I have on a wall in my study at home in New Braunfels, Texas, a professionally framed letter from James Hillman to me dated 20 November 2000. It is one of several precious letters I received from him over the…
Myths that involve resurrection span cultures from the Pharaohs to the Pagans. We see them appear, be forgotten, and then reappear throughout history. From Passover to the Paschal Mystery, we continue to celebrate them in our modern day. Considerations of…
The deeper my relationship with Joseph Campbell, the more I see him everywhere—and not just what I come across for the Campbell in Culture posts I help curate. The references we hear about, the overt mentions, are just the surface. By now…
With the 1949 publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell accomplished the rare task of uniting wisdom with mainstream interest, presenting foundational patterns of human experience through the archetypal content embedded in the myths. His insights have…
Searching for the Face of Heroism in the Modern Era Joseph Campbell famously suggested that the hero has a thousand faces. While time and space have molded that hero into a vast number of different visages, we find ourselves constantly…
As we celebrate Joseph Campbell’s birthday this month, we can use the occasion to consider the mythological roots of our rituals of celebration. Sometimes we celebrate a one-time occasion, like a college graduation, getting a new job or promotion, or…
A love of wonder: according to Aristotle, this is what brought the lover of wisdom (Greek, philosophos) and the lover of myth (Greek, philomuthos) together. For Socrates, love was that most ancient of gods, Eros. For lovers and students of…
One of my favorite quotes by Joseph Campbell, in Myths to Live By, refers to Love as the burning point of life. When he elaborates, what we come to understand is that life is sorrowful, and so is love. And…
In Creative Mythology (Masks of God, Vol. IV), Joseph Campbell’s exquisite musings on love offer a palliative to the Hallmark-style simulacrum of Valentine’s Day love drenching this month in heart-shaped candies, teddy bears, and flowers. Why not gift your love…
The theme for the month of February at JCF is love, and February, with Valentine’s Day at its heart, is certainly the month to celebrate love. But there is another event every February that Americans love with an unrivaled intensity:…
In his 1944 preface to A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Joseph Campbell calls Joyce’s book “…a kind of terminal moraine in which lie buried all the myths, programs, slogans, hopes, prayers, tools, educational theories, and theological bric-a-brac of the…
The Role of Story in Crafting New Beginnings for Our Lives Most attribute the foundations of Western story structure to Aristotle. His simple idea that stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an end has long served as the…
I recently had the pleasure of reading Michelle Obama’s Becoming—a story, eponymously, about Michelle’s “becoming,” grateful for the accessibility of an autobiography that models the unfolding nature of finding one’s purpose. I think how different the experience of this text…
Many years from now, at the crossroads of our lives, our souls will want to remember the day our lives were given a fresh start. In such moments of reflection, the past, future, and present all seem to roll together…
This month, the first month of the new year, we begin again; and beginning again is, in fact, our theme for January at JCF. No doubt we’ll soon be inundated by numberless lists extolling the best and worst of the…
There is nothing more mythic than the ceremonies and stories that have gathered around the winter solstice. They are powerful metaphors that are present across cultures, irrespective of time and places, with the vastness of the skies as their native…
The winter solstice approaches and soon the sun’s course will reach its lowest noon altitude and its shortest day, marking both the end and beginning of another solar year. Hence, this day aligns itself with transmutation, with endings and beginnings,…
1986 saw the publication of three seminal books: The Society of Mind by MIT cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky, On the Plurality of Worlds by philosopher David Lewis, and The Inner Reaches of Outer Space by mythologist Joseph Campbell. In their…
There is a saying attributed to Hermes Trismegistus: “As above, so below; as within, so without” (The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean, p. 47). This means that whatever happens on any level of reality also happens on every other level—that…
W.H. Auden once remarked that a real book reads us, an observation that seems right enough to me, and certainly seems right to apply to the work of Joseph Campbell. After all, Campbell spent his life in conversation with the…
As we move into the holidays, experiencing the passage of seasons, the weather shifts to a cooler disposition, the world darkens early, and the sun’s transit diminishes, foretelling the coming winter lull. We light the home fires, pull up the…
For every profession, there’s a question people ask that isn’t the real question. When I was an actor, the question audience members asked was, “How do you learn all those lines?” when what they really meant was, “How do you…
For the month of November, we at the Joseph Campbell Foundation are exploring the theme of blessings. The comfortable blessings of bounty, family, and health are certainly likely to spring to mind, but there are difficult blessings, too. And these…
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