Shopping Cart

No products in the cart.

Mythblasts Category NewsBlast

Reflections upon a Hawaiian Graveyard

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…

The Sacredness of Rituals

“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…

Temptations of Clarity

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…

The Boundary-Blurring Nature of Myth

double exposure

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…

The Rhythmic Cadence of Life

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…

Fools Rush In

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…

When Mythology Meets Dance and Sounds

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…

When the Adventure is a Drag

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…

A Call to a Collective Adventure

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…

Tossing the Golden Ball

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…

The King Who Saved Himself From Being Saved

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…

The River Erdman

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…

Don’t Look Up: The Doomsday Dilettante

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…

Missteps as a Redemptive Path to Destiny

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?…

Cunneware’s Laugh: The Enticement of Delight

At first glance, the frivolous dilettante seems an unlikely aspect of the archetypal hero. In the outcome-driven culture that most of us inhabit, dilettantes are creatures of a certain derision: we see them as dabblers, superficial and affected, interested in…

Rocking New Year’s Eve

Welcome to another New Year, still in its childhood—a toddler beginning its adventure. Popular culture routinely portrays the New Year this way, as a Child watched over by a kindly and fatherly Old Year, usually in the form of an…

NewsBlast | Joseph Campbell’s Correspondence available for the first time

We are excited to announce a unique new addition to the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell, Correspondence: 1927–1987! New World Library, Joseph Campbell Foundation’s longtime publishing partner, has released a fascinating collection of letters that captures ongoing conversations between famed mythologist…

MythBlast | The Paradox of the Outsideness of Myth

I have been rediscovering Campbell’s collection of essays on Asian mythology, Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal, as the Joseph Campbell Foundation and publishing partners have preparing to release it as an audio book and eBook.These are some of Campbell’s most accessible…

NewsBlast | The Mythic Dimension is now open to you!

We are delighted to be able to bring you two new editions of The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959–1987. This exciting collection is now available in ebook and audiobook formats, as well as in paperback. The Mythic Dimension presents twelve eclectic, far-ranging,…

Subscribe to JCF’s email list to receive a weekly MythBlast newsletter along with occasional news and special offers from JCF.