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. (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.”

“Imagination is the star in man, the celestial or supercelestial body.” —Martin Ruland the Younger Arthur Edward Waite, the famed esoteric scholar and mystic who with Pamela Colman Smith created the classic tarot deck, understood very well what he was dealing with. In the same way that C. G. Jung and Joseph Campbell understood the nature of mythic imagery, we are dealing with a “presentation of universal ideas by means of universal types, and it is in the combination of these types—if anywhere—that it presents Secret Doctrine.” (The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, pp. 18–19) One of the most coveted cards in the tarot deck is the Star. It is beautifully described by Waite as a perfect picture of “eternal youth and beauty.” (p. 47) A naked woman, with her left knee bent upon the ground and her right foot resting on the waters of a pond or lake, strikes the eye as deeply symbolic. She pours her elixir of eternal youth upon the two maternal elements of earth and water. The elixir of life runs through both maternal elements as the outpouring of the Star’s indestructible psychic energy. Waite sees in this anima figure an archetypal image of the divine feminine. He points to its further significance in the light of Jewish mysticism where She is “the Great Mother in the Kabalistic Sephira Binah, which is supernal Understanding, who communicates to the Sephiroth that are below in the measure that they can receive her influx.” (47–48) In the Kabalistic tradition, Binah or Understanding is one of the ten sefirot or emanations of the Unending One, Ein Sof.  Along with Chockmah (wisdom) and Da’at (knowledge), Binah exercises the power of discriminating judgment and critical thinking, both necessary to the conscious functioning of the divine intellect. Where Chockmah and Da’at are both lofty and high, Binah is “down to earth”; she is close to the waters of our cultural inheritance and the ebb and flow of everyday life. She purges and nourishes the scorched earth with her vivifying essence as She establishes a harmonious balance of the elemental forces of life. The Sephiric Mother thus pours the emanations of the Unending One into this world through her twin vessels of psychic energy. This twinship of the vessels points to a dialectical pattern of creation. The Great Mother separates two psychic streams of unconscious life in order to unite them again in the cosmic reflection of the waters of the essence. For what the waters reflect is the celestial energy of the Star, which is not just an instance of light in the sky but the very head and source of the Light of creation. The pristine character of this card with the spiritual nakedness of the figure brings us back to the very beginnings of the book of Genesis and the Garden of Eden. The Star recalls the archetypal moment in which God, sailing over the unconscious waters, uttered the first Logos of the creation: “Let there be light: and there was light.” (Genesis 1:3) Joseph Campbell also picks up on the creative interaction between light and water in the book of Genesis, for “it is that activation of the water that demarks the world creation.” (Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal, 53) As a mythic image, the Star also demonstrates a certain moment of the “activation of the waters” as in the context of the alchemical Opus Magnum. Thus the waters that are activated in this scene correspond to what the alchemists called “our water,” aqua nostra, a mercurial fluid also described as a “fiery water” or aqua ignis. In the activation of these waters we have the character of the alchemical transforming substance of the Great Opus of Creation. As a whole the tarot Star image represents an act of grace in which conscious discrimination and free will combine with the unconscious movement of the archetypal imagination. While the Star shines in the background, the Great Mother divides and channels the supernal stream of archetypal creativity into two gradients of elemental functioning. These separated streams are conjoined in a single dialectical process or logic. The outpouring of the Unending One has been divided in two; it has entered the dichotomous conditions of conscious manifestation: space and time, object and subject. In the fiery light of the Divine Intellect, the sephiric goddess of the understanding pours its logical essence into the cosmic elements of feeling and sensation, both psychic elements of an emotional connection to Nature and her secrets. In view of the true philosophical mysteries of the Star card, you can understand why Waite seems so impatient with “the summary of several tawdry explanations,” which say that the Star is simply “a card of hope.” (The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, p. 47) Such facile readings and interpretations muddle the dialectical waters of association with “loss, theft, privation, abandonment,” as well as “arrogance, haughtiness, impotence.” (p. 81) For all these emotional states or psychic events are experienced by anyone engaged in the process of creation. In order to understand the symbolism of this card, therefore, we must find a dialectical path that entwines the inner contradictions of the image into a single stream of truth—or Logos. This is what the Star is trying to express through purely pictorial means. For in the activation of these waters we find the unifying “cosmic” reflection of the fiery Logos of creation, as Heraclitus of old had already understood it: “This world-order [cosmos] (the same of all) did none of gods or men make, but it always was and shall be: an everlasting fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures.” (The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts. Kirk and Raven, 199, fr. 220) As the Star represents this fiery element of cosmic order in the sky, it is also reflected in the smooth waters of creation. Through the mediation of the anima, we have the activation of the transcendent function—the function that allows us to grow and change psychologically—having thus barely scratched the surface of one of the Major Arcana of the tarot deck.

In The Power of Myth, Bill Moyers remarks that the Lord’s Prayer begins with, “Our father, who art in heaven,” and then asks Joseph Campbell if it could begin with our mother. It is a delightful trigger for the mythologist to talk about female metaphorical images as a representation of the world. In this context, the field of the symbolic images, the challenge of March’s MythBlast theme is to delve into the tarot card called the Star. We can use Moyers's curiosity as a prompt to remember the history of the Waite Tarot, a popular deck which dates back to 1911. It was created by the American-born British poet and mystic Arthur Edward Waite (1857–1942), and is sometimes also called the Rider-Waite, bearing the name of its first publisher, the British company, William Rider & Son, Ltd. (which is still alive, so to speak, as a part of Penguin Random House UK). However, it is also known by the name of Rider-Waite-Smith, acknowledging its British illustrator, Pamela Colman Smith (1878-1951), a theatrical designer, artist, and writer. So, in this text, Rider-Waite-Smith it is. Card number seventeen, the Star card in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck shows a woman kneeling like the ancient knights: one leg on the ground and the other in a flexed position. Two knees to the ground means full and strict submission, so in this case the individual has surrendered to their fate, but the other leg in a flexed position shows that the ego is properly in its structuring, balancing function. “I surrender of my own will: having said this, do Thy will,” we can imagine the woman murmuring. We know that this position in general is also associated with a duly respectful and humble attitude towards people and life—and her bowed head confirms it. She is still young, but she appears to be well on her way to becoming a wise old woman, taking the responsibility for her life into her own hands and yet listening to the mystery.  Her right leg is solidly resting on the ground—grounded—representing her practical abilities, skills, and, perhaps, her attentiveness to the traditions she inherited. But the other foot is gently resting on a pool of water, usually a symbol for the Source of Life, showing us her willingness to listen to her intuition and inner resources. She holds a jug of water in each hand, the one in her right hand pours into the pool (the unconscious) while the jug in her left hand empties onto the earth (consciousness). An auspicious image by all means, if we consider the lush, fertile greenery around her, as well as the bird on the verge of taking flight in the background. The two feminine elements, earth and water, seem to be at peace and in balance: common sense and inner voice. In the image of card seventeen, the feminine principle in women and men makes the connection between the water element (usually linked to the emotions) and the earth, generally associated with firmness, strength, determination, objectivity, practicality, and structure. This individual has her foot on the ground, in touch with and stabilized by the earth. It is also on earth that the material treasure of gold is found, so in a broad sense the earth can be related to prosperity. The background of the card shows eight stars with eight points, one star being larger in relation to the other seven. Let's remember the Star’s tarot card number is seventeen: if we add the numbers one and seven we will have eight again. In both Eastern and Western cultures, the number eight is a lucky number and related to the idea of growing, victory, and prosperity. The woman is naked, which symbolises her naïve attitude—no shame, no social masks, a perfect state of trust. It’s not accidental that this card is associated with hope, faith, purpose, renewal, and good paths, as well as a bridge to something larger than material life and the present, something we can call spirituality. In the Mythic Tarot, the Star card features Pandora, possessed by curiosity, opening the tricky box given to her by Zeus, designed to obtain revenge for Prometheus’s theft of fire, which was then given as a gift to the human race. We can see Pandora’s wow face at the exact moment she sees its contents released into the world, not yet realizing she is actually letting loose all manner of misery and evil. Things like illness, death, and probably aging too. Though she hastened to close the container, the only thing that was left behind is usually translated as hope. For the ancient Greeks, hope was an expectation without a corresponding action and might be interpreted as a sign of self-deception or delusion. Pandora must have seemed like a happy child waiting to open a Christmas package, whose jaw drops when she doesn't get exactly what was envisioned. From some future perspective, however, the present may turn out to be even better than one might have hoped, but in the moment it causes pain, feelings of betrayal, and disappointment. Pandora seems distraught in this image and therefore, in the reversed position, the card usually refers to a star traveler’s setbacks, bewildered because their foundations are not solid enough, and they may feel lost. In that case, the card is associated with a lack of faith and trust, despair, disconnection, a detour in the path, possible losses of various types (the opposite of the abundance card number eight promises). If we refer to the inverted Rider-Waiter-Smith Star card, the containers of water would fall towards the sky, showing an upside-down rain that would obviously not be in accord with nature. The starry night sky is not in the heavens, a metaphor for the peaceful state of mind known as Nirvana in Eastern traditions. What may the Star card teach us today? Perhaps it speaks to a part of our psyche that, despite the frustrations and disappointments inherent in human life, with its ups and downs, does not allow itself to be endlessly trapped in the depressions caused by the inevitable losses experienced in the process of living. That despite everything, after the necessary period of sadness and mourning, every individual has the inner resources and strength to let the dead take care of the dead, to see the successes embedded in the failures, and to find meaning enough to cling to life again and again. Somewhere out there is a dim light that shines softly like a guiding star that heals our wounds and leads us home. After all, as Campbell points out in Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, these mythological images are references to the field of potential experience of the human spirit. “These are to evoke attitudes and experiences that are appropriate to a meditation on the mystery of the source of your own being,” says Campbell. It is indeed a pleasant challenge to take on. In the Christian tradition, we can remember the saga of the three wise kings who were guided by the star of Bethlehem to pay their respects to the divine child. And let's face it: the star was up there in the sky, in plain sight, within everyone's reach. But only three people were open enough to see what it meant. What remains is the notion that the symbols and synchronicities are all around, but it is necessary to pay attention to the signs and stars so as not to let them, or our own lives, pass by unnoticed.

Jean Marion Erdman, choreographer, director, co-founder of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, and wife to Joseph Campbell for 49 years, was born on February 20, 1916. This week, in honor of her birthday, Diane McGhee Valle explores how the polarities in Erdman's life were integral to her art. We cannot know Joseph Campbell without knowing Jean Erdman, and likewise, we cannot know Erdman if we ignore the life and work of Campbell. This week we celebrate the birthday of Joseph Campbell’s spouse, Jean Erdman (Feb. 20, 1916 – May 4, 2020). The occasion presents an opportunity to note a contrasting variety of influences on her life and artistic work. Erdman was an extraordinary creator, performer, and producer of dance and theatre. The influences discussed here, can be seen as opposing tensions that pushed, pulled, and ultimately guided her to experience the fullness of life. Each challenge she faced provided insights that allowed her to achieve the epitome of artistic expression and create sublime works of art. Her challenges can be viewed through lenses of culture, geography, the art of dance, and of course, illuminated by her relationship with Campbell. Joe Campbell frequently wrote about the psychological concepts and opposing tensions of duality and non-duality. Whereas duality refers to a split or fracture of our consciousness, non-duality represents the complete union of it. We often long for the distinctions of duality to be eliminated; true art offers a way to discover this divine form. It can sometimes be encountered when extraordinary beauty brings “aesthetic arrest”; when opposites seem to dissolve, and a viewer experiences a sense of “wholeness, harmony, and radiance”. (See Campbell’s discussion of proper art in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, 100-102.) Dance can also offer these qualities, and is “a powerful way of embodying and realizing the moving potential of the human soul”. (Jean Erdman Papers. 1939 – 2001. 18(2:2):4, New York City Public Library Collection) Although a dance-maker could create choreography for the purpose of special effects or to induce desire, both Joe and Jean did not consider this approach to be powerful or “true”. Instead, they believed, proper art is realized through the liberation from clichéd earthly ideas. In The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Campbell observed that both the mystic and the artist show similar innovative insights. For both, “It is of their own inmost truth brought to consciousness: by the mystic, in direct confrontation, and by the artist, through reflection in the masterworks of his art.” (91) An artful choreographer may hone a somatic approach to movement invention. She may actively pursue the fluctuations between the conscious and unconscious mind and permit these to interplay in metaphorical ways, ultimately to be expressed by the moving body. For dancers, movement can be qualitatively analyzed using a system of opposites. The choreographer finds artistic opportunities by selectively passing through and among the opposites to create a visual interest in the human form. For example, force can range from heavy to light; the speed of the dancer can vary from fast to slow; and directionalities are assigned terms, such as forward or backward, right or left, high or low. Body shapes are also defined within frameworks of opposites, illustrated by terms such as symmetrical or asymmetrical, straight or curved, large or small, wide or narrow, and so forth. Exploring these possibilities could go on ad infinitum. In the art of concert dance, Jean Erdman drew from the entire spectrum of possibilities. She was a genius in her methods. Her selected actions were derived from both from basic skills and a priori knowledge, and also from various cultures and artistic styles that she had studied. These experiences gave Erdman a vast store of dance knowledge that provided her greater mastery of the body and opened avenues for artistic innovation. Reared in Hawaii, Erdman learned well from her childhood dance experiences. She practiced the ancient Hawaiian sacred traditions, especially hula, and was deeply interested in the traditions of Japanese and Chinese theatrical styles. She studied American tap dance and learned the basics of modern dance from an innovative teacher while at the Punahou School. These opportunities turned her attention to the remote philosophies and values of Asia, and these teachings subsequently left a deep impression on her identity. Jean identified as Oriental and Polynesian but, she acknowledged, the modes of living and thinking were often at odds with those of her family’s old New England roots. (Jean Erdman Papers, 1939 – 2001. 7:8) One of Erdman’s challenges was to resolve the tension between these internal opposites. Erdman noted that distinctive dance traditions developed according to location and culture but also revealed that all humans are essentially the same. This idea seemed to parallel the theories of ethnologist Adolf Bastian (1826 – 1905). Following both Bastian and C. G. Jung, Erdman recognized that traditional dances frequently retained the characteristics of ancient archetypes and were steeped in mythology and thus, often timeless in their meanings. She felt, “There is value [in] the uniqueness of each dance tradition – and that each style should be approached as a complete unity.” (Jean Erdman Papers, 1939 – 2001, 10(1:2):9) Much of Erdman’s early professional dance training took place under the tutelage of several significant 20th century icons, such as Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman. Each choreographer had invented a dance style that bore the name of its originator. But Erdman eventually came to the opinion that such individual methods and styles were pieces fractured from the glorious whole of movement possibilities. For art’s sake, she sought release from the subjective sentiments of her respected masters. She advanced the position that an individual cannot claim ownership of a technique or dance, and stated, “The style belongs to the dance, not to the dancers.” (The Ecstasy of Being: Mythology and Dance, 162) Erdman subsequently sought to transcend the elements of distinct styles and use the capacity of myth to give strength and structure to her dances. In the early 1940s, Erdman briefly sought the company of the New Dance Group to gain choreographic and teaching experience. The Group was an association of Erdman’s peers from the various modern dance camps in New York. Most members were strong-willed women who held deep ideological beliefs about socialism. Erdman soon discovered that the Group did not provide the creative freedom that she sought. It seemed the Group’s call to “freedom” frequently became a story for political advocacy and propaganda. It was a difficult decision, but ultimately Erdman pulled away from the collective to become the agent of her own myth.  She went forward using, as her husband wrote, the “courage to let go of the past, with its truths, its goals, its dogmas of ‘meaning,’ and its gifts: to die to the world and to come to birth from within”. (Campbell, J., The Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology,  677 – 678). One of the most transformational influences for both Erdman and Campbell was their love story. Through Erdman’s early days of college and professional career, Campbell was her mentor. As they matured together, she achieved the place of his intellectual equal. They were well-matched in their social abilities, as well as their mutual fascinations with myth, literature, religions, philosophy, and aesthetics.  In 1972, they collaborated to co-found the Theatre of the Open Eye. Throughout their careers, the two often operated at great distances from one another; yet, their personas melded so closely they seemed of one consciousness, an idea symbolized in Hindu mythology by the image of the androgynous deity, Ardhanarishvara. In this deity, the paradox of the opposites form the unity of the male and female principles, transcending all distinctions. Such a union is a true and proper likeness of this remarkable couple.

Epigraph to Letter I: The Magician from Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism: “Spiritus ubi vult spirat: et vocem ejus audis, sed nescis unde veniat, aut quo vadat: sic est omnis, qui natus est ex spiritu. (John iii, 8) The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit. (John iii, 8) Into this happy night In secret, seen of none. Nor saw I aught, Without other light or guide. Save that which in my heart did burn.” (St. John of the Cross) “Dear Unknown Friend” begins the anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot in Letter I: The Magician: The words of the Master [the author of the Gospel of John] cited above have served me the key for opening the door to comprehension of the first Major Arcanum of the Tarot, ‘The Magician,’ which is, in turn, the key to all the other Major Arcana. This is why I have put [the above verses] as an epigraph to this Letter. And then I have cited a verse from the ‘Songs of the Soul’ of St. John of the Cross, because it has the virtue of awakening the deeper layers of the soul, which one has to appeal to when the concern is the first Arcanum of the Tarot and, consequently, all the Major Arcana of the Tarot. (3) The unknown author continues: For the Major Arcana of the Tarot are authentic symbols, i.e. they are ‘magic, mental, psychic and moral operations’ awakening new notions, ideas, sentiments and aspirations, which means to say that they require an activity more profound than that of study and intellectual explanation. It is therefore in a state of deep contemplation—and always ever deeper—that they should be approached. And it is the deep and intimate layers of the soul which become active and bear fruit when one meditates on the Arcana of the Tarot. Therefore this ‘night,’ of which St. John of the Cross speaks, is necessary, where one withdraws oneself ‘in secret’ and into which one has to immerse oneself each time that one meditates on the Arcana of the Tarot. (4) The tarot invites us into the mysteries of the darkness (this ‘night’) and beseeches us to trust the holy dark while resting in its sacredness (‘in secret’) too. This requires the use of our own agency and autonomy—the masterful application of our will-forces—while simultaneously navigating life’s terrain through an archetypal and symbolic eye, utilizing metaphoric language while drawing on and feeling into both a mythic consciousness and a poetic imagination. (Is that all???) Joseph Campbell wrote in Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, One of the goals of initiation in the mystery religions is to introduce the individual, through a spiritual journey, to the grounds of existence, that source of consciousness and energy of which we are all manifestations. So the aim is to guide us to the knowledge of this power, and the cornucopia that is symbolic of the course of our life. (191) The tarot, then, is a form of initiation, the art of learning how matter, energy, and consciousness interweave. Though if it’s a conscious initiation, we need not become totally lost in the darkness. The tarot is a tool to translate unconscious data to the higher mind, and it all begins with the Magician, which is why, according to Meditations on the Tarot, the Magician is Letter I and the Fool is Letter XXI. The Magician is the fundamental precept for engaging all other Major Arcana cards. But why? According to the unknown author, The first Arcanum—the principle underlying all the other twenty-one Major Arcana of the Tarot—is that of the rapport of personal effort and of spiritual reality. It occupies the first place in the series because if one does not understand it (i.e. take hold of it in cognitive and actual practice), one would not know what to do with all the other Arcana. (Meditations on the Tarot, 7) In my younger years I, mistakenly, thought that I could simply engage the initiation process (or archetypes, mythology, or any other topic) through academic reading, verbose discussions of theories, and engaging in abstract thinking. I preferred secondhand knowledge to firsthand experience—and if truth be told, I still often do! But as the unknown author continues, For it is the Magician who is called to reveal the practical method relating to all the Arcana. He is the ‘Arcanum of the Arcana,’ in the sense that he reveals that which it is necessary to know and to will in order to enter the school of spiritual exercises whose totality comprises the game of Tarot, in order to be able to derive some benefit therefrom. (7) This is why the Magician is the ‘Arcanum of the Arcana,’ because no amount of explanation can make a blind person see. Transformation occurs when it’s action oriented. And it must be untrammeled and decisive action, of which the Magician is begging me … you … us. The Magician’s power comes from practice—cognitive and actual—in the physical world, not only through connecting to the astral plane. And the results come from both knowing and willing. Otherwise, we’ll prove Leonardo da Vinci’s words, “the supreme misfortune is when theory outstrips performance,” to be true. (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci) It’s so easy to get high on the possibility and aspirations of alchemy and magic in theory, but fail to value the grunt work of transmuting the lead to gold within ourselves or a situation. Avoiding the hard work leaves alchemy and magic in the realm of make believe, or just another hypothesis, not an actual theory-in-use, one that informs and directs a theory-of-action. The book is called Meditations on the Tarot for a reason. The text is to be meditated upon, not read, so that a shift in consciousness may occur. In the final analysis, we’re awakened not by nature but by our own efforts. And, unfortunately, the lower mind can easily paralyze the higher mind’s spiritual perception at the expense of any embodied wisdom. If we find a particular esoteric teaching intriguing, the Magician asks us to examine its purpose and usefulness in our own lives instead of blindly taking a third party’s word for it. Carl Jung stated that “magic is a way of living” (The Red Book, 314) and this tarot card is an invitation to become the Magician of your own life. And in doing so, through both knowing and willing, there’s the possibility to integrate all the other twenty-one Major Arcana, so that “as above” really is “so below.”

The magician made a modest request. Could he and his friends from the local chapter of the Society of American Magicians perform the “broken wand ceremony” at my grandfather’s open-casket, Catholic funeral? My resistance, bordering on physical revulsion, to the casual syncretism of wand and crucifix is difficult to explain and makes me sound like a cultural bully, but I think Joseph Campbell can help me out here. Throughout the history of the Christian cult,” he wrote in Creative Mythology, “the liability of its historicized symbols to reinterpretation in some general mythological sense has been a constant danger.” Or, put another way, keep your wand in your pocket. We do our own magic here. Indeed, we have our own magic wand. According to my treasured Dictionary of Symbols (a Penguin reference), the Bishop’s staff or “crosier” has the same approximate function as a magic wand, both of which confer hieratic status upon the owner. “Like the staff, the wand is the symbol of authority and of second sight.” And yet, the symbols appear to be in competition rather than mutually reinforcing, evoking from me a swift rejection to the Magician’s plea. And what was he asking for? Nothing more than the radical inclusivity one might expect of a mythologist. And yet, Campbell, whose unum mundum philosophy underlies every important work of his oeuvre, recognized the limits of interfaith exchange. “For, as every serious study of intercultural exchange has shown, it is simply a fact—a basic law of history, applicable to every department of life—that materials carried from any time past to a time present, or from one culture to another, shed their values at the culture portal and thereafter become mere curiosities or undergo a sea change through a process of creative misunderstanding” (Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology, 137). In short, the pairing of your Wal-Mart magic wand with our bishop’s sacred crosier does credit to neither, bringing the dime-store novelty a step closer to a status it frankly should never have and simultaneously taking the fun out of it. Or, worse, from the Catholic’s point of view, the puissance of cross and crosier are reduced, their mystic voltage diminished, the spiritual charge sputtering from the association to a cheap contender in the field. It is a sad fact of life that men cannot help comparing their wands. When Harry Potter shows up in the Little Hangleton graveyard in a duel with Lord Voldemort, their respective wands, both composed of a phoenix-feather core, refuse to attack one another. They are “brother wands.” The officiating priest at my grandfather’s funeral would probably balk at recognizing any “brother wand” equivalences at play in the Requiem Mass underway in the Sanctuary. More typical is the wand contest of the book of Exodus, where Aaron throws down his staff and it becomes a snake. Not to be outdone, Egyptian magicians do the same. Aaron and Moses watch as their predatory wand literally swallows the wands of the opposing tribe, the Egyptians. Catholic magic, it could be argued, is on the order of miracle, never a “trick.” It is a miracle going by the tongue twister transubstantiation in which ordinary bread is transformed into the body and blood of Christ. The distinction between miracle and trick is not always obvious. When a professional illusionist is about the do the big reveal where the broken egg emerges from the hat as a full grown rabbit, he might (in simpler times) be heard to say “Hocus Pocus Dominocus,” a medieval corruption [many scholars agree] of the words “Hoc Est Corpus meum” (This is my body) said by the priest to announce the completion of the mystic conversion of flour to flesh. So, on that level, the magician could be forgiven for thinking he is among friends. And what about that water into wine business? And those loaves and fishes? How is the magician asking you to pick a card, a different species from the Savior telling the women to roll back the stone? Are they not at least on the spectrum of the same archetypal figure? If so, why do I find the idea of a magic wand in church so provocative? Campbell had a similar reaction to a third-century panel of graven images which once adorned the ceiling of Rome’s Domitilla catacomb. “In the center of the panel, where a symbol of Christ might have been expected, the legendary founder of the Orphic mysteries appears, the pagan poet Orpheus, soothing animals of the wilderness with the magic of his lyre and song” (14). It’s not just an anachronism. It ignores the ocean of philosophic difference separating the Orphic mysteries and the early Church and, maybe worse, ruins the aesthetic. It doesn’t belong. It’s the wrong kind of magic. The magician’s request to place his magic wand in the open casket of the late Jack Steck, my beloved grandfather, was not a crime, nor a sin. It was just presumptuous. Catholics are no longer a miracle-dependent faith community. We’re more like this: I never saw him calm the sea Nor change the water to wine But he has calmed the rage in me And changed my heart and my mind I never saw him multiply the loaves and fishes one day But he has multiplied my love which grows more when given away. I wrote this song to remind the audience or congregation that the best miracles do not require the suspension of the laws of physics.  So, nothing personal, Magic Man. I know you loved my grandfather who, himself, was a card-carrying member of your society. But it’s no longer about magic. We’ve moved on. The magicians ignored me. When they got to the coffin, they encircled it, spoke their words of commendation, snapped the wand in half, and placed it somewhere on the body of my grandfather. It was inappropriate, ill-considered, contrary to rubrics of the one true faith, and absolutely adorable.

The wheel of the year ROTATes and the next card in the TAROT pops up. What card did we pull out of the Year of the Rabbit’s hat for 2023? The next one: The Magician. Tarot decks typically display roughly the same symbolic features for this card. A mercurial figure holds aloft a scroll, or a wand, or a hollow-tube-to-bring-down-fire-from-heaven. Before him we see a table prepared for some kind of work: a workbench, or a scrying table, or an altar. Tools float in his vicinity or are laid out on the table waiting for the action to begin. In Frieda Harris’s deck he’s shadowed by an ape. Hm. This month we’re looking into Campbell’s Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology. We now live in an era in which mythology had to become creative rather than inherited. How do we appropriate these traditional symbols and retrofit them to make sense of our situation today? People who haven’t worked with symbolic structures can see the process as more magical than rational, although there is plenty of good sense floating through proper magic. What we’re being asked to do in the twenty-first century is to come up with ways to put ourselves back into a relationship with the ground of our being—whatever that happens to be. And that’s tricky because, and regular readers will recognize a common theme, the world that the old myths related us to has vanished. So how do we proceed? Well, one of the ways to uncover the ground of our existence was discussed last month when the MythBlast series took up the Fool card of the Tarot. The Fool seems to wander aimlessly while never missing a step, an idea reinforced in the classic Daoist texts which remind us that the best way to find yourself is to lose yourself. Whenever you lose yourself in an activity, you almost always discover something that seems to be most suitably you. (For instance, the religious cult I spend most of my time with, I discovered by accident, by wandering aimlessly, by leaving the road where the woods were darkest, where there was no path—the cult of the ukulele. There are a lot of really interesting people in that cult. You should join us.) Maybe that’s a MythBlast for another time. If the Fool card (and the important, but apparently aimless wandering it symbolizes) can bring us to the truth about who we are in the world, and begins to describe our relationship to living-in-the-world, then the follow-up would be understanding and articulating the life this foolish wandering recommends. The Magician, the Magus, carves the runes of that understanding. This is easier said than done. Mythology has to be creative now, but creativity can be funny. Edison seems to have captured it best when he said that invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Sometimes you have to wander a lot before you get to wonder about the wandering, and once you wonder about the wandering, you have to use the wand, the pen and ink, of your will to articulate the fire you’ve brought down from heaven, and then let the wonder determine itself. And this is where the magic comes in. You have to take the moment of aha!, the sigh, the breath, the inspired respiration of that moment of discovery and then carve that column of air—using your teeth and tongue—into a Word, a Logos, that can be transmitted not just to others but also to ourselves. I want sublime and amazing experiences, but I also want to be able to think about them—and that requires making them definite, and making them definite is always a problem because they don’t like being definite. That’s why there are so many tools laid out on the table in front of the Magician. The inspired insight, the fire brought down from heaven, must be crafted into concrete meaning using the elements available to us—earth, air, fire, water, and spirit—in order to determine it. And while I’m thinking about it, sometimes German is really helpful. The German word for “determinate” is bestimmt or bestimmtheit. But Stimmen is also the word for “voice” and so, to determine something means “to give voice to it.” Until we can say it, until we can speak it, we haven’t fully grasped or understood it. We may have had an amazing experience of some kind—and it could be spiritual, or scientific, or even pizza—but experiencing and understanding are not the same thing. Any attempt to articulate our relationship to an experience, whether that means my relationship to my spiritual adventures or even to an amazing and “heavenly” pizza (and sometimes these are the same thing), will always and of necessity be inadequate to the task. We can get close, but that relationship will always be expressed metaphorically in the language of myth and it will, therefore, always be inexact—close, sure, but never perfect. By the way, this applies equally to attempting descriptions of sublime spiritual attainment and descriptions of sublime pizza. You’ve probably had that experience. So the symbol of the Magician card reminds us that, in some serious sense, any overly serious attempt to articulate that truth will always end up a kind of lie. This, of course, is the conundrum of all mythological discourse. When we believe myths are attempts to explain the facts about the universe, all myths turn out to be lies—and when we recognize that their function is, instead, a narrative one that places us into relationship with the deep experiences of our lives, all myths are the truth. Speaking of which, the idea that all mythological speech is, in some sense, inadequate to the task of complete expression, provides a useful analysis of the craziest and most dangerous of all human beings—the ones who demand the purity of perfect clarity instead of a useful, and liveable, approximation. For more of which, stay tuned for September’s MythBlasts when I take up The Tower. I suppose there’s also the truth that any time anyone brings down fire from heaven, there’s hell to pay. Thanks for musing along!

As we begin a new year, our calendar seems to have a magical effect upon us, triggering a certain archetypal response in our souls which may be appropriate for all new beginnings and ends. Thus our Gregorian calendar, with its hidden archetypal background, is preparing us to face the new challenges and problems of the new year. Although no one doubts the cosmic reality of the next sunrise, at least for several billion years, the length of our individual lives is but a flash of lightning. The question of our own mortality, or the mortality of those we love, is thus riddled with doubt and fear. We all know that only a few precious turns around the sun are granted to us, and we never know which rotation will be our last tour. In the words of the mad Ophelia: “Lord, we know what we are but know not what we may be.” (Hamlet  4.5, lines 48–49) Old or young, sick or healthy, rich or poor, no one knows the expiration date that will be added to their epitaph. To mark in advance our own calendar run with the words consummatum est (“it is finished”) remains beyond our mortal grasp ”—the rest is silence.” (5.2, line 395) Although the knowledge of our death may be denied to us by the order of things, it bleeds into that tremendous and fascinating mystery of being alive between birthlife and death. As Shakespeare again expressed it in Hamlet, lacking such knowledge of our death, we must learn to understand the “special providence in the fall of a sparrow”: If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. (5.2, lines 234 -237) The awareness of our mortality is a double-edged sword: it may lead to the realization of profound gratitude, that every day is a gift and a miracle, but it may also lead to a heightened awareness of the immense background of death and nothingness that engulfs every star. To the extent that we are alive, therefore, the light has won its vindication over death’s dominion. But Death, the Unconscious, is all around us, even in the physical form of “dark matter.” Likewise, the beginning of a new year represents an immense gift which opens the door to infinite possibilities—including the ones that may prove to be our downfall. Such is the standard image of the Fool from the tarot deck: a youth happily walking toward a cliff, only one more step to make before falling into the abyss. In its mythic dimensions, the Fool represents a certain archetypal constellation in which great danger is combined with free-spirited naivete. This androgynous figure represents youthful innocence, a childlike stranger free from the cares of this world. They strut down a path, with their gaze to the sky, dancing toward the precipice of life and ruin. The presence of the dog at his side, as if warning the Fool of the impending folly, is an emblem of instinct, the connection to the earth, which the wonderstruck hero sorely lacks. For in its inferior pole, the Fool is indistinguishable from literal foolishness, reckless abandon, and extreme risk-taking. Also closely associated with madness, as in Batman’s Joker figure, the Fool can exhibit a kind of suicidal or even criminal death drive, a compulsion or addiction, which leads the youth to walk over the cliff. The Fool thus contains divine and demonic aspects that must be taken seriously and with great discrimination—lest we ourselves fall into the trap of the Fool! For the edge of this precipice is quite real today for individual egos as it is for nations. Indeed, it involves the entire social collective of humanity at large. In our own times we are dealing with end-of-time questions such as the ones brought out in books like Hegemony or Survival and The Precipice by Noam Chomsky. There are certain ecological and geopolitical conditions we face today that point to a whole constellation of apocalyptic signs, impending catastrophes at scales that have never been imagined. These existential conditions, aloofness of which drives the Fool to the precipice, seriously put human survival into question. For our present world situation is not simply another period of tensions and confusions like the ones we’ve had in the past. Today we face absolutely unprecedented conditions which our ancestors could have barely imagined in their myths about the end of the world. In the present horizon of mythic history, it is not an exaggeration to say that we are living in end times, breathing a toxic cultural atmosphere, with mass-scale disasters looming on every side. Taken together, it is hard to avoid the feeling that we are passing through a possibly terminal stage of human history. Faced with the new horsemen of the apocalypse–Climate Catastrophe (Famine), Nuclear Annihilation (War), New Pandemics (Disease), Social and Economic Breakdown (Death) – our civilization as a whole stands in the situation of the Fool about to walk off the cliff. Thus the Fool perfectly mirrors our current existential situation as a species, the understanding of which is made clear by its mythohistorical dimensions. As Campbell states of the primary functions of mythology: The first function of a mythology is to reconcile waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of this universe as it is: the second being to render an interpretive total image of the same, as known to contemporary consciousness. Shakespeare’s definition of the function of his art, “to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature,” is thus equally a definition of mythology. It is the revelation to waking consciousness of the powers of its own sustaining source. (The Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology, 13) Joseph Campbell thus credits Hamlet’s speech with the highest honor that a mythologist can give, that of providing a definition of mythology itself. In the culminating volume of Masks of God, Vol 4: Creative Mythology, Campbell comes home to the creative foundation that makes mythology indistinguishable from art. To the question, what is art? Campbell directly answers: “it is mythology itself.” Creative mythology, whose reflective function it is, like Hamlet’s mirror, to imitate in the medium of consciousness the archetypal powers of its own unconscious source.

As I sat down to write this article, I delightedly cracked my metaphorical knuckles, savoring the irreverent opportunity to use the Fool as a symbol to push back against our cultural inclinations to embody rational responsibility in the beginnings of a new year. In most tarot readings, the Fool represents new beginnings and journeys, heroic or otherwise. I think for most of us in modern Western culture, the impulse toward the unknown is almost immediately met by a need to chart a course, to have a plan, and to be mature enough to weigh the risks and potential consequences of starting something new. In the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, often described as the “original tarot” deck, the Fool is a rather feckless, beautiful youth on the edge of a cliff, his purity reflected in the white rose he carries, with a small dog seemingly poised to keep his human from plunging into the abyss. It is simultaneously an image of possibility and constraint. I instinctively want to poke at that staidness, to avoid what Campbell speaks of in his “Jung and the Tarot” lecture (Audio Lecture Series II.3.2 and II.1.6) when describing Jung’s insights into the inferiority complex: “a compulsion throughout one’s life to prove one’s self because one has been given the sense in early life that one is unable to do what one wants to do. Then every endeavor … becomes a field for testing or proving one’s self.” Instead, I see the Fool as an invitation to leap headlong into wildness and into chaos without that sense of external validation or constraint. As Jungian analyst Sallie Nichols writes in Jung and Tarot, An Archetypal Journey, “It is easy to see how the Fool’s emblem has become the symbol for the unmanifest destiny, from the primal chaos or void from which the cosmos and all its creatures arose.” (39) Oh, yes. But, as it is in the way of myth, be careful what you ask for … As I began to excavate further into the symbolism of the Fool in tarot, I found myself in an unexpectedly chaotic search for the meaning in these symbols: their source, their relative mythic antiquity (or lack thereof), and how that reflects my basic understanding of how we intersect with myths—both how we assign them meaning and value, and how they might come to be. I am, at best, a dabbler in tarot. In my experiences with its use as a divination system, I have earnestly assumed that the symbols artist Pamela Colman Smith embedded in her art were closely reflective of a long tradition of an esoteric, arcane use of such cards as a way to extrapolate meaning. As I listened to Campbell’s lecture “Tarot and the Christian Myth: Four Suits of the Tarot,” in which he described his four-hour musing on tarot as something of a beginner, I was surprised to learn that the cards comprising the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck were the joint creation of early twentieth-century mystics, artist Smith, and her commissioner, Arthur Edward Waite, published by the Rider Company in 1909. The symbolism in these cards was likely predominately hers, in spite of being something of a forgotten partner in the project. (CNN) Earlier tarot cards were simply playing cards; the oldest surviving cards are the Visconti-Sforza deck, commissioned by the rulers of the Duchy of Milan. There is no overt link to archaic mystic traditions for these cards prior to the work of Smith and Waite. They extrapolated the symbolism of the imagery in these older decks, but the use of them as a divination tool was their own creation. Pareidolia I found myself fairly confounded by this. I did not want to be disrespectful of those who find meaning in the use of tarot, but I simultaneously wondered if this was a bit of chicanery that had pulled several generations of seekers into the world of the pseudo-fortune tellers. Were Smith and Waite, and those who have found meaning in the tarot symbology, simply making patterns out of nothing? Was this simply an example of pareidolia, when humans see shapes in random visual patterns? Is this simply what the study of mythology is? (Enter existential crisis moment.) Certainly both Smith and Waite had studied mystic traditions deeply, but this imagery in the deck was the work of an individual artist in her context, her time, pulling from older images but layering meaning on them. It did not arise, fully formed from the collective, the volk. As Marie-Louise von Franz states in Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales: “Fairy tales ‘written’ by an author are not genuine fairy tales.” (99) How, then, could a deck of cards that had been imagined simply as a card game, that was reimagined by two people yearning to push back against modernism and find the magic of what they presumed to be a more mystical age, carry meaning? How could they hold mythic relevance? Paradox Campbell’s dive into the cards didn’t stop with his pointing out the modernity of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. He explored both the Christian iconography and medieval symbolism in the earlier decks, extrapolating meanings that are echoed in Smith and Waite’s work. Then I looked further into the Fool in the Visconti-Sforza deck: He was a woodwose, dressed in rags with feathers in his hair. As a figure that connects to wildness, he was much closer to the chaotic understanding of the Fool than Smith’s, more outside of cultural expectations. As I recognized my sense of relief at finding this more ancient, more complex understanding of the Fool in the history of the tarot, I became aware of the need for that relief. My yearning for this connection to the essence of this archetype—this validation, even—is the same yearning that inspired two nineteenth-century mystics to create a divination card deck. It’s the yearning that I think most scholars of mythology feel, that Jung felt as he spoke of the collective unconscious. It’s the yearning for the connectivity of humans to our imaginations. And while scholars like von Franz extol the virtues of the idea of fairy tales and mythic images and ideas emerging from the collective, they also exist within our own contemporary context. They reflect our time, place, cultural, and individual experiences. This paradox is one of the great challenges of the study of myth: the dance of the collective to the personal and back again. One never exists without the other. We lend a sense of moral superiority to the collective, as it keeps us from the inflationary move of seeing ourselves at the center of myth, indeed, as mythic. At the same time, our mythic lenses are always set in our own glasses. In the way that myth does, this reach for the chaotic, creative drive of the Fool flipped me ass over teacup, gripped by the daimon in my sometimes insouciant love of paradox and chaos and the destabilizing inversions of the trickster and the fool. In that desire for irreverence, I played the fool. And, arguably, was played. And a card game morphed from an example of pareidolia into a tool for finding meaning.

Every year’s end, I and the inner female circle of my family draw animal cards as inspiration for the upcoming year. For 2023, my card is the otter. I loved welcoming this joyful creature who, according to the explanation in the book, represents “absolute bliss.” So I was in the playful energy of a child when I started thinking about the challenge of writing this essay. This year, we are invited to consider the images of the tarot. We’re starting the year with card number 0, The Fool. To be frank, it is one of my favorite tarot cards. I got into my hands the familiar Rider-Waite deck, in which The Fool card shows the sun, the universal symbol of the source of life, shining brightly. Despite that the enterprise seems to be blessed by the sun itself, the male figure is standing at the edge of a cliff. As the young man gazes upward, as if lost in thoughts, there is the suggestion of imminent danger. The white dog that is a little behind seems to be trying to alert him of what is coming ahead. Animals tend to be symbols for our instincts, so it would be a good idea to listen to them whenever we need guidance in our life journey. In his right hand and across his shoulder, he carries his possessions in a small bag on a stick. Not amounting to much yet, but certainly things related to power, achievements, goals, and things that matter to him in this phase. This initial reading of the symbol speaks to the first part of life, as Jung wrote in a 1931 essay entitled, “The Stages of Life.” (“The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche,” Volume 8, The Collected Works of Carl Jung) The Swiss psychiatrist uses the sun metaphor to characterize the lifespan: “In the morning it rises from the nocturnal sea of unconsciousness and looks upon the wide, bright world which lies before it in an expanse that steadily widens the higher it climbs in the firmament.” (§ 778) We are talking, therefore, about the floating islands of consciousness that emerge from the child's unconscious and gradually build the ego. As Campbell said to Bill Moyers in The Power of the Myth, in the Western world, we are not intended to neutralize our ego as in the Eastern traditions, for a well-developed ego is necessary to face life's struggles, especially when it comes to having a job, a healthy romantic relationship, raising children, or running a business. But as Campbell says, the ego can become a real dragon, in the sense that it may hold us in and not let us go beyond our beliefs, established objectives, and society’s conventions, pinning us down in a smaller life than the one we could be living. How to slay the dragon in us? Moyers states that Campbell remarked on the “soul’s high adventure,” to which the mythologist replies: “My general formula for my students is follow your bliss, find where it is, and don't be afraid to follow it.” And of all the amazing phrases Campbell uttered, perhaps this one represents the heart of his teachings, which, for me, are both practical and profound. If the individual has the courage to follow this advice, The Fool card has a chance to become tarot card 22—traditionally, it ends with card 21, The World—in a reversal that mirrors the complete journey, the ultimate achievement. As Jung says in the prologue of Memories, Dreams and Reflections, “My life is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious.” So we have the same card in front of us, but the meaning may be entirely different. The man stepping to the edge of the cliff now makes us remember the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and the famous Leap of Faith scene. There is a previously unseen path ahead to what seems to be the end of the track. As the way forward is not visible, it is necessary to have a good deal of trust in the unknown to discover what is still veiled, and be open to letting go of things that were important but no longer serve us. Now, if we pay attention carefully, we can see that The Fool is holding a rose in his left hand. In Jungian theory, the left side of the body is always attributed to the feminine, the unconscious, or little things that are not that much praised in our times, but still they express the voice of the soul. And above all flowers, and especially the rose, are connected to love. With Christmas still fresh in our minds, I remember the 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life with James Stewart. What really matters, Zuzu’s petals, takes up very little space. This might be one of the positive dimensions of experience and aging. As Jung wrote: “A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.” (§ 787) In between The Fool card as number 0 or as number 22, the journey of life takes place. In the audio Tarot & the Christian Myth, Campbell recalls the first time he saw a tarot deck at Esalen, and he reminds us that these symbols are referring to a basic principle: the elevation of consciousness and, consequently, spiritual life. Therefore, this journey represents an illumination that is possible and can be achieved. In a sense, it is only one small step away.

This year in the MythBlast Series we’re exploring the symbols and archetypal images of the major arcana of the Tarot. A picture is worth a thousand words, or so the old saying goes, and the images of Tarot are laden with archetypal significance — so much so, that those thousand words barely begin to open the symbolic, representational, elements of those images. This first month of 2023 we’re looking at the image of The Fool, the first (or last) card of the Tarot deck, as it bears the number zero. Zero is not a counting number and, similarly, the Fool cannot be counted on to behave predictably nor conventionally. From a traditional point of view, the Fool is a zero, a nobody; one to be ridiculed and degraded. The Fool is thought to be impulsive, irresponsible, unorthodox, unmannered; an empty-headed, naive simpleton who lacks good judgment. The Fool is often understood to be graceless, senseless, and ugly — sometimes even deformed. He may be a dwarf, crippled, or otherwise deformed. Fools may also be incredibly pompous while simultaneously being shockingly incompetent. But there is another, deeper, side to the Fool, an aspect that is the most important of this multi-faceted, bewildering, disturbing, frustrating, and yet ultimately revitalizing and creative archetype: the Wise Fool. Usage of the word fool was quite common in 1800, but over the next two hundred years fell out of fashion. By 1980 or so, it was seldom used. Around the year 2000, usage returned to became more common; Now, in 2023, it’s used nearly as often as it was in the year 1800. Why has this word made a comeback, and why now? That’s always the therapeutic question, you know; why this symptom, and why is it expressing now? The forms always emerge before understanding, just as the disease has always progressed before symptoms emerge. The image of the Fool, like all archetypal images, is timeless. Archetypes are not rigidly bound to any particular time, place, or situation, however they can be constellated and shaped by the energies of a given age and place. The idea of foolishness, and therefore the image of the Fool, seems to be constellated by difficult, dangerous times — eras that may be metaphorically represented by arid and distorted landscapes, Wasteland situations, one might say, in which hearts have become hardened and heads have become empty and addled. In the sociopolitical climate of the early 2000s, when the word fool returned to common use, fear dominated the emotional landscape of the time. Fears of terrorism, of political opponents, fear of the truth, and a new fear much harder to understand: the fear of the mutability — the relativity —of truth. We seem to be living in a time in which conservatism — as an idea, as a psychic perspective or a sociological reflex, as opposed to a political philosophy — is more and more popular. Primarily because the conservative perspective, in its preference for order and rules, stability and traditional values, offers an escape from Modernity and the bewildering uncertainty of Postmodernism. The more rapid the pace of change in a society, the more frangible, malleable, and unfathomable life becomes, the more appealing conservatism becomes. Conservatism, with its hunger for rules and black and white thinking, sets the stage for the appearance of the transmogrifying, chaotic wisdom of the Anarchic Fool (think of Groucho Marx movies with shipboard staterooms filled to overflowing with all sorts of people, the manic comedy of Robin Williams, or the revolutionary satire of Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl). When societies and cultures become too proscribed, too rigid, or too rule bound the Fool, through his militant anarchy, turns institutions and logic upside down and inside out. Jesus himself often occupied the role of the Wise Fool, and in Matthew 20:16 Jesus taught, “So the last shall be first, and the first last…” demonstrating the same foolish ability to invert and subvert the usual order of things, rebelling against the excesses of wealth and privilege and the exercise of grim authoritarianism. Echoing the words of Jesus, the Tarot Fool may also be the first card or the last, which adds a kind of symmetry or circularity to the chaos of subversion. Since irony is the primary constituent in the language of myth, perhaps the fool is the personification of myth itself, because irony is the language of the fool. Irony intensifies and subverts reality just as the Fool does. Like the fool, irony turns things inside out and upside down. It deconstructs and overthrows. It draws attention to the discrepancy between literal and essential meaning, all the while allowing the Fool to go about his business serenely untroubled, almost as if he’s above it all, like Paul McCartney’s “Fool on the Hill” watching the world spinning ‘round. The Fool sitting on the hill isn’t really “above it all,” he’s a metaphor for the clarity of perspective–the sense of seeing a big picture while at the same time, deeply engaged in life — that reveals the interdependence of everything, that all existence is harmonious and in accord, even when it appears to be a cruel, chaotic mess. It’s the perspective of the deepest Self, a way of honoring one’s own passions while simultaneously recognizing the limitations of being human; of following one’s own heart and utilizing the wisdom of one’s own mind. Merriment and sadness are always intertwined, and an undercurrent of melancholy flows through the fool. In the second half of Shakespeare’s career, his fools become more worldly wise, more world-weary and, consequently, more compassionate. Being full of word play, puns, and silly jokes, the gravedigger in Hamlet is one example of a fool. But there is also in him a deep wisdom that accepts the course and nature of life on life’s own terms. He unearths a skull and tells Hamlet it was once Yorick, his father’s (King Hamlet) Fool. Taken aback, Hamlet says: Yorick! I knew him, Horatio—a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times...Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? (Act 5, Scene 1) “He hath bore me on his back a thousand times…Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.” Hearing or reading these lines always makes me think that Yorick, the jester, the fool, must have been the main source of whatever love young Hamlet received. It was Yorick that played with the child, not his father. It was Yorick, not his vain, self-interested mother, whom he showered with kisses. Even in death, the fool tried to teach Hamlet the simple truth about living: that what survives of us is love. And if we are to become fully fledged, functional adults, the love we must pursue is not that of a parent nor a lover, but a love of the conditions of life itself. These conditions of life are not congenial to human understanding or comfort, and rather than rage against this reality, we must learn to accept, even love, the conditions of life if we are to love others, the world, ourselves and our own lives and stand against hopelessness and the death of the spirit. If we can achieve this, we discover that love really is all around us. Even, perhaps especially, in the company of Fools. Thanks for reading,