The human mythic imagination Bill Moyers: What do you think our souls owe to ancient myths? Joseph Campbell: Well, the ancient myths were designed to put the mind, the mental system, into accord with this body system, with this inheritance. Bill Moyers: A harmony? Joseph Campbell: To harmonize. The mind can ramble off in strange ways and want things that the body does not want. And the myths and rites were a means to put the mind in accord with the body, and the way of life in accord with the way that nature dictates. Bill Moyers: So in a way these old stories live in us. Joseph Campbell: They do, indeed… (5:08-5:53) In this episode of the Power of Myth , Campbell speaks of the mythic imagination that arose from human interaction with animals as hunters. He points to the Lascaux caves exquisite paintings as a “burst of magnificent art and all the evidence you need of a mythic imagination in full career” ( 28:00-28:10 ). At an estimated 30,000 years old, the Lascaux cave paintings in Dordogne, and the even earlier paintings of Chauvet-Pont D’arc in Ardèche in France are magnificent—Picasso anecdotally said, “Since Lascaux, we have invented nothing.” What if story is not a human invention? I am wondering about an idea, though: while these caves may well be one of the earliest efforts at mythic storytelling by humans, there are actually story-tellers that began these stories millions of years earlier. What if story is not simply a human invention, but one we humans simply understand in a particular way? What if story is not simply a human invention, but one we humans simply understand in a particular way? If we think mythically about stories themselves, and about how these stories create the world as much as they define it—and how as humans we are created by the stories we tell, an intriguing mythic and scientific lens begins to open. The creator microbes In June, The New York Times Magazine published a piece by science writer Ferris Jabr , an adaptation of his book Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life. Jabr accompanied a group of geomicrobiologists down into a mine shaft in South Dakota, a cave carved out by gold miners rather than water, tunneling a mile and a half below the surface. What they discovered here is extraordinary, as Jabr writes: “Here we were, deep within Earth’s crust—a place where, without human intervention, there would be no light and little oxygen—yet life was literally gush­ing from rock.“ Microbes abound there, without human intervention, and they are ancient, living and moving seemingly endlessly, and they breathe, eat, and create rock. It’s a radical realization: that our planet is not life perched on a shallow surface, but is instead constantly being created by life. These microorganisms create their surroundings. Jabr continues, “Subsurface microbes carve vast caverns, concentrate minerals and precious metals and regulate the global cycling of carbon and nutrients. Microbes may even have helped construct the continents, literally laying the ground­work for all other terrestrial life.” Simultaneously, microbiologists are just beginning to parse out the relationship between microbes in the human body, particularly in the human gut, and how they don’t merely inhabit their surroundings, but transform them as well. Genes in the human gut microbiome vastly outnumber the “human” genes we carry, and not only develop human cognitive function, including memory, but our emotional capacity. In an article echoing Jung in its title, “Collective Unconscious: How Gut Microbes Shape Human Behavior,” researchers report that “gut microbes are part of the unconscious system influencing behavior, and microbes majorly impact on cognitive function and fundamental behavior patterns” (pgs. 1-9). Mythic microbial stories If Campbell is right—and our human myths emerged as a way to bring harmony with the natural world—and the microbiologists and microgeologists are right—and the microbe community on the planet are creators and communicators, building both the natural world and human capacities to function within it—is it that outrageous to imagine that the first and most powerful story-tellers were not human at all? But that our stories that we shape and are shaped by each telling of them actually are mythic echoes of microbial stories? I find this idea both utterly compelling and oddly comforting. It weaves a powerful connection and rightness for me, in both scientific and mythic ways, about human kinship with everything else on—and in—this planet. And perhaps this affinity can be an opening into how we might better articulate that connection as we try to respond to a beleaguered natural world. MythBlast authored by: Leigh Melander, Ph.D. has an eclectic background in the arts and organizational development, working with inviduals and organizations in the US and internationally for over 20 years. She has a doctorate in cultural mythology and psychology and wrote her dissertation on frivolity as an entry into the world of imagination. Her writings on mythology and imagination can be seen in a variety of publications, and she has appeared on the History Channel, as a mythology expert. She also hosts a radio who on an NPR community affiliate: Myth America, an exploration into how myth shapes our sense of identity. Leigh and her husband opened Spillian, an historic lodge and retreat center celebrating imagination in the Catskills, and works with clients on creative projects. She is honored to have previously served as the Vice President of the Joseph Campbell Foundation Board of Directors. This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 3, and Romance of the Grail Latest Podcast In this episode we speak with Master Chungliang Al Huang —a tai chi master, writer, philosopher, dancer, and generational teacher. Originally from Shanghai, China, Master Huang moved to the United States to study architecture and cultural anthropology, and later Dance. In the 1960s, Master Huang forged a significant collaboration with philosopher Alan Watts, which led him to Esalen. There, he became a beloved teacher and formed meaningful connections with thought leaders such as Huston Smith, Gregory Bateson, and Joseph Campbell. He and Joe taught together at Esalen until Joe’s death in 1987. Master Huang is an author of many books including the classic Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain. His contributions include pioneering modern dance in the Republic of China and sharing the stage with luminaries like the Dalai Lama and Jane Goodall. He has been an assembly member and presenter at The Council for the Parliament of the World’s Religions and has been a keynote speaker for the YPO (Young Presidents’ Organization) and WPO (World Presidents’ Organization) and at major global gatherings in China, India, Switzerland, Germany, South America, South Africa, and Bali. In 1988 he was featured in the inaugural segment of the PBS series, A World of Ideas, moderated by Bill Moyers. Joseph Campbell famously remarked, “Chungliang Al Huang’s Tai Ji dancing is ‘mythic images’ incarnate. He has found a new way to explain ‘the hero’s journey’ to help others follow their bliss through the experience of tai ji practice in his work through the Living Tao Foundation.” In this conversation, we discuss his life, his relationship with Alan Watts, and his friendship with Joseph Campbell. For learn more about Chungliang visit:  https://livingtao.org Listen Here This Week's Highlights “Within each person there is what Jung called a collective unconscious. We are not only individuals with our unconscious intentions related to a specific social environment. We are also representatives of the species Homo sapiens. And that universality is in us whether we know it or not." -- Joseph Campbell Myth and Meaning , 18 The Center of The World (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

The past decade, I've been a part of creating over 200 weddings. And that surprises me a bit.  While I believe in romance and love as an artist, a scholar, and a human being who has been relatively happily married for almost thirty years, I have never been fully convinced that weddings or marriages were inherently good ideas.  In most cultures worldwide, monogamous marriage has been primarily a social and economic construct that strengthens patriarchy, frequently casting women as secondary, as lesser, and often ultimately as a form of property. This perception of marriage centers procreation and strengthens reductive ideas about gender and gender roles that become self-perpetuating and actually don’t serve anyone particularly well, as I wrote about in a MythBlast last year .  Current wedding ceremonies still echo traditions from ancient Greece when marriages were first, in Western culture, identified as a state-sanctioned benefit to the public interest. Wedding partners were chosen by the kyrios , guardian of the bride, usually the father. Potential suitors would show off their plumage with extravagant gifts, feasts, and games, and the victor and kyrios  would then perform a ritual engysis , literally a “pledging into the hand,” where the two men would make a commitment to the marriage over a handshake. The woman being pledged wasn’t even in the room.  Then, as women stepped into marriage, Hera as the archetypal image of wifehood was hardly an encouraging exemplar. Seduced by her brother Zeus in the form of a cuckoo (there’s a metaphor!), she got her version of a Big Fat Greek wedding that women are supposed to want, but then was continually condemned to rebelliously but often ineffectively stand on the sidelines as Zeus romped through affairs and seductions. In an institution defined by the importance of offspring, even bearing children became a place of competition; in revenge for Zeus’ creation of Athena, Hera bore Hephaistos without a father, and Zeus threw him to earth, crippling him. In The Iliad , Homer describes her character as “not of a very amiable kind, and its main features are jealousy, obstinacy, and a quarreling disposition, which sometimes makes her own husband tremble”(i. 522, 536, 561, v. 892. William Smith, ed. A New Classical Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, Mythology, and Geography ). In pop culture and media, wives are frequently still buffooned this way: the old ball-and-chain who nags and talks too much, gaining power by needling and conniving.  As I work with couples who are optimistically seeking wedding rituals and meaning that can set the stage for a marriage that reflects their aspirations together and as individuals, they most often instinctively recoil from these echoes, but aren’t sure how they might supplant them. An entire industry has risen from this uncertainty, seducing couples into perceiving weddings as performative, gigantic overblown selfies, which in their own ways echo the extravagance of Greek suitor-competitors and the consolation prize of a grand wedding designed to impress observers. In spite of how ubiquitously it sits in our collective imagination in the West now, the idea of love being required for marriage is a remarkably new idea. In spite of how ubiquitously it sits in our collective imagination in the West now, the idea of love being required for marriage is a remarkably new idea. Emerging out of the courtly love longings of the medieval troubadours and trobairitz (for whom love and marriage were distinctly not intertwined), it wasn’t until the 18th century that society began to encourage young people to even consider romance as an antecedent to marriage.  Interestingly, in the core definitions of kinds of love in the ancient Greek imagination, there isn’t an delineated image for love between married partners.They include: Eros , erotic love Agápe , unconditional love, primarily of god Philia , affectionate love between equal compadres Storge , the love between parents and children Xenia , the love of hospitality Philautia , self love, which can be either positive or negative In 1973, in his book Colours of Love: An Exploration of the Ways of Loving ,  psychologist John Alan Lee made a valiant effort to broaden these qualities, including borrowing the word pragma as an image to evoke the love between long-time partners. In spite of its eager adaptation by many in the psychological community, there really isn’t much evidence that the Greeks utilized the word in this way. It’s also problematic etymologically, pulling from the Greek pragmatikos , or business-like, which holds layers of its Renaissance connotations of being meddlesome or impertinently busy. What a dreary way to imagine long-term love! How then, might we re-imagine love into marriage? How can we hope to touch the essence of the bliss and the pain of an enduring love such that it amplifies our multitudes: of who we are, of how we love, of how we choose to live into that love?  I think the answer lies in two ideas: First, rather than trying to narrow what a long term love might look like to a single word or idea, we can instead understand ongoing love of a partnership as an intertwined dance of all of the ways we might love others or ourselves. We can love ourselves and partners as flawed and sometimes self-involved creatures who also have allure and divinity, are companions and family and sometimes strangers. This begins to give us a vocabulary of metaphors that could help us to expand into love that can both meet us in the moment and invite us to imagine beyond that.  Second, as Campbell argued in this month’s highlighted book, The Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth , reflecting on the Grail legends and the lessons of the wounded Fisher King, installed by ritual rather than rightness: we find love when we follow our own nature, rather than simply respond to the expectations of society. If we build a wedding and a marriage following the essence of ourselves as two and one, we can begin to redefine marriage itself, and re-imagine love into its heart. MythBlast authored by: Leigh Melander, Ph.D. has an eclectic background in the arts and organizational development, working with inviduals and organizations in the US and internationally for over 20 years. She has a doctorate in cultural mythology and psychology and wrote her dissertation on frivolity as an entry into the world of imagination. Her writings on mythology and imagination can be seen in a variety of publications, and she has appeared on the History Channel, as a mythology expert. She also hosts a radio who on an NPR community affiliate:  Myth America , an exploration into how myth shapes our sense of identity. Leigh and her husband opened Spillian , an historic lodge and retreat center celebrating imagination in the Catskills, and works with clients  on creative projects. She is honored to have previously served as the Vice President of the Joseph Campbell Foundation Board of Directors. 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 “Love is born of the eyes and the heart; it is an individual experience. The eyes quest in the outer world for the object of inspiration, and the heart receives the image, and this image then becomes the idol of individual devotion” -- Joseph Campbell,   Romance of the Grail, 27 The Goddess and the Madonna Q&A (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

That’s a good question. One of the recurrent themes in Campbell’s work is the idea that our inherited mythology was created to put humans into relationship with a world that no longer exists. Looked at from today's experience of gender, the original stages in the Hero’s Journey seem to bear this out. When he wrote Hero with a Thousand Faces , the material from which he elicited the monomyth described journeys undertaken by a hero , rather than a heroine . For most of the past four thousand years, these narratives of psychological development were crafted around the experience of men and not women. (Still, it is always worth remembering that one of the original “ heroes” in Western mythology was the Goddess Inanna. Ahem. But let’s save that for another day.) So does that mean a heroic life’s journey can only describe the experience of men and not women? I assume everyone is okay with “ NO .” But it does raise some interesting questions. Let’s consider some options. We could just stick with the historical view (and stick our heads in the sand) and argue that if women are essentially different from men, then perhaps women can’t be heroes at all — that such gender differences mean only men can be heroes. Safe to say, 1) this understanding of gender grounds most of the historically sourced mythology bundled together in Hero with a Thousand Faces ,   and 2) nobody today is likely to think this is reasonable. Or we could argue that, if the biological  differences between men and women give rise to entirely different ways of experiencing the world, then women’s experience needs to be reflected in a heroine’s journey, distinct from any male version. Which seems more likely. But , there’s a “but.” The world we live in doesn’t look like this any more either. These kinds of binary presuppositions are increasingly problematic, and the intersectionalities of biology and gender tend to sabotage what seemed obvious a thousand years ago. The world we live in contains a spectrum of gender-related experience. Everyone is different and therefore, if   we follow this logic, we’d require as many journeys as there are humans. Goodbye, monomyth (?)  Hmm. So, what to do? Well, it is obviously true that every person is on a journey specific to their own lived experience, and this begs the question: can a single bit of mythological scaffolding still provide meaning for all human beings?   Surely some psychological continuities remain among humans, regardless of their personal circumstances — and if that’s true, can we still imagine the possibility of a general narrative to provide context and meaningfulness to those experiences? Can a single bit of mythological scaffolding still provide meaning for all human beings? I don’t have a definite answer, but I have some ideas.  A few years ago my colleague Chris Yogerst and I wrote up a book chapter applying Campbell to HBO’s Watchmen  series — in which the hero was a woman. You can find the full details here [ After Midnight: Watchmen after Watchmen   (University Press Of Mississippi, 2022)], but let me pass along an outline of our working hypothesis. We wondered whether it might be possible to reframe the stages of the hero’s journey operationally : by looking at the social and psychological function these stages describe, regardless of gender preference or identity. For practical purposes, we found that the stages belonging to Separation  and Return seem to stand up to today’s evolved understanding of gender, but when you get to Initiation  (i.e.“Meeting with the Goddess,” “Temptation,” “Atonement with the Father,”) gender just kicks in the door and says, “Excuse me, what?? ”  Start by considering the function of Separation .  To become who we really are, humans have to separate and distinguish themselves psychologically from the socially sanctioned roles they’ve been assigned by parents, society, the ambient culture, etc.  So far, so good. Once underway, each of us moves through stages of Initiation  that strip off the masks we’ve been taught to wear, the internalized, socially constructed identities that condition and often occlude our self-understanding. That’s the main order of business if we wish to discover our true natures — whatever those happen to be — and this idea allows us to translate Campbell’s gender-saturated stages into operationally defined and gender-neutral language. Here are some of the details: Meeting with the goddess (and the “sacred marriage”) Looked at as a psychological process, Campbell's historically based metaphor can be reframed as describing that moment when a person embraces amor fati , the   love of one’s own fate — understood as their authentic selfhood. At that point, once separated from their past, a person kind of wakes up and says, “Huh, this is who I might be? This is who I really am?”  Everyone can experience this, regardless of gender. Temptation For those who have embraced a fate truly their own, independent from socially sanctioned authorities (parents, the culture, etc.), the Temptation  to fall back into the role society had planned for you (accountant instead of artist, lawyer instead of teacher, etc.) always remains a challenge. Let’s face it, the path of social acceptance and reward is more tempting (and easier) than, as the Knights of the Round Table did, plunging into the woods where it was darkest and there was no path – the only path to the Grail. Again, there’s nothing gender specific here. And one more. Atonement with the father: It’s not enough, psychologically speaking, to embrace the path toward authentic selfhood and then endure the temptations of socially sanctioned (and socially rewarded) roles: anyone who’s taken this adventure seriously knows that, eventually, they’ll have to live with the anxiety, and the paradox, of walking along the razor’s edge between the two. Atonement  means, finally, to be at-one-with  both the need to follow our path while living with the daily pressures to cave in or to turn, as it were, to The Dark Side. From here on, the remainder of Campbell’s stages (Apotheosis, the Ultimate Boon, the Return, etc.) seem to proceed without trying to fit the round pegs of contemporary lived experience into the square holes of a now-fossilized tradition. Moreover, the usefulness of reframing the stages of Initiation as we have, suggests that the gender described in the history of mythological narrative is, after all, just an accident of birth. Something to consider. Thanks for musing along. MythBlast authored by: Mark C.E. Peterson, Ph.D. is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Washington County and past president of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture ( ISSRNC.org ). Philosopher, gadfly, poet, cook, writing along the watermargins of nature, myth, and culture. A practitioner of taijiquan and kundalini yoga for over 40 years, Dr. Peterson is also a happy member of the Ukulele World Congress. This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 6, and The Hero with a Thousand Faces Latest Podcast In this episode entitled, "Mythologies of Quest and Illumination", Campbell discusses the four functions of myth, love, and discovering one's own authentic life. Host, Bradley Olson introduces the episode and gives commentary after the lecture. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "In northeast Siberia and in many parts of North and South America, the call of the shaman involves a transvestite life. That is, the person is to live the life of the opposite sex. What this means is that the person has transcended the powers of his or her original gender, and so women live as men and men live as women. These transvestite shamans play a very large role in the Indian mythology in the Southwest—the Hopi, the Pueblo, the Navaho, and the Apache—and also among the Sioux Indians and many others." -- Joseph Campbell Pathways to Bliss , xviii A New Mythology - The Planet (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Our given topic for this month–The Message of the Myth: Arts and Artists–is both majestic and expansive. Over millennia and across cultures, countless great art has drawn inspiration from the realm of myth. Frequently in Western societies, artists have sought to represent puissant themes that are embedded in the traditions of both ancient Greece and Rome, as well as in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. In the realm of classic art, most of us are familiar with The Sistine Madonna painted by Raphael, The Last Supper mural painting by Leonardo da Vinci, the many works of art depicting Hercules slaying the Hydra, or the sculpture of David’s Michaelangelo. Such works of artistry are usually admired irrespective of the culture or tradition of the beholder. But what about our immediate time? In this MythBlast I want to focus on the artistic genre of music. Specifically, the voice and phenomenon of Taylor Swift and how powerful our personal experiences can be when they’re associated with a myth or an archetype. Cassandra, the cursed prophetess Swift’s emotional storytelling has the ability to make the personal universal and the universal personal. This can especially be felt in the song “Cassandra” from The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology (TTPD) double album. So, they killed Cassandra first ’cause she feared the worst And tried to tell the town So, they filled my cell with snakes, I regret to say Do you believe me now? Wikipedia succinctly explains, “Cassandra in Greek mythology was a Trojan priestess dedicated to the god Apollo and fated by him to utter true prophecies but never to be believed. In modern usage her name is employed as a rhetorical device to indicate a person whose accurate prophecies, generally of impending disaster, are not believed.” (As an aside, Swift also has a song titled “The Prophecy” on the same album.) Cassandra was a powerful and wise woman who accurately predicted both the fall of Troy and the death of Agamemnon, but was ignored by society. A rhetorical question: “How many women have also experienced their predictions being ignored?” It’s a tale as old as time. Let’s first explore Swift’s connection with the Cassandra archetype and how she links a personal life event with this mythical figure through both her artistry and the shared emotive field of her audience. In 2016 Kim Kardashian leaked a short recording on Snapchat appearing to prove that Swift had given her consent to being mentioned in Kanye West’s song “Famous,” despite Swift claiming she was never told that West planned to use the word “bitch” to describe her. And when the full footage of the call came out in 2020, it exonerated Swift (“Do you believe me now?”). As Swift describes in her Time Person of the Year interview , “Make no mistake–my career was taken away from me. You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar. That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.” Cassandra, anyone? The alchemical snake symbol Swift sings about being betrayed, disbelieved, persecuted, and defamed. These are–unfortunately–incredibly relatable global experiences that she captures in her allegorical, metaphorical, and poetic lyrics. “So, they filled my cell with snakes” references how in the myth it’s the snakes who whisper the prophecies to Cassandra and how she was also taken prisoner. For Swift, the “cell” was her rental house that became a prison and a cell phone full of snakes, because at the time, the overwhelming consensus online was that Swift was a liar–a snake–and so this emoji covered her social media (“filled my cell”). As she mentioned in an Elle interview , “A few years ago, someone started an online hate campaign by calling me a snake on the internet. ... It would be nice if we could get an apology from people who bully us but maybe all I’ll ever get is the satisfaction of knowing I could survive it, and thrive in spite of it.” Swift returned in 2017 with her album Reputation , a fan favorite with the lyrics: “I’m sorry / But the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now / Why? Oh, ’cause she’s dead (oh),” and the snake became a defining symbol of this era. Joseph Campbell in his artful prose writes in The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers: The power of life causes the snake to shed its skin, just as the moon sheds its shadow. The serpent sheds its skin to be born again, as the moon its shadow to be born again. They are equivalent symbols. Sometimes the serpent is represented as a circle eating its own tail. That’s an image of life. Life sheds one generation after another, to be born again. The serpent represents immortal energy and consciousness engaged in the field of time, constantly throwing off death and being born again. There is something tremendously terrifying about life when you look at it that way. And so the serpent carries in itself the sense of both the fascination and the terror of life. (53) A snake symbolizes transformation, transmutation, and alchemy. (Track 15 on TTPD is titled “The Alchemy.”) Now who among us hasn’t had to shed the outer skin of a present identity to reveal a new life chapter? Or in Swiftie language, “era.” No one likes a mad woman I also want to highlight how in the myth Cassandra was viewed as a mad woman instead of a divinely-inspired seer. Author Seth Schein describes Cassandra as one of those women “who often combine deep, true insight with utter helplessness, and who retreat into madness” (12). A madness that comes from being a frenzied prophetess whose “prophetic utterances” are dismissed, ridiculed, and gaslighted by those around them and the wider society. In Swift’s song “mad woman” on the album folklore , she describes this, again, all-too-common experience. And there’s nothin’ like a mad woman What a shame she went mad No one likes a mad woman You made her like that One of many reasons Swift is so popular is because her music makes the listener feel that their personal story is important, their feelings are in fact valid, and their truth matters; their story is just as significant and valuable as the eternal, cosmic stories playing out in the grand myths. And through Swift and other artists, we witness how these ancient and universal stories can indeed be reawakened through the power of creativity. Through Swift and other artists, we witness how these ancient and universal stories can indeed be reawakened through the power of creativity. Archetypal and mythic inspiration Now, speaking about our subject more broadly ... do great works of art draw their inspiration from great myths? Or is it that when a striking piece of art so impresses itself upon our souls, it naturally wakes us up to the potential presence of the underlying myth and therefore amplifies it? Swift’s expressive and evocative songwriting can inspire and encourage us to explore the mythic base of her lyrics so that we too may appreciate the archetypal dimensions at play in our own lives. But the great myths can also press themselves into our own souls, even if we’ve not directly invited them to do so. Even if we’re not immediately led to explore the generative archetypal realm behind (and within) a display of art, some artists’ portrayals of a mythical event will nevertheless move us simply because of the sheer power of their creation. A song can be an ohrwurm (catchy tune) “just because.” Florence and the Machine also have a track on their album Dance Fever called “Cassandra,” and as one fan wrote on reddit , “Cassandra Live at MSG is a perfect example of a live performance making a great song into a spectacular song! That extra verse at the end, the build up from the band, the emotion in her singing, even the cheers from the crowd! It all makes this song go from 10/10 to 15/10.” Both Swift and singer Florence Welch (who collaborate on the song “Florida!!!” on TTPD) draw from the same myth to extract their own lore from their personal lives, and as Welch said in an interview on vulture.com , “‘Cassandra’ very much reminds me of the way that I used to create myths around things that I was trying to understand or wrestle with. ... I just was always an overthinker and anxious, and I had to create worlds and characters to help me understand my feelings.” But even without any of the archetypal and mythic awareness, “Cassandra” is a dance floor banger! Over time we may come to more readily recognize the mythical elements within works of art, as well as sensing something of the larger archetypal impulses living in them. We can best cultivate an awareness of the archetypes at play in the outer world–and within ourselves–when we bring an artistic sensitivity to our act of perception so that we may sense both the mythic in the art, as well as the archetypal impulse within the mythical. For this recognition to occur, we’re called to be artists ourselves–in our perceptive and imaginal lives. 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 2, and Pathways to Bliss Latest Podcast In this episode entitled "Interpretation of Symbolic Form" which was recorded around 1970, Joseph Campbell delves into the meaning of symbolic forms and narrative. In the lecture, he explores how symbolic forms point to the human capacity for the transcendent experience. Host, Bradley Olson introduces the episode and gives commentary after the lecture. Listen Here This Week's Highlights “ What we’re 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 All the Gods are Within Us (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

I have on a wall in my study at home in New Braunfels, Texas, a professionally framed letter from James Hillman to me dated 20 November 2000. It is one of several precious letters I received from him over the years. Nothing lengthy or elaborate, but all of them are thoughtful and carry a warm hue. By the way, they are all hand-written, not typed. Two of them are on The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture letterhead. In it James is wondering what part of a review of mine of one of his books that was published in a psychology journal that the review editor could not understand. He also asked me if I could send him what the editor either removed or altered of my typed original and the later published version. He was curious about what they felt needed to be changed from the original and how the two renderings differed. But that is not why I took the time and care to preserve this letter “in his own hand,” as we say, framed and hung in a prominent place in my work space. No, it was what he wrote at the end: “Meanwhile, my thanks to you for your many kind and intelligent reviews, as well as your own continued valuable writings. Best, James.” I begin this short reflection on letter writing with James Hillman's kind and extremely valued note to me about my own writing, as a warm expression of appreciation, exhibited in his own cursive hand. It is my lead in to a volume titled, Correspondence: 1927-1987, which Evans Lansing Smith and I worked on for years as co-editors before finally bringing to fruition this year the letters of  Joseph Campbell to others as well as letters to him, and about him, spanning the years mentioned in the title. It is a handsome volume by New World Library that joins an expanding list of excellent publications of Campbell’s studies in mythology as well as edited volumes on a variety of  themes from his life-long work. I may have been thinking of James’ letter above when I wrote the Foreword entitled “Letter Writing: The Imagination’s Personal Genre” (Correspondence, xiii-xvi). There I mused on the personal, informal and more humanly-inflected rhetoric of a letter. Some of the observations I included in the Foreword I want to emphasize in the rest of this short essay. First of all, letters most frequently carry affect—feeling and emotion on a different register. A personal letter, directed not at a wide audience but to a specific individual, carries its own vocabulary, its own brand of sentiment as well as its own personal acknowledgement of the recipient. And yes, it can convey sentimentality as well. Letters have as their subject matter the writer's own feelings, how their own emotional life steps forward to be recognized. Letters seem to convey above other forms of writing a conjunction of both thinking and feeling, such that their affective reality is prominent and carried often in the form of affection. Letters, as is certainly true with the varied forms of expression from and to and about Campbell, reveal the qualities of a person, over and above the data imbedded in their vitae. Moreover, a hand-written letter is embodied, unlike other forms of communication. I remember working in the archives at Pacifica Graduate Institute where the letters were arranged in boxes. I wore a pair of white gloves in order to handle the sheets of paper that Campbell himself handled, or that other individuals, whether famous or not, held as they wrote on the paper. I remember, for instance, so many of the letters to Campbell from his mother thanking him for gifts sent to her and his father and how proud she was of him. Precious artifacts touched by both affection and gratitude. I remember as well one letter in particular, dated February 29, 1940, that the famous novelist and political activist Thomas Mann, whom Campbell admired so, wrote to thank Campbell for his kind words about Mann’s book, Lotte in Weimar. Mann mentions that he was also delighted to learn that Campbell had read the publication in the original German. The letter, though typed, carries Mann’s hand-written signature, splitting the difference between the mechanical and the hand-made. As I read the original document, I felt connected to Mann and Campbell in a new way, knowing I was handling the very sheet of paper that Mann had signed and that Campbell held while reading it. My own history entered the conversation at this moment, for Mann’s fiction was a central part of my student life decades ago as an English Major at Kent State University, and I had been teaching Campbell’s work for over a decade to graduate students. In his short missive, I learned something of Mann’s own temperament, his warmth and generosity, affectionately shown to the mythologist and extended out to include his wife, Jean Erdman. I end with the observation that hand-written or typed, signed letters revitalize history in a different way than, say, the publication of a book, even the publication of a book of letters that is the topic of this reflection. It is as if touching, handling and reading letters that are “hand-written” and hand-held, stretch the hand of the writer and the hand of the reader out to one another, across the expanse of time, culture and circumstances. In this reach there arises a numinous connectedness between the living and the living as well as, more poignantly, the living and the dead. The dead live once more in the hand-written and/or signed letter, a literal reliving of the dead in the present.

Pt. I: The Hobgoblin of Doubt (April 15, 2019) We all know about things. In fact, we all know a lot of things about a lot of things. The human brain is stunningly complex; a new born baby has somewhere around 100 billion neurons—twice as many as adults, and in a brain half the size. No wonder a child’s brain from birth to around the age of three functions as a knowledge sponge, constantly learning things, all sorts of things. The extravagant diversity of thingness makes the world and its inhabitants an utter wonder. Most of us grow up learning to have a mind of things, filled with the qualities of things and heuristic schemas that help us manipulate those things. Materialism constitutes the foundation of most of human learning. For example, parents speak to children materially: what animal is this? What color is that? How many fingers do you have? We ask children to perform counting, but we seldom go beyond material applications and ask them, for example, what numbers actually are. We never ask them whether ourselves or our universe is real, whether there’s free will, or an objective reality; we never ask them why is there something instead of nothing. It’s proper, of course, that we don’t introduce metaphysics and existentialism to young children, for they would likely dissolve into an angsty goo right before our inquisitorial eyes, and parents would be forced to save for their child’s long term psychoanalysis rather than college. In Thou Art That, Joseph Campbell notes that Zen masters always dissolve the material world by including the opposite immediately after whatever object or concept they might reference: “That which is no thing. That which is no that. This is the ultimate reference of our metaphors […] opening the mystery of the operation of this transcendent energy in the field of time and space” (Thou Art That, 18). And in Myths of Light, Campbell writes, “You cannot say a thing either is or is not. The things are no things, there is nothing there. Here, below, all things [are] dual. This line is the mystery of māyā. The word māyā comes from a root ma, which means ‘to measure forth; to build.’ Māyā is what builds forth the world” (Myths of Light, 73). It’s easy to imagine Lear’s Fool as a Hindu scholar when he asks King Lear, “Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle” (King Lear, Act I, Scene IV)? Myth’s foundation is metaphor, and metaphors are the no-things of which myth makes the most extraordinary use; correspondingly, a mind of myth makes use of everything. Living often gets in the way of understanding life, of seeing through the illusions of materiality, and a mind of myth saves one from the emptiness of a life lived solely, and soullessly, on its surface. A mind of myth frees one from the pernicious distraction of pursuing happiness. Furthermore, myth saves us from a too remote, too sterile history, one that neglected to send a salubrious message in a bottle downstream to us in the present who struggle to find meaning in a history largely content to present the past as a quaint curiosity. Developing a mind of myth requires one to think mythically, striving to see through the world of appearance, the world of convention, the world of belief, of life, of death—the literalized world—to the world in which nothing is not a contradiction (at the same time everything is and nothing is contradiction). In his poem, The Snow Man, Wallace Stevens put it this way: One must have a mind of winterTo regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. A mind of myth is created from a long, uncompromising practice of saying yes to the world exactly as it is—yes to all its suffering and pain, its joy, its beauty, its impenetrability, its staggering disregard for human concern. A mind of myth is the result of saying yes to “the full catastrophe,” as Zorba put it, the mysterious māyā that gives rise to human consciousness and existence itself. It isn’t simply knowing the stories of mythology that develop a mind of myth; one must inhabit them until thinking mythologically becomes second nature, until one is able to see the nothing that is not there and the no-thing that is. The ability to do just that was Joseph Campbell’s particular genius.

Resurrecting the Hobgoblin of Doubt We love our myths, don’t we? We love how they empower us, we love how they make us think, we love how they enlarge our world. We love feeling that, as students of myth, we’ve captured—or nearly so— the enticement as old as humanity itself: occulted or forbidden knowledge, knowledge that is covered or eclipsed, hidden from general view. Often, the feelings stimulated by a deeper penetration into myth are accompanied by the satisfying sense that one has, if not found the truth, at least found more truth. One basks in a sense of accomplishment—“That I,” as Wordsworth put it, “at last, a resting place had found: ‘Here will I dwell,’ said I, my whole life long.” Eternal dwelling seems always to me to be a risky ambition. That one has explained the unexplainable, that one knows which of the innumerable roads stretching out before us leads to wisdom or virtue, these are invariably lessons in vanity and human folly. I think most of us believe, at some level, that certainty is impossible, and it’s usually in the inky dark hub of night that the hobgoblin of doubt is resurrected once more and we feel as if, to gloss Kierkegaard, we’re being trampled to death by geese. But the hobgoblin of doubt is not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, quite to the contrary. In his essay, Self Reliance, Emerson noted that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” an attempt, he says, to avoid being misunderstood and thereby win the approbation of others. But Emerson rejects such approval: “With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do,” (and one might easily substitute the word certainty for consistently to create another fine and useful dictum). “To be great is to be misunderstood,” Emerson notes, and I would personally add that to be great one must live with uncertainty. To be uncertain about life, about its purpose or its meaning, requires one to live with the greatest courage. Believing that we can’t be certain may be pessimistic, but it certainly need not be perceived as nihilistic. In fact, pessimism encourages important faculties like critical thought, humility, and skepticism. Nihilism, on the other hand, is a species of certainty and arises from believing that life is inexorably and unrelentingly impoverished; that the world as it is, is the worst of possible worlds. But Nihilism is not the same as doubt; doubt arises because there is simply too much life and one’s capacity to embrace it in its totality is much, much greater than one’s capacity to live it. And in that disjuncture, in that abyss between one’s understanding and ambition on the one hand, and one’s incompetence on the other, lays the consoling, sublimely aesthetic experience of pathos. Pathos is fundamental to myth and suggests that an ending isn’t the end of anything, that there is so much more to come. Robert Browning describes the consolation of pathos in Andrea del Sarto: [I] Know what I do, am unmoved by men's blame Or their praise either. Somebody remarks Morello's outline there is wrongly traced, His hue mistaken; what of that? or else, Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that? Speak as they please, what does the mountain care? Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? Ultimately, it’s not the opinions of others that need matter, for what does the mountain care? Others offer opinions as if they were Rockefeller and opinions were dimes and, again, what does the mountain care? What matters is that we understand that life often outstrips our ability to live it or even understand it, and we live it anyway; we live it as though we were gods, and our consolation is found, not in living as gods, but rather by living indomitably in the wreckage of our human, our all-too-human failures, unavoidable failures that are always accompanied by the consolation life unfalteringly extends when we exceed the limits of ourselves, when we are forced to recognize we are finite and fallible creatures sent into this breathing world, scarce half made up*. Life always offers consolation—not always of the sort we may strive for or desire, but certianly a deeper and more salutary consolation than we could have imagined. I think one may fairly characterize Joseph Campbell as a pessimist, albeit a joyful one. He often remarked on the tragedy and suffering of life but, like Nietzsche, he always said yes to the world. He seemed to have begun his life in wonder, he marveled at the world and was drawn to all its manifestations, whether horrifying or sublime, and he never retreated to, nor lived within some comforting illusion. In next week’s MythBlast, I’ll discuss further how one might develop a Mind of Myth. Pt. II: The Nothing That Is Not There and The Nothing That Is (April 22, 2019)

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.

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 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

“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

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.