The JCF theme this month of lovers, against the background of Campbell’s early academic work on medieval literature, has provided an opening for me to examine how gaining access to personal and creative autonomy directly invites otherwise marginalized voices to sing. It is in these moments, I believe that mythos can exist as a breathing, fluid force that moves both individuals and cultures forward, rather than serving as a reductive cultural tool. Trobairitz is a medieval Provençal word, the feminine of troubadour, and descends from the root, trobar, meaning “to find.” The trobairitz, women troubadours, lived in Occitania, now known as Provence, at the end of the twelfth century into the beginning of the thirteenth century. There are twenty women known to have been writing during this period in Occitania, from whom twenty-three poems still exist. Some of the trobairitz were described in the vidas of the troubadours, a collection of often fanciful biographies written by medieval historians. From such writings, as well as the names and connections of the women, it is evident that they were aristocrats, patronesses of male troubadours, and often closely personally connected to troubadours. Eleanor of Aquitaine, grand patroness of troubadour poetry, was the granddaughter of Guillelm de Poitiers, the first recorded troubadour, and Marie de Champagne, Eleanor's daughter, hosted acclaimed stylized “Courts of Love.” Additionally, trobairitz Maria de Ventadour was the wife of Viscount Ebles de Ventadour, one in a long family line of troubadours, and Tibors was the sister of Rimbaut d'Orange. In addition, several of the women actually wrote tensons (arguments in poetic form) in conjunction with male troubadours. It is reasonable to conclude that the trobairitz were more than passingly familiar with the conventions and expectations of troubadour poetry. Unlike the jongleurs, the traveling minstrels of medieval Occitania, the troubadours and trobairitz were both of aristocratic stature, arbiters as well as creators of their culture. They existed in a culture that was emerging from the Dark Ages, with extraordinary wealth and accompanying sophistication, but one that hardly demonstrated open-armed acceptance of women. How then, while the women obviously knew what to write, did it occur to them that they, indeed, could write? While there were other women scattered throughout the Middle Ages whose writings have survived, their works were letters and journals, intended for private use. How then was it possible that a group of women who lived in an area of about a fifty-mile radius within about fifty years of one another could create their own literary tradition? There are several factors that probably had some effect on both situations. In general, in the Middle Ages women were nonpeople; they “were virtual nonentities who counted only insofar as they were good for bringing sons into the world.” (Bogin, Meg. The Women Troubadours, p. 22) Whether peasant or aristocrat, they had virtually no rights and were wards of either their father, their lord, or the church throughout their lifetimes. Marriages were, largely, economic contracts. Romantic love was far from the epicenter of married life. Women were rarely allowed to own property, but one of the differentiating aspects of Occitanian culture from the rest of medieval France was the existence of the Theodosian Code. “The Theodosian Code of 394–95 … was brought to Occitania by the Visigoth invaders of the sixth century. This code gave sons and unmarried daughters an equal share in their father's estate.” (ibid, 23) While from contemporary records it is obvious that this code was not followed on a general basis, it still provided some legal background for a certain amount of female autonomy. By far, however, the single greatest influence on the women of Occitania was the onslaught of the Crusades. The Crusades provided a drain of men to the East, in search of adventure, riches, and religious rewards. “If contemporary records are to be believed, some 60,000 men took part in the first siege of Jerusalem in 1099. The next hundred years would bring four more Crusades: in 1146, 1189, 1204, and 1217.” (ibid, 33) Increasingly, then, women were placed in positions of responsibility and authority out of necessity, for there were gaps to be filled in leadership and governing left by the absent lords of realms. “The most immediate effect of the drastic reduction in the male population was to place women in direct control of fiefs that had been previously run by men” (ibid, 35). With that responsibility came an increased sense of freedom and self-worth, and women in Occitania began to not merely listen to the songs of troubadours and through patronage color the language, concepts, and intent of the poetry, but instead began to write it themselves. This lasted really only as long as the Crusades lasted. Bogin writes, “It is clear … that the women troubadours belonged to a uniquely favored generation. There was no comparable flourishing of women poets in any other areas where troubadour poetry took hold … nor had there been in Occitania before the women troubadours nor was there after them.” (ibid, 36) While there indeed were similarities in the poetry of men and women in medieval Occitania, of more interest are the differences, which were extensive. Male troubadours wrote of idealized love, of fin amor, and of accompanying idealized ladies, but the women were much more down to earth. They spoke with less abstraction, much more directness. They were speaking intimately and passionately to real, individualized men. One of the most obvious aspects in which that directness materializes is the trobairitz's address of sexuality. While with the men it was either idealized love, even a platonic love for the good of the soul that characterizes fin amor, or ribald wordplay utilized in jeuc d'amor, for the women sexuality was a many-faceted, often harsh reality. Duke Guillelm was willing to play word games with sex in his discussions of the jeuc d'amor with thinly veiled references to the size of his dice, two of which “were well-squared, valid / but the third was loaded.” (The Poetry of William VII, Count of Poitiers, IX Duke of Aquitaine. ed and trans, Gerard A. Bond, p. 55) Conversely, the Comtessa de Dia cries longingly, “If only I could lie beside you for an hour and embrace you lovingly.  Know this, that I'd give almost anything to have you in my husband's place ...”  Later in the same poem, she bitterly says: Now I've seen that I've been betrayed Because I wouldn't sleep with him. Night and day my mind won't rest To think of the mistake I made. (Bogin, p. 89) Sex is not a game to the Comtessa, nor a place where she quietly submits to her lord's will. Equality, both sexual and social, was treated differently by the men and women in medieval poetry. Many of the male troubadours engaged in fulsome flattery of their imaginary perfect ladies within a very feudal form. They positioned themselves as vassals, to be used and/or given away as their lady pleased. This was a mildly humorous and ironic posture for the male troubadours, for they were not in reality subject to any such response from women. For the trobairitz, however, this hit too close to home, and their attitudes differ as a result. Maria de Ventadour, in her tenson with Gui d'Ussel arguing about equality within a courtly relationship, states: The lover ought to do her bidding As toward a friend and lover equally, And she should honor him the way She would a friend, but never as a lord. (Bogin, p. 101) A number of the other poets have a yearning for equality, and often merely for a sense of being taken seriously. Ultimately, the trobairitz emerge as individual, independent women who want to be acknowledged as such, involved in real relationships with all of their inherent joys, frustrations, and pitfalls. They write of joy and desire, heartbreak, and betrayal. Many of the trobairitz’s poems tackle the concept of joy, in many of its colorings; a tradition originating with Guillelm de Poitiers in his discussions of joi e joven, joy and youth, but adding their own sense of immediacy and vibrancy. Additionally, some of the poems, most notably one by Azalais de Porcairagues, have a lyrical natural description, wherein nature itself becomes a player in the relationship. She writes, in perhaps one of the most beautiful moments in the poetry of the trobairitz: Now we are come to the cold time When the ice and the snow and the mud And the birds' beaks are mute (For not one inclines to sing;) And the hedge branches are dry - No leaf or bud sprouts up Nor cries the nightingale Whose song awakens me in May.  (Bogin, 95) These wants and joys, angers and hurts, echo in our perceptions of romantic love today. Women, in a moment of opening into a sense of self-authorship, found a way to articulate the realities of their lives. They reworked their cultural narratives, challenging both medieval and modern patriarchal assumptions about the power and relevance of their voices. In a parallel opening, the power of the trobairitz’s insights were rediscovered by predominantly female scholars after the first stirrings of modern feminism, who broke past the dominant scholarly narrative that this poetry had far less worth than what had been written by men. The creative work of the trobairitz serves as an invitation to seek out other sidelined voices to better understand how they carry metaphor and myth forward in ways that strengthen individuals and communities. And as we assess our own access—and barriers—to power in our lives, this poetry and the women who found the courage to write it can serve as inspirations to embolden our own individual voices.

There’s a story to every scar, physical or emotional. And the scar tissue almost always remains (in some form or another). Especially with heartbreak. We’ve all read enough well-meaning articles to know that we should walk away from  someone who doesn’t treat us with decency and respect. But it’s not just as simple as walking away, now is it? Often when we remove ourselves from a denigrating situation we’re left with huge insecurities about our self-worth. Perhaps we’re tempted to think that we’re incapable of maintaining a loving relationship, let alone be deserving of one. Self-woven narratives of insecurities begin to whisper into the psyche’s inner ears. Dakota tribal wisdom states, “If your horse is dead, dismount!” But it can feel almost impossible to give up a relationship that we’re so heavily invested in, even if at our core we know that it isn’t going anywhere. We may innocuously say that we simply want a lover who will meet us where we are, while continuing to choose people who will only disappoint us, not realizing that we’re trapped in the archetype of the unrequited lover. For example, we choose people who are unavailable so that our love is never requited … and our affection is never returned. But why would we do that? Possibly, because it keeps us safe. It’s why people can (and often do) unconsciously choose an addict, whose addiction means that they’re never grounded in present (vertical) time; or the lover who lives in another country and isn’t available in geographic (horizontal) time; or we chase the workaholic, who has no time at all and can’t reciprocate our feelings, even though they have the best of intentions. Opportunely, in such situations, there’s no chance to expose our vulnerability to the gritty presence of intimacy. Could the underlying issue be that we can’t receive or give intimacy to another when we don’t even have a close, intimate relationship with ourselves? And if so, have we the courage to recognise this and face it? In A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living, Campbell writes: “The distance of your love is the distance of your life. Love is exactly as strong as life.” (p. 35) We may find it to be incredibly easy to say to a friend, caught in the same unrequited love situation as our own, that there’s nothing more ruinous than waiting for someone to love you back. And it’s not necessarily because this other person is too shy or immature to show their feelings; rather, they don’t feel the same way. They don’t really love you. Or, as the popular book and movie title bluntly states, He’s Just Not That Into You. We’re clearly not open to the same wise counsel that we’re so willing to readily impart to others. It’s why we sometimes overinvest in a friend’s heartache, because our own is too much to confront. But what does our friend who wrote Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism advise? Now, to feel something as real in the measure of its full reality is to love. It is love which awakens us to the reality of ourselves, to the reality of others, to the reality of the world and to the reality of God. In so far as we love ourselves, we feel real. And we do not love—or we do not love as much as ourselves—other beings, who seem to us to be less real. Now, two ways, two quite different methods exist which can free us from the illusion ‘me, living – you, shadow’, and we have a choice. The one is to extinguish love of oneself and to become a ‘shadow amongst shadows’. This is the equality of indifference. India offers us this method of liberation from ahamkara, the illusion of self. This illusion is destroyed by extending the indifference that one has for other beings to oneself. Here one reduces oneself to the state of a shadow equal to the other surrounding shadows. Maya, the great illusion, is to believe that individual beings, me and you, should be nothing more than shadows – appearances without reality. The formula for realizing this is therefore: ‘me, shadow – you, shadow’. Their Letter VI to us continues: The other way or method is that of extending the love that one has for oneself to other beings, in order to arrive at the realization of the formula: ‘me, living – you, living’. Here it is a matter of rendering other beings as real as oneself, i.e. of loving them as oneself. To be able to attain this, one has first to love one’s neighbor as oneself. For love is not an abstract programme but, rather, it is substance and intensity. It is necessary therefore that one radiates the substance and intensity of love with regard to one individual being in order that one can begin to ray it out in all directions. ‘To be able to make gold one has to have gold’, say the alchemists. The spiritual counterpart of this maxim is that in order to be able to love everyone one has to love or to have loved someone. This someone is one’s ‘neighbor’. (p. 140) Know Thyself (Gnothi Seauton) is the foundation that allows one to love oneself and one’s neighbor. The Lover tarot card therefore is a reminder to be love. Because one can’t be separate from what one is. This is the love that we’re actually seeking. And it can be effortlessly requited, for the very fact that we are it.

I am not exactly sure when I first heard “Wedding Song (There Is Love)” by Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul, and Mary, but I am quite sure it evoked what Joseph Campbell terms (in a reference from James Joyce) “aesthetic arrest”—a moment of complete seizure when viewing a work of art. Mind you, this was in the 1970s and I was a preteen, so my stunned state was probably due more to the song’s musical rather than lyrical qualities. However, growing up in a church environment, I understood the basics of the words’ surface meaning: a Judeo-Christian view of what marriage “means.” Only later in life, did I come to realize the more expansive meanings associated with the vision Stookey evokes. So in the context of poetic images from “There Is Love,” I want to meditate on the tarot’s version of The Lovers. “He is now to be among you”: I find it interesting that Stookey’s first word is “He.”* The song celebrates two people uniting in marriage, but this other—this third—occupies the prime spot, not “you” or “you both.” (Stookey later clarified, “In matters of theology, it’s wise that we remember, in Christ there is no East or West, in God there is no gender.”) The Rider Waite Smith tarot indeed shows this third figure as an angel hovering between the male and female. In conversation with Bill Moyers, Campbell contends, “By marrying the right person, we reconstruct the image of the incarnate God, and that’s what marriage is.” (This and all subsequent Campbell quotes are from The Power of Myth, Episode VII, “Tales of Love and Marriage.”) This incarnation of the third relates to Jung’s concept of the transcendent function, “a living, third thing…a living birth that leads to a new level of being.” (Collected Works, Vol. 8, 90) Stookey references this aspect later as he paraphrases Matthew 18:20: “Whenever two or more of you are gathered in His name.” (Lyrics by Noel Paul Stookey, ©1971 Public Domain Foundation) A joining in accord, a “union of spirits,” no matter its nature, summons the transcendent into their midst. And although “the two shall be as one,” in that one are three, the “something that you’ve never seen before” Stookey refers to later. “At the calling of your hearts”: When Moyers presses Campbell on how one chooses this “right person,” Campbell replies, “Your heart tells you.” While the Lovers card depicts Eve and Adam naked in their pre-fallen state, their open-armed gestures indicate an even deeper vulnerability—an open-heartedness. Something about this core part–indeed, core comes from the Latin word for “heart,” cor–shows that the third is invoked and evoked from the inmost place, not the brain or the reproductive organs. Clearly Stookey wants to differentiate the “language” of the heart from that of the lower or upper chakras of the human being. “Rest assured this troubadour is acting on His part”: The troubadours celebrated a much different view of love (Amor) than had been part of the earlier overculture—a person-to-person connection that transcends both the animalistic erotic and the generically spiritual. Campbell elaborates Stookey’s reference to the troubadour’s role when he suggests, “The troubadours recognized Amor as the highest spiritual experience,” even paradisical, as the Lovers card depicts. This is as opposed to Eros, a purely physical/psychological experience, and Agape, an impersonal, though noble, one. As the angelic presence in the card represents the third that appears in an Amor connection is both personal and of the highest spiritual order. Stookey as troubadour is reassuring the uniting couple that his work aligns with this supreme sphere of human self-actualization. “Woman draws her life from man and gives it back again”: While overtly this alludes to the biblical story of Eve being created from Adam’s rib, a deeper reading awaits. If we use the esoteric approach of yin and yang—the feminine and the masculine as emblems—then the principle of “the receptive” drawing in, transmuting, and creating in reciprocation to “the directive” removes any hint of male primacy. Moreover, referring to the yin/yang relationship, Campbell asserts, “You couldn’t relate at all to something in which you did not somehow participate.” The male and female principles not only need each other but somehow contain each other; they are not absolute others. Nor, as he goes on to say, is the Divine. Thus Stookey encapsulates the mystery of the union of two opposites: woman and man, as well as human and divine. “Is it love that brings you here, or love that brings you life?”: While most of us would define libido as just sexual drive or lust, depth psychology views it more subtly as energy itself, in particular the energy of life. “Libido is the impulse to life,” Campbell explains, “It comes from the heart…the organ of opening up to somebody else.” The Lovers card also portrays the Tree of Life and the serpent, symbolic of libido. So Stookey asks the philosophical question—are you getting married because that’s what people in love do? Or are you doing it because that’s what life does? “What’s to be the reason?” he wonders. Is your heart open enough to look beyond what you think of as an individual choice to see these greater powers at play? Self and other, the directive and receptive, the transcendent third, life energy itself? I have been receiving so much pleasure later in life, having encountered the works and ideas of Joseph Campbell and many others in the fields of myth and depth psychology. And when I reexamine cultural “artifacts” from my early years—songs, books, movies, and so on—with a fresh set of lenses, I almost always find that the texts which I loved as a child hold so much hidden treasure that my childhood eyes failed to apprehend. Paul Stookey’s beautiful and seemingly simple song is a perfect example of this phenomenon, especially when contemplating the richness and complexity of the Lovers in the tarot. Perhaps it will get you closer to something you have never seen before.

Joseph Campbell’s work is full of reflections on love. I like to think this is due to his successful marriage to his life partner, the dancer and modern dance choreographer Jean Eardman (1916–2020). In a Q&A session during Joseph Campbell's Mythos series, The Ego and the Tao, the mythologist uses the Eastern notion of Tao, that circle with a sinuous line that divides it into equal parts, one white and luminous and the other black and dark, to speak of the wisdom of the body to produce the world. In this symbol, he highlights the interaction of the pairs of opposites, rotating his hands in a moving sphere to convey the idea that this interaction is not static, but happens in a continuous, circular way. Therefore, life must conform to this cycle. According to Campbell, it’s important to watch closely in order to take the right action at the right time. This essential capacity for observation and discernment, which underlies the processes of choice, is clearly represented in tarot card six, the Lovers. Most people interpret it as the arrival of romantic love in life, which may be correct in some cases. But if you have a Raider-Waiter-Smith deck, hold card six in your hands. You will see a sun that opens wide onto an angel-like figure with its wings spread out over male and female figures. The woman is innocently standing in front of a tree with a snake wound around its trunk. The metaphor captures Eve, of course, on the verge of eating the forbidden fruit, a choice that will grant them wisdom but also represents the end of their paradise, or at least that particular experience of paradise. Well, Jungian psychology is solidly based upon the concept of the union of opposites. This is because the male and female figures are not only symbols of love and marriage, but also of our own dual nature. In this psychological approach, the integration of the conscious and the unconscious is the ultimate goal. The interesting thing is that in this choice the union of duality gives rise to a third condition, which is dialectical, called the transcendent function. Something new emerges that did not exist before. In the mythic tarot deck this card is represented splendidly by a scene inspired by the judgment of Paris. As we know from the Greek myth, Paris is minding his own business tending cattle. He is the son of King Priam of Troy. And out of nowhere, Hermes chooses him to award the golden apple to whichever of the three goddesses before him he deems fairest: Hera, Athena, or Aphrodite. A tough choice, and he doesn’t want to do it, as he probably intuits the mess it will inevitably cause. The goddesses, as is their way, try to cast their spells upon him: Athena promises him power in war, Hera promises to make him king, and Aphrodite promises he will get the most beautiful woman in the world. The most beautiful woman in the world? Paris is a young man, and like most young men he has romantic love on his mind. He can plainly see that Aphrodite is offering him the most beautiful mortal woman in the world, Helen. And, as we know, this event precipitates the Trojan War, for the beautiful Helen is married to King Menelaus of Sparta. There’s perhaps a side of us that wants to point the finger at Paris and say, “Hey, you didn’t choose wisely.” But let’s face it, the contest had been imposed on him (by a God, the metaphor for that divine part of the psyche that wants our personality to relate to the Self, the most integrated, whole version of ourselves). The contest takes him out of his bucolic comfort zone and throws him into something entirely new. After choosing love, his entire known world is radically transformed. What he will likely learn as the story unfolds is that every choice has its own particular consequences, and we are responsible for them. And yes, as the ancient Greeks might have said, skata happens, and eventually it will be all right. And this brings us to one of Joseph Campbell’s favorite themes: the troubadours and the Arthurian legends. The troubadours used to associate love to spiritual life. Perhaps, in our troubled times more than ever, it is necessary to have a kind heart—that is, a heart capable of love—in order to face the interesting and challenging times of today. As Campbell says in Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, “the best we can do is ‘lean towards the light’ in an attempt to understand the other in a compassionate way. (197) Because the other mirrors a conflict that is within us, in our family, our community, our country, our culture, our world. It was Campbell’s integrated perspective on body, love, and spirituality that captivated me when I first heard him talking about stories of love and marriage in the Power of Myth series with Bill Moyers. I never forgot the journalist’s frequent surprise when he asked Campbell a question. It was as if he were facing a wise old man like no other. I felt the same way. I imagine that, like many, I was hooked by the erudition and sympathy of the mythologist, who interpreted profound mysteries in a passionate and simple way. The series first aired on Brazilian public TV in 1991. I diligently recorded each episode on VHS tapes so I could review them whenever I wanted. Eventually the series could be purchased, and I acquired the box set to use in the mythical narrative structure classes I taught to students of journalism in those days. For the past year, and two residences later, I’ve been organizing my house and moving things up to the attic. I confess that I couldn’t merely put these old tapes in a cardboard box and banish them to the solitude of the attic. For me, those tapes represent something that I consider to be among the best of my academic and human training. They reflect the heart of who I am. I have learned from Campbell that troubadours recognized love as the highest spiritual experience. And, for me, the individual experience in relation to another is still the toughest and the most sacred journey, one that smooths one’s edges day after day. Woe to Paris, woe to Tristan and Isolde, and woe to us lovers all!

Have you ever been in love? I was. I fell in love with an angel kissed by a demon. That’s how I experienced the hormonal havoc of adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin, and huge quantities of endorphins. It was as if I had eaten a ton of chocolate all at once and began falling yet never fell. However, there is nothing mystical about the familiar butterflies in the stomach. It’s just our endocrine system, controlled by our biological rhythms, that has gone awry. All the mythology of love comes down to a couple of glitches in the hormonal system, an error in the arc of the arrow of Eros. Eros is the son of Aphrodite and Ares. How can you be normal if your parents are goddess of love and god of war? Free-spirited, capricious, mischievous, licentious—this handsome young man shoots arrows from his bow impetuously, on a whim, often by mistake, sometimes calculated, sometimes accidental. But there is no cure for the mystical spell cast by these arrows. He could use a good course in marksmanship. His arrows of love can make heaven out of hell and a hell in heaven. Zeus wanted to get rid of him because of the trouble he would bring to the world, but Aphrodite hid him in the woods until he grew up. The gods were later mesmerized by his gaiety, joyfulness, charisma, social skills and beauty. Zeus was certainly not bored, and Olympian mythology would not exist without his sexual field trips. Eros is an emanation of the spiritual and the physical, oppositions that can be harmonious as well as chaotic. Love can be the bearer of life, but also of death. Eros in Greek or Cupid in Roman mythology is archetypally associated with spirit and soul, consciousness and emotion, body and intellect. Getting lost and falling in love is a kind of death brought about by his arrows of love. It creates confusion because it aims directly at our ego: And since all life is sorrowful, and necessarily so, the answer cannot lie in turning—or “progressing”—from one form of life to another, but only in dissolving the organ of suffering itself, which—as we have seen—is the idea of an ego to be preserved, committed to its own compelling concepts of what is good and what is evil, true and false, right and wrong; which dichotomies—as we have likewise seen—are dissolved in the metaphysical impulse of compassion. Love as passion; love as compassion … And in both it’s the work of Eros … (Myths to Live By, p. 142) In absolute love all the negative traits of our ego are lost, which means ego as an “I” is dead. So, someone must die. In his love poem, Sadghuru explains this type of death: “Who but the lovers have been the most willing to sacrifice all that matters and themselves at the altar of love. Love, the tenderest and the most resilient of all human traits.” On the Lovers tarot card, an arrow from above is pointed at one of the figures on the ground and foreshadows the death of rational choice. The roles cast in this triangle are played by these characters: male, female, and a figure of the supernatural force that connects them from above. This is a card of attraction, choice, compassion, a card that has the same visual composition as the Devil. Instead of an angelic Eros, there is a demon at the top of the card. This card represents passion, illusion, and repression. Both cards are interpreted as the direction of a higher force. The appearance of the card may vary with the interpretation of the archetype. On some cards, there are three figures in the foreground. Sometimes there are two women and a man, in which case it is a matter of choosing between motherly, protective love and passionate, sensual love. On some cards, there are two men at the bottom, and they can be interpreted as a priest marrying a couple or choosing a path between the paternal or youthful spiritual and moral aspects of life. Or it may even be understood as a choice between homosexual or heterosexual relationship. It can be interpreted as a path between wife and a lover, or vice and virtue. That’s how things are on earth, but from above the magic potion is delivered in the form of an arrow to the one who chooses the path between. Does that mean we have no choice in love? “If you drink a love potion there is no full consent of the will!” (The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work, p. 123) “The anima is the ideal that you carry within yourself that you put onto the different entities out there and you unite with that.” (The Hero’s Journey, p. 102) This projection is regulated by the arrow of Eros, the trigger of our hormonal hell.  Such unions can be fatal or blissful. The union of anima and ego can be transcendental in two directions. This is the crossroads between hell and heaven, but on this path, demons and angels do not play the roles of good guys and bad guys. Eros and the Devil are only symbolic interpretations of the metaphor of the transcendent. Love in itself is a heroic act. And heroes must sacrifice something. The aim of such love can be only that of the moth in the image of al-Hallaj: to be annihilated in love’s fire … Do we not recognize here an echo of that same metaphysically grounded sense of a coincidence and transcendence of opposites that we have already found symbolized in the figure of Satan in Hell, Christ on the cross, and the moth consumed in the flame? (Myths to Live By, p. 152–156) One of the most beautiful love stories is the Sufi story of the Devil as God’s most devoted lover. When God created man, he called the angels and asked them to bow to the human form. Lucifer, the best and most loyal of all the angels, refused to bow down to anyone but God. He did not want to be disobedient, as it is usually interpreted in a religious context. Let's take a closer look at his decision. Would someone who is so captivated by love refuse to fulfill the wish of their loved one? It’s not about being rude or arrogant or disobedient here. This is about love. The Devil could not have anyone else in his heart but his loved one—God. But God became angry at his disobedience and said: “Go to hell, get out of my sight!” This great love was bound by the shackles of the ego. Even today, the Devil suffers because he cannot see the one and only whom he loves, and he’s comforted by the memory of his beloved’s voice condemning him. Such enormous pain is often the result of loving. Love is sometimes hell! Now it has been said that of all the pains of Hell, the worst is neither fire nor stench but the deprivation forever of the beatific sight of God … What an image of that exquisite spiritual agony which is at once the rapture and the anguish of love! (Myths to Live By, p. 149) Orson Welles says that if you want a happy ending, it depends on where you end your story. The tarot card of Love doesn’t tell us how the story ends: “And in their kingdom, everyone lived happily ever after. And drank tea.” There is no such end. When this end occurs, you are no longer among the living. And since it is The End, there is no experience of love or life behind it. One of the definitions of cinema is that there is nothing before the beginning and nothing after the end. However, the card of Love does not mean the end, but rather the beginning of the journey. It invites both storm and stability, the union of two beings and the antagonism between the two sexes. It is obvious that the card does not advocate perceiving love through rose-colored glasses, chocolate candies, flowers, or the best sex of your life. This card hints at the transcendence of the ego and the spiritual dimension of heroism. Transcendence is not limited by our understanding of good and evil, or beautiful and ugly. An angel kissed by a demon, or a demon kissed by an angel, are two sides of the same coin. Maybe this very coin was glued to the arrow of Eros.

“Therefore, our first impression of the Card plunges us into the heart of the problem of the relationship between man and gravitation, and the conflicts that this relationship entails,” states the anonymous author in Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism. (p. 330) “The Hanged Man represents the condition of one in the life of whom gravitation from above has replaced that from below.” (p. 332) I suspect that the majority of MythBlast readers would subscribe to the notion that every earthbound crisis, whether it’s finances, health, work, or relationship difficulties, also contains within it a spiritual crisis, an underlying mythological narrative, or a hidden symbolic meaning. These invisible elements and their forces are often veiled in our everyday lives. This is because we can’t, as yet, easily recognize these patterns while existing in a world that wants to be rationally controllable and visibly understandable. The material world permeates so much of our thinking and leads to a preoccupation with logic, rationality, and reason. But working with archetypes and mythology requires a new type of logic, one linked to irrationality and paradox. So while in our everyday parlance we may understand that economic terms such as inflation, deflation, and depression are also psychological terms, we can’t easily translate or universalize these expressions to manage the invisible and transcendental. To continue this thought, it behooves us to reveal the hiddenness that drives our (largely) unconscious motivations and actions. As Carl Jung wrote, “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.” (The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 9 Part 2, p. 71) Again though, I suspect that our readership is rather au fait with these situations because we spend a great deal of our time contemplating symbols, their meaning, and valuing the power of imagination and metaphorical thinking—activities that attune us to the soft whispers of our souls. And furthermore, if we deeply value our inner life, we must therefore also highly value our will too. According to Letter XII in Meditations on the Tarot, our will (a power deeper than thinking and feeling) is connected to the unseen spiritual realms. Once the intimations from these realms are integrated within ourselves, they require concrete and practical expressions on the physical plane. Just as the Hanged Man suspended from a T-shaped cross made of living wood from the Tree of Wisdom—whether perceived as Yggdrasil (the sacred tree in Norse cosmology), the cross of Jesus, or Arbor Vitae (the Tree of Life)—we, too, would do well to contemplate the world from an entirely different angle. In the card, the figure’s feet are tied to the realm of the unseen unconscious, prompting us to find our sure footing in the heavens. Our grounding is to be found in the encompassing spiritual realms, and this is what brings forth the potential for wisdom and indeed the enlightenment signified by the figure’s halo. Now, terms like eternal and temporal are used interchangeably across cultures and traditions, and we could link here to Joseph Campbell’s discussions in the Renewal Myths and Rites section within The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959-87: “These are the two modes of considering God that Rudolf Otto has termed the ‘rational’ and the ‘ineffable’: the same that are called in India saguna and nirguna Brahman: the Absolute with qualities and without.” (p. 68) In preceding paragraphs, I’ve been discussing these two realms, whether we think of them as the invisible and visible, heaven and earth, or the spiritual and physical. Campbell also offers us another way to view them in this Sioux legend: ‘This rock,’ the holy woman continued, ‘is of the same red stone as the bowl of the pipe; it is the earth – your Mother and Grandmother. It is red; you, too, are red; and the Great Spirit has given you a red road.’ The red road is the road of purity and life. The various Indian nations have many names for this road. The Navaho call it the ‘Pollen Path of Beauty.’ Its opposite, the black road, is followed by those ‘who are distracted, ruled by the senses, and live rather for themselves than for their people.’ […] And so we notice now that even the ethical polarity that we recognize between the bird and serpent as allegoric of the winged flight of the spirit and the earth-bound commitment of the passions, here too is suggested. (p.68) This leads us to recall that it’s an indispensable skill to be able to hold the tension of polarities, to entertain contrary interpretations of reality: “winged flight of the spirit and the earth-bound commitment of the passions.” Because this, of course, is the basis for alchemy. And as Jung stated in the Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 18: The cooperation of conscious reasoning with the data of the unconscious is called the ‘transcendent function.’ […] This function progressively unites the opposites. Psychotherapy makes use of it to heal neurotic dissociations, but this function had already served as the basis of Hermetic philosophy for seventeen centuries. (p. 689) We heal through numinous encounters while suspended between opposing fields of gravitation … and this is what the Hanged Man tarot card reveals. However, our world of increasing fragmentation veils the fact that we need to work constructively with polarities, and our anonymous author instructs us: Do not scorn anything or reject anything, if you have authentic faith. It is this, and this alone, which renders everything truly useful and which gives them value which they would not have without it. This is the essential message of the Hanged Man, the upside-down man, whose feet are above and whose head is below, whose zodiacalised will is an authentic witness of the truths of the twelve articles of faith, and who lives suspended between two opposed fields of gravitation – heaven and earth.” (p. 364) We must hold the tension of such polarities within us, inclusively, because the poles and the exchanges between them are highly instructive for our lives while we “hang” between heaven and earth.

Now this brings in a terrific emphasis on what the tender-minded call violence. But that's what nature is. And every now and then you see something that opens your mind to this. -Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey, p. 21 For our contemplation, the Joseph Campbell Foundation presents the image of the Hanged Man, an image of great potency as an organizing principle for this month’s MythBlast essayists. The Hanged Man, card no. 12 of the major arcana of the tarot, surely is what the “tender-minded call violence,” a depiction of the aftermath of torture, with the victim still dangling. Depending on the deck, the figure is either clearly dead or somehow mystically imbued with inner strength, his wisdom magnified by the ordeal. The Hanged Man in the deck I was given (illustrated by Giovanni Caselli) seems suspended between death and life. One could say the same of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot; the Hanged Man is clearly beatified, and that means he’s won his halo through physical and/or psychic trial and tribulation. “There has been a great deal of high and fancy talk displayed in the interpretations of this card,” Campbell wrote, “and yet its basic reference is both simple and well known. In the south of France and in Italy to this day, to be hung up this way in public is a sign of social disgrace.” (Tarot Revelations, 17) The image, minus the halo, is known in Mediterranean culture, and particularly in Italy, as the pittura infamante or defaming portrait, the ultimate degradation of your defeated enemy. It’s what they did to Mussolini and his mistress. Conversely, the style of execution is often a matter of preference. St. Peter, so the story is told, demanded to be crucified upside down because he was unworthy to die in the same way as his master, Jesus. A Catholic might be flooded with associations to the inverted or Petrine cross suggested by the Hanged Man, which is a prominent symbol of the papacy to this day. Perhaps the card speaks to us of our own painful passage through life, during which consciousness is acquired and expanded through suffering. Jeffrey Kripal thinks that trauma is the trigger of transcendence, quoting Greg Mogenson who went a step further in suggesting that God is a trauma. (Secret Body. Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions, p. 331)  Trauma, humiliation, even death itself are the flagstones in the garden of life leading up to the Hanged Man’s terrible denouement. The idea that suffering is the royal road to enlightenment is not unfamiliar to the religious sensibilities of many cultures: from the Sioux warrior who hangs from pectoral hooks while forbidden to show any indication of pain, to Odin’s self-imposed ordeal in which he hung upside down from a tree for nine days in order to gain knowledge. In a deck created by the British surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, the Hanged Man is a symbol of transcendence, at least for this author, as well as for Rhian Sasseen, writing here for the Paris Review: “Carrington’s Hanged Man is one of the loveliest versions I’ve seen, all purple and gold, with its odd message of surrender. The Hanged Man is also a card of crossroads, of biding one’s time; it pictures a man strung up by his heels and hung upside down, as was once done to traitors in Renaissance Italy … In Carrington’s version, the hanged man stares out calmly, a slight smile on his face. It is a card of thresholds, of doorways, of change in the air—but not yet. It is a card of holding off decisions.” (The Paris Review, 4/6/21) What is that “slight smile” on Carrington’s creation? It is more than passive acceptance, but something vibrant; perhaps it’s the very essence of one of Campbell’s favorite coping mechanisms, as described by Nietzsche: My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it. (Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufman, p. 714). It was in this spirit that I sought out my own tarot reader. We sat outside, as befits a religion without walls, a spiritual practice without a priesthood. “The Hanged Man,” says my reader, “is not about death; it is about pausing, contemplating what has gone before and what may come after.” The pause in the midst of struggle, of course, is the highpoint of the Bhagavad Gita, where Arjuna is held back from battle so that Krishna can unpack the theological questions regarding action and inaction. I am Arjuna to her Krishna. A tarot reading refocuses the experience of the numinous as an intimate exchange between two people. There are no mosques, nor monasteries. In fact, historically, the great faiths have distanced themselves from practices they consider to be born of popular superstition and unworthy of serious consideration. But as Campbell writes, “Their hard line, too, is dissolving, and we are now observing throughout our culture world a resurgence of the sense of the immanence of the occult, within ourselves and within nature. (Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays, 1959-1987, p. 260) I experienced the immanence of the occult under a carob tree in a communal green space in West Hollywood with a young Russian woman who tells me things I want to hear. And why not? They do that in church too. They tell you that this corruptible body is not to be the sum total of our existence, that immortality is ours for the asking. This woman is simply telling me that my anxiety is a choice and I should get past it. Be the Hanged Man. Embrace that amor fati beloved of Campbell. Then you will understand the slight smile on the Hanged Man’s face indicating what Buddha might recognize as the joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.

Suspended between Strength and Death is the Hanged Man. He doesn’t look particularly concerned. The illustrator of the emblematic Smith-Waite tarot deck, Pamela “Pixie” Coleman Smith, portrayed him as seemingly unsurprised and unbothered by his situation. His hair dangles down, and blood begins to pool in his head, which is encircled by a halo of yellow light. He swings gently in the breeze from one elegant leg, the other bent down behind it as a sort of physical and visual counterbalance. His hands are—clasped? tied?—behind his back. For more than one hundred years, tarot readers have wondered at Pixie’s illustration, turning its meaning over in their minds and deciding how it might reflect a truth personal to them alone. And the numbers of those handling cards are growing: the early pandemic years saw a boom in the number of tarot cards sold in the United States, causing some game companies to double their printing in 2020 and 2021 to keep up with demand. In this month’s featured text, The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays, 1959–1987, Joseph Campbell reflects on the cycle of humanity’s love of the occult in the essay “The Occult in Myth and Literature” (302): The Old Bronze Age realization of a micro-macrocosmic unity is returning, and everywhere all the old arts that once were banned are coming back. I have myself been traveling about 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. When Campbell published this line in 1977, the curtain had just gone up on the Broadway revival of Hair, the “American tribal love-rock musical” of 1967. The show had been regaling audiences with its representation of hippie subculture for ten years, enthralling and alarming viewers in equal measure with nudity, drug use, and occult references alongside a vehement rejection of the country’s puritanical Christian philosophy. The musical is called Hair, for gods’ sakes, the ultimate symbol of liberation and power across cultures for millennia from the Indigenous peoples of the Americas to ancient Greek gods and heroes. “My hair is holy,” Dionysus says in Euripides’s tragedy The Bacchae. “I grow it long for the god.”  Hair is packed with references to Christianity as both allegory and foil to the tribe’s aims and antics. Alongside these are vibrant celebrations of the natural world, especially the stars, a mainstay of the occult. Even though British astrologer Neil Spencer referred to “Aquarius,” the show’s anthem, as “astrological gibberish,” it had no bearing on its wild and sustained success. The Civil Rights movement, the sexual revolution, antiwar fury, and women’s liberation made it imperative for Western seekers to find beliefs that better suited their ideals of love, freedom, and connection with all things. Christianity fell extraordinarily short in all areas, leading to a surge of Eastern practices in the US and England, as well as a rebirth of many esoteric practices, including tarot and astrology. The “ancient” feeling of these disciplines resonated with people looking to escape the confines of their tight-laced post–World War II upbringing, even though many of these practices had been refined at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it was music that offered the direct pathway to the ineffable. Campbell was given the opportunity to see the Grateful Dead in concert near the end of his life. He told his audience in a lecture after the show that “this is Dionysus talking through these kids.” He further describes the experience in The Mythic Dimension: Rock music had always seemed a bore to me, but I can tell you, at that concert, I found eight thousand people standing in mild rapture for five hours. The place was just a mansion of dance. And I thought, ‘Holy God! Everyone has just lost themselves in everybody else here!’ (260-261) “[Music] is the oldest form of religious worship,” writes Peter Bebergal in his 2015 book The Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll: when magic and religion were inseparable, where myth was communicated through a colorful and often wild blending of costume, song, and dance. This type of yearning for freedom and self-expression is our first and earliest glimmer of the spirit of rock and roll, a primeval and communal method to transmit a truth, to celebrate, to mourn, to sacrifice something to the gods. And to do it together. (18) Occultism isn’t one set belief, making the figure of the witch the perfect symbol of counterculture, outcasts, and weirdness: too loud, unpredictable, otherworldly, and, most terrifying of all, sexually liberated. An accusation of witchcraft is still mortally dangerous in many parts of the world; far from a kitschy symbol of rebellion, the witch is a declaration of freedom in spite of legitimate deadly risks. It’s little wonder that witches were invoked in the face of life-or-death causes like Civil Rights and the Vietnam War, or by groups like WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) founded by radical feminists to fight for women’s liberation. One of the leaflets WITCH dispersed at their protests in the late 1960s read: If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a Witch. You make your own rules. You are free and beautiful. You can be invisible or evident in how you choose to make your witch-self known. You can form your own Coven of sister Witches (thirteen is a cozy number for a group) and do your own actions ... You are a Witch by saying aloud, "I am a Witch" three times, and thinking about that. You are a Witch by being female, untamed, angry, joyous, and immortal. (Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshipers, and Other Pagans in America. Margot Adler, 1979) Witchcraft, this vector of fascination as well as fear, was criminalized in Britain until 1951 when the old law was repealed and replaced with the Fraudulent Mediums Act. Hair itself wasn’t permitted to be performed in London’s West End until 1968, when the Labour government repealed a 1737 law that prevented the show on the grounds of nudity and drug use, itself a revolutionary act for free speech that boosted the show’s popularity in the UK. Once the curtain was up, reviews began flowing in. Most were positive, if overwhelmingly English; Philip Hope-Wallace wrote for the Guardian, “It is all a good deal less awful than it sounds but will probably find its own proper audience, if that is the right adjective.” The renewed celebration of the witch, and the discomfort and alarm that follows, is not so different from the journey of the Hanged Man himself: someone unfamiliar with the tarot will often take the card as a bad omen based on the name and imagery, but spending time with the card, turning it over and examining the details with an open mind, might lead them to some surprising revelations. A.E. Waite of the Smith-Waite deck wrote The Pictorial Key to the Tarot in 1910, which includes descriptions and interpretations of Smith’s illustrations. He wrote of the Hanged Man that “it has been called falsely a card of martyrdom, a card of prudence … a card of duty.” A rope ties you in place where you hang, uncomfortable and unable to release yourself. What it does mean, Waite writes, is enlightenment: expansiveness, perspective, intuition, circumspection, prophecy. One interpretation of the card even says the Hanged Man put himself up there, tying himself deliberately to the Tree of Life to gain knowledge from experiencing a new perspective. As long as there are cultural norms, there will be the drive to rebel against them, and the witch will be there. As the Hanged Man alarms passersby in his personal quest to achieve enlightenment, the witch strives for truth and empathy with the full knowledge of disruption and fury it will inevitably provoke. The old arts that were once banned are back. A “micro-macrocosmic unity” is what makes the occult appealing, and is why it will always, in some form, return. We need this connection: tying ourselves upside down to the Tree of Life, a radical rejection of convention, a tug-of-war between duty and spiritual expansion—and a responsibility and connection to one another.

No one, I imagine, would like to draw the cards of Death, the Devil, the Tower, and the Hanged Man in tarot divination. You do not need to be a connoisseur of symbols to have the blood frozen in your veins at the very idea of these archetypes at work in your life, especially if you came to see a psychic to ask about the possibility of investing in a small business venture or the state of your health. However, the metaphorical meaning of these cards need not have negative connotations. Joseph Campbell says that metaphors are used to point to the experience that lies beyond the field of knowledge but yet lives in all of us. All mythology is one, and myths live deeply buried in the individual. We cannot excavate them, as they belong to the field of Kant's transcendental, but we can reach close enough to the archetypes that live there to try to interpret them through metaphors. Such metaphorical images are represented on tarot cards. But we often make mistakes when interpreting metaphors or symbols. “Metaphors are used to point out past all knowledge to the experience of that which lives in you. If the metaphor is interpreted as a fact it’s misunderstood. “ (Joseph Campbell, Mythos III: The Shaping of the Western Tradition) The metaphor of the Hanged Man is one such yin-yang example that shows that in every evil there is some good, and vice versa. Bend your right leg at the knee from an upright standing position and place the right sole on the inner part of the right leg above the knee; then fold the palms over your hands in a prayer position, and you will get to the yoga position called Ekapada Pranamasana. This asana calms the mind and develops a sense of balance, concentration, focus, and self-awareness. This posture is also known as One Leg Salutation or the Tree (Vrksasana). It is visually comparable to the Hanged Man card from tarot. Le Pendu is the original French name of this card. The position of this figure does not allow for movement but radiates peace and patience in waiting. There is a notion in Islamic culture for being stuck in a certain position while exercising extreme patience and perseverance. The Arabic word Sabur, one of the ninety nine names of Allah, corresponds to the concepts of meditation, endurance, acceptance, and patience. This could be the right description for the metaphor of the Hanged Man. In the 1999 Roman Polanski film The Ninth Gate, adapted from the novel El Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, a hanged man appears in several places: as an illustrated image, as a man executed by hanging, and yet another hanged man who committed suicide. Pérez-Reverte took this idea from a legend concerning the tarot in Middle Ages Europe, when the Inquisition was under the impression that the major arcana of the tarot were copyrighted by the Devil himself. One should remember the gruesome creativity of capital punishment in the Middle Ages: impaling, crucifixion, burning at the stake, branding, scalping, guillotining, burying alive, flogging, and death by hanging. As recently as three hundred years ago, the favorite pastime of Londoners and Parisians was not binge-watching streaming TV serials but attending public executions. At the time, humans believed that murderers had violated the order of the universe, and therefore punishment was needed to restore that order. Death by hanging is the symbolic act of the restoration of order for those who betrayed it. Whether it involves hanging as suicide or hanging as punishment, the barbarism of the act sends chills down our spine and disgusts us as well as the sensibilities of our age of liberal humanism. “Where is the sport in simple hanging? The terror, the murder. The fun!” exclaims Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek  series (S1:E17 “The Squire of Gothos”) after he was captured by the infantile alien obsessed with the eighteenth-century history of Earth, especially its methods of torture, which were adopted from Europe and transplanted to America’s Wild West. Hollywood Westerns abound with scenes of swaying bodies and the suspense of the hero being rescued from the noose at the last minute. There is a suggestion of the sublime in a body suspended and swaying in the air. Meditative. Stuck. Lingering. The all-patient, forbearing, restrained sensibility of Sabur. All of which makes one wonder, what exactly are we seeing when looking at the card of the Hanged Man? A man hangs upside down, tied by one leg. In the inverted position, the man looks as if he is standing on one leg. In her book Jung and Tarot, Sallie Nichols describes the image of the Hanged Man as a turnip waiting for someone to pull it out of the ground. His hands are tied behind his back. The other leg touches the inner thigh of the opposite leg. He is not dead; there is no expression of pain on his face, only a half-blissed smile. The position cannot be attributed to the act of self-harm. Someone hung him up, but not to exact punishment. Nor is it about torture or revenge, since the Inquisitioner’s methods included hanging weights on other limbs. The Hanged Man of the tarot card is about waiting for something while hanging—hanging out. Or perhaps it is as if he is “hanging” with friends. Awake. Patient. Killing time while in the position of being stuck. The archetype of the image in this position is a metaphor for isolation, surrender, sacrifice, uncertainty, transition, temptation, and renewal. It can also be seen as an inverted cross,  a symbol of the atoning sacrifice. The emphasis of this card is on the necessity of sacrifice in order to achieve goals and maintain freedom. It is important to be able to go through the often upsetting, overwhelming transformations of life that turn us and our world upside down while maintaining composure. Perhaps we cannot change the situation in which we find ourselves, but this is no reason for panic; instead it is an opportunity for growth. Discipline leads to change, and only he who can overcome himself can achieve transformation. While we are waiting, it might be commendable to practice Ekapada Pranamasana or Sabur. The Hanged Man cannot control his own life; he has to wait for someone to pull him down and untie him. If one were to cast tarot cards for years, the year 2020 would draw exactly this card. Everything was suspended, and we waited for better times, trying to develop self-awareness, awareness of others, awareness of disease and dis-ease. The Hanged Man is a representation of the mythology of the pandemic. The man is still alive, he is hanging, he is not very clear about what is happening, but he is waiting for something to pass. It is relatively easy to interpret archetypal situations a posteriori, in hindsight, but we can use archetypes, symbols, and metaphors to connect us with the otherworldly or the transcendent. Psychics claim to approach the transcendent a priori, and in so doing, an image of a trip can mean a trip to the supermarket or a trip around the world. It depends on how we choose to interpret the metaphor. The Hanged Man can be seen as a metaphor for a global pandemic or simply indecision in buying a pair of shoes. In very large or very small ways, we can often find ourselves in a state or situation that archetypically corresponds to the symbolism of the Hanging Man. A good example of the Hanged Man situation is one particular period in Joseph Campbell's life that corresponded with the Great Depression. After he returned from his study trip in Europe, he did not have a job for five years. During this time he hung out with dogs and read. Every day he had two periods of four hours dedicated to reading. ”I just retired to the woods. I went up to Woodstock and just read, and read, and read, and read, for five years. No job, no money.“ (The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work, p. 65) Campbell read for five years! He used the position and the mindset of the Hanged Man for self-improvement, meditating on his life and his passions, and patiently waiting while being stuck. The development of one of the most brilliant minds in philosophy, mythology, and comparative critical thinking in the world took place under the archetypal image of the Hanged Man. Being stuck and being a sport about it is the true meaning of the word Sabur and the metaphor of the Hanged Man.

Before diving into the symbolism of the Star card of the tarot, let’s first consider its predecessor the Tower, whose sudden onslaught of destruction will have already descended (precisely) like lightning upon us. By now, however, we have hopefully distanced ourselves from the drama enough to compartmentalize events in the gentler, more manageable abstractions of “dissolution” or simply of “loss.” Sometimes this act of distancing comes naturally with the passage of time, while at others it requires a conscious choice. The element of conscious choice has a significant place in the present look into the symbolism of the Star card because it invites Logos into the mix. “Logic?” you ask. “Intellect and reason in the business of symbols?” Yes, because it’s the literalist—the dogmatist of symbolic hermeneutics who leans exclusively on the intuitive/associative/experiential encounter with the image—who believes the intellect has no part to play. For Logos is both complementary and necessary to an albeit predominantly intuitive, irrational process—and if the adjectives complementary and necessary are not ample, then let me add inescapable. We’ll return to the Logos later, and to its correlation with choice, so please hold that thread. For now, however, having found ourselves here at ground zero, centered and empowered to consciously contribute as creators and cocreators to our own rebuilding, we are able to proceed with options of far greater scope and scale had the lightning not come in the first place. For such is the case with foundational work: the deeper we’ve gone—or should I say been sent?—the greater the potential if we choose to “build big.” So, on to the images of the Star card as our formative stage of renewal, and with a fuller appreciation of what they can teach us not about loss but rather about what we can do now that we’re back. First we register the gestalt, the overall feel of the scene: distinctly serene, more at ease and in flow, and all in a deeply natural setting. Clearly it is nature’s harmonious aspect, her tending, nurturing side, not her destructive one. However at ease the scene may be, it is not idle, as demonstrated by the calm industriousness of the central actor and action of the card: the Woman. Her composed demeanor deepens the unembellished simplicity (and sincerity) of her nakedness. She is strong. And without need or concern for the egoic armor (symbolized by clothes) that we must don to defend ourselves from all the physical, social, and psychological dangers that accompany the human context. Vulnerable? Sure. But without urgency or fear. She instead possesses a quiet kind of confidence that seems to affirm all the more that shebelongs here, her sensibilities and sensitivities exposed to a more immediate relationship with her environment and story—in short, with her myth. I am tempted to say she is vulnerable to destiny. But not as a victim, not as acted upon as we see in the Tower, but rather by choice. Call it destiny in its dharmic sense, where one is simply on the Path, playing one’s part, doing precisely what it is one is called to do. One foot is placed on top of the water and not submerged in it as one would expect, emphasizing the conscious over the unconscious (for water is, among other things, an archetype of the unconscious). This highlights the conscious, rational attributes of choice and the capacity to act, both Logos based and intellect initiated. On that note, I must insert an irrational criterion for relevant reasons to come—and because it’s just too valuable to omit: Hope—an irrational, emotional phenomenon quite beyond the domain of intellect. For the Star card is widely known as the card of hope, which is probably the single most potent initiator and ally to renewal. For sake of time, and rather than defining hope, to fully appreciate its value one needs only to consider its opposite: the ruinous destroyer despair (literally “de-hope”) and move on. So, hope. Sometimes descending by grace, but more often requiring us to open the door and get involved via conscious choice and action. In short, we must jump-start an attitude. Enter Logos. And please note that this simple act need not take more than a moment—less than even a second!—to perform its priceless function. However brief, this intellectual maneuver is paramount, and not just with hope but with all kinds of content and contexts. Although it’s not my intention to get into the distinction between symbols and signs right now, I’ll share the following popular quote from Jung as an analogy, in lieu of an explanation, of what attitude can do: “Whether a thing is a symbol or not depends chiefly upon the attitude of the observing consciousness.” (The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Psychological Types, 603) Point being, with attitude we can actually shift our conscious perspective, and in so doing we shift the whole (apparently) external environment, dimension, reality—whatever one wishes to call it—to reveal that which formerly lay hidden, embedded in the topography of our initial encounter. And this, as you’ve probably gathered by now, I find astounding. With that point established to reinforce our focus on attitude’s relationship to what we can do, let’s return to the Woman, because for all this talk of being conscious and “above,” her business is quite “down.” She is kneeling down, looking down, pouring water down from jugs in her hands, all of which demonstrates a conscious perspective toward the unconscious, toward the foundational, with an attitude of tending—in other words, to “inner work.” In this image one cannot help but think of Demeter, the Eleusinian Mysteries, and its theme of renewal, initiated first through Persephone’s abduction by Hades (surely a Tower event) and subsequently by Demeter’s fierce quest to retrieve her daughter from the underworld. She attends to the chthonic, the unconscious (cf., the jug that the Woman pours into water). Third is Demeter’s archetypal role as grain goddess. And this is the conscious, the field of life symbolized by the other jug poured upon earth. Joseph Campbell speaks to both the conscious and unconscious sides of renewal while addressing the figures on the Terra Nouva Sarcophagus: “Demeter is seated on a sacred serpent-coiled basket, and from the mystic basket precedes the serpent, that which sheds its skin to be born again and which represents the engagement of life-giving consciousness in the field of time and space.” (Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, 195) But we have further correlations to Demeter in the Woman’s bright golden hair. Straight from the poet’s mouth nearly three-thousand years ago: … a lovely fragrance from her perfumed veils spread about and a brightness from the immortal flesh of the goddess shone far away and her blond hair fell to her shoulders and the sturdy house was filled with light like lightning (The Homeric Hymns, Charles Boer, Trans. 139) Consider a moment all the brightness in the passage above. And next, how the Woman’s hair matches precisely (and only) the gold of the one larger star on the card. Is she then linked to a sun symbol, albeit shaped like a star? I’m fine with that. Or have we forgotten our sun is a star? Or so it is in the empirical fantasy. Since archetypal interpretation tells us sun is masculine, then we have an exception, which increases its emphasis via uniqueness. In short, there is something exceptional to the Woman’s sun connection, less as an ultimate symbol of Source or Being but rather more worldly in the Demeter sense—as in that which shines down and causes the flora and grain to grow—from germ to flower, from darkness to star.

Hence in a season of calmer weather Though inland far we be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither, Can in a moment travel thither, And see the Children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. (Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood by William Wordsworth) The vernal equinox marks the transition from winter to spring here in the northern hemisphere, and our friends in Australia can now breathe a sigh of relief as a tough, hot summer transitions into autumn. Regardless of where you are, this astronomical moment marks a boundary both factually and symbolically. Appropriately enough, this month our MythBlast family has been musing on the seventeenth trump card of the tarot: the Star. The Star is one of the goddess cards in the tarot. There are a number of such cards representing different aspects of the “Divine Feminine,” that is to say a variety of characteristics ascribed to the symbol as “feminine” based partly in a socially constructed and culturally inflected set of experiences and conceptual structures and then projected into that misty ganz andersein (Ultimate Other) lying just beyond, or below, normal waking consciousness. I'm being careful in this description, because describing something as “one aspect of the Divine Feminine” suggests that these representations are prototypes, as if they describe a set of “divine” characteristics or Platonic Forms to which human beings are supposed to aspire and against which human lives are to be judged. I think this view is exactly backwards. Symbols like these are projections of our psyche captured in metaphor—the metaphors can be beautiful, but their value depends upon the degree to which they effectively disclose, or direct our attention to, deeper parts of our own experience. Metaphors like these put us in relationship with the world and, when our understanding of the world changes, so too must those metaphors. As civilization moves into a less binary understanding of life and culture, these metaphors will have to morph as well. In any case, while women can be stereotypically understood using these aspects of the Divine Feminine, the symbolic topography of Divine Feminine must first be understood as having been determined by what a particular culture, situated in a particular time and space, deemed to be a “woman.” The same goes for the masculine side of this traditional binary. There is a chicken-and-egg analogy working in the background here, but it's important to get the order of signified and signifier right. With that safety lock in place, let's get starry eyed. The Star, as a verb instead of a noun, seems to work regardless of current social constructions. Operationally defined, she symbolizes the boundary layers and the mode of transit between daily, mundane consciousness and that which lies beyond. Discerning readers will have noticed that in some sense the metaphors that link us to what lies beyond mundane consciousness will, to mundane consciousness, often seem to be understood as lies. What lies beyond often seems to lie. That’s always the problem with metaphors. The fact that it’s ironic and corny at the same time is always the first indication of a deeper hermeneutical, and hermetic, mystery. The Star card typically shows a woman at the water's edge, sometimes a river, sometimes a pond, but the water always represents the Great Sea. She kneels beside it wielding two jugs, one held aloft pouring water (or starlight) onto herself and the other slung below, pouring that water out into the world. She inhabits the shoreline, marking the tide, straddling the boundary between Here and There, making accessible the Yonder Shore or, at least, the watery starlit pathway that transits Here to There. In normal life you may have had the experience of walking the beach at night when the water is still, rippled by hushed zephyrs, and felt the sea dew gentle itself against your face: a barest intimation of the vast and mostly opaque ocean depths rolling out of sight to the horizon. Arguably, most days, our unconscious selves communicate in the same way, as the slightest, almost unnoticeable mist bringing material to consciousness from what seems a mostly opaque and inscrutable depth rolling out of sight beyond the horizon of normal consciousness. It whispers misty intimations (I really want to say mythsty intimations). Sometimes we recognize and rejoice in these mythsty intimations of immortality, but, more often than not, we perceive these whispers as nothing more than a spray of healthy hydration that keeps the hardening skin of adulthood softer, and more pliant, and more functionally alert. So, to normal waking consciousness, the Star card represents a kind of humidifier—although, admittedly, sometimes a fire hose—powered by the unconscious. We notice it only when we shut it off or when it runs out of starlight … I mean, water … and our skin, or the protective membrane of mundane consciousness, dries out and hardens, or cracks. The metaphor here suggests how we can share in this transverberation by absorbing the sea dew, the spilled starlight, and then acting as a conduit, spilling it out into the world. Spilling starlight into the world is a pretty dense, if twinkly, metaphor, but it would come down to something like this: once one is in touch with the Great Sea—and the “Great Sea” here is a kenning for the Jungian unconscious or even for the universal architecture which Aristotle reminds us is accessed through wonder—one cannot help but spill the water from that Grail out into the world. Twinkle twinkle. Thanks for musing along.

These days engaging with myth, for me, can be an invitation to poke at sacred cows. In a month that JCF has dedicated to Campbell’s work on goddesses and what he, and many other mythologists, call the divine feminine, I find myself asking what a divine feminine (or divine masculine, for that matter) actually is. Or why—even if—it should matter to us. What is served when we define qualities of self, soul, or action as gendered? In contemporary Western culture, we are inundated with language and constructs about what are perceived to be inherent differences between female and male, and what we define as feminine and masculine. This binary engulfs us. By way of illustration, I’d like to invite you to look at this cloud of words and note what image pops into your head with each one. Is there gender associated with it? If so, which one? Soft. Caring. Bold. Voluptuous. Direct. Analytical. Rational. Emotional. Nurturing. Silly. Earnest. Ambitious. Light. Strong. Fertile. Discursive. Pierce. Vain. Shrill. Learned. Fierce. Brave. Lead. Heights. Cunning. Embrace. Receive. Depths. Beauty. Power. I’m willing to bet that even if you consciously push back at where you landed with these, most of the connections landed along the lines of feminine being soft, caring, nurturing, silly, light, shrill, embracing, or beautiful. I think that relating archetypal qualities to gender is one of the great failings in the study of mythology to this point, and mythologists and depth psychologists have generally followed this convention and have been an ongoing force in promulgating it. Feminine and masculine energy, strengths, and identities are defined as unique and distinct from one another, and used to justify accepted gender roles in society. Perhaps most obviously, C. G. Jung’s ideas about the anima and animus purport to open the possibility for women and men to hold qualities not defined by their gender. However, he embeds them within a rigid opposition: men carry “anima,” those so-called feminine qualities that their masculine self doesn’t possess; women carry “animus,” those so-called masculine qualities their feminine Self lacks. Additionally, Jung confessed to a deep suspicion about what he identified as his anima, stating that the voice he heard was of “a patient, a talented psychopath who had a strong transference to me,” and continued on to describe his anima as commanding a “deep cunning” and “twisted” his fantasies “into intrigues” that might have “seduced him” into believing he was an artist. (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 221–223) The narratives that support this separation build on one another and further calcify our sense of what masculine and feminine should be until they have been accepted as archetypal truths. Some examples of these narratives include the following: From the perspective of what might be considered historical truth, Joseph Campbell suggests in Goddesses: Mysteries of the Divine Feminine that in the earliest hunter-gatherer cultures, men are the hunters and killers and women are the life-givers, perceiving this as the primal beginnings of mythic understanding of masculine and feminine. (p. 38) Offered as a neurological truth, multiple studies have supported the idea that women’s and men’s brains are inherently and largely different. And assumed biological truth includes decades of scientific assumptions which have asserted that humans have two genders that are fixed and immutable. And these narratives are each wrong. Recent anthropological research has contradicted the traditional hunter-gatherer separation between women and men, and instead has found that the earliest human cultures did not define tasks along gender lines. For example, in “Female Hunters of the Early Americas,” anthropologist Randy Haas writes that, “Analysis of Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene burial practices throughout the Americas situate [this archaeological site] as the earliest and most secure hunter burial in a sample that includes 10 other females in statistical parity with early male hunter burials. The findings are consistent with non-gendered labor practices in which early hunter-gatherer females were big-game hunters.”) In 2021, neuroscientists published results of a metasynthesis of three decades of research, which discovered that brain function differences were not gender driven but were, in fact, much more reflective of place and culture. And, incidentally, those small scale studies that pointed to the differences between female and male brains had created their own cultural narratives, privileging false data to enhance chances of publication. Lead researcher Lise Eliot summarizes the implications of these biases in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, stating, "Sex differences are sexy, but this false impression that there is such a thing as a 'male brain' and a 'female brain' has had wide impact on how we treat boys and girls, men and women.” Finally, DNA research is increasingly clarifying that chromosomes that build gender are both plentiful and nuanced. From an article in Scientific American entitled “Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic: What’s more, new technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match that of the rest of their body. Some studies even suggest that the sex of each cell drives its behaviour, through a complicated network of molecular interactions. Even when voices call to push against the hierarchies embedded in these definitions of gender and turn them around, they tend only to challenge their definition, not their existence. One luminous example of this is writer/ecologist/mythographer Sophie Strand’s book The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine. She makes an eloquent case to break past our stereotypes regarding what may be encompassed when defining something or someone as masculine. And in doing so, she evokes everything from Merlin to mycelium. Why does this matter? By embracing this binary, we fail to understand the depth and complexity of what makes humans, of any gender, tick. As mythologists, we are in danger of succumbing to the temptation to define archetypes as narratives that feel comfortable, clean, and well defined, reducing them to stereotypes instead of embracing the superb discomfort of the “both/and” inherent in careful mythological thought. As a culture, we condemn individuals to be marginalized, defining them by roles that serve extant power structures rather than inviting and empowering a deeper comprehension of what they can accomplish and what they may contribute to society. In closing, I’d like to invite you to reread that cloud of words at the beginning of this piece, consciously imagine them containing the gender that didn’t reflexively ring true, and examine how that feels. And then read them again, this time extracting any sense of gender from them. What changes? As Walt Whitman said in Song of Myself, “I am large. I contain multitudes.”