The Wheel of Fortune tarot card serves as a poignant pointer to the sobering fact that we do not, and cannot, control the deep substrate behind our lived existence, even though we do instinctively and intuitively experience the presence of…
In Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: On the Art of James Joyce, Campbell embarks on a mythically based, archetypal study of James Joyce, beginning with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It is here that Campbell picks up the…
One day, long ago, the ever-spinning Wheel of Fortune found me sitting at a desk in an open office workspace, my back to a room full of coworkers. Absorbed in a document on my computer, I had just reached an…
What, if any, is the value in consulting the tarot? In an age where the rational mind reigns supreme, all forms of divination would seem little more than the fading traces of archaic superstition. After all, how could anything so…
The JCF theme this month of lovers, against the background of Campbell’s early academic work on medieval literature, has provided an opening for me to examine how gaining access to personal and creative autonomy directly invites otherwise marginalized voices to…
There’s a story to every scar, physical or emotional. And the scar tissue almost always remains (in some form or another). Especially with heartbreak. We’ve all read enough well-meaning articles to know that we should walk away from someone…
I am not exactly sure when I first heard “Wedding Song (There Is Love)” by Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul, and Mary, but I am quite sure it evoked what Joseph Campbell terms (in a reference from James Joyce) “aesthetic…
Joseph Campbell’s work is full of reflections on love. I like to think this is due to his successful marriage to his life partner, the dancer and modern dance choreographer Jean Eardman (1916–2020). In a Q&A session during Joseph Campbell’s…
Have you ever been in love? I was. I fell in love with an angel kissed by a demon. That’s how I experienced the hormonal havoc of adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin, and huge quantities of endorphins. It was as if I…
“Therefore, our first impression of the Card plunges us into the heart of the problem of the relationship between man and gravitation, and the conflicts that this relationship entails,” states the anonymous author in Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey…
Now this brings in a terrific emphasis on what the tender-minded call violence. But that’s what nature is. And every now and then…
Suspended between Strength and Death is the Hanged Man. He doesn’t look particularly concerned. The illustrator of the emblematic Smith-Waite tarot deck, Pamela “Pixie” Coleman Smith, portrayed him as seemingly unsurprised and unbothered by his situation. His hair dangles down,…
No one, I imagine, would like to draw the cards of Death, the Devil, the Tower, and the Hanged Man in tarot divination. You do not need to be a connoisseur of symbols to have the blood frozen in your…
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…
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