Stephen Gerringer
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Indeed, Mars – the more myths from different cultures we learn, the more striking that correspondence is. I appreciate Shaheda’s contribution (even when universities focus on myths of other cultures, like Africa, Latin American indigenous cultures, India, the Pacific islands, we rarely do more than scrape the surface of Chinese and Japanese mythology).
Hello Mary Ann,
Picking up on this thought of yours:
. . . after all, the “I Can’t Breathe” archetype surfaced first with corona virus and then with the death of George Floyd after years of warning about air pollution/global warming and all the raging wildfires in the western U.S. and Australia
Timely that you mention the raging wildfires in relation to the “I can’t breathe” motif. I live in Modesto, in California’s large Central Valley. The second week of August we endured ten days of a heat wave with highs ranging from 105º to 111º, and overnight lows never reaching the point where it was cool enough to open the windows and let in fresh air. It wears on a soul having to keep the air conditioning running 24 hours a day 10 days in a row.
Then, the day before the heat wave broke, what has now become the second largest fire in state history erupted in the southeast corner of our county (Stanislaus), some 20 miles from my home as the crow flies. It’s an isolated area – grasslands, scrub oak, and the low hills of our coastal range separating our valley from the Bay Area – but that corner of the county butts up against Contra Costa and Alameda counties, which include large cities (San Jose, Fremont, Oakland, Berkeley, etc.) with millions of inhabitants the other side of those hills.
So just as temps were falling and we we were looking forward to breathing fresh air once more, smoke poured into our skies – and not just from that fire. What has become the third largest fire in state history ignited to the northwest, close to wine country – a bit further from us, but also funneling smoke in our direction. And a day or two later, up in the spectacular Sierra Nevada range, which forms the eastern wall of our valley, lightning sparked a huge forest fire outside Yosemite, and more smoke from that conflagration also filled the air.
We had to keep our windows closed and not spend any time outside at all – not because of summertime temperatures, but because we could not breathe the air! ( . . . and so the theme of the year continues . . . )
Here is a graphic on my phone registering the air quality those first few days:
I’ve never seen it in the purple zone before! (You’ll notice at the bottom of the image that the day’s original prediction was in the yellow zone, and the following day was supposed to be green; alas, the fires proved too fickle for forecasters.)
I wish I could describe the atmosphere – at best, the air outside the door was thick and visible, brassy in color – looked as if we were on the surface of another planet, or perhaps residing in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Pictures weren’t able to capture the reality; during the day light shining through our windows glowed a cherry red. Here is an image taken outside my home several days later, after the air had improved dramatically (“improved” is a relative term – let’s just say it was somewhat less toxic):
By the end of the first week the skies turned gray in a perpetual overcast (though absent any legitimate clouds), the air still heavy with the scent of smoke and chemicals.
When I did go outside to take out the garbage or change the kitty litter I was masked, but still had problems breathing once I returned inside.
Naturally my mind turned to the topic of breath and spirit touched on in my MythBlast essay, and the resultant discussion here. Our triple-digit summertime heatwaves, along with the extended annual fire season, have increased in frequency and intensity the past several years, in large part a result of human-induced climate change. It’s “as if” – those two words that Campbell relates to ritual and myth: “as if” – Gaia were underscoring the effect of our action on the planet, and reminding us that what we do to the Earth we ultimately do to ourselves.
On a personal level, I’ve spent much time focused on not just the mythology of Breath, but the very act of breathing – in and out (Richard’s observations could not be more timely or relevant on this topic!). Breath is a bedrock archetype, for in its absence, nothing else is possible – there is no progress, no comfort, no prosperity, no self-actualization if we are not able to perform this simple act common to all humans, all animals (even those with gills in place of lungs), and even plants (which take in carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen).
The best way for me to process this most recent crisis followed the same prescription as with Covid and the widespread protests in June: just sit and follow my breath: in and out, deep and slow, riding it into a meditative state. We could call that a spiritual prescription.
That also suggests what is missing on the collective level: whether the polluting and profaning of the planet, the racial divide, and even the failure, at least in the United States, to mount a cohesive national response to the pandemic, all strike me as symptoms of a widespread spiritual crisis.
Mother Nature is doing her best to get our attention. As you point out, Mary Ann, we have ignored her warnings for so long – so she’s turned to harsher methods. If we continue to ignore the obvious, I can’t begin to imagine what comes next . . .
Mary Ann writes:
For a long time, I have felt that on Facebook I am expected to put my best most positive face forward even when I don’t want to and don’t feel like it.
Heck yeah – though I have a tendency to overshare on social media, it’s a far cry from journaling. There is no soul satisfaction in the cyber Etch-a-Sketch that is Facebook (so ephemeral – even the most profound thoughts scroll off the screen after an hour or two, a day or two at most).
I often go days, even weeks without journaling. But the longer I do, the more disconnected I feel (the same applies to meditation, Tarot spreads, dream work, and other tools I use for plumbing soul – when life is in disarray they all fall by the wayside … until I am so overwhelmed that I hit the re-set button).
And then a happy by-product of journaling is that it helps me discover – or uncover – my personal myth.
I thought to recommend a book by a friend – Dennis Patrick Slattery, who co-edited Correspondence, the collection of Joseph Campbell’s letters (served two years with him on the committee planning the Study of Myth Symposium held on the Pacifica Graduate Institute campus eight years ago this coming weekend; at the last minute he couldn’t attend due to unexpected health issues, so Pacifica put me up in the spacious secret apartment on campus [kitchen, bedroom, living room, office area] that Dennis used when he’d fly in from Texas to teach there). Dennis has devoted a lot of thought to writing qua writing, and collected his wisdom in Riting Myth, Mythic Writing: Plotting Your Personal Story.
Wouldn’t you know, just as I started to compose this post, an email landed from Will Linn (another friend I first met at that same symposium), sharing this event:
Synchronicity? This will happen tomorrow (Wednesday, August 26), at 5 p.m., via Zoom. Drs. Kwame Scruggs, Will Linn, John Bucher, and Dara Marks will join Dennis for a panel discussion – a presentation well worth it if you can spare the time. To register, visit this link.
I’m going to do my best to attend . . . maybe see you there!
Welcome Aboard, Satcitananda! (Love your cybermoniker)
The Power of Myth interviews provided a portal into Joseph Campbell’s mythological perspective for so many. And it wasn’t in the sense of telling people like a biblical prophet “This is the way; walk ye therefore in it”; my sense was more that here was someone articulating ideas and beliefs I held, at least in embryo, that I had never been able to put into words – and doing so with confidence and delight.
His enthusiasm proved contagious – Joseph Campbell helped find my own voice.
Keep going on The Masks of God – such a treat!
Feel free to check out the other forum categories, and jump into any conversation, or start a new one by posting your thoughts on a topic of your choice.
Hello Linda,
These certainly reflect Joseph Campbell’s perspective, but finding the exact source can be tricky. Often Campbell “quotes” found on the internet turn out to be truncated paraphrases of something Campbell said, or someone’s comment on a point of Campbell’s that someone else mistakenly assumed were Campbell’s own words and then re-shared them widely – which, as Lynn points out above, is certainly the case with the first quote, which is actually Deepak Chopra discussing Campbell (I happened to be in the room when he said it …), but has mistakenly been attributed to Joe because it does reflect his viewpoint.
So we’ll do our best to track the second one down, but can’t guarantee anything. However, in the meantime, here are a couple related thoughts of Joe’s on myth vs. history:
Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.”
Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces (Third Edition, Copyright © 2008 Joseph Campbell Foundation), p. 213
“Mythology, in other words, is psychology misread as biography, history, and cosmology.”
Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces (Third Edition, Copyright © 2008 Joseph Campbell Foundation), p. 219
A past JCF Board member drew my attention to an article this morning that examines, in the wake of the choice of the Democratic presidential’s running mate, how the caste systems not just in India, but in the United States, still shape our public conversations, whether or not we are aware of them.
Seemed relevant, so I’m parking a link here to Kamala and Caste: How the crushing hierarchies of India, the United States, and Nazi Germany echoed over a historic vice-presidential selection.
Philosopher can accurately be applied to Joseph Campbell (it’s not a job title, but a description, like philanthropist or statesman). Most philosophers in recent centuries have had day jobs: Erasmus was a monk; Immanuel Kant taught physics and mathematics at the University of Königsberg; Nietzsche started off as a professor of philology at the University of Basel; Ayn Rand was a film extra, junior screenwriter, head of the costuming department at RKO, and novelist, etc.
(Of course, anyone with a Ph.D. is technically a “Doctor of Philosophy,” but Campbell dropped out of the doctoral program at Columbia; all he had was a Master’s Degree.)
Ivanka Trump’s citing Campbell toward the end of her commencement address drew a lot of attention to JCF on social media: a number of posters on various platforms were incensed and quite vocal with demands that the Foundation condemn her usage. All we could do is verify the accuracy of the quote (she doesn’t provide a source, so took a little while to track it down); after that, our hands were tied. Whatever one thinks of Ivanka Trump or her father politically, the quote was correct and did fit the context of her speech, which was relatively generic and uplifting, as commencement addresses tend to be. Had the same speech been delivered by, say, Reese Witherspoon, or Tom Hanks, there would have been no public controversy.
I can’t say whether or not Ivanka is familiar with Campbell’s work. She well may be, but seemed more like whoever wrote the speech was looking for a relevant quote to plug-in from a figure who might carry some weight with young people. Could just just be my projection, but if that truly were the case, Ivanka’s reference does signify how deep Campbell’s influence is in popular culture.
I’m sorry for the lag in reply, Shaheda. I’ve been trying to follow-up on your questions.
#1 Is this a large, coffee table size volume? The description fits the original edition of the first volume of The Historical Atlas of World Mythology: The Way of the Animal Powers – a huge volume (later published in softcover in two parts, both oversize):
All physical editions are out of print, though we have been slowly compiling portions of the whole as eSingles that can be downloaded, though it will be some time before we have the entire work available as an eBook.#2 We did feature a free download of Campbell’s intro to Gimbutas’ Language of the Goddess as JCF.org’s monthly gift in July of last year. I have been trying to track down where that lives on our server, but can’t find it – not sure if it’s still accessible or not, but I will keep looking.
(By the way, I did the same thing – purchased a softcover edition of Gimbutas’ work many years ago just for Joe’s words – and then tracked down everything else I could find of hers).
“A myth is something that never happened but is always happening. Myths are the plots of the psyche.”
Tom Robbins
“A myth is something that never happened but is always happening. Myths are the plots of the psyche.”
Tom Robbins
Thanks to everyone who contributed to this conversation – and especially Dr. Norland Tellez, for taking the time to directly engage your readers.
Two takeaways from this exchange occur to me:
One is the awareness that mythologizing is always going on, under the surface, both in our individual psyches as well as the collective psyche of the greater society – but these are unconscious processes: we are generally not aware of them. As Norland points out, in ancient India the caste system was shaped by and reinforced through that culture’s mythology, though those who lived inside that bubble didn’t think of their mythology as “myth,” but simply “what is.”
We can look back today and see the central role mythology played in their culture because we live outside that bubble; however, what we don’t see are the bubbles we inhabit: whether in our individual lives, or the culture-at-large, we remain generally unaware of the mythological dynamics driving our bus.
One of Joseph Campbell’s most potent observations is that we don’t live in a culture shaped by one prevailing myth anymore – but that doesn’t mean there are no “living mythologies” in the world today. Islam, Catholicism and other Christian denominations, and even communism, all share qualities of a living mythology among their most devoted adherents (Communism? Well, Campbell made a compelling case that communism, as practiced in the old Soviet Union and Mao’s China, conformed to the pattern of a Levantine mythology – Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam – with its revelations and sacred scriptures, its prophets, it’s linear concept of time with a blissful global utopia at the end [the workers’ paradise] when the forces of Good finally triumph over the forces of Evil, etc.; the only function of living mythology this secular version misses is the first of the four Campbell posits: the mystical or metaphysical function).
Norland subtly makes a compelling case that we, too, are subject to unconscious mythic forces shaping our culture. In the United States this includes the concepts of manifest destiny, American exceptionalism, and an unbridled faith in capitalism and the power of the free market (faith indeed, as we have never experienced a true free market), not to mention the unconscious racial myths that drive our behavior.
Awareness – bringing what is unconscious into the light – is the first step in depotentiating the power of these unconscious forces to compel collective behaviors; alas, that is often a painful and revolutionary process. We experienced a bit of that late spring into summer in the United States in the wake of the George Floyd murder, which triggered a powerful confrontation with society’s collective shadow for so many who had ignored or stuffed these issues in the past.
But that’s just a first step.
My second takeaway from this conversation is the tension between the two poles of the Campbellian universe. There is an academic side to Joseph Campbell’s work, in the best sense (yes, Joe had his problems with the academy, but he also relied on the work of specialists when conducting his research, and did his best to document and reference what he had found: some of Campbell’s best academic work appears in several of the essays in The Flight of the Wild Gander).
But his work also has broad popular appeal – especially in the areas of self-actualization and self-improvement (such as the embrace of the trajectory of the hero journey motif as a road map to life), not to mention in the woo-woo of things-that-go-bump-in-the-night.
At the Joseph Campbell Foundation, that’s a fine line we walk, that delicate balance between the academic and the popular appeals of Campbell’s work. For Joseph Campbell it was not an either / or proposition – and so it is at JCF, where we inhabit that tension: no one side is allowed to capture the flag.
I found a few of the exchanges over the course of this discussion reflecting that tension. That’s not to suggest that any individual post was either right or wrong – far from it – but rather an illustration that there is more than one way to approach myth.
No doubt the conversation will continue, whether tomorrow, or next week, next month, or two years from now when someone new to the forums stumbles across this thread and revives it, adding her or his own thoughts. For now, though, I’d like to thank Norland for his generosity of time and spirit. I have no doubt we’ll see more ripples spreading out from the pebble he has tossed into the pond.
Thanks for this post, James. Allow me to second your motion!
Writing about what happens to us can’t help but widen our perspective, especially if we do so with a sincere and open heart.
James Hillman believed that reflection – chewing over and digesting life, if you will – is what deepens events into experience. Ideally, that’s what we do when we journal – step outside ego, outside the “I,” the “me,” that sense of myself I experience as me – and then psyche (or soul, if you will) washes across the page.
Journaling is one of the most useful tools in my toolbox. There is plenty of pondering (and wandering) in my journals; in fact, I have an entire file drawer jammed full of loose pages – irregular sized art paper, the back of discarded reams of unused office stationary, and all types of blank paper – that record nearly a decade of travels by thumb across the continent way back when.
I would write on every and any thing, every and any where – and, in the writing, found myself forging my own soul.
Of course, the words aren’t all profound observations and nature scenes. There is plenty of hunger and loneliness and sunburn and despair in those pages as well. To this day my journal serves as a portal to shadow realms. I vent frustration and anger, confront jealousies and fears, beat myself up and beat myself down
. . . which I find now, after decades of keeping a journal, keeps me sane and preserves me from falling prey to those same shadow impulses. And when I am possessed by Shadow, my journal is the place I go to lick my wounds – a safe and sacred space to recuperate.
It’s also where I amplify insights, accept and embrace my strengths as well as my flaws, and discover the elements that make up my bliss. Looking over the pages of journals past I see patterns appear and reappear – and notice what is that I keep coming back to, the situations that draw me again and again.
I can’t imagine a more useful process right now, when we are pummeled by events we cannot control and Shadow, individual and collective, confronts us at every turn.
Of course, it’s not easy for those who aren’t used to writing words they will never show another, reflections of their interior world, to just pick up a pen and start. We have so many roadblocks in our head.
I sense that many who try unsuccessfully to diary their thoughts may be approaching it as I did my first few attempts, back in high school and college (none of which lasted more than a few days, maybe a week or two of feeble, sporadic entries).
Looking back, I notice those early unsuccessful efforts exhibit two common characteristics:
First, I would try to detail exactly what happened during the day – the order and times in which events occurred, who said what to whom, etc. – an impossible journalistic task. It had taken me all day to live it; writing it all down would take another day – hence I found the process time-consuming and impossibly overwhelming. No matter how enthusiastic I was at first, my efforts faded and entries soon dribbled away to nothing.
And then second, I now notice that in those early efforts I was always the star of my story. Everything was about me – everything I did was right, and where there were problems in my life I was either misunderstood, or others were, of course, to blame. I wrote as if I expected all sorts of people to one day read my words, and boy, would they be blown away at what a mistreated, misunderstood genius I was! Can’t say I was writing for me, but for posterity – which also meant a certain amount of editing history, to put me in the most favorable light possible.
Of course, this wasn’t a conscious process – nevertheless, my early daily diary efforts proved a flood of mundane details mixed with shameless self-promotion and self-justification. No reflection, no coming to know my self better, no point to the exercise at all. That’s not journaling – not in the sense I’m using the word here.
Journaling is a movement not of ego, but of soul.
And, years later, that’s how my real journaling began – born out of the sincere anguish of my soul. I found myself writing down truths about myself – truths I did not know until they spilled from my pen. I asked questions, pondered, mused, all with no audience in mind other than myself – or is that my Self?
Instead of ego directing the pen, now my words carry me wherever they will. I’m not keeping a journalistic account of my day, but am penetrating the depths of the world around me, and the world of my own thoughts – and noting the correspondence between the two. I might describe at length the politics and play of the magpies outside my window, or ramble on for pages about an image in a daydream, or a phrase overheard in line at the cash register in the local market, or explore why my speech patterns automatically and seemingly on their own change when certain people walk into the room.
I still delve into relationships and personal exchanges, but now my attitude is not that I’m automatically the good guy; before, I thought I knew myself – now, though, I’m as curious about myself and my own motivations as I am about others.
That openness and wonder strikes me as a hallmark of personal journaling. It’s also subtly altered my behavior. Instead of re-acting reflexively to forces originating outside myself, I am a more conscious actor, moving in concert with forces arising from a deeper part of my Self.
In this moment, when life can be so overwhelming, scribbling words across the blank page (yes, I’m old school – typing is too close to what I do everyday in the mundane world: an unlined journal and a clean white page is my sacred space), putting pen to paper slows me down and truly does deepen events into experience . . .
(Including pics of my journal below)
Poet Robert Bringhurst’s take on myth:
Speech itself is neither verse nor prose, and myth itself is neither fact nor fiction. Myth is a species of truth that precedes that distinction.”
Robert Bringhurst, A Story Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World
Poet Robert Bringhurst’s take on myth:
Speech itself is neither verse nor prose, and myth itself is neither fact nor fiction. Myth is a species of truth that precedes that distinction.”
Robert Bringhurst, A Story Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World
