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

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

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

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

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

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

Today, May 29, 2018, the date of the first full moon in May, is the day of celebration for the birth of the Buddha called Vesak. Mythology has it that on the night the Buddha was conceived, his mother, Maya, dreamt a white elephant with six white tusks entered her right side, and ten months later the Buddha was born, miraculously, from his mother’s side. Deities attended him, received him on a golden cloth and laid him gently, very gently, on the ground. The infant promptly got to his feet and took seven steps, pointed up, pointed down, and said in a thunderous voice, “Worlds above, worlds beneath—there is no one in the world like me” (Campbell, Myths of Light, 137). D.T. Suzuki once remarked, “You know, they tell me when a baby is born, the baby cries. What does the baby say when the baby cries? The baby says, ‘Worlds above, worlds beneath—there is no one in the world like me’” (p. 138). So, all babies are Buddhas! What’s the difference between Queen Maya’s baby and all the other babies? Siddhartha knew from the beginning that he was Buddha; all the other babies are caught in the illusion of materiality and the worlds of perception and sensation, but not him. Buddha means “The Awakened One” or “The Illuminated One,” and what brings one to illumination other than a deep, penetrating, attention to life, life exactly as it is, an attention to life that allows one to realize that the forces of nature, the pulse of the cosmos, course through and pulse in you, too. The nature of the Universe is your nature as well. So how does one celebrate Vesak; how does one pay homage to the Buddha? Make a sacrifice or an offering? Meditate in a shrine, chanting, hoping to be transformed? The story goes that when the Buddha was dying, he noticed his most beloved disciple, Ananda, weeping. Buddha gently instructed Ananda not to weep, but rather focus on the eternal Dhamma (teachings of the Buddha) for that is what will become Ananda’s teacher once the Buddha has passed; that’s how you honor Buddha. The Buddha doesn’t have to be present for one to find Buddhahood within one’s self; one may discover for oneself by following the Dhamma that one is indistinguishable from the eternal, inseparable from the source. We celebrate the Buddha by placing his teachings, and most importantly the living into them, at the center of daily life. Every day, but particularly on Vesak one might think how one might bring happiness into the lives of others through actions of loving-kindness, philanthropic generosity, comforting the sick and afflicted, or any other way one might think of, as Aeschylus put it, to “Tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” Thanks for reading,

I have been rediscovering Campbell's collection of essays on Asian mythology, Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal, as the Joseph Campbell Foundation and publishing partners have preparing to release it as an audio book and eBook.These are some of Campbell's most accessible writings, I think: exploring his understandings of the complex intersections between Eastern and Western ways of approaching the world with his uniquely brilliant storytelling. Paradoxically, though, these essays remind me of my own uncertainties as someone who studies mythology. While I am fascinated by the great Asian religious and mythic traditions, I am deeply aware of the distance between my cultural contexts and theirs. Campbell writes: In the great mythic world of the Bodhisattvas and the Buddhas, whose grace and mercy and compassion yield the energy that enables us to release ourselves from the bonds of illusion, on the other hand, you have the way of outside power. This is the way to myth. A mythic image is an outside power that comes to help you; through it you can achieve release from the bounds of the mundane world. (96) This idea of a mythic image as an outside power is so potent; capturing what I think is one of the key differences between our own internal, personal stories, and the innate scale and 'otherness' of myth. Myth draws us outwards, helping us to perceive our experiences within a context that is larger than our own individual experience. It connects us to a sense of the largeness of the stories that resonate in us, but with a reminder that those stories are larger than we are. Simultaneously, this idea of the mythic image becomes a reference point for one of my ongoing tensions about the study of myth: when is 'outside' too outside? To study mythologies outside of our own experiences, cultures, and geography is compelling. And, I think, if we are to find points of commonalty in our human experience, imperative. Yet, it is not without inherent dangers. The fields of anthropology, archaeology, comparative religion, and mythology have an uncomfortable history of colonializing thought. The eye that regards does so through its own lens, and even when we make conscious efforts to see and note those lenses, we cannot lose them. It is difficult - and I would argue, in many ways impossible - to remove ourselves from the deep stories that we live within, and step away from either passing judgment on other stories or grabbing at them with the indiscriminate enthusiasm of an adolescent, trying on identities. How, then, can we, as students of myth, remember to hold the 'outsideness' of myth, particularly if it is one springing from a culture different than our own? As we seek to find meaning and points of connection in the image, I think that we need to hold a deep sense of discipline, and remember that it is never our image. We cannot claim it as our own, even if we fall in love with it, and we cannot dismiss its relevance even if we do not. Perhaps one way to do this is imbedded in Campbell's thought above - 'a mythic image is an outside power that comes to help you.' It comes to help us (impersonally, and often indifferently), whether we understand it or not. And if it comes to us via a culture very different than our own, it is, indeed, a gift worthy of respect. And, paradoxically, a gift that will always remain in some way, outside of us.

The Joseph Campbell Foundation will soon be releasing an ebook publication of Campbell’s Myths of Light, an utterly charming little book in which the attentive reader will be able to discern Campbell’s joy and exuberance in exploring Asian mythology. In this work he recounts many of the myths of Asian traditions in an accessible, conversational manner, and one may clearly see what a pleasure it must have been to be a student in one of Campbell’s classes. Throughout the book Campbell often references the correspondences and disparities in Western thought and traditions as a way of describing and clarifying important points. The symbology of light is familiar in the study of myth, particularly in the images and mythologies of “solar deities” which have, throughout most of recorded history been found in one tradition or another. Plutarch used the analogy of the visible light spectrum to highlight the relationship of myth and truth when he wrote in De Iside: And as mathematicians do assert the rainbow to be an appearance of the sun so variegated by reflection of its rays in a cloud, so likewise the fable here related is the appearance of some doctrine whose meaning is transferred by reflection to some other matter; as is plainly suggested […] by the forms and makes of their temples, which sometimes run out themselves into wings, and into open and airy circs, and at other times again have underground certain private cells, resembling vaults and tombs. In the psychology of C.G. Jung, consciousness itself is associated with the color yellow at the center of the visible light spectrum. The red “end” of the spectrum, he associated with the body and its biological processes, and the blue end of the spectrum with spiritual ideas and archetypes. So, lest the associational process draw me too far away, I want to return to Campbell and this delightful volume in which he describes two kinds of light, sunlight and moonlight, and the modes of mythological thought emanating from each. The light from the sun is an intense, incandescent, fiery light that never dies; wherever the sun goes, the light goes with it. A direct experience of the transcendent truths this light symbolizes burns out life, Campbell says, the way “the sun burns out vegetation” (p. 13). The moon gives us a reflected light somewhat more congenial to life; its light waxes and wanes, eventually dies and then is reborn. “So the interaction of these two powers—the solar power of sheer light and the lunar power of reflected light, modified to life—is one of the great mythic themes.” These mythic themes, Campbell reflects, are the expressions of two kinds of immortality: the lunar kind of cyclic immortality in which one dies and is reborn, and the solar kind of immortality in which the human shell is burned away and one’s essence—one’s soul, if you will—has passed beyond, has achieved the transcendence of becoming one with “the eternal source of being” and will not return. As Dr. Van Helsing tells Mina in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, “There are darknesses in life, and there are lights. You are one of the lights.” In Myths of Light so, too, Joseph Campbell urges us to discover the light within us, burning brightly and intensely at the core of our being, transcendent.

This month, in honor of the re-releases of Mythic Dimension and Primitive Mythology in eBook and audiobook forms, the Joseph Campbell Foundation is celebrating how we use mythology in our lives. As a form of knowing that is deeply based in metaphor, myth holds hands with poetry. This week, we'd like to share a piece by poet and mythologist, Stephanie Pope. We asked her how she would respond to the challenge of a poem that captured a sense of using mythology, and she responded with this new poem, not yet published. Enjoy. And we invite you to roll it around on your tongue and see what it brings up for you as April begins to green the world in the Northern hemisphere. . . . MARTIAL SPIRIT AND NOBLE GREENNESS O most noble greenness rooted in the soul  - Hildegard von Bingen, Also, Of The Maids A saturnalia is the blackening of a star a star buried in Saturn Here beauty streams from the eyes of women noble and green Drain the swamp and hole becomes shithole how low must one go? Well-being does not exist at the top where one might think Buried deep where a low is lit; down there a secret fire (in the hole of workers, high schooled students, and the mass generation not inviolate where enough is enough) gathers a viable massa confusa gnawing at its own rootedness in an ars requirit Let that sink in a bit.  Evil is without autonomy having served its role in holeness. Joined is high and low in the head of state; something more passive in matters consoled sharpens our discernment for what is real in what merely simulates shit. Tears cleanse our words, our cloudy ears our eyes; our throats adorned in crystal. About Stephanie Cultural mythologer, poet-essayist, Stephanie Pope, MA, publishes Mythopoetry Scholar Ezine and Mythopoetry Blog. Her latest poetry volume, Monsters & Bugs, can be found on Amazon.

This week I want to continue the exploration of what, in her MythBlast last week, Dr. Melander called "the use of myth." The uses of myth are as various as they are abundant, and exert influences in every aspect of human life, “galvanizing populations, creating civilizations, each with a beauty and self-compelling destiny of its own” (Campbell, Primitive Mythology, 4). Mythology and mythologies are very powerful things indeed. Myth has the power to acquaint one with the vastness and complexity of the universe, to inspire transcendent awareness, but it also has the power to shrink the universe and domesticate it—reduce it to a familiar, bounded space in which human beings live comfortably and, perhaps, smugly in the knowledge that the universe needs human beings (and special, chosen ones at that) in order for itself to exist. Campbell recognized the dangers of literalizing myth and believing in it as though it were incontestable fact: “Clearly mythology is no toy for children. […] For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations.” He goes on to say, “For surely it is folly to preach to children who will be riding rockets to the moon a morality and a cosmology based on concepts of the Good Society and of man’s place in nature that were coined before the harnessing of the horse! And the world is now far too small, and men’s stake in sanity too great, for any more of these old games of chosen folk […]by which tribesmen were sustained against their enemies in the days when the serpent still could talk” (ibid, 12). In his brilliant, provocative book Mythologies Roland Barthes, influenced by the semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure, argued that myth is “a system of communication, that it is a message. This allows one to perceive that myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a form” (109). For Barthes the message of myth consists of material (oral or written narrative, art, photography, cinema, musical, etc.) that has already been worked on, sometimes over many centuries, to make an incredibly effective communication. The message of myth signifies a particular state of consciousness with which one may explore, discuss, enter into, or dissect without attending to its substance (to be clear, that is not the same as saying the substance of a myth is unimportant). On this particular point, at least, Barthes seems to be in accord with Campbell in the sense that the form of myth insists upon metaphor, a communication more plastic, more flexible, more mercurial than literal, factual objects can be. Myth is, for me at least, most meaningful when one explores the deeper messages the myths point to or suggest. Those messages don’t lend themselves to literal or factual understanding and we always end up by saying what they are like. This is not a shortcoming at all, and the immersion into the message is itself participation in the powerfully primal rhythms of life, our own as well as the life of the world. Ludwig Wittgenstein suggested that the limits of one's world are defined by the limits of one's language, and I sense that at one’s limits or edges, a protean potential for change and the realization of meaning is present. It’s the struggle of working at the limits or the edges of oneself, and one's limited ability to speak about it, that unearths important awareness and deep truths. To discover the true power of myth it must not, I believe, be worked within the confines of that which one finds comfortable, concrete, or understandable; those qualities never move us closer to boundaries or limits. It is difficult, however, to prevent the exploration of myth from lapsing into the literal and the comfortable, from becoming nothing more than a comforting fantasy. I think there should be an element of danger as one works with metaphor and myth. Not physical danger, obviously, but rather an element of psychological danger in the sense that one is courting awarenesses that once realized, may bring one to one's knees, subvert one's ego and its perceptions of the self, and perhaps even radically change one’s life. No, myth is certainly not a tool for children, nor is it for childish adults. To quote Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust: “The very best that thou dost know/Thou dar’st not to the striplings show.” Thanks for reading,

In the month of April, the Joseph Campbell Foundation is celebrating the impending release of several new editions of two Campbell classics, The Mythic Dimension and Primitive Mythology, both coming soon as eBooks and audio books. Both works delve deeply into one of the most enduring questions about myth: how do we use it? Inspired by this, JCF will be focusing our musings this month on this question, sharing thoughts from our community, and inviting you to dive deep into your own ideas about how we collectively and personally use myth in our cultures and our individual lives. As an opening salvo for this month’s conversation, I’d like to share an idea from  Campbell’s prologue to Primitive Mythology, the first title in his series, The Masks of God. In this articulation of mythology’s abiding role in the human– and as he suggests a few paragraphs later, even beyond human – experience and life, what intrigues me most is that he quantifies the study of this role as a science. This prologue is entitled, “The Lineaments of a New Science.” While I think that perceiving the study of myth as a scientific one versus other disciplines is an opening point for a grand argument (lots of grand arguments, actually), what it has opened for me, and I’m hoping that it might open for you, is the broader idea of one of mythology’s uses as an invitation to think. Often, I find, we can use mythology to shore up our own assumptions about ourselves, our values, and our cultures. It is one of the dangers of embracing what we define as archetypal or mythic too literally and closely, so it justifies beliefs rather than opening them. I think one of myth’s highest and best uses, to borrow a phrase from the prosaic world of real estate development, is to understand that its deepest beauty isn’t in building the metaphorical high rise, but instead allowing the ground to lay somewhat fallow, in terms of our own certainty, and instead use it as an invitation to invite us to the uncertainties it offers, so we can think, and think hard. One of the most evocative invitations I know to do that, particularly in conjunction with Campbell’s ideas, is a rather splendid paper entitled “The Fire is in the Mind” from myth and religious studies scholar (and former Joseph Campbell Foundation Board member) David Miller. He explores Campbell’s work as a scholar in this paper, celebrating his insight – and, particularly in its failures – the ‘drips and leaks’ in his thinking – and works how mythology is both challenged and challenging in careful thought. Miller writes, If someone assigns a so-called "meaning" to a myth, it then serves to engage energy and consciousness to itself (mythoduly, idolatry of myth and the study of myth).  For myth to work properly, "meaning" must be withdrawn, deferred, itself a catapult into the unknown and the unknowable and to be left behind.  Myth is like a bow disengaging an arrow. ("The Fire is in the Mind") May your arrows be disengaged!