Each week, an author in the JCF community contributes an essay interpreting our monthly theme and featured Campbell work. This little blast of mythology—a MythBlast—forms the centerpiece of our weekly newsletter, which also contains curated selections from our archives. Subscribe below to receive a weekly email with this springboard into myth, storytelling, and the work of Joseph Campbell
Labyrinth. Misch Kohn, 1955. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase.
“And my understanding of the mythological mode is that deities and even people are to be understood in this sense, as metaphors. It’s a poetic understanding.”
It’s the middle of winter. Bedtime. I hear a thump in the bedroom. I go in to find out what happened. My husband is lying in bed on his back, limbs rigid and shaking, jaw working, his unblinking gaze staring straight up. In the direct light from the ceiling, his wide-open eyes are fathomless emeralds that I’ve never seen before. A rush of adrenaline turns my vision crisp and clear as I dial 911—fire trucks and an ambulance fill the street—pulsing red lights in the dark—EMTs come inside and administer seizure medication—they carry him out on a canvas stretcher.
~
Thousands of years ago, in the labyrinthine caves of southern France, artists drew galleries of stylized horned bulls, majestic and fearsome. The Chauvet Cave has one figure with a man’s body and a bull’s head, arranged so that this early Minotaur overlaps and wraps another image, this one of a woman’s pubic triangle and upper legs. The artist had to have worked by firelight—smoke, flickering honey-colored light, hands brushing the rough stone, as images sprang into being where before there had been only blank rock.
Read more
Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine
It’s the day after my husband’s seizure. The doctors perform emergency surgery. They cross the threshold of his skull, venture into the cave of his brain, and try to release the pressure caused by a mass that appears on the MRI as a blurry zone without clear edges.
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Around 1400 BCE, on the island of Crete, in a civilization whose bull art dazzles us to this day, a clerk recorded an offering of honey to someone whose name is often translated as The Lady of the Labyrinth. Literally translated, however, her name would be “The Female God of the Labyrinth Who Has Great Power.” (T. Palaima 441, 448) Centuries later, mainland Greeks told a story of their hero Theseus, who sailed to Crete to kill a Minotaur who lived at the center of a labyrinth to end the human sacrifice the monster demands. But Theseus could only succeed with the help of Ariadne, whose name means Most Holy. Ariadne gave Theseus a sacred sword with which to kill the Minotaur, and a divine ball of thread to lead the way back out of the labyrinth.
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Three weeks after surgery. We sit in the surgeon’s office with more MRI scans. The mass is cancer, the doctor says. A brain tumor. My husband needs more surgery, this time at a specialist center in San Francisco. This time doctors will go in ready to confront the entity inside.
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The Cretan Minotaur was named Asterios, which means Starry One (C. Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks, 110-11), from the root astro, or star. So Asterios is a brilliant but dangerous being, an animate, cannibalistic star who inhabits the furthest reaches of the circuitous labyrinth.
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The Minotaur in the center of my husband’s brain has a name, too: Astrocytoma. It is a cancer of the astrocytes, which are star-shaped brain cells that play a supporting role for neurons. Astrocytoma demands the sacrifice of healthy cells to feed its hunger.
~
It’s the day of the second surgery. Along with anesthesia, the specialists administer medication that makes tumor cells glow when bathed in a blue light. Then they open my husband’s head again and reach inside with the aid of a surgical microscope fitted with a blue light. Now they can see the horned cells, the way ancient artists saw beings emerge on the cave walls, the way Theseus saw the brilliant Minotaur. By seeing the cells clearly, by bringing them into the realm of conscious inspection, the neurosurgeon can understand them and deal with them.
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The center is a pivot point, a discovery, a realization. It’s not the end of the adventure—you still have to make your way back out—but nothing will be the same again after you encounter the star within.
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With the help of that technological blue thread, the medical team does such incredible work that they send my husband home with no further treatment needed. Miracle-drenched, we enter the new labyrinth of recovery, knowing nothing of what comes next.
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The labyrinth removes us from linearity. It’s a bubble that pauses the flow of time and reminds us of the limits of logic and planning. Labyrinths derange our routines and teleport us into the present moment to face our inner starry animals, so shockingly similar to ourselves, potentially so dangerous. But Ariadne presides. She stands ready to help. Her thread turns the labyrinth into the simplest possible map. Just follow the path. The labyrinth itself will lead you.
~
What labyrinths have you walked, literally or metaphorically, and what surprises have you found in the center? How has Ariadne’s thread guided you? Join us in Conversations of a Higher Order to share your thoughts.
Foreword to Marija Gimbutas’s The Language of the Goddess (Esingle)
Our gift to you this month is short ebook.
Access this download for free until the end of the month.
One of the last things that Joseph Campbell wrote, this foreword reflects Campbell’s most developed thoughts on the subject of the Great Goddess.
News & Updates
On Janmashtami[August 30] Hindus celebrate the birthday of Krishna who once said, “Of that which is born, death is inevitable. Of that which is dead, birth is inevitable.”
Weekly Quote
Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.
“In The Way of Myth, the culminating book of the prolific Dennis Patrick Slattery’s career, I find an abundance of wonder and a plenitude of what the poet-astronomer Rebecca Elson called our ‘responsibility to awe.’ For him, mythology is everywhere if only we develop “the mythic slant,” the ability to see its wild wisdom all around us. What vitalizes his writing is how he encourages the reader to venture beyond theory to experience one of the least appreciated aspects of mythology—the sheer joy that can come from identifying with its characters—to the point where we no longer feel alone in our own struggles.
The sheer range here of essays, poems, reminiscences, reviews and retellings underscores Slattery’s ardent belief that mythmaking is one of the constants in cultures throughout history. I especially value his uncanny awareness of what he calls the ‘weathervanes of the soul,’ the cultural devices, if you will, found in art, literature, theater and cinema, as well as in sports, religion, psychiatry, nature and our romantic lives, which indicate the direction of our mythologically-inclined minds.”
Featured Work
Goddesses
While Joseph Campbell’s work reached wide and deep as he covered the world’s great mythological traditions, he never wrote a book on goddesses in world mythology. He did, however, have much to say on the subject.
Editor Safron Rossi collected over twenty of Campbell’s lectures and workshops on goddesses to create this evocative volume. Campbell traces the evolution of the feminine divine from one Great Goddess to many, from Neolithic Old Europe to the Renaissance. He sheds new light on classical motifs and reveals how the feminine divine symbolizes the archetypal energies of transformation, initiation, and inspiration.
Book Club
Walking in the Sacred Manner
By Mark St. Pierre and Tilda Long Soldier
“Walking in the Sacred Manner celebrates Plains Indian people, their spiritual traditions, and history from the moment of creation to the present day. Through extensive interviews with traditional holy women and their relatives, Mark St. Pierre and Tilda Long Soldier weave a tapestry of memory and story full of beauty and compassion, bound to the old ways of knowing…”
Leon Aliski, PhD
Editorial Advisory Group
Joseph Campbell Foundation
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Joanna Gardner, PhD is the Director of Marketing and Communications at the Joseph Campbell Foundation, where she also serves as Managing Editor of the Skeleton Key Study Guide series and the lead author of Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide. Joanna is an adjunct professor in Pacifica Graduate Institute's Mythological Studies program and a founder of the Fates and Graces Mythologium, an annual conference for mythologists and friends of myth. Joanna’s fiction, poetry, and nonfiction appear in a variety of venues, available at joannagardner.com/stories. 
~From the Foreword by Phil Cousineau
