Before diving into the symbolism of the Star card of the tarot, let’s first consider its predecessor the Tower, whose sudden onslaught of destruction will have already descended (precisely) like lightning upon us. By now, however, we have hopefully distanced…
Hence in a season of calmer weather Though inland far we be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither, Can in a moment travel thither, And see the Children sport upon the shore, And hear…
These days engaging with myth, for me, can be an invitation to poke at sacred cows. In a month that JCF has dedicated to Campbell’s work on goddesses and what he, and many other mythologists, call the divine feminine, I…
“Imagination is the star in man, the celestial or supercelestial body.” —Martin Ruland the Younger Arthur Edward Waite, the famed esoteric scholar and mystic who with Pamela Colman Smith created the classic tarot deck, understood very well what he…
In The Power of Myth, Bill Moyers remarks that the Lord’s Prayer begins with, “Our father, who art in heaven,” and then asks Joseph Campbell if it could begin with our mother. It is a delightful trigger for the mythologist…
Jean Marion Erdman, choreographer, director, co-founder of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, and wife to Joseph Campbell for 49 years, was born on February 20, 1916. This week, in honor of her birthday, Diane McGhee Valle explores how the polarities in…
Epigraph to Letter I: The Magician from Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism: “Spiritus ubi vult spirat: et vocem ejus audis, sed nescis unde veniat, aut quo vadat: sic est omnis, qui natus est ex spiritu.…
The magician made a modest request. Could he and his friends from the local chapter of the Society of American Magicians perform the “broken wand ceremony” at my grandfather’s open-casket, Catholic funeral? My resistance, bordering on physical revulsion, to the…
The wheel of the year ROTATes and the next card in the TAROT pops up. What card did we pull out of the Year of the Rabbit’s hat for 2023? The next one: The Magician. Tarot decks typically display roughly…
As we begin a new year, our calendar seems to have a magical effect upon us, triggering a certain archetypal response in our souls which may be appropriate for all new beginnings and ends. Thus our Gregorian calendar, with its…
As I sat down to write this article, I delightedly cracked my metaphorical knuckles, savoring the irreverent opportunity to use the Fool as a symbol to push back against our cultural inclinations to embody rational responsibility in the beginnings of…
Every year’s end, I and the inner female circle of my family draw animal cards as inspiration for the upcoming year. For 2023, my card is the otter. I loved welcoming this joyful creature who, according to the explanation in…
This year in the MythBlast Series we’re exploring the symbols and archetypal images of the major arcana of the Tarot. A picture is worth a thousand words, or so the old saying goes, and the images of Tarot are laden…
Dark, dark, dark, dark, dark. The solstice will have come and gone by the time you read this, but the darkest time of the year (here in the northern hemisphere) is still the best time to chew through the inevitability…
“If you sow lightly, you reap Lightly. And a good crop Requires the kind of soil Where seeds sprout a hundred- Fold, for even good seed Dries up in dried-up ground. What Chrétien sows—the seeds He scatters—are the start of…
I am thrilled to write on the MythBlast Series’ monthly theme, “The Heroism of Failure.” Especially on the failure part, because I feel so qualified in the matter—so much relevant content from my past to choose from! Strange though it…
This month, the concluding month of the year, our MythBlast Series theme is The Heroism of Failure. Perhaps it’s proper to explore this topic at the end of the year because in some sense, endings and failure are, I think,…
The inscription on the curved aluminum surface reads simply: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.” Signed,— alongside signatures from the three astronauts—Richard Nixon. It’s…
This month’s MythBlast Series highlighted text is Joseph Campbell’s Myths To Live By. I leafed through my copy in Portuguese and nothing struck me. I like to think about things that make me curious to know more, and apparently there…
A few weeks ago, on October 25th, we observed St. Crispin’s Day. I recognize that it’s probably an exaggeration to say “we” observed it. This feast day was removed from the Roman Catholic Church’s universal liturgical calendar following Vatican II,…
Light and dark. Heat and cold. These are some of the primal archetypal polarities that underpin the world and its workings. For example, we experience these archetypes within the natural cycles of the earth. The Winter Solstice: dark and cold.…
I have noticed over the years, a characteristic of human beings–not quite a fatal flaw, but a potentially disabling one. It’s best described as the lack of congruence between the life they are living and the life they would like…
“I like the cover,” he said. “Don’t Panic. It’s the first helpful or intelligible thing anybody’s said to me all day.” Douglas Adams, A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy The 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics was just awarded to three…
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