For six months of the year Kachinas visit the tribe, bringing with them rain for the crops and good health for the people. Their January arrival is celebrated in the Powamu Festival, and the Niman Kachina Festival celebrates the Kachina’s return to their mountain home on the San Francisco Peaks outside Flagstaff, Arizona. The commencement of the Kachina season coincides with the winter solstice as the Hopi begin to prepare the ground for planting and lasts through the first harvest in July. The Kachinas don’t actually leave for the mountains until the second morning of the festival when a brief sunrise ceremony allows the Kachina dancers to be seen leaving the village heading west. They disappear just as the sun rises over the eastern horizon, apparently returning to the mountain, bearing the people’s gifts and prayers for the gods. Hopi mythology is an example of a mythology so complex and nuanced it is frankly impossible to convey an accurate sense of its significance and influence in the short space allotted for a MythBlast, but one of its aspects, the concept of cyclical time, is a feature shared by many mythologies and conveys ideas of the sacred or numinous in ways that the modern notion of linear, advancing time simply cannot. Cyclical time emphasizes the cycles of life and death, darkness and light, cold and heat, solar and lunar progressions, ages and epochs that give way one to another. Cyclical time is the essence of Mircea Eliade’s notion of the eternal return, making each new year, season, or important day, a recapitulation of the referenced mythic period. Joseph Campbell noted that myths are bound inseparably to a particular time, place, culture, and even geography, and yet there is something fundamentally, perhaps even universally, human reflected to ourselves in myth, and one may do well to engage it in the spirit of the word Hopi: with civility, with respect, and with veneration.

In a 1907 letter to his wife, Clara (a fine artist and sculptor in her own right, who had studied with, among others, Auguste Rodin), Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “Only as though with their radiance can things reach us, and just as the magnet rouses and organises the forces in something susceptible to it, so they, through their influence, create within us a new ordering” ( The Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke , 121). Like art, the potential of myth to facilitate the creation of a new inner order is, perhaps, the primary reason behind Joseph Campbell’s lifelong love of and scholarly fascination with myth and its relationship to the human psyche. In his work titled,  The Ecstasy of Being  (releasing this month as an eBook), Campbell asserts, “In a work of proper art every aesthetic element has a psychological value equivalent to that of some mythological image or idea” (74), and I think that the psychological value accompanying the mythological image is often one of ecstasy. Ecstasy is derived from the Greek word,  ekstasis , which literally means to be standing outside of oneself, carried beyond individual, rational thought to a psychosomatic state in which rationality and personal volition are suspended.  Ekstasis  dissolves the sense of the bounded, the contained, the self-inspecting and self-experiencing sensation of the world, and plunges one into a transcendent experience, an experience of the world, the universe even, as unified, timeless, unbounded, and harmonious. Several years ago I was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the intent to enjoy the Greek and Roman wing of the museum when, finding myself with time on my hands, I wandered into the modern art section and was gob smacked by a 6 ¼ foot tall, 18 ½ foot wide work of art by Anselm Kiefer called “ Bohemia Lies by the Sea .” I’ve since learned that Kiefer is a German artist born in 1945, an author of several books, and his body of work wrestles with recent German history such as Nazi rule, the Holocaust and other controversial, sometimes even taboo, issues. The ecstasy I experienced looking at this piece was no doubt abetted by its composition—a thickly painted oil, powdered paint, charcoal, shellac, emulsion on burlap—and three-dimensional quality. But even more influential were the qualities of the artwork that didn’t initially register in my conscious awareness during the initial viewing. The title, for instance, very subtly confuses or disequilibrates as one struggles with the thought, Bohemia doesn’t lie by the sea at all does it? I’ve always associated it with Prague, land-locked in Eastern Europe. And is that a hint of the sea at the top of the painting, or is it sky? Where does that road take me? All of my associations to Bohemia, even the ideals of Bohemia were activated: Puccini’s opera, the Broadway play titled Rent, the notions of free thinking, experimental art, and free love; a vigorously energetic and spirited, impecunious and thread-worn existence cloaking a richly baroque intellectual and spiritual life lived in a vaguely communal coalition of artists, intellectuals, and marginalized souls drawn together by a common Utopian dream. Later still, I learned of this poem by Ingeborg Bachmann, titled, “ Bohemia Lies by the Sea ,” which almost certainly served as some inspiration for Kiefer’s painting. An excerpt from that poem says:  If it’s me, then it’s anyone, for he’s as worthy as me. I want nothing more for myself. I want to go under. Under – that means the sea, there I’ll find Bohemia again. From my grave, I wake in peace. From deep down I know now, and I’m not lost." Well, suffice it to say that I am unable to ever again leave The Met without having at least a glimpse of this painting; its aesthetic, its  ekstasis -inducing power remains with me still. As Campbell put it, the image “synthesizes the ‘pulse of life’ with the ‘stillness of death’” allowing one to see through the literal painting to a background of mystery normally occluded to the eye, which is finally, he says, the function of both art and mythology (106-107). The ecstatic experience is bigger than the momentary “real,” bigger than the painful or the unbearable elements of life; it is somehow full of inner awakening and soothing validation. When looking at proper art we are turned toward the Outside, but when we are most so, momentous things are happening within us, things that we might not know how to describe or name, things that put our mundane anxieties to shame. One discovers one’s true self living in a place that isn’t on any maps, ineffably radiant and powerful, in an inner Utopia, a Bohemia near the Sea. Thanks for reading.

When I first was drawn to myth, it was through play. My sisters and I, nerdily passionate children of academics, spent a lot of time playing “Greek Gods and Goddesses” in a father-made fort in our suburban back yard in Pennsylvania. Armed with D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths , we developed elaborate story lines based on myths that most intrigued us, in what was, as I think about it, a rather intuitive form of fan fiction. Not content simply to re-enact the stories from the book, we invented new adventures for our favorite divinities, each more far-flung and impossible than the last. One sister was almost always Artemis. The other, Persephone.  I most often cast myself as Demeter, drawn by the power of growing things, of abundance, and perhaps, a bit of authority over my younger sister. Those archetypes have rolled through all three of our lives in rather fascinating ways. (Though I no longer have any fantasies that I hold any authority over sisters, mythic or otherwise.) Even as fairly young children, we were drawn to those qualities that would lead us through the rest of our lives, metaphorically and even, at times, metaphysically. While we probably were the only kids in our neighborhood living into that particular set of characters and storylines, we were hardly alone in breathing life into our make-believe. And, I think, we were tapping into a deeply human instinct to make myth come alive through play. In "The Historical Development of Mythology" , Campbell writes: We all know the convention, surely! It is a primary, spontaneous device of childhood: a magical device, by which the world can be transformed from banality to magic in a trice. And its inevitability in childhood is one of those universal characteristics of man that unite us in one family. It is a primary datum, consequently, of the science of myth, which is concerned precisely with the phenomenon of self-induced belief. (36) Play is, perhaps, the clearest way not only to conjure that magic and banish banality, but, is, I am increasingly convinced, one of the most powerful paths into the heart of myth. Campbell thinks that ritual play, ritual make-believe, brings us into the heart of the metaphysics of myth. I think he’s right.

In the United States, July 4th is a national holiday celebrating the Second Continental Congress’s approval of The Declaration of Independence, a document created to explain congress’s decision on July 2, 1776 to formally separate from British rule and form an independent nation comprised of the original 13 colonies. John Adams believed it would be the July 2nd date that would be celebrated in American memory “…from this time forward forever more.” But in the American creation myth, the founding fathers signed the declaration on July 4th, even though most Historians believe the Declaration of Independence was signed much later, perhaps even a month later, on August 2nd. Initially, when fighting began in 1775, Americans were fighting only for their rights as British subjects, and all out war with Great Britain was not an option anyone relished. Yet, in another year the Revolution was under way, and congressional action resulting in the issuance of the Declaration of Independence had been taken. The war was costly, both in blood and treasure; casualty rates were second only to the Civil War. Americans banded together to fight a capriciously tyrannical monarchy, and “mutually pledge[d] to each other,” as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration, “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” There are few documents, especially government documents, that transcend their functions as forms, records, certificates, authorizations, or mere reports, and actually live. The Declaration of Independence is one such living document; it seems sentient and discursive, at times angry, disappointed, insulted, anxious, and above all, determined; determined to honor its enduring pledge of justice, safety, happiness, and prudence to its citizens, encouraging Americans to live a meaningful life. In return, the pledge from each of us to give our best and our all to every person engaged in this bold, risky, and ultimately fragile experiment breathes life into that most remarkable of documents, resuscitated by every new generation of Americans. I think nothing is better than mythology at emphasizing the glaring discrepancy between individual perceptions and desires and the harsh inflexibility of external reality, and certainly countries may be similarly understood. A state is reasonably clear and objectively defined—it’s a necessary organizing principle—but a nation is a mythological, imaginal notion, a nation is a living myth. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, a pronouncement of individual freedom, is the first attempt at shaping and advancing the founding mythology of America, and we can see the discrepancies between aspiration and reality, individuality and plurality, when a little more than a decade later, the U.S. Constitution emphasizes the words “We the people,” and “a more perfect union.” Perhaps the best measure of independence is the recognition that I am interdependent; I am more free when I work to ensure that those immortal words—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—apply to each and every American.

It seems to me, life on this planet displays a disturbing propensity for the powerful to further afflict the already afflicted. The  personae non-grata , the sick, the powerless, the poor, are forced to live in the margins of society, a  Hobbesian  existence that is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Not surprisingly, the temptation to “punch down” seems to be a primordial, enduring, and ineradicable strain of human nature, which Sophocles brilliantly described in his 409 B.C.E. tragedy titled, simply,  Philoctetes . Sophocles was the defender and patron of those whom society had tossed aside, and writes movingly about betrayal, abandonment, and that last moral voice standing in opposition to unprincipled tradition or overwhelming force. Philoctetes was with the armada sailing to Troy (he was already famous for assisting Hercules to die as the latter suffered horribly from Nessus’ poisoned shirt, and for this assistance was rewarded with Hercules’ bow and arrows) when they stopped at a tiny island along the way to sacrifice to a local deity and Philoctetes is bitten by a snake. His groans of pain make the performance of the ritual impossible, spoiled by the ill-omened sounds of agony. Additionally, Philoctetes’ wound begins to suppurate and emit such a horribly foul odor that he is abandoned on a nearby deserted island where he spends the next ten years in tremendous pain and suffering: “On every side I looked, and nothing saw but woe.” Eventually, the Argives learn they can only defeat Troy with the aid of Hercules’ bow and arrows, and presumably, Philoctetes; they also learn that Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus, must be summoned, given his father’s armor, and help secure the unsurpassable armaments. Neoptolemus and Odysseus set out to retrieve the bow of Hercules, but Odysseus has no intention to retrieve Philoctetes and is instead intent on gaining the bow through deceit, trickery, or force. Initially, cunning Odysseus convinces Neoptolemus to work with him to deceive Philoctetes. But the more Neoptolemus watches Philoctetes bravely bear his grotesque wound, his betrayal, and his suffering, the more he realizes he cannot treat so shabbily this noble soul, whom he is beginning to love. Neoptolemus decides he will lie no longer and tells Philoctetes about their mission to exploit him, and returns to him the bow and arrows of Hercules, an act of honesty and atonement that enrages Odysseus, but further endears Neoptolemus to Philoctetes. After some hesitation Philoctetes eventually agrees to return to Troy with Neoptolemus and Odysseus after a too tidy  deus ex machina  intervention by Hercules (who after his death became a god), directing Philoctetes to return to Troy, win the war, and be healed of his wound by the sons of Asclepius. All the ruined, broken-yet-unbowed, heroes of Sophocles’ greatest plays,  Ajax ,  Oedipus at Colonus , and  Philoctetes , remain—against all odds—people of remarkable virtue, virtue made all the more remarkable by their humiliating circumstances, and one has no alternative but to admire them. Due to their ghastly suffering, they no longer have regard for the demands or opinions of others; they are, in a moral sense, free. It is the nature of the powerful, like Odysseus, to focus solely on what materially serves their power and disregard values, humanity, and pathos; people like Philoctetes, the human, the invalid, the desperately needy.  Dissolving the deontological divide between Philoctetes and Odysseus is the young, guileless, humane, young man who sees another, not as a means to an end, but as a fellow human being whose suffering elicits empathy and whose dignity elicits love. To think generously and kindly toward others, not acting as though people are tools employed for naked self-interest, is our charge. If we fail, then as Philoctetes said,” I dread the woes to come; for well I know when once he mind’s corrupted it brings forth unnumbered crimes, and ill to ills succeed.”

It is high summer in the Catskill mountains of New York where I live: green, lush, blooming, sparking with life. It’s an enchanted time. Every morning I walk my dogs in our meadows and life is bursting forth. We see and hear birds, from warblers, killdeer, and yellowthroats announcing their presence like characters in a Seuss story: ‘we are here!;’ to the wild turkeys that beat the air like drums as they thrash into flight, startled  by the dogs. And we stumble upon a host of treasures: a fawn, still spotted as she curls in the high grass, red efts looking oddly tropical against the forest floor, and wild roses and black cap raspberries indecorously in bloom. It is a time of year that seems to simultaneously stand still and rush by far too quickly. It is the solstice. We tend to think of the solstice as a day, but it is actually, formally, a moment in time. This year, in 2017, that moment happens at 12:24 AM – ironically enough, in the middle of the night.  But it’s that moment – that standing still – that has caught my imagination today. Solstice is a word with Latin roots - solstitium , from  sol - sun - and  stitium  – to stop.  For a moment, the sun appears to stop on each Solstice, and in this most solar of days, opens up a moment into the eternal. When time no longer moves, it no longer exists. Suddenly, in that moment outside time, the infinite unfolds, both in our fleeting understanding of the immanence of the universe and in ourselves. Of course, its mystery confounds us, except for glimpses, caught in a breath, or out of the corner of our eyes. It is so vast, we can only catch the slightest trail of it. This brush with the infinite, at its heart, one of the central virtues and points of ritual, of myth – to help us find those breaths, those glances, into what lies beyond our understanding. In Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor , Campbell writes: The sun is our second symbol of rebirth ... When you realize that eternity is right here now, that it is within your possibility to experience the eternity of your own truth and being, then you grasp the following: That which you are was never born and will never die; that is the insight rendered in term of the solar mystery, the solar light. (89)   What better time to imagine into that solar mystery and our own transcendence than on the day of the solstice?

Ramadan, celebrated this year between May 27th and June 24th by approximately a quarter of the world’s population, is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar and commemorates the revelation of the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad. Ramadan’s most marked characteristic is the daily dawn to dusk fasting, the length of which is determined by one’s location and the time of year. For instance, the days of fasting get longer the nearer to the summer solstice and shorter as winter approaches. And this year, if you live in say, New York, you’ll rise around four in the morning and eat a breakfast hearty enough to get you through the day without additional food or water until the sun sets around 8:15 p.m.  Iftar , the breaking of the fast, is a ritual often shared with family and friends indulging in dates, water, and sweet tea along with other favorite traditional meals often served buffet style to family and friends. The “night of power,” or  Laylat al-Qadr , is the holiest night of the Muslim year, commemorating the night Muhammad received his revelation, and falls on an odd numbered night during the last 10 days of Ramadan. Of course, there is so much more to the celebration of Ramadan than the bare, simplistic introduction I have just provided, but I’d like to focus on one aspect of Ramadan in particular, the ritual of self-restraint through fasting. Participating in mythic rituals is a powerful way to more deeply understand the condition of being human and the challenges inherent in human development. C.G. Jung and Joseph Campbell believed that archetypes are among the constituent elements of the human psyche and, in addition to being reflected in myths, the rituals accompanying mythic narratives allow for a more conscious interaction with, and an examination of, the powerful energies of existence swirling around, in, and through individual lives. I believe it’s important not to mistake the ritual itself as the fulfillment, or the point of the myth. Enacting rituals is not simply a mandated, legalistic obligation of a myth but rather, rituals are a didactic, metaphoric, self-educating act of deepening and expanding one’s consciousness so that one may more fully grasp what it means to be a human being related to one’s self and other humans, to other animals, and to one’s world. So how then, do we begin to understand ritual acts of self-restraint such as fasting? Typically, when one initiates a fast, a condition of need quickly occupies one’s attention: lowered blood sugar makes one feel weak and perhaps a bit shaky, confusion and irritability are common and one often feels restless. Dehydration from a lack of water makes one’s mouth dry and begin to feel sleepy and headachy. It begins to become unpleasantly clear how difficult and complicated a proposition it is to sustain ourselves; we see that we are clearly dependent upon others for our own well-being. And as our instinctual needs mount how challenging is it to remain compassionate and humane--are we still able to be kind to our children and spouses, patient with the demands of others, and sympathetic to those who are forced to live on a daily basis with hunger, oppression, disability, desperate longing, and a host of other challenges, without the same resources and good fortune that most of us reading this essay enjoy? Fasting humans are not fighting humans; one simply hasn’t the strength, energy, or cognitive sharpness needed for conflict, and one’s energies may be more easily tuned toward reconciliation and the search for peace. Self-restraint creates the conditions under which humans may recognize and strengthen our best selves, try to relieve oppression and fear, and since we have ourselves tasted a bit of the diminishing, perhaps even dehumanizing effects of privation, we may be inspired to relieve others of the burden of need and comfort the afflicted. Thanks for reading.

As we enter the month of June remember that this month, her birth month, is named for Juno, the Roman goddess married to Jupiter (who is also her brother), and who has traditionally been concerned with all aspects of women’s lives—no easy responsibility in the ancient world. Juno was also a powerful military goddess, and seems to have had oracular powers as suggested by one of her names, Juno Moneta (the verb  monere  means to warn, hence Juno the Warner). She is a tremendously complex figure, and this complexity coupled with the great accumulation of epithets she bears suggests to me a goddess of great age and power. For example, she is mentioned with Hercules in an inscription consecrating the Temple of Hercules at Lanuvium, a very ancient site, and it appears the two of them together assisted women and infants in the perilous proposition of childbirth. In the Greek tradition they are bound together in a difficult, contentious relationship. One epithet I find particularly compelling is Juno Lucina who in her relationship to the moon—generally speaking it’s safe to say that goddesses who are associated with the moon are also associated with some aspect of childbirth—represents the cyclical, renewing nature of cosmic time, just as the menstrual cycle articulates cycles of biological time. Her role in renewing time puts her in relationship with Janus; he presides over the passage of time from the previous to the subsequent month while she helps the month thrive by lending it the strength of her vitality. Some scholars suggest that Juno’s original spouse was Janus, not Jupiter. Juno and Janus seem to have much more in common and, perhaps, if that “relationship” had survived Juno would have been a much more happily married goddess. Once again, in Juno/Hera’s mirthless, troubled marriage, one finds the mythic mirror reflecting contemporary truths about gender roles and relationships between wives and husbands. She would have been, I’m sure, among the first in line to buy and read Betty Friedan’s  The Feminine Mystique  when it first became available: The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of […] women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning […]. Each [woman] struggled with it alone. As she [went about the mundane tasks of her daily existence] she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question— “Is this all?” Hera seems to me the most human-like of the gods in her frustrations, her regrets, in her deep longing and aspiration. Unlike her profligately promiscuous husband she was scrupulous in her refusal to dishonor marital fidelity and she’s repaid by living in myth as a harridan or a shrew, a competitive battle-ax who wants nothing more than to control her hard working and hard playing husband. We tend to be unable to see behind her frustration to the deep wound she bears, a wound that contemporary human beings should recognize as a metaphor for human existence. Hera received her wound, Homer tells us in the Iliad, when Herakles struck her in the right breast with an arrow. If we can read mythically, the wound in her breast and its periodic relationship to the moon suggests an incurable wound to the feminine that seems at times to be non-existent and at others to inflict unimaginable agony, an apt description of Juno’s psychological suffering. She was admired, envied, lusted after, betrayed, humiliated, and abused until she was sick of it and lashed out in a bitter, all too human way. Juno’s wound is entwined with her existence, existential and incurable, just as human beings cannot be cured from an existence that ends in death, and sharing with Her the existential dread of the incurable wound forges a deep bond indeed between the goddess and human beings. Thanks for taking the time to read this MythBlast.

As I watch the renewing, generative energies of spring wrestle with the lingering insistence of winter in the mountains of Northern Arizona it might be apt to remember Freyja, the most familiar and powerful of the Norse goddesses and whose beneficent influence in the concerns of love, beauty (particularly gold) and fertility was popularly sought after. She is a conspicuous figure in  The Poetic Edda , the sagas of great tragic poetry compiled and set down from older traditional sources in the period from 1,000-1300 A.D., and from which J.R.R. Tolkien drew a great deal of inspiration. Freyja is the most glorious of the Norse goddesses and most kindly disposed to humankind, particularly lovers, and finds herself mediating disputes between mortals and gods alike. When she travels, she is carried in a chariot pulled by two cats; another remarkable mode of transportation for Freyja is her cloak of feathers which she often loans to other gods, notably Loki and Thor, to aid them in their efforts. In the Eddas (in addition to The Poetic Eddas , a  Prose Edda  exists, written in the late 13th or early 14th Century and attributed to Snorri Snorrelson), there are many commentaries on Freyja’s beauty as well as her generative powers. She is described as flying over the earth sprinkling morning dew, spring flowers falling from her hair and, in a trope made famous by poets, weeping tears that turn to gold. Many plants in Scandinavia were once named for her (Freyja’s Tears and Freya’s Hair are familiar examples), and despite being relegated during the process of Christianization, Freyja continues to be influential in Scandinavian folklore and art. It seems to me there is something quite modern—and necessary to modern life—about Freyja; there is something indomitable, civilizing, and empowering to be found in her strength, her compassion, and in her wisdom. The tears she cries are tears of loss and grief, and when fallen to the earth turn to gold, a precious gift to humans from the goddess. Freyja's strategic martial and political gifts seem essential in creating balance and restraint in the midst of her often hot-tempered Aesirian brethren. Her spirit may easily be re-imagined at work in contemporary life attending to issues of poverty, domestic violence, illiteracy, sanitation, food supply, and championing reproductive and human rights through a movement that has proved to be a most efficacious way to rapidly raise the quality of life in countries afflicted by prolonged conflict, abysmal health care, and profound poverty: the empowerment of women. When women are empowered in developing nations, the society itself blooms. It flowers not necessarily because women are inherently wiser, more compassionate, or more efficient than men but rather because half of its members are restored to the life of the society, and all its members can commit to the ideal of becoming more humane, more educated, more dignified, no longer living feral lives of mere subsistence and survival. Self-expression, innovation, art, social reciprocity, practical reason, and conviviality—all those things that make human beings value being human—begin to flourish and, as Aristotle said, the noble shines through. Individuals begin to be seen as having goals, activities, aspirations, and plans, thereby causing the old ideas that previously regarded people as pawns or property serving another’s ends, to be cast in an abhorrent light. In her book,  Women and Human Development , the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, writes that “…fully human functioning requires affiliation and reciprocity with others…” and affiliation and reciprocity are surely among the most highly developed of Freyja’s values. Thank you for reading,

What is myth... and why should anybody care?   What do you think? I ask this because that one of the most marvelous ways to play with mythology is to assess our own answers to this question.  And I love this question because there are a multitude of answers to it. Here's one... If you look up myth in the dictionary, it generally says something about a myth being a story that attempts to explain a set of beliefs or natural phenomena in a given culture. There is generally an assumption implicit in this definition that the people originating these stories were somehow naïve, childlike, even primitive. They could not scientifically understand the world around them, so they made up nonsense to make sense.While I love the idea of using nonsense to make meaning, this is a limited and largely erroneous view of myth. It also gives rise to the common usage of myth in contemporary Western culture, as least, as something that is simply not true. “Oh, that’s just a myth,” we say when we’re dismissing something utterly, “It’s just not true.” I think this misses the point of myth. The ancient Greeks talked about myth as being that which is, simultaneously, least and most true. And they were on to something. Far from taking myth as literal truth, many cultures that have recognized and embraced their mythology understand even in the weaving and telling of it that it is fiction. And they understand that there is truth behind the fiction. Looking at myth this way forces us deep into the story, delving its deeps for the pieces that ring true to us not on a literal level, but in our psyches. These are truths that cook in ourselves not on the surface, not empirically, but instead on a metaphorical level. The roots of the word metaphor lie in Greek for metapherein – which translates “to transfer.” Metaphors transfer meaning from literal and concrete to intuitive and imaginal. And this is not a small movement – as a prefix, meta suggest something that is comprehensive and transcending. So metaphors transform meaning, their movement into the nonliteral giving us a glimpse of transcendent meaning. This is what myths do. They give us moments of understanding transcendent meaning. It’s why taking myths as literally true is such a mistake – one that our culture intuits when it says “That’s not true, it’s just a myth,” but only intuits part of the movement, and deafens its collective ears to the transcendent truths behind, under, and between the cracks of the myth. And it’s the same mistake in the other direction when people grope towards the comfort of taking myth literally, and tumble over backwards into fundamentalism. The power in any myth of creation, for example, is  not in its literal truth, but in its metaphor – what is it saying about a universe and how it was birthed and the generative, creative, imaginative energy that could create such an exquisite infinity? And populate it with such exquisite minutiae? So, then, for me, myth opens our eyes to seeing beyond what is in front of our faces. These stories, whether they are ancient, beginning of the world tales, or the smaller but equally important stories we tell ourselves about our families, our communities, our values, give us insight.  At least they can when we stop long enough to hear ourselves tell our stories, and let our sight get pulled inward and outward into imagination and metaphor, away from what we perceive as literal truth. Through their fiction, they give us truth. And it that truth, there is meaning.