“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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...