From Correspondence: 1927 – 1987 (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell): [Barbara Morgan (July 8, 1900 – August 17, 1992) was an American photographer best known for her depictions of modern dancers. She was a cofounder of the photography magazine…
When I was in graduate school studying mythology, I volunteered in the archives that housed Joseph Campbell’s papers. My job was to create high-resolution scans of Campbell’s personal photos—baby pictures, childhood, youth, adulthood, snapshots from his later years. Sitting…
When I lived on a mesa in northern New Mexico, one summer night I left every window open so the starlit, indigo air could cool the house after a long, hot day. It seemed like I had barely fallen asleep…
Stories of heroes and their exploits occupy an important place in the collective imagination. The hero leaves the familiar, struggles through the dreaded dark night of the soul, and emerges as savior, role model, leader, and teacher. Heroes, mortal and…
“The axiom is worth recalling here, because mythology was historically the mother of the arts and yet, like so many mythological mothers, the daughter, equally, of her own birth. Mythology is not invented rationally; mythology cannot be rationally understood. Theological…
Art imitates life. I look like the crazy father, just like they said. I look like the crazy father just like they said about Richard Williams. But love will make you do crazy things. Will Smith Although what the world…
I am standing in a Hawaiian graveyard looking down at the final resting place of Joseph Campbell. My wife is in the car with our eleven-month-old grandson, waiting. Waiting for me to come to some sort of conclusion about why…
Who’s not intrigued by boundaries? The markers of where a thing ends and another begins. Or they can be approached as meeting places where distinct phenomena bump up against each other. Or they can simply be that all-too-familiar frontier that…
“Individualism is perfectly fine if the individual realizes that the grandeur of his being is that of representing something,” writes Joseph Campbell in The Hero’s Journey. “Even representing a system of ideals and images that the rest of the world…
Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius. William Blake, Proverbs of Hell The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy It turns out that all boundaries…
This month in the MythBlast Series, we’re exploring the relationship of blurred boundaries to heroism. Anyone who has ever been in psychotherapy is likely to be familiar with the no-nonsense injunction to have clear, defined boundaries, to prevent others from…
In this MythBlast, I want to contrast the words of the dancer Isadora Duncan (as quoted by Joseph Campbell in The Ecstasy of Being) with my own thoughts on rhythm. Rhythm in art and in the art of life is…
In the first essay of his collection The Ecstasy of Being, “The Jubilee of Content and Form,” Joseph Campbell writes that after fairy tales and folklore were shoved to the wayside in favor of “modern, scientifically-grounded disbelief” that “the great…
I first heard of the 11th-century bronze Shíva Naṭarāja statue in 1991, while watching Power of Myth—the television series that made Campbell famous in Brazil, at least to me and others of my generation. In the book based on the…
To begin, I offer you two words: Atychiphobia. Kakorrhaphiophobia. Dive into them past the vague gloss of vowels and consonants as we are wont to do with unknown words; say them aloud, and you will find that they roll off…
The Joseph Campbell Foundation MythBlast Series has spent March musing about The Adventure and reading Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss which, let’s face it, sounds exciting: filled with presentiment, and descriptive of that happy flow state you can taste when deeper…
In 1968, singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson tried to make a phone call and heard a sound familiar to anyone that remembers the age before cell phones. Beep, beep, beep, beep. The sound not only informed the caller that the party they…
Myths do not ground, they open. James Hillman In The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Campbell revealed the myth of the hero’s transformation and invited us to locate our lives in this myth. When you enter the metaphor of the…
Joseph Campbell reminds us in Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation: Perfection is inhuman. Human beings are not perfect. What evokes our love – and I mean love, not lust – is the imperfection of the human being. So,…
Heroism and Adventure, the theme of this month’s MythBlast Series essays, seem to me to be a linked pair. Reflexively, I think, we imagine adventure as a going out, an extension into the world, a leaving of the known, familiar…
Jean Marion Erdman (Feb. 20, 1916 – May 4, 2020) was a dancer and avant-garde theatrical artist who was married to Joseph Campbell for 49 years until his death in 1987. In celebration of Erdman’s birthday, we can examine the unfolding…
Despite all rumors to the contrary, Don’t Look Up is not about climate change (spoilers ahead). An incoming comet, being a purely natural phenomenon independent of human influence, would in fact be a bad analogy for the problem of climate…
In a crisis our life often feels out of control, as if we have lost our quintessentially human dignity of character. But how can we retain our dignity while also building the courage to move forward without first experiencing oblivion?…
Subscribe to JCF’s email list to receive a weekly MythBlast newsletter along with occasional news and special offers from JCF.