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Mythblasts Category MythBlast

The Goddess of the Star Card: Lighting the Way Back

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…

The Star

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…

The Star of the Archetypal Imagination

  “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…

An Interplay of Opposites

Jean Erdman

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…

Wand Envy

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 Edge of the Precipice

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…

Merry Christmyth!

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…

The Seeds of a Story

“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…

Ecstatic Failure

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…

The Illusions of Failure

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,…

Joseph Campbell On the Moon

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…

We Happy Few

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,…

The Union of Purposeful Polarities

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.…

One Way to Avoid Hell

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…

Don’t Panic

“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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