[caption id="attachment_77925" align="alignnone" width="400"] "Women Playing Music" Giovanni Boccaccio, Early 15th century, Public domain[/caption] The JCF theme this month of lovers, against the background of Campbell’s early academic work on medieval literature, has provided an...

[caption id="attachment_77814" align="alignnone" width="900"] "Morning Sun" by Edward Hopper. 1952. Columbus Museum of Art[/caption]   There’s a story to every scar, physical or emotional. And the scar tissue almost always remains (in some form or...

[caption id="attachment_77759" align="alignnone" width="400"] The Lovers from the Modern Way Tarot by Jiri Bindels and Neil Fernando[/caption] I am not exactly sure when I first heard “Wedding Song (There Is Love)” by Paul Stookey of...

[caption id="attachment_77678" align="alignnone" width="400"] "The Lovers" from The Rider-Waite Tarot Deck by Pamela Colman Smith. Public Domain.[/caption] Joseph Campbell’s work is full of reflections on love. I like to think this is due to his...

[caption id="attachment_77626" align="alignnone" width="396"] Dean Cornwell - The Other Side, 1918[/caption] Have you ever been in love? I was. I fell in love with an angel kissed by a demon. That’s how I experienced the...

[caption id="attachment_77615" align="alignnone" width="450"] Oluf Olufsen Bagge - Yggdrasil, The Mundane Tree 1847 - full page.[/caption] “Therefore, our first impression of the Card plunges us into the heart of the problem of the relationship between...

[caption id="attachment_77588" align="alignnone" width="473"] Leonora Carrington, The Hanged Man, ca. 1955, © Estate of Leonora Carrington/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.[/caption]                         Now this...

[caption id="attachment_77584" align="alignnone" width="460"] National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of an anonymous donor, 1967[/caption] Suspended between Strength and Death is the Hanged Man. He doesn’t look particularly concerned. The illustrator of the emblematic Smith-Waite...

[caption id="attachment_77534" align="alignnone" width="400"] "Le Pendu" The Rider-Waite Tarot Deck by Pamela Colman Smith. Public Domain.[/caption] No one, I imagine, would like to draw the cards of Death, the Devil, the Tower, and the Hanged...

[caption id="attachment_77470" align="alignnone" width="900"] "At Sunset" by Giuseppe Milo. CC by 2.0[/caption] Before diving into the symbolism of the Star card of the tarot, let’s first consider its predecessor the Tower, whose sudden onslaught of...

[caption id="attachment_77403" align="alignnone" width="375"] "Le Stelle" from the Soprafino-Gumppenberg Tarot. Art by Carlo Della Rossa (1840).[/caption] Hence in a season of calmer weather Though inland far we be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal...

[caption id="attachment_77300" align="alignnone" width="592"] "Man and Woman" Boris Lovet-Lorski; (c. 1930-1935); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966[/caption] These days engaging with myth, for me, can be...

[caption id="attachment_77224" align="alignnone" width="900"] "Church in the sea" by Aaron Crowe. CC 2.0[/caption]   “Imagination is the star in man, the celestial or supercelestial body.”  —Martin Ruland the Younger Arthur Edward Waite, the famed esoteric...

[caption id="attachment_77150" align="alignnone" width="300"] The Star from The Rider-Waite Tarot Deck by Pamela Colman Smith. Public Domain.[/caption] In The Power of Myth, Bill Moyers remarks that the Lord’s Prayer begins with, “Our father, who art...

[caption id="attachment_63539" align="alignnone" width="370"] Jean Erdman in Medusa. Photo c/o Barbara Morgan[/caption] Jean Marion Erdman, choreographer, director, co-founder of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, and wife to Joseph Campbell for 49 years, was born on February...

[caption id="attachment_77005" align="alignnone" width="354"] The Magician. Visconti-Sforza Deck, Bonifacio Bembo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons[/caption] Epigraph to Letter I: The Magician from Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism:   “Spiritus ubi vult...

[caption id="attachment_76934" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Image by Freepik[/caption] The magician made a modest request. Could he and his friends from the local chapter of the Society of American Magicians perform the “broken wand ceremony” at my...

[caption id="attachment_76839" align="alignright" width="341"] The Magician from the Rider-Waite Tarot Deck by Pamela Colman Smith. Public Domain[/caption] The wheel of the year ROTATes and the next card in the TAROT pops up. What card did...