In this, the month of October, we at Joseph Campbell Foundation are celebrating the theme of masks; a theme apropos, I think, for October and Halloween. After all, it is the time of the year when the comfortable infinite space of light diminishes and the obverse–but no less infinite–darkness gathers, conjuring monsters, spirits, bad dreams, and those things that go bump in the night. What time of year could be better, therefore, for turning to Joseph Campbell’s four-volume series The Masks of God, a singular example of his masterly command of story-telling, and of the impressive depth and breadth of his scholarship? The series focuses on Primitive Mythology, Oriental Mythology, Occidental Mythology, and finally, Creative Mythology, and reflects the musings of a writer and a scholar at the top of his game. Campbell's ability as a writer, crafting these volumes in such a way so that an extraordinary aggregate of information is conveyed in as clear and concise a manner as I can imagine, is clearly on display in these volumes. As Campbell notes in Oriental Mythology, there are profoundly different mythologies at work in Eastern and Western cultures, mythologies that create distinctive (and arguably divergent) psychologies in their initiates, as well as vastly different ways of understanding the natural world and its manifestations, both material and immaterial. And yet, at the same time, one must be cautioned that differences among human beings may often be exaggerated, and that we have more (perhaps much more) in common than we realize. In fact, in Campbell’s note on the completion of The Masks of God series, he writes: Looking back today over the twelve delightful years that I spent on this richly rewarding enterprise, I find that its main result for me has been its confirmation of a thought I have long and faithfully entertained: of the unity of the race of man, not only in its biology but also in its spiritual history, which has everywhere unfolded in the manner of a single symphony, with its themes announced, developed, amplified and turned about, distorted, reasserted and today in a grand fortissimo of all sections sounding together, irresistibly advancing to some kind of mighty climax, out of which the next great movement will emerge (Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. II: Oriental Mythology, "On Completion of the Masks of God"). Additionally, I think that it’s fair to note that in the contemporary state of geopolitical and geocultural affairs, many differences between the Western World and Asia are being gradually erased by the process of globalization which is essentially, it seems to me, a process of Westernization and corporate capitalism fueled largely by manufacturing and advances in technology, and cultures that were once remote and largely unfamiliar to one another may now, in some respects, share surprising similarities and values. While mindful of the “single symphony” playing in the background, the most striking of the traditional differences between Asia and the West is their differing conceptualizations of ego. In the Western World, and perhaps particularly here in America, the emphasis has been on developing an individual ego, an individual self, separate from and unique to the millions of other egos and selves in the country. The myth of a lone, rugged, resourceful individual, placed at a specific point on a linear understanding of history, armed with a moral code, a higher truth, or greater skills, and set against the malevolently illiberal, unaware, foolish, or frightened masses, is the story that stirs the American imagination. In Asia, history is circular, the “myth of eternal return” is omnipresent in forms that appear and reappear throughout the course of history: the orbits of the sun, the cycles of the moon, the year, and those cycles of life and death. Individual effort cannot fundamentally alter anything; people are not separate from the world, nor are they merely in the vicinity of god, but rather, the task of the individual in traditional Asian culture is to “order his mind as to identify its consciousness with the inhabiting principle of the whole” (Oriental Mythology, "The Signatures of the Four Great Domains"). Based on his studies of Oriental Mythology, Campbell comes to regard what he calls “mythic identification,” referred to in this volume and also in Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal, as among the most important of concepts. The idea is that individuals are not in a relationship—separate and other in the field of time—to the objects of religious awe, but instead each individual has the potential to experience that the object of religious or mythic awe is themselves! Each one of us has within ourselves all the gods and demons, all the heavens and hells, all the divine mysteries that fascinate, inspire, and menace. As Campbell beautifully ends this volume, the Eastern effort toward mythic identification and its transcendent realization is “the nectar of the fruit of the tree in the garden that Western man, or at least a notable number of his company, failed to eat” (Oriental Mythology, "Tibet: The Buddha and the Great Happiness"). Thanks for reading,

When I was asked to lead the team of academics responsible for fact-checking and updating the archaeological discoveries, anthropological theories and migration patterns presented in the Primitive Mythology, the first volume in Joseph Cambpell’s four-volume opus, The Masks of God, I was humbled and overjoyed by the opportunity, but also a bit worried about how the material would hold up. Would a text about the Paleolithic (originally written in 1959, before the advent of advanced dating and other methods) still be relevant to readers in this modern technological age, a world not only experiencing profound paradigm shifts but also on the verge of environmental, political and economic collapse? Would the old arguments about “pure culture” vs. syncretized mythic structures be so obscure as to render them hopelessly outdated, not only in factual accuracy but in the very paradigms of thought and ways of seeing that were used to consider the research to begin with? What of the recent discoveries in central Europe, Indonesia and the African Savanna which are entirely rewriting our understanding of our earliest human ancestors and their migrations, rituals and systems of belief? “Stuff just keeps getting older,” the author Graham Hancock gleefully reminds us, and this observation has some profound implications for our evolving understanding of the origins of culture and mythology. I worried that Primitive Mythology, at nearly six decades old, might require so much revision that we would need to write an entirely different book. Much to my surprise (and ultimate delight), I found that the text not only holds up but is now, in many ways, more relevant and immediately applicable to the ongoing human project than it was when Campbell first published it. Beyond updating some dates that came from discoveries made after the text was published, the content remains a clarion call for our species to reconnect to its unified spiritual origins before the world is engulfed by the flames of our unyielding ignorance, apathy and jingoistic pride. In the foreword to Primitive Mythology, Campbell reflects on the years he spent developing the series and what it taught him about the unitary nature of consciousness and the overlapping goals, relational structures, and mythopoetic motifs of the world’s great wisdom traditions. He claims that the project confirmed an idea that he had long entertained: a thought that informed his entire body of work and stands as perhaps his most important contribution to the study of myth and human culture. His notion was this: “The unity of the race of man, not only in its biology but also in its spiritual history, which has everywhere unfolded in the manner of a single symphony [...], is irresistibly advancing to some kind of mighty climax, out of which the next great movement will emerge” (Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. I: Primitive Mythology, v). Building on the work of the German anthropologist Adolf Bastian, Campbell noted that the long, winding and often quite diverse pathways of human mythological mapmaking contained some important repeated  patterns. Bastian noted the difference between what he called the “elementary” ideas (foundational meta-structures of association, relationship, and meaning) and the “folk” ideas (the particular cultural “clothing” in which the elementary ideas were shrouded). The distinction is a cornerstone of the way Campbell addressed the various intersections within and among mythological constructs. It served as the basis for his assertions about the ultimate cohesion of the seemingly disparate threads of our species’ spiritual agency. Where do these elementary notions come from, according to Campbell? For this he relied on the work of the psychologist Carl Jung. According to Jung, mythic symbols, characters and motifs are not simply the expression of individual acts of creative consciousness but rather emerge from the collective subconscious, fully formed and imbued with their own teleological force. Myths, to Campbell, are relational algorithms in narrative form that develop in service of deep, fundamental and ultimately unchanging human needs. Who are we? Where do we come from? What is the nature of our relationship to ourselves, to each other, to the natural world, and to transcendence? We do not grow past these questions. We do not evolve or innovate beyond this timeless confrontation with the abyss. In fact, when we reject the reflective contemplation of these mysteries, we become jaundiced, jaded, and cut off from one another. Cast adrift in a dark sea of calloused anonymity and performative identity, we fade away into the very abyss with which we were once engaged in a cosmic co-creative dance of relational mythogenesis. That which once gave us meaning now, cruelly, robs us of it and replaces it with a constant struggle against itself. Like the ancient Hebrews, we become Is-ra-el (Hebrew: the ones who struggle against G-D.) Recent discoveries in the field of quantum physics have, strangely, been lending scientific support to many of Campbell’s theories about the unitary nature of consciousness, the mythic self and the entangled symbolic structures within which it is expressed. In his new book The Quantum Revelation, author Paul Levy states, “Quantum Physics is itself the greatest threat to the underlying metaphysical assumptions of ‘scientific materialism,’ a perspective which assumes that there is an independently existing, objective material world that is separate from the observer” (14). What the new studies are showing in the lab is what folks like Campbell were discovering in the field close to a century ago: a fundamental truth about the nature of the Universe and our place within it that was directly intuited and experienced by our Neolithic and Paleolithic ancestors but which has been lost in the glamour and glitz of the modern world of perpetual distraction. The high-tech materialism of modern civilization has cut us off from the transformative, creative energies that animate all forms and give rise to myths — the narrative construction of individual and cultural identities. God, in this equation, is a technology for accessing and communicating with nonlocal consciousness: a conduit to generating and sustaining communal spaces that foster compassionate, life-affirming and wellness-generating choices. The Torah, the Dao, the Way, the Dharma, the Gospel, the Marga: all are variations on a constant Cosmological theme — harm-reduction writ large in the mytho-cultural milieu of the given society. The world “religion” itself comes from the Latin religio (“to reconnect, to tie together”). What is it that we need to be reconnected to, according to the myths? The answer is always the same: ourselves. Campbell also understood that it was in the Paleolithic that the clues to our mythological origins should be sought. The power of the symbolic activity of the Paleolithic that Campbell explores in Primitive Mythology lies in the images, figurines and ceremonial masks themselves. The images call to us across an impossible chasm of time and space. A mysterious, seemingly insurmountable void sits between us and the people of the Upper Paleolithic and yet, the symbols and artifacts they left behind still speak to us. They trigger the timeless need that springs eternal in the human heart to reach out and touch the infinite. In Primitive Mythology, Campbell engages us in a conversation about the origins of mythological consciousness, the importance of symbolic “play,” and the purpose of putting on, and taking off, the various masks we wear (Jung’s persona/personae matrix) in the course of living a human life filled with human experiences. Campbell explores how the notion of play (intentional and targeted detours into the Otherworld) not only alters the consciousness of the individual but allows them to more easily travel back and forth between the realities of the seen world and those of the shadow world upon which it is built. Primitive Mythology directly introduces the reader to this Cosmic Consciousness at the very moment in our history where it began to shroud itself in the masks of the flesh. The work seeks to rekindle that sense of childlike wonder and infinite creative potentiality expressed in notions like the “imaginative universals” of Giambasta Vico; which suggests that we relate what we don’t understand to things we do have experience with in order to integrate the mystery into our living sense of wonder. In a world that is increasingly fractured by the binary masks and oppositional roles we find ourselves forced into, I can think of no better tonic than this prescient reminder of our original inheritance. Primitive Mythology explores the lived experiences of unified consciousness that are reflected and refracted in the essential forms of the manifested world. “He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it,” George Orwell once noted (Orwell, "Shooting an Elephant"). Campbell shows that this process is at once ancient and modern. And one that can provide a roadmap back to the most essential parts of our human story. Yours, Andrew Gurevich

As we at the Joseph Campbell Foundation wrap up our celebration of the month of September with the theme of Timeless Tales, I want to return to an exploration of the Grail Romances and the relevance these stories have to the challenge of living a contemporary life. In Wolfram’s Parzival, the grail is described as “a stone vessel brought down from heaven by the neutral angels” (Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, 51). Campbell also discusses the symbolic significance of this act in Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth). The neutral angels refused to participate in the heavenly war between God and Lucifer and thus, symbolically, they and their neutrality represent the transcendent principle, the function of which is to reconcile pairs of opposites. Read this way, the grail and its various narratives are seen not simply as the search for a priceless relic, but rather as an effort to move towards a profoundly life-affirming ideal culminating in healing and wholeness, not just limited to the individual, but extending outward to others and to the world itself. It is a union of the spiritual, the psychic, and the physical; it is the phenomenon that C.G. Jung described as the coniunctio. The knights-errant who rode forth seeking the grail didn’t ride under the banner, Amor, as was the habit of the suffering Grail King Amfortas. Amor is a tricky thing: it is often convention masquerading as freedom, infatuation posing as love, a frequently ecstatic projection that leads one unavoidably, at some point, into wounded, impotent grief. Knights-errant striving to attain the grail labor toward an ideal of chivalry which, contrary to the ecstatic rapture of Amor, exposes them to difficulties, trials, and suffering, the very experiences that prepare them to apprehend the sublime. Chivalry may well be the generative, procreative quality of the heart, and it gives birth to individual expressions of courage, nobility, mercy, curiosity, patience, and charity. Chivalry expressed as the action of living lifts the veil of quotidian life to reveal an enchanted world, a world of mystery, of wonder, a world of meaning, a world of soul. There are people mentioned in the grail romances who lack the ethos of chivalry, and thus lacking, lack what the grail represents. They live fine, probably even honorable lives as clergy, merchants, farmers, fishmongers, servants, husbands, wives, and children. They, in all likelihood, are not aware that the world in which they work, play, live, emote, speculate on, laugh about, and die in, is enchanted. All they know of the world are its instinctual pleasures and its unpredictable terrors. For them the world is often harsh, nasty, and short; they commend their souls to God and let fortune do what it must to them, for God and fortune are all they have to rely upon. For them, it's inconceivable to operate in and on the world with anything resembling individual agency because human agency relies upon the qualities of chivalry. Agency knows the value of risk, of effort, of imagination, and dignity; all those qualities that teach us that breathing is not the same thing as living. The only chance one has of finding the grail—or finding that which the grail represents—is through the living of a life predicated on the values of chivalry. Now before you scoff at the notion of chivalry as an antiquated, old-fashioned, straightened notion that contemporary people can disregard, what if I told you that chivalry is not merely a way of life, it is a science? In fact, in his famous paper on phenomenology, Don Quixote and the Problem of Reality, Alfred Schütz calls chivalry “the queen of all sciences.” Chivalry, Schütz argues, encompassed all or most of the sciences in the world at that time: the knight-errant had to be an expert in criminal and civil law, a theologian, a healer: both physician and herbalist, an economist, an astronomer, an athlete, an artisan who could shoe a horse, mend a saddle, or repair weapons and armor as the need arose. Above all the knight-errant had to be a philosopher, one who knew and defended truth, while simultaneously understanding that such a defense might well cost him everything, even his own life. In contemporary life, some will see such individuals and identify them as renaissance hominum, renaissance individuals, while many others will probably call them fools. But, it was said of Don Quixote, and it is no less true of ourselves: that one may live as a fool and yet die wise. Thanks for reading.

In "On the Great Goddess," the introduction to Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, Joseph Campbell addresses “the challenge of the moment” for women, which is to “flower as individuals, neither as biological archetypes nor as personalities imitative of the male” (xiii–xiv). He touches as well on the idea that we are in this together, and must find a way to work it out with compassion. This flowering of the individual feminine — separate from the masculine — is indeed the challenge of the moment as the mushrooming of the #metoo movement seems to demonstrate. I believe women’s psychological development is potentially revolutionary. The discovery of the importance of intimacy, relationships and care, those things which value connection above autonomy and competition, have been familiar to women from the beginning, a legacy or gift of the Goddess. In rediscovering this gift, perhaps both men and women can rediscover the organic flesh and blood of this earth, this divine aspect in a living relationship, as opposed to remaining greedy tenants, hardly aware of their own aliveness, waiting to be serviced, in a soulless building. A new relationship to the divine feminine is an important aspect of the journey to find one’s authentic voice and femalehood, a femalehood separate from the patriarchal identification with the role of women as only nurturer and child bearer, prisoner of biology. In the older view the goddess Universe was alive, herself organically the Earth, the horizon, and the heavens. Now she is dead, and the universe is not an organism, but a building, with gods at rest in it in luxury: not as personifications of the energies in their manners of operation, but as luxury tenants, requiring service. And Man, accordingly, is not as a child born to flower in the knowledge of his own eternal portion but as a robot fashioned to serve. (Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, xxii) Today, dead, (or at least attenuated) goddesses reach us through affliction, through pathology, through the suffering of the Soul and attendant symptoms of the body. Greek goddesses in particular exhibit such divine infirmitas—a wounded or suffering aspect present not just in physical symptoms, but in a psychological view of life as well, in other words, an infirm way of seeing, an infirm psychology. These suffering aspects are reflected in the suffering of contemporary women—such as depression, sexual abuse or sexual dysfunction, and eating disorders. These wounded places in women also have a mythopoetic and psychospiritual perspective, which you can see in the profound resonance between the wounds of woman and the wounds of the Goddess. When a woman journeys inward to retrieve her frozen creativity, she faces Medusa. (In the animated film Moana, the feminine hero finally comes to understand that the sacred heart of the goddess Te Fiti, stolen by Maui, the hero of men, must be returned to her, in order for creativity and life to be restored to both). To face Medusa is to face the prisoner of the depths, the rage of not being able to speak our truth, acknowledge our creativity, our freedom of expression, and our aliveness. It is terrible and terrifying. The Demonic Goddesses in their horrific and fearful aspects have developed from their confrontation with Indo-European patriarchal invaders of Goddess-worshipping cultures. When women cry out about Mother Earth’s suffering, they functioning as priestesses of Gaia, of Mother Earth. From the ancient oracle of Delphi to Joan of Arc, from Rachel Carson to Vandana Shiva, women have spoken out powerfully against greed and the abuses of the patriarchal order, urging people to come back to their senses and listen to the wisdom of the earth which first emerged from the depths in Delphi, so long ago. Women’s voices often illuminate the power of the feminine principle in the world today, and the essential role it must play in bringing back a sense of balance, and harmony to the excesses of an Apollonian driven ethos. The Feminine principle may live, or be suppressed, in both men and women. I believe our future and our well-being, depends upon meaningfully and perhaps even heroically, reconnecting and reengaging the Feminine principle in our everyday encounter with the world around us. Today women are “unlearning not to speak” as poet Marge Piercy says so eloquently in Circles on the Water: She must learn again to speak starting with I starting with We starting as the infant does with her own true hunger and pleasure and rage (97) Thanks for reading.

Six years ago I was literally elbow deep in the Joseph Campbell archives, retrieving dozens of audio cassette tapes on whose delicate ribbons were etched hours of Campbell talking about goddess myths. Between 1972 and 1986 he gave over twenty lectures and workshops on goddesses, and so it was from these tapes that Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine was born. We could say that this volume was incubating for decades, waiting for the right moment to emerge from the archives, and I had the privilege of being able to act as its midwife. For Campbell, the main themes of goddess myths are those that deal with the mysteries of initiation both in terms of how temporal life is animated by eternal mystery, and also in how we experience the great round of life and death. Even though Goddesses itself is a posthumous publication, goddesses figure throughout Campbell’s work. This is because one of Campbell’s favorite themes was the transformation and endurance of the symbolic powers of the feminine divine, even in the face of these last three thousand years of patriarchal and monotheistic religious traditions that have attempted to exclude them. His characteristic brilliance required a large range of discourse, and this is evident in the territory that is covered in the volume. From the one Great Goddess to the many goddesses of the mythic imagination, Campbell traces for us the deep symbolic threads — from the Paleolithic period to Marija Gimbutas’ studies of Neolithic Old Europe, into Sumerian and Egyptian mythology, through Homer's epic The Odyssey, the Greek Eleusinian Mystery cult, the Arthurian legends of the Middle Ages, and into the Neoplatonic Renaissance. While there are many stories and insights from this volume that I love, at this moment I am reminded of what Campbell said at the close of a lecture he gave to an alumni audience at Sarah Lawrence in 1972: I taught at a women’s college for nearly four decades, and as I said to my students, all I can tell you about mythology 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. And it is a future—it’s as though the lift-off has taken place, it really has, there’s no doubt about it. And it’s been one of my great pleasures teaching at Sarah Lawrence all these years instead of teaching a classroom of anonymities, to have had these person-to-person conferences with one woman after another. The sense of individuality that I got from that is something that makes all this general talk about women and men mean nothing to me at all. There is something that the world hasn’t really recognized yet in the female, something that we are waiting now to see.  And so, with Goethe’s old line 'the eternal feminine is what draws us on,' (Faust II, having been drawn on for thirty, what is it now, eight years, I watch it to go on its own and go back into a sort of observant rather than teaching role, watching the marvel of this ascent into heaven of the Goddess. Campbell's sensitivity to the need for women to enter this stream of ideas — the mythic images and their psychological significance — on our own terms and in relation to our needs, is a message of profound support. Myth is nutrient-rich material for the psyche; we need these stories and images to help give shape and imaginal depth to our lives. Thank you for reading, Safron Rossi, Ph.D.

The theme for the month of September at the Joseph Campbell Foundation is “Timeless Tales,” and what tales are more timeless than those of the Matter of Britain, the thematic cycle containing the legends and tales relating to King Arthur? In September, the Joseph Campbell Foundation in association with Amazon’s Kindle eBooks is releasing Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth, edited by Evans Lansing Smith. For Campbell, the Grail Legend, and particularly Wolfram’s Parzival, “…is the great mythos of the modern European world” (Romance of the Grail, 23).  But the Arthurian cycle was not the only recognized “cycle” of the middle ages; in fact, two other commonly recognized cycles of the medieval age were called, the Matter of Rome, stories that centered on the life and adventures—adventures that were conflated with the Trojan War—of Alexander the Great, and the Matter of France, which contains the stories of the adventures of Charlemagne and his paladins.  In addition, there were a number of other, non-cyclical romances written by medieval authors such as Robert the Devil, a personal favorite which is a story about a Norman knight (of whom legend says was the father of William the Conqueror) who discovers that he is the son of Satan. One of the things that made Joseph Campbell a remarkable scholar and storyteller was his ability to contextualize and frame his expositions in such a way that the reader (or the listener) is rewarded with deeper and deeper insights. For example, in the first chapter of Romance of the Grail, he notes how Europe formed itself into something entirely new as the result of powerful forces brought to bear upon it from the East: “An Oriental religion swept into Europe with real force at the end of the fourth century—namely, Christianity…” (5). That simple statement delivers the plangent reminder that at one time, Christianity was something strangely alien to a European sensibility, and perhaps it remains unconsciously strange to modern ears (hence its enduring power to fascinate) because, as Campbell goes on to write, “A century or so later [after the establishment of Christianity as the State Religion of the Roman Empire] the European portion of the Roman Empire collapsed and what we called Rome from then on is really Constantinople, which is Byzantium, which is Asia again.” Looking at even the most common of themes in the Arthurian tales — love — forces us to re-contextualize and rethink the stories in this way. In the traditionally Christian European world, until roughly the 12th century and the appearance of troubadours and romance legends like Parzival, essentially two types of love existed: Agapē, which was spiritual love, impersonal and meant for everyone equally, and Eros, also impersonal in the sense that it is largely rooted in biological and instinctual yearning, largely absent of personal, volitional choice. Till that point, love was merely a calcified act of duty: social, political, financial, and legal. Marriage was less an act of love, than an act of reinforcing the status quo: “…when you think of the Provençal and the Latin word for love, amor, and spell it backward, you get Roma. Rome was regarded as representing the exact opposite principle to love—and love was held to be the higher principle” (Ibid, 28). Troubadours and the author-poets of the Arthurian Romances saw love not as an impersonal, social duty to be performed, but as a personal revelation, a revelation of the self in service to something higher, something greater; love reached the level of an ideal, an aesthetic, a calling. No longer could it remain an empty, social convention but instead as the result of a personal quest, a revelation facilitated by an individual heart. Romantic love was something more, too; a dangerous and risky something, a transgression. If marriage was, as Campbell noted, a violation of love then romantic love must be a violation of the conventions of marriage; a trespassing that surpassed all impediments to the marriage of true minds and true hearts. In these timeless tales, therefore, love becomes something both familiar and strange, a curse and a revelation. To be truly human means to test limitations even though the cost of doing so may be very high. Iseult’s nurse said to Tristan, “…in that cup you have drunk not love alone, but love and death together.” Understanding that life can never be one thing or the other, Tristan was simple and resolute: “Well then, come Death” (The Romance of Tristan and Iseult). Tristan’s response conveyed understanding and acceptance as well as another, nearly simultaneous, opportunity to transcend limits, even the limits of death! Amfortas, the suffering Grail King, used the cry, “Amor!” prior to incurring the grievous wound from which he suffered. And in part, he suffered because he was young, callow, and unprepared for the demands, trials, and pain inherent in the revolutionary new force of romantic love. Amfortas imagined Amor within the conventions of Roma. He may have fared better if he, like Tristan, knew and accepted the dangers of love and had quietly, resolutely uttered the cri de coeur, “Well then, come Death.”

Editor's Note: After a year and a half of editing this MythBlast series for the Joseph Campbell Foundation, the time has come to hand the editorial pen to the next set of writers and imaginers. Thank you to everyone who has written, read, responded, and shared the first 75 essays in this series. It has been an honor and a delight to have the opportunity to ride the mystery with you all. Thank you.    -- Leigh Melander "Every shaman has his song that takes him away." (The Hero's Journey, 61) I believe that we all have songs that can take us away. We do not have to be shamans to find the shamanic threads in our lives, inviting us to go deep into creative consciousness and our own versions of vision quests. As I am learning to listen for that song for my own next quest, I am struck by how easy it is to miss it. To not hear well, or to discount the song while wrapped up in our lives and the expectations of those around us.  Our lives, even if not what we dream them to be, are comfortable, even when they are uncomfortable. We know how to do it. It's familiar. Known. Quantifiable. Even when we are unhappy, we can cling to the ways we walk because we know how to navigate them. The well-worn path, deemed valid and productive by our society and community, can be so seductive because it seems to offer direction. But that illusion of certainty, that comfort in the known and accepted, can keep us from finding our way in, from hearing the music that calls us to the quest that can deepen our understanding of our work in the world. In The Hero's Journey, Campbell shares a story: There’s an interesting paper, “The Shaman from Elko,” in the festschrift novel volume for Joseph Henderson, a psychiatrist in San Francisco. It’s an account of a woman in West Virginia, in the coal-mining areas there, who in her late sixties had the dreadful feeling that she had lost life, that she had never lived life, that there had been a life for her that she had not lived. And in the analysis they found one time when she was a little girl, about thirteen years old (that’s about the time for the experience), she was walking in the forest and she heard a strange music, a strange song. But she didn’t have in her culture the assistance to help her do something with that and so she lost it. And then throughout her life she had the feeling that she hadn’t lived her life. The thing about the shaman crisis is that if the individual does not follow the song he will die, he will really die. (The Hero's Journey, p 62) While Campbell frames this experience as something that happens in adolescence, I believe that it can - and does - happen at multiple times in our lives.  We have so many opportunities to forge that new path, to hear a new song, or find the lost tune of a song that's been working in our psyches. Each is a chance to find your next quest, and to bring a boon - small or large - back to your community. This is what I wish for you: that you may hear your song and that the culture around you can help you follow it. And that you may find ways to assist those around you to hear theirs, and 'do something with it.' And that you may feel that you really have lived your life. Thank you for being a part of bringing myth to life in the world.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this month’s theme at JCF, the theme of independence, reflecting on Joseph Campbell’s often bold, independent nature, and what it means to become an independent human being. As Campbell describes in Pathways to Bliss, releasing this month as an eBook, independence is a difficult achievement for humans: The first fact that distinguishes the human species from all others is that we are born too soon. We arrive, incapable of taking care of ourselves for something like fifteen years. Puberty doesn’t come along for twelve years or more, and physical maturity doesn’t arrive until our early twenties. During the greater part of this long arc of life, the individual is in a psychological situation of dependency. We are trained, as children, so that every stimulus, every experience, leads us simply to react, “Who will help me?” (Pathways to Bliss, 11) The reflexive, human reaction to novelty and fear, to the unfamiliar or unknown is to ask, at least initially, “Who will help me?” Of course, the slowly dawning realization occurs that it is primarily oneself upon which one must rely, and this is the beginning of maturity. In our maturity others may still point the way or render aid, they may still give comfort, but ultimately one understands that one has the solitary, frequently heavy, responsibility to reach out, to investigate, or to seek counsel, to deal with and navigate life’s challenges. It’s made all the more difficult because as a rule, others no longer magically appear, as one’s parents may once have—unbidden, and just when they were most needed. This is fundamentally how one grows and matures, this is how one becomes an independent person. Such a move towards maturity and independence is equally important in relationship to our myths as well. Generally speaking, people believe that the objects of myth are somewhere “out there,” either in this world or in some adjacent, perhaps ancient, conventionally unapproachable or misapprehended realm. “Now,” Campbell writes, “it’s a basic mythological principle, I would say, that what is referred to in mythology as ‘the other world’ is really (in psychological terms) ‘the inner world.’ And what is spoken of as ‘future’ is ‘now (Ibid, 18).’” Later, on page 42 he notes, “[…] the incarnation—the avatar—is merely the model through which you find this miracle in yourself.” Ideally, one works to destroy the notion that the objects of mythic awe are somewhere out there, separate from oneself, while simultaneously discovering that one is, in fact, the thing one is searching for. It’s a bit of a paradox, isn’t it? We unconsciously create the objects of myth, project them out into the world so that they seem separate from ourselves, and yet in some sense the objects of myth were there all along (within and without) waiting to be created and become realized! The revolutionary change from dependence to independence in mythical thought is a substantive change from an orientation of mere “relationship” to an orientation of “use.” One shifts from a relational modality which simply places one in relationship to something “other” and “out there,” to a perspective of use which gives the objects of myth energy, gravity, and consequence within; one might say that the objects of myth are present-to-hand or ready-to-hand. Such a perspectival shift requires that the mythic idea, concept, or symbol experienced as “other” be destroyed in order to realize that one possesses these energies oneself. Destruction of the mythic symbols existing out there in “the other world,” leads to the discovery of the symbol’s deeper reality living within. By destroying the objects of myth through the recognition of them as projections or fantasies, the reality of what they represent may be directly experienced in the inner world. The iconoclastic move, the smashing of the image, results in the creation of a new space, a new reality; no longer a potential space, but an area of actual experience. This is why Campbell can say, responding to Bill Moyers’ statement about him being a man of faith, “No, I don’t have to have faith, I have experience (The Power of Myth, 208).” The importance of this willing destruction cannot be overstated. It represents the birth into a living reality of what was formerly a simplistic, dualistic concept or heuristic device; this move allows one to experience in a given moment, at first hand, a transcendent reality of bliss, not merely the products of projective mental processes. It enables myth to be used. Thanks for reading.

Happy Independence Day! For Americans, this day falls on July 4th every year, celebrating a terrifying and exhilarating moment when thirteen colonies ratified their declaration to come together as a new nation. I think it is important that Americans mark the day that the Continental Congress met in a hot Philadelphia chamber to bring their ideas into concreteness. They voted to declare independence from Great Britain two days earlier, but the day we remember is the day that they made it real. Ideas are marvelous things, but ultimately, they matter when they actually 'matter' - start to come into concrete being. Underneath the fireworks, the carnivals, cookouts, and bunting that wraps this day in my part of the world, I find myself musing on the true audacity involved in declaring - and then enacting - our independence. And by 'our,' I mean not just a group of somewhat unlikely revolutionaries in the American colonies 200 plus years ago - farmers, merchants, tavern-owners, physicians, lawyers, many of whom had deep ties to Britain and so much to lose - but each of us, yesterday and today and tomorrow, each time we break from systems that no longer serve us and have the nerve to step into the unknown. Independence is a fairly modern word, first emerging at the end of the Renaissance. By the 1670's, just a hundred years before the American Revolution, it began to mean "one who acts according to his own will."  This definition reflects a new sense of the importance and power of the individual that exploded into the Enlightenment, and set the stage for that group of people daring to cast off moorings of cultural, economic, political and even familial ties with their mother (think on that as a symbol for a moment!) country. It is truly an audacious move, to act according to our own will. C.G. Jung would, I believe, characterize this as an integral outcome of individuation, bringing the personal and collective unconscious into the conscious, as we develop our individual personalities - and, ultimately our own lives. This sense of the individual is a mythos that resides close to the surface in much of how Americans imagine ourselves, the stories that we tell about who we are. It can carry shadows, no doubt, but on a bright fourth of July morning, it seems filled with promise, carrying with it the courage inherent in breaking our dependence on other, external ways of thinking, and offering infinite possibilities for us to embrace the responsibilities and joys of living true to our most inspiring adventures. It can even, as Campbell suggests, bring us to bliss. The hero journey is one of the universal patterns through which that radiance shows brightly. What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There’s always the possibility of a fiasco.But there’s also the possibility of bliss. (Campbell, Pathways to Bliss. 2004. p 135)

Editor's Note: We promised Joyce in June. Well, it's July. And we had one more piece to share! But what is time, really? Enjoy. And stay tuned for our month of independence, ecstasy, and bliss...all that high summer should be. • • • On his return in 1929 from years of study abroad, Joseph Campbell knowingly and with conscious aforethought committed a crime! Who was the bad influence that prompted the young Campbell to turn outlaw––and helped inspire him to drop out of the doctoral program? The same individual Campbell credits with jumpstarting his career as a public scholar and writer. In Paris on a Proudfit Scholarship in the late 1920s, Joseph Campbell discovered James Joyce: “The whole thing opened up like crazy when I found Ulysses, which was forbidden in the States. I had to smuggle my volume in. You went to a bookstore feeling you were doing something pretty far out and said, ‘Avez-vous Ulysses?’ ” James Joyce’s writing played a major role throughout Campbell’s life, but it was no love at first sight. The newly arrived grad student apparently felt Joyce’s novel was indeed a transgression, though for different reasons than those of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (which was behind the original prosecutions that declared Ulysses obscene in 1921): “That third chapter of Ulysses––‘Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot.’I couldn't understand what I was reading! What the hell's going on here? I went to Sylvia Beach at the Shakespeare Book Shop in indignation: ‘How do you read this?’ And she said, ‘As follows.’” Beach, Joyce’s publisher, shared with Campbell multiple works that fleshed out the mythological context and opened Joe’s eyes to the depth of Joyce’s scholarship. At the time, Joyce was publishing early drafts of what was to become Finnegans Wake in the avant-garde magazine transition, edited by Eugene Jolas. Joseph purchased every issue and studied it closely; not quite sure what to make of Joyce’s Work in Progress, he nevertheless realized it held deep meaning for him: “I was pulled in. And with that I began to lose touch with my Ph.D. direction. Suddenly the whole modern world opened up. With a bang!” James Joyce remained a constant companion the next sixty years. He even appears in letters between Jean Erdman and Joe Campbell from their courting days (Jean once swore she would never read Joyce’s masterpiece because “I was on one arm and Finnegans Wake on the other arm, and he spent as much time with Finnegans Wake as he did me.”). Campbell first came to public attention as a literary scholar years later, when he and Jean attended a performance of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, a play that he was surprised to recognize borrowed liberally, without attribution, from Finnegans Wake. The ensuing plagiarism controversy, examined in an earlier MythBlast, led to Joseph Campbell’s first published work, with co-author Henry Morton Robinson––A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake––which, as Campbell told New York Times writer D.J.R. Bruckner, is “how I got started writing. I've been writing ever since⁠.” Campbell regularly drew on James Joyce’s theory of aesthetics and art in writings and lectures, and never ceased playing with the myriad mythic motifs that permeate Joyce’s work. Even Jean Erdman, a celebrated dancer and choreographer, eventually overcame her initial reluctance, not only reading Finnegans Wake but giving life to Anna Livia Plurabelle, the Wake’s lead female character, in her creation of The Coach With Six Insides––an award-winning production that debuted in Greenwich Village and toured the world. What explains Joyce’s appeal to Joseph Campbell? This comment in Mythic Worlds, Modern Words, on a passage in Ulysses offers a huge clue: " 'A shout in the street' . . . is God. Stephen's shift of emphasis is a very important theme: God isn't the transcendent one 'out there'; God is the immanent principle right here in everything, in everybody. In the dog that is going to be walking about on the shore, God (dog in reverse) is right there in him. God is a shout in the street: God is immanent everywhere and in everything. Mr. Deasy speaks of the process of God in history. There is no process, Stephen says, God is present. This resembles the idea in the Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas: 'The kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it.' (Thomas 99:16-18) That revelation of the Father's kingdom is also the radiance of esthetic arrest. Stephen says, 'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.' His quest is for that eternal core, that essence of all things which moves through all history––the metamorphosis I spoke of––that one spirit that lives through all the metamorphoses of all things."

As you know, this month JCF is celebrating James Joyce, who was an important influence on the work of Joseph Campbell, and continues to be an important influence for many of my colleagues and friends affiliated with the Joseph Campbell Foundation. But I must admit that I’m at a bit of a loss regarding the way to distill the essence of James Joyce in a MythBlast. It’s not that I’m unfamiliar with Joyce; to the contrary, I’ve read Joyce most of my adult life. It is impossible not to regard James Joyce as a giant of the modernist movement and, despite the too common currency of the word these days, a genius. But I find that in his books, Joyce remains distant, difficult to know, unknowable in the way that one feels one knows Hemingway or say, Virginia Woolf. This lack of knowing, this authorial distance or remove, exists as paradox in the most autobiographical of authors.Paradox is the word that best defines Joyce, it seems. Lionel Trilling wrote that in Ulysses particularly, Joyce exhibited an intrinsic “sympathy for progressive social ideas.” Relying on Ulysses alone, one easily assumes the author to be politically liberal, democratic, protective of individual rights, and supportive of social and political reformation. But Dominick Manganiello, in his work on Joyce’s politics, concludes that Joyce was a libertarian. And then there’s the matter of Joyce’s nuanced relationship to religion. While Joyce categorically denounced the Catholic Church, some of the subject matter of Ulysses sincerely wrestles with profoundly religious concerns and intimations. Some catholic supporters of Joyce argue that he reconciled with the church prior to his death, and in an interview, during which he was asked when he left the Catholic Church, Joyce replied, “That’s for the Church to say.” On the one hand he adored Nora Barnacle; so much so, that he memorialized the date of their first encounter, June 16, 1904 as the single day within which the narrative of Ulysses unfolds. He was capable of summoning feelings of great love, and yet he was often faithless, self-centered, and unthinkingly cruel to her. Joyce was both highbrow and lowbrow at once: he was undeniably the brilliant stylist of literature, something of an elitist and an aesthete, dandyish, spendthrift; and yet had remarkable affection for and concerns about the plight of everyday, ordinary, anonymous people barely eking out livings in the great urban sea of everyday life. Joyce granted some of the faceless mass immortality through his indelible characterizations and satires of them. His family was often nearly destitute during Joyce’s adolescence and in the early days of his adulthood, his father having squandered, if not a fortune, at least a very sizable nest egg. Perhaps, better than anyone, Gertrude Stein summed up the paradox of James Joyce when she remarked, “Joyce is a good writer. People like him because he is incomprehensible and anybody can understand him.” Paradox is the métier of myth, and the more intensely paradoxical one’s situation, the more deeply one finds oneself in the mythic world. Paradox is the most present and identifiable feature of the sublime mystery commonly referred to as the divine. Joyce’s writing, as well as his life and biography, abound in paradox and I don’t think it a stretch to call him the most mythological of modern writers. Furthermore, I don’t even think it is a stretch to favorably compare Joyce with Sophocles; like Sophocles, Joyce has a great compassion for those unfortunates who have to bear difficult fates, he empathizes with those who find themselves struggling with, and ultimately pinned beneath Fortuna's revolving wheel. Finnegans Wake has a distinctly mythic, cyclical structure, and one can’t help but recall Joseph Campbell’s remark that dreams are private myths, and myths are public dreams. HCE’s somnambulistic journey through dreams and a bad conscience has the familiar mythic elements of finding oneself in a strange world with unfamiliar physics, populated with challenges and terrors (not the least of which are the ten one hundred letter words scattered through the text), and finally emerging once again into the familiar light of day, transformed and renewed. Wake’s narrative pattern is, as is its entire form, circular and recursive, falling back onto and into itself and reemerging from the murky dream and myth-like darkness with new directions and insights; worlds coming into being and dissolving, Brahman-like, dreamt by the dreamer dreaming the dream of the Universe. What Picasso’s cubism did for the visual arts, in his last two books Joyce did for the literary arts. I don’t even pretend to fully comprehend Joyce, but as he wrote in Ulysses, "I’m almosting it."

For years I have been intrigued with what I perceive as a particularly Celtic sensibility, an ability to dance on the knife's edge between insight and nonsense, tragedy and comedy, sacred and profane. Not to say that only those of Celtic antecedents have this ability, of course, but there seems to be a profound and specific love for this dance in Celtic myth, story, and literature. This month, the Joseph Campbell Foundation is celebrating that uniquely Celtic voice, James Joyce, and his intersections with Campbell's work and thought. Campbell viewed Joyce as a core inspiration for his work (indeed, this is where the famous - or perhaps infamous -  'monomyth' sprang from for Campbell), and lectured and wrote extensively on Joyce throughout his career. As I open the proverbial door for a series of essays from various myth and Campbell writers on this Joycean thought play this month, I am struck by how interwoven not only the thought on Joyce's writings have been with that knife's edge, but how the personalities and relationships have been as well, and how they brush up lightly against my own landing place and fascination with how people and ideas connect. I live in the Catskills, just down the road from Woodstock, where Campbell holed up for several years reading voraciously after deciding that a doctorate at Columbia wasn't of interest, and where he ran into Henry Morton Robinson, whom he had known while he was getting his master's degree when Robinson was teaching at Columbia. Robinson grew up in the heady creative radicalism of the Maverick artist's colony, a rebellion not only against polite society of an America in a new century, but a rebellion against the lingering politeness of the Byrdcliffe artist's colony efforts at rebellion against polite society. Its founder, Hervey White, co-founded the latter, but recast his vision into something simultaneously more sacred and profane with the Maverick. In a superbly Joycean move, he underwrote most of the prosaic expenses for food, heat, and supplies for a free-thinking artist's colony by producing an ever-wilder festival every year, where people (as many as 6000 at a time) would flock to shatter their proprieties into wildness. By the time Campbell landed in Woodstock, the Maverick had subsided into an ongoing, fairly decorous concert series that continue today in White's exquisite concert hall, but that wildness lingered in the area's imagination. (And was reborn decades later in the Woodstock Festival, which, of course, in a superbly nonsensical way, didn't actually happen there, but instead, almost 60 miles and two counties away in Bethel, NY. This hasn't kept the town of Woodstock from cashing in on its imaginary history as the epicenter of tie dye hippy culture, with little memory of its antecedents in the mavericks who actually lived there several decades earlier.) Both Joyce enthusiasts, Campbell and Robinson decided that they could, as a mythologist and writer, respectively, write a 'key' to the seemingly impenetrable Finnegans Wake after its 1939 release. Their efforts were met with disinterest by publishers until Campbell and Robinson reacted to Thornton Wilder's hit play, By the Skin of Our Teeth, with two articles imbued with a fair amount of outrage, seeing it as a cheap trick light-fingering of Finnegan's Wake by Wilder, in a creative and financially opportunistic move. ...Campbell and Robinson were offended by what they saw as an attempt to profit from Joyce’s work at a time when Finnegans Wake itself had been remaindered, and when the Joyce family was in financial difficulties; the war had frozen British and American royalty payments, thereby preventing money from reaching Nora and Giorgio in Switzerland. (A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, xv) These articles gotten snapped up by the Saturday Review, and suddenly publishers were interested in seeing more from Campbell and Robinson on Joyce. Together, they wrote A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, which has lasted as the bedrock unlocking of Joyce's profanely sacred nonsensical insights for generations of scholars and readers. What delights me about this is the earnestness of their desire to assist the world to begin to understand what Joyce had to offer, which was dismissed as having importance until they rose to his defense at the expense of another writer. The ideas themselves weren't as juicy as outrage. Highbrow intellectual thought about controversial writing became interesting when the artists themselves became controversial. Campbell and Robinson both shouldered their own bits of controversy - Campbell with accusations of being a pop culture guru himself, and Robinson, who served as a senior editor for that most polite society of publications, Reader's Digest, and then wrote The Cardinal, which took on assumptions about the Catholic priesthood. And Campbell and Robinson's outrage, whether they were right about Wilder's use of Joyce as a plagiarized source (which they make an eloquent case for, but as you can imagine, scholarly arguments still echo on this), was from a distance. Neither of them knew Joyce personally. Ironically, Thornton Wilder did, wrote a biography on him, and in fact was working hard to bring financial resources to Joyce and his wife in this era. Wilder spoke of his inspiration from Joyce's work not unlike how Joyce spoke of his inspiration from Homer for his version of Ulysses. To me, this swirl of place, of people, of the complexity of alliances and ideas, with all of their good intentions and emotional tiger traps, feels like something what Joyce could have written. And it feels, ultimately, deeply mythic, filled with the same dance between what is most and least true, what is most sacred and most profane, and most ridiculous and most heartbreaking.