“This first stage of the mythological journey—which we have designated the “call to adventure”—signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown.” --Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 48. The conditions under which destiny summons the hero are reconfigured and recast in every time, every place, and every generation. How about you? What was it like when you heard the “call to adventure?” I’ll bet many of our readers experienced a moment of vocational clarity and gave up one life to pursue another. That’s classic. Eligibility for that sweet moment of mystical awakening is not reserved for Buddhas and Brahmins but extends even to common laborers. I speak of my grandfather. I come from a long line of such heroes beginning with my namesake, John Bonaduce, born in the lovely Abruzzi region of Eastern Italy by the shores of the Adriatic in 1902. As a teen he dug ditches while his father became a carrettieri, or freight handler, driving two decrepit mules across several Italian provinces. This was the time just after the end of World War I when Nonno (the Italian familiar for “grandfather”) and his myth found one another.  At the time, Nonno was angry because he felt his father had betrayed the family. Instead of purchasing a new four-cylinder truck to replace the mules he’d worked to death, the paterfamilias returned to Abruzzi with two more mules. The little Italian boy had visions of a technological future—internal combustion engines, electricity, telephones—but simultaneously, he was gripped by images of a romantic past, a non-Italian past, indeed, he yearned to embrace what was then arguably the greatest myth of the Americas. He wanted to be a cowboy. He told his father that very night that he was leaving for America. It was not a sensible decision. It was not grounded in any of the pressing necessities of life.  He had the kind of single-hearted madness which Campbell notes in artists, but certainly applies to my Italian forebear in particular. “Survival, security, personal relationships, prestige, self-development—in my experience, those are exactly the values that a mythically inspired person doesn’t live for. They have to do with the primary biological mode as understood by human consciousness. Mythology begins where madness starts. A person who is truly gripped by a calling, a dedication, by a belief, by a zeal, will sacrifice his security, will sacrifice even his life, will sacrifice personal relationships, will sacrifice prestige, and will think nothing of personal development; he will give himself entirely to his myth. (Pathways to Bliss, p. 138) Blame it on the movies. Campbell’s monomyth translates very well to celluloid and the Westerns of the day not only tended toward depictions of the hero’s journey but also inspired the desire to live that adventure in the hearts of impressionable peasants. Destiny summoned my grandfather that day in the new medium of motion pictures and his plan came into sharp relief at exactly 26 minutes into a full-length silent film, The Squaw Man, when he saw a close up of a man’s finger pointing to a map. It was a map of Wyoming in letters that spanned twenty feet of silver screen. From this point, the narrative seemed to speak to him not so much as an entertainment, but a prefigurement of the rest of his life. In DeMille’s epic, the hero crosses a wine dark sea to seek his fortune and escape from his European circumstances. He experienced Campbell’s “road of trials” as surely as any Argonaut, slipping the clashing rocks of competing cultures to find his singular path. There were many dangers at every turn but there were also unseen hands helping him in the form of a Native American woman who would save his life, and whom he would marry. Racists call it miscegenation. Mythologists call it the heiros gamos, the sacred marriage. America, already saturated in its own mythology, triggered some innate releasing mechanism in my grandfather who saw his own future projected at 24 frames per second, demonstrating that a European can wear a Stetson, strap on a six-shooter, and who knows, marry a Native American and live happily ever after (although the Native American love interest called “Nat-U-Rich,” a member of the Ute tribe, dies at the end of the movie). The transAtlantic passage was brutal on a teenager whose experience of the sea was limited to the gentle lapping of the Adriatic where he had grown up. Ellis Island was the crossing of the threshold for generations of displaced Europeans and here he met his first threshold guardians, the ones whose job it is to screen aliens for Typhus and misspell their names—this is where Berkowitz becomes Burk and Rossini, Ross. (Nonno stubbornly clung to every vowel of his noble surname). Remember what Campbell said about the “blunder” as oftentimes key to the ongoing quest. “A blunder—the merest chance—reveals an unsuspected world.” The mistake upon which the subsequent family fortune rests took place the second night in the New World. When Nonno got to the train station in Philadelphia he had the word W-Y-O-M-I-N-G block printed on a piece of paper just as he had seen it in the DeMille silent film. Overland passage by train cost far less than he imagined and after boarding, the scruffy Italian wayfarer slid his front-snap Gatsby cap over his eyes and tried to sleep… “Wyoming!” shouted the conductor. Really? How long had he been asleep? It seemed that even with his rudimentary grasp of geography, a trip to Wyoming should have taken much longer. He got off the train. Thus, would my grandfather spend the next twenty-two years digging for anthracite in the mines of Wyoming, Pennsylvania alongside other men who had made similar journeys, whose dreams slowly died in the daily katabasis into the mines. I will resist the temptation to check all the boxes of the monomyth because the value is diminished if too rigidly applied. However, we could make the case for Nonno’s “meeting of the goddess,” resulting in the heiros gamos (his marriage to the beautiful Michaelina Minicozzi) or the atonement with the father (Nonno’s eldest son, Joseph, returned to Italy after the war to keep his father’s promise only to arrive two weeks after the old freight handler had passed away). Long before Star Wars turned our attention to the hidden framework of the hero’s adventure, there were the Westerns with Wyoming, Montana, Utah, and the whole American southwest standing in for the eternal void of space, and populated by the same cast of archetypes, albeit armed with Colt .45’s instead of lightsabers. Campbell’s insights are great by virtue of their astonishing universality, equally applicable to an Achaean mariner washed up naked on a Phaeacian shore or an Italian laborer asleep in a Philadelphia lumber yard dreaming of Wyoming. MythBlast authored by: John Bonaduce, PhD, a seasoned writer for Norman Lear and for most of the major Hollywood studios (Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros, et al.) developed a profound interest in story structure beyond the commercial objectives of the industry. His exploration led him to conclude that much of what we call myth derives from a biological origin. This insight inspired his pursuit of deeper relationships between biology and narrative through his theory of Mythobiogenesis, which he explored in his dissertation at Pacifica Graduate Institute and was recognized as a “discovery” in the field of prenatal psychology by Dr. Thomas Verny. John was recently appointed to the editorial board of the Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health (JOPPPH) where he advocates for an unrecognized level of human consciousness which exists at the border of biology and mythology. As a featured writer for the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s MythBlast, he passionately showcases Joseph Campbell’s enduring relevance to a modern audience. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to John J. Bonaduce, 12437 Sylvan St., No. Hollywood, CA 91606 or jbonaduce52@gmail.com This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 4, and Pathways to Bliss. Latest Podcast In this episode we welcome Ben Katt. Ben has been helping people experience deep transformation and access lives of greater joy, compassion, and purpose for the past twenty years. His first book, The Way Home: Discovering the Hero’s Journey to Wholeness at Midlife, is a guidebook and memoir about the inner journey we all must embark on in order to live our fullest lives. He writes regularly about identity, purpose, creativity, and belonging in his STILL newsletter on Substack. He is a certified advanced meditation teacher with 1 Giant Mind, holds a Master of Divinity degree, and was an ordained minister for over a decade. Previously, he led The On Being Project’s work in supporting religious and spiritual leaders in social healing. In the conversation, Ben and Tyler Lapkin of the Joseph Campbell Foundation speak about Ben’s life, why he based his book around Campbell’s hero’s journey, what it means to have your heart, the necessity of following your weird, and why midlife is such an important crossroads for us all. To learn more about Ben and his book, visit https://www.benjaminkatt.com/ Listen Here This Week's Highlights "The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding . . . It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal — carries the cross of the redeemer — not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair." -The Hero With A Thousand Faces, 337 Kundalini Yoga: Solar & Lunar Energy Pathways (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Sometimes science can blinker us to what we’ve been myth-ing. How can you know what you already knew? When the now becomes new, that’s how. For instance: I’ve enjoyed annoying my colleagues over in psychology for some decades now by reminding them that they are, technically and by definition, engaged in a science (“-ology”) of the soul (“psyche” in ancient Greek). They don’t always think that’s funny. Sometimes the great success of our scientific approach to the world blinkers us with a set of cultural lenses that can keep us from coming to know what we already knew, and keep us from knowing it in new ways. Like this: when it comes to the psyche we might feel smugly moderne, but the Indus Valley civilization will always be a few thousand years ahead of the West when it comes to thinking about the soul. What “the West” once understood as superstition comes back to us now as a rather advanced, and useful, description of human psychology. Kundalini yoga. I’ve dipped my toes into contemporary psychology and have a pretty good grasp of Jung and Freud and Skinner, but none of them have ever been more useful to me as a way of understanding my fellow human beings than Campbell’s interpretation of the first three chakras in the kundalini system. If you need a touchstone, imagine these symbolic representations as a prefiguration of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (check out the video of Prof. Campbell’s lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG5Ml82A3vA). Now, of course, we’re accustomed to hearing New Agers talk about “balancing their chakras,” glowing mystical orbs floating in the candy box of contemporary esoterica, but fixating on the woo woo of occult glamor can distract us from the useful implications these ancient observations have for real life in the twenty first century West. What “the West” once understood as superstition comes back to us now as a rather advanced, and useful, description of human psychology. Kundalini yoga. The system starts at the base of the spine with chakra one. This is where we find a concentration of the psychological complexes associated with our instinctive processes: the reflexive clinging to what we believe, rightly or often wrongly, is required for survival. Campbell’s insight is that this can be represented symbolically by the idea of western dragons. Now western dragons are well-known hoarders – unlike Asian dragons which represent the fullness of prosperity in life – and they famously hoard two things in particular: gold and virgins.  Here’s the key: these are two things for which dragons have no use whatsoever. Even as a youngster reading The Hobbit I remember wondering what it was, exactly, that Smaug found so compelling about hoarding gold. It’s shiny, but you know something else must be going on there. You know people like this – sometimes it’s ourselves. We cling to things out of reflex, very often things we don’t truly need or even want. And it is possible, for many people, to go through their entire lives at this level. It is a rather wonderful explication of the role tanha, craving or desire, plays in Buddhist analyses of suffering. If we’re able to resolve or sublimate these impulses, we find ourselves ready to confront chakra two: sex. This encounter typically occurs as we move from childhood into adulthood. After freeing ourselves from the reflexive clinging to what we believe we need for survival, sex is usually the next set of complexes that confront us. While just as psychologically fraught as the fears that characterize life lived purely for survival, sex is a lot more fun. Addictive, even. I’ll leave you to fill in your own examples of people stuck at this stage of their spiritual or psyche-ological development. I suspect this set of complexes is common to all of us – and we all know people who never quite manage to get further along in life than this but, if you do, you end up immersed in the complexes of chakra three: a fire-in-the-belly for worldly success. Chakra three is, appropriately, at the level of the belly. Looking back you can trace this developmental pathway in most humans: childish fears about life which, when conquered, allow us to migrate into a time of sexual awakening and preoccupation that in turn eventually gives way to a sense of social responsibility, family life, career, and attention to the financial and political power structures that govern our adult lives. These first three spheres of human development characterize the world of daily experience: navigating the psychological impulses surrounding fear, sex, and social interactions. It’s where most of us live most of the time.  Let’s add one more chakra for some perspective. Chakra four, at the level of the heart, is characterized by compassion – the ability to experience the suffering of others. Achieving a grasp of chakra four is generally the stated goal of most of the world’s religions and you can find plenty of evidence for the psyche-ological insight this hierarchy of complexes provides, but here’s the easiest way to think about it: as compelling as any one of these psychological complexes might be for someone, they’ll find that the next level up is even more compelling. Fear is trumped by the desire for sex and sex can be trumped by the desire for worldly power – and, most remarkably when you think about it, the desire for worldly power is very often trumped by compassion for others. The wealthy will often walk away from their source of power, wealth, and self-validation to commit themselves to the welfare of others. That’s exactly what history describes as a religious awakening. But at this point we move into rather more rarefied psyche-ological development.  Saints are more difficult to understand than those committed to business. as compelling as any one of these psychological complexes might be for someone, they’ll find that the next level up is even more compelling. Fear is trumped by the desire for sex and sex can be trumped by the desire for worldly power – and, most remarkably when you think about it, the desire for worldly power is very often trumped by compassion for others. But, contributions like these, from what we often characterize merely-as-myth can help us fill in exactly what we were myth-ing – and makes what we know, (k)new. Thanks for musing along. MythBlast authored by: Mark C.E. Peterson is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies and past president of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture. Originally from Honolulu, raised in Minneapolis, Uppsala, Sweden, Chicago, Mobile, and Toronto. I’ve lived in Riga and Shanghai and West Bend, Wisconsin. A practitioner of taijiquan and kundalini yoga for over 40 years, I'm also a member of the Ukulele World Congress. This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 4, and Pathways to Bliss. Latest Podcast Joseph Campbell speaks at the University of Arkansas, in 1973, discussing personal myth and the life of the soul. Host, Brad Olson, offers an introduction and commentary after the talk in this episode of the Pathways podcast. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "What the virgin birth represents is the birth of the spiritual life in the human animal. It has nothing to do mythologically with a biological anomaly. In the Indian kuṇḍalinī system the first three cakras are our animal zeal to life, animal erotics, and animal aggression. Then at the level of the heart there is the birth of a purely human intention, a purely human realization of a possible spiritual life which then puts the others in secondary place. " -Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, 258. The Radiance Behind All Things (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. (John 12:24, NIV) The term sacrifice has become somewhat of a dirty word over the course of my life. This changeover began in the 1970s with the ascent of the “Me Generation” of Baby Boomers. However, the creeping selfishness of this period of time has not diminished. Reinforced by social norms, an ever-present pressure to acquire rather than to give up, lurks behind much of our modern thoughts and actions. Even the literary and filmic heroes we so admire, with whatever sacrifices that they make on their journeys, almost always in the end get to participate in what Joseph Campbell called “the boon” or the benefit they bring back to the collective. Very rarely does a fictional hero climb to the heights of popular culture whose story involves making the ultimate sacrifice—forfeiting their very life for a boon that they cannot experience. However, inevitably such “A Hero Will Rise” and this is indeed the subtitle of the 2000 DreamWorks film Gladiator, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russell Crowe. With a sequel to this movie currently in production, I will turn my mythic inquiry to the original film–set in a highly fictionalized Imperial Rome–to see what a fresh examination of it, incorporating Campbell’s ideas of The Power of Myth episode “Sacrifice and Bliss,” could offer us (please note the typical warning of spoilers to come). Even before we are introduced to Gladiator’s protagonist Maximus (Crowe) as the head of the Roman army, we see daydream images of him walking through a wheat field, his hand brushing the sheaf tops, which are ready for harvest. Soon after he awakes from this reverie, we learn that General Maximus is actually a farmer who longs to return home to his agrarian life after an epic battle that ends a long campaign. Yet Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) has one last duty for him: to become “The Protector of Rome” and oversee its transition from an imperial state to a Republic after Caesar’s death. Making Endings and Beginnings Sacred The archetypes of birth and death are, for Campbell, the main concerns of sacrifice. The loss of something—its being given up or dying—is “made sacred” (sacer: “sacred”; facere: “to make”) because something is being born. “Unless there is death, there cannot be birth,” he asserts to Bill Moyers in the Sacrifice and Bliss episode of The Power of Myth. “Every generation has to die in order that the next generation should come. As soon as you beget or give birth to a child, you are the dead one; the child is the new life, and you are simply the protector of that new life.” In the fictional Rome of Gladiator, the dying generation is that of the Caesars, and the “child” coming into being is the Republic. Echoing Campbell’s word, Marcus wants to pass the initial protector role to Maximus. Maximus’s self-concept is as a farmer first, a warrior second, and not at all a political participant. He views himself as the wheat we see in the film’s first image: ready for harvest in a rural backwater of the Empire, at the end of a journey, not at the start of another. Both longing for the comfort of his old way of life and not wanting to take on a new one, Maximus hesitates, an action which Campbell has labeled “the hero’s refusal of the call” (see Michael Lambert’s January 28th MythBlast). Consequently, Marcus’s immoral son, Commodus, kills his father and assumes the throne, ostensibly ending Marcus’s “dream of Rome.” In doing so, Maximus falls under the power of Commodus, who orders him and his family killed. While Maximus escapes, his family does not, and his farm is burned. Remarking on the refusal of the call Campbell states, “Whatever house [the refuser] builds, it will be a house of death” (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, pg. 49). Thus, Maximus’ clinging to the life he planned led to its demise. He is eventually enslaved, becomes a gladiator, and must fight his way to Rome to fulfill the role at which he initially balked, and to exact his revenge on Commodus. No Death, No Birth The metaphorical death of Maximus the Farmer/General is the seed of his new journey, for, as Campbell paraphrased the idea found in John 12:24, “If the seed does not die, there is no plant” (A Joseph Campbell Companion, pg. 19). Under the mentorship of the retired gladiator Proximo (Oliver Reed), Maximus learns the ways of “winning the crowd.” This idea of pleasing the people will eventually be sublimated into benefiting the people, as Maximus’ goal is to end Commodus’s tyranny for the sake of all of Rome. As a general, he had fought for one person—his father-figure, Marcus Aurelius. Now he fights for the collective. The film's ending beautifully merges the themes of sacrifice and bliss, death and birth. Commodus agrees to face Maximus in single combat in the Colosseum but treacherously stabs him before the duel to gain advantage. As Maximus fights and bleeds to death, he begins to see visions of the bliss of the afterlife—a reunion with his wife and son, and a return to his agrarian life. Elysium awaits and even tempts him, but he has not yet bestowed on Rome the ultimate boon. Maximus, in a final burst of herculean effort, kills Commodus. As he openly declares Rome’s transition to a republic before dying, Maximus succeeds in being the Protector of Marcus’s dream. His death marks the birth of the new Rome, a Rome from which he himself will not experience benefit. His sacrifice produces the seeds of freedom from imperial authority. At the same time, he himself is born into immortality and a much more spiritual wheat to harvest than his original, mundane goal. Time to Harvest, Time to Plant How are all of us non-gladiators supposed to see ourselves in this story? We are all, at the same time, both the wheat and the seed within. We are growing and evolving where we are planted, yet there exists within us potential for more in life, more that might require death and replanting. The call to extend beyond our current paradigm (like Maximus’s Farmer/General) may come when we think we are ready for harvest and the enjoyment of our labors. But as Campbell often repeated, “We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us” (A Joseph Campbell Companion, pg. 18). That getting-rid-of process is the symbolic death and sacrifice. Yet our losses are made sacred through the boons that come through our new callings, new paradigms, and new crops. Many folks have adopted Campbell’s saying “Follow your bliss,” but perhaps more accurate would be to say “Follow your sacrifices to your bliss.” Even though it contains that “problematic word,” it would more deeply reflect the wisdom of what I believe Campbell was conveying. MythBlast authored by: Scott Neumeister is a literary scholar, author, TEDx speaker, and mythic pathfinder from Tampa, Florida, where he earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of South Florida in 2018. His specialization in multiethnic American literature and mythology comes after careers as an information technology systems engineer and a teacher of English and mythology at the middle school and college levels. Scott coauthored Let Love Lead: On a Course to Freedom with Gary L. Lemons and Susie Hoeller, and he has served as a facilitator for the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Myth and Meaning book club at Literati. This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 4, and Pathways to Bliss. Latest Podcast In this episode we welcome Ben Katt. Ben has been helping people experience deep transformation and access lives of greater joy, compassion, and purpose for the past twenty years. His first book, The Way Home: Discovering the Hero’s Journey to Wholeness at Midlife, is a guidebook and memoir about the inner journey we all must embark on in order to live our fullest lives. He writes regularly about identity, purpose, creativity, and belonging in his STILL newsletter on Substack. He is a certified advanced meditation teacher with 1 Giant Mind, holds a Master of Divinity degree, and was an ordained minister for over a decade. Previously, he led The On Being Project’s work in supporting religious and spiritual leaders in social healing. Ben is a perpetual student of religious, spiritual, and cultural wisdom and an expert at adapting ancient personal development practices for modern contexts to help people wake up to who they are and why they are here. He lives with his wife, three children, and a bunny in Milwaukee, WI where he enjoys walking by the lake, trail running, karaoke, and volunteering as a hospice companion. In the conversation, Ben and Tyler Lapkin of the Joseph Campbell Foundation speak about Ben’s life, why he based his book around Campbell’s hero’s journey, what it means to have your heart, the necessity of following your weird, and why midlife is such an important crossroads for us all. To learn more about Ben and his book, visit https://www.benjaminkatt.com/ Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Unless there is death, there cannot be birth. The significance of that is that every generation has to die in order that the next generation can come. As soon as you beget or give birth to a child, you are the dead one. The child is the new life, and you are simply the protector of that new life ." -Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, 137. The Ego and the Tao - Q&A (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Sigmund Freud wrote that in our mourning, the world becomes “poor and empty.” I felt something like that sensation in the days after hearing the news that a dear friend and JCF colleague passed away. Some of you reading this were fortunate enough to have met or known the magical Jimmy Maxwell, a beguilingly kind, generous, good-humored man who seemed to have never met a stranger. Jimmy was a Joseph Campbell Foundation Fellow, one who achieved success in their individual field and volunteered their time and talent to JCF. For years Jimmy has been helping us sort through, compile, cross reference, digitize, and otherwise clean up our extensive audio collection of recorded Joseph Campbell lectures. It was an Augean task, and his efforts in this regard were invaluable. Jimmy was a gifted and well-known bandleader, the pied piper of New Orleans live music generally and Mardi Gras specifically. The Jimmy Maxwell Orchestra is synonymous with the music of the New Orleans Mardi Gras and additionally, he was also the director of the Louis Armstrong Society Jazz Band. He has performed for U.S. presidents as well as members of the British royal family. He’s performed with the Neville Brothers, Harry Connick, Jr. (and Sr.), and for several years in the ‘80’s Jimmy partnered with Peter Duchin, the famed society band leader from New York City. In addition to being a first rate musician, he was a self-educated philosopher, but perhaps most of all, he was a story-teller. Whether musically or in quiet conversation, Jimmy enchanted, surprised, and captivated with his stories. In addition to being a first rate musician, he was a self-educated philosopher, but perhaps most of all, he was a story-teller. Whether musically or in quiet conversation, Jimmy enchanted, surprised, and captivated with his stories. But the one story he had the hardest time talking about, which is also the story that eventually brought Jimmy into our lives here at JCF, was the devastation wrought by 2005’s Hurricane Katrina upon his beloved New Orleans, her people, and his own psyche. Fortunately, Jimmy and his family were able to evacuate the city, but the loss of life among those who were unable to leave was staggering. The city was left in chaos, emergency services were overwhelmed, and the damage inflicted by the hurricane was appalling. Eighty percent of the city remained flooded for weeks and most of New Orleans's transportation and communication infrastructure were destroyed, leaving tens of thousands of residents struggling to survive with little access to food or shelter, and largely unable to meet even their most basic needs. The life he had been living was gone, people he cared about, landmarks—both personal and public—were gone, wiped away by a pitiless, “once-in-a-century” flood. Jimmy once told me he felt “broken” by these events, and in their aftermath he had lived a strange sort of half life, not really alive but not dead either, feeling helpless to know what to do for himself. Jimmy had begun reading Joseph Campbell years before in his longstanding, determined effort to make sense of life’s vicissitudes and complexities, and the March following Katrina, searching for ways out of his despair, he decided to dive more deeply into Campbell’s work by attending a “playshop” called “Your Hero’s Journey: A Mythological Toolbox,” which was facilitated at Esalen by Robert Walter, who at that time was the Joseph Campbell Foundation president. During the six-day playshop, through a range of deceptively playful exercises, participants in the playshop remember and explore significant life events and learn to recognize the human propensity to mythologize at work in their own lives. They gain a deeper understanding of the ways in which myth grows, evolves, and coalesces into a single, and singular, narrative. Participating in this workshop, one sees that the way one became oneself—how one was shaped and the patterns one’s life formed—isn’t accidental, nor is there at work a kind of supernaturally assigned destiny. The “self” is formed by a narrative woven together from a unique constellation of biological manifestations and personalized perspectives. And when life brings us to our knees, when we lose ourselves, it’s our helplessness that becomes our greatest asset. In the universe of the Grail Legends it seems that everything and everyone is connected—in Wolfram’s Parzival this is particularly so, and by recognizing those connections Parzival receives help at every turn. In the beginning, Parzival is utterly helpless, it’s true, but it is precisely that helplessness which becomes the greatest tool in his toolbox; helplessness inspires magic—another way to say this may be to say that helplessness catalyzes creativity, it’s the activator of enchantment. Perhaps it is helplessness itself that desires and searches for the Grail. Helplessness is also the spring from which morality flows, it helps us recognize the good and the just and, importantly, love. In his book, The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud saw helplessness as “…the primal source of all moral motives” and we learn through the experience of helplessness that what’s good for us is often good for others. I want it to be clear that I’m speaking of a particular kind of helplessness, a generative helplessness, a helplessness that is curious and determined to learn, helplessness that is anxious without panicking, earnest without being innocent, a helplessness born of the awe one feels standing in uncertainty overwhelmed by the sublime mystery of existence. Neurotic helplessness is needy, desperate, dependent, grasping, and greedy; the wrong sort of helplessness repels and nullifies love, but generative helplessness inspires love, perhaps that’s why the grail romances spend so much time describing romantic love and the helplessness and vulnerability that attend it. Jimmy returned to the Esalen playshop the following year, and again for a third year, and every year thereafter for nearly two decades, because he found the playshop to be so nourishing and transformative. His relationship with Bob and with Campbell’s work became supremely important in developing his ability to make some sense of, to contextualize and reimagine the catastrophe of Katrina. Not only did Jimmy spontaneously provide and coordinate musical entertainment in the evenings after the day’s activities (as well as a grander production for the celebration of Campbell’s birthday which always fell during the week of the playshop), that third year at Esalen he began discussing ways to become more involved in the foundation. These discussions led Jimmy to take on the responsibilities for curating the audio database—digitizing, organizing, and enhancing the numerous lectures Campbell recorded over the course of his career, dating back to wire recordings made in 1941. Jimmy was something of an autodidact, teaching himself not just sound engineering, the new digital technologies which were rapidly evolving, or Campbell and Schopenhauer. Most recently, right up until some weeks before his death, he was exploring and teaching himself about AI and all its diverse applications. Working with Joseph Campbell’s material helped him to make meaning out of seemingly meaningless tragedies and gave him exciting new insights into events with which he was long familiar. For instance, Campbell’s work helped him understand, for the first time, the mythic meaning underlying the Mardi Gras celebration. “They don’t realize what they’re doing!” he once remarked excitedly to Bob Walter as he unpacked the symbolism of Mardi Gras. Finally, with a musician’s impeccable timing, Jimmy made the Great Leap into the mysterium on Leap Day, February 29th. Over the past several years Jimmy and I had conversations about death, his own and death in general—after all, it’s an irresistible topic and virtually dripping with inevitability. And yet, his indomitable joy in living, and his resolute determination to continue to do so, made it difficult to imagine that that day, Leap Day, would in fact, arrive. Death is a fundamentally impenetrable mystery of life, and it’s a mystery that, no matter how desperately we seek answers from it and for it, remains indifferent to human inquiry. What we do know is that life and death define one another; we wouldn’t recognize the one without the other. They’re inextricably linked in such a way that it suggests to me that they are likely one and the same. It appears to be impossible to know with certainty anything about the most important features or aspects of life, and death is no exception. We lurch through life hoping to uncover some vital piece of information that will, at long last, free us from an existential detention center and let us finally and freely live, rather than merely survive. But science, theology, and philosophy have been epistemologically inadequate when it comes to navigating what the poet Theodore Roethke called that “dark world where the gods have lost their way.” Therefore, we must here turn away from words and rather, feel or sense our way through the dark world, for this world is not made up of clearly drawn boundaries: up is not always up and down is not always down. Evil wins more often than it should, and good is sometimes mistaken for evil. That indistinctness, that grayness, covers the universe and embeds itself in time so that the very flow of it–its seconds, minutes, hours, and days–distorts, transforming one into another, making the languid second seem like days, while decades pass in the blink of an eye. But there are hints of something in us, Walt Whitman insists, that is without name. It is a word unsaid, it is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol. Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on, To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me. … Do you see O my brothers and sisters? It is not chaos or death—it is form, union, plan—it is eternal life—it is Happiness. Whitman goes on to say that he wishes he could find words to give to this presence, this indivisibility, this homogeneity, this indomitable, this perfect, inexhaustible dynamism of life… All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it (Song of Myself). It’s lucky to die?! I wish I could ask Jimmy if this is so. Pour a dram or two of a nice scotch and sit back while he regales me with tales of his sojourn through that “undiscovered country.” Perhaps he’d tell me the same thing Dante wrote in the Inferno: “Do not be Afraid; Our Fate Cannot be Taken From Us; it is a Gift.” Our fate is a gift. It’s lucky to die. Those like Walt Whitman, whose imagination was able to reach far enough into the Mysterium and pick up the straws in the wind, have always described an experience of death that is far, far removed from the mawkishly saccharine, schmaltzy idea of heaven or the ghastly, unrelenting and overdetermined image of hell. It seems, judging from such “letters from the front,” that the reality of it remains largely unimaginable, but death is without a doubt “different from what anyone supposed.” The great challenge is to see that one’s own fate—the one life that we have and must live—is also the life that we must love and experience as fully as possible, despite everything and no matter what happens in the living of it. However, there lies within the explorations of our own mortality an even greater achievement, a boon, if I might borrow a word from Campbell, and it is precisely this: to understand, as Dante did, that our fate will not, nor cannot, be taken from us. Our fate won’t be altered, renovated, or retrofitted. Despite all our efforts, we must live the life that we have. The great challenge is to see that one’s own fate—the one life that we have and must live—is also the life that we must love and experience as fully as possible, despite everything and no matter what happens in the living of it. The gift is discovered living this way, and it’s the most precious gift we could possibly receive, for by accepting our lives as they are, not needing or wanting anything to be different than it is, we make it possible to experience complete freedom. Jimmy Maxwell certainly aimed to do that and, suffering his loss, sad are the daughters of Mnemosyne. Silent, too, is the house of weeping, wine-dark Dionysos. Thanks for reading, To learn more about the extraordinary life of Jimmy Maxwell, go to https://everloved.com/life-of/james-maxwell/ MythBlast authored by: Bradley Olson, Ph.D. is an author, speaker, and a psychotherapist. He serves as the Publications Director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation, as well as the Editor of the MythBlast Series and the host of JCF's flagship podcast, Pathways With Joseph Campbell. Dr. Olsonholds a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Dr. OIson is also a depth psychologist in private practice in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he has lived since 1995. Dr. Olson has graduate degrees in psychology from the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Olson offers mythic life coaching at What's Mything in Your Life (bradleyolsonphd.com). This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 4, and Pathways to Bliss. Latest Podcast In this episode originally released in December 2022, Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Tyler Lapkin interviews British Explorer, Levison Wood. Levison is a world renowned explorer, writer & photographer who has written nine best-selling books and produced several critically acclaimed documentaries which have been aired around the globe. He has travelled and filmed in over one hundred countries worldwide, and his expeditions include walking the length of the river Nile, the Himalayas, all of central America and circumnavigating the Arabian Peninsula. His most recent project followed the migration and conservation of elephants in Botswana. He also has a new book, "Endurance: 100 Tales of Survival, Adventure and Exploration". John Bucher introduces the guests and follows up with commentary about their conversation. Find out more about Levison at http://www.levisonwood.com/ Listen Here This Week's Highlights "It’s the experience of death that I regard as the beginning of mythic thinking: actually seeing someone dead who was alive and talking to you yesterday—dead, cold, beginning to rot. Where did the life go? That’s the beginning of myth.” -Joseph Campbell -Myth & Meaning, 15 Life is Always on the Edge of Death (see more videos)

“We were not new. They were. Sapiens are just the improved model of Homo. Erectus was the first to journey. They were the original imagination-motivated travellers.” ---Daniel Everett (How Language Began: The History of Humanity’s Greatest Invention, p. 48) As we all know from Greek Mythology, Prometheus was the Titan and Creator God who stole Fire from the Olympian Gods and gave it to the benefit of humankind. What is often not recognized, however, is that the treasured Promethean Fire that made us human first came from the Goddess Athene, who “taught [Prometheus] architecture, astronomy, mathematics, navigation, medicine, metallurgy, and other useful arts, which he passed on to mankind” (Robert Graves, Greek Myths: Vol. I, p. 141). Athena was the source of the technological and scientific knowledge of the day, already mediated through the collective activity of Zeus as the principle of established social order among homo sapiens. The relationship between Prometheus and Athene has given rise to an abundance of mythic speculation. There is even a suggestion that the Titan and the Goddess had, at one point, a love affair. What we can say with more certainty is that Prometheus was there in attendance to the birth of Athene. He assisted Hephaestus, another Fire God, in the procedure of splitting open the head of Zeus “from which Athene sprang, fully armed, with a mighty shout” (Greek Myths, 51). As we recall the myth, Zeus fell into this state of pregnancy after swallowing the Goddess Metis, who was herself made pregnant by Zeus. The old fear that haunted Olympian lineage, punctuated by the image of a castrated Chronos, came back to Zeus. For it was prophesied that Metis would give birth to a son that could depose Zeus, just as he had done with Chronos, and Chronos Uranus. The great fear of castration at the heart of a patriarchal lineage is indicated here in the powerful connection between Athena and Metis. Although Athene thenceforth became branded as her “Father’s daughter,” she was fully functioning as herself within the new patriarchal order established by Zeus. The Titaness Metis, daughter of Okeanos and Tethys, was the original figure of archetypal wisdom. She was one of the Okeanides, a colossal sea-nymph, “Titan-goddess of good counsel, planning, cunning and wisdom” who “hatched the plan through which Kronos (Cronus) was forced to regurgitate his devoured children” (theoi.com). Metis thus played a crucial role during the great war of the Titanomachy, when the Olympians fought against the primeval order of the Titans. This tactical wisdom in war passed over to Athene, who thus carries her mother’s legacy into the patriarchal era. Even the ploy to steal the Fire back from the Olympians was possible only because of Athene. It was she who helped Prometheus gain access to the halls of Olympus through the back door. Only then could he steal a glowing piece of the Sun’s Chariot, wrap it in the pith of a fennel-stalk, and bring it back to humanity, thereby achieving general acclaim. Although Prometheus is the poster boy for human knowledge and inventiveness, a closer reading of the mythology can show a slightly different meaning. From the angle of the Goddesses, we can see the chthonic and tactical wisdom of the Goddesses irrepressibly pass through Zeus, from Thetys to Metis and finally Athene, before landing into the thieving hands of Prometheus as the vaunted “archetype of human existence” (Kerényi). Prometheus was not the Apollonic Hero that so enthralled the romantic period. He was a wily trickster figure and not the figure of an ideal humanity raised to the Divine. It was Prometheus’s treachery that provoked Zeus into punishing humans “by withholding fire from mankind. ‘Let them eat their flesh raw!’ he cried.” (The Greek Myths Vol. I, p. 141). Before Prometheus had to steal it back, humans already had fire at their disposal. Prometheus was not the Apollonic Hero that so enthralled the romantic period. He was a wily trickster figure and not the figure of an ideal humanity raised to the Divine. Although some will say it was originally Zeus, others insist it was Prometheus, who first gave fire to humanity, the fact remains that “humans” (hominins) have been using fire for well over a million years. Humanity had fire even before we became “human” (sapiens). If there was ever any fire theft, it did not come from some Olympian height but from the savage earthly origins of homo erectus and its kin, the first creatures on earth to use and control fire. These fellow humans, you might say, were entirely enveloped by the wisdom of the Goddess Gaia. They would fit “the mood […] of Mother Goddess thinking” where there is a perfect sense that “we are one with the deity” as Campbell says in Goddesses (228). These distinguished hominins not only possessed fire in the literal sense, they also possessed the Fire of the human mind, or as Daniel Everett argues, “Humanity’s Greatest Invention”: the symbolic power of Language (logos). Prometheus appears more like a propagandistic figure for sapienkind, appropriating the goods and discoveries of others as our own. For we did not invent fire or hunting and cooking technologies. These fundamental homo skills, which point to the use of language and its higher functions, are already present with homo erectus and its kin, who are the true Promethean figures of humanity as we know it today. We were not the first storytellers, they were. Theirs were the first conversations on earth. With them, the faculty of human language first emerged as a multi-dimensional symbolic order independent of sense perception. And Fire, both literal and symbolic, was their supreme invention. MythBlast authored by: Norland Tellez is an Artist and Teacher with over 25 years of experience in the animation industry. He graduated from CalArts in 1999 with a degree in film animation, while training and working at Walt Disney Studios, Turner Feature Animation, and Warner Brothers Feature Animation. As a Writer and Director, Norland has produced award-winning educational properties in Once Upon a Sign mini-series which features deaf actors using American Sign Language. As a teacher of Life Drawing and the animated arts, Norland has taught at CalArts and Santa Monica Academy of Entertainment and Technology, as well as AIC-LA. Norland completed a Masters and Doctorate degrees in the study of mythology at Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2009 with a dissertation on the Popol-Vuh, a classic of Mayan mythology. This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 3, and Goddesses. Latest Podcast In this episode, Trudy Goodman speaks with Tyler Lapkin of the Joseph Campbell Foundation. One of the earliest teachers of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Trudy taught with its creator, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn at the MBSR clinic at University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1983. In 1995 she co-founded, and is still the Guiding Teacher at the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, the first center in the world dedicated to exploring the synergy of these two disciplines. She was an early adopter and now smiles seeing mindfulness everywhere. In the conversation today, Tyler and Trudy discuss her life, meditation, mindfulness, and her perspective on the famous Campbell quote, "Participate Joyfully in the sorrows of the world". To learn more about Trudy visit: https://www.trudygoodman.com/ Listen Here This Week's Highlights "There is one bit of evidence earlier [of mythological thinking], and that comes from the period of Homo erectus (before Homo sapiens, before Neanderthal man) about 500,000 B.C. from the River Thames. A hand axe that’s very long, too big to use, but is symmetrically beautiful. This is what Robinson Jeffers called “divinely superfluous beauty,” and is the first signal we have of a tool that’s not simply a practical tool, but something that is a beautiful, beautiful piece of stone. No animal would do a thing like that. The only thing you can guess from it is for a ritual of some kind . . ." -Joseph Campbell -The Hero's Journey, 87 The Mythic World of the Navajo: The Vision of Black Elk (see more videos)

Spoiler alert and content warning: This MythBlast discusses details of the film Pan’s Labyrinth, a movie that contains great beauty and graphic violence. Pan’s Labyrinth is rated R. If I could wave a magic wand and invite Joseph Campbell over for dinner tonight, the instant he walked in the door I would sit him down to watch Guillermo del Toro’s film Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). No pleasantries, no chit-chat, no snacks except popcorn and soda, not until he sees the movie. I can already imagine the look on his face when young Ofelia circles down the spiral stone staircase into the realm of the Underground, when the woodland faun first shudders awake, when Ofelia sets out to complete harrowing fairytale tasks to prove her true identity. Set in rural Spain in 1944, Pan’s Labyrinth weaves imagery of wonder with images from history, recreating the early years of Franco’s fascist rule after the Spanish Civil War. The main character, Ofelia, hovers on the brink of adolescence. Her father died in the war, and her mother remarried a cold-blooded captain in Franco’s army who embodies the patriarchal brutality of the regime. Ofelia and her mother, who is pregnant with the stepfather’s child, move to a remote mill where the captain runs a command post dedicated to wiping out “underground” resistance rebels in the forested hills. But the forest holds a mythic Underground as well as a human one. Ofelia's initiation in Pan's Labyrinth Near the end of his life, in the companion book to his conversations with Bill Moyers, Campbell mused that movies might function as substitutes for the ritual re-enactments of myth that serve as initiation rites in other cultures, “except that we don’t have the same kind of thinking going into the production of a movie that goes into the production of an initiation ritual” (The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers 102). Maybe that was the case in the 1980s when Campbell and Moyers created The Power of Myth, but Pan’s Labyrinth presents exactly what Campbell describes: a young woman’s passage into adulthood as a mythic initiation into maturity. When Ofelia first arrives at the mill, she is an innocent with a free spirit and a fixation on fairy tales. Wearing a green dress, green coat, and green leather shoes, she follows a flying bug into the forest and then down into the Underground, where she meets the faun and undertakes the terrifying tasks that pit her against monsters of many kinds: a giant toad, a cadaverous child-killer with eyes in his hands, and worst of all, her own stepfather. From the toad she learns the power of trickery, from the cadaver she learns to follow her intuition, and from her stepfather she learns who she isn’t: she isn’t him. She is, instead, someone who will bleed and die to protect those who are weaker, rather than hurting them for her own supposed benefit. Pan’s Labyrinth presents exactly what Campbell describes: a young woman’s passage into adulthood as a mythic initiation into maturity. None of these tasks is easy. Initiation never is. But each task teaches Ofelia something vital, something imperative. By learning these lessons in emotionally charged, dangerous situations, she changes forever. She is initiated into a new way of being. In this context, the terms learning, initiation, and transformation are nearly interchangeable. The final scene makes this point by showing the new Ofelia now wearing blood-red: red coat, red shoes, and a dress embroidered with red flowers. Having sacrificed her innocence in her initiation out of virginal, vegetal, unconscious childhood, she steps into her true identity. The cool greenery of leaves blossoms into the brilliant flowers of her authentic, mature, passionate self. Relocating the sacred toward greater equality I grew up in a religion that valued purity, obedience, heaven, and men. Women were literally and spiritually subordinate, a word that means “below ordination.” Only men were ordained to religious authority, which meant there were no women in the room when men decided how to run things—from the smallest congregation all the way up to church headquarters—and for guidance, the men consulted scriptures full of overt and covert misogyny. Pan’s Labyrinth, on the other hand, values dirt, disobedience, earth, and women. For example, Ofelia gets covered in mud in her confrontation with the toad, while the most well-groomed person in the film is the fastidious, hollow-hearted captain. Ofelia learns to follow her intuition and conscience rather than blindly obeying outside forces. Instead of a distant heaven, the movie presents a majestic Underground Realm, an earth-centered image of the divinity beneath the everyday world containing a trinity of Father, Mother, and Holy Daughter. “You are not born of man,” the faun pointedly tells Ofelia (0:23:17), in a clear revision of the sexist Biblical phrase, “son of man.” Pan’s Labyrinth relocates the sacred away from patriarchy, thereby initiating the viewer into a spiritualized, co-creative vision of gender equality. Ofelia learns to follow her intuition and conscience rather than blindly obeying outside forces. Joseph Campbell taught at a progressive women’s college for thirty-eight years, from 1934-1972. Year after year, from the Great Depression through World War II, the post-war years, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War, Campbell inspired classrooms full of young women with the transformational possibilities of myth in a time when society hadn’t yet allowed them the right to hold credit cards. “All I can tell you about mythology,” he would say, “is what men have said and have experienced, and now women have to tell us from their point of view what the possibilities of the feminine future are” (Goddesses 263). Many women have accepted that challenge, before and after Campbell issued it, but what gives me even more hope for gender equality is when men imagine into and champion the experience of women, as del Toro does in Pan’s Labyrinth. With empathy and affection, the film portrays complex female characters, exposes the soul-violence of patriarchal oppression, and shows male characters who treat women as honored, beloved equals. Pan's Labyrinth and Campbell's four functions of myth In his interviews with Bill Moyers, Campbell said that the artist’s task is “the mythologization of the environment” (The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers 107). For Campbell, that would mean shaping some aspect of the world into a narrative, Spanish fascism under Franco for example, imbuing the narrative with wonder and awe, showing how to cope psychologically with the situation, and pointing to the mystery that lies just behind it. In other words, illustrating Campbell’s four functions of myth. Pan’s Labyrinth accomplishes exactly that. Sociologically, the film reveals the brutality of fascist oppression and the possibility of gender equality. Psychologically, Ofelia develops her intuition and conscience. Cosmologically, an ensouled natural world of beauty and vitality encompasses the built world. Metaphysically, everything springs from the animating source of the Underground Realm, an enchanted font of earth energy that gives rise to all and imbues the world with magic. The faun embodies an especially poignant image of sacred, animate earth. With woody limbs and curving horns, he serves as an earthen-animal-human shaman-priest, facilitating Ofelia’s initiation. Del Toro plays a similar role, facilitating the initiation viewers experience. Everything springs from the animating source of the Underground Realm, an enchanted font of earth energy that gives rise to all and imbues the world with magic. When the movie ends, my imaginary dinner party would move to the kitchen table. Because I have a magic wand, I might as well invite del Toro over as well. I’d conjure spaghetti with homemade tomato sauce, fresh bread, olive oil for dipping, and wine to wash it all down. For dessert, walnut brownies with a glossy frosting of melted chocolate and butter—anything to keep my guests talking. So much has happened since The Power of Myth and Pan’s Labyrinth were released. I’d love to hear what the creators of these works have to say about our current mythic moment. MythBlast authored by: Joanna Gardner, PhD, is a writer, mythologist, and magical realist whose research and teaching focus on creativity, goddesses, and wonder tales. Joanna serves as director of marketing and communications for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and is the lead author of the Foundation's book Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide. She is also an adjunct professor in Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Mythological Studies program, and a co-founder of the Fates and Graces, hosting webinars and workshops for mythic readers and writers. To read Joanna's blog and additional publications, you are most cordially invited to visit her website at joannagardner.com. This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 3, and Goddesses. Latest Podcast Joseph Campbell speaks at Cooper Union in New York in 1967 on the many images of the divine mystery -- a topic he famously wrote about in his book series, The Masks of God. Host, Brad Olson, offers an introduction and commentary after the talk in this pilot episode of the Pathways podcast. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "What we are taught today mainly has to do with economics and politics. We are not nurturing our spiritual side. So we are left with this void. It's the job of the artist to create these new myths. Myths come from the artists." -Joseph Campbell - Myth and Meaning, 177 Living in Accord With Nature (see more videos)

Joseph Campbell liked to say that mythology may be defined as “other people's religion,” a way of dismissing foreign orthodoxies as fiction while recognizing our own as truth. For Archbishop Juan de Zumárraga, the gods and goddesses of 16th Century Mexico were mere fictions, mythology at its most pernicious. Though he seemed to have exercised genuine pastoral concern for his illiterate flock, Zumárraga would not have gained his high rank by being soft on paganism. Indeed, as a former inquisitor, he demanded strict obedience from his native Nahua congregations and once even ordered the execution of a heretic. Most people have some familiarity with the historical and a-historical events associated with Our Lady of Guadalupe but may have forgotten Zumárraga’s role in the story: A peasant named Juan Diego starts tripping on a vision of Mary, mother of Christ, who appears uncharacteristically dressed as a native of Juan’s own Nahuatl tribe, whose skin is dark, like his, and who speaks in his indigenous language. But the archbishop, Zumárraga, demands proof that a miracle has taken place in the desert. The proof, as many will recall, comes in the nature of a two-part miracle. First, Our Lady produces fresh Spanish roses, a clear impossibility since it is the dead of winter. The second part of the miracle has sustained the cult for the last half-millennium. Contravening the laws of nature, an image of mysterious origin appears on the rough maguey cloth of the peasant tilma worn by Juan that day, a visual reproduction of the very woman Juan encountered at the top of the hill. The image is rich in mythological symbolism but, at its core, it appears to be a kind of self-portrait of Mary, the mother of God. Thus, the Archbishop is convinced of the supramundane provenance of the picture and the rest is the History of Mexico. So goes the story. The problem is this: The Archbishop never publicly endorsed the devotion of Our Lady of Guadalupe, never openly recalled his December encounter with a peasant named Juan Diego and seems to have had nothing but disdain for popular devotions based on miracle accounts. His words, years after the “miracle:” You ought not, brethren, give way to the thoughts and blasphemies of the world, which tempts souls with the desire to see by marvel and miracles what they believe by faith...The redeemer of the world no longer wants miracles to be worked because they are not necessary, because our holy faith is so well established by so many thousands of miracles we have in the old and New Testaments. (Pool, qt. Zumárraga, 35) Zumárraga would have probably been reluctant to recognize the validity of the apparition because of its problematic location. Tepeyac wasn’t just a grassy knoll outside Mexico City. It was the holy precinct of Tonantzin, the Great Mother, the snake woman, a deity sometimes called Coatlicue (serpent skirt), sometimes Cihuacoatl (woman serpent). Called by any name, one stands out: Goddess. She takes the pronoun thou. Tonantzin is a Goddess and belongs to that sacred sorority which Campbell had reduced to a familiar litany, one he loved to recite: “In Classical myths, she appears as Aphrodite, Artemis, Demeter, Persephone, Athena, Hera, Hecate, the Three Graces, the Nine Muses, the Furies, and so on. In Egypt she appears as Isis, in old Babylon as Ishtar, in Sumeria as Inanna; among the western Semites she’s Astarte. It’s the same goddess, and the first thing to realize is that she is a total goddess and as such has associations over the whole field of the culture system” (Goddess: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, p. 22). Patriarchies often seem to be natural-born goddess hunters and Western civilization has waged an on-again, off-again war against the Goddess—by whatever name—for at least 4000 years. One thinks of Marduk dethroning his own grandmother, Tiamat, so that a panel of male deities might run the Babylonian heavens as they see fit. Or the Indo-European warlords subjugating peaceful, Neolithic villages of Old Europe and eliminating its goddess cults as they encounter them. Or Israel, fighting a war against the “Abomination,” their preferred title for the goddess. Campbell notes that “when the Semites moved in as conquerors, then, they dislodged deities to make way for their own…” (The Power of Myth, p. 55). By the 1200’s, the centuries-long push to eliminate the feminine aspect of the divine throughout Europe had resulted in a kind of sacred subterfuge. The Goddess wasn’t gone. Not at all. She was just hunkering down in her somewhat reduced role as the mother of Jesus. “The goddess comes back into the Christian, anti-Goddess tradition by way of Mary, Mother of God, and there has been, particularly in Catholicism, a steady magnification of the Virgin from the fifth century A.D. to the present” (Goddesses, 350). Despite the sentimental role history has assigned to him, Zumárraga probably had doubts about Guadalupe for the rest of his life suspecting that this “Mary” was nothing more than Tonantzin in disguise. Here is a report which probably came across his desk which he probably endorsed. Near the mountains are three or four places where they used to offer very solemn sacrifices, and they would come to them from very distant lands. One of these is here in Mexico [City], where there is a hill that is called Tepeyacac [sic] and the Spaniards call Tepeaquilla and is now called Our Lady of Guadalupe. In this place they used to have a temple dedicated to the mother of the gods, whom they called Tonantzin, which means “our mother.” …Now that the church of Our Lady of Guadalupe has been built there, they also call her [or it] Tonantzin… It is something that should be remedied because the proper name for the Mother of God, Our Lady, is not Tonantzin but Dios inantzin. This appears to be an invention of the devil to cover over idolatry under the ambiguity of this name Tonantzin” (Stafford Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797, p. 78). Mythology is other people’s religion. It is always an archbishop’s job to know the difference and so, just in case there was any ambiguity, a 1694 episcopal edict was read publicly at the church of Guadalupe forbidding all associations with former religious practices at the site so that “no remnant of heresy or error should remain in the land… not even superstition of the former heathenism that had its adoration on the hill of Guadalupe” (Poole, 155). Five centuries later, history has rendered its verdict. Tonantzin is virtually unknown, all former rites are forgotten, and meanwhile some twenty million pilgrims have annually visited the shrine at Guadalupe for the merest glimpse of the famous pictograph hanging in a frame above the altar outside of Mexico City. Goddess or not, the woman who brought roses to a recent convert to Catholicism accomplished for the natives of Mexico what Yahweh accomplished for the people of Israel at Sinai.  The Hebrew God conferred upon his chosen people an historical identity in the form of ten written principles or commandments by which they were to define themselves as a culture. Our Lady of Guadalupe arrived on Tepeyac one brisk December morning in 1531 for the same purpose, leaving behind neither treatise nor tract, conveying the birth of a new people wordlessly in the language of pictograph--the textile as text. In the pursuit of truth over fiction, the inescapable theme of Tepeyac is sometimes overlooked or ignored altogether. Quite simply, “The lesson taught by Guadalupe was the value of the natives as persons” (Poole, 165). The message falls short of the miraculous but must have appeared so to Juan Diego when he was admitted seeing the Archbishop of Mexico without an appointment. The Virgin had made herself visible to Juan. In doing so, an indigenous people became visible to those who preferred not to see them. MythBlast authored by: John Bonaduce, PhD, a seasoned writer for Norman Lear and for most of the major Hollywood studios (Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros, et al.) developed a profound interest in story structure beyond the commercial objectives of the industry. His exploration led him to conclude that much of what we call myth derives from a biological origin. This insight inspired his pursuit of deeper relationships between biology and narrative through his theory of Mythobiogenesis, which he explored in his dissertation at Pacifica Graduate Institute and was recognized as a “discovery” in the field of prenatal psychology by Dr. Thomas Verny. John was recently appointed to the editorial board of the Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health (JOPPPH) where he advocates for an unrecognized level of human consciousness which exists at the border of biology and mythology. As a featured writer for the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s MythBlast, he passionately showcases Joseph Campbell’s enduring relevance to a modern audience. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to John J. Bonaduce, 12437 Sylvan St., No. Hollywood, CA 91606 or jbonaduce52@gmail.com This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 3, and Goddesses. Latest Podcast In this episode, we are joined by Trudy Goodman. One of the earliest teachers of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Trudy taught with its creator, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn at the MBSR clinic at University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1983. In 1995 she co-founded, and is still the Guiding Teacher at the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, the first center in the world dedicated to exploring the synergy of these two disciplines. She was an early adopter and now smiles seeing mindfulness everywhere. After becoming a mother, Trudy was fascinated by human development, and studied w Jean Piaget in Geneva, Carol Gilligan, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Jerome Bruner at Harvard. Trudy co-founded a school for distressed children, practicing mindfulness-based psychotherapy with children, parents, teenagers, couples and individuals. She enjoys the company of kids of all ages and has kept her own child-like wonder and curiosity about the world she loves. Since 1974, Trudy has devoted much of her life to practicing Buddhist meditation with great Asian and Western teachers in the Zen and Theravada traditions. From 1991 to 1998, Trudy was a resident Zen teacher at the Cambridge Buddhist Association. She then moved to Los Angeles and founded InsightLA, the first center in the world to combine training in both Buddhist Insight (Vipassana) Meditation and non-sectarian mindfulness and compassion practices. Trudy has always been a connector of people, spiritual traditions, cultures, and communities, carrying her Zen delight across the divides. Trudy has trained a new generation of teachers, mindfulness humanitarians who make mindfulness and meditation classes available for professional caregivers, social justice and environmental activists, first responders, teachers, and unsung individuals working on the front lines of suffering – all done with tenderness, courage and a simple commitment to holding hands together. Trudy conducts retreats and workshops worldwide – from the hallowed halls of Mazu Daoyi’s Ch’an monastery in China, to leading trainings on the ground in the intense heat of Darfuri refugee camps in Eastern Chad on the Sudanese border. She has loved it all. Trudy is still creating new projects and good trouble wherever she can. Details to be found in her forthcoming memoir! In the conversation today we discuss her life, meditation, mindfulness, and her perspective on the famous Campbell quote, "Participate Joyfully in the sorrows of the world". To learn more about Trudy, visit: https://www.trudygoodman.com/ Listen Here This Week's Highlights "In Classical myths, she appears as Aphrodite, Artemis, Demeter, Persephone, Athena, Hera, Hecate, the Three Graces, the Nine Muses, the Furies, and so on. In Egypt she appears as Isis, in old Babylon as Ishtar, in Sumer as Inanna; among the western Semites she’s Astarte. It’s the same goddess, and the first thing to realize is that she is a total goddess and as such has associations over the whole field of the culture system. In later periods these different associations became specified and separated off into various specialized goddesses." -Joseph Campbell - Goddesses, 22 Psyche & Symbol: The Origin of Elementary Ideas (see more videos)

Parenting teenagers is not for the faint of heart. As a mother of two, I try to keep my finger on the pulse of their current experience. Teen angst evolves with the challenges of each generation, and storytelling has a way of providing a window of continuity and comfort into these worlds. For that reason, I was drawn to Netflix’s recommendation of Ginny & Georgia, a television show focusing on the relationship of a mother and her teenage daughter. Ten episodes later, with tears in my eyes, I was left wondering why this television show was engrossing me this way. In the show, Georgia flees a childhood of abuse and becomes a mother at age 15. We meet her character as she is finally achieving her vision of the ideal life. Ginny, Georgia’s daughter, is turning 15, the same age Georgia was when she gave birth. As her daughter comes into her own, we witness them struggling to understand one another. Georgia hopes to give her daughter a better life than her own. But Ginny has a completely different experience, drowning in the tumultuous life her mother has created, while attempting to negotiate her teenage years amid the cruelty of American culture. And we, as viewers, are caught up in this tension between mother and daughter. With no maternal role models, Georgia struggles to survive in a system that is not designed to protect her or her children, so she fiercely protects her children at all costs. Her daughter, Ginny tries to understand, but her mother’s fierce love comes with a lot of emotional baggage. The way this show depicts women navigating the dangers of society brings to mind some of the challenges Joseph Campbell acknowledges in Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine. Campbell recognized that many of the “difficulties that women face today follow from the fact that … there are no female mythological models” (xiii). Myths provide frameworks to help us process the human experience. In their absence, we float adrift without an anchor grounding our everyday lives. However, this was not always the case. Throughout the text, Campbell highlights how myths are adapted to reflect current social circumstances, and he cites multiple examples of the abstraction and degradation of female mythic figures. For example, Campbell explains how Athena is a Greek version of an older Mycenaean and Minoan protective snake goddess (136-141). In order to integrate this earlier goddess into the Greek pantheon, Athena is depicted as the daughter of Zeus, a more recent male deity. Artemis, too, is a Greek version of an earlier Minoan goddess or perhaps even Paleolithic (111-113). In Greek myth, she is depicted as Apollo’s twin, who was originally a male deity of the Indo-European Hittites. Artemis is connected to much older mythologies, and the uniting of these two deities as siblings conjoins two different cultures with different value systems: “the god of human culture to balance the nature goddess” (120). And arguably, at least in modern popular culture, Apollo has eclipsed Artemis all together. Myths are fluid, changing to fit the needs of the society. And while transforming ancient goddesses into sisters and daughters helps integrate disparate cultures, it also disempowers those particular goddess figures, at times even erasing them completely. For instance, in the Akaddian myth of Tiamat, who in later biblical traditions is abstracted as the abyss or primordial waters from which creation emerges, “The Goddess is called the Abomination, and she and her divinities are called demons and they are not given the credit of being divine” (87). Mythologies reflect the cultural systems in which we live, and history has not always been kind to women. The absence of female mythological models forces us to forge our own paths. Echoes of ancient powers still reverberate in these abstractions if we know where to look, and Campbell assures us that the task is well within our grasp: “And is it likely, do you think, after all her years and millennia of changing forms and conditions, that she is now unable to let her daughters know who they are?” (xxvi). But what does “telling us who we are” look like when the myths passed down to us have been distilled, distorted, or erased? How do we write new stories when we have yet to dispel the internalization of the stories we’ve been told for millenia? Degradations are embedded in our own stories. Like these goddess figures, we see ourselves as the daughters and sisters of the ones to whom we gave birth. Our myths carry emotional baggage, too. Cultural memory carries stories and it carries trauma as well. Our mothers showed us the protection mechanisms they inherited from their mothers. They told us the fairy tales that whispered warnings. We learned how to build armor to maneuver through spaces that were not meant for us. But ironically, the armor entraps as much as it shields, and these protections are written underneath our skin, like spells binding us from within. I see that struggle in Ginny & Georgia. I see a mother who can’t understand why her daughter struggles to seize the opportunities before her and I see a daughter fraught with internal demons. Desperately attempting to find some way to conceptualize and express the pain she feels internally, Ginny harms herself externally. When Georgia, the mother, realizes this, she begs her daughter “give me your pain, let me carry it.” A wish so many mothers have had for their children. And yet, Georgia can’t carry Ginny’s burden, nor can she fully prepare her for the struggles she will inevitably face. Each generation has to make their own way. We may share a common experience, but our journeys are uniquely our own. As with Georgia’s fierce mother-love, the goddess mythologies women have inherited are fraught with the thorny traumas of the societies that passed them down to us. Much work has been done to fill the gaps left by the goddesses lost to time, but as the daughters before us, we join a long lineage tasked with separating the wheat from the chaff and disentangling the internal knots that bind our ability to step into our own power. To do this, we look for echoes of female power in the eyes of our mothers, the earthly songs of our grandmothers, and the fearlessness of our daughters. And perhaps, we hear whispers in the stories that bring us to tears because, for a moment, we feel seen, we feel a sense of belonging in a world that has not always embraced us. This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 3, and Goddesses. Latest Podcast In episode 6 (orignally released in January 2023), Tyler Lapkin of the Joseph Campbell Foundation and Lonny Jarrett discuss Lonny's career as an acupuncturist, herbalist and teacher. Lonny is recognized worldwide as a leading practitioner, author, and scholar of East Asian medicine. This conversation takes an in-depth look at the Inner Tradition of Chinese Medicine, the role of a practitioner, and what it means to see medicine and mythology from an Integral perspective. John Bucher introduces the guests and follows up with commentary about their conversation. Learn more about Lonny at https://lonnyjarrett.com/ Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Pandora is another inflection of the idea of the woman who brings bounty into the world. The later, smart aleck, masculine-inflected story of Pandora—the notion that every woman brings with her a box of troubles—is simply another way of saying that all life is sorrowful. Of course, trouble comes with life; as soon as you have movement in time, you have sorrows and disasters. Where there is bounty, there is suffering." -Joseph Campbell Goddesses, 206 The Center Of The World (see more videos)

As I explore the mysteries of mythology through Sree Lalitopakhyanam, a dedicated Hindu scripture, part of Brahmanda Purana that captures the divine episodes of Lalita devi, goddess, I feel I can access the myriad expressions of the human Self. These are  unique yet universal. I have charted it as an attempt here to tune into the mythic-mystic fantasies of this scripture that speak to me of my inner cosmology and immerse me in decoding its living quality. It became a transcendental, and cathartic, meaning making process for me—giving me the eyes to see the evergreen awe-inspiring knowledge. Let’s walk through it together. Here, I outline the significant episodes before the birth of the creation mother, Lalita devi narrated by Lord Hayagriva (an incarnation of Lord Vishnu) to the sage Agastya, consequential to understand devi’s raison d'être, her purpose for being. These episodes from Sree Lalitopakhyanam evoke a curiosity for the numinous, psychological maturation and milestones of knowing the self for me that I share here… An ostentatious Lord Indra was once cursed by Durvasa rishi, a sage who enjoyed the blessings of the goddesses of victory and wealth, and was so deluded by his inflated pride that he refused the garland sent by Lord Rudra. Instead of wearing it, he gave it to his celestial elephant, Airavatha. Seeing this, Brihaspati deva, god then took over the baton to teach Lord Indra how not to behave unrighteously, performing adharma. This was the time when the rule of the danavas, the demons, rose and so the devas had to take the reins back into their own hands to create a just world. Lord Vishnu set up the churn to milk the ocean and gain the elixir of immortality, amrit, for the devas to reinstate their prominence. He even transformed himself as an enchantress Mohini to entrap the asuras, demons who were after the immortality elixir (Rao, Sree Lalitopakhyanam, pp.6-18). A curse, a boon of immortality, and a battle between the asuras and devas. Reading this in 2024 may seem like a metaverse experience in contemporary language. Such  confusion and contemplation was also dealt with by Joseph Campbell, who tried to understand whether the modern world had become bereft of the numinous (Myths Dreams and Religion, pp.119-133). Like Campbell, I want to focus on rekindling mythic consciousness and opening the abysmal psychological symbolism of the curse, boon, and battle. Self development is attributed to balanced actions, so getting rid of the shackles of a negative self-construct (just like Indra’s pride), as well as the hope-like aspiration for amrit, is transformative for a waking Self. This can be achieved by favoring and balancing the inner alchemical symbols in the battle between the demons and the divine, the asuras and the devas. Sree Lalitopakhyanam then speaks of the portentous birth of Bhandasura after the episode of churning the ocean for amrit. Seeing her husband (Lord Shiva) humiliated at her father’s (Lord Daksha) organized yagna sacrifice, Sati couldn’t take it and sacrificed herself in chid-agni, sacred fire. When Shiva heard of this he marched to the yagna, and destroyed it for taking away his beloved. This was the beginning of Sati devi’s transformation to goddess Parvati. Thereafter an asura was born and could only be decimated by a son of Lord Shiva. As Shiva was in samadhi at that time, the highest meditative state, his third eye got activated and he burned the demon down to ashes. It was only after Shiva-Parvati’s wedding that Chitra Karma-Gananadha (a form or epithet of Lord Shiva) shaped the ashes of the burned demon into a human form and presented it to Lord Shiva. Seeing the renewed human form, he embraced him, taught him the Sata-Rudriya Mantra, a divine chant and conferred upon him his blessings and boons of his desire. He was also given the rule of all the worlds and was gifted the supreme armaments to assist in his battles. This form born of ashes thus became Bhandasura. When Lord Brahma saw this creation, he said well done, which in Sanskrit means Bhanda. This is how he got the name, Bhandasura. Gifted by the mightiest of the mighty, Bhandasura so became unconquerable. This was threatening to the devas and they attempted to stop him by requesting Lord Vishnu to lure him with the erotic charm as Mohini, but that didn't last long, and Bhandasura undertook his mission to weaken the protective shield of the devas in his attempt to conquer the devas and devaloka, dwelling of the gods. But as these shields were created by Lalita devi and were impervious, it reassured devas of their belief in their divine rescuer. Bhandasura’s birth was the beginning of kama-pralaya, the ultimate dissolution which could only be countered by the birth of the devi. The devi was so powerful that she was the protector of the devas and the prana, life of the worlds, and what follows is her birth myth. All devas, in order to pray for their protection, performed a yagna wherein they offered their flesh and limbs into the sacred fire from which emerged the goddess. Different kinds of births, such as the mind, sweat, seed, egg, and womb born were rendered to this homa kunda, a sacred fire pit made to perform the yagna. Lord Shiva Shambhu, too, prayed to strengthen devi Lalita’s powers during her creation so she could battle and defeat Bhandasura. In the sacred yagna, Lord Shiva poured all oceans as offerings like the sacred ghee, clarified butter, to amplify her prowess against the demon and his army. Her birth marked the beginning of the restoration of the divine and along with Kamesvara deva, her partner, she was enthroned to rule Sri Nagara, a city created by the goddess after the ultimate battle. All bodies renounced in the maha-yagna, the divine sacrifice for the goddess, were resurrected after this momentous win and the restoration of the worlds took place thereon. From Lalita devi’s physical being rose the sun, moon, fire, sky, winds, directions, stars, flowers, the past, present and the future; in short, life itself. And so she triumphed, crumbling Bhandasura’s illusional city into dust, reinstating and populating the worlds (Rao, Sree Lalitopakhyanam). Campbell posits that myths are divine stories that offer guidance, realizations, and new perspectives, even a slice of life in the here and now (Myth and Meaning, Conversations on Mythology and life, p. xv). Understanding Bhandasura and goddess Lalita’s mythic origins in this context, I want to bring to light its present psychological manifestations. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” born of ashes and nestled by Lord Shiva, Bhanda’s birth is a representation of the impermanence of life, which helps us dwell on our inward relationship to ourselves (Ronnberg & Martin, Book of Symbols, p. 728). Bhanda’s birth from ashes, and then being reduced to ashes yet again by the goddess, is a lesson on how impermanence teaches us to give way to adaptive, flexible strategies for personal growth. As Campbell puts it, myth is as nurturing as a bird’s nest and functions as a base for the psyche to actualize, and carve out our own unique journey (Myth and Meaning, Conversations on Mythology and Life, pp. 4-7). The visual of the devi shielding the gods from the demon with barriers, making them stronger each time they were demon attacked, serves as a symbol of strength for us. It helps us deal with the contradictory inner turmoil and to construct a harmony as sustainable as the barriers. From time immemorial agni, fire blazes as a source of consciousness and the all-consuming principle of life. Lalita devi’s birth from the fire of consciousness glows on us, illuminating our light, power, purity and transformation. Fed with the divine, it represents the birth of the numinous in us. This mythic genesis communicates the primary feminine essence of life. This is the mythic recipe for an  energy system that permeates our present thought, action, and feeling. It is the source of our functioning, the source of our life force. (Ronnberg & Martin, Book of Symbols, pp. 82-84) As a woman, I wonder about and reimagine my being through the eyes of goddess Lalita. Juggling many roles in order to flourish and endure, I experience the numinous divine in all the stages of womanhood today, balancing the masculine and feminine voices within as a dedicated effort toward a wholesome, yet complex way.  So when Kamesvara deva is needed by the goddess’s side for her to be enthroned and begin a new world, or Lord Shiva performs yagna to empower the goddess for the battle ahead, it is a metaphor for a path that establishes my inner commitment to psychologically renew myself in preparation for new experiences, fostering creativity and fertility. The notion of renewed worlds understood as the bodily offspring of the Goddess can also be seen as a classic example of the iconography of the symbolic processes of mythology. Its creations are our inherited symbols helping us to experience societies, cultures, people, circumstances more deeply and dream the dream of life onwards. Understood in this way, the mythic realm, the sacred, gods and angels are our Sri Nagari, our divine dwelling grounds that gives us wings to experience the yonder. Let God, God in Us (Campbell, Myths Dreams and Religion, p. 137). This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 2, and Myth and Meaning. Latest Podcast In this episode, we are joined by Anthony Byrne, an accomplished Irish writer, director, and producer renowned for his work on large-scale international dramas like Peaky Blinders, Lioness, and In Darkness. He has also directed music videos for Hozier, Liam Gallagher, The Smile. And as he says, more importantly, he is a new Dad. In this engaging conversation with JCF's John Bucher, Anthony shares insights into his life and career, revealing the influence of Joseph Campbell on his creative journey. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "From a psychological standpoint – trying to recognize where humanity is, in all of this – one sees everywhere the same symbols, and this becomes then the problem of first concern. And what transforms the consciousness is not the language, but the image; it's the impact of the image that is the initiating experience. If you get the point of mythology and see that what's being talked about over here is what's being talked about over there too, you don't have to quarrel about the vocabularies." -Joseph Campbell Myth and Meaning, 6 Adventure into Depths - Q&A (see more videos)

BILL MOYERS TO JOSEPH CAMPBELL: “Why myths? Why should we care about myths? What do they have to do with my life?” CAMPBELL TO MOYERS: “My first response would be, ‘Go on, live your life, it’s a good life. You don’t need mythology.’ I don’t believe in being interested in a subject just because it’s said to be important. I believe in being caught by it somehow or other. But you may find that, with a proper introduction, mythology will catch you. And so, what can it do for you if it does catch you?” When I heard Joseph Campbell say these words in Part II of PBS’ The Power of Myth, I knew exactly what he was talking about, and I’m guessing that many of our readers do, too. Everyone I have met on the myth journey has come to it by a different path,  and has been “caught” by it in a different way. Some had heard the siren call of Skywalker Ranch where Campbell attained Delphic status as a master interpreter of the world’s one great story, the Hero’s Adventure. For them, Campbell studies had a single purpose: to unlock the secret of big budget action adventure moving pictures. For anyone with a screenplay in their Prius the answer to “why myth” is self-evident. Others, just as devoted to Campbell, took the “hero’s journey” as the key to individuation; these were mysteries of the spirit, not of the story conference. Or mythology may “catch you” as a lover of classic literature; it may alert you to a new level of spirituality missing in your relationship; bring you to an understanding of what is transient and what is eternal; or leave you on a street corner without any socks, a card-carrying mystic. Or, as in my case, myth may “catch you” in its most kinetic form, myth as ritual. It was ritual that “caught me.” Like Campbell, I came to myth through the theological complexity of Roman Catholicism. He explains the process better than I can: “I was brought up as a Roman Catholic. Now, one of the great advantages of being brought up a Roman Catholic is that you’re taught to take myth seriously and to let it operate on your life and to live in terms of these mythic motifs. I was brought up in terms of the seasonal relationships to the cycle of Christ’s coming into the world, teaching in the world, dying, resurrecting, and returning to heaven. The ceremonies all through the year keep you in mind of the eternal core of all that changes in time (The Power of Myth, P. 12). Which partially explains my most outrageous breach of social norms back in Broomall, Pennsylvania, circa 1962. On a day when John Glenn was circling the planet 160 miles overhead, I, too, was making a little orbit in the cul de sac named, synchronistically enough, Glen Circle, circumambulating the neighborhood in a religious procession of my own devising. Why? There is no why. I was “caught,” and here’s how it happened. My parents had transferred me to Catholic school. I never saw it coming. One day, I was a reasonably popular kid in a public kindergarten swapping my slinky for a Davy Crocket cap and the next thing I knew it was all holy water and rosaries. I still managed to meet with my old friends, usually after school in the late afternoons before the lightning bugs came out, before moms called us home. That’s when we compared notes and I learned that my Protestant pals were being subjected to a relentless form of civic paganism in a place without crucifixes on the wall in classrooms where teachers made no reference to God or gods, saints or apostles. No sin. No heaven. No prayers.  It sounded both awful and attractive at the same time. But after a few years, I learned to appreciate the cultural richness in my tradition and I wanted to share it the way I had always shared with my friends, only this time it would not be a Mickey Mantle baseball card still smelling of the bubble gum it originally came with. This time, I would be sharing a ritual practice apparently unknown to these deprived Protestants.  I would demonstrate the principles of putting on a procession. The elements of a good Catholic procession are few. Most important is finding two kids bored enough to want be candleholders. There should be two, for symmetry and to help focus the attention on Mary who would be represented by a statue borrowed from the mantle of our fireplace. I would carry Mary. Catholics sing when processing. Not well, mind you. But apparently that’s not the point.  We sing songs relevant to the ritual act itself, the readings of the day, or in response to special parish events. I could only think of one song that the girls (one my sister, the other her friend Ellen) and I might know in common: “She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes…” Except for my choice of hymnody, there was nothing remarkable about our little trinity solemnly marching along the sidewalks of Broomall but rituals are not supposed to be remarkable. As Campbell points out, “Rituals themselves are actually very boring. They go on and on, beyond your secular tolerance” (The Power of Myth, p. 29). In a bad way, that’s what happened. Ellen’s Dad had apparently been taken “beyond secular tolerance,” when he saw his only daughter participating in objectionable papist rites. He rushed from his little brick house and grabbed Ellen rudely by the arm. Her candle self-extinguished on the median strip where it fell. My sister just stared in wonder. I blew out her candle. “You are never to play with those children again!” I heard the outraged father shout. I was as mystified as my sister, and I can thank my mother and Joseph Campbell for explaining it all to me. MOM: You see, Johnny… Some folks don’t believe it proper to pay respects to statues. JOSEPH CAMPBELL (sixty years afterward and not in person) “… in India it is believed that, in response to the consecrating formulae, deities will descend graciously to infuse their divine substance into the temple images” (The Masks of God, Vol. 1:Primitive  Mythology, p.44). Exactly! Somewhere in my teeming nine-year-old brain, I expected the “real” Mary to somehow inhabit the statue since I had gone to so much trouble to do it homage. That is a true ritualist in the making. There was another cosmological issue at play that February of 1962. Mary herself was the issue. And, again, Mom and Joe explained it to me. Mom claimed that some people don’t feel comfortable paying too much attention to Mary. In fact, Catholics are sometimes accused of worshiping the Virgin as if she were some kind of goddess. Joseph Campbell’s far more disturbing view suggests that Mary is indeed a pagan derivative, an iteration of the original goddess, the Goddess of Many Names. She is Annapurna, from the Indian subcontinent; the Egyptian Isis; the Babylonian Ishtar, and the Sumerian Inanna, all “archaic prefigurements” of the BVM, the Blessed Virgin Mary. Why myth? Because it raises me high above the doctrinal fray and elevates me to a perspective where the transcultural oneness of humankind is as obvious as if I were looking down from a Mercury spacecraft 160 miles above Broomhall, Pennsylvania in 1962. This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 2, and Myth and Meaning. Latest Podcast In this bonus episode of Pathways, Joseph Campbell answers questions from his lecture on the symbolism of Christianity, Buddhism, European Paganism, and the Arthurian Romances. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Going back at least nine thousand years to the early agriculture of the Near East and Old Europe, we have a tradition of the power of the Goddess and of her child who dies and is resurrected - namely it is we who come from her, go back to her, and rest well in her. This tradition was carried through the cults of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and down into the Classical world, before finally delivering the message into Christian teaching." - Joseph Campbell - Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, 8 Four Functions of Mythology (see more videos)

I thought I’d focus in this MythBlast on the same quote from Joseph Campbell’s 1969 essay The Symbol without Meaning in The Flight of the Wild Gander that I first highlighted in my February 2021 MythBlast titled Metamorphosis: Dreaming the New Songs. I wanted once again to use Campbell’s words, featuring C. G. Jung, as a touchstone to explore the maturing psyche’s journey: As the researches and writings of Dr. Jung have shown us, the deep aim and problem of the maturing psyche today is to recover wholeness (p. 154). If you’re anything like me, the last few years have often felt like one, big, indistinguishable blur. The essence can be captured in any one of the numerous memes titled: “Leaving 2019, Entering 2022, 2023, 2024” referring to the absolute trainwrecks that both 2020 and 2021 – according to large swathes of the global population – turned out to be. These leaving/entering memes capture how many of us feel: it’s been several l-o-n-g years now. My favorite is the one with an image of John Travolta as Danny from the movie Grease, with Olivia Newton-John’s character Sandy by his side, under the heading of 2019. Both appear blissfully happy, looking fresh as daisies with a wide-eyed innocence, and completely unaware of the worldwide chaos that the following years are to bring. Over the past few years, in the final weeks of December we’ve seen the meme pop up on social media, juxtaposing the 2019 image against the title of the upcoming year with an image of Travolta as Vincent from the film, Pulp Fiction, and this time seated next to Uma Thurman’s character, Mia. Both have an appearance of bone-crushing, beaten-to-a-pulp weariness, looking like they’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards multiple times over. For me, this meme invites reflection on the year I just lived, and to question if it was more Grease or Pulp Fiction-like in nature? Was I living or merely existing? Thriving or surviving? Full of hope or utterly devoid of it? Did I mostly feel whole in myself, holding a holistic viewpoint of the past year’s events? Or was my mood, countenance, and attitude fragmented like piles of broken glass? At year’s end, was my psyche more shattered, or more unified? Perhaps, with a more meta perspective we could all do with asking ourselves: “Did I/we lean more into my/our wholeness during these last few years? Or did I/we only fracture and divide myself/ourselves further? Or was I/we experiencing both wholeness and multiple fractures simultaneously?” Richard Rohr in Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life describes how “psychological wholeness and spiritual holiness never exclude the problem from the solution. If it is wholeness, then it is always paradoxical, and holds both the dark and light sides of things.” In my 2021 MythBlast I wrote that: Only when the impulse for inner renewal, for psychological and spiritual wholeness, becomes far more preferable to the unbalanced and misguided sense of perfection that once satisfied us, do we move towards the more fully rounded and integrated self. By necessity this brings an encounter with the underworld of our psyche, a descent that often involves the grief of separation, an unraveling or a deconstruction of the old patterned self, and both a breaking down and a breaking open. In the below extract C. G. Jung elegantly describes the necessity of both the breaking down and breaking open that occurs when everyday consciousness intersects with the unknown and unseen workings of the underworld: But the right way to wholeness is made up, unfortunately, of fateful detours and wrong turnings. It is the longissima via [longest path], not straight but snakelike, a path that unites the opposites in the manner of the guiding caduceus, a path whose labyrinthine twists and turns are not lacking in terrors (Collected Works, Vol. 12, p. 6). If the labyrinthine twists and turns are necessary on the path to recovering wholeness, then maybe these memes can be seen as faithful portrayals of the psyche’s journey in uniting the opposites rather than providing just mere comic relief. Campbell closes The Flight of the Wild Gander with these words: However, not all, even today, are of that supine sort that must have their life values given them, cried at them from the pulpits and other mass media of the day. For there is, in fact, in quiet places, a great deal of deep spiritual quest and finding now in progress in this world, outside the sanctified social centers, beyond their purview and control: in small groups, here and there, and more often, more typically (as anyone who looks about may learn), by ones and twos, there entering the forest at those points which they themselves have chosen, where they see it to be most dark, and there is no beaten way or path (p. 186). So if you’ve started your year in the forest where it’s most dark, with no clear way or path forward, and you’re in desperate need of a metaphorical torch, then picture an image of wholeness that you’d like to use at year’s end to represent your “Finally Leaving 2020-2024, Entering 2025” meme. And then live into and embody this vision of wholeness whilst enjoying all the detours and wrong turnings along the way! This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 2, and Myth and Meaning. Latest Podcast In this episode, we are joined by Anthony Byrne, an accomplished Irish writer, director, and producer renowned for his work on large-scale international dramas like Peaky Blinders, Lioness, and In Darkness. He has also directed music videos for Hozier, Liam Gallagher, The Smile. And as he says, more importantly, he is a new Dad. In this engaging conversation with JCF's John Bucher, Anthony shares insights into his life and career, revealing the influence of Joseph Campbell on his creative journey. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "The deep aim and problem of the maturing psyche today is to recover wholeness" - Joseph Campbell - The Flight of the Wild Gander, 154 Psyche & Symbol - God is not one, God is not many, God transcends those ideas. (see more videos)

These bits of information from ancient times, which have to do with the themes that have supported man's life, built civilizations, and informed religions over the millennia, have to do with deep inner problems, inner mysteries, inner thresholds of passage, and if you don't know what the guide signs are along the way, you have to work it out yourself. (Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, Episode 2) Our MythBlast theme for February is “The Message of the Myth,” title of the second episode of the interview series that first aired on PBS eight months after Campbell’s passing. Given his influence on popular culture, many today are surprised to learn Joseph Campbell was little known during his lifetime, apart from a relatively small circle of influential artists, scholars, and readers. It’s The Power of Myth that is responsible for posthumously introducing Campbell and his work to the public-at-large. The six hours of this popular series are distilled down from twenty-four hours of discussions filmed in 1985 and 1986 at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch in California, and the Museum of Natural History in New York. This was not Moyers’ first encounter with Joseph Campbell: in the spring of 1981, he invited Campbell to be a guest on two episodes of Bill Moyers Journal. The overwhelming public response to these conversations provided the impetus for a more extended exploration of the aging mythologist and his ideas, before it was too late . . . and the rest is history. MOYERS: So there is in the myth a kind of message from the unconscious to the conscious. CAMPBELL: Right. And it takes only a little training to be able to understand the language of this vocabulary. (Bill Moyers Journal, April 17, 1981) The Power of Myth programs also spawned a companion volume with the same title, edited by Betty Sue Flowers, Ph.D. (Emerita Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, and former director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum). Despite plenty of overlap, The Power of Myth book is not a transcript of the televised interviews; these are distinct, albeit related, works. This is immediately clear from their structure: the PBS series consists of six episodes, in contrast to the book’s eight chapters –– and even those chapters that share the same title as programs in the series include additional and often rearranged content. For example, “The Message of the Myth,” the program that supplies our February MythBlast theme, does not have its own chapter in the companion volume; nevertheless, much of the content from that episode appears in the book’s first two chapters (“Myth and the Modern World” and “The Journey Inward”). Betty Sue Flowers faced a formidable task editing the book. Where Bill Moyers was able to directly engage Campbell, she instead engaged the material generated from that collaboration, though their goals were the same: to create a platform that allowed Campbell to convey “the message of the myth.” While the book’s themes and much of the content overlap with the broadcast interviews, the questions have been moved around and many of the responses on video broken up, rearranged, and spliced together with bits and pieces taken from other episodes, as well as material that did not make it onto the screen. The result is more than just a transcript; it’s a new work, created from the same raw material, that complements rather than duplicates the PBS series. What draws my interest are the editorial choices that lead to such differences between the video and print versions of the Power of Myth interviews (hence my title: “Questioning Campbell”). Books that Joseph Campbell authored during his lifetime are essentially solo efforts; he alone determined how best to convey the message of the myth. Interviews, on the other hand, are collaborative efforts between interviewer, subject, and often, after-the-fact, an editor. This is more than just a passing fancy, given my role as editor of this month’s featured title, Myth and Meaning: Conversations on Mythology and Life, the most recent addition to The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell. Sourced from 34 relatively obscure print and audio interviews over the last twenty years of Campbell’s life, along with 10 lengthy audience question-and-answer sessions following lectures, this is a “big picture” survey, gathering together bits and fragments of Campbell’s thoughts from many different conversations and blending those fragments into one whole. The fifteen years spent compiling and editing this work offered insight into the different kinds of questions (and questioners) Campbell encountered. Of those sources, a handful are live radio interviews that aired one time on one or another local station as much as half a century ago, with no opportunity for editing before broadcast; there is a sparkle and spontaneity to these exchanges that comes through even very fuzzy audio. Others are local newspaper articles written by a reporter assigned to interview Campbell during a book tour, who may or may not have known anything about myth, or what to ask (in such moments, Campbell skillfully pivots away from generic queries, answering instead the unasked questions). And then there are skilled interviewers who have done their homework and are willing to dive deep, allowing Campbell the time and space he needs to thoroughly cover a subject; a few of these, however, also have their own thoughts to share, and questions sometimes morph into speeches longer than Campbell’s response. Sources also include a few lengthy taped sessions where only a small portion of the recorded discussion made it into print, along with two detailed transcripts of interviews that remain wholly unpublished, all providing insights and observations no one has seen before now. But my favorite sources are Q & A sessions with audience members, regular people rather than journalists, motivated to understand Campbell’s work and its relevance to their own lives. Their sincerity and desire to learn delighted Joe, which comes through in his replies. My challenge was to sift through this wealth of material, extract the gold, and meld the results into one seemingly seamless conversation. Naturally, it was essential to eliminate repetition, especially on topics Campbell frequently addresses. For example, he would often “set the stage” by providing a description of the four functions of mythology before launching into a more direct response to an opening question. It wouldn’t do to bore the reader with eight iterations of the same concept; nevertheless, having access to so many versions did offer considerable flexibility, allowing me to weave the best from each into the conversation. At the same time, many of Campbell’s lengthy responses tended to cover multiple topics tangential to the specific point of an interviewer’s question, so it wasn’t unusual to discover several sentences in one answer that could serve as the perfect coda to an interrupted description culled from a completely different discussion. Given that, I opted to compose a truly syncretic work: tickle out the constituent ideas, break them apart, and then braid them together to form a comprehensive, dynamic reflection of Campbell’s mythological perspective, taking care not to dilute his meaning or present his ideas in a scattershot pattern. No wonder the process took fifteen years! After early efforts kept hitting a brick wall, what made the most sense was to discard the original questions and then sort Campbell's comments into separate "bins," or categories, based on the central theme of each passage. Some paragraphs could find their way into more than one bin; for example, a discussion of the Bronze Age Goddess might include references to the emergence and development of agriculture, so could fit into two different bins; much later, I'd have to decide which category fit best, or whether it was possible to split the comment into separate statements on separate subjects without doing damage to Campbell's intentions. Of course, trying to combine insights from so many different conversations over so many years into one unified text could have come across as forced and disjointed. I believe I successfully resolved this conundrum by composing new questions to help stitch these many discrete pieces together. Of course, the focus of Myth and Meaning is wholly on Joseph Campbell and his ideas; the questions merely serve to get us there. Questions are generally brief and suggested by the material, or what might be missing from the material, thus bridging gaps and helping Campbell’s comments move gracefully from point A to point B to point C. The questions provide a sense of continuity and internal cohesion, serving as the strand on which are beaded Joe's observations. Whether new to Joseph Campbell’s work, or longtime aficionados, I trust readers will be pleased with the results. Hearing the song that is beyond that of your own individual life cycle is the thing that opens you to wisdom. You can hear it in your life, interpreting it, reading it, not in terms of the calamities or boons of your individual existence, but as a message of what life is. (Joseph Campbell, Myth and Meaning, 16) Find out more about what Campbell means by “the message of the myth” by delving into one or all of these works. You should be able to purchase the hardcover edition of Myth and Meaning at your local bookstore, as well as any of the usual online platforms, or by downloading the Ebook directly from JCF.You can order the paperback of The Power of Myth here (JCF receives a small percentage of the sale price when purchased through an Amazon affiliate link). And all six episodes of Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers can be viewed for free on JCF’s YouTube Channel. This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 2, and Myth and Meaning. Latest Podcast In this episode of Pathways (the final full episode of season 3), Joseph Campbell speaks about similarities in the symbolism of Christianity, Buddhism, European Paganism, and the Arthurian Romances. Host Bradley Olson introduces the episode and gives commentary after the lecture. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Hearing the song that is beyond that of your own individual life cycle is the thing that opens you to wisdom. You can hear it in your life, interpreting it, reading it, not in terms of the calamities or boons of your individual existence, but as a message of what life is." - Joseph Campbell - Myth and Meaning, p.16 All the Gods are Within Us (see more videos)