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The art of letter writing has been significantly threatened since e-mails and text messages brought about faster and more efficient ways to communicate with words. Once human relationships depended heavily on written correspondence. This...
The text we’re highlighting this month is Correspondence: 1927-1987, which offers selections of Joseph Campbell’s correspondence over the last 60 years of his life. I have long loved reading the correspondence of people who...
Here in America, November marks the celebration of Thanksgiving, and we at JCF have adopted the theme of gratitude for the MythBlasts this month. Gratitude is an interesting assortment of feelings, a complex emotion...
What did Joseph Campbell mean when he said, “Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be” (Joseph Campbell and the Power of...
Looking at my life, I cannot escape a basic fact: my individual existence is enmeshed in the life of the collective—not only my immediate family and friends, but in the larger institutions and systems...
My first memories of Joseph Campbell are through my dad’s love for him. Dad played Campbell’s lectures on cassette tapes on long, sun drenched drives to visit our family’s patriarch in the desert. Ironically,...
It is the first day of spring as I sit down to write. The sun has entered Aries, the first sign in the Zodiac, marking the dawning of a new astrological year. The sun...
We are excited to announce a unique new addition to the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell, Correspondence: 1927–1987! New World Library, Joseph Campbell Foundation’s longtime publishing partner, has released a fascinating collection of letters that...
The deeper my relationship with Joseph Campbell, the more I see him everywhere—and not just what I come across for the Campbell in Culture posts I help curate. The references we hear about, the overt mentions,...
With the 1949 publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell accomplished the rare task of uniting wisdom with mainstream interest, presenting foundational patterns of human experience through the archetypal content embedded...
The Role of Story in Crafting New Beginnings for Our Lives Most attribute the foundations of Western story structure to Aristotle. His simple idea that stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an...
This month, the first month of the new year, we begin again; and beginning again is, in fact, our theme for January at JCF. No doubt we’ll soon be inundated by numberless lists extolling...
W.H. Auden once remarked that a real book reads us, an observation that seems right enough to me, and certainly seems right to apply to the work of Joseph Campbell. After all, Campbell spent...
Six years ago I was literally elbow deep in the Joseph Campbell archives, retrieving dozens of audio cassette tapes on whose delicate ribbons were etched hours of Campbell talking about goddess myths. Between 1972...
The Joseph Campbell Foundation will soon be releasing an ebook publication of Campbell’s Myths of Light, an utterly charming little book in which the attentive reader will be able to discern Campbell’s joy and...
In the month of April, the Joseph Campbell Foundation is celebrating the impending release of several new editions of two Campbell classics, The Mythic Dimension and Primitive Mythology, both coming soon as eBooks and...
Mythology and the Hero’s Journey became pervasive throughout film culture and history as generation after generation turned to Joseph Campbell and The Hero with a Thousand Faces. With his guidance, countless filmmakers have come...
Last week JCF, through its new arrangement with Amazon, made available a new digital edition of Joseph Campbell’s The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension. As I have remarked recently in this...
A few days ago, I came across this sentence from Joseph Campbell in his essay “Symbol Without Meaning” in The Flight of the Wild Gander. “The highest concern of all the mythologies, ceremonials, ethical systems,...
Editor’s note: As we celebrate inspired teaching and learning this month, we are excited to share the ideas and work of one of JCF’s Board members, Kwame Scruggs, PhD, exploring his extraordinary work with...
This month, we’re offering you a uniquely personal view of Joseph Campbell at a pivotal juncture in his life and work. At the beginning of his career, Joseph Campbell developed a lasting fascination with...
We tell stories about who we are, to understand what makes us different – what makes us alike – what connects us what our families might be and look like – and who our...
“Tell me your myth that the whole world may turn to myth.” — Nikos Kazantzakis The Talking Heads were right. We can’t truly know where we are going without reflecting upon where we have...
Joseph Campbell was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work covers many aspects of the human experience. His philosophy is often summarized by his phrase: “Follow your bliss.” More…
