Mythblasts Category MythBlast

This month, the MythBlast Series is centered on Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God, Vol. 3: Occidental Mythology. Given that we in America are celebrating the fourth of July on the day this MythBlast is published, and given that the…

When I was invited by Dr. Mary Watkins, director of Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Liberation Psychology program, to volunteer to teach a correspondence course with inmates from a California state prison, I responded to her request with a course on personal…

One more idea: mythology as the second womb—it must be constructed of the stuff of modern life. The tendency of the clergy is to hold to the past and therefore reject, not redeem, the contemporary world. A variant of this…

While in Tokyo on Wednesday, April 20, 1955, Joseph Campbell wrote in his journal about an item he read in the morning paper: Einstein’s formula for success: A = XYZ. A is success in life. X is work, Y is…

The journey into the mythic imagination which opens the abyss of the collective unconscious is not some fixed track devoid of reason. It is not a dead end for the creative intellect; it provides stores of food for speculative thinking…

In Chapter IV of The Masks of God, Vol. 2: Oriental Mythology, Joseph Campbell supplies his readers with a quote from the Buddha’s Fire Sermon, a dharma talk focused on renunciation and developing an “aversion” to the material world, including…

Life is hard; it wears us out. We are worn down by the tooth of time as well as luckless circumstances that are well beyond our personal control. We are worn down by people, especially those closest to us, as…

The pathways that guide people to the land of myth are many. For me, it was a path called art. Growing up in a small town in East Texas, storytelling was in the very air we breathed. However, I was…

“Read myths as newspaper reports by reporters who were there and it doesn’t work. Reread them as poems and they become luminous,” [9] writes Joseph Campbell in Myths of Light as he invites us to cultivate faithful, imaginal thinking and intuitive perception,…

One of the things that I find endearing about Joseph Campbell is that frequently in his writing, as well as his lectures, he displays a palpable enthusiasm for certain subjects. When I read Myths of Light, for example, I recognize…

Campbell was fond of talking about dualities and how getting beyond them forms a critical part of the hero’s journey: dualities like finite and infinite, transcendent and immanent, sacred and profane. The blooms of April provide us with an excellent…

Edgar Allan Poe once wrote a little piece called “The Imp of the Perverse,” and I do believe that there must be in the fashioners of piously held beliefs, all over the world, an exceptionally strong strain of the faculty…

There is a story from the ancient Hebrew tradition in II Samuel 12 where a king spots the beautiful wife of a young warrior bathing on her roof. He sends for her and the two sleep together shortly thereafter. Upon…

Once, a very long time ago, the Buddha preached a sermon to his followers by saying nothing at all. Instead of speaking, he held up a single flower. Only one listener, a monk named Mahakasyapa, heard what that flower had…

This month in the MythBlast Series, we’re focusing on Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God, Vol II: Oriental Mythology. On page 490 of that volume, Campbell quotes from “The Song of the Cowherd” by the poet Jayadeva: “Oh may this poem…delight…

Some have confused a mythology as nothing more than an elegantly-packaged ideology. Not so. Nor is it true to say that mythic figures are to be read as literal facts. The confusion commonly stems, as Campbell often repeated in his…

Art, among other things, is image-making. As a teacher of creative writing, I often emphasize the power of images due to their effectiveness in rendering experiences in our readers. Concrete language, which communicates to (and through) the senses, is what…

One of Campbell’s last projects, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, was developed from a series of lectures delivered in San Francisco. The series included a symposium at the Palace of Fine Arts with…

In The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and Religion, Joseph Campbell writes that the mythic metaphor, the mythic image, “is necessarily physical and thus apparently of outer space. The inherent connotation is always, however, psychological and metaphysical,…

“Mythology is the womb of mankind’s initiation to life and death,” states Joseph Campbell in his collection of essays titled, The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension. (34) Death and rebirth myths exist in various forms in…

Anytime I read, and especially reread, Joseph Campbell’s books, I feel like I am in a personal conversation with a priest or a confessor, one who understands the need for the transcendent in our lives and is prepared to point…

There is no doubt that Joseph Campbell’s words sing – and not just his prose, but the titles he chooses as well: The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Masks of God, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, all have a…

All roots are dark, and the deeper they go the darker they get until they touch the light of the primal fire of the human soul. In Masks of God, Volume 1: Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell turns our gaze to…