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The Sacrificial Wheel of Fortune

Icarus falling while Daedalus reaches out with open hands.

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…

As Beatrice to Dante

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…

Around and Around

Wheel of Fortune Tarot Card

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…

Requited Love

  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…

To Be Among You: The Mystery of Love

Lovers card from Modern Way Tarot

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…

Love, Lovers, and Choices

The Lovers Tarot Card. A male and a female with angel above.

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…

An Angel Kissed by a Demon

A painting of a couple kissing, one with angel wings.

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…

Between Heaven and Earth: The Hanged Man

Drawing of Yggdrasil showing two realms

“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…

The Hanged Man

                        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…

Rhythm of the Witch

Hippies National Portrait Gallery

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,…

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…

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