Happy New Year, and thank you to all who continue to read and support JCF’s MythBlast Series. May the new year bring you all love, joy, and peace.

The theme for the MythBlast series during the first month of 2025 is “The Fool at the Movies.” This is a rich vein to mine, indeed, given the cinematic contributions of great geniuses like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Groucho Marx, Madeline Kahn, Gilda Radner, and Robin Williams, to name just a few. All of them, for the most part, absurdly, chaotically, hilariously foolish. But I want to focus on an often overlooked variant of the archetype, the tragic fool.

The Film

Chimes at Midnight is a 1966 film written, directed by and starring Orson Welles. It's a masterpiece of a film made of loosely adapted scenes from William Shakespeare's plays, Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor that focus on the relationship between the young Prince Hal (Keith Baxter) and his roguish companion Sir John Falstaff (Welles). It is, by the way, Welles’ favorite of all his films: “It's my favorite picture, yes. If I wanted to get into heaven on the basis of one movie, that's the one I would offer up” (Estrin and Welles Orson Welles Interviews), and more than a few critics have insisted that it is the best Shakespearean film ever made. For what it's worth, so do I.

Welles had great affection for Falstaff, he may well have identified strongly with the clever, creative, “huge hill of flesh.” Certainly, they both were similarly immense (Prince Hal says Falstaff “sweats to death and lards the lean earth as he walks along”), both challenged conventional norms, loved wit, revelry, and drink; they were raconteurs of the first order (as an example, do yourself a favor and watch Orson Welles’ Sketchbook, which aired on television in the mid-1950s), and they were both painfully ejected from orbit around a world that was everything to them. Near the end of his life, Welles himself may have become something of a tragic fool, suffering a painful, humiliating fall from cinematic royalty that included drunkenly shilling Paul Masson wine in television commercials.

I think that Falstaff is, perhaps, Shakespeare’s most vividly human, most fully realized and embodied figure of all the characters he imagined, and probably for that very reason, one of his most beloved. So much beloved that tradition has it that Shakespeare couldn’t bear to see Falstaff die on stage, and after seeing Henry IV Part I, Queen Elizabeth I asked Shakespeare to write The Merry Wives of Windsor, requesting that Falstaff be shown in love.

I think that Falstaff is, perhaps, Shakespeare’s most vividly human, most fully realized and embodied figure of all the characters he imagined, and probably for that very reason, one of his most beloved.

Falstaff Was My Tutor

If I might be allowed a short digression, in the early Twenty Teens I wrote a blog called Falstaff Was My Tutor. It proved to be modestly popular; in fact at one point I was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in creative nonfiction, and some of you who followed me then may remember it. I began the blog thinking that I would share sad, funny, strange, poignant stories from the time when I, a rather callow young man, was a police officer. The blog was inspired by a friend and frequent patrol partner who, as I reflected upon his premature death, I understood to be a Fallstaffian influence: a man of vast appetites, sometimes questionable ethics, a riotously funny, self-deceptive man who often told the hard truth about the world, while struggling with the fact of seeming ill-suited for it.

Having left that career, that world, behind, I foolishly identified with Prince Hal, who as king finally decided to take upon himself all the responsibilities of his station and renounce his former way of life:

I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers; How ill white hairs become a fool, and jester! I have long dream'd of such a man, So surfeit-swell'd, so old, and so profane; But being awake, I do despise my dream [...] Presume not, that I am the thing I was [...] I have turn'd away my former self; So will I those that kept me company. When thou dost hear I am as I have been, Approach me; and thou shalt be as thou wast, The tutor and the feeder of my riots: Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death (emphasis is mine).

I say foolishly because now, in my late middle age, I see that I have always been Falstaff. Not so much in the sense of his riotous behaviors or too much sherris-sack, food, or licentiousness, but rather in the sense of his tragic foolishness: his vulnerability, his loneliness, and his self-delusional overcompensation. How could Shakespeare not be speaking to me? Just look at my photo accompanying this post. “How ill white hairs become a fool and a jester.” But unlike Hal, I no longer despise my dream, and I attempt to incorporate it into the broader fabric of my life. That’s the thing with archetypes; we’re constituted by so many, and each one contains its own opposite which, at some time or another demands to be reckoned with. Shakespeare’s Falstaff reflects this quality, and Welles’ film depends upon this nuance.

The Fool as Truth Teller

Falstaff, like other Shakespearian fools, was a truth-teller. He revealed the sordid realities underlying high flown ideals like honor, duty, and patriotism. He even tells the unflinching truth about himself. When the Lord Chief Justice, a grave, important advisor to the king, scolds Falstaff, saying, “Well, the truth is, Sir John, you live in great infamy…Your means are very slender, and your waste is great.” Falstaff replies, “I would it were otherwise. I would my means were greater and my waist slender.” He knows, painfully, that he is not what he once aspired to be, and instead he finds his untapped potential in the youthful Prince Hal, who will soon be the shining sun of the realm. Traditionally, the king is the central source of life, power, and authority within the kingdom, just as the sun is the center of the solar system, providing light and warmth to all who come into his orbit, and Falstaff loves the young prince whose bright light warms his old heart.

Earlier in the film his companions ask him to put his ear to the ground and listen for the approach of travelers of whom they might relieve their material goods and Falstaff—knowing that once he’s prostrate on the ground will have great difficulty rising—replies, “Have you any levers to lift me up again, being down?” But Falstaff's question seems to foreshadow a time when he will be so far down that no lever large enough could ever be found to lift him up again and he will die, killed by regret and a broken heart.

And sure enough that old heart, that great ironic, comic heart, that poor, foolish heart, is broken when Henry V banishes Falstaff from his presence, a fate he can’t quite accept. In the film we’re told that Falstaff is dead, that “the King has killed his heart.” His companions can’t accept that Falstaff is dead, and because Shakespeare and Welles have given such zeal to Falstaff, such an immense, vivid vitality that theatergoers, like the aforementioned Queen Elizabeth I and those of us watching the film, have a hard time accepting it, too. Mistress Quickly insists that surely he’s not in hell, but instead, “He’s in Arthur’s bosom, if ever a man went to Arthur’s bosom.” A curious thing to say, and a number of scholars argue that being an uneducated, uncouth woman, Mistress Quickly intended to say “Abraham’s bosom” rather than Arthur’s. But I think she’s got it exactly right. Falstaff went to Arthur’s bosom, and like the once and future king, he will return when we most need him.

This is the essence of a tragic fool; they live life to the fullest while knowing they will surely die—perhaps sooner rather than later since they tempt fate so often—and they diminish the influence and authority of death by laughing at it, taunting it, domesticating it, and most of all, humanizing it. The rest of us may not realize their value until they’re dead, but like Orson Welles, we love them all the more after death. The archetypal fool provides a lever large enough to lift us all out of our powerlessness, ennui, and existential dread, encouraging the rest of us to make a game of life, discovering joy, enthusiasm, and wonder in the midst of its terrifying mystery.

Thanks for reading.

MythBlast authored by:

Bradley Olson, Ph.D. is an author, speaker, and a psychotherapist. He serves as the Publications Director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and the host of JCF's flagship podcast, Pathways With Joseph Campbell. Dr. Olson holds a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Dr. OIson is also a depth psychologist in private practice in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he has lived since 1995. Dr. Olson has graduate degrees in psychology from the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Olson offers mythic life coaching at What's Mything in Your Life (bradleyolsonphd.com)

This MythBlast was inspired by Creative Mythology and the archetype of The Fool.

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Today, we’re excited to bring you a conversation with Dr. Robert Maldonado, a pioneering voice in the intersection of psychology, spirituality, and mythology. With advanced degrees in Clinical and Counseling Psychology, Dr. Rob has dedicated his career to helping others overcome limitations and embrace spiritual transformation. As the President, Co-Founder, and Educational Director of CreativeMind, he offers a unique program that blends cutting-edge science with deep spiritual insight—bridging worlds that are often seen as separate. Dr. Rob’s work is deeply influenced by the teachings of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, two legendary thinkers who explored the mysteries of the human psyche and the power of myth. Through his practice and teachings, he invites us to uncover the transformative potential of both science and spirituality in our lives. In this episode, JCF’s Scott Neumeister sits down with Dr. Rob to explore his journey, his approach to the human mind, and the ways in which mythology has shaped his work.

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This Week's Highlights

"Wisdom and foolishness are practically the same. Both are indifferent to the opinions of the world."

-- Joseph Campbell

A Joseph Campbell Companion, 215

The Individual Adventure - Q&A

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Myth is a holy ghost, moving effortlessly through boundaries while making sacred appearances that sometimes seem to come out of nowhere. It moves as a zeitgeist that has always resisted being confined to a single expression. It defies linear history, geographic borders, and profane attempts to capture and confine it. For some, it primarily manifested in oral tales; for others, it appeared in written words; and still, for others, it has been revealed through images and symbols.

In Creative Mythology, the final volume of his Masks of God series, Joseph Campbell explores images and symbols, stating, “Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies or reason and coercion” (6). It's perhaps no wonder that images and symbols are carried into our eyes on something as delicate as light itself. Campbell continues discussing this fragile relationship between symbols and light, saying, “The light-world modes of experience and thought were late, very late, developments in the biological prehistory of our species. Even in the life-course of the individual, the opening of the eyes to light occurs only after all the main miracles have been accomplished of the building of a living body of already functioning organs, each with its inherent aim … though our eyes and what they witness may persuade us ...” Hearing Campbell speak of light passing through the opening of the eyes and persuading our beliefs, I cannot help but think of how this also occurs in cinema.

Dream palaces and cathedrals

The moving images of myth have always struck me in ways that I haven’t always had language to describe. As a young boy, I was mesmerized by Star Wars, though not just by the spaceships and the Wookies. They transported me into a world much larger than the Texas landscape I grew up in. Entering that dark room, sitting with strangers, eating popcorn, and drinking soda felt magical, transcendent, and almost ritualistic. I wasn’t just transported into a different time in a galaxy far, far away. I was transported into something that felt beyond the experiences of reality and consciousness I had previously known.

Now, years later, I have come to recognize the similarities between theaters, temples, and cathedrals. All involve the coming together of the community to participate in spoken and unspoken rituals. The experience in the theater was not unlike my experience each Sunday at church. The bread and the wine were reflected in the soda and the popcorn, echoing the ancient practice of buying ritual corn before entering the temple. The movie theaters of the 1940s explicitly recognized the mythic connection, often referring to their venues as “Dream Palaces,” referencing the fact that both dreams and movies take place in the dark and often outside the conscious experience. Campbell famously described the dream as a personalized myth and the myth as the depersonalized dream (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, pg. 19). The 6200-seat Roxy Theater in New York City claimed to be “the cathedral of the motion picture” and offered what was akin to a religious experience for many attendees—an ecstatic event that inspired awe. That ecstasy came from the movies themselves and the surroundings in which they were presented—the cinema. Since its inception, the cinematic experience has been recognized as a container for something larger than itself. The art form of cinema is a container for the archetypes of ancient myth.

Cinematic sacred spaces

The movie theater remains a place where we go to enter another world. It was (and maybe still is) one of the only places you could go and sit in total darkness with strangers, experiencing something together. It was (and maybe still is) one of the only places where it was okay to cry in public. These factors, and dozens of others, made movie theaters special and even sacred for some. As a culture, we went to experience something we couldn’t experience by ourselves at home. When society began watching movies in their homes and then on their phones, noticeable confusion set in about that type of space the movie theater was. It became ordinary, less special, and no longer sacred, and in turn, people started behaving as if it was not a special place anymore—a reality that has kept many away from theaters in recent times. But I would suggest that for those with eyes to see it, cinema still holds all the power it ever did, even though we as a culture have slowly stopped recognizing it in its fullness.

Throughout its brief history, cinema has played a crucial role in identity formation for many and helped others negotiate significant changes in their identity. Films have reflected who we believed we were at the time of their creation and traced our transformation from one “world” to another. For these reasons and so many more, we have decided, here at the Joseph Campbell Foundation, to theme our 2025 MythBlast series around an invitation to experience the power of myth at the movies. We believe that in this age of screens, great value can be found in allowing those screens to act as mirrors, reflecting who we are and who we could be. We believe those reflections can lead us toward deeper insights into some of the most profound mythic questions that can be asked—what it means to be human, who we truly are, how we can experience life fully—and countless others. Over the coming months, writers and thinkers in this series will explore stories, characters, archetypes, and motifs of the screen that have made an impact on them individually or on us collectively. We hope that by better understanding mythic ideas through the lens of cinema, unforeseen understandings about our journeys might also be revealed to us all. So, we invite you to sit back, get comfortable, grab your popcorn, and experience the power of myth at the movies with us in 2025.

MythBlast authored by:

John Bucher is a renowned mythologist and story expert who has been featured on the BBC, the History Channel, the LA Times, The Hollywood Reporter and on numerous other international outlets . He serves as Executive Director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and is a writer, podcaster, storyteller, and speaker. He has worked with government and cultural leaders around the world as well as organizations such as HBO, DC Comics, Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon, A24 Films, Atlas Obscura, and The John Maxwell Leadership Foundation, bringing his deep understanding of narrative and myth to a wide array of audiences. He is the author of six influential books on storytelling, including the best-selling Storytelling for Virtual Reality, named by BookAuthority as one of the best storytelling books of all time. John has worked with New York Times Best Selling authors, YouTube influencers, Eisner winners, Emmy winners, Academy Award nominees, magicians, and cast members from Saturday Night Live. Holding a PhD in Mythology & Depth Psychology, he integrates scholarly insights with practical storytelling techniques, exploring the profound connections between myth, culture, and personal identity. His expertise has helped shape compelling narratives across various platforms, enriching the way stories are told and experienced globally.

This MythBlast was inspired by Creative Mythology and the archetype of The Fool.

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This episode of Pathways with Joseph Campbell, titled "The Harmony and Discord of Religions," was recorded at Brandeis University in 1958. At the time, Joseph Campbell was 54 years old and nearing the completion of Primitive Mythology, the first volume of his Masks of God series. In this lecture, Campbell offers an affirmative defense of comparative methodologies, exploring both the commonalities and differences among the world’s religious traditions.

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This Week's Highlights

"I think that the movie is the perfect medium for mythological messages. The medium is so plastic and pliable and magic things can happen. And then the combination, you know, of fantastic landscape and possible modes of action and voyaging that we can hardly conceive of in good solid terms ... That’s a mythological realm, and movies could handle this kind of thing."

-- Joseph Campbell

The Wisdom of Joseph Campbell (© 1997 New Dimensions Foundation) 

Tape 3, Side 1

The Hero with a Thousand Faces

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The theme for the MythBlast Series this month is “Death and Renewal,” but we should not take for granted that these two are a happily wedded pair, that one follows the other axiomatically, nor should we think that renewal necessarily means rebirth. It might be more useful, more practical, to think of renewal as renovation, revival, or restoration—much what one would do with an old house fallen into disrepair. Renewal is derived from the Latin word renovare (to restore, to flourish once more), and we can likewise remodel our thinking, restore our reinvigorated metaphors to their proper soulful place at the heart of life, and revive our sometimes flagging energy and rediscover enthusiasm for life.

Often things—including the metaphors of myth—are beautiful, not because they’re true, but because they are not. W.H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” contains the oft-quoted, cherished-by-many line”: “We must love one another or die.” Auden was not at all happy with this line, primarily because it simply isn’t true and moreover, as Auden later reflected, not one word of poetry—regardless of its beauty or consolation—could have prevented the Second World War, or any other cataclysm for that matter. What’s more, love doesn’t ameliorate nor, even for a moment, forstall death. To believe otherwise is a comforting illusion of the kind without which, Nietzsche would say, we might die of the truth.

Great Deceptions

Great poetry is often a great deception, and often the greatest poetry considers the coldest truths deceptively, as if mythopoesis had a mind of its own with an intention to comfort or steel the reader just enough to be able to finally face what is inescapably, dreadfully, perhaps even humiliatingly true. Auden later changed the famous line to “We must love one another and die.” More true, I suppose, but less poetically powerful, so he got rid of it entirely. Much later, friends convinced him to reinsert the line in a late book of selected poems. Ultimately, restoring the line proved irresistible because—if I have learned any single thing having been a student of unadulterated human nature throughout the course of my life—we are utterly besotted with the beautiful lie.

Facing the unalterable facts of life is difficult, especially facts like death, which seem to offer no consolation of understanding, no comprehension of what death is or what, exactly, happens to us when we die. In their inevitability, however, in their stubborn resistance to inquiry, those unalterable facts can reconcile us however surprisingly, probably always uneasily, to their inscrutable reality.

Auden’s wrestling with seven words in one of his most famous poems reflects how much he, like all of us, would like to avoid certain inescapable mortal realities, regardless of their inevitability. Nevertheless, through a clever bit of metaphorical or artistic jujitsu, the beautiful lie, Picasso says, “...makes us realize the truth. At least the truth that is given us to understand,” and by deploying it, Auden gives us the possibility of entering into a profound truth in such a way that all our resistances to it fall away.

If we live long enough with the idea that we must love one another or die, we will inexorably be led to the conclusion that we cannot avoid death; not even love can nullify its cold, all-consuming, mortal embrace. The cracks in the foundation of the beautiful lie quickly become apparent: people often love deeply, fully, sometimes with abandon, yet still have to face death—their own, or worse, that of their beloved. Death’s reality, its pervasively singular presence, cannot be denied. The bliss of love may obscure the inconvenient truths of mortality, but sadly it will not alter them; nor will a beautiful metaphor repeal the force of natural law.

Immortal Longing

“Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have immortal longings in me” (My emphasis). In Shakespeare's play Antony and Cleopatra (5.2.280-81), Cleopatra utters these lines just a few moments before she places a poisonous snake to her breast, releasing its venom into her body, and dying. Most of us, I suspect, would be in agreement with the semblance of her sentiment; when thoughts of death occupy our minds, most of us long for immortality, too. One may understandably understand her as literally longing for immortality; she’s expressing a self-conscious wish not to die.

One may also read something else in her statement and conclude that she’s telling us that it’s longing itself that is immortal. Longing is much more than mere desire. Desires can be fulfilled, sometimes even achieved, but longing is never completely satisfied. Even when we’ve achieved long-cherished goals, when we’ve acquired what we’ve only dared dream of, what remains is a nagging sense of incompleteness or emptiness as though we expected to feel something more, find some sort of all-encompassing satisfaction, to finally feel complete.

Longing is fundamental to our all-too-human constitution: we long for that which cannot be humanly attained, for that which cannot be humanly grasped. We long for something that reaches beyond our human existence—some transformative force that impels us beyond human limitations. Ultimately, I think that we long for a fundamentally aesthetic experience, the experience of beauty and transcendence to which mortal flesh can hold to but for a moment. In order to have the illuminating experience, however, we must follow the beautiful lie to its ultimate conclusion. Beauty is the product of an alchemy of impermanence: our own on the one hand and on the other, the rarity, the strangeness, the fragility of the beautiful. The aesthetic impulses within ourselves bind, for a transcendent moment, to the same qualities in the regarded beauty and for a split-second, we are transported outside of ourselves. We experience a longed-for moment of awakening that simultaneously obliges us to understand that the beautiful is also ephemeral, and the longing we must perpetually live with returns to us with the formidable realization that deep beauty is a regenerative fugitive from conscious intention or will, even from death.

Ultimately, I think that we long for a fundamentally aesthetic experience, the experience of beauty and transcendence to which mortal flesh can hold to but for a moment.

Its transience in no way diminishes the renewing, revitalizing impact of beauty—in fact it defines it. The 14th century Zen poet Yoshida Kenko in his wonderfully charming book called Essays in Idleness wrote: “If we lived forever, never to vanish like the dews of Adashino, never to fade like the crematory smoke on Toribeyama, men would hardly feel the beauty of things.” So if it is, in fact, our longing that is immortal, it is still possible to experience the eternal, to realize immortality in a significant, life-changing, evanescent moment of aesthetic rapture. From such a transcendent experience, mere seconds in terms of ordinary time, we “...see a world in a grain of sand And heaven in a wildflower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour...” (William Blake, Songs of Innocence).

Death Opens to Life

Mortality and death are the primary organizing principle of human life. Material possessions, success, fame, and embodied power are all subordinate to the knowledge that we will one day die. In Myths to Live By, Joseph Campbell writes, “This recognition of mortality and the requirement to transcend it is the first great impulse to mythology” (17). Apparently the long contemplation of eternal nothingness, or worse, eternal suffering, tends to focus the mind on discovering ways to deny such an eventuality. But more specifically, and from my perspective a more salutary thought, is that the recognition of mortality is the first great mythopoetic impulse, whose aim it is to find beauty, poetry, and narrative epistemologies that make the project of living a human life under the shadow of death not just bearable, but irresistibly appealing just as it is, on its—life’s—own terms. (As an aside, Professor Campbell touches on this idea in his lecture called “Man and His Gods,” which is featured on the most recent Pathways With Joseph Campbell podcast episode https://pathways-with-joseph-campbell.simplecast.com).

It is death itself that makes life beautiful, and perhaps surprisingly, it is death that makes life bearable. Living consciously with the fact of death renews our spirit, our compassion, our feeling for life. In that affirming feeling for life there is peace, a sense of order, propriety, and a heroically steadfast tenderness towards life itself.

Finding beauty in the living and dying of life remains, after all, the first duty of the living.

Thanks for reading,

MythBlast authored by:

Bradley Olson, Ph.D. is an author, speaker, and a psychotherapist. He serves as the Publications Director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and the host of JCF's flagship podcast, Pathways With Joseph Campbell. Dr. Olson holds a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Dr. OIson is also a depth psychologist in private practice in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he has lived since 1995. Dr. Olson has graduate degrees in psychology from the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Olson offers mythic life coaching at What's Mything in Your Life (bradleyolsonphd.com)

This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 6, and The Hero's Journey

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In this episode, we’re pleased to welcome Phil Cousineau—a modern mythologist, storyteller, and inspirational speaker whose life and work are deeply rooted in the world of myth and the wisdom of Joseph Campbell. Cousineau’s journey through mythology is woven into every aspect of his career, from his prolific writing and filmmaking to his role as a teacher and speaker. His fascination with mythology began at an early age and has led him around the globe, exploring the intersections of culture, art, and the human spirit. Over his decades-long career, Cousineau has become an influential voice in translating ancient myths into relevant insights for the modern world, emphasizing what he calls “the omnipresent influence of myth in modern life.” In this episode, he and JCF’s John Bucher delve into Cousineau’s wide-ranging work as an author, filmmaker, and consultant, and explore his relationship with Joseph Campbell. So get comfortable and enjoy this conversation with John Bucher and Phil Cousineau.

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This Week's Highlights

"Hearing the song that is beyond that of your own individual life cycle is the thing that opens you to wisdom. You can hear it in your life, interpreting it, reading it, not in terms of the calamities or boons of your individual existence, but as a message of what life is."

-- Joseph Campbell

Myth and Meaning, 16

Kundalini Yoga: Flying Elephants that Support the World

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The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation. When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed.

Joseph Campbell, Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion

The Joseph Campbell Foundation is publishing this MythBlast the day after the winter solstice of 2024 (for Northern Hemisphere residents). When it happens, no matter one’s hemisphere, this monumental event in the sky manifests as the sun appears to stop its retreat down the dawn and dusk horizons—the term solstice coming from sol, sun, and sistere, to stop. It also marks the longest night of the year, and although the winter has officially only begun and more cold times lie ahead, the turning of the sun to higher angles signals that days will soon increase in length, darkness will retreat, and warmth will return. While those in equatorial regions miss this aspect of the changing length of days and temperatures, most of us have the yearly, lived experience of sunlight lessening, weather cooling, and vegetation withering and dying before the opposite occurs.

This sky event and longest night have always reminded me (in the as-above-so-below way) of a phenomenon termed “the dark night of the soul.” This phrase, coined by the Spanish poet and mystic St. John of the Cross, has come to equally signify a distressing, troublesome life season and a subsequently transformative spiritual episode. In view of the MythBlast themes this month, a dark night can be a death of sorts, especially since loss and endings of all kinds quite often accompany it. The renewal theme is not guaranteed, however, as simple recovery from this period might not evoke any newness, only grief and despair (all of these themes have been skillfully addressed by my fellow MythBlast writers this month). The transformative quality of the soul’s dark night must be evoked through intentional contemplation and meaning making.

Viral impairment: mono(litihic) weakness

Of the times in my life that I can unequivocally label as a dark night of the soul, one was my experience of mononucleosis. While the onset of my infection with the Epstein-Barr virus felt like other viral illnesses (producing fever, body aches, fatigue), as time progressed the weakening of my muscles overtook all other symptoms. I gradually found walking short distances tiring, and soon even the standing rest that I was forced to take more frequently didn’t renew my energy. When speaking, I started randomly failing to produce sound—I would simply go silent mid-sentence. Prying open sealed jars or bags, never before a problem, became difficult and then impossible. I needed to remain in bed almost for the duration of my waking hours, with only trips to the bathroom and kitchen possible. At my lowest point, I actually would roll off my bed as I could only to crawl to my destination; walking had become that difficult.

I hadn’t realized how much my life and ideology leading up to this point had been founded on the assumption of bodily autonomy, physical power, and (directly influenced by Emerson’s essay as a teen) self-reliance. No prior illness or injury had placed me for so long into the category of disabled. I could not have even imagined myself in such a category. Yet there I was, with no say in the matter and no path out of it. In Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way through Life’s Ordeals, Thomas Moore conveys this feeling of helplessness and the encounter with something so beyond one’s normal way of facing the world.

During the dark night there is no choice but to surrender control, give in to unknowing, and stop and listen to whatever signals of wisdom might come along. It’s a time of enforced retreat and perhaps unwilling withdrawal … a profound initiation into a realm that nothing in the culture, so preoccupied with external concerns and material success, prepares you for.

Many of Moore’s words echo the events of the fall-into-winter progress of the sun and seasons: “surrender,” “stop” (as in sun-stop/solstice), “enforced retreat,” “a profound initiation.” And in my case, the physical component reflected a sort of autumn and then winter of my body, which evoked the darkness within my soul. This was a soulstice—an enforced standing still of my physical and spiritual aspects.

This was a soulstice—an enforced standing still of my physical and spiritual aspects.

Gifts of the night: making meaning in the dark

Campbell regularly addressed the need for darkness as a precedent to light/enlightenment. Aside from the epigraph of this essay, one of his most-quoted affirmations concerning this concept is: “It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life … The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you were looking for” (Reflections on the Art of Living, 24). Somehow, these night-evoking places—the abyss, the cave—are both tomb and womb, both a death and a renewal, as is the renowned Belly of the Whale in the hero’s journey.

In the case of my bout of mononucleosis, what treasures of life were there in it for me? What was I looking for, even if unconsciously? Cliché though it may be, we only get to know the full experience of life through contrasts, and my foray into the abyss of disability galvanized my appreciation for all the abilities I’d enjoyed and taken for granted all my life. To move, to walk without tiring—these were not givens, they were gifts.

Even more deeply, I found myself, as I began to recover some strength, at the grocery store for the first time in a long while and moving quite slowly. Suddenly, I noticed the others there who were moving slowly, people who before I might have simply blown past or even gotten annoyed at for their sluggishness. I unexpectedly realized that I had been “erasing” or, worse, disparaging fellow humans who were outside of my energy/strength paradigm. The treasure of life I had found was the feeling of connection with and compassion for more people because my experience had allowed me to live in their world.

So as to approach the dark nights of the outer or inner world more mindfully, we can ask ourselves: what aspects of life-as-it-is has this loss or deprivation made me appreciate more? What new segment of humanity is now my “tribe” because of it? What qualities has this “initiation,” as Moore calls it, evoked in me, unbidden though the experience was? Only through careful contemplation can any experience of the dark acquire the power of the death and renewal that Campbell envisions.

MythBlast authored by:

Scott Neumeister is a literary scholar, author, TEDx speaker, mythic pathfinder and Editor of the MythBlast series from Tampa, Florida, where he earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of South Florida in 2018. His specialization in multiethnic American literature and mythology comes after careers as an information technology systems engineer and a teacher of English and mythology at the middle school and college levels. Scott coauthored Let Love Lead: On a Course to Freedom with Gary L. Lemons and Susie Hoeller, and he has served as a facilitator for the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Myth and Meaning book club at Literati.

This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 6, and The Hero's Journey

Latest Podcast

This bonus episode, titled The Birth of the Savior, was recorded in 1962 at WNET, a PBS member station in Newark, New Jersey, serving the New York City area. In this lecture, Joseph Campbell examines the mythology of the "savior" across cultures, with a particular focus on the image of the Christ child.

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This Week's Highlights

"Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be—if we are to experience long survival—a continuous 'recurrence of birth' ('palingenesia') to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death."

-- Joseph Campbell

The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 11 - 12

The Circle

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This month’s MythBlast topics include: “death and renewal,” “the Hero’s Journey” and “horizons.”

Whew.

Now there’s a tricky little puzzle for a winter’s game of connect-the-dots. 

Get some hot chocolate, and let’s see if we can fit these together.

Death and renewal 

Sometimes during the calendar year, metaphors put on their boots and stomp into consciousness. Here in the northern hemisphere we’re enjoying the darkest time of year, just before Sol returns to light up and renew the manger of our hopes. When it comes to Death and Renewal, the Winter Solstice is easily one of those times.

Horizons

Trickier. Whenever I get into a pickle trying to figure something out, I start by digging into the etymology of whatever it is, and “horizon” has a weirdly contrary genealogy. The word derives from the Greek word horos, stones used to mark boundaries. So, technically, the horizon marks a border.

A lot of borders, some with barbed wire, lie between us and the New-Year-of-our-lives. The most imposing ones seem continually out of reach, however, rolling away from us like the rainbow’s end, out there at the edge of our comprehension. But while we’re used to thinking of horizons as something forever in the distance, they’re still borders, and we still stumble into them–a barrier we thought we’d never even approach can turn out to be, surprisingly <thump> right there in front of us. Borders can be psychological or temporal or geographical–they can even be gastronomical, if you consider “getting through dinner with some of your relatives” a line you have to cross every year.

The hero’s journey

Arguably, after getting past the initial threshold guardians, every initiation on the Path is a kind of death and renewal, a doorway that once marked a limit, the horizon of what we knew or believed. In real life a lot of these initiatory stepping stones can seem impossibly distant or impossible to cross: will I ever find a job I love? Will I ever find my people? Will I ever get out of school? Stuff like that. Personally, I was afraid for a while that I’d never fall in love, it was always out there in the receding distance … and then <thump>. I got run over by Blitzen.

Oops, wrong metaphor. Anyway, you know what I mean.

When I think about horizons, I think about The Truman Show, the movie with Jim Carrey where he plays a guy raised entirely inside a huge artificial world as the subject of a highly-rated “real life” television show. He doesn’t know he’s spent his life inside a huge set until, one day, he overcomes his fears, sails across what he’d taken to be the ocean, and bumps into the horizon.

Thump.

It was a surprise. After that discovery Truman had to leave the world he knew and venture out to meet … well, the rest of the world. Imagine the collisions of expectation and reality.

In a sense, we’re all in the same boat. 

Campbell had some thoughts about the loss of horizons in the current era, and the loss of any mythological compass to help us navigate. He wrote:

There were formerly horizons within which people lived and thought and mythologized. There are now no more horizons. And with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples but also of their mythologies. ... That is just what we are experiencing; and we are riding it: riding it to a new age, a new birth, a totally new condition of mankind—to which no one anywhere alive today can say that he has the key, the answer, the prophecy, to its dawn.” (Myths to Live By, 254)

He has a point. 

It’s a constant theme for Campbell: our mythology puts us into relationship with the universe, but when the universe (and thus, our understanding of the universe) changes, our myths need to change as well. When the sources of our traditional mythological discourse have been washed away by science–when God and the angels have been chased out of heaven–our understanding of ourselves seems lost in a boundless universe, one without a North Star. Our relation to that universe, as well as the meaning attached to that relation, seems to recede into an infinite distance.

I don’t know what the solution is and Campbell is right: no one alive today has the answer to this question. But we’re all seeing the collisions and we can prepare for them.

every initiation on the Path is a kind of death and renewal, a doorway that once marked a limit, the horizon of what we knew or believed.

Crossing horizons

Thinking about horizons as boundary stones puts some of this into perspective.

A boundary is not a thing in itself, although we often think of it that way: as a fence or barbed wire or a line in the sand. But that’s just what it looks like, not what it is. A boundary is really a zone where two territories meet, a line of mediation between ourselves and an often frightening Otherness. Historically a border is where our territory meets their territory. Now, if the relations are good, all border crossings are an occasion for happy and congenial trade and interaction. If relations are unfriendly, or yet to be established, the boundary can pose a threat or an occasion for conflict–which is why we say that boundaries “mark” territory. “Mark” is derived from Mars, the Roman god of war and the god who, naturally, oversaw boundaries between territories. There’s some useful mythology: the god of war oversaw boundaries and borders. This much is still true today, geographically but also psychologically, philosophically, and metaphorically. 

One thing we can know about a future without horizons is that we’ll bump into new ones, both out there on The Final Frontier but also inwardly, in the conflict between the self you think you are and the Self revealed to you over time as a result of your pilgrimage through life.

No Horizons? Nope.  

New Horizons.

Thanks for musing along.

MythBlast authored by:

Mark C.E. Peterson, Ph.D.  is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Washington County and past president of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture (ISSRNC.org). Philosopher, gadfly, poet, cook, writing along the watermargins of nature, myth, and culture. A practitioner of taijiquan and kundalini yoga for over 40 years, Dr. Peterson is also a happy member of the Ukulele World Congress.

This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 6, and The Hero's Journey

Latest Podcast

In this episode, we’re pleased to welcome Phil Cousineau—a modern mythologist, storyteller, and inspirational speaker whose life and work are deeply rooted in the world of myth and the wisdom of Joseph Campbell. Cousineau’s journey through mythology is woven into every aspect of his career, from his prolific writing and filmmaking to his role as a teacher and speaker. His fascination with mythology began at an early age and has led him around the globe, exploring the intersections of culture, art, and the human spirit. Over his decades-long career, Cousineau has become an influential voice in translating ancient myths into relevant insights for the modern world, emphasizing what he calls “the omnipresent influence of myth in modern life.” In this episode, he and JCF’s John Bucher delve into Cousineau’s wide-ranging work as an author, filmmaker, and consultant, and explore his relationship with Joseph Campbell. So get comfortable and enjoy this conversation with John Bucher and Phil Cousineau.

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This Week's Highlights

"Out of perfection, nothing can be made. Every process involves breaking something up. The earth must be broken to bring forth life. If the seed does not die, there is no plant. Bread results from the death of wheat."

-- Joseph Campbell

A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living, 19

Kundalini Yoga: Yoking to the Source of Consciousness

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Death: the good version and the bad version

As I love telling my fellow associates and colluders in myth: “If death’s not your favorite part of this stuff, then you’re just not studying hard enough.” Granted, my zealous ultimatums have been known to prompt concern—especially from the more literal-minded—who then take steps to deescalate my passion through masterfully rendered rebuttals cloaked in neutral tones like: “I don’t think so” or “Maybe you should sit down for a minute?” or “Here, have some of this non-caffeinated herbal tea.” I gladly comply because I see the unconscious affirmation concealed in their reactions. They are all reducible to notions of death and underworldly directions whether through a nonplussed disagreement intentionally engineered to have as little to do with the matter (cf., the realm of the living) as possible, or through a striving toward calmness, stillness—an out, so to speak, from the heated blood of life for which the shades of Hades so yearn in the Odyssey. Oh, the irony.

For once one gets past its literal face, there’s something about how the content of and around death deepens downward (and concurrently grows upward) the more one looks at it, watches it, reflects on it—something about its fertile richness, its dark mystery that is so present and necessary to the fullness of psyche. Technically the full topic is “death and renewal,” but as far as mythology’s concerned, renewal is the inseparable complement and completion to death. 

More pressing for the moment, however, is all this glib talk, my light tossing around of such a heavy term. Precisely what makes “death” so amenable and easy on my tongue is simply the notion that I am talking here about metaphorical death, which means I am encountering the concept of death through the innumerable attributes and entailments of whichever sources are fitting comparisons (e.g., sunsets, waning moons, winter, sleep, etc.). Let that foundational fact sink in, please. For surely there is that other death, literal death—the kind we read about in headlines, and that we all have witnessed one way or another, and been touched by. I mean the kind of death that we have crumbled before on those ruinous occasions when it came and took everything and left in its wake not a thing but the poignantly tangible absence of what once was present and dear and warm and suddenly, irrevocably gone. I will not presume to investigate this literal version—a separate thing altogether—before which I cover my mouth, lower my head, and am silent.

Coming to life through metaphor

Meanwhile, back to the metaphor, which presents a very different perspective and which renders a depth of experience by providing contexts of association through relationships in place of denotative definitions. Before proceeding, let’s do a quick refresh on metaphor so we can sate the logos (our trusty and necessary threshold guardian) and get on with the mythos…

Simply put, a metaphor works by making a comparison between two things (and a “thing” can be an image, an action, or a concept), in which attributes are borrowed from one thing (the source) and applied to another thing (the target). On a deeper level, however, attributes are not borrowed from only the source itself, but from the “domain” of that source—meaning, from that source’s whole environment. This includes all the other phenomena that inhabit that same environment and all the relationships that the source has with those other phenomena! 

This very complex network of relationships (entailments) within a particular source-domain is then mapped onto the equally complex domain of a target. Thus metaphor is not just a comparison of one thing to another thing, but a comparison of the innumerable relationships within one thing’s “life” (to employ a type of metaphor called “personification”) to the equally innumerable relationships within another thing’s life. In short, metaphor puts relationships into relationship with each other. Whew, that was hard work. But don’t worry, there’s more… 

As an example, one can say that a sunset is a metaphor for death—or even an archetype for death, as it is seen, for example, as marking the beginning of the sun god’s journey through the “twelve hours” of the Ancient Egyptian underworld. For our purposes here, archetypes are simply metaphors that are universal, metaphors that register across cultures. As Jung reminds us, “An archetype expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors” (The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 157). Whether we call it metaphor or archetype, the many entailments that accompany a sunset can easily be applied to the concept of death: a sunset is a transitioning event that eventually ends; a sunset sinks down into a horizon and disappears; a sunset is a thing of warmth that becomes cold, a thing of light that becomes dark. And speaking of entailments within domains, “light” is a subcategory of the broader category of sunsets. Within this subcategory, light is (independently) a metaphor for “consciousness” and for “being alive.” 

Perpetual depth in metaphor

 If I may take things one step further, let me suggest that metaphors are not the one-way journeys of entailments from a source to a target. Rather, metaphors are simultaneously the reciprocal journeys of entailments from the target back to the source. Why is this important? Because it emphasizes a chief concern of individuated consciousness: Relationship—or, worded differently: “interaction with the cosmos that an individuated consciousness finds itself in.” Moreover this concurrent reciprocity imagines a dialogue between source and target. Unlike the monologues of literal fact that simply put a bow on the matter and end it, dialogues iterate. They actually “go” somewhere—as in two feet working in tandem, striding, the one and then the other, carrying the attention of the witness (i.e., us) deeper and deeper into the ever-unfolding terrain of their perpetual interaction. 

And this, like all things associative and connotative, renders experience to the witness because the attributes and entailments (which, metaphorically speaking, are the contents of the conversation that the source and target pass back and forth to each other) are never captured. 

Rather, their perpetual dialogue summons responses and associations from the witness, and so the metaphor is encountered and experienced as living, as protean. In the field of life, everything is relative, encountered and experienced through comparison. The path of the living metaphor simply goes on and on, deeper and deeper towards transcendence and (I like to think) backlit by the pure energy of being that inexplicably emits from transcendence. The only thing that can stop this emittance and perpetual deepening is literal thinking which shifts the perspective from relationships to isolation, from connotative to denotative. And denotation is an experiential dead-end—it is an intellectual solution that stops shy of transcendence. Sure, the connotation never reaches transcendence, either. But unlike the denotation, it does not shut it out completely.

Metaphors cease to be metaphors when they become denotative, when the dialogue ends, when the associations borne by comparison become facts, when figurative thinking becomes literal, when “raining cats and dogs” summons naught but the concept of heavy rain (and leaves neither the images nor the ideas of lovely pets anywhere in mind). Fittingly, these are called dead metaphors, more popularly known as clichés: dead bodies or husks of words over which we might as well throw some dirt, some flowers, mumble something or other, and go back to our cars. Maybe a real metaphor will sprout in the spring.

With all that in mind, let’s take a moment to appreciate Joseph Campbell’s “new” definition of myth: “My definition of myth now is: a metaphor transparent to transcendence … Mythology opens the world so that it becomes transparent to something that is beyond speech, beyond words, in short, to what we call transcendence. If the metaphor closes in on itself [i.e., becomes literal] then it has closed the transcendence; it's no longer mythological. It's distortion” (The Hero’s Journey, 40).

And so, a death-and-renewal metaphor that can be applied as an effective approach to metaphor: When we die to the confining urge of literalism, we are renewed in the living spaciousness of metaphor and myth.

When we die to the confining urge of literalism, we are renewed in the living spaciousness of metaphor and myth.

A bird and a stream

Here is something that happened to me a few days ago while I was writing this essay in the mountains. I could call it a small myth about death and renewal. I will not explicate, I will not kill the metaphor or the myth. Instead, I leave you to your associations, the only way they can be: Living and as they are. Hopefully all that metaphor-math above has groomed the trail for frictionless passage to that special kind of experience that Campbell spoke of—the kind that has a little transcendence coming through.

Anyway, I was walking through 10 degrees Fahrenheit along a ploughed path beside a stream cutting through several feet of snow, edged on both shores by sheets of ice protruding like shelves over the busy water. And then there was this bird, a songbird, about the size of a baseball standing on the far sheet looking into the black glassy current. To my horror the lovely creature just hopped into the water and disappeared. Moments later it reappeared, emerging out of the icy water. A flurry of wings, and it was back on its ice sheet. Then back into the water again, and I mean underwater. This went on for some time and I thought, “Well this is fitting content for my essay: a death-and-renewal metaphor wrought not of words nor of concepts, but of ice and feathers, sunlight and snow.” It was my first encounter with the American dipper. Obviously, my new favorite bird.

MythBlast authored by:

Craig Deininger has been a regularly featured writer for the JCF since 2018. He has taught at many institutions including Naropa University, Studio Film School in Los Angeles, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he earned an MFA in Poetry. He also earned an MA and PhD in Mythology and Jungian Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. He has balanced his scholarship with a long history of (what he calls) "fieldwork," ranging from commercial fishing in Alaska, building trail for the Forest Service in the Rockies, commercial farming in the midwest, years of construction and landscaping across the country and, of course, countless outdoor misadventures in backpacking, rockclimbing, mountain biking, and the like. He ranks himself in the top 99% of the world population in the art of digging a hole with a shovel and acknowledges his inflation for thinking this. His poetry has appeared in several literary magazines including The Iowa Review, and his first book of poetry Leaves from the World Tree, was co-authored with mythologist Dennis Slattery and published by Mandorla Books.

This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 6, and The Hero's Journey

Latest Podcast

In this episode, recorded in 1974, Joseph Campbell explores the relationship between humans and their gods. The lecture was given just two years after Campbell's retirement from Sarah Lawrence College and five years after the publication of the final volume in his Masks of God series. Host Bradley Olson introduces the lecture and provides commentary at the conclusion.

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This Week's Highlights

"Life is but a mask worn on the face of death. And is death, then, but another mask? "How many can say,' asks the Aztec poet, 'that there is, or is not, a truth beyond?"

-- Joseph Campbell

The Mythic Image, 160

The Eternal Principle

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An initiation is a shock. Birth is a shock; rebirth is a shock. All that is transformative must be experienced as if for the first time.

“On Being Human,” Mythos I, Episode 3

I have often wondered about the best way to celebrate and honor the legacy of Joseph Campbell as a great scholar and teacher of myth. What is the best way to keep his corpus alive for our contemporary world? The approach one may take can range from fanaticism to outright rejection, following the motto “I honor whom I attack.” Perhaps there is a razor’s edge of critical appropriation that would help us cut through the opposition of both sides.

We often talk about honoring this legacy or that person, but what does “honoring” even mean nowadays? Does it mean a worshipful conservation of what has been accomplished in the past? Does it mean the restoration and preservation of a bygone past?

The antiquarian approach

To the conservative approach to Campbell, nothing more is to be desired. It is perfectly happy conserving and preserving Campbell’s legacy such as it is, maintaining it as much as possible in the same state in which he left it. This conservative approach, using Nietzsche’s classification, we may call the antiquarian approach to Campbell’s work as a recepticle of the world of myth and history. Opening up this world of epic historicity, what is at stake in Campbell’s work is our fundamental relationship to the whole of human history.

As mediated through Campbell’s monumental work, such as Masks of God, the epic history of humankind spreads before our eyes. From its primeval origins shrouded in the veils of prehistory, reaching back to our evolutionary origins, Campbell’s boon is an initiation into the archetypal imagination of epic mytho-history.

In the way we pick up Campbell’s work, we express our philosophy of history; it demonstrates the way in which we understand the value and use of history for life.

Going back to Nietzsche’s famous essay, sometimes dubbed “On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life”, in the second part of his Untimely Meditations, he brings up the point of the existential relevance of the pursuit of historical knowledge: “We need history, certainly, but we need it for reasons different from those for which the idler in the garden of knowledge needs it, even though he may look nobly down on our rough and charmless needs and requirements” (Untimely Meditations, 59). Nietzsche points to the existential needs and requirements which Campbell too came to demand from the living study of myth and history.

The monumental approach

After meeting the conservative or antiquarian approach to Campbell, a second option casts a more liberal line over the historic corpus, one which seeks to go beyond the necessary tasks of conservation and restoration. This second option attempts to bring the past back to life as if it were an ever-present reality. In a more liberal way, this second approach seeks, in Nietzsche’s words, “that the summit of such a long-ago moment shall be for me still living, bright and great—that is the fundamental idea of the faith in humanity which finds expression in the demand for a monumental history” (68).

The monumental approach to Campbell’s legacy would also work to maintain this faith in humanity through the reanimation of Campbell’s voice in mythological studies, building on the conservation efforts carried out by antiquarianism. Revitalizing Campbell’s work for contemporary audiences, monumentalism will freely adapt Campbell’s voice to better suit modern cultural sensibilities, even if it means trimming the tricky political edges of his work. To make an author feel “relevant” to the times, the work must be rearticulated and remade to conform to the “new” timely forms of conventional wisdom.

Both liberal and conservative approaches, for all their apparent differences, stand on one and the same ideological platform. In both cases an attempt is made to preserve a certain status quo, to constitute a mythic ism, in the understanding of Campbell’s work.

Both liberal and conservative approaches fail to create any new vision of Mythological Studies. Both sides suffer from a certain infertility or barrenness of imagination, blind to the truly transcendent possibility which might sprout out of the decomposing corpus of Joseph Campbell. Where the antiquarian is doing her best to prevent decomposition with all the tools of the trade, the monumental approach tries to reanimate this corpse while being in denial that decomposition is taking place at all. Both sides demonstrate a form of stagnation, an incapacity to produce a new order of understanding of myth and history as a complete whole.

This creative impotence is symptomatic of a certain ideological fixation which is shared by both sides. Promoting ultimate contentment with the status quo, the antiquarian and monumental approaches pose no threat to the “spirituality” that sustains the established order of things.

The critical path of creative mythology

Beyond these first two approaches, Nietzsche proposes a third option, which is bound to trigger the traps of both conservatism and liberalism alike. Failing to catch their usual fare, however, the ostensive opposition between liberal and conservative collapses into the ideological mire of their secret identity.

Preserving the kernel of truth which belongs to each side, this third option invites the possibility of death and renewal combined. This “middle path,” working right through conventional oppositions, opens a transcendent possibility for Mythological Studies in the 21st century.

Nietzsche called this third approach simply critical, “and this, too, in the service of life” (pg. 75). In this final dialectical approach, the devotion of the antiquarian and the zeal of the monumental are combined. This form of thinking exposes ideology to the sacrificial fires of truth in preparation for a new harvest of the mind. Campbell’s established corpus must be exposed to these flames of critical reflection, where he is offered as a sacrifice to the Gods. Upon this sacred altar of critical thinking, we must learn to surrender our precious belief systems; we must be willing to burn ideology to the ground. Let the flames of critical historical reflection perform their purifying function. As Nietzsche observes:

For since we are the outcome of earlier generations, we are also the outcome of their aberrations, passions, and errors, and indeed of their crimes; it is not possible wholly to free oneself from this chain. If we condemn these aberrations and regard ourselves as free of them, this does not alter the fact that we originate in them. (76)

We can never regard ourselves as being totally free from the crimes of the past. For we cannot ever break the mythic chain of our existential historicity. As the stage of an event of truth, the critical approach opens the way forward into the new terrains of creative mythology.

A legacy that will not expose itself to criticism will not amount to much more than conventional piety. In the hands of the liberal and conservative lines, rather than living myth, we can recognize a belief system or ideology which is in full support of “business as usual” and “the powers that be”.

In his own way, Campbell follows Nietzsche’s critical approach, for he believed in using mythology, above all, as an instrument of personal liberation. He promoted the break from infantile dependence on all belief systems or mythic ideologies—including his own—as well as social prestige, wealth and power, or any other form of ego fixation. As we can read in Hero’s Journey:

One of the functions of the rituals again is to kill that infantile ego. Then you have a death-rebirth motif. So the individual falls into the ground of his own being and comes out an adult, a responsible adult, who’s undergone certain transformations. (156-157)

Nowadays, intellectual and emotional independence is a rare and precious achievement. Swimming against the floods of state propaganda, culture wars and relentless social media, this independent state of mind may seem like a miracle. In everyday life, however, we can find that it is rooted in a spiritual struggle of liberation from the status quo—a struggle which can only be waged in the service of truth—the cutting edge of critical thinking. As a consummate expression of freedom, an independent mind points to the most radical form of individuation, a process that can only take place within the commonwealth of an intellectual or spiritual community across the centuries.

In the critical crucible of myth and history, the substance of true mythology (vera narratio) is mortified and dismembered, cooked and boiled down to its own most essence, where it becomes one with Campbell’s ultimate dream of a “New Science of Myth.” This critical phoenix of Mythological Studies can today be reborn as the study of epic mytho-history out of the antiquarian ashes of Campbell’s monumental achievements.

MythBlast authored by:

Norland Téllez is an award-winning writer and animation director who currently teaches Animation and Character Design courses at Otis College of Art and Design, Cal State Fullerton. He is also conducting a Life Drawing Lab at USC School of Cinematic Arts. He earned his Ph.D. from Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2009 with a dissertation on the Popol-Wuh of the K’iche’ Maya, which he is currently translating and illustrating in its archetypal dimensions as the Wisdom of the Peoples. You can learn more at norlandtellez.com.

This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 6, and The Hero's Journey

Latest Podcast

In this episode, we are joined by Mollie Adler—a podcaster, writer, and existential thinker whose work deeply explores the complexities of human experience. As the creator of the podcast Back from the Borderline, Mollie challenges us to move beyond surface-level conversations and engage with our innermost selves. Influenced by mythology and the transformative work of Joseph Campbell, her approach is rooted in emotional alchemy—embracing the belief that from the ashes of suffering, something new can arise. Mollie often discusses mental health issues, encouraging her listeners to view mental health symptoms as messengers rather than flaws, guiding us toward alignment with the deepest yearnings of our souls. Drawing from her personal journey, she diverges from mainstream psychiatry’s tendency to "pathologize", offering instead a path of personal transformation and healing that acknowledges trauma, shame, and the challenges of modern life. Through her work, Mollie creates a space for vulnerable conversations, exploring the darkest parts of the human condition in pursuit of self-compassion and renewal. In this episode, she and JCF’s John Bucher discuss her life, her journey into mythology and soul-centered work, and how she has been influenced by Joseph Campbell. Mollie also opens up about her personal struggles with mental health and the topic of suicide. Listener discretion is advised, as sensitive themes are addressed. Find out more about Mollie here: http://www.backfromtheborderline.com/

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This Week's Highlights

"One of the functions of the rituals again is to kill that infantile ego. Then you have a death-rebirth motif. So the individual falls into the ground of his own being and comes out an adult, a responsible adult, who’s undergone certain transformations."

-- Joseph Campbell

The Hero's Journey, 156-157

The Hidden Dimension

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"The challenge is to flower as individuals, neither as biological archetypes nor as personalities imitative of the male.” 

Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine (xiii)

Myth, religion, and gender

For over a decade beginning in the 1970s, Joseph Campbell waded into the murky waters of gender, sex, and myth through a series of lectures on historical goddesses. Dr. Safron Rossi has collected these lectures for us in a compilation entitled Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine. Up to that point, it wasn’t as if Campbell avoided the subject or was not inclusive in his work. Rather, during this time he decided to discuss this archetype separately with more care and intentionality. 

Perhaps this undertaking was due to the powerful undercurrent of second wave feminism—built upon the philosophies of people like Simone de Beauvior, Betty Freidan, and Gloria Steinem. These writers inspired and documented a movement which would lead to the Equal Pay Act of 1963, crystallizing the economic rights of women in the United States. A year later, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would prohibit discrimination by employers based upon race, religion, sex, or national origin. And nearly a decade later when Campbell was to begin speaking on the goddess, bell hooks was releasing her first writings broadening the feminist movement to include social topics other than economics such as race, love, and sexuality. 

While we cannot definitively know what inspired Campbell to take on this project, the evidence would suggest that he found himself (along with most people of that time) staring headlong into more than one existential crisis—who are we, who am I…better yet, what am I? 

And what better tool does our species have than myth to address such amorphous, sensitive, albeit confusing topics such as gender and sexuality? 

What better tool does our species have than myth to address such amorphous, sensitive, albeit confusing topics such as gender and sexuality? 

The two “traps”

Throughout this essay, we are mindful of at least two “traps” for us to fall into and traps which Campbell had to navigate in his lectures. The first trap is that of the fundamental attribution error. To paraphrase Bertram Gawronski, a social psychologist, the fundamental attribution error is a bias humans are prone to express in which we underemphasize situational and environmental factors to explain someone's behavior, while over-index on things like their personality or disposition. In other words, when we study social history (in this case, historical mythology) we are prone to make meaning of events in the past using our interpretation of personality factors rather than the environmental factors which led to individual choices. 

The next trap is adjacent to the first—this is the tendency to assume that ancient peoples’ social and cultural experience with things like gender, sex, and roles is similar to our own. True, homo sapiens 30,000 years ago were the same as homo sapiens 2,000 years ago, which are the same as homo sapiens today. What was different in each of those periods, however, were the norms and expectations socialized among any given people at any given time. 

In other words, while we cannot make the mistake of assuming that ancient people were somehow less intelligent, evolved, or capable as we are today, we must also respect that we cannot naturally intuit the social values they held about things like gender and sex, for example. Rather, this takes work, documentation, and evidence gathering as Campbell does in the book Goddesses. 

War killed the goddess

In the Goddesses we discover early on one of Campbell’s more forceful opinions on the subject of the goddess. He believes that the goddess finds herself a second class citizen of many of the world’s myths. Campbell asserts, “All I can tell you about mythology is what men have said and have experienced, and now women have to tell us from their point of view what the possibilities of the feminine future are. And it is a future—it’s as though the lift-off has taken place, it really has, there’s no doubt about it" (263). 

He argues that the primary driver of the devaluation of the woman (and by extension the feminine and the goddess) is rooted in the evolution of war during the Bronze Age–more specifically the developments from the Indo-European warrior cultures to the Semitic-speaking patriarchal cultures. These two warrior cultures differed greatly in the way they approached war and winning. The Semitic-speaking peoples tended to favor annihilation, countering the Indo-European custom of assimilation. To put it another way, war killed the goddess. 

When considering this development Campbell questions, 

One is moved to ask why the [ancient Semetic speaking peoples]...turned their backs so resolutely on the goddess and her glorious world … A completely contrary understanding and attitude is presented in the mythological system of the other great complex of warrior tribes … Like the bedouins of the deserts, they too were patriarchal herding folk, and their leading gods were gods of war, finally subject however, to the larger powers of nature. (xxiv) 

In other words Campbell argues that the Semitic-speaking tribes of the Bronze Age greatly challenged the norms of assimilation with annihilation. This threat of male violence, of patriarchy annihilating the divine feminine—first by separating or “othering” the feminine and then destroying her—is a legacy whose impressions remain to this day. In some respects, the very act of “othering” by separating and classifying is itself the defining behavior of patriarchy. At its core, these particular warrior tribes introduced an idea that man is superior to nature in so many ways. Suddenly the idea emerges that there is only one god, and that god is inherently gendered, and that gender is male.

Perhaps the counter force to the warrior death-cults of the Bronze Age is the non-dualistic god of Rome, Janus. Janus stands at the gate–at all gates–with two heads or eyes pointing in opposing directions. One eye looks to the future while the other to the past. Janus is the liminal, the in-between, the doorway from this place to the next. Similarly, in one of the oldest cities on earth called Çatalhöyük, modern excavations have uncovered at the gates of temples and homes alike two felines which gaze at all who enter. One must enter the “in-between” space, under the watch of both this and that. Campbell suggests in his lectures that one of these is a lion and the other a lioness, as if sex, the dualism of male and female, is the gateway to the divine. 

The liberation of the goddess (or how the goddess liberates us all)

The error of patriarchy, then, is that of a logical fallacy. Patriarchy mistakes the symbol of gender for the reference. It is akin to religious fundamentalism in that it only manages to identify the most basic interpretation available. As Campbell quips in Goddesses, “My definition of mythology is ‘other people’s religion’” (pg. 14). Unlike the Roman god Janus looking forward and behind or the two felines discovered around Çatalhöyük, the modern world appears increasingly challenged at holding non-dualistic perspectives. Perhaps we have forgotten how to see the world before it was carved up and fought over. Perhaps we have grown accustomed to seeing gender as a fact and less as itself a myth, a story which helps us cope with our psychology.

After reflecting on these lectures by Campbell, we believe it’s possible that we as a culture have mistaken the symbol for the reference and forgotten that the goddess is an archetype available to us all—for our wellbeing, for our liberation, and for our hope. Because, like Ranier Maria Rilke so famously captured in his famous poem “Widening Circles” (as translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows): 

I live my life in widening circles

that reach out across the world.

I may not complete this last one

but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.

I’ve been circling for thousands of years

and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,

a storm, or a great song? 

If the hero has a thousand faces, would it not be true that some of them are feminine, some masculine, and others something entirely different? Our myth is only as great as our courage and our imagination, and as Campbell reminds us, “The challenge is to flower as individuals, neither as biological archetypes nor as personalities” (Goddesses, pg. xiii). Perhaps the goddess, in the underworld of oppression all these years, has returned with a boon which she gives freely to us, if we only have the courage to listen.  

MythBlast authored by:

Kami Hope is a designer, entrepreneur, creative, and myth enthusiast. Growing up in a part of the US which taught religious fundamentalism, Kami has enjoyed exploring art, science, and myth in adulthood in order to navigate the realities of life and better enjoy the world around her. She lives with her partner Matt in Nashville Tennessee along with their two young children—though they are currently relocating to London, England. There she hopes to dive deeper into design and art by taking advantage of iconic museums, culture, and history.

Matt Malcom is a writer, public philosopher, and investor currently living in Nashville Tennessee. He studied philosophy at the United States Military Academy at West Point and was an Army Officer before joining the NGO world. During the pandemic, Matt expanded his work in public philosophy by launching a multi year project called The Pocket Philosopher. Now a global community spanning 5 countries, the mission remains focused on increasing public access to philosophical ideas. Today, he works in investment management focusing on ESG integration and is relocating to London at the end of 2024 to further this pursuit. He lives with his partner, Kami and their two young children. Kami and Matt enjoy long discussions about life, love, politics, and philosophy.

This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 5, and Goddesses

Latest Podcast

This bonus episode contains a short lecture that Campbell gave at Westerbee Ranch in Sonoma in 1987 on the "Symbology of the Tarot". It is a "slide" lecture meaning that Campbell was speaking to a curated set of slides, which he often did. Even though we cannot see the slides, his discussion and interpretation of the Tarot deck is worth a listen. This lecture was recorded in the same year as Campbell's death. One can hear him clearing his throat often. He was being treated for esophageal cancer.

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This Week's Highlights

"All I can tell you about mythology is what men have said and have experienced, and now women have to tell us from their point of view what the possibilities of the feminine future are. And it is a future—it’s as though the lift-off has taken place, it really has, there’s no doubt about it."

-- Joseph Campbell

Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, 263

The Goddess Embodied

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While thousands of books with millions of words have detailed the alluring topic of the Goddess, I personally am far more interested in the embodied and emotional aspects of Her “beingness” versus reading primarily intellectual pursuits. The leading question for me is, “How can the individualities, powers, and wisdom meanings of the various Goddesses actually live within us in a deeply visceral way?” Not in the sense of some kind of channeling, but as a faculty of self within us. How can we incorporate the Goddess in body, mind, and soul so that Her expression is walking and living within us, instead of solely existing as a concept of the mind?

It appears to me in our present time–certainly in modern Westernized cultures–that while we may worship the body as per the Olympic Games or in other sports, or in sex (even through pornography), that we’re not really “in” our bodies at all. Or certainly not in a deeply integrated way. So where are we if we’re not in our bodies? It seems that we mostly float in the demands and addictions of the digital world while being tethered to screen culture. Metaphorically speaking, most of us through work demands or personal choices have replaced the heartwarming hearth of Hestia with the coolly attenuated and impersonal Wi-Fi signal. These online cultures and worlds promise, and do deliver much (in their own ways), but leave many of us feeling disconnected from the Goddess and Her realms, and somehow disassociated from the deeper impulses of life too.

Living within the electronic airwaves

The Goddess is (amongst other things) a representation of authentic embodiment, and for us humans, this is suggestive of our capacity to represent a quality or idea so thoroughly that it becomes internalized in our souls too. Yet in our 24/7 digital world it can be extremely challenging to fully value such a physical and spiritual incarnation. When online we’re mostly exposed to self-improvement courses promoting a Goddess mindset (pandering to the narcissistic self) or Her likeness gets enlisted to sell more makeup, skincare, haircare, and fragrances. By releasing the Goddess from Her entombment within the desolate realms of intellectualized or superficial abstractions, She becomes actualized in our deeper selves, instead of only floating around the human mind or acting as a lip gloss brand ambassador.

Multiple research studies point to an epidemic of loneliness that’s currently sweeping across the world. Alongside experiencing this loneliness epidemic, many adolescent girls and women feel trapped in commercialized online spaces that are constantly selling them idealized, filtered, “in vogue” images of the feminine. These spaces exert pressure to adopt a persona, disposition, and guise that places heavy emphasis on outward appearances, yet all the while a more authentic and deeper self lies dormant, desperate to emerge and bloom in genuine and meaningful connection.

The Goddess Universe is alive

Joseph Campbell writes in Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, “In the older view the Goddess Universe was alive, Herself organically the Earth, the horizon, and the heavens. Now She is dead, and the universe is not an organism, but a building, with gods at rest in it in luxury: not as personifications of the energies in their manners of operation, but as luxury tenants, requiring service” (xxiii). The latter sentence encapsulates the modern view that the Goddess Universe is dead and that nature has suffered disenchantment. But I’m asserting that the Goddess Universe is fully alive and is merely awaiting our conscious recognition.

Screen thin Goddess content

Social media is full of content selling Goddess vibes, “glow up” guides, affirmations, and so on. But this content cannot suffice for the Goddess actually being incorporated within us. The teenage girls and women that I mention above usually don’t fully appreciate, let alone embody, a genuine Goddess archetype. She hovers as a purely mental projection or lingers as a seductive, fantasy image. For example, clickbait headlines read, “Want to look divine? How to dress like a Goddess!” rather than tangibly detailing how to embody Her ethos and principles. But when a true transmission of the grace of the Goddess occurs in us, She not only ennobles our personal selves, She also inspires and encourages us to higher levels of service, which is to assist the planet and others around us for their flourishing too. In this way She becomes an empowering presence for all.

Awakening an archetype through physical incorporation

While in this MythBlast I’m arguing for the soul interiorization of the divinities, unfortunately mostly in the Western media landscape these deities are commercially and neatly packaged as attractive but dimensionless commodities to meet shallow spiritual trends. We could say Marilyn Monroe, or rather her manicured persona, was deliberately “Godessified” by the mass media for commercial consumption ... an artifact Goddess! And while many people have an intimate knowledge of the lives of screen celebrities like Monroe, fewer have familiarized themselves with the characteristics and deeds of some of the thousands of divine Goddesses available to them from mythological antiquity.

And while we can study the female deities, their myths and archetypal energies, or create altars for the purpose of worshiping specific Goddesses, sadly, the study of Her qualities and “ways of being” often remains no more than a trivial mental activity. I’m proposing here that we cultivate a deeper resonance when incorporating the divine feminine into our bodies, hearts, and minds. For it’s only when we encapsulate the Goddess in our thoughts, feelings, actions, choices, and behavioral patterns that we may become an expression and extension of Her mission. Only then do we become a temple in which She may dwell. When Her life force truly pulses through us, we’re not just mimicking Her persona, we’re actually bearing Her identity affirmation to the world.

I’m proposing here that we cultivate a deeper resonance when incorporating the divine feminine into our bodies, hearts, and minds.

So why does any of this matter?

And why would we even want to bear an internalized expression of the Goddess? Well, from a skin deep perspective, we might–by Gen Z slang standards–“slay” or “pop off, queen” on social media, but it’s not just a matter of Goddess imitation through adopting a gimmicky persona or beauty and dress code. From a more rounded perspective, by having the presence of the Goddess within us, it allows Her identity to be felt and experienced in the world. Our lives become invigorated when each of us exudes the principles of the deities in our own unique ways.

We could also consider what Goethe implied with these words from Faust, “The eternal feminine draws us on.” Goethe here is not referring to any particular Goddess, nor even to Gaia Herself. Rather, he is referring to the feminine spirit. What’s more this spirit of ceaseless, self-generating energy, creativity, love, nurturance, power, and grace exists within us all. And as Campbell ardently states in Goddesses, “People often think of the Goddess as a fertility deity only. Not at all–She’s the muse. ... She’s the inspirer of the spirit” (36).

MythBlast authored by:

Kristina Dryža is an ex-futurist, author, TEDx speaker, archetypal consultant, one of the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Editorial Advisory Group, and a steward for The Fifth Direction. Based between Australia and Lithuania, her work focuses less on the future and more on the unknown. Presence. Not prediction. What’s sacred? Not only what’s next. Kristina is passionate about helping people to perceive mythically and sense archetypally to better understand our shared humanity, yet honor the diverse ways we all live and make meaning. To learn more about Kristina, you can view her TEDx talk: Archetypes and Mythology. Why They Matter Even More So Today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o4PYNroZBY&t=525s

This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 5, and Goddesses

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In this episode, we are joined by Mollie Adler—a podcaster, writer, and existential thinker whose work deeply explores the complexities of human experience. As the creator of the podcast Back from the Borderline, Mollie challenges us to move beyond surface-level conversations and engage with our innermost selves. Influenced by mythology and the transformative work of Joseph Campbell, her approach is rooted in emotional alchemy—embracing the belief that from the ashes of suffering, something new can arise. Mollie often discusses mental health issues, encouraging her listeners to view mental health symptoms as messengers rather than flaws, guiding us toward alignment with the deepest yearnings of our souls. Drawing from her personal journey, she diverges from mainstream psychiatry’s tendency to "pathologize", offering instead a path of personal transformation and healing that acknowledges trauma, shame, and the challenges of modern life. Through her work, Mollie creates a space for vulnerable conversations, exploring the darkest parts of the human condition in pursuit of self-compassion and renewal. In this episode, she and JCF’s John Bucher discuss her life, her journey into mythology and soul-centered work, and how she has been influenced by Joseph Campbell. Mollie also opens up about her personal struggles with mental health and the topic of suicide. Listener discretion is advised, as sensitive themes are addressed. Find out more about Mollie here: http://www.backfromtheborderline.com/

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This Week's Highlights

"People often think of the Goddess as a fertility deity only. Not at all––she's the muse. She's the inspirer of poetry. She's the inspirer of the spirit. So she has three function: one, to give us life; two, to be the one who receives us in death; and three, to inspire our spiritual, poetic realization."

-- Joseph Campbell

Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, 36

Emerging Mythology

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The human woman does give birth as the earth gives birth to the plants. She gives nourishment as the plants do. So, woman magic and earth magic are the same, they are related. And the personification, then, of this energy which gives birth to forms and nourishes forms is properly female. And so, it is in the agricultural world of ancient Mesopotamia, the Egyptian Nile, but also in the earlier planting culture systems, that the goddess is the mythic form that is dominant.

Joseph Campbell, Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, 209-210

Worshiping nature and women appears in many classical myths. Aphrodite is born from the foam of the sea, when Cronus castrates his father Uranus, and throws his severed genitals into the sea. According to some less bizarre and cruel myths, she was the daughter of Zeus and Dione. Desirable and beautiful, she restores youth, fertility, and beauty to those who respect her. She was married to Hephaestus, but was constantly unfaithful to him, kidnapping lovers, starting wars because of her arrogance, and disrupting the love affairs of those who disrespected her. During one sexual encounter with Ares, her husband Hephaestus covered them with a metal wire, so that all the gods would laugh at their adultery. Aphrodite promised fidelity to Hephaestus, but Hermes saw this act of two lovers and fell madly in love with her. From this next adultery of hers, Hermaphrodite was born, a young man with a woman's breasts and long hair. Hermaphroditism arises as an idea in the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy.

Aphrodite was constantly causing trouble, but also solving problems, granting wishes and giving back life, beauty and immortality. Paradoxically, she helped establish patriarchy, a society that James Brown describes as:

This is a man's, man's, man's world

But it wouldn't be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl

Through the centuries that followed in this men's world, Aphrodite suffered oppression and persecution, and her followers went through metamorphosis. However, the love, fertility, and beauty she represents is found in other shapes and forms in different cultures over the history of patriarchal rule. The women-guardians of the patriarchy of Mediterranean culture are best illustrated by the line of the "Mother Goddess“ Maria Portokalos in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002): “Let me tell you something. The man is the head, but the woman is the neck. And she can turn the head any way she wants.” Aphrodites all over the world know how to turn heads, and at the same time keep the paterfamilias order, pretending that they are only the neck and not the head of the house. Famous sentences of the baby boomer generation, including "Now I'm going to call your father" or „Just wait till your dad comes home," simulate the power of the male principle in society, while actually showing the true power of the goddess–the guardian of the order who controls and gives birth to life and love.

Aphrodite Archetypes

Joseph Campbell asserted that the deity is the personification of energy. Mythology is something that is woven into our reality but is not a fact per se. It is metaphoric and symbolic in relation to reality. Female deities around the world personify the same metaphorical energy of love, fertility, lust, and birth. The Greek Aphrodite, the Phoenician Astarte, the Egyptian Isis and Hathor, the Babylonian Ishtar or the Sumerian Inanna, the pre-Islamic Arab goddess Al Uzzi, the Nordic Freya, and the Aztec Xochiquetzal ruled the cultures of the first agricultural cities. These goddesses are imprinted with comparable and compatible archetypes of love and passion. However, the “enemy of lust” in the form of Christian teachings appeared in the Middle East and soon spread throughout Europe. Aphrodite or Venus became assimilated as the Mother of God in the new popular religion, where she remains partly until the Renaissance and partly today. In the Eastern traditions, the Indian name for a woman is Maya-Shakti-Devi, which means: "Goddess who gives life and mother of all forms."

Patience of the Goddess

These rulers of all forms, through the flexibility of the cervical vertebrae with which they turn the governing structures, show a great power of adaptation and metamorphosis throughout history. The Goddess archetypes have, incredibly in the face of patriarchal power, survived persecution throughout the ages. For example, women who had cats did not get sick during the plague epidemic. Cats eat mice, and mice carry the plague. Thus the patriarchal leaders reasoned that those women must be immune to the Black Death by conspiring with Satan, and they need to be burned at the stake. Even fairy tales, echoing this reasoning, depict witches as the proud owners of black cats.

In many cultures, the archetype of the feminine principle is demonized through conservative religious dogmas, which become expressed in explicitly patriarchal and warrior societies. Obstruction of the talents and gifts of the goddess of love and beauty, through feelings that cause joy, mirth, or happiness, originates from some sort of witch hunt on the goddesses. Just as in state systems, where oligarchies, autocracies, or dictatorships make rules, so in social systems, not tied to any particular monotheistic god, the rules for morality, behavior, and appearance in public were imposed on women. Since the flexible goddesses' necks skillfully turned and swiveled through the ages, thus guarding the order, they adapted to different forms of demonization, always knowing that survival and the source of all life was within them. So, they were patient, because even the Bible’s patriarchal slant cannot dim this truth about love:

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.

1 Corinthians 13:4

Return to the Goddess

The patience of Mother Earth and persisting feminine principles in the context of morality and social arrangements will certainly be of significance in our modern society, which is on the verge of a global war. The patriarchal-warrior and profitable industrial concept of our age has already made Mother Earth, old Tiamat, very angry. Global warming, apocalyptic weather changes, meaningless patriarchal laws and rules, production of henchmen-warriors and obedient workers in our education systems, greed, corruption, destruction of nature, wars, and tensions raging among nuclear powers, are not the product of Aphrodite's whims, but of testosterone from gods of thunder and warriors, who think that by erecting fences and drawing borders, the land they conquered belongs to them.

The Goddess archetypes have, incredibly in the face of patriarchal power, survived persecution throughout the ages. 

Aphrodite, no matter how capricious, forgives and grants wishes. Goddesses tend to give, not take, life. Their purpose primarily is to give birth, not to conquer. They have many faces and names and have suffered much in turning men's hot heads. Aphrodite's gift is one of the most important gifts of all the “pagan” gods: unconditional love and the birth of life. It is necessary to respect this through the understanding of the gift of life that we have, through love and unity in the desire for the beautiful and good, as well as through the preservation of nature and the respect of the Earth Goddess, which should be passed unharmed as a legacy to the next generations.

MythBlast authored by:

Dr. Lejla Panjeta is a Professor of Film Studies and Visual Communication. She was a professor and guest lecturer in many international and Bosnian universities. She also directed and produced in theatre, worked in film production, and authored documentary films. She curated university exhibitions and film projects. She won awards for her artistic and academic works. She is the author and editor of books on film studies, art, and communication. Her recent publication was the bilingual illustrated encyclopedic guide – Filmbook, made for everyone from 8 to 108 years old. Her research interests are in the fields of aesthetics, propaganda, communication, visual arts, cultural and film studies, and mythology. https://independent.academia.edu/LejlaPanjeta

This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 5, and Goddesses

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In this episode of Pathways, Joseph Campbell speaks at the Cooper Union in New York City in December 1967. He explores the "mythology of love" - from eros to agape and beyond. Host, Bradley Olson introduces the lecture and gives commentary at the end.

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This Week's Highlights

"The human woman does give birth as the earth gives birth to the plants. She gives nourishment as the plants do. So, woman magic and earth magic are the same, they are related. And the personification, then, of this energy which gives birth to forms and nourishes forms is properly female. And so, it is in the agricultural world of ancient Mesopotamia, the Egyptian Nile, but also in the earlier planting culture systems, that the goddess is the mythic form that is dominant."

-- Joseph Campbell

The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers 209-210

The Virgin Birth

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The Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey appears as one with the small rocky island on the coast of Normandy, France. With its spires pointing to the heavens, the buildings look as though they are floating on the waters. The islet is inaccessible when the tide closes in, the ocean fortifying the abbey from attack or isolating it for solitude. The journey to the island feels mythic as one crosses water, shuttles ferrying the bustling tourists to the mysterious isle, the winds whipping one’s hair with a story all its own.

Our intrepid guide led us through the quaint medieval village lined with storefronts and delicious delights, but our journey was upwards, climbing over 200 steps towards the spire at the top of the abbey with its golden statue of the archangel Michael, aspiring to reach the heavens he points to.

Passing through the light-filled sanctuary, then the scriptorium where wise words were memorialized in script, and finally through the public meeting rooms where visitors were welcomed, I was filled with awe by the beauty of the gothic structures. The buildings were layered in order of importance, our guide explained, the sanctuary is closest to God, the business of society the furthest. The organization of the buildings seemed to tell a story as well.

Our Lady underneath the earth

On our descent from the abbey, our guide pointed to a small door and stated: “And through this door is Notre-Dame-Sous-Terre–Our Lady Underneath.”

I froze on the steps. Translated as Our Lady underneath the earth, our guide explained that the oratory, or small chapel, remained buried and hidden for years. Built during the eighth century upon what was thought to be an ancient burial site, what remains of the chapel is one of the oldest structures on the island. Throughout the centuries, structures were built on top of Notre-Dame-Sous-Terre. Forgotten to time, the chapel was excavated in the 19th century.

So, at the heart of this 13th-century breathtaking gothic structure is a chapel dedicated to Our Lady underneath the earth–an underworld goddess.

One must know death to understand life

Underworld goddess figures are often feared in mythology. Homer’s Odyssey refers to the Greek underworld goddess, Persephone, as dread Persephone, showing such trepidation. Yet, in the Sumerian myth of the “Descent of Inanna,” the goddess Inanna descends through her own agency, seeking the wisdom found in the underworld. At each of the seven gates of the underworld, Inanna relinquishes her worldly power as goddess of heaven and earth and bows low in the inner sanctum to the goddess of the underworld, Erishkigal, seeking the depths found therein.

In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell finds that in the underworld journey:

“The hero, whether god or goddess, man or woman, the figure in a myth or the dreamer of a dream, discovers and assimilates his opposite (his own unsuspected self) either by swallowing it or by being swallowed. One by one the resistances are broken. He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty, and life, and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable. Then he finds that he and his opposite are not of differing species but one flesh.” (89)

The descent to the underworld deepens the experiences of the hero and is a transformative moment in the journey.

The underworld then appears to be reflective of the psychological experience. Sigmund Freud begins The Interpretation of Dreams with a quote from Virgil’s Aeneid, “Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo,” referencing the idea that if the heavens will not offer help, one will turn to the underworld. The use of this quote seems to illuminate how the underworld is a source of psychological images for Freud. Mythologist Christine Downing highlights how Freud often refers to the underworld as a “privileged metaphor for the unconscious” (Gleanings, 129).

Archetypal psychologist James Hillman echoes Freud's connection between dream imagery and the underworld. Hillman’s book The Dream and the Underworld relates the psychology of dreams to the mythology of the underworld, demonstrating the mythology’s relevance to the field of psychology. In Myth of Analysis, Hillman states that “the Platonic upward movement toward aestheticism is tempered by the beauty of Persephone” (pg. 102). In other words, the driving forces of our daily lives are informed by the knowledge of the depths of human existence. Hillman refers to these depths as “underworld beauty.”

These scholars highlight ways in which myths of the underworld are a source of meaning and significance for enhancing the human experience. Beauty is found in laying down one’s pride, power, and identity in life, to attain the wisdom of the underworld. Somehow, one must know about death to understand life, and therefore these myths are touching on what it means to truly feel alive.

Beauty is found in laying down one’s pride, power, and identity in life, to attain the wisdom of the underworld.

Insight of the underworld

I find it interesting how Notre-Dame-Sous-Terre was hidden for so many years beneath the surface. Like so many goddess figures lost to time.

In Episode 5 of the Power of Myth, “Love and the Goddess,” Bill Moyers introduces the conversation with Campbell by inquiring about the disappearance of goddess figures, stating that “patriarchal authority finally drove the goddess from the pantheon of imagination” (26:58).

Moyers then pointedly asks Campbell, “The Lord’s Prayer begins, ‘Our Father, which art in heaven.’ Could it have begun ‘Our Mother’?” (27:27). “What psychological difference would it have made …?” (33:47).

“Well,” Campbell responds, “it makes a psychological difference in the character of the cultures” (33:56).

The myths we hold dear in our societies inform societal actions. So too Campbell's statement seems to imply that what is lost to time or buried in the underworld affects the upperworld as well.

Later in the episode, Campbell suggests that the goddess returned, “She came back with the virgin in the Roman Catholic tradition … Notre Dame” (37:33). Perhaps Notre-Dame-Sous-Terre, Our Lady of the underworld has something to say about this as well. Campbell asserts that these female figures are surfacing, their presence offering balance, insight, and wisdom to the culture.

Surfacing

What does it mean for female figures who have been lost to time to step into the light? These goddesses, heroines, and leaders who have remained hidden and unseen for so long–do we fear them, like those who fear the Greek goddess Persephone, or do we welcome their wisdom as the Sumerian goddess Inanna seeking Erishkigal?

Can we even begin to remember the time when the church upon the island of Mont-Saint-Michel was dedicated to her, Our Lady Underneath, before the gothic cathedral was built atop her?

Perhaps a starting point for excavating the gifts of the goddess is where the “Love and the Goddess” episode ends. Moyers and Campbell have taken the conversation beyond words. Moyers inquires, “And it begins here?” (56:06) as he points to his body, the internal world that is “the womb of all of our being” (54:22), represented mythically as the goddess. And Campbell knowingly nods, responding, “It begins here” (56:06).

What must it mean then, from the womb of being, to allow what has been repressed, buried, and hidden for so many years to come into the light? What gifts might this goddess from underneath the earth offer?

MythBlast authored by:

Stephanie Zajchowski, PhD is a mythologist and writer based in Texas. She serves as the Director of Operations for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and is a contributing author of Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide. Stephanie is also a co-founder of the Fates and Graces, hosting webinars and workshops for mythic readers and writers. Her work focuses on the intersection of mythology, religion, and women’s studies. For more information, visit stephaniezajchowski.com

This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 5, and Goddesses

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In this episode, Campbell speaks to the relationship of mythology to psychology. He goes through the four functions of myth and emphasizes the fourth function - the psychological. He focuses on why this psychological function is so important in our contemporary world. The lecture was recorded at the Houston Jung Center in 1972. Host Brad Olson introduces the lecture and offers a commentary at the end.

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This Week's Highlights

"There was a whole galaxy of mythologies that influenced each other in that period, back and forth, leading to the Christian recovery of the Goddess. . . . with the Christians in the first centuries, she comes back very strongly. There are certain aspects of Catholicism, for instance, where Mary is more important than either the Father, Son, or Holy Ghost. In all of the great cathedrals of Notre Dame, she is the guardian, protecting, mediating Mother. See, the god image as it is in our tradition is a pretty heavy one—he’s a kind of savage deity—and the mother is a protective, intermediary screen. When she’s wiped out in Puritanism, God becomes really a ferocious figure, as you read in some of those Puritan sermons."

-- Joseph Campbell

Myth and Meaning, 53

The Great Goddess

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“Celestis, Divinitus, Insania, Vero.” Maybe, like me, you’ve also recently devoured the mythological black comedy TV series KAOS on Netflix where the deities of the Greek pantheon are revealed to be the ones who originally put the “funk” into the term “dysfunctional family.” And, like me, maybe you too have thoroughly enjoyed the Greek myths being reimagined, with Hera shown to be as calculating and ruthless as Zeus, Eurydice seemingly content in the underworld and not particularly desiring a rescue by Orpheus, and Persephone adoringly doting on Hades and willingly being married to him. 

This month the MythBlasts have focused on unpacking the term bliss, and I want to do this via the Dionysus character in KAOS (played by Nabhaan Rizwan). In doing so, I’m mindful of the following Joseph Campbell quotation. He wrote in The Hero’s Journey: “If your bliss is just your fun and your excitement, you’re on the wrong track. I mean, you need instruction. Know where your bliss is. And that involves coming down to a deep place in yourself” (253). These words and this sentiment will become apparent in the course of my commentary.  ​

Spoilers ahead

We find Dionysus in Episode 1 bored with being the god of pleasure, madness, and wild frenzy. Tired of being perceived as a lightweight and a disappointment, he wants a promotion. At the Fate of Falafel food truck, Dionysus innocently asks the vendor if he likes his job because he says he’s bored of his.  

Vendor: What do you do? 

Dionysus: I work for my dad. But he doesn’t take me seriously. I could do more with the humans. 

Vendor: Huh? 

Dionysus: The ... people. I’m good with them. I like them. I just want to get more involved. I want more responsibility. 

Vendor: You mean like moving to HR or something? 

Dionysus: HR, exactly. Yes. 

Vendor: Well, tell him how you feel. 

Dionysus: Yeah, it doesn’t really work like that with him. He doesn’t really do emotions.

So Dionysus heads up to Mount Olympus and asks his father, Zeus (Jeff Goldblum) for a promotion, “Just make me the god of love, or ... or, uh, war. Wisdom. I don’t know. Something serious. Something proper with influence.” But he’s sharply rebuked and finds himself back at the falafel cart. Complaining about Zeus’ attitude towards him, Dionysus receives these words of wisdom from the vendor: “Find a purpose for yourself, not your father.”

Soon after at a concert by Orpheus (Killian Scott), Dionysus is utterly moved by the performance of his song “Eurydice,” the musician’s passionate offering to his muse that professes his absolute undying love for her. He then appears bereft and heartbroken at Eurydice’s funeral when we then hear a voiceover from Prometheus (Stephen Dillane), “Dionysus has found his purpose. Helping Orpheus.”

So what may we take from this? Well, “true” bliss is never solely self-seeking. Dionysus discovering a purpose–wanting to help Orpheus be the first mortal to bring someone out of the underworld because he feels how Orpheus’ love for Eurydice is greater than death–is him following his bliss. Though Dionysus eventually needs to explain his decision to his furious father. “I gave your watch to the Fates so that a mortal could get his wife back from the dead. … And he failed the quiz, but he loved his wife. I’ve never seen anything like it. … the more I saw of him, of his love, the more I just ... I wanted him to be able to get her back.”

Bliss is a state of a co-existence

Genuine bliss always involves an element of service because our potential can only become fully actualized when it’s in service to something greater than ourselves. But bliss isn’t just about existing in selfless service. It’s also present when the psyche has arrived at a state of integration, harmony, and wholeness. Campbell’s invitation of “coming down to a deep place in yourself” won’t–on its own–automatically lead you to bliss, because service to others, or to a noble ideal or even self-sacrifice, are essential elements of bliss too.

Furthermore, bliss can’t just self-generate or exist on its own. It mostly often emerges through being in enriching relationships with other people, or with the Divine, or with animals. Bliss can also be felt when we’re in a sacred relationship with our own creativity, or when we’re steeped in prayer, or immersed in nature. And yes, human relationships often include a lot of messiness, despair, and sorrow, but the potential for bliss exists even there ... and indeed everywhere. 

Service to others, or to a noble ideal or even self-sacrifice, are essential elements of bliss 

Ethical hedonism 

Seeking bliss isn’t the craving for it as a peak state. It’s also not about fixating on bliss as an end goal while dismissing the process and ignoring who you’re becoming (character development) along the way. Also, bliss is not a pass for selfish, reckless, hedonistic behavior with absolutely no regard of the consequences for oneself or for others. But it doesn’t need to be boring or moralistic. Following your bliss in a more rounded sense can be a highly exalted, explorative process. A euphoric inner quest can be as rapturous as any experience in the outer world. Either way, inner or outer bliss in this richer context is not simply given to us on a silver platter (as much as we sometimes wish it were!). 

Pathways to bliss

We each have our own path to bliss. The most important thing to remember though is that we are all on a path. And this path is not just a journey; it’s a process of becoming. In this, it isn’t the mere exhilaration of simply feeling blissful (i.e. the naïveté of a “bliss bunny”). The vibrant resonance of bliss cries out for multi-dimensional depths, profound embodiment, and relational capacities. It’s also a state of being that requires commitment, nurture, and work, but it’s not about the hustle culture with its endless “rise and grind” attitude. Yes, an ongoing focused attentiveness is required for cultivating this state. Yet on some occasions, bliss is miraculously and graciously bestowed on us as if from the realm of the gods or from one’s Higher Self or Daimon.  

Following your calling

In an interview on netflix.com describing the character of Dionysus, Rizwan states, “He’s kind of not got a life. He’s just out here partying and everyone else has gone off and got proper jobs. The god version of proper jobs, which is part of Dionysus’ dilemma. He wants something real to do in the world. He feels something deeper.” As I alluded to earlier, our genius gets expressed when it’s in service (or even sacrifice) to others, so when Dionysus turns his back on partying to help someone else, his genius– his Daimon–is awakened, and therefore his capacity for bliss awakens too. We could also note that in this respect the word sacrifice derives etymologically from a Latin term meaning “make sacred.” And as Moyers succinctly states in Episode 4 of Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, “From death comes life; from sacrifice, bliss.” Bliss co-exists with sacrifice, not outside of it. 

All the best things are human  

In the final KAOS episode, Zeus berates his son with this tongue lashing: “... human love, that needy, cloying, unsophisticated stuff that they experience, it’s not somethin’ to be admired. … It’s ... It’s weakness. … You’re a god. We’re gods. We don’t bleed. We don’t die. And, uh, we don’t love anything lesser than ourselves.” The gods who do not love anything lesser than themselves can never progress because they can never self-actualize into a higher level of their being or potential.

In all of this, we should remember that human beings aren’t one-dimensional. We contain multitudes: love and indifference, trust and betrayal, light and shadow, order and chaos, death, rebirth, and renewal. And precisely through experiencing and feeling these multitudes, we evolve. Returning now to Zeus’ words above, human love is not a weakness. Not in the slightest. And as Persephone (Rakie Ayola) comfortingly says to Dionysus after the tirade from the king of the gods, “Maybe the better part of you is human.” Being human means being willing to experience all the blissful perfections, imperfections, contradictions, and sacrifices that a mortal life and journey holds. Let us be thankful to the gods for this. “Vero!”

MythBlast authored by:

Kristina Dryža is an ex-futurist, author, TEDx speaker, archetypal consultant, one of the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Editorial Advisory Group, and a steward for The Fifth Direction. Based between Australia and Lithuania, her work focuses less on the future and more on the unknown. Presence. Not prediction. What’s sacred? Not only what’s next. Kristina is passionate about helping people to perceive mythically and sense archetypally to better understand our shared humanity, yet honor the diverse ways we all live and make meaning. To learn more about Kristina, you can view her TEDx talk: Archetypes and Mythology. Why They Matter Even More So Today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o4PYNroZBY&t=525s

This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 4, and Myth and Meaning

Latest Podcast

In this episode, we’re joined by the legendary John Densmore, the rhythmic force behind one of the most iconic bands in rock history, The Doors. From his early days as a young musician in Southern California, John has always been captivated by the primal call of the drum—a heartbeat that transcends time and culture. In this conversation we discuss his relationship with Joseph Campbell, and explore his deep connections to music, spirituality, and the creative process that has fueled his remarkable career.

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This Week's Highlights

"So, I have a little word: “Follow your bliss.” The bliss is the message of God to yourself. That’s where your life is."

-- Joseph Campbell

Myth and Meaning, 161

Sacred Place

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The balance of sacrifice and reward: a chemical analogy

If you’re getting your dopamine from a source that does not require some form of effort on your part, beware! 

Dr. Andrew Huberman (Neurobiologist)

This, you probably already know. But just in case, and in (very) brief, dopamine is the chief chemical responsible for experiences of fulfillment, meaning, reward and novelty. Every time we do something that introduces dopamine to the bloodstream, we get so-called “dopamine hits.” And when, for example, I eat an avocado, the dopamine is what makes me feel good and fulfilled. 

A less healthy example of getting dopamine, and one that does not require effort, is when I keep scrolling like a zombie through lists of news headlines on my smartphone, inducing cheap dopamine-hits in an attempt to sate my appetite to experience something new. However, as I get my fix in this listless way, something simultaneously drains my soul. 

Whether it is cheaply acquired or not, the unfortunate news is that any dopamine surge will cause one’s dopamine baseline to drop, requiring either an increase in speed or magnitude of the dopamine-inducing activity (which then lowers the baseline even further), OR one can escape the catch-22 by initiating an act of replenishment.

To accomplish this, Huberman’s formula (above) emphasizes effort. This replenishment can be effort in the more concrete sense of the physical exertion that drives such things as running, weightlifting, walking, gardening, and so on. Or, it can be the effort of the ego—that is, the pinch the ego feels when it must choose a thing less thrilling or immediately gratifying—when it must exert to clear an opening of time, or perhaps to muster enough patience to enable its person (so to speak) to sit still long enough to appreciate a setting sun or to properly observe (like Whitman would) a spear of summer grass. 

What Huberman is calling effort, mythologists call sacrifice. But keep in mind that Huberman is employing the best term he can to describe what it is and what it takes to sustain a balanced relationship between the cost (replenishing the dopamine baseline) and the reward (enjoying the dopamine). In depth psychology, when we speak of balance we often speak also of the tension of the opposites which are held in balance, and we also acknowledge the responsibility of the individual to provide the energy to hold them. I believe Huberman’s effort intuits not only the sacrifice that must be made, but also the presence of the “tension” that indicates a balance is in holding in the first place.

Also of importance, these dynamics of dopamine functioning show that nature has already set it up (indeed, has wired it into our brains) that if we want to feel good and live well, we must regularly engage in sacrifice. 

 If we want to feel good and live well, we must regularly engage in sacrifice. 

Pursuing the possibility curve: inviting sacrifice

I thought [to myself] "…but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being." I think it worked.

                                              Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth, 120)

I feel fortunate when I look back upon the rapturous, ruinous history of my youth, replete with all the psychological trainwrecks and self-induced disasters prompted by a seemingly endless spate of asinine choices. 

I also feel fortunate because I indeed did pursue my bliss (which Campbell is addressing in terms of “rapture” in the above quote). And I like the quote because the question of what bliss is does not get watered down into some abstract definition. Instead, he provides a simple, common-sense formula that says: You know what you like or what calls you, so just hold on to that. It’s kind of like saying you don’t have to know what a glass of milk is, or how to define it, to drink it. Just drink the damn milk. Well, my version of milk was exploring, and my methods were as reckless and passionate as they were open and sincere. 

But now that I’m approaching my 60s and the spark of let’s-just-do-it-and-see-what-happens has pretty much been clobbered out of me, I have the luxury and disposition of reflecting: central to all the mayhem, I believe, was the drive to explore (which involved a lot of “testing” of reality). I suppose it all involved a desire for possibilities that were significantly different from the ones the universe kept offering. 

So, I engaged in what (in recent years) I’ve come to call the possibility curve: a notion which I had unconsciously formed and pitted against the immensely more popular and dependable probability curve. What made the possibility curve exhilarating was getting to be far out on the margins where certainty was least and chance greatest, where the likelihood of an act rendering a favorable result was absurdly low. But under these conditions, a uniqueness or specialness was ceded to those few occasions in which favorable results did come through, soaked with intimacy and meaning. It was as if they’d beaten all imaginable odds to get here. Anyway, these rare occasions were the paydays, while the rest of the time involved a lot of losing. 

But losing was not a loss. Rather it was excellent training in getting familiar with sacrifice. “But these were consequences,” you may say. Yes, but who’s to say that consequence and sacrifice are not just two sides of the same coin, where consequence follows, while sacrifice precedes, an event? And where consequence is sent from “out there” while sacrifice emerges from “in here”? And what if our notion of sacrifice can be described as consequence-in-advance? Etymologically speaking, “consequence” does not indicate a linear timeline of cause and effect. Rather it means the “uniting” of sequence.

I bring this up because I’m suspecting/guessing/intuiting there’s a concurrence-value to this relationship between sacrifice and bliss—neither the credit card of consequence nor the up-front-in-cash of the sacrifice. More precisely, I’m thinking of those kinds of sacrifice that are enacted while the reward is being reaped, like a bicyclist locked into an uphill slope, his lungs gasping for air, his thighs burning, and yet these very sensations thrill and fulfill him. Or the fulfillment that accompanies the egoic effort it takes to watch a sunset or (again) observe a spear of summer grass. 

In short, there’s something about all this stuff that feels like it needs to be mixed into one moment, pulsating, resonating like a frequency of vibration that hums through the body and psyche, the kind one feels when they are in stride with their dharma (i.e., their calling) because they have taken full responsibility for their individuation. In so doing, they reap the rewards of their condition because they are simultaneously making the sacrifice of bearing that responsibility. All this, I am guessing, is getting nearer in definition to what bliss is, on levels beyond mere pleasure or reward. 

The sacrifice that is not offered is imposed

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering

                     C. G. Jung (from Psychology and Religion: West and East, CW 11, para. 129)

To conclude the concept of sacrifice and consequence as two sides of the same coin, here is an exceptionally apt depth-psychological context. It’s important to point out that “neurosis” is a neutral term that simply indicates an incompatibility between one’s ego and their unconscious—in other words, neurosis is a condition that affects all human beings in various forms and degrees. And so, relevant to us all. Regarding the above quote, the neurotic symptoms are the sacrifices that are imposed (cf. consequences) upon those who do not pay attention to the correlating complex. Or another way to put it, neurotic symptoms are the collection-agents of the unconscious.

Jolande Jacobi provides what I consider a priceless formula by which one can direct the energy of neurosis into individuation. She writes of neurosis that something in us “knows full well that no complex can be resolved unless one faces the conflict that causes it, and this requires courage, strength, and an ego that is capable of suffering" (Complex, Archetype, Symbol in the Psychology of C. G. Jung, 18). Let me repeat that last part … and an ego that is capable of suffering. For that is the payload. Huberman would approve, as Jacobi’s suffering correlates nicely with his effort. 

And, let me leave you with this final thought as a possibility: bliss as a unified phenomenon, as the simultaneity or dynamic synergy of sacrifice and reward, as a fluid concurrence of opposites in which the suffering—and effort—aspects neither hinder nor hurt (precisely because they complement and, indeed, complete the reward). And for some rather inexplicable, paradoxical reason, this delights.

MythBlast authored by:

Craig Deininger has been a regularly featured writer for the JCF since 2018. He has taught at many institutions including Naropa University, Studio Film School in Los Angeles, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he earned an MFA in Poetry. He also earned an MA and PhD in Mythology and Jungian Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. He has balanced his scholarship with a long history of (what he calls) "fieldwork," ranging from commercial fishing in Alaska, building trail for the Forest Service in the Rockies, commercial farming in the midwest, years of construction and landscaping across the country and, of course, countless outdoor misadventures in backpacking, rockclimbing, mountain biking, and the like. He ranks himself in the top 99% of the world population in the art of digging a hole with a shovel and acknowledges his inflation for thinking this. His poetry has appeared in several literary magazines including The Iowa Review, and his first book of poetry Leaves from the World Tree, was co-authored with mythologist Dennis Slattery and published by Mandorla Books.

This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 4, and Myth and Meaning

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In this bonus episode recorded in 1957 at The Cooper Union in New York, Joseph Campbell speaks about the similarities and differences in "Eastern" and "Western" mythologies and ways of thinking.

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"The basic myth is of an earthly paradise, like the Garden of Eden, where there is no distinction between male and female, between men and animals, and no movement in time. Then a killing takes place, the bodies are planted, and out of that come the food plants. So begetting and death come together. You see in some ritual sacrifices the repetition of that original mythological act: you go back to the beginning and get a renewal of energy."

-- Joseph Campbell

Myth and Meaning, 39

Follow Your Bliss

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To put into rhyme (at the count’s command)

The best of tales

That are told in royal court:

This is the story of the Grail.

Chrétien de Troyes

Joseph Campbell looked comprehensively upon the whole corpus of medieval Holy Grail stories and pronounced it the world’s first “secular mythology.” And that means, according to one expert, that “the myths were not to be taken literally but to be interpreted as metaphors of the natural stages of spiritual growth and development—symbols of the stages of the individual process, one might say” (Lansing-Smith, Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth, 18). 

Like the clash of matter and antimatter, Catholic and Pagan influences (which is to say Cistercian monks’ reworking of Celtic material) cancel each other out, leaving Campbell’s secular mythology in place: 

But no matter what their origins may have been, it is clear that these curious parallels between tales of the Crucifixion and of the dolorous stroke [the wound received by the Fisher King] were recognized by Medieval ecclesiastics and employed to allegorical purpose. Discovering in the grail romances material susceptible to reinterpretation, good monks carefully set about reorganizing the legend, abridging here, interpolating there, explaining, allegorizing, and embellishing. The lance they connected with the lance of the Crucifixion. The grail they connected with the cup of the Last Supper. The maimed king they connected with Joseph of Arimathea, who preserved the holy relics of Christ’s passion. The young fertility god, they renamed, finally, Galahad; and then they exalted him to the strangely incongruous role of the celibate ideal. The women connected to the legend they transformed either into nuns or into temptations. The Celtic marvels they turned into Hebraic miracles. (Romance of the Grail, 313)

All. For. Nothing.

The Grail will never be Catholic. If the Arthurian canon—including de Troyes’ Romanz de Perceval, Robert de Boron’s Roman de l’Estoire dou Graal, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, the Vulgate cycle of the well-intentioned Cistercians, the original Celtic stories, Sir Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century Le Morte d’Arthur among others—ended up with a patina of Christian theology, the true meaning of the myth transcended all denominational bias. 

The conflict between the Grail tradition and twelfth-century Catholicism is mirrored in that deep division between theology and psychology: “In the church, there are leaders who tell the followers what to think and how to worship. The priests hear confessions, celebrate the Mass, and assure the faithful that salvation is theirs. But the adventurer must always quest for the Grail alone” (Myth and Meaning: Conversations on Mythology and Life, 145).

Which is why I would suggest that the Grail can never be found by either Catholic or Celt because it is not an element of a faith tradition.  It is an element of the unconscious. It belongs to everyone who looks not to some distant shore where an imagined enemy walks among the parapets of stone defenses, but with the inward look, to the Self, to the Soul. In brief, the Grail belongs to depth psychology.

The Grail belongs to everyone who looks not to some distant shore where an imagined enemy walks among the parapets of stone defenses, but with the inward look, to the Self, to the Soul.

Dropping the reins

 Those of us who cherish insights regarding the true nature of the Self cannot help but take note when Perceval, having only recently acquired his horse, simply lets go of the reins. Why would a knight on a quest relinquish the power of agency for the skittish wisdom of a beast?

During the Middle Ages, the power of life was symbolized in the horse, and the power of the mind in the rider. So, in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, when Parzival seeks the Grail Castle, he lets the reins lie on the neck of the horse. He could not have guided the horse to the castle; the horse knew where it was and automatically led the way. You have to be guided by nature, not by this head up at the top. (Myth and Meaning, 112)

We “drop the reins” when we allow in the experience of Jungian “active imagination,” never knowing where the next set of mental associations will take us, ceding our autonomy to our unconscious, hoping for the best but keeping our thumb off the scale. 

We “drop the reins” when we follow our bliss, knowing that we are not in control of all the outcomes, only of our attitudes—foremost among which is hope. 

Moses “dropped the reins” to follow his creator for a forty-year tour of the desert in the hopes of reaching a Promised Land.

And Joseph Campbell dropped the reins when he disappeared into a reading room for five years and emerged the foremost scholar of mythology in the twentieth century who would come to the conclusion that “[t]he Waste Land is the land of people not living their own authentic lives, but doing what people expect them to do. One goes and gets a job because you’ve got to live, and so you’re doing the daily grind” (Myth and Meaning, 145). 

How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen calvary?

The Mass no longer spoke to the hearts of Crusader Europe because the act of military incursion in the name of Christ is, to put it mildly, a contradiction, and a fatal one at that. Chrétien and Wolfram were both military men. Subverting the bloodless simplicity of the Eucharistic feast for actual warfare in the name of the Prince of Peace left these noble knights—indeed, much of Europe—in a dissociative state where principles had eroded with the clash of spears and thundering of hooves. 

Against their better intentions, these twelfth-century writers had been forced to look through the symbols of the Mass and to insist that we do the same because the old thinking had become obsolete:

Today, with the economic net knitting us all together and the resulting interdependency, every single one of the in-group mythologies is not only out of date, but dangerous. There’s no notion of the global community as the prime unit. What I see as the main problem of mythology today is not what the new myth is going to be. The myth is going to be one that recognizes the whole planet as our society … and the next breakthrough has to be of the recognition of the planet as the Holy Land. (Myth and Meaning, 205)

Knights like Chrétien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach learned this lesson the hard way and wrote their works in part to process the disintegration of former orthodoxies. Their faith died on the battlefield because it was not intended for the battlefield. Or, put another way, the armies of Pope Innocent III were successful in their attempt to destroy a religion contrary to the teaching of the Messiah, but that religion turned out to be their own.

MythBlast authored by:

John Bonaduce, PhD, a seasoned writer for Norman Lear and for most of the major Hollywood studios (Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros, et al.) developed a profound interest in story structure beyond the commercial objectives of the industry. His exploration led him to conclude that much of what we call myth derives from a biological origin. This insight inspired his pursuit of deeper relationships between biology and narrative through his theory of Mythobiogenesis, which he explored in his dissertation at Pacifica Graduate Institute and was recognized as a “discovery” in the field of prenatal psychology by Dr. Thomas Verny.

John was recently appointed to the editorial board of the Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health (JOPPPAH) where he advocates for an unrecognized level of human consciousness which exists at the border of biology and mythology.

As a featured writer for the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s MythBlast, he passionately showcases Joseph Campbell’s enduring relevance to a modern audience.

This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 4, and Myth and Meaning

Latest Podcast

In this episode, we’re joined by the legendary John Densmore, the rhythmic force behind one of the most iconic bands in rock history, The Doors. From his early days as a young musician in Southern California, John has always been captivated by the primal call of the drum—a heartbeat that transcends time and culture. In this conversation we discuss his relationship with Joseph Campbell, and explore his deep connections to music, spirituality, and the creative process that has fueled his remarkable career.

Listen Here

This Week's Highlights

"In the church, there are leaders who tell the followers what to think and how to worship. The priests hear confessions, celebrate the Mass, and assure the faithful that salvation is theirs. But the adventurer must always quest for the Grail alone."

-- Joseph Campbell

Myth and Meaning, 145

Becoming One with the Beloved

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Bumper sticker vs. rabbit hole?

You’ve seen the bumper sticker version of Campbell’s famous aphorism: it’s catchy, filled with portents, a sound and a fury signifying … like, something.

But like what?

Something like, “What, me worry?”  

Or, “Don’t worry, be happy”?  

Once you start asking these questions, a rabbit hole opens up and a Cheshire Cat begins to smile from the nearest overhead branch.

Aphorisms, like metaphors, can be a little slippery. In some ways, the more obvious they look, the less obvious they are. To get to the bottom of what they mean, you have to follow the White Rabbit all the way down. In this case, for instance, fully understanding a phrase like this one requires unpacking and sorting out exactly what “Follow,” “Your,” and “Bliss” all mean. 

Whew.  

“Follow” by itself would involve being fully conscious of the entire trajectory of the Hero’s magical mystery (mythstery!) tour. “Your”?  That would require fully understanding your own existence. That’s a lot of heavy lifting.  

It turns out that the best bet here is to follow Campbell’s own advice and focus on “Bliss.” 

Aphorisms, like metaphors, can be a little slippery. In some ways, the more obvious they look, the less obvious they are.

Campbell’s advice

Here’s what he said originally:

Now, I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: sat-chit-ananda. The word "Sat" means being. "Chit" means consciousness. "Ananda" means bliss or rapture. I thought, "I don't know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don't know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being. 

I think it worked. (The Power of Myth 149)

This is terrifically practical advice. Getting a handle on “proper consciousness” or “proper being” feels like too much all at once, but bliss? That seems like a more promising place to start–even though we still have to follow that rabbit, and the first step is a bit of a doozy. 

“Bliss” is the standard translation of the Sanskrit word ananda [आनन्द] and denotes the moment of ego dissolution in which the personal jiva attains to the status of atman in order to properly engage Brahman–with the proviso that you still want to taste the sugar without being the sugar. Ananda is, therefore, also deeply connected with samadhi, which is its highest form.

Yikes.

Whenever I run into technical definitions like this my mind races back to the moment in Monty Python’s Holy Grail when Galahad asks, “Is there someone else up there we can talk to?”

Translating technical terms from–shoot–from any other language (German, Chinese, take your pick) into English is rough enough. Even the simplest words defy easy translation. But attempting to translate ideas from ancient languages, across thousands of years, poses even greater hazards. Too often the subtleties of meaning are lost as you shift between forgotten alphabets and lost cultural contexts. 

Fortunately, and much closer to home, similar translation issues are discernible in the meaning of “happiness”: specifically in how its definition has devolved from a more robust, ancient Greek understanding into the fuzzy-slippered, hot-chocolate-yummy-satisfaction we attach to it today.

Here’s the idea in a nutshell: think about the difference between being happy and feeling happy.

They look the same, but they aren’t.

Feeling happy vs. being happy

Feeling happy results from satisfying your immediate appetites or emotions. No matter how bad your day has been, for example, the sudden appearance of chocolate ice cream usually puts you in a better mood. Chocolate ice cream by itself, of course, can’t make you be happy, but it sure can make you feel happy. By contrast, being happy (being in a state of happiness) describes, for the ancient Greeks at any rate, the experience of flourishing in the life you’ve been given–hitting on all cylinders, so to speak. Their word for this kind of happiness is eudaimonia. You might notice daimon lurking in there. This is a big hint. A daimon was understood to be a guardian spirit assigned to help you live your life skillfully and with excellence, and that, in turn, is what it truly means to be, rather than merely feel, happy.  So being happy always has the aftertaste of a bit of divine assistance.

To use Campbell’s language, as we move along our life’s journey we eventually come to a place of amor fati, a point where we can embrace our fate, our own authentic nature, and surf the curl of our own karma. No matter the circumstances we find ourselves in, then, we can still claim to be happy. 

So, finally, winding our way back to all that technical language in the definition of ananda, think about those times when you found yourself being happy and not just feeling happy. In moments like that, your normal ego-consciousness is suddenly suspended: most often in moments of aesthetic arrest when the art, the poetry, or music sweeps you up and out of yourself.  The “self” you’re being swept out of is the ego-consciousness (your jiva) and the “Self” that experiences this liberation or relief is the beginning of experiencing your true nature, your atman. 

And that’s what characterizes, and what it means, to be in a state of bliss.

Here’s a practical example: can you remember the greatest concert you ever attended?  I know there are some Dead Heads out there but, for me, it was Carlos Santana opening for Eric Clapton. At the end of the concert they played an encore, just the two of them, tossing musical ambrosia back and forth and into the audience, lifting the entire stadium up into stratospheres of ecstasy.  And when they finished?  

Everyone forgot to applaud.

That’s the bliss we need to follow.  Chocolate chip ice cream–and bumper stickers–can help, but they won’t get us there.

Thanks for musing along.

MythBlast authored by:

Mark C.E. Peterson, Ph.D.  is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Washington County and past president of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture (ISSRNC.org). Philosopher, gadfly, poet, cook, writing along the watermargins of nature, myth, and culture. A practitioner of taijiquan and kundalini yoga for over 40 years, Dr. Peterson is also a happy member of the Ukulele World Congress.

This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 4, and Myth and Meaning

Latest Podcast

In this episode, Campbell speaks to the relationship of mythology to psychology. He goes through the four functions of myth and emphasizes the fourth function - the psychological. He focuses on why this psychological function is so important in our contemporary world. The lecture was recorded at the Houston Jung Center in 1972. Host Brad Olson introduces the lecture and offers a commentary at the end.

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"I think the best thing I can say is to follow your bliss. If your bliss is just your fun and your excitement, you’re on the wrong track. I mean, you need instruction. Know where your bliss is. And that involves coming down to a deep place in yourself."

-- Joseph Campbell

The Hero's Journey, 253

Psyche & Symbol - Apollonian vs Dionysian Dichotomy

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From the time of the first myths and stories, the problem of the overinflated ego and its repercussions has been a recurring theme. This psychic construct, which ostensibly helps us to survive and find a place in our “tribe,” seems to sometimes go astray during its development, distorting a person’s sense of identity and importance. In fact, one of the most prominent signs of excessive ego—hubris—underpins two of the best-known mythic epics, Gilgamesh and The Iliad. And while we certainly do not lack examples of egocentrism in modern culture, I am always fascinated by how fictional storytelling addresses this problem. In 2016, the Marvel Cinematic Universe introduced its version of Doctor Strange, a character that Steve Ditko first developed for comics in 1963. I loved Doctor Strange from the first time I watched it, but I had to reflect for some time on how it was speaking to me and what root themes I felt called to investigate. One of these roots is the archetype of the ego, and I want to explore that motif in the film (note: some spoilers ahead, but not the ending).

The fall to adventure

Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is undoubtedly a gifted neurosurgeon—so gifted, in fact, that he can spout answers to music trivia questions in the midst of performing the most delicate operation and not make a mistake at either one. Yet after he performs an intricate procedure in the emergency room at the request of ER surgeon Christine (Rachel McAdams), she pointedly explains why he refuses to work consistently in that “butcher shop”: “In the ER, you’re only saving lives. There’s no fame, there’s no CNN interviews.” This insight is confirmed in the very next scene when, as Strange drives to a speaking engagement, he discusses on a phone call the types of cases he will take, all to boost his prestige. Distracted while racing down the rain-slick road, Strange plummets over the edge of a cliff, where his hands are crushed by the vehicle. “Pride goeth before a fall” literalized on film.

Wayne Dyer has defined two aspects of ego as “I am what I do. My achievements define me” and “I am what others think of me. My reputation defines me” (The Power of Intention, pg. 10). Of course, this leads to questions we all must face: who are you when you can’t do, and who are you when your reputation changes? For Strange, this is the moment of crisis and desperation, because he has constructed his self-identity around his abilities and status as a skilled doctor. But those abilities are instantly taken away; his hands shake when he tries to steady them, and he finds no chance of recovery (despite his own deep knowledge to guide other surgeons and his herculean rehabilitation efforts). Strange has gotten so accustomed to the esteem his skills and intellect give him that his ego is viewing this as a survival situation–not so much financially but instrumentally (what he can do) and positionally (how he “ranks” in society). With all the possibilities for Western medical solutions exhausted, Doctor Strange heads to a mysterious place in Kathmandu called Kamar-Taj seeking answers and hoping to recover the physical ability he has lost.

Meeting (and mistreating) the mentor

Joseph Campbell speaks about the encounter of East meeting West and the problem of conflicting worldviews. “In the Orient, the path of salvation is to follow a way that already has been marked out by the guru. You go to a guru with perfect faith and no questions. He didn’t question his guru … The goal of Oriental mysticism is to wipe out the ego” (Myth and Meaning: Conversations on Mythology and Life 145-146). In Doctor Strange, the guru he meets is called the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton). Still, as relatively humbled as Strange is by his ego defeat, he resists belief in the non-rational/non-scientific vision the Ancient One speaks of—until she evokes several out-of-body and surreal experiences that even more reduce his ego and his trust in the size and power of his knowledge.

The overinflated ego, however, can resist deflation quite zealously. Even after Strange submits to a rigorous study of the mystical arts, he continues trying to be clever. He often questions his guru and opposes the more organic experiential/emotional aspects of the training, leading to his difficulty in producing any mystical effects. “[You once] told me to open my eyes,” he complains, “Now I’m being told to blindly accept rules that make no sense!” The Ancient One insists, “Your intellect has taken you far in life, but it will take you no further … Silence your ego, and your power will rise.” Later in the Myth and Meaning conversation, Campbell explains the Western resistance to the path when adopting Eastern philosophies: “When the Westerner puts himself through an Oriental meditation system … [i]t’s as though you were trying to break a boulder with a tack hammer … The way that’s more congenial to us [Westerners] is one of bringing, little by little, the unconscious orders into play in our conscious world; that is to say, a slow integration” (pg. 149). Indeed, more time and experience are needed for Strange to shed his uber-reliance on his intellect before he can begin to uncover his undeveloped/shadow aspects (both his feeling function and his mystical abilities), and thus find integrative power.

"… Silence your ego, and your power will rise."

Letting (e)go

The final hammer-blow to Strange’s ego comes when Earth is faced with a metaphysical threat, and Stephen must kill in order to defend the planet from an initial attack. “I’m not doing that again,” he asserts to the Ancient One, “I became a doctor to save lives, not take them.” She retorts, “You became a doctor to save one life above all others: your own.” Will Doctor Strange return to his old life and simply revert to the ego structure props of what he does and what others think of him? Or will he dedicate himself to a cause far greater than “saving his own life” and be of service for completely different and non-egoic reasons? I won’t reveal the end of the film, but suffice it to say that Strange must address the question Campbell (paraphrasing Schopenhauer) poses in the “Sacrifice and Bliss” episode of The Power of Myth: “How can this happen? That what we normally think of as the first law of nature, namely self-preservation, is suddenly dissolved?” (28:39-28:46). Or more broadly for us viewers, what beloved ego concept must we let go for us to step into our path and power? Strange behavior, indeed.

MythBlast authored by:

Scott Neumeister is a literary scholar, author, TEDx speaker, mythic pathfinder and Editor of the MythBlast series from Tampa, Florida, where he earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of South Florida in 2018. His specialization in multiethnic American literature and mythology comes after careers as an information technology systems engineer and a teacher of English and mythology at the middle school and college levels. Scott coauthored Let Love Lead: On a Course to Freedom with Gary L. Lemons and Susie Hoeller, and he has served as a facilitator for the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Myth and Meaning book club at Literati.

This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 4, and Myth and Meaning

Latest Podcast

In this episode we speak with Master Chungliang Al Huang—a tai chi master, writer, philosopher, dancer, and generational teacher. Originally from Shanghai, China, Master Huang moved to the United States to study architecture and cultural anthropology, and later Dance. In the 1960s, Master Huang forged a significant collaboration with philosopher Alan Watts, which led him to Esalen. There, he became a beloved teacher and formed meaningful connections with thought leaders such as Huston Smith, Gregory Bateson, and Joseph Campbell. He and Joe taught together at Esalen until Joe’s death in 1987. Master Huang is an author of many books including the classic Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain. His contributions include pioneering modern dance in the Republic of China and sharing the stage with luminaries like the Dalai Lama and Jane Goodall. He has been an assembly member and presenter at The Council for the Parliament of the World’s Religions and has been a keynote speaker for the YPO (Young Presidents’ Organization) and WPO (World Presidents’ Organization) and at major global gatherings in China, India, Switzerland, Germany, South America, South Africa, and Bali. In 1988 he was featured in the inaugural segment of the PBS series, A World of Ideas, moderated by Bill Moyers. Joseph Campbell famously remarked, “Chungliang Al Huang’s Tai Ji dancing is ‘mythic images’ incarnate. He has found a new way to explain ‘the hero’s journey’ to help others follow their bliss through the experience of tai ji practice in his work through the Living Tao Foundation.” In this conversation, we discuss his life, his relationship with Alan Watts, and his friendship with Joseph Campbell. For learn more about Chungliang visit :https://livingtao.org

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This Week's Highlights

"What is it we are questing for? It is the fulfillment of that which is potential in each of us. Questing for it is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself. There is nothing you can do that's more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way you will find, live, become a realization of your own personal myth."

-- Joseph Campbell

Pathways to Bliss

Nature and the Human Mind

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Gods within

Joseph Campbell had a vision of an independent “science of myth,” a discipline of depth mythologizing which could stand on its own academic legs. Rather than being relegated to literary, anthropological, and archeological disciplines, Campbell wanted to ground myth on its own mythic substance while privileging a depth-psychological approach. Especially leaning on Carl Jung, Campbell comes again and again to a fundamental insight about the universality of myth—the archetypal figures of myth and legend correspond to psychological factors that are at work in the depths of the collective unconscious mind: “And this is one way of saying that in all of us, in our human activities, deities are operating” (Romance of the Grail 152).

Whenever a human action shines with the power of the archetypal, it has been transfigured by the power of myth. Archetypal images mediate both outer and inner realities. They constitute a psycho-physical medium of consciousness, indispensable to the cognitive function of the symbolic and its capacity to disclose the reality of the world. 

Logos vs. mythos

Images are not outside of language, not even outside verbal communication. For there is a direct relation between images and their meaning; they belong together as integrated wholes in the symbolic order. When we hear a foreign language, for example, we may have the jarring experience of hearing sounds without meaningful images attached to them. Without the resonance of images in our soul, we could not hear the song of meaning in the vibrations of human thought. As Martin Heidegger put it, “Language itself is poetry in the essential sense,” (Poetry, Language, Thought 72) that is, in the sense that language can reveal the essence of things. Hence, he explains: “Language is not poetry because it is primal poesy; rather, poesy takes place in language because language preserves the original nature of poetry” (72).

Rather than external opposites, mythological images are internal to words, as mythos to logos and logos to mythos, in the full concept of mythology. We know that “non-verbal” images have the power to speak louder than words. As structures of signification, archetypal images are core channels of meaning and imagination; they constitute the world wide web of our symbolic life as a species. 

Archetypal images retrace the order of the collective unconscious; they express the cultural forms of a collective consciousness which casts its shadow on the reality of the social field where it generally becomes unconscious. The collective consciousness and the collective unconscious are one and the same.

Mythic images both hide and reveal the subterranean movement of the universal in the order of conscious thought, a movement that unleashes the power of the creative imagination. Combining the literal with the metaphorical into a single force, it is in the nature of the mythic to become historic. 

Mythic images both hide and reveal the subterranean movement of the universal in the order of conscious thought, a movement that unleashes the power of the creative imagination. 

The crucible of mytho-history

Mythic images mediate between the literal and metaphoric, the manifest and latent, the ghostly and the real, in the virtual medium of psychic inexistence. For the mythic only “exists” inside the historic. Mythic images are thus historic self-elucidations of the human spirit, caught between the metaphoricity of language and the literalism of fact. 

The mythic and the literal are thus not external factors opposed to each other in fixed hierarchy. The metaphorical is not better than the literal and vice versa; one should not be on top of the other, as good is supposed to rule over evil, right over wrong, better over worse. Adapting the words of Jacques Derrida: “It is not, therefore, a matter of inverting the literal meaning and the figurative meaning but of determining the ‘literal’ meaning of [the mythic image] as metaphoricity itself” (Of Grammatology 15). The mythic image expresses this metaphoricity of the literal itself, which opens up new horizons of meaning and archetypal vision.

Dehumanizing mythology

The human soul as human language, the archetypal Logos, which includes the mathematical and cognitive dimensions, has a demonstrably inhuman reach into the secrets of Nature. This very inhumanity at the same time allows us to peer into the unfathomable workings of nature as revealed by quantum physics, for example. 

To speak of the archetypal, therefore, is to lay bare our naked inhumanity. For archetypes come to embody the best and the worst of what humans can do to one another, other creatures, and the environment. In the same vein, James Hillman too was compelled to speak of the “dehumanizing” effect of archetypal experience in general. For better or worse, the archetypal power of the mythic image comes to life in the deeds and misdeeds of human history. 

The transparency of the transcendent

Campbell had a beautiful way of expressing this opening of the mythic dimension. Rather than the opacity of the black and white, he spoke of achieving a certain transparency to the transcendent. To this purpose, he bid us look to artists for “These people can look past the broken symbols of the present and begin to forge new working images, images that are transparent to transcendence” (Pathways to Bliss 20). In their disclosure of archetypal truth, myths are guides and guide posts to help us light our way. The power of their created works is to reawaken our capacity for mythic vision out of the primeval void of the collective unconscious.

Artists are thus specialists in the deployment of the symbolic dimension of myth in the light of what is true; we are molders and shapers of the transparency of language to the shattering experience of archetypal truth.  “Thus in the work it is truth, not only something true, that is at work” (Heidegger 54). It is the archetype of the Logos or the “Holy Ghost” or Spirit of Truth that is also at work in mythological creation.

The event of truth in the work of art goes beyond the aesthetic experience of myth.  The aesthetic experience is itself made transparent to the operation of the transcendent function of truth, or logos, through which we as human beings evolve. Mythos and logos are not binary opposites or mortal enemies. In their togetherness alone mythos and logos complete the archetypal pattern of true mythology in the crucible of myth and history.

Rather than aestheticizing myth in an imaginary universe divorced from truth, true mythology (vera narratio) emanates from “Its Root Ancient Truth,” as the Maya Popol Wuh has it in its opening pages of creation. The power of myth, therefore, pushes toward the creation of new worlds of truth in time. Rather than a fixed essence, existential truth grows and develops in time. So what Heidegger writes about art is in every sense applicable to the power of true myth defined as: “the creative preserving of truth in the work. Art then is the becoming and happening of truth” (Poetry, Language, Thought 69).

The transcendence of this event of truth is the real power that sets us free. Rather than correctness or adequation to a thing, the concept of truth in the existential sense becomes a concept of freedom. Truth as freedom in mythic creation opens the creative space in which we learn to become true ourselves. In touch with the event of truth in myth, we experience the transcendence of creative being itself as the spirit of our authentic selves.

MythBlast authored by:

Norland Téllez is an award-winning writer and animation director who currently teaches Animation and Character Design courses at Otis College of Art and Design, Cal State Fullerton. He is also conducting a Life Drawing Lab at USC School of Cinematic Arts. He earned his Ph.D. from Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2009 with a dissertation on the Popol-Wuh of the K’iche’ Maya, which he is currently translating and illustrating in its archetypal dimensions as the Wisdom of the Peoples. You can learn more at norlandtellez.com.

This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 3, and Romance of the Grail

Latest Podcast

In this bonus episode, Campbell answers questions following his 1971 lecture, "Primitive Rites & Traditions", at Esalen Institute. He first speaks about the differences between male and female rites in various times and places and then gives an overview of his interpretation of the meaning of the "Virgin Birth".

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This Week's Highlights

“The logics of image thinking and of verbal thinking are two very different logics. I’m more and more convinced that there is, as it were, a series of archetypes which are psychologically grounded, which just have to operate, but in whatever field is available to them. In the myths, they are represented pictorially. There’s a big distinction to be made between the impact of the image, and the intellectual and social interpretation and application of the image.”

-- Joseph Campbell

Myth and Meaning, 27

The Dynamic of Life

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The human mythic imagination

Bill Moyers: What do you think our souls owe to ancient myths?

Joseph Campbell: Well, the ancient myths were designed to put the mind, the mental system, into accord with this body system, with this inheritance.

Bill Moyers: A harmony?

Joseph Campbell: To harmonize. The mind can ramble off in strange ways and want things that the body does not want. And the myths and rites were a means to put the mind in accord with the body, and the way of life in accord with the way that nature dictates.

Bill Moyers: So in a way these old stories live in us.

Joseph Campbell: They do, indeed… (5:08-5:53)

In this episode of the Power of Myth, Campbell speaks of the mythic imagination that arose from human interaction with animals as hunters. He points to the Lascaux caves exquisite paintings as a “burst of magnificent art and all the evidence you need of a mythic imagination in full career” (28:00-28:10). At an estimated 30,000 years old, the Lascaux cave paintings in Dordogne, and the even earlier paintings of Chauvet-Pont D’arc in Ardèche in France are magnificent—Picasso anecdotally said, “Since Lascaux, we have invented nothing.”

What if story is not a human invention?

I am wondering about an idea, though: while these caves may well be one of the earliest efforts at mythic storytelling by humans, there are actually story-tellers that began these stories millions of years earlier. What if story is not simply a human invention, but one we humans simply understand in a particular way?

What if story is not simply a human invention, but one we humans simply understand in a particular way?

If we think mythically about stories themselves, and about how these stories create the world as much as they define it—and how as humans we are created by the stories we tell, an intriguing mythic and scientific lens begins to open.

The creator microbes

In June, The New York Times Magazine published a piece by science writer Ferris Jabr, an adaptation of his book Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life. Jabr accompanied a group of geomicrobiologists down into a mine shaft in South Dakota, a cave carved out by gold miners rather than water, tunneling a mile and a half below the surface. What they discovered here is extraordinary, as Jabr writes: “Here we were, deep within Earth’s crust—a place where, without human intervention, there would be no light and little oxygen—yet life was literally gush­ing from rock.“ Microbes abound there, without human intervention, and they are ancient, living and moving seemingly endlessly, and they breathe, eat, and create rock. It’s a radical realization: that our planet is not life perched on a shallow surface, but is instead constantly being created by life. These microorganisms create their surroundings. Jabr continues, “Subsurface microbes carve vast caverns, concentrate minerals and precious metals and regulate the global cycling of carbon and nutrients. Microbes may even have helped construct the continents, literally laying the ground­work for all other terrestrial life.”

Simultaneously, microbiologists are just beginning to parse out the relationship between microbes in the human body, particularly in the human gut, and how they don’t merely inhabit their surroundings, but transform them as well. Genes in the human gut microbiome vastly outnumber the “human” genes we carry, and not only develop human cognitive function, including memory, but our emotional capacity. In an article echoing Jung in its title, “Collective Unconscious: How Gut Microbes Shape Human Behavior,” researchers report that “gut microbes are part of the unconscious system influencing behavior, and microbes majorly impact on cognitive function and fundamental behavior patterns” (pgs. 1-9).

Mythic microbial stories

If Campbell is right—and our human myths emerged as a way to bring harmony with the natural world—and the microbiologists and microgeologists are right—and the microbe community on the planet are creators and communicators, building both the natural world and human capacities to function within it—is it that outrageous to imagine that the first and most powerful story-tellers were not human at all? But that our stories that we shape and are shaped by each telling of them actually are mythic echoes of microbial stories?

I find this idea both utterly compelling and oddly comforting. It weaves a powerful connection and rightness for me, in both scientific and mythic ways, about human kinship with everything else on—and in—this planet. And perhaps this affinity can be an opening into how we might better articulate that connection as we try to respond to a beleaguered natural world.

MythBlast authored by:

Leigh Melander, Ph.D. has an eclectic background in the arts and organizational development, working with inviduals and organizations in the US and internationally for over 20 years. She has a doctorate in cultural mythology and psychology and wrote her dissertation on frivolity as an entry into the world of imagination. Her writings on mythology and imagination can be seen in a variety of publications, and she has appeared on the History Channel, as a mythology expert. She also hosts a radio who on an NPR community affiliate: Myth America, an exploration into how myth shapes our sense of identity. Leigh and her husband opened Spillian, an historic lodge and retreat center celebrating imagination in the Catskills, and works with clients on creative projects. She is honored to have previously served as the Vice President of the Joseph Campbell Foundation Board of Directors.

This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 3, and Romance of the Grail

Latest Podcast

In this episode we speak with Master Chungliang Al Huang—a tai chi master, writer, philosopher, dancer, and generational teacher. Originally from Shanghai, China, Master Huang moved to the United States to study architecture and cultural anthropology, and later Dance. In the 1960s, Master Huang forged a significant collaboration with philosopher Alan Watts, which led him to Esalen. There, he became a beloved teacher and formed meaningful connections with thought leaders such as Huston Smith, Gregory Bateson, and Joseph Campbell. He and Joe taught together at Esalen until Joe’s death in 1987. Master Huang is an author of many books including the classic Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain. His contributions include pioneering modern dance in the Republic of China and sharing the stage with luminaries like the Dalai Lama and Jane Goodall. He has been an assembly member and presenter at The Council for the Parliament of the World’s Religions and has been a keynote speaker for the YPO (Young Presidents’ Organization) and WPO (World Presidents’ Organization) and at major global gatherings in China, India, Switzerland, Germany, South America, South Africa, and Bali. In 1988 he was featured in the inaugural segment of the PBS series, A World of Ideas, moderated by Bill Moyers. Joseph Campbell famously remarked, “Chungliang Al Huang’s Tai Ji dancing is ‘mythic images’ incarnate. He has found a new way to explain ‘the hero’s journey’ to help others follow their bliss through the experience of tai ji practice in his work through the Living Tao Foundation.” In this conversation, we discuss his life, his relationship with Alan Watts, and his friendship with Joseph Campbell. For learn more about Chungliang visit: https://livingtao.org

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This Week's Highlights

“Within each person there is what Jung called a collective unconscious. We are not only individuals with our unconscious intentions related to a specific social environment. We are also representatives of the species Homo sapiens. And that universality is in us whether we know it or not."

-- Joseph Campbell

Myth and Meaning, 18

The Center of The World

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Once upon a time…

Long, long ago there lived a…

In the days when…

You’ll never believe what happened…

Someone says, “You’ll never believe what happened to me the other day,” and strangers’ ears perk up within hearing distance. We reflexively focus our attention on some random storyteller because we are hardwired to do so. We want to listen. We want to know how it begins and ends. Just watch a small child’s face in front of a skilled storyteller to see how powerful a story can be.

Why is this?

Joseph Campbell: the storyteller

Joseph Campbell was a master, indeed epic, storyteller—epic in that he attempted to tell the human story: from the Paleolithic Great Hunt and animal deities adorning the walls and ceilings of deep, blacker than midnight caves to the shift in stories; to the heavens and the movement of the Sun, Moon, planets and stars. These are stories that continue to influence our contemporary mythic and secular traditions. He cross-referenced stories from around the globe, finding similar patterns and symbology from culture to culture and along that timeline from the First Storytellers to today. He saw the problem we’re still experiencing as these different story traditions—with no new horizons beyond which to populate with our enemies and monsters—crash and grind against each other in their insistence that our cultural stories, our myths, are inherently different instead of differently dressed.

Campbell’s work found an audience with the publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949 and his revision of that work in 1968, but it wasn’t until the release of Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers in June of 1988, eight months after Campbell died, that his name and work gained popular attention.

I remember first seeing the advertisement for The Power of Myth on PBS. I had always been interested in mythology, but that promo hit me with the force of a “Once upon a time,” to a child. From there he charmed me, and countless others, with the story he had to tell: a story in which Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed—traditions still at odds with each other and within themselves—all play a similar role in relaying from the deepest wisdom of our shared humanity a similar message.

A story for the world

His storytelling resonated then and continues to resonate today.  As the Rights and Permissions Manager of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, I negotiate and curate contracts for translations of Campbell’s print works and am in the unique position of seeing that resonance in action around the world. When I first began my tenure in rights and permissions in 2016, I oversaw forty-three contracts of published translations covering sixteen languages. Today, JCF has ninety-four contracts of published translations in twenty-four languages with twenty-nine more translations in production, including five additional languages. 

I should note here that Campbell’s premier title, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, alone has been translated into twenty-seven languages.

No country sells more of Campbell’s work than Mainland China, followed by the multi-country Spanish market and the Russian Federation. Other languages added in the past eight years include Arabic, Japanese, German, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Vietnamese, Serbian, and more. 

These impressive and growing numbers are not the result of any particular effort on the part of JCF.

Publishers, whose mission, of course, is to sell books and make money, come to us to ask if the rights to this or that title are available. Joseph Campbell’s work sells itself, and one can only imagine that the reason for this is his primary message of the unity of humankind in the intersections and similarities of our cultural stories. People the world over are saying “Yes!” to a message which continues to be shared thirty-six years after Campbell died.

 People the world over are saying “Yes!” to a message which continues to be shared thirty-six years after Campbell died.

A story for the future

Campbell did not live to see the conclusion of his epic “Once upon a time,” and neither, in all probability, will we. But he did foretell where this story, our story, needs to go:

The only myth that’s going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that’s talking about the planet … and everybody on it. That’s my main thought for what the future myth is going to be … the society of the planet … You don’t see any divisions there of nations or states or anything of the kind. This might be the symbol for the new mythology to come. That is the country that we are going to be celebrating, and those are the people we are one with. (The Power of Myth 41)

I can’t think of a more important conclusion to this story: E pluribus unum—Out of many, one. Though the motto of the United States, this phrase embodies the democratic ideal which Campbell expresses so well in Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume 4:

There are today no horizons, no mythogenetic zones. Or rather, the mythogenetic zone is the individual heart. Individualism and spontaneous pluralism—the free association of men and women of like spirit, under protection of a secular, rational state with no pretensions to divinity—are in the modern world the only honest possibilities: each the creative center of authority for himself, in Cusanus’s circle without circumference whose center is everywhere, and where each is the focus of God’s gaze. (645)

Joseph Campbell would be pleased that his work, his epic story, played a role in guiding us toward such an outcome.

MythBlast authored by:

Michael Lambert has worked with Joseph Campbell Foundation since 2002, first as a moderator of the Conversations of a Higher Order forums (where he was known as Clemsy), and more recently managing the foundation's rights and permissions program, protecting and licensing Campbell and JCF's copyright and trademark material. From 1989 until 2016, he taught in the Gloversville, New York public schools, including using the Hero's Journey® as a central theme of a college preparation English course for high school seniors. He can be reached regarding licensing of rights and permissions at rights@jcf.org

This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 3, and Romance of the Grail

Latest Podcast

In Episode 34, "Primitive Rites & Traditions", Joseph Campbell speaks at the Esalen Institute in 1971. During the lecture, he interacts with participants about the importance and significance of rites and traditions in early mythologies. Host, Bradley Olson introduces the lecture, and offers commentary at the end.

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This Week's Highlights

"There are today no horizons, no mythogenetic zones. Or rather, the mythogenetic zone is the individual heart. Individualism and spontaneous pluralism—the free association of men and women of like spirit, under protection of a secular, rational state with no pretensions to divinity—are in the modern world the only honest possibilities: each the creative center of authority for himself, in Cusanus’s circle without circumference whose center is everywhere, and where each is the focus of God’s gaze."

-- Joseph Campbell

Creative Mythology, 645

Myth and Ritual

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Two most interesting interpretations of the origin of humans: religion says we are made of dust (some of us from the rib), and Darwin says we share common ancestry with apes. There is also a third one, whimsical but very prominent today–we are the progeny of the extraterrestrials who planted their seeds in the ancient civilizations. Whatever you believe, human development has been scientifically theorized to start some two million years ago. How did our ancestors develop abilities to address the problems they were facing? In order to survive, these first hunter-gatherers and cave artists had to communicate.

Communication begins with the living world and art with the appearance of humans. The first people to band together for survival in ancient times were the first syncretic artists. They did not just invent fish stories around the fire for entertainment, but were spiritually connected with the world around them, creating a magical reality that extends to the energy fields where "drawn buffaloes are killed buffaloes."

Power-off ritual

Performing the first rituals, the psychoanalysts of that era–the shamans–became the first artists. Music, painting, and performing arts, as well as the first letters originate from the stories and rituals of the Stone Age. These rituals begin with an understanding of the concept of death. "The oldest evidence of something resembling mythological thinking comes in connection with graves," says Campbell in his conversation with Bill Moyers in the series The Power of Myth. He affirms that, around 50,000 BCE, “We have evidence of a ritualized burial, with sacrifices and with the grave gear, which certainly indicated that the experience of death started something” (The Hero’s Journey, 86). Ancient burial ceremonies are the first evidence of human thought around which stories and rituals were formed. Ritual is the revival of a myth with the active participation of all members of the community, and some of the most widespread in the world are the rituals of death and sacrifice, birth, growing up, and weddings. These rituals very much resemble the defragmentation and cleanup of a modern computer system, while the final ritual–the ritual of death–is comparable to the formatting and rebooting to the initial settings and finally pressing the power-off button of the system. Early people explained the cycle of life and the “power of powering-off” with myths and rituals. By participating in a ritual, one participates in a myth.

Campbell generalized his notion about the importance of the death rite for society as a whole, remarking in Myths to Live By, “Individual death and the endurance of the social order have been combined symbolically and constitute the nuclear structuring force of the rites and, thereby, society” (23). However, he says that today we no longer have rituals. We have replaced myths with New York Times–news of the day. A society without rituals becomes barbarian, and young people do not grow up, because they don’t defragment themselves until their later years.

We pride ourselves on being a wise species while often oversimplifying and trivializing the power of unobservable planes of mythology.

We pride ourselves on being a wise species while often oversimplifying and trivializing the power of unobservable planes of mythology. Rituals are symbolically preserved by religions nowadays, but Campbell believed that today's rituals are too mild relative to the meaning they are supposed to convey. Religious or national holidays are almost the same everywhere: fanatical shopping, excessive cooking and eating, visiting relatives, and gratitude for returning to the peace and quiet of individuality and daily routine. For example, the sacrificial offering in Islam practiced during the holiday Eid al-Fitr nowadays somewhat reduces the weight of experiencing Abraham's/Ibrahim's sacrifice. In most Islamic countries, believers pay money to the butcher to slaughter a sheep, camel, or cow for them, without having any contact with the animal or the sanctity of the sacrificial process.

Stories about animal sacrifices, warriors, and the diet of the first people are a process through which respect is paid to the cycle of life and in which, allegorically and anagogically, one comes to the realization that we are all the same and that everything is connected. "We are made of star stuff" is a famous quote by Carl Sagan, richly interpreted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who speaks of atoms as an integral part of all of us. We are made of those same particles found in the first stars, thus making the Universe live in us and vice versa. We are the stars, and we are the Universe–all one and all connected by the same power of energy and matter. Nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon are integral elements of life on Earth, as well as the energy created from the Big Bang. The connection of subatomic particles can be compared to the mythologically invisible, which supports the visible world, as temporality in eternity and movement in time that takes place in Axis Mundi. Campbell himself referred to the theme of mythology as the notion “that there is an invisible plane supporting the visible one, and whether it is thought of as a world or simply as energy that differs from time and time, and place to place” (The Power of Myth, 90). First storytelling refers to this invisible plane. 

Lies that keep us alive

The origins of storytelling can be found in cave rituals around fire and the first syncretic art from which all the arts as we know them today are born. Prehistoric man dances, sings, paints and acts, practicing syncretic rites of the concept of his mythic consciousness. Myth is understood here as a conception of consciousness, while ritual is its action. This mythical concept and ritual action, make communication between the members of the tribe in a syncretic combination of artistic expression so that art evolves later into the experience completely opposed to reality and separated from that initial syncretism of the magical consciousness of early Homo sapiens. Art has become a lie, a game, a metaphor, and a pretense, unlike the original rituals, which reflected the invisible planes to our consciousness. That magical consciousness through archetypes has remained to this day an inseparable part of what differs our starry molecules from other species. 

The first stories were created in Paleolithic caves where Homo sapiens created culture. We have replaced the cave and the light of the fire in modern times with an altar in the center of our living room that emits photons from flat screens amusing us with stories which have mythological ancestry. The multitude of worlds that we discovered and created in the narrative patterns of the first myths, we have today translated into the entertainment industry. Binge-watching series from the comfort of the sanctity of our living room is just a remnant of our innate desire to experience the myth and adventure we call life.

Miracles in movies and series are offered to us on the altar in our living room, without us having to make any effort. The question is when they will be replaced by other technological content, which will include cinematic means of expression, virtual reality, metaverses, and artificial intelligence. In the 2024 series 3 Body Problem, based on the 2008 Chinese bestselling trilogy by Liu Cixin, humanity must prepare for destruction by a high-tech species coming from outer space. The reason they want to destroy us is–the story of RED RIDING HOOD! This highly advanced species does not understand why the wolf was lying to the grandmother. For them: “This story is a lie about a liar. A liar is someone not to be trusted. We communicate what is known."

Far more technologically advanced than us, but devoid of the ability to lie, these aliens are a metaphor for our future with artificial intelligence and neurolinks as envisioned by author and philosopher Alan Watts. In his future, human beings will be connected by neural connections, and every thought and desire will be open and accessible to everyone. It sounds scary, but we are already living the prototype of this vision with social networks and the Internet. We are well on our way to erasing what makes us “lying humans,” with the help of artificial intelligence, algorithms, and silicon networks. In our living room with myths in front of a flat screen, we are slowly creating a civilization completely devoid of rituals and mystical experiences. 3 Body Problem species are not capable of understanding the story of the Lying Wolf, imagination in fairy tales or fantasy, grasping the concepts of play, metaphors, or anything non-factual. We humans are not to be trusted, because we tell stories.

A Homo liar who understands and enjoys the story of Little Red Riding Hood cannot survive in a world of algorithms that is deprived of myths and rituals. There is no place for defragmentation cycles and mystical power-off experience in it. But that world is exactly what makes us a wise species–Homo sapiens. If we renounce the experience of the invisible that supports the visible world, stories that anagogically lead us to mystical knowledge, lies that interpret the truth, artists who preserve myths, and natural cycles of life–then we renounce ourselves, we lose our connection with the stars from which we are all built. 

MythBlast authored by:

Dr. Lejla Panjeta is a Professor of Film Studies and Visual Communication. She was a professor and guest lecturer in many international and Bosnian universities. She also directed and produced in theatre, worked in film production, and authored documentary films. She curated university exhibitions and film projects. She won awards for her artistic and academic works. She is the author and editor of books on film studies, art, and communication. Her recent publication was the bilingual illustrated encyclopedic guide – Filmbook, made for everyone from 8 to 108 years old. Her research interests are in the fields of aesthetics, propaganda, communication, visual arts, cultural and film studies, and mythology. https://independent.academia.edu/LejlaPanjeta

This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 3, and Romance of the Grail

Latest Podcast

In this episode entitled "Interpretation of Symbolic Form" which was recorded around 1970, Joseph Campbell delves into the meaning of symbolic forms and narrative. In the lecture, he explores how symbolic forms point to the human capacity for the transcendent experience. Host, Bradley Olson introduces the episode and gives commentary after the lecture.

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This Week's Highlights

"There are two attitudes toward religious and mythic images today. One is that they are references to facts, and the other is that they are lies. But they are neither facts nor lies; rather, they are metaphors. Mythology is a compendium of metaphors."

-- Joseph Campbell

Myth and Meaning, 19

Living in Accord With Nature

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