Saving Private Ryan (1998) Paramount Pictures On a visit last fall to the American Cemetery in Normandy, I saw the grave markers of two American brothers side by side who died in the Allied operation to liberate France in 1945. But after Robert and Preston Niland sacrificed their lives, the U.S. Army realized that two other Niland brothers were in the war as well: one missing in the Pacific theater and another fighting in Europe. The Army’s fateful decision to reassign the living Niland soldier away from the front would later inspire Steven Spielberg’s 1998 film, Saving Private Ryan . In the movie, the Army realizes that three out of four sons of a fictional Mrs. Ryan have been killed in action, and the fourth, Private James Ryan, is lost behind enemy lines in the chaos following D-Day. The Army hierarchy understands that this mother of many must be spared the insupportable grief of losing all her children, the way the Greek goddess Demeter had to be spared the grief of completely losing her child Persephone. In this way, Mrs. Ryan resonates with a mythic figure whom Joseph Campbell calls the “Great Mother” ( Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine , eBook 91).  So the Army sends a squad of Rangers on a collective journey into the underworld of Nazi-occupied France to find Private Ryan, the Great Mother’s lost child. The Rangers must scour a wasteland of war to find one unremarkable soldier among thousands dressed exactly like him. In searching for Private Ryan, the squad assumes the mantle of the Seeker archetype. The courage to search Saving Private Ryan  is an imaginal plunge into the full-body commitment soldiers make to war: its horrors and hurts, its blood and its brawls. From the famous sequence that recreates D-Day to to the final fight protecting a strategic bridge, the immediacy and realism of the film’s battle scenes testify to the courage required to put oneself in harm’s way in order to save others. The Seeker archetype requires courage, too. The Seeker appears when something is missing, lost, or not yet achieved—in other words, a situation of vulnerability. Although the search can lead to discovery and new knowledge, the Seeker must accept that there’s no guarantee they’ll like what they find, if they find anything at all. They can only search from a place of not-knowing. Will they find what they seek? Will they win or lose? Live or die? These unknowable questions take on heightened urgency for Seekers in wartime and therefore require heightened courage.  Still, the Saving Private Ryan  Seeker squad sets out. They encounter deadly distractions and competing priorities. They make hard decisions. They keep going when everything seems impossible. They pool their courage and skills. The collective capacity of a team of Seekers is far more than the sum of each individual’s.  A team of Seekers If a wartime Seeker summons a special kind of bravery, a team of wartime Seekers leads to a surge of Seeker courage. What’s more, each Seeker trusts the rest of the team to play their part, freeing everyone to focus on their own tasks. Each functions as a safety net for the others and for the mission. If one falls, others will step into the breach, dress wounds, carry the search forward. In addition to greater combined courage, this increase in focus and resilience are gifts of a collaborative, collective hero’s journey. For more about collective journeys, I highly recommend the work of John Bucher , the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Executive Director, starting with his MythBlast A Call to a Collective Adventure .  Saving Private Ryan ’s Seekers might look like each other from a distance, but they have unique and complementary skills: captain, technical sergeant, medic, sniper, light machine gun specialist, translator. In other words, anyone can be a Seeker, and each soldier represents a particular capacity that this search requires. Seeking alone, none could succeed, but when each lends his powers to the search, they can save the Great Mother from further suffering. The collective capacity of a team of Seekers is far more than the sum of each individual’s.  For whom they all seek The mission makes no sense in a financial cost-benefit analysis—sending a squad of elite Rangers to find one nondescript private—but it is essential for the life force Mrs. Ryan represents. In other words, it makes soul sense. At home in the heartland, surrounded by endlessly vast wheat fields, Mrs. Ryan represents the bountiful Great Mother and the soul of America, or what Campbell might call the nation’s “power of life” ( Goddesses , eBook 219). Her silent presence permeates the film, from dying soldiers calling out for Mama (11:39, 1:31:18) to stories the squad tells about their mothers (1:09:20, 1:09:42, 1:09:58) to their many references to upsetting mothers back home (21:33, 43:22, 45:22, 1:39:09, 1:51:05). The movie’s plot runs on the truth that the Great Mother can only take so much suffering before the land begins to wither, and her sons represent a generation at risk. If they all die, the nation can’t survive. The image of the Great Mother also makes a sharp contrast to the Nazi metaphor of the Fatherland that seeks to own, occupy, and destroy those whom it considers lesser. When lost becomes found I love  Saving Private Ryan . I won’t pretend it’s an easy film to watch, but for me it serves as utterly effective myth-making: crafting the events of history with a dash of fiction to create a work of deep meaning and import that tells the soul’s truth. It’s a battle hymn to the courage of the Seeker archetype, to the capacities of a team of Seekers, and to the Great Mother whom they fight to protect.  Does the squad succeed in their seeking? Yes and no. They find Private Ryan, but six out of eight Rangers die in the process. Similarly, the imperfect moral code of the Allies triumphs over the absolutely immoral code of the Nazis after the cost of countless lives.  The Seeker in Saving Private Ryan  offers many suggestions for how to search: Scan the horizon. Keep moving. Protect those who can’t protect themselves. Serve, survive, save your companions. Devote yourself to what you love for as long as you can. Summon your courage, leap into the fray, and keep going especially when the search seems impossible. Remember that feeling fear is the only possible way to be brave. MythBlast authored by: Joanna Gardner, PhD , is a writer, mythologist, and magical realist focusing on creativity, goddesses, and wonder tales. She is the author of The Practice of Enchantment: MythBlast Essays, 2020-2024   and the lead author of Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide . Joanna serves as director of marketing and communications for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and as adjunct professor in Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Mythological Studies program. She also co-founded and co-leads the Fates and Graces , hosting webinars and workshops for mythic readers and writers. For Joanna's updates and additional publications, you are most cordially invited to visit her website at joannagardner.com . This MythBlast was inspired by Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine and the archetype of The Seeker. Latest Podcast Francis Weller has spent his life restoring the sacred work of grief and deepening our connection to the soul. A psychotherapist, writer, and soul activist, Francis weaves together psychology, mythology, alchemy, and indigenous wisdom to show us how grief is not just personal but profoundly communal. His bestselling book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, has guided thousands in embracing loss as a path to renewal. Through his organization, WisdomBridge, and his work with the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, Francis helps others navigate sorrow with ritual, story, and deep remembrance. In this conversation, we explore how grief can serve as an initiation into a richer, more connected life—and why reclaiming lost rituals of mourning is essential to healing both ourselves and the world. For more information about Francis, visit: https://www.francisweller.net/ Listen Here This Week's Highlights "The demand on the individual is that he give himself up for his community. That’s the mysticism of the warrior life, that he accepts death for himself. And there are rituals, or there used to be, for bringing about that shift of accent in the mind." -- Joseph Campbell Myth and Meaning , 195 The Radiance Behind All Things Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Still from Rango (2011) If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it's not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. Joseph Campbell, Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion The MythBlast series has so far focused on the Fool, the Lover, and the Trickster in film. Now for the month of April, we turn and engage the Seeker archetype, the last in the Archetypes of Innocence. I have chosen a movie that has elements of all three preceding archetypes yet squarely emphasizes the Seeker–Gore Verbinski’s Rango , released in 2011. This animated pastiche of the Western genre humorously illustrates the core issue for the Seeker: pursuing something external that will ultimately bring inner meaning and enlightenment. I would like to more carefully unfold how the film’s protagonist-Seeker actually portrays how this progression of the last few months’ archetypes works in each of our lives. “Who am I? I could be anyone” Our unnamed protagonist (voiced by Johnny Depp) reveals himself in the film setup as an actor asking himself this very question. He is actually a chameleon, riding alone inside an aquarium-as-stage in the back of a station wagon and playing a scene by himself with various props. After asking the above question about his identity, he imagines that he can be any role he wants: a voyaging sea captain, a rogue anthropologist, or a Don Juan-like lover. But the solo performer realizes he needs both real “costars” and some kind of inciting event to shake things up. Suddenly, his glass “proscenium” flies out the back window of the car onto the desert highway. As he immediately gets thirsty in the desert heat, finding water for survival becomes his overt quest. But underlying this are the deeper, archetypal goals of a solidified social role, connection with others, and somehow making a difference in the world. The chameleon’s entry into the desert town of Dirt fulfills both of the most basic story beginnings that John Gardner famously recommended to budding authors: “a trip or the arrival of a stranger” (203). Of course, everyone in town asks the stranger, “Who are you?” In a place where toughness and courage are the societal norm, the chameleon transforms the name Durango into Rango and constructs a rugged gunslinger personality, bolstered by fabricated stories and Western cliches. Through his grand performance and sheer accident, “Rango” rises to become a hero and figurehead for the town. Rango then is on the “trip” to self-discovery and himself is the stranger in town as well as a stranger to who he really is. What are the chameleon’s real colors? Rango’s immediate need for both physical and social survival represents the needs each of us has coming into this world. We, like him, must rely on the tribe we’re surrounded with–most often the family situation, but also extending to the community. To have our survival needs met, we must blend in, chameleon-like, so that we are accepted and cared for. With the addition of the Seeker, the trajectory of the previous month’s archetypes form a progression, a sequence. We all start out as newborn Fools, only gaining wisdom by living. We need the nurture of Lovers around us to provide what we require and to be the objects of our love. And we play the Trickster in two modes: by “acting” in ways that are calculated to bring us the love we need (the Jungian persona), and by masking the qualities that our tribe deems unacceptable (the shadow). Like Rango, we have many potential “roles” before us, our encounters with others and with life shape the character of our “performance.” “Who am I? I could be anyone” Of course, the problem with the Fool desperately seeking Love and leaning into their Trickster is that both naivete and an oversized ego tend to build houses of cards. Rango’s tall tales of who he is fosters his acceptance and ultimately his being named sheriff, but soon a reckoning must come. When the lie is exposed, he shamefully walks away from the friends he so desperately wants to save. And once again, that question arises that started the movie: “Who am I?” This crisis now stems from having a persona wholly influenced by the collective, conditioned to follow what’s expected, versus the expression of what’s unique to the individual. In The Power of Myth , Campbell speaks of the ideal “that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else’s” (186). Moving from innocence to experience The remainder of the movie explores how Rango can tap into his “ordinariness” (versus his Western gunslinger persona) to face the town’s foes and not be THE hero but to galvanize its residents into what JCF director John Bucher has called “ A Call to Collective Adventure.” He is inspired to step away from the typical hero role that’s expected of him (what Campbell has called “the primary mask”) and become a leader operating through influence versus raw force and intimidation. The deep joy of the film unfolds as Rango, as Campbell notes in Transformations of Myth Through Time , “begins to find his own path, and the drag, you might say, of the primary mask is gradually thrown off” (26). Each of us may have varying degrees of the Fool, the Lover, the Trickster, or the Seeker active within. They both accompany and drive us along the path we are on. We at the JCF have grouped the nature of these four into the “archetypes of innocence,” and perhaps an even better term for them might be “archetypes of development.” Through their interplay and the working out of them in relation to the world, we are constantly answering the question “Who am I?” When that question pushes us to explore the safety beyond our own glass enclosures, the Seeker can powerfully activate to reach further externally to experience deeper meaning within. And as you will see for the remainder of this month, the Seeker’s path will develop from innocence into experience. MythBlast authored by: Scott Neumeister, Phd  is a literary scholar, author, TEDx speaker, mythic pathfinder and Editor of the MythBlast series 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 Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine and the archetype of The Seeker. Latest Podcast Francis Weller has spent his life restoring the sacred work of grief and deepening our connection to the soul. A psychotherapist, writer, and soul activist, Francis weaves together psychology, mythology, alchemy, and indigenous wisdom to show us how grief is not just personal but profoundly communal. His bestselling book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, has guided thousands in embracing loss as a path to renewal. Through his organization, WisdomBridge, and his work with the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, Francis helps others navigate sorrow with ritual, story, and deep remembrance. In this conversation, we explore how grief can serve as an initiation into a richer, more connected life—and why reclaiming lost rituals of mourning is essential to healing both ourselves and the world. For more information about Francis visit: https://www.francisweller.net/ Listen Here This Week's Highlights "You are that mystery which you are seeking to know. But it’s not the you that you fancy. It’s not the aspect that your friends are enjoying, that thing in the phenomenal world that is moving around. It is that ground of being that was there, will be there, is what you are to refer to." -- Joseph Campbell The Hero’s Journey, 197 Kundalini Yoga: Solar & Lunar Energy Pathways Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Casablanca (1942) Warner Brothers Pictures We are living in a moment where trickster energy is weaving through much of the momentum in the world. Where truth lies, who holds power, and whether our perceptions of what’s happening around us is uncertain, as it shatters many of our ideas about how things work. This energy is truly uncomfortable, as trickster energy often is, but I’m finding myself wondering about both its oppositional and the generative power, as well as its ability to disquiet us, both individually and collectively. The trickster in resistance: Casablanca “Two German Couriers were found murdered in the desert. The unoccupied desert. This is the customary roundup of refugees, liberals, and of course, beautiful young girls by Inspector Renault.” This is how Casablanca   (1942) begins, rounding up suspicious characters (or as Renault says later, in a wonderful trickster metaphor, the “usual suspects”), in the ongoing dance between compliance and complicity, self-interest and selflessness, courage and defiance that runs through the film. While Renault is the most obvious trickster figure in the film, ultimately, almost no one is exactly who they seem to be, and truth and perception are fluid and unsettling. Ambiguity reigns; Sidney Rosensweig in Casablanca and Other Major Films of Michael Curti z , cites the different names that each character gives Rick (Richard, Ricky, Mr. Rick, Herr Rick and boss) as evidence of the different meanings that he has for each person (82). Laszlo is indomitable, elegant, and utterly vulnerable not to the Nazis, but to Ilsa, who in turn chooses passion over righteousness. And of course Rick, who “sticks his neck out for nobody,” finds the courage for both of them to reach for that rightness at the cost of their happiness.  Resisting “The” trickster What is most intriguing about the film, though, is that the archetype is not fixed, but instead an energy that touches everyone in the film.  Place itself is liminal. Casablanca operates under its own ever-shifting rules, outside of both the structure and destruction of Europe during the Second World War. Vichy, the headquarters of the French government collaborating with the Nazis, is the site of volcanic springs that offer mineralized water that promise health and new beginnings. And always, the plane to Lisbon offers an escape to order and the freedom that the United States promised in the era.  I am reminded of David L. Miller ’s insights in lectures where he has challenged the crystallization and literalization of archetypes into static figures by stressing the importance of thinking of archetypal versus archetype. It shifts archetypes from “what” into “how,” and even “why.” Understanding archetype this way, as movement rather than a fixed set of character traits, as more of a verb rather than a noun, deepens our intuiting of the power of archetypal thinking. Instead of being a conclusion, archetypes are instead flowing metaphors that exist and move both within us and outside ourselves. They provide openings rather than answers. By resisting our inclinations to say, “so-and-so is a trickster,” we can look at the movement and essence animating not just people, but also places, stories, and ourselves. Archetypes then become genuinely mythic, as metaphors that touch upon ideas that are larger than we can completely wrap our arms around, rather than simply stereotypes.  Instead of being a conclusion, archetypes are instead flowing metaphors that exist and move both within us and outside ourselves Tricksters, human nature, shadow, and resistance C.G. Jung argues  that the trickster archetype is undifferentiated human consciousness, reflecting the earliest humans and what he perceived as psyches that had yet developed. He states: The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when, irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him or of things being bewitched. He never suspects that his own hidden and apparently harmless shadow has qualities whose dangerousness exceeds his wildest dreams. As soon as people get together in masses and submerge the individual, the shadow is mobilized, and, as history shows, may even be personified and incarnated. Perhaps, if we resist the temptation to perceive ourselves as “civilized” and somehow beyond this hermetic, base-line part of being human, we can begin to wrestle with our own shadows and reshape the mobilization of cultural shadows.  But ultimately, I am inspired by Campbell, with the idea that the trickster “represents the power of the dynamic of the total psyche to overthrow programs” ( 00:00:32-00:00:40 ). We can join Rick and Renault, unleash the usual suspects, and exhale, “Vive la résistance.” MythBlast authored by: Leigh Melander, PhD has an eclectic background in the arts and organizational development, working with inviduals and organizations in the US and internationally for over 20 years. She has a doctorate in cultural mythology and psychology and wrote her dissertation on frivolity as an entry into the world of imagination. Her writings on mythology and imagination can be seen in a variety of publications, and she has appeared on the History Channel, as a mythology expert. She also hosts a radio who on an NPR community affiliate: Myth America, an exploration into how myth shapes our sense of identity. Leigh and her husband opened Spillian, an historic lodge and retreat center celebrating imagination in the Catskills, and works with clients on creative projects. She is honored to have previously served as the Vice President of the Joseph Campbell Foundation Board of Directors. This MythBlast was inspired by Creative Mythology and the archetype of The Trickster . Latest Podcast New Episodes of Pathways will begin again in June. In this episode from Season 1, (Episode 8) Joseph Campbell speaks at the Wainwright House in Rye, New York, in 1966, discussing mystical experiences. Host, Brad Olson, offers an introduction and commentary after the talk in this episode of the Pathways podcast. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Mythology, in other words, is not an outmoded quaintness of the past, but a living complex of archetypal, dynamic images, native to, and eloquent of, some constant, fundamental stratum of the human psyche. And that stratum is the source of the vital energies of our being." -- Joseph Campbell The Ecstasy of Being , 18 The Center of The World Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) Orion Pictures Tricksters in myth and folktale have long charmed us with their creativity, spontaneity, and intimacy with the dynamics of chance. And yet, in tale after tale, we encounter the most  unsavory aspects of this character. Driven by appetite, tricksters lie, thieve, and act rude, crude, lewd, and completely self-centered. Not known for either empathy or self-reflection, the Trickster never seems to learn from consequences, ever blundering from one scrape to the next. Still , despite Trickster’s flawed character, we remain entranced.  One reason might be that we see a bit of the trickster in ourselves – but also, as Joseph Campbell tells Bill Moyers, because “the imagery of mythology is rendered with humor” ( The Power of Myth , 276). Trickster makes us laugh. A trickster myth The !Kung  people in the Kalahari tell a tale about Jackal out hunting one day, when he comes across Lion’s house. Jackal asks Lion’s wife where her husband is. She haughtily replies that her husband, a great leader, would have nothing to do with the likes of him. Jackal shrugs off the insult and informs Lady Lion, “Your husband is my servant.” When Lion arrives home, he gets an earful; he promises his wife he’ll teach Jackal to respect his betters and goes hunting for the rogue. Eventually, Lion finds him napping under a bush, shakes him awake, and orders the rapscallion to follow him home — but Jackal feigns blindness, telling Lion he had earlier only accidentally stumbled across his house. Impatient, Lion growls, “Well, then I’ll carry you,” and helps Jackal climb onto his back. But Jackal has hidden away hornets and bees that he releases as they near Lion’s house, which then attack his regal mount. Lion’s wife hears a ruckus, rushes outside, and sees her husband racing past, with Jackal, astride his back, lashing him with a whip and shouting, “Faster, you knave, faster!” Spying Lion’s wife, Jackal calls out, “Your husband would have nothing to do with me? And yet, you see, he is my servant!”  In indigenous cultures, the Trickster is often depicted in animal form. But it’s not unusual to find these same images surfacing in popular media today. Trickster times two The Jackal, as an icon for the Trickster, plays a central role in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels , a lighthearted 1988 comedy directed by Frank Oz. (WARNING: Here be spoilers!) Lawrence Jamieson (Michael Caine) is a suave, sophisticated Englishman living on an elegant estate in the charming French Riviera town of Beaumont-sur-Mer. With the help of the corrupt Inspector Andre, he poses as an exiled royal to swindle rich, decadent, unsophisticated tourists out of significant sums under the guise of supporting the liberation of his homeland. After a visit to his Swiss bank account, an amused Jamieson observes Freddy Benson (Steve Martin), a loud, vulgar American, scamming an attractive young woman out of a free meal. Benson later mistakes Michael Caine’s character for a dull, domesticated husband, and boasts to the older man about how he cons women out of relatively small amounts of money.  Enter the jackal The following morning, Inspector Andre informs Jamieson that an unknown American con artist, nicknamed “the Jackal,” has been fleecing tourists on the Riviera. Worried “a poacher who shoots at rabbits may scare big game away,” Jamieson arranges a phony arrest; as the only person in town whom Freddy knows, Jamieson “persuades” Inspector Andre to release him, and puts Freddy on a plane back to the U.S. Things take a turn during the flight when another passenger lets slip that she, too, knows “the prince.” Realizing he has been outwitted, the brash young American shows up at Jamieson’s estate begging to be tutored. There follows a series of playful, amusing vignettes. Freddy, however, chafing under Jamieson’s discipline, eventually decides to strike out on his own. As there’s not enough room for both to work Beaumont-sur-Mer, they strike a wager: the first to extract $50,000 from an agreed-upon dupe wins, with the loser leaving town. Their target? The just arrived U.S. soap queen, Janet Colgate (Glenne Headley), a young, well-dressed, doe-eyed heiress from the Midwest. Freddy poses as a disabled Naval officer; he confides to Janet that he can only be cured by Dr. Emil Schaffhausen, who charges $50,000. Jamieson then convinces Janet, who is developing feelings for Freddy, that he  is the renowned psychiatrist and agrees to take the case – on the condition she pay the fee directly to him. So begins a delicate dance. As neither can expose his rival without dropping his own mask, each takes turns turning the tables on the other; this results in much frustration for the protagonists, and much merriment for the filmgoer – until Jamieson learns the innocent and naïve Janet is no heiress, but rather the winner of a soap company contest. He tries to call off the bet, but Freddy insists they instead make Janet the prize: if Freddy can seduce her, he wins. Hilarious hijinks ensue. Jamieson eventually learns a “cured” Freddy has spent the night with Janet. Prepared to accept his loss to the Jackal, he is surprised when Janet appears in tears; after a night of passion, Freddy has disappeared, along with her jewelry, the cash prize, and more. No spoilers as to how the situation is resolved: suffice to say there remain laughs and a reveal or two to come. Trickster motifs in play  The debt the film owes to Trickster symbolism is clear, reflected in one of Inspector Andre’s observations: “Perhaps the Jackal realizes he is no match for the Lion.” The mythic Trickster is associated with gambling, so it’s no surprise the major cons in this film all begin at the roulette table, or that the ultimate outcome rides on a wager. Double the tricksters allows for a wider range of trickster traits. While Lawrence Jamieson embodies the charm and noble carriage associated with trickster figures in the myths of later cultures, Freddy Benson channels many of the baser qualities exhibited by tricksters in pre-literate traditions: greed, an obsession with sex, and, when posing as Ruprecht (the younger brother of Jamieson’s prince), the crude, scatological humor common to Coyote and others. Much like the traditional figures of Raven and Coyote in Native American myths, Freddy gives no thought to the consequences of his misbehavior, which explains much of his success. Compassion, after all, is the Trickster’s kryptonite: once Jamieson sees Janet not as an “Other” (one of a series of silly, superficial, interchangeable, and undeservedly wealthy women), but a “Thou” (an individual and authentic human being), he loses his edge. The trickster within In his essay, “On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure,” in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious , Carl Jung declares, “All mythical figures correspond to inner psychic experiences and originally sprang from them” (256). The Trickster mirrors shadow qualities; Jung, nevertheless, stresses this figure is by no means the face of evil.  Meeting the Trickster, whether in myths or at the movies, reveals something about ourselves. We laugh at the characters in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels  because those same tendencies, however exaggerated, resonate with our own experience. We can see the consequences of such behavior on the screen, even if we haven’t always been cognizant of these energies as they play out in our own lives. The greater that awareness, the less power we cede these otherwise unconscious aspects of the psyche.  The Trickster mirrors shadow qualities; Jung, nevertheless, stresses this figure is by no means the face of evil.  But these figures also mirror positive shadow traits. Like their mythical counterparts, Lawrence Jamieson and Freddy Benson are inventive, playful, persistent, optimistic, and resilient in the face of the unexpected. As my colleague, Joanna Gardner , points out, these same qualities are essential to the creative process: Trickster can return to us our inner flame, the sparks that sometimes sputter out along the way, the embers of personal creativity and world-making. (Joanna Gardner, Ph.D., “In the Company of Coyote,” The Practice of Enchantment ) Of course, the primary objective of this film is to entertain and make us laugh. I doubt viewers experience any life-changing illumination as the credits roll . . . apart from the insight that one should never, ever, underestimate the Jackal. MythBlast authored by: Stephen Gerringer has been a Working Associate at the Joseph Campbell Foundation (JCF) since 2004. His post-college career trajectory interrupted when a major health crisis prompted a deep inward turn, Stephen “dropped out” and spent most of the next decade on the road, thumbing his away across the country on his own hero quest. Stephen did eventually “drop back in,” accepting a position teaching English and Literature in junior high school. Stephen is the author of Myth and Modern Living: A Practical Campbell Compendium , as well as editor of Myth and Meaning: Conversations on Mythology and Life , a volume compiled from little-known print and audio interviews with Joseph Campbell. This MythBlast was inspired by Creative Mythology and the archetype of The Trickster . Latest Podcast Enuma Okoro , is a Nigerian-American author, essayist, curator and lecturer. She is a weekend columnist for The Financial Times where she writes the column, “The Art of Life,” about art, culture and how we live. And is the curator of the 2024 group exhibition, “The Flesh of the Earth,” at Hauser & Wirth gallery in Chelsea, New York. Her broader research and writing interests reflect how the intersection of the arts and critical theory, philosophy and contemplative spirituality, and ecology and non-traditional knowledge systems can speak to the human condition and interrogate how we live with ourselves and others. Her fiction and poetry are published in anthologies, and her nonfiction essays and articles have been featured in The New York Times, The Financial Times, Aeon, Vogue, The Erotic Review, The Cut, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Bazaar, NYU Washington Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and more. Her Substack, "A Little Heart to Heart" is a labyrinth towards interiority, exploring the fine line between the sacred and the ordinary in our daily lives. Find it at Enuma.substack.com and learn more about Enuma at www.enumaokoro.com . In this conversation, we explore Enuma’s journey, the ways myth, art, and storytelling shape us, and how we can use them as tools to reimagine both our personal and collective realities. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "The trickster hero represents all these possibilities of life that your mind hasn’t decided it wants to deal with. The mind structures a lifestyle, and the fool or trickster represents another whole range of possibilities." -- Joseph Campbell An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms , 39 The Mythic Symbology of Release Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Photo of Glow-in-the-Dark Workshop Mask by author, 2010 I once attended a workshop that included a day spent reliving one’s teenage years. Participants were divided into high schools and assigned a variety of tasks: adopting a school mascot and motto, painting papier-mâché masks to reflect a school identity, writing a class song, and competing against other schools in a variety of silly, playful contests. A lot of triggers there, but also lots of laughter and fun for all involved . . . except for one couple in their seventies, who seemed at a loss. Yuki and Miko had traveled from Japan for this workshop. Their formal education followed a far different trajectory than those of us born in the United States, which made it difficult for them to relate to the assigned activities. With no shared cultural experience to draw on, they were quiet, reserved, almost painfully shy, in contrast to the casual and convivial informality of their schoolmates. Nevertheless, Yuki and Miko gamely volunteered to represent their school in the dance competition, to the song “Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie.” Rehearsal, however, proved awkward and stiff, despite helpful tips and demonstrations from others––no rhythm, no flow, no sense of joy to their movements. That evening, when the elderly couple stepped up and the lights dimmed, they surprised everyone by donning the full face masks they had painted earlier––and then, as the first notes sounded, Yuki and Miko vanished, replaced by two young, lithe masked dancers who twirled, dipped, bounced, and boogie-woogied through the high energy portions of the piece, then segued into a supple, sinuous, sensual embrace as the music slowed, bodies swaying as one, like two high school sweethearts at the prom. The music stopped. Yuki and Miko removed their masks, bowed, and all forty participants burst into cheers and applause. There was momentary speculation they were professional dancers who had fooled us all; how else could they have spontaneously performed such an intricate, elaborate, well-choreographed dance? Miko, who had a somewhat better command of English than her husband, smiled at the idea. “That not us. Too embarrassing to do alone, and never around people.” Then just who were we watching? “The masks. The masks danced for us!" Acting “as if” The masks of God invite us in the direction of the experience of God; they are composed, you might say, to fit the mentality and spiritual condition of the people to whom these masks are directed. In the naive relationship of popular religion, people actually think that what I’m calling a mask of God is God—but they are intermediates between divorce from God and movement toward the mystery. ( Myth and Meaning: Conversations on Mythology and Life 74) How does Joseph Campbell arrive at this metaphor of the mask? Is it simply a clever literary device, no more than instructive analogy? Or does the mask worn in rituals present an embodied experience, serving as the vehicle for archetypal energies that actually transform the wearer? Masks have long provided a gateway to other dimensions, other realms, beyond the senses. According to Campbell, “The mask motif indicates that the person you see is two people. He’s the one wearing the mask and he is the mask that’s worn—that is, the mask of the role” ( Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine 37). This is very much the way an actor dissolves into a role. The mark of a good actor is to become the character they portray. The audience meets the actor more than halfway; when we watch a movie or attend a play, we expect to suspend our disbelief. We know that Harrison Ford isn’t really a dashing and daring archaeologist, and Nicole Kidman no southern belle, but we go along with the pretense. If the actors are skillful and the drama well written, then we are able to enter into this “play world,” experiencing the adventure and its accompanying emotion as if they are real. It’s not surprising to learn that the earliest theatrical productions in ancient Greece evolved from sacred rituals –– which brings us back to masks, for the actors in these plays wore masks. (That is not unique to Greece: the same can be said for the development of theater in many parts of Asia; even today, in Japan, masks are worn in Noh plays). Initiation The masks that in our demythologized time are lightly assumed for the entertainment of a costume ball or Mardi Gras—and may actually, on such occasions, release us to activities and experiences which might otherwise have been tabooed—are vestiges of an earlier magic, in which the powers to be invoked were not simply psychological, but cosmic. For the appearances of the natural order, which are separate from each other in time and space, are in fact the manifestation of energies that inform all things. (Campbell, The Historical Atlas of World Mythology: The Way of the Animal Powers , Part I, 93) According to Campbell, the mask serves as a conduit for the community to powers which transcend the individual. But the mask is also used in many cultures as an agent of individual transformation. Masks have the power to transform even when they are not worn. A classic scene appears on a wall fresco preserved beneath volcanic ash in the Villa of Mysteries in Pompeii. A youth bends over and peers into a silver bowl held up by a bearded figure, generally thought to be playing the role of Silenus, the satyr who served as teacher to Dionysus. The youth is told to look in the metal bowl to see his own true face––but the bowl acts as a concave mirror. Behind the lad an assistant holds up a mask; instead of his own face, the initiate is shocked to see the face of old age: ”the whole body of life from birth to death.” Campbell explains the significance of this reveal: Now suppose one of his friends, before he went in there, had said to him, “Now look, this guy in there is going to have a bowl and he is going to tell you that you’re going to see your own face. You’re not! He’s got another fellow there who’s holding this mask thing up behind you so that what you will see is nothing more than a reflection.” If this happened, there would be no initiation. There would be no shock. This is why mysteries are kept secret. An initiation is a shock. Birth is a shock; rebirth is a shock. All that is transformative must be experienced as if for the first time. ( Mythos I: The Shaping of Our Mythic Traditions, Episode 3: “On Being Human”) Masks within masks Raven/Sisutl transformation mask, closed, by Oscar Matilpi, Kwakwaka'wakw Nation, 1996. In the permanent In the permanent collection of The Children's Museum of Indianapolis (Photo by Randy Johnson). CC BY-SA 3.0) The indigenous tribes in the American Northwest, from the Kwakiutl to the Haida, are known for their Transformation Masks. This is a double mask, with the outer mask usually in the form of an animal. After fasting in the woods, then dancing into a frenzy in the lodge house, the masked dancer reaches a state of ecstasy and opens the hinged outer mask to reveal the interior: the image of an ancestral spirit. The dancer experiences a double transformation, identifying not just with the Animal whose mask he wears, but also with the Ancestor. Raven/Sisutl transformation mask, open, by Oscar Matilpi, Kwakwaka'wakw Nation, 1996. In the permanent collection of The Children's Museum of Indianapolis (Photo by Randy Johnson). CC BY-SA 3.0) The masked dancer enters a realm that once was and yet still is, a dimension where humans and animals are able to change form, hidden behind the world of waking reality. The wearer experiences the unity of all life: hunter and hunted; animal, human, and ancestral spirit––these are but masks for the one Life that animates All. Are such realizations possible today? After all, ceremonial masks seem somewhat archaic in this secular age––art objects to be collected, rather than tools for transformation. Surely, we have moved beyond the magic and the mystery today. And yet, my thoughts keep returning to Miko and Yuki. Their masks put them in touch with something greater than themselves, beyond their lived experience, that connected them with everyone in the room ... which may be why “mask” is such an apt metaphor for myth: Myths are the “masks of God” through which men everywhere have sought to relate themselves to the wonders of existence. (Campbell, The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work xx) MythBlast authored by: Stephen Gerringer has been a Working Associate at the Joseph Campbell Foundation (JCF) since 2004. His post-college career trajectory interrupted when a major health crisis prompted a deep inward turn, Stephen “dropped out” and spent most of the next decade on the road, thumbing his away across the country on his own hero quest. Stephen did eventually “drop back in,” accepting a position teaching English and Literature in junior high school. Stephen is the author of Myth and Modern Living: A Practical Campbell Compendium , as well as editor of Myth and Meaning: Conversations on Mythology and Life , a volume compiled from little-known print and audio interviews with Joseph Campbell. This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 6, and The Hero's Journey Latest Podcast Joseph Campbell speaks at Cooper Union in New York in 1964 on the many functions of ritual and how it shapes the individual, the consequences of the degradation of ritual, and the role of creativity in ritual. Host, Brad Olson, offers an introduction and commentary after the talk in this episode of the Pathways podcast. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Myths are the “masks of God” through which men everywhere have sought to relate themselves to the wonders of existence." -- Joseph Campbell , The Hero's Journey, xx The Hidden Dimension (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Still from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) Years ago I was lucky enough to get to know that anthropologist and Native American faith keeper, Dr. Bill Hawk. I’d had a run of bad luck and was complaining to Bill about it. He perked up and said “sounds like Coyote.” I knew that Coyote was a central trickster figure in Native American mythology. “Well, damn it, Bill,” I asked. “What do I do about it?” He smiled and said, “Don’t feed him.” Pretty classic stuff. Strangely enough, that took care of my bad luck–but what if the Trickster is feeding you ? And what if they’re feeding you something delicious? Like chocolate. You might have noticed an abundance of Trickster figures out there lately, from traditional versions like Loki to the anti-hero’s own anti-hero, Deadpool. These figures perform an important mythological function: they embody the disruptions that fracture “the normal course of events.” Their stories put us into relation with the occasional cataclysmic events which, for good or ill, break us loose from well-established, but often fossilized, socially sanctioned norms. Now, socially sanctioned norms do provide the useful service of keeping the world running, but they can also shackle us to a version of the world that no longer exists: a world that changed while we were “busy making other plans.” Considering the increasing chaos in our current social/cultural/political situation–as traditional moral and political structures erode and we find our society experiencing a kind of extinction burst in reaction to these inevitable changes–we shouldn’t be surprised to find these Tricksters appearing in our popular media culture, in the stories we tell about ourselves. I already mentioned a couple of obvious examples. However, while I was sorting through my Rolodex (do they still make those?) of likely Tricksters, I kept hearing the voice of Gene Wilder, the original Willy Wonka in the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory , in his sarcastic monotone, warning the kids: “Stop. Don’t. Come back.” Trick or treat Wonka is not an immediately obvious Trickster, but consider: he’s a mysterious figure who hands out Golden Tickets , inviting some lucky guests inside his Mysterious Factory to win the most desirable of all treasures:  the best chocolate in the world! Now that’s a call to adventure if there ever was and includes, appropriately, both promise and threat that a great treasure can be yours if you survive the ordeals to come .  Like any Trickster figure, Wonka is characterized by mischief, misdirection, and apparent cruelty, and, in the context of the hero’s adventure, Tricksters seem to embody the entire process of Initiation. They provide tests and temptations that typically involve exacerbating, or feeding (ahem), and exposing weakness in your character: weaknesses like gluttony, greed, pride, or vanity, say. But a Trickster isn’t your typical Initiator. As a rule, when you’re neck deep in an initiatory process, you know you’re being tested. In normal life, for instance, you might sigh, “Great, another freaking growth experience”…but at least you know you’re going through it. When the Trickster is at work, you don’t always know you were being tested until it’s too late. Willy Wonka, for instance, never just walks up to Charlie Bucket and says: “Charlie, you must learn the ways of the Force.” The initiations are, well…tricky. When the Trickster is at work, you don’t always know you were being tested until it’s too late. Charlie survives all this, but each of the other Golden Ticket holders suffers a poetically and spectacularly appropriate failure as Wonka feeds, and then reveals, their character flaws. Roald Dahl, the original author, signals these flaws in the names of the kids he cooked up for this mythstery  play. They are deliberately and consciously symbolic. Here’s a quick recap of the failed adventures, in order of excision: Augustus Gloop is the kid who can't stop stuffing his face. He’s the first one to go when he falls into and is carried away by the chocolate river. It might be useful to notice how much the language itself tells us: he’s carried away by his favorite weakness. Violet Beauregarde has the perfect nose-in-the-air name for a snotty, compulsively competitive and obnoxious world-record gum-chewer. She meets her end by snatching and chewing up an experimental blueberry gum which turns her into a giant blueberry. Veruca Salt is the quintessential spoiled brat who only “found” a Golden Ticket because her father bought a gazillion candy bars and lucked into the right one. She wants everything she sees–and is accustomed to getting everything she wants. Different productions use different approaches to her failure, but all work out about the same: in the book and the 2015 adaptation, she meets her end in Wonka’s Nut Testing room where specially trained squirrels sort good nuts from bad nuts. She demands her father buy her one of the squirrels, and when Wonka refuses to sell, she tries to grab one herself. The squirrels determine she’s a “Bad Nut” and throw her down a garbage chute. (And here, a moment of etymological musing: her name, like the others, is hilariously appropriate since ‘verruca’ is Latin for ‘wart’ and ‘salt’... well, at the end of the day, she wasn’t worth her salt. Even the squirrels figured that out.) And finally there’s “little” Mike Teavee, who embodies the kind of vidiocy  we might associate with the entitled distractedness found in today’s doom-scrolling, phone-addicted children (and adults). His fate, literally stepping into the media he’s obsessed with and being shrunk to fit inside a TV screen, is also poetically associated with his name. In each case, their failure follows directly from their own unreflective compulsions and desires and one of the classic techniques you find in the Trickster’s bag of tricks involves simply giving people what they want–at which point they discover they’ve wanted the wrong things. In this case, one rich with metaphor, they all wanted the candy more than the factory. Something to think about. Trick and  treat All of which leaves wonderful little Charlie Bucket. He’s the only good kid in the bunch and displayed the virtues needed to pass the Trickster’s tests: humility and kindness. Like the other children, however, Charlie too is surprised by the initiation he’s undergone–amazed to be found worthy to inherit the true prize of the Golden Ticket, surviving the sticky, candy coated–and Tricky–initiations of a life’s adventure. Thanks for musing along! MythBlast authored by: Mark C.E. Peterson, Ph.D .  is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Washington County and past president of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture (ISSRNC.org). Philosopher, gadfly, poet, cook, writing along the watermargins of nature, myth, and culture. A practitioner of taijiquan and kundalini yoga for over 40 years, Dr. Peterson is also a happy member of the Ukulele World Congress. This MythBlast was inspired by Creative Mythology and the archetype of The Trickster . Latest Podcast Enuma Okoro , is a Nigerian-American author, essayist, curator and lecturer. She is a weekend columnist for The Financial Times where she writes the column, “The Art of Life,” about art, culture and how we live. And is the curator of the 2024 group exhibition, “The Flesh of the Earth,” at Hauser & Wirth gallery in Chelsea, New York. Her broader research and writing interests reflect how the intersection of the arts and critical theory, philosophy and contemplative spirituality, and ecology and non-traditional knowledge systems can speak to the human condition and interrogate how we live with ourselves and others. Her fiction and poetry are published in anthologies, and her nonfiction essays and articles have been featured in The New York Times, The Financial Times, Aeon, Vogue, The Erotic Review, The Cut, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Bazaar, NYU Washington Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and more. Her Substack, "A Little Heart to Heart" is a labyrinth towards interiority, exploring the fine line between the sacred and the ordinary in our daily lives. Find it at Enuma.substack.com and learn more about Enuma at www.enumaokoro.com . In this conversation, we explore Enuma’s journey, the ways myth, art, and storytelling shape us, and how we can use them as tools to reimagine both our personal and collective realities. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "An initiation is a shock. Birth is a shock. Rebirth is a shock. All that is transformative must be experienced as if for the first time." -- Joseph Campbell An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms , 39 Adventure into Depths - Q&A Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Warner Independent Pictures' Before Sunset 2004 For my entire life, romantic Love was supposed to last forever. That was the goal: Find "the one." Fall in Love. Live happily ever after. Fade to Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle singing " A Whole New World . " Let me tell you, Disney movies really did a number on a young girl's psyche. However, my personal experience with Love didn't match the fairy tale. No, Love was fleeting and temporary; Love didn't stay. A scene in Richard Linklater's Before Sunset captures this perfectly. Céline, played by Julie Delpy, delivers a line that encapsulates my cynicism: It's funny ... every single one of my ex's ... they're now married! Men go out with me, we break up, and then they get married! You know, I want to KILL them!! Why didn't they ask ME to marry them? I would have said, “No,” but at least they could have asked!! I was just a stop along the way, a bridge to the next Love—part of someone's journey but never their final destination. Before Sunset itself exists as a bridge. The middle chapter in Linklater's Before Trilogy spans eighteen years and multiple countries. In the first film, Before Sunrise , Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline are strangers who share one magical night in Vienna, promising to meet again in six months. Nine years later, Before Sunset finds them reuniting in Paris, each having built separate lives—Jesse with a wife and child, Céline with her career and boyfriend. Their day-long, real-time conversation through the streets of Paris becomes a walking meditation on adulthood, our choices, and how life experience colors our connection to Love. Throughout the film, we see how even though their night in Vienna was fleeting, it set them on a path to find each other again, albeit nine years later. The Lover as guide "I feel I was never able to forget anyone I've been with. Because each person has...their own specific qualities. You can never replace anyone. What is lost is lost." Céline in Before Sunset Every person I've loved or thought I loved brought something unique and irreplaceable into my life: one carried a deep calmness that could weather any storm, even when that storm was me. Another possessed such devotion to their art that it inspired me to try an art of my own (Watercolors. I was awful and will never speak of this again.) A third moved through life with infectious mischief that changed how I saw the world. These qualities can never be replicated, nor should they be. What is lost is lost, but what is gained can change you. These are the boons of the adventure that is Love. When referring to relationship baggage, we typically refer to it negatively. We should refer to it as a boon. Yes, we've loved and lost. Yes, we have wounds, but we also know more about who we are. Let me be more of myself with you. Let me show up as cynical as Céline and cautiously hopeful as Jesse. What is lost is lost, but what is gained can change you. These are the boons of the adventure that is Love. Romantic Love isn't the end-all and be-all, but perhaps we're drawn to it because of the knowing that you will never be the same. You can't ignore the Call, even if you know pain could be on the other side. Like Joseph Campbell says in Pathways to Bliss: 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. (133) The lovers' walk "Walking Each Other Home" is a phrase often used to discuss how to guide the dying, but isn't love itself a series of deaths and rebirths? Each new connection offers the possibility of life-giving transformation, and every ending holds a necessary grief that reshapes us. From Jesse and Céline's first meeting to their walk through Paris nine years later, we witness this cycle of death and rebirth. Céline and Jesse lament how romantic they were when they first met but how time and life have made them more cynical. Yes, the naive lovers they were are no more, but now, as the more actualized adults they've become, they allow for another form of Love to be born. And the harsh truth is that meeting "the one" and living happily ever after will end in two ways: you break up or you don't. And if you don't, eventually, one of you will leave this earthly plane for another. There will still be a separation. Grief either way. No happy ending "The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved." The Hero with a Thousand Faces , 19 Could the one ending Campbell speaks of be the “happy” ending? Every Love who has entered my life has initiated a disintegration, an undoing of who I thought I was. A death or separation from who I was before and a rebirth into someone new, with the wounds and boons to show for it. I can only hope I've done the same for them. Understanding that I was part of their journey and they were part of mine doesn't diminish our time together because it didn't last forever. If anything, the ephemerality of these connections makes them more precious. The Love expressed, the trials endured, the knowledge gained, and even the grief over the end were all essential steps in becoming. Before Sunset ends ambiguously—we don't know what choices Jesse and Céline will make, and that's the point. Love resists our attempts to contain, predict, and control its outcome. It's messy, terrifying, frustrating, and glorious, and still, we ask, do I dare ? Before Sunset shows us that Love and the Lover can't be stagnant or controlled but, the Lover will bring us exactly where we need to be, always guiding us home to ourselves. When, or if, I meet "the one," I hope I don't hold them too tightly. Let us meet again and again. Let us grieve who we were and celebrate who we are becoming. Let's take a walk together and see how we change. MythBlast authored by: Torri Yates-Orr is an Emmy-nominated public historian passionate about making history and mythology engaging, accessible, and informative. From exploring her genealogy to receiving a degree in Africana Studies from the University of Tennessee, the history was always her first love. Combining her skill set in production with her love of the past, she started creating history and mythology lessons for social media . Her "On This Day in History" series has over two million views. She's the content curator for the MythBlast newsletter for The JCF and co-host of the Skeleton Keys podcast . This MythBlast was inspired by Creative Mythology and the archetype of The Lover . Latest Podcast This bonus episode, recorded at WNYC TV in 1963, was part of the “Myth, Mask, & Dream” lecture series. In this episode, Campbell explores the mythological significance of the “Mother Goddess” across the Neolithic, Bronze, and early Iron Ages. Please note that the audio quality improves approximately 10 seconds into the lecture. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Human beings are not perfect. What evokes our love – and I mean love, not lust – is the imperfection of the human being. So, when the imperfection of the real human peeks through, say, "This is a challenge to my compassion." Then make a try, and something might begin to get going." -- Joseph Campbell Pathways to Bliss , 76 Four Functions of Mythology (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Valentine’s Day This month being the calendar home for Valentine’s Day, the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s MythBlast series is looking at The Lover At The Movies. The origins of Valentine’s Day are a bit murky, but they seem to reach back into the early Roman celebrations of Romulus and Remus and the fertility festival of Lupercalia observed on the ides of February, the fifteenth of February. Lupercus was an ancient Roman god worshipped by shepherds as the promoter of fertility in sheep and the protector of their flocks. Lupercalia was itself a modification of another, even older (dating back to Etruscan or Sabine cultures) springtime cleansing ritual, Februa, which lent its name to the month of the year. As Christianity was emerging in the empire, several Christian martyrs named Valentine or Valentinus were created during the first few centuries of the early church, and we don’t exactly know which one the fourteenth day in February is named for. Regardless, the modus operandi of the early Christian Church was to co-opt venerable pagan celebrations, rename them, and redefine them in Christian terms in order to make the new celebration seem familiar to pagans and facilitate a broader acceptance of Christianity. I am particularly fond of one legend that describes an imprisoned, soon to be martyred, Valentine sending a greeting of love to a young woman whom he adored. He signed the missive, “From your Valentine.” Not only is this a bittersweet story explaining the origins of the phrase, but it also discloses the distressing aspects of love—I recall Joseph Campbell remarking in A Joseph Campbell Companion that romantic love is an ordeal—aspects one would rather overlook for the contemplation of more exhilarating, affirmative, blissful aspects of love. Loving another and communicating that love is often not easy, especially if the thrilling, enthralling, novelty of love has settled into a predictable familiarity—perhaps just such an examination that Valentine’s Day affords. The Philadelphia Story It is certainly the examination that the 1940 movie The Philadelphia Story affords. I think this movie sets the standard for all romantic comedies. Its wit, its pathos, its celebration of love and, to borrow a phrase from Campbell, following one’s bliss is, I think, unrivalled in the genre. In addition, one has the pleasure of watching the unparalleled appeal of legendary actors performing at the peak of their thespian powers. The imperious Katharine Hepburn (of her cheekbones, one Hollywood wag said they were the greatest calcium deposits since the White Cliffs of Dover) overcame her reputation as box office poison. Cary Grant was his irresistible, dapper self. Jimmy Stewart won the Best Actor Oscar for his role as writer/journalist McCauley Connor, and Ruth Hussey flawlessly delivered brilliant, sparking lines of dialogue that helped the movie win the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Released in 1940, the film has its baggage, of course, sprinkled with common early-mid twentieth century themes of male privilege, masculine philandering, implied domestic violence (which the movie attempts to atone for), and Uncle Willie’s creepy lecherousness. However, despite some of these limitations, we watch Katharine Hepburn in the role of the rich, entitled heiress, Tracy Lord, transcend gender role expectations and limitations of the time and assert her own independence in matters of the heart, spirit and mind. As the movie opens, we find Tracy Lord, a wealthy, arrogant socialite, preparing to remarry. Concurrently,her ex-husband, C.K. Dexter Haven (Grant)—who, it’s implied, had until very recently been in rehab in Argentina—smuggles two tabloid reporters into the old Main Line Lord family mansion. It’s a harebrained idea to obtain exclusive pictures and copy of the nuptials in return for Spy magazine’s publisher killing an unflattering story about her philandering father while saving Tracy from public humiliation. As the wedding weekend unfolds, Tracy grapples with her renewed affection for Dexter, who, in overcoming his demons, has become kinder, patient, and more accepting of human frailty. He’s finally become the man that she always hoped he could be. As the weekend unfolds, she discovers Connor also has his charms and realizes that class and privilege should not dictate who one loves. Tracy recognized her unattainable standards and perfectionism stood in the way of her own individuation—her in-her-selfness, and the discovery of lasting, imperfect, human, love. As a wedding gift, Dexter gives Tracy a model of the yacht The True Love, on which they spent their honeymoon—a beautiful, sleek sailboat that she called “yar.” A yar vessel is quick, agile, easy to steer or reef the sails. In the eastern United States where this film is set, a boat is considered yar when it is well-balanced on the helm, quick, and handy. Regarding the model of The True Love , Tracy says, “My, she was yar!” “She was yar, alright,” Dexter replies. “I wasn’t, was I?” “Not very.” Tracy's dawning awareness, the inception of self-objectivity, eventually replaces an egoic self-subjectivity that, until now, always scuttled love and relationship. Tracy’s moment of revelation occurs in the middle of a Dionysian revel, her pre-wedding party: “Oh, it’s just that a lot of things I always thought were terribly important, I find now are—and the other way around, and—oh, what the dickens.” She realizes that her conventional, striving, ambitious, vain fiancé is not the man she loves. She loves Dexter, the patient, kind, clever man, who, like Eros emerging from Chaos, becomes the driving force of creation; in this case, the creation of self-hood in tandem. The two have not become one, but rather each has become, as Nietzsche put it, who one is. It's a dynamic and ongoing creative act of becoming, of actively shaping oneself through self-overcoming and embracing the uniqueness of oneself and the other. Love as a people-growing machine Rainer Maria Rilke w rote to a young poet that Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate — ?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things. Only in this sense, as the task of working at themselves (“to hearken and to hammer day and night”), might young people use the love that is given them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must save and gather for a long, long time still), is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives as yet scarcely suffice. Love is the inducement to individuation, to becoming who one is, and while one is engaged in that process, one finds that love brings out both the best and the worst of oneself. “The whole catastrophe,” as Zorba said. Love is the inducement to individuation, to becoming who one is But love won’t make us beautiful, it won’t make us complete, it won’t make us content with our fate, at least not on its own. That’s where the ordeal comes in. It’s not a struggle with another to mold, shape, or bend them into the person we want them to be. Instead, it’s a struggle with oneself, dealing with the shadowy selves that emerge in sometimes surprising or novel ways. The lover can be the incitation to that inner-self work. The more of it we do, the better love is. In the words of McCauley Connor, “That’s the blank, unholy surprise of it!” Thanks for reading. 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 and the host of JCF's flagship podcast, Pathways With Joseph Campbell . Dr. Olson holds 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 Creative Mythology and the archetype of The Lover . Latest Podcast This lecture, recorded at the Esalen Institute in 1981, features Joseph Campbell delving into Jung’s concepts of the Anima and Animus, the shadow in psychology, and the role of myth in helping us navigate unexpected life challenges. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "If you go into marriage with a program, you will find that it won’t work. Successful marriage is leading innovative lives together, being open, non-programmed. It’s a free fall: how you handle each new thing as it comes along. As a drop of oil on the sea, you must float, using intellect and compassion to ride the waves." -- Joseph Campbell A Joseph Campbell Companion , 47 Psyche & Symbol (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

The theme for the MythBlast Series this month is The Message of the Myth: Art and Artists, so I’d like to take a look at transforming emotion into art, particularly those emotions we are reluctant to express or even acknowledge to ourselves, let alone to others. So let me first say this as unambiguously as I can, if you’re struggling with depression, reach out to your doctor, to a therapist, to a loved one who can support you to find the right treatment for your depression. What I want to explore in this essay is what Sigmund Freud understood as common unhappiness; Fernando Pessoa called it disquiet; William Wordsworth heard the still, sad music of humanity. In his 1895 book, Studies on Hysteria, Freud wrote this: When I have promised my patients help or improvement by means of a cathartic treatment I have often been faced by this objection: “Why, you tell me yourself that my illness is probably connected with my circumstances and the events of my life. You cannot alter these in any way. How do you propose to help me, then?” And I have been able to make this reply: “No doubt fate would find it easier than I do to relieve you of your illness. But you will be able to convince yourself that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a mental life that has been restored to health you will be better armed against that unhappiness.” ( Studies on Hysteria , Vol. 2, 270) Transforming hysterical misery into common unhappiness is no small thing. What Freud called hysterical misery is a defensive response to the awareness, conscious or not, that there is so much life one cannot even begin to live it all. For the hysteric, life has become cumbersome, incomprehensible, and in some curious way, unspeakable; it’s impossible to talk about. The unwillingness to accept life on its own terms creates the intense psychological suffering Freud describes. Transforming such abject misery, becoming “better armed against that unhappiness” may be hard to imagine, but such a transformation is where the art comes in. In King Lear , Shakespeare tells us that “When we are born, we cry that we have come to this great stage of fools” (Scene IV, Act 6). We cry because we have indeed come into this world of fools, and ourselves not least among them; we cry because we have won the role of a human being in the great play of life, and whether it is a tragedy or a farce is, it seems to me, entirely up to us. Art as epiphany In his late work “Art as Revelation,” a section in his unfinished magnum opus The Historical Atlas of World Mythology, Campbell discusses the effects of “proper art” upon the individual: “One is held, on the contrary, in aesthetic arrest, a moment of sensational (aesthetic) contemplation, as before a recognized revelation, or in Joyce’s language, an ‘epiphany’” (p. 19). The key then, as I see it, is to approach our lives, all of our experiences no matter how prosaic or chaotic, all our fears, our griefs, our pain, as well our joys, as we would approach a great work of art. The Raft of the Medusa. Painting by Théodore Géricault, circa 1819 (Louvre Museum, Paris) Théodore Gericault’s painting, The Raft of Medusa , hangs in the Louvre Museum, and I admit I lingered looking at this painting for the better part of a morning. The Mona Lisa hangs in a room not far away, and laying eyes upon her requires patience, as great crowds fill the accordion-like rope lines in the room, cameras at the ready, straining to get a glimpse of this legendary woman before the allotted fifteen seconds or so of viewing time are up and docents move you along. She is beautiful enough, certainly, but she’s not the best painting in the museum; I don’t think she’s even the best Davinci in the Louvre, and like certain reality TV stars, she’s famous mostly for being famous, and no particular epiphany occurred from my encounter with her. But that’s not the case with Gericault’s masterpiece, the epiphany accompanying it virtually reaches out and seizes one by the throat. First, it’s immense, at 16 feet by 23 feet, its figures are life-size, and the figures in the foreground are more than life-size. Because of its enormity, the detail the artist renders is astonishing; the fear, despair, starvation and suffering are viscerally recognizable, etched onto the life sized-faces of the literally overwhelmed, desperate, ship-wrecked survivors clinging to a makeshift raft, while the two men attending the dead reflect a dejected futility. Looking at this painting I immediately understood Joyce’s remarks about epiphany, gripped as I was by a profound, involuntary sense of pity. James Joyce's theory of art In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Joyce lays out his theory of art: “Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer” (Chapter 5). Pity is not an emotion of implicit superiority of the kind which Mr. T referenced when he uttered his catch phrase, “I pity the fool…” Rather, pity is a sympathetic sorrow evoked by the suffering of others. Pity is compassion, pity is empathy, pity is pathos—literally, what befalls one—that projects the observer into the world the art portrays. The Raft of Medusa certainly invites both pity and pathos—not just for the poor survivors on the raft who, by the way, apparently still hold out hope for rescue and try desperately to get the attention of some distant passing ship. One is moved to pity for the fact of human suffering itself, something each of us knows all too well in our own secret ways, precisely because we have come to this great stage of fools. Joyce further proposes that “Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause” ( Ibid ). The secret cause is one’s own fate, one’s own life exactly as one has lived it; the secret cause is ultimately one’s own death: cold, impassive, mortality. To experience the rapture of life we must consciously and intentionally move beyond the personalization of the epiphany, of which would be pity, to the universal human truth, the terror of the realization that we are mortal and we will die. That is the familiar psychic territory in which we encounter terror. If we are able to encounter the terror of our own mortality the same way we encounter “proper art” that terrifies, if we regard the circumstances of our lives as art (as though we ourselves were the pitiable crew of the Medusa), we elicit the sublime epiphany that reconciles us with our own mortality, as well as the circumstances of our own lives exactly as they are. We make the surprising discovery that this life we live, life with all its abundant sufferings and barely sufficient joys, is heart-breakingly beautiful. If we are able to encounter the terror of our own mortality the same way we encounter “proper art” that terrifies, we elicit the sublime epiphany that reconciles us with our own mortality. Epiphanies are not states of being; we can’t occupy the sublime for very long at all until we’re thrown back into the problems of living. We return to them, not with dread nor with hysterical misery, but with that recurring melody of the still, sad, music of life playing in the background, evoking the vaguely dissatisfied, bittersweet sense of common unhappiness. Acknowledging the common unhappiness of life has a salutary, restorative effect when we find ourselves in the grip of the pain of living. Pierrot knows as much by the end of the 1965 Jean-Luc Godard film, Pierrot Le Fou and reflects, rather wistfully, “Life is sometimes sad, but it’s always beautiful.” Beauty is the aesthetic epiphany Joyce refers to, and it functions as a homeopathic remedy for the pain of living; it’s the healing alchemy of like curing like. Beauty, because it is always too fleeting, because each encounter with it is thoroughly novel and personally reconfiguring, creates an aesthetic seizure that works on us consciously to a degree, but much more so unconsciously. What seizes us at first is a barely perceptible sensation of intimate strangeness, the paradoxical disclosure of terrible beauty adorning all life, the full realization of which depends more on mythos than logos . It is a potentially life changing validation of the perplexing nonpareil, the uncommon common life. To feel beauty we must be willing to feel pity and pain, even terror. No pity, no terror, no beauty. For those willing to welcome beauty and its occasionally troublesome collaborators, life holds no misery. In a world that so often exposes us to catastrophes and terrible suffering, common unhappiness is an uncommon achievement. If you have suicidal or other thoughts of self-harm, please reach out to professionals for help, or call 988, which is now the three-digit dialing code that routes callers to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Thanks for reading. 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 2, and Pathways to Bliss Latest Podcast Dr. Reedy has a Ph.D. in Marriage and Family Therapy. Brad has broadcast over 1,300 webinars on parenting since 2007, and hosts the podcast “Finding You” He is also the author of two books on parenting and self-discovery: The Journey of the Heroic Parent and The Audacity to Be You. Brad has developed an accessible and liberating approach to adolescents, young adults, and their parents. His powerful ability to use his own story and stories from the thousands of families he has treated, offers hope to families suffering from mental health, addiction, and stage-of-life issues. Brad is a co-founder and the Executive Clinical Director of Evoke Therapy Programs, which provides therapeutic services for adolescents, young adults, parents, families, and individuals looking to gain greater intimacy in their relationships. In the conversation, he and John Bucher of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, talk about Brad’s life and work, storytelling and its role in a therapeutic setting, how myths can be used in parenting, and how Campbell’s work has been an important guide in Brad’s life. Listen Here This Week's Highlights I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you. -- Joseph Campbell Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers, 6 Hell & Transcendence Q&A (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

During a recent wellbeing fair, I attended a mental health workshop on preventing burnout. Surprisingly, I learned that over half of US employees express feelings of burnout (websites below), a startling enough trend that companies are working to mitigate its effects. Some time later, while listening to Episode 24 of The Podcast with a Thousand Faces , I heard Dr. Ben Rogers, Assistant Professor of Management & Organization at Boston College, explain how his ongoing research on the psychological benefits of framing one’s life within the pattern of the Hero’s Journey could be used to help alleviate burnout (48:40-50:37). This insight stirred my curiosity. Perhaps in addition to reducing the impact of burnout on the current workforce, a mythological take on burnout could offer insight and meaning to the experience. This MythBlast is the beginnings of such an endeavor. The call to adventure The Hero’s Journey begins with the call to adventure, a moment that marks a change in the hero’s life. The hero can refuse the call to adventure or willingly enter into the ordeal, either way they sense that change is happening. Beyond this point everything will be different. Soon after the call to adventure, the hero comes to the first threshold–a space that marks the end of the known domain. Beyond this crossing lies an unknown world of both promise and peril. To enter into this unchartered territory, the hero faces a threshold guardian. Innumerable characters or elemental agents serve as threshold guardians in myth. Ogres, dragons, and monsters are some of the mythic images of threshold guardians, all of which are entities that halt the hero’s journey. Joseph Campbell states that these “custodians bound the world in the four directions–also up and down–standing for the limits of the hero’s present sphere, or life horizon” ( Hero with a Thousand Faces , 64). Beyond this point is the initiation that will broaden the hero’s experience and expand the hero’s consciousness. Thus begins the transformation of the hero. But first, they must overcome the threshold guardian to prove worthy of transformation. Burnout as a threshold guardian If one were to characterize burnout in the Hero’s Journey, it would be a threshold guardian. Like a sorcerer transfixing the hero with the illusion of boundless assignments, burnout stops the momentum forward, halting the journey with tasks and fruitless labor. Myths present images of what one might imagine burnout to feel like. Studies show that the stress of constant work leaves people feeling cynical, losing their sense of achievement and connection to the driving forces within ( World Health Organization ). People have too much to do, and thus the vitality of life has been dampened by exhaustion and overwhelm. One could see the Greek goddess Psyche feeling such overwhelm when tasked by Aphrodite to sort barrels of grain by nightfall. Cynicism and the loss of achievement could be imagined in the Greek myth of Sisyphus whose ordeal is to push a boulder up a hill until he almost reaches the top, only for the boulder to roll back down to the bottom of the hill so he can begin the endeavor all over again. The task saturation of constant work can feel like the emotional and physical weight described in these myths. Burnout as a threshold guardian is a seemingly benevolent custodian whose snare traps the hero. The hero completes each task only for another to be placed before them, stuck in an ongoing cycle and thus not progressing on the journey. Remedies for burnout often include stress management, diet and exercise, rest, or time away from work. While these are worthy endeavors, the root of burnout seems deeper. Even if we step away from the hamster wheel of task overload, the tasks await our return. Breaking the spell of burnout requires perspective to see the mechanisms at work in our lives in order to regain one’s center, the source of the call to life which began the adventure in the first place. Campbell expresses in Episode 1 of the Power of Myth , “ The Hero’s Adventure ,” that we are all “living in terms of a system, and this is the threat to our lives, we all face it, we all operate in our society in relation to a system. Now, is the system going to eat you up and relieve you of your humanity? Or, are you going to be able to use the system to human purposes” (27:00-27:25). In other words, can we maneuver within the system enough to maintain our sense of self? If not, then it’s time to step out of the system for a time in order to find our center and regain a bird’s-eye view of the greater journey. The system has limited our growth causing us to lose the vitality of feeling alive. Burnout is the system eating you up. Dispelling burnout’s hold The challenge then is to first identify the burnout and recognize its hold on us. Often in the hero’s journey, threshold guardians are clearly identified as an adversary that the hero battles directly. Burnout’s secret weapon is the quiet way it consumes us. Some of the most difficult threshold guardians to pass through are the quiet and insidious ones that bind us while we aren’t even conscious of their presence. The mundane tasks that slowly drain one's energy, quietly restricting our soul in the tedium of what appears to be important, maintaining the illusion of grandeur with empty achievements–like food that doesn’t nourish or water that doesn’t alleviate thirst–the too-much-ness that life brings when we try to do it all. Once identified, the trance of burnout is dispelled and can either be aligned with the greater human cause or slayed altogether by wielding the immense power of the word “no.” As with the Hero’s Journey, to cross the threshold into the domain of transformation, the hero has to pass the threshold guardian by strategy, wit, or strength. One can trick the guardian, or beguile them to change their ways, or slay them–whatever the encounter, something must change in order to cross the threshold. Determining the best way to interact with this threshold guardian requires self-inquiry. Are the tasks at hand in line with the heroic endeavor, or detracting from it and allowing the system freedom to consume one’s life? For Psyche, sifting the grain is one venture of many on her journey to gain immortality. The monotonous and overwhelming task of sorting grain is a laborious task that is one step of a greater journey. For Sisyphus, however, the ordeal of pushing the boulder up the hill is never-ending. He is stuck forever in a cycle of finishing one task just to start another with no greater purpose to his labor. For Psyche, burnout is a trial; for Sisyphus it's a torment. In the day-to-day grind, it’s challenging to see the difference between tasks that are moving us forward on the journey and tasks that have us walking in place. Fear of the unknown, societal commitments, or misplaced desire yearning for something that is not necessarily tied to the greater cause of the adventure can keep us in stasis. We lose ourselves in the endeavors of the moment rather than holding the center within us that guides us forward on our path. Burnout then becomes a sign asking us to come back to our center to attain an outlook that encompasses the bigger story at play. Like a threshold guardian, burnout then is something to recognize and overcome. The dragon to slay, the ogre to trick, or the sleeping spell from which to awaken. Finding meaning in the mundane Infusing burnout with a sense of mythic meaning may not alleviate the issue at hand, but seeing our day-to-day lives mythically does have a way of pulling one out of the grind and offering perspective. The patterns at play in our lives can sometimes appear less daunting when we can place those experiences within a grand archetypal pattern understood by many. The patterns at play in our lives can sometimes appear less daunting when we can place those experiences within a grand archetypal pattern understood by many. Burnout, as the name suggests, snuffs out our fire, the vitality that enlivens us with the feeling of being alive. Beyond this threshold guardian is a domain in which to expand consciousness, a playground of exploration. On the other side of the threshold is a rekindling of the life-spark. Taking the first step into this unknown realm takes a tremendous amount of strength. Many never embark on the journey because the status-quo is just too comfortable. The system whispers in our ear that it is better to deal with burnout than failure. The call to adventure beyond the threshold is the call of the life-spark within each of us. The minute we step away from all the tasks demanding our time, someone comes in to replace us. The system will replace us. But our life is ours alone. No one can live it but us. MythBlast authored by: Stephanie Zajchowski, PhD is a mythologist and writer based in Texas. She serves as the Director of Operations for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and is a contributing author of Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide. Stephanie is also a co-founder of the Fates and Graces, hosting webinars and workshops for mythic readers and writers. Her work focuses on the intersection of mythology, religion, and women’s studies. For more information, visit stephaniezajchowski.com This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 6, and The Hero with a Thousand Faces Latest Podcast Dr. Reedy has a Ph.D. in Marriage and Family Therapy. Brad has broadcast over 1,300 webinars on parenting since 2007, and hosts the podcast “Finding You” He is also the author of two books on parenting and self-discovery: The Journey of the Heroic Parent and The Audacity to Be You. Brad has developed an accessible and liberating approach to adolescents, young adults, and their parents. His powerful ability to use his own story and stories from the thousands of families he has treated, offers hope to families suffering from mental health, addiction, and stage-of-life issues. Brad is a co-founder and the Executive Clinical Director of Evoke Therapy Programs, which provides therapeutic services for adolescents, young adults, parents, families, and individuals looking to gain greater intimacy in their relationships. In the conversation, he and John Bucher of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, talk about Brad’s life and work, storytelling and its role in a therapeutic setting, how myths can be used in parenting, and how Campbell’s work has been an important guide in Brad’s life. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "All life has drudgery to it ... In Zen, however, even while you're washing the dishes, that's a meditation, that's an act of life. Sometimes the drudgery itself can become part of the hero deed. The point is not to get stuck in the drudgery, but to use it to free you." -- Joseph Campbell Pathways to Bliss , 156 Slaying The Dragon (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

“From very early—around four or five years old—I was fascinated by American Indians, and that became my real studying. I went to school and had no problems with my studies, but my own enthusiasm was in this maverick realm of the American Indian mythologies.” —Joseph Campbell ( The Hero’s Journey , 6) The maverick realm of Native American mythologies ignited the transcendent passion for mythology that Joseph Campbell is known for. The Native American spirit inspired Campbell to study myth and beyond; it revealed to him a world of wonder and philosophic insight. After all, as Aristotle famously put it, “a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of Wisdom, for the myth is composed of wonders).” ( Metaphysics 982b19) Native American Mythologies extend their wonders and wisdom far south of the border, spreading mythography across three subcontinents: North, Central, and South America. If we were to travel with native leaders across these native lands, we would experience a variety of rituals and customs, strange languages and symbolism, all bearing testimony to the rich creativity of the indigenous mythological imagination. At the same time, we would also be struck by a fundamental sense of agreement, a common-sense wisdom, everywhere shared by indigenous peoples across the Americas—and beyond. The wisdom of the peoples Struck by this remarkable archetypal sympathy among Native peoples, Chief Oren Lyons—a faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan, esteemed member of the Onondaga Council of Chiefs, Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy)—gives testimony to this profound accord of Native American Wisdom. When he visited the Maya in Central America, despite not knowing the language, the specific dances, or rituals, somehow “I know what’s going on,” said the Iroquois Chief. “It’s always the same,” he continued, “Thanksgiving to the creation. Thanksgiving to the life-giving forces of the earth” (“ Tree Media: Oren Lyons on the Indigenous View of the World " 15:20-52). There is a shared font of wisdom that unites indigenous peoples across the earth. Rather than a secret anti-rational or “mystical” doctrine reserved for the privileged few, however, the Wisdom of the Peoples gives itself out as the plainest of rational common sense. Otherwise it would not be of the people. There is a shared font of wisdom that unites indigenous peoples across the earth As Chief Lyons reiterated, it comes down to the most elementary lessons of human coexistence, such as the principle of sharing, about which the Council of Iroquois Nations found themselves in “profound agreement,” summing up their treaty in the emblem: “one dish, one spoon.” Everyone deserves one dish, one spoon. No one should go without. Food and shelter, healthcare and education, are all human rights and not privileges for those who can afford them. Understand, we are all in the same boat, etc. Such are the simple lessons we used to pass to our children: don’t think only about yourself, learn to share; don’t fight, make peace. Be grateful to the earth. Respect the natural environment and its biodiversity, your elders, etc. These lessons seem so childishly simple, and yet, as Chief Lyons observes, everything in our capitalist culture is hell-bent on giving us the “opposite instruction”: think only about yourself; care only for your private gains and benefits; amass more wealth and power; be content to serve your corporate masters, and do not concern yourself with the fate of others. “And they’re rewarded for that” ( 14:00-15:07 ), says the Chief Elder, thus underlining the madness of so-called Western civilization. For the sake of this narcissistic lifestyle, representing the triumph of hyper-individualism, our society rewards sociopaths, liars, thieves, and scoundrels. Dismantling the colonial gaze This is not a controversial claim. All native people across the globe are in full agreement with a growing consensus among young people: our system, in its current shape, causes a lot more harm than good. Placing profits over people, it is committed to the destruction and ruthless exploitation of our environment, our labor, and our very souls. There is nothing that is not for sale within the frameworks of global capitalism, including the human soul. Rather than promoting “democracy” and “freedom,” the interests of a tiny minority takes precedence over the common good—nay, even over the survival of entire peoples, life forms, and ecosystems. There is something absolutely crazy about the system, something that runs against the exercise of reason and common sense. It is no wonder that its ideological matrix profits from the irrationalist “mythic” core of our belief systems and pet theories. Power centers do not want a population to think rationally, to think critically, structurally, about the economic logic of the system that determines and shapes our entire society. It does not want us to see through the basic ideological fantasy that underlies it, namely, the Hobbesian idea that human beings are fundamentally selfish and greedy, and badly in need of a Master. Enemy of the state If we are true seekers of Native American wisdom, however, we cannot get on board this irrationalist bandwagon which opens the door to a narcissistic appropriation of myth as a tool for our success in a capitalist system. We need to be critically aware that this narcissistic appropriation of the other is an extension of the colonial gaze that already frames our study of mythology. As we approach native cultures, we must wrestle with our own unconscious prejudices and beliefs, powerful ideological fantasies that have been driven into us since we were children playing cowboy and Indians. This objectifying and exoticizing gaze is itself derived from hegemonic power structures and material conditions which we take for granted in the West. These economic and political structures have a powerful ideological or “spiritual” hold over Western readers, who are in every way predisposed—or “educated”—to side with imperialist projects of any description. Smuggling the colonial gaze into the study of Native American Wisdom, we do not notice the fatal contradiction inherent in the “metaphysical” violence of our objectifying quest. The patronizing adoration of indigenous culture, the dismissal of their common-sense wisdom as childish or archaic—all speak to the symbolic violence of this colonial gaze. But this violence of cultural appropriation is only an offshoot of the quite real, murderous violence that has always accompanied colonial projects throughout their history. Placing Native bodies in the killing fields of genocidal conquest, the colonial gaze is by definition in full support of imperialist domination over Native peoples and their lands. As the all-seeing eye of “Western interests” with its well-funded capacity to unleash hell on earth, the imperial gaze is ready to annihilate anyone standing in its way—not excluding women and children, schools and hospitals. Accelerating climate catastrophe and socio-economic breakdown, supporting genocidal wars and courting nuclear holocaust, this disastrous mindset is driving us today, full force, to the literal brink of extinction. In the ideological matrix of cultural capitalism, Native American wisdom can only appear as the enemy. Chief Lyons expressed as much when he said that “the American structure” is everywhere giving us “instructions” to go directly against the principle of sharing, that is, against the communitarian sense and socialist vision of the Wisdom of the Peoples. Within the hegemonic space of this selfish culture, “you have an instruction that’s contrary—v ery contrary to this concept [of sharing]” ( 15:08- 15:17 ). How do we subvert and dismantle the colonial cage? Not without a revolution of thought and vision. MythBlast authored by: Norland Téllez is an award-winning writer and animation director who currently teaches Animation and Character Design courses at Otis College of Art and Design, Cal State Fullerton. He is also conducting a Life Drawing Lab at USC School of Cinematic Arts. He earned his Ph.D. from Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2009 with a dissertation on the Popol-Wuh of the K’iche’ Maya, which he is currently translating and illustrating in its archetypal dimensions as the Wisdom of the Peoples. You can learn more at norlandtellez.com . This MythBlast was inspired by  The Power of Myth  Episode 6, and The Hero's Journey Latest Podcast Welcome to the fourth season of Pathways with Joseph Campbell! This episode entitled, "The Psychological Basis of Freedom", was recorded at Bennett College in North Carolina in 1970. Host, Bradley Olson introduces the episode and gives commentary after the lecture. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Black Elk was a Lakota Oglala Sioux who had in his youth a mystical vision of the destiny before his people. He saw “the hoop of his nation,” as he called it, as one of many hoops, and all the hoops interlocking, and all of them expressing the same humanity. The hoop of his little nation had to be opened out and become one of many, many hoops of many, many nations." -- Joseph Campbell , Myth and Meaning , 24 Joseph Campbell — Jung, Pedagogy, and Projection of the Shadow (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter

Life among the luminous As the sixth of seven children, I grew up surrounded by people who towered over me and performed feats of astonishing creativity and capacity. My brother was a centaur riding his motorcycle. Dad designed a car wash machine, penciling mysterious schematics of circuitry onto flattened cardboard boxes, as Hephaestus might if he owned a gas station. Mom floated on air when she executed swan dives into the lake, and, in winter, on the frozen pond behind the house, she skated circles around me—forward and backward—like a water spirit of the north. My four older sisters drew, painted, baked, photographed, sewed, played basketball, softball, and piano, and regaled me with stories they invented on the spot. One sister would materialize as though out of nowhere to give me magical elixirs—a bottle heated to just the right temperature, a tiny cup of “jello juice” she scooped from the mixing bowl before the liquid gelatin went into the fridge. I can still taste that sweet, warm, red nectar. When my younger sister arrived, she glowed like the divine child with eyes of clear blue quartz and gleaming coppery hair. It all felt miraculous. Stunning. I had blundered into a pantheon of powers greater than myself, and I adored them all, exactly the way I would so many goddesses and gods. I had blundered into a pantheon of powers greater than myself, and I adored them all, exactly the way I would so many goddesses and gods. With no language to describe it, I was experiencing my family’s transparence to transcendence, as Joseph Campbell calls it ( The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work , 51). My child’s eyes let me see what Campbell calls “the radiance of the presence of the divine” ( The Power of Myth , 267). That radiance shone through my family as though through a cluster of suns. Unfortunately, I was hopelessly opaque.   When the light dims So there I was, handed from giant to dazzling giant, tossed in the air like a squealing beach ball, spun in circles then set down to fall over in the grass, laughing with giddy dizziness—much the way religious experience leaves me feeling. But I had no awareness of my own talents. I couldn’t sense Campbell’s radiance shining through me. This luminosity, for Campbell, occurs especially in the experience of art, poetry, myth, and religion ( The Power of Myth , 277, 283, 259, 285)—all of which are fields of human creativity. I knew it existed, because I’d seen it from the outside, but I had no experience of it myself. All I had was a desperate desire to participate in the fun everyone else was having. Before long my siblings started going off to college, marriages, jobs, journeys. I wept at the airport when we dropped them off. It was like I lost God, every single time. I self-medicated with books—another form of creative marvel which I had no idea how to make. I longed to write stories, the way the Brontë sisters did. But no one taught me how, not in high school, not in college. So, after graduating, I read about narrative structure. I attended writing classes and conferences. I joined writing groups, and I wrote terrible stories, one after another after another. Ten full years of this went by, and then one day I came across Ray Bradbury’s book Zen and the Art of Writing , in which he advises aspiring writers to write one story a week every week for a year. Well, why not? Nothing else had worked, so I rolled up my sleeves. The first week, I wrote a terrible story. The second week, a horrible story. Weeks three, four, five, and six: awful story after awful story. My settings lacked vitality. Plots petered out. Characters lay flat on the page, stubbornly refusing to stand up and do anything. Looking back, I must have been as stubborn as they were. My grim determination would not let me give up, no matter how much I despaired over each failure. Stubbornness, meet surrender In the seventh week of my Bradbury challenge, I had a vague idea for a character and setting. The first few pages filled up decently well, but the middle slowed down. Words dried to a trickle. Then they stopped. I had no idea what came next. The sun had gone down, and it was a Thursday—late in the week, late in the day, late in my soul. Why was I unable to write a story? None of my siblings would struggle like this, not with their array of talents. But it was time to make supper, so I gave up. This story would be another swing and a miss. I turned off my computer and trudged down the shadowy staircase from my office to the kitchen, letting gravity do most of the work. Downstairs, the windows were squares of the evening’s deepening blue, the furniture all but invisible in the dark. As I stepped off the last stair, I flipped the switch for the kitchen lights, as I always did. Unlike other times, though, this time when the kitchen lit up, so did the story’s ending. There it was, all at once, and it was perfect. Perfect! I loved it! Surprising yet inevitable, it fit the previous pages like a key in a lock, and I had not invented it. The story’s ending arrived in my mind all on its own, at the same moment as that burst of light. Electrical light and story light flooded me both at once, along with a feeling of indescribable joy and impossible delight, wordless, timeless, thrilling, alive. If a camera had recorded that moment, it might have captured Eureka photons beaming from my ears, somewhere on the light spectrum just this side of indigo. The radiance. The divine. Still breathless, I wrote up the ending. That was my first published story. But while I edited, I was looking over my shoulder. Who or what had come up with that ending? It certainly wasn’t me. A creativity credo  I was thirty-five when that story’s ending burst in and lit up my imagination. That’s thirty-five trips around the sun before I found a situation where the radiance could shine through. Afterwards, it became more accessible. That’s why I believe creativity can be cultivated. But chasing the mystery of how that insight happened became more urgent for me than writing more stories. The embodied sensation of light was so overwhelming, so benefic, that I found myself in graduate school learning about creativity and creation myth. I never solved the mystery, and I never will, but I learned that creation myths represent creativity metaphorically, masking the radiance in stories about forces that pour into the world, stop us in our tracks, break through sometimes in the experience of art, myth, and religion. I believe Campbell is right that mythic images represent our spiritual potential, and encountering them, thinking about them, actually activates them in our lives ( The Power of Myth , 273). If goddesses and gods embody and evoke cosmic powers, creator deities embody and evoke creativity. And because creator deities are sacred, so is creativity. My siblings remain bathed in wonder to me. I’ll never stop trying to earn my place among them. I have come to believe their exploits were, in fact, so many acts of God, and I believe our birthright—yours, mine, and everyone’s—is to radiate and create. 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 6, and The Hero's Journey Latest Podcast Pathways Bonus: The Psychological Basis of Freedom Q&A In this bonus Q&A episode, Campbell answers questions about the nature of freedom, the origins of religion, following one's bliss, living out of one's center, and aesthetic arrest. It is taken from the Q&A session after his lecture, "The Psychological Basis of Freedom", recorded at Bennett College in North Carolina in 1970. Listen Here This Week's Highlights "Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, the words of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way the gods will be attracted." -- Joseph Campbell The Hero’s Journey, 147 Kundalini Yoga - The God Syllable "AUM" (see more videos) Subscribe to the MythBlast Newsletter