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“The Handless Maiden,” collected by the Brothers Grimm, is one of the most complete stories of feminine individuation in fairy tales. It addresses the wounding of the feminine by the patriarchal shadow, but it also allows for a transformative journey of the masculine with a hieros gamos, a sacred wedding, at the end. “The Handless Maiden” reflects a compensatory psychic function present in many fairy tales. As Joseph Campbell shows us, “Where the male comes in, you have division; where the female comes in you have union.” (Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine). The handless maiden’s father, a miller who has fallen into poverty, trades the apple tree in his backyard to an old man in return for great wealth. The Miller fails to recognize the old man as the Devil, and he fails to understand that the apple tree is incidental to what is truly at stake: his daughter who was in the backyard, sweeping. This is the devil’s bargain. As Robert Johnson puts it, “Trickery as attitude always involves getting something and refusing to pay the human, direct price for it.” (The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden: Understanding the Wounded Feeling Function in Masculine and Feminine Psychology, 69). The miller’s wife, despite her grasp of the situation, is unable to protect her daughter. The devil comes to collect his prize, but the maiden has kept herself clean, outwardly and inwardly, and she is so pure the devil cannot touch her. The devil is furious, and the daughter cries so hard into her hands that her hands are washed clean, which is enough to repel the devil again, illustrating the power of tears as a purifying, sanctifying element. In his rage, the Devil demands that the Miller cut off his daughter’s hands, or he will take the Miller. The Miller begs his daughter to trade her hands for his life. To save her father, the daughter agrees to this terrible sacrifice. But again she cries so deeply, that the stumps that were once her hands are purified, and the Devil loses possession of her a third time. The devil leaves, swearing revenge. The Miller, now wealthy, tells his daughter that he’ll take care of her. She refuses. The grief of the handless maiden relates to her understanding that she no longer belongs in the world of her father, her inability to touch the world or be fed by it, her lack of embrace, all reflect a dismemberment of the human feeling, seeing, touching, holding and healing functions. Her loss of a sensual and instinctual life is complete. The fairy tale reveals what is required for the feminine to return to wholeness, to be restored and re-membered. Such a regeneration requires the solitude of the forest, and illuminated by the light of the moon, the handless maiden’s attendant spirit or soul (with her from the moment she made the decision to leave) leads her to a garden, creates a dam on which she crosses the river, and bends a pear tree toward her so she can taste a single pear with her mouth. Perhaps it is the tree itself that bends toward her. In the midst of her loneliness and despair, her soul guides her into a paradise. The shift from ego to Self as the center of the personality has begun. In the garden, the gardener watches the Miller’s daughter, but doesn’t interfere. When the king comes to count his pears and finds one missing, the gardener tells him of the maiden and they return the next night with a priest/magician. The three of them hide and watch her, as she comes with an angel at midnight. The priest believes she must be a spirit, but the king is wise enough to see beyond the handless maiden’s wild appearance. He takes her as his wife and gives her the gift of silver hands. The silver hands, though precious, are only a stage in her transformation. While silver is representative of the alchemical process she is going through, it is metal, not flesh and blood; cold, not the gold of life transfigured, not individuation, not yet. That will take 7 more years. The Devil as a symbol of the shadow often leads us back into the forest, deep into the collective unconscious, especially when we tell ourselves that our work is done. The handless maiden, now with a newborn child, is forced back into the forest in order to escape once more the trickery of the Devil. They live in a cabin “where all who enter dwell free.” There, the handless maiden learns the ways of nature from a wise woman and during this time, her own hands finally grow back. Understanding what it takes to bring the masculine and the feminine back into balance, to return to our feeling nature, to wholeness, are the gifts of this particular fairy tale. When the handless maiden recovered her natural connection to the physical world, the king finds her again and, having undertaken his own heroic journey for the past seven years, a second wedding occurs: a coniunctio, and the shift from the ego to the soul-centered personality is completed. Failing to value the feminine feeling and healing functions, we find that, “The universe is dead, no longer an organism but a building[…] and man, accordingly, is not as a child born to flower in the knowledge of his own eternal portion, but a robot fashioned to serve.” (Goddesses, xxii). Without the inner work, as “The Handless Maiden” illustrates, we all are in danger of becoming robots. This is why the world-wide healing and re-membering of the Feminine is essential to the survival of the planet and of both human and non-human species.

Growing up in East Texas, I was afraid of exactly two things—funerals and poison ivy. I occasionally had nightmares about having to attend the local rituals of the dearly departed. To be fair, many of the customs in our particular area of the county, which sometimes included a bereaved relative pulling a loved one’s body from the coffin in a final act of embrace, could border on the macabre. Equally frightening to me were the little green plants called poison ivy that seemed to surround our home like multiplying monsters, growing stronger with every effort aimed at their destruction. My friends and I called poison ivy the devil’s weeds. It was a symbol of what seemed, at the time, to be eternal suffering and pain. In The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, Campbell, as he often masterfully does in other texts, compares the likenesses and development of various mythological images throughout history. Though his foliage is never mentioned, one particular idea Campbell unpacks is associated with the Christian image of the Devil – a staple of horror films. Poseidon’s trident (which in India is Śiva’s) became thus the Devil’s popular pitchfork; Poseidon’s great bull, sire of the Minotaur (In India, Shiva’s bull Nandi) gave the Devil his cloven foot and horns; the very name, Hades, of the god of the underworld became a designation of that inferno which Heinrich Zimmer once described wittily as ‘Mr. Lucifer’s luxury skyscraper apartment-hotel for lifers, plunged top downward in the abyss’; and the creative life-fire of the netherworld displayed in Persephone’s torch, became a reeking furnace of sin. (Creative Mythology, 21) As Campbell tells us here, though they morph and transform, images of evil continue to appear in our narratives. Specifically, mythological images of evil continue to find their way into the darker avenues of our expressed consciousness through horror films and speculative fiction, a safe playground for us to work with these ideas. In more recent cinematic manifestations, there has been a reassociation of evil imagery with nature, as has been the case at various other points throughout history. The Green Man of the Roman and Celtic traditions is a popular example of a mythic figure connected to nature’s expression of vegetation, and is one that we see variations of in modern horror narratives. The figure’s green, coarse hair and barbaric nature is currently on display in the television adaptation of DC Comics’ Swamp Thing, an anthropomorphized creature composed of vegetable matter. The stories in Swamp Thing are often dark and horror-themed. While the green protagonist is seen by some as the personification of evil, similarly to how Campbell mentions the mythological devil has been viewed, he is actually a much more nuanced and complex figure, protecting the ancient environment he inhabits, though it is often an undesirable place filled with death. Campbell tells us in Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine that “In the Celtic World, the mythology of the Mother Goddess was dominant.” He connects the feminine image in Celtic mythology to the natural world of the fairy hills, stating that “The fairies are the inhabiting nature powers, and the reason they are so fascinating and enchanting is that their nature and your unconscious nature, your deep nature, are the same.” (Goddesses, 230)  Campbell’s insights begin to offer a possible explanation for the connection between death, flowers, and the mythological motifs that frequently appear in horror films. In the speculative fictional world of comics and television, Poison Ivy is a dark character and mythical figure of the feminine, associated with plants. While often known only as an enemy of Batman, in one storyline she received her superpowers and personae while assisting her botany professor with the theft of an Egyptian artifact containing ancient herbs. Poison Ivy is identified by Swamp Thing as having an “elemental mystical component.” He begins to occasionally call her the 'May Queen' giving reference to the psychological image used by other modern horror narratives and discussed in last week’s article. My fears of funerals and poison ivy may well have been on multiple levels of consciousness. Death was certainly an existential fear, even at an early age. However, fears about poison ivy stretched beyond sheer inconvenience and certainly mirrored the fears of the feminine handed to me by the culture I was surrounded by, which often sought to suffocate the great feminine much in the way that poison ivy suffocated the flowers in our backyard. Living in Los Angeles, I don’t often run into poison ivy anymore. The fears I once held both existential and unconscious likely remain with me on some level, but they accompany me as passengers and no longer as navigators in my journey.

An immense billboard looms over Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. On it, a woman appears to be consumed with deep sorrow, hot tears streaming down her cheeks. A crown of flowers rests ironically upon her head, suggesting she should be filled with joy and celebration. Folklorists would quickly recognize the image as that of a May Queen – a personification of May Day and perhaps more generally of springtime. The billboard is an advertisement for a new horror film called Midsommar. The film’s narrative explores the journey of an American woman who travels to Sweden with friends and experiences the country’s Midsommar festival. The twist is that the celebration is hosted by a small rural community that maintains the ancient pagan rituals associated with the festival. Gruesome displays of human sacrifice, sexual rites, and dark ritual make the film far more than many of even the most strong-stomached can endure. However, the film has found a faithful audience, deeply interested in exploring the more profound mysteries that surround the motifs, themes, and mythologies in the film. It has been celebrated as perhaps the first horror film to take place completely in the light and some have suggested that the film feels like a surreal dream in the vein of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Its popularity is a reminder of the enduring power and mystery of myth, as well as the transcendent and complex relationship between the dark and the light. In The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, Campbell contrasts the attitudes of modernist authors James Joyce and Thomas Mann towards what he terms the “night world” and the light. He describes this “night world” as the abyss into which all pairs of opposites disappear and the light as where these pairs of opposites subsist (Creative Mythology, 658). He goes on to discuss what he sees as the disintegration of the waking consciousness into dream found in the work of both of these literary masters, remarking specifically about the presence of supernatural elements like the ones found in horror films such as Midsommar—seances, occult powers, and orgies. Early film theorists Jean Epstein and Ricciotto Canudo both suggested that films have a certain dream-like quality to them. Roland Barthes took the idea even further, stating that, when a film ended, filmgoers experienced a type of drowsiness as though they had just woken up, referring to the state as “para-oneiric.” Horror is a genre specifically engineered to move the audience between the “day world” of consciousness to the “night world” of the unconscious with subtle movements in and out of the liminal space between them. A group of campers within a horror narrative may enjoy a normal day of hiking, eating, and conversation only to happen upon witches, ghosts, or other symbols of the supernatural, within the blink of an eye. Resurrection motifs abound within the genre where a “monster” is thought to have been slain but strangely reanimates. The play between death and resurrection, conscious and unconscious, vacillates constantly in horror films. The mythic relationship between death, resurrection, flowers, and even human sacrifice is particularly central to the image of the May Queen. Her flowered crown, symbolizing the planted seed that has pierced through the soil to express a flower is primal. Campbell discusses in Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine the ancient pedagogical experience of the plant world that originated such patterns, stating, “[T]here you have the planting of the seed in the Earth, the rebirth, and the coming of the new plant. Here the dominant motif is death and resurrection, and it’s in that sphere that human sacrifice predominates. You don’t get human sacrifice in a major way in the realm of the hunters, as they’re doing enough killing and their experiences of the guilt of killing involves them in rites of penance and of compensation to the animal world.” (Goddesses, 183) Western sensibilities around death, sacrifice, and beauty are sometimes sanitized, though we still associate flowers and funerals in a perhaps subconscious nod to the ancient relationship between the two. Films like Midsommar can be hard to watch, but they remind us that some aspects of myth and ritual are not clean, family-friendly, or for the faint of heart. They may not be for every person at every moment. They may be for a season. They may be disturbing. But they change those that experience them and who are in need of what they provide.

Who will tell the stories if not You? Who will tell the story if not Me? Who will tell Our story if not Us? My story begins in the 70’s. A time of dissolution. I grew up in an environment haunted by nostalgia for the authentic energy of the 60’s, when everything was possible. Inadvertently, my dad’s longing for the past, for when he’d felt something magical and real, left me with the feeling that I’d been born into a time of wasteland. The condition was archetypal. Dad’s hunger swallowed the oxygen in our house so that my two sisters and I slipped into the strange underworld of his quest for “the blue diamonds.” Because Dad was on this quest, he pulled his children into the archetypal terrain of the great grail legends. And it wasn’t just our family. It was the culture of the 70’s, from those burning up in drugs and disco, who eventually flamed out, and those drowning, in the cults and spiritual by-passes manifested in obsessions with transcendental meditation, cults, India, gurus. Tune Out. Tune In. Anywhere but here. Anywhere but Home. Shamans, Healers, Artists, Shysters, all of these mythological energies, literally populated my father’s dinner table. They should have been wise. But consistent with the condition of the wasteland that Joseph Campbell explores in Creative Mythology (Masks of God, volume IV), these characters were like the wounded grail king: invested with an inherited function in a role wherein they did not understand the spiritual function of the task at hand. False Fathers… Campbell was never a False Father. He told me that I was like Telemechus, Odysseus’ son. And I grew up in a time that was something like the conditions of Ithaca Homer described: Kingless. Campbell gave me a mythological frame to understand that the curse of the world I’d been born into was really initiatory. The 70’s, a time which was for me, un-parented, was an expression of a mythological theme, and a time that had happened before.  Campbell shows us how the great grail stories can be used as a map to a road through an existential condition. This condition is not a problem. It is the call to the hero’s journey. The messy middle of the story we are born into is, through failure, personified in the Grail King and dramatized in Parzival’s first debacle at the Grail Castle. But the story doesn’t end there. Act II of the grail legend’s hero’s journey, curiously enough, shifts. From Father and Son stories we move into the terrain of a Love Story. Think of Parzival’s Act II in Gawain and Orgeleuse.  Find Love Story again in Tristan and Isolde. In failure, in love, we find individual authentic experiences with the potential to re-order us. Together, these challenges shatter the  daylight world, dropping us into night. Night serves a function. The function isn’t for us to be disillusioned, to tune out, get high, or escape and remain disillusioned. Burning up and drowning are initiatory… The function of these experiences is for us to move through, to the very bottom, like Dante, moving through hell, until we have reached the nadir, and then, begin the ascent. Disillusion, of both the Grail Legends and of the 70’s, serves a mythological function. If gone through without succumbing to the drama of the wound like the Grail King, we find, on the other side….Fullness. Fullness as found in the path of our becoming. Break down via Failure. Break through via Love. The very ordinary experiences of our lives, (who doesn’t fail? who doesn’t experience love?), reveal our living myth when we relate to them at the symbolic dimension of their meaning. Campbell tells us that the question  of meaning, a question to be asked by the young hero of the Grail quest when he beholds the rites of the Grail Castle, is about “the release of the sufferer from his pain and the transfer of the role to the questioner.” At this moment, there is “an experience possible for which the hero’s arrival at the world axis and his readiness to learn, (as demonstrated by his question), have proven him eligible. Will he be able to support it?...The problem of the Grail hero will therefore be: to ask the question relieving the Maimed King in such a way as to inherit his role without the Wound” (Creative Mythology, 424). What that means, as it plays itself out, is that a life looks a lot like the stories Campbell retells in Creative Mythology. We are Parzival. We are Tristan and Isolde. The two stories are merely two acts of our larger journey. Wasteland is about Failure, in the beginning and middle, but further, needs Love to find its way home to Fullness. This is a constant leitmotif resounding through Campbell’s work and message. Through failure, love, suffering, woundedness, all experiences of night, we find our way to the mythological dimension of our lives.

My grandfather was a farmer in rural Minnesota on land that was homesteaded, probably by my great-grandfather, in the late 19th century. It was a small farm by today’s standards, not much more than 80-120 acres or so. I remember childhood Augusts spent wandering around the fields, along creeks, or through a grove of apple trees. Time on the farm in August moved slowly, languidly, while crops like wheat and corn mellowed into an eye-pleasingly warm, golden color; fruits and berries hung pendulously off branches and vines, grasses were cool, thick and luxurious; even the August air had a voluptuous, distended quality that made life itself seem idly rich, a little insouciant, and blithely serene. Aptly, I think, we at JCF have decided that the theme for the month of August is fullness. As such, I would like to explore some ideas of fullness found in the Mystery Cult at the Sanctuary of Eleusis, a cult established around Demeter and Persephone, which endured for nearly two thousand years and attracted initiates from all over the civilized world (See Carl Kerényi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter). Joseph Campbell points out that, unlike summer on my grandfather’s farm in the North American Midwest, “In the Greek summer, fierce heat dries up the vegetation, so during the summer the grain that was harvested in the spring was stored in silos in the ground. Hence the wealth of the culture is in and under the ground, in the domain of Hades…” (Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Divine Feminine, 191). Because all of the images and symbols in it refer to agricultural technology, the Demeter-Persephone myth makes a great deal more sense when one keeps in mind that times of planting and harvest are reversed in the more northern latitudes from those of the Mediterranean world. It's also important to note that Hades, or Plutus, is not only the god of the underworld, he’s also the god of wealth — and not just the cultural wealth Campbell mentioned, but also the mineral wealth found beneath the earth’s surface. In a sense, the mineral wealth and siloed grain fills the earth in the same way a cornucopia is filled, often to overflowing abundance. The cornucopia is an important symbol in the Eleusinian Mysteries (see figure below) and represents the wealth residing in one’s own psychic potential and the abundant gifts discernable in the midst of living one’s life if one knows how to look, how to see. The entire purpose of the mystery rites at Eleusis was for the initiate to be inducted into a way of seeing, to apprehend a profoundly rapturous, overwhelming vision similar to what theologians in the Middle Ages called the Viso Beatifica. The Viso was the beholding of God, a direct revelation of God from God to the viewer who once having seen, achieved eternal blessedness. The Eleusinian Mysteries also culminated in a seeing, the difference being that while the Viso Beatifica was revelatory, it was still relational; there still remained distance between the seer and the seen, whereas in the Eleusinian rites the seer achieved Epopteia, an ability to see the inner god shining through the human being, to see that (in all senses of the word) one has become One with divinity, that life isn't extinguished by death, that death is nothing to fear. In the kuṇḍalinī yoga, this is the realization at the opening of the seventh and final cakra. Epopteia is consistent with Campbell’s concept of mythic identification in which one realizes that one is oneself the object of religious awe. It’s hard to say exactly what happened at Eleusis, partly because speaking about the ritual was, as Campbell puts it, “a mortal offense." The rituals were a secret “kept by hundreds of thousands of people” (Goddesses, 192). We are given clues to some aspects of the ritual based on drawings and carvings on krators and sarcophagi, the fact that Aeschylus was put on trial and eventually acquitted for violating the omerta around the rituals, and that the notoriously narcissistic, treasonous sot, Alcibiades, is said to have staged scenes from the rites in his home. Later, the Apostolic Fathers, while writing to discredit the Mysteries described aspects of the rites associated with them. The end of the Mysteries came around 400 C.E. when Alaric, King of the Goths, accompanied by his soldiers and black-robed monks, poured through the Pass of Thermopylae and overran Greece. What we do know is that “The initiate possessed a knowledge which conferred blessedness and not only in the hereafter; both knowledge and beatitude became his possession the moment he beheld the vision” (Kerenyi, p. 15), and this epiphany was repeated again and again over a period of nearly two thousand years. Invariably, the initiate was filled with knowledge, blessedness and beauty, and bliss. It was such a satisfying physical and spiritual fullness that it lasted, according to a profusion of accounts, one’s whole life long. Walt Whitman probably never heard of the Eleusinian Mysteries, but he sums them up perfectly in his great poem, “Song of Myself”: The smallest sprout shows there is really no death; And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas’d the moment life appear’d. All goes onward and outward—nothing collapses; And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. (“Song of Myself,” lines 29–32)

For most, the term revolution brings to mind matters of nations and politics. We see irruption, violence and wars in which all involved parties incur tremendous loss. However, on a less severe scale, revolutions can simply refer to the emergence of a new attitude within the collective psyche of a culture. Such was the case when Joseph Campbell arrived in India in 1954. In his Asian Journals — India and Japan, Campbell recounts in diary form his six months of travel there. It was his first time in the country and the collective attitude was fixed on claiming autonomy from Western perspectives and influence. However, it is often the case that when something is shunned with great emphasis by an individual or culture, the very content that is being rejected takes on even greater presence in the awareness. And so, just one week after his arrival, Campbell writes: “I came to India to hear of brahman, and all I have heard so far is politics and patriotism” (Asian Journals, 12). It is a fair remark to make seeing that similar attitudes will emerge in all cultures; and that few, if any, are able to escape the age-old pattern of incompatibility between politics and spirituality. All the same, we can imagine Campbell’s disappointment, especially after having devoted tremendous effort to the study of Vedic literature and traditions, not to mention his editing of Indologist Heinrich Zimmer’s voluminous store of notes into several publications, the most popular being Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. This abrupt meeting of political climate with the quest for spiritual understanding summoned in Campbell an inner revolution that distinguished the transience of politics from the timelessness of spirit. In keeping with Campbell’s remark on brahman, consider the following, more applicable, denotation to revolution: “The rotation of a celestial body on its axis.” Applied metaphorically, this definition lends itself to the dynamics of understanding the relationship between an individual’s sense of self (ego) and brahman (the source of one’s existence and, indeed, existence in itself). Granted, it may be a little inflated of me to associate human beings with celestial bodies. But then, on a grander scale, I ask what in the phenomenal universe is not a celestial body? Besides, the perspective is refreshing, and does well to present the sanctity of a human being (for once) in a wholly beautiful and worthy light. That said, what is this brahman that Campbell desires to hear more of? What is this mystery from which the ego emerges and around which the senses and intellect revolve? The answer is both simple and complicated—simple in that we have words with which to define it; complicated in that what we are trying to define is transcendent. Nonetheless, we try. We give it names like Pure Being; Pure Existence; Pure Consciousness; The Absolute; The Immanent; The Transcendent; Source; Self, and so on. Traditionally, spiritual seekers strive to “realize” the truth of brahman—that is, they strive through meditation, devotion, and study to experience the ego-sense as none other than brahman itself. The full integration of this experience is called “enlightenment”—a permanent and irreversible state of consciousness characterized by oneness and bliss (or so I have read). However informative these definitions and meanings may be, like a celestial object revolving on its axis, they can only circumambulate the truth, but fail to provide the (purportedly) crucial ingredient to knowing brahman: experience. To this point, I recall the opening quote to The Power of Myth where Campbell distinguishes between meaning and experience: People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life . . . I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. (The Power of Myth, 3) Although the context here is not addressing brahman or enlightenment per se, the insights are strikingly relevant. Furthermore, they express Campbell’s affinity for experience over meaning. In similar fashion, I wish to conclude on an experiential note by recounting my first encounter with the term brahman. Some 25 years ago, I was camped out on a mountain ridge in New England, reading Shankara’s Crest Jewel of Discrimination (Vivekacūḍāmaṇi) In it, he addresses the relationship between the ego-sense and brahman thusly: A jar made of clay is not other than clay. . . the form the clay takes has no independent existence. What, then, is a jar? Merely an invented name! The form of the jar can never be perceived apart from the clay. The reality is the clay itself. This universe is an effect of Brahman. (Crest Jewel of Discrimination, verse 190) Surely, these are simply words and descriptions, and fall shy of experience. Nonetheless, I vividly recall a series of—how shall I say it?—inner-events that accompanied those words as I read the same lines over again and again. And whether those events were delusions or real was of no importance to me. Of great importance, however, was that they were irrefutably true, unspeakably profound, profoundly simple, and of the highest order. All I can really say for sure is that it was a fortunate afternoon, that it brought me to a daily practice of meditation, and that I fully agree with Campbell’s valuation of experience and the hearing of brahman.

“…to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act . . . Joyfully participate in the sorrows of the world and everything changes.” (Joseph Campbell, Sukhavati: Place of Bliss) With Sukhavati, a mesmerizing and spiritual portrait of Campbell emerges, as he challenges us to participate “joyfully in the sorrows of the world.”  Such joyful participation in the sorrows of the world is a truly revolutionary act. Campbell tells us that by following our dream, “it will lead you to the myth world in which you live. The god is in you. It Is not something that happens somewhere else.” This is the truth to which all myths refer; this is the ecstatic song of the Sufi poets, and the mystics. This is the numinous, creative place an artist or an athlete can touch when she surrenders completely to the moment. Dreams are the key. In truth, Campbell tells us, they are self-luminous, they shine of themselves as gods do. Through dreams we create our own mythology related to the archetypes. The dream is the path of our imagination, our capacity for this symbolic movement of the mind toward the eternal, the unfathomable. Myths exist as a reflection of our deep longing for the numinous at the level of culture. Our soul knows what is real, what matters, and what the true nature of Beauty is. When we lie to ourselves, we get sick. Our dreams will tell us so, they will reflect our disconnection, our pain and take us to the brink — the borderland where chaos and order, dark and light, meet. To dare to enter into the adventure is to hold hands with the terrifying wisdom of Psyche; it is saying yes to the hero’s journey. To enter the place of bliss is to enter something greater than yourself and become animated with the fire of the gods living within us all. This experience can be nearly intolerable for those of us whose heart has been calcified by fear and trauma and, honestly, the return to the everyday world from the place of Bliss can be just as difficult. When we get lost, disconnected, or forget the guidance of the dream, as we tend to do, Life generously provides us with what often seems to be a crisis, but in reality is a moment of truth: the loss of a job, the death of a loved one, an illness, an accident, a betrayal. These are the initiatory moments that make us listen more deeply, question our motives, examine the old wounds that are covered over but not healed. These challenges are the portals to stillness and healing, where we can begin again to follow our passion, where we can follow our bliss. Mystery is at the core of life and each of us continues to wrestle with that archetypal principle in our own way. It is often in the most difficult of times that the soul can finally free itself from the tyranny of the ego, and wherein one may “joyfully participate in the sorrows of the world where everything changes.” It sometimes seems the soul guides one into a paradise which exists in the midst of loneliness and despair.  When we have nothing left to lose, when even our very lives no longer seem to belong to us, when all seems lost, these are the moments in which the individuation process begins. In such situations it seems divine intervention is required, at least some unimaginable response that transcends the ego is needed, and that is exactly when the Self may appear, uniting heaven and hell in the same breath, in a revolutionary moment of total surrender to the fact that who I was, I am no longer, and who I am feels less than human, and is yet worthy of divine attendance. Lived as such, life is a revolutionary process. When we can accept the processes of life and death that occur again and again as a part of learning to live a life of soul--a life which has its origins in the underworld, we become free to choose, and we choose to “turn our fall into a voluntary act." This experience presents itself to us in order to illuminate our journey toward an authentic connection with the Self, and extends both inward toward the individual soul and outward toward the world soul (Anima Mundi). It is the dance of life, the dance of Naṭarāja, the lord of creation and destruction.

This month we in the US celebrate the genesis of our country, marked by the signing of a document establishing the sovereignty of 13 colonies and establishing their collective intention to form an entity unlike any seen before: The United States of America. The mythology of the United States is reflected in its establishing documents, including The Declaration of Independence, wherein the first declaration—and arguably the most essential declaration to America’s core values—states: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — Declaration of Independence Our origin story is one of great vision, established on ideals so revolutionary that the United States was considered a beacon of hope for the rest of the world. Once challenged within its own borders, these ideals proved strong enough to sustain the unity of the country through a civil war. And now, over 150 years have passed without internal threats to the existence of the country. Yet, while unimaginable a decade ago, the word “revolution” has recently emerged in American dialogue. Articles by John Ferling and James Schall, entitled “Forget a new civil war. We need a new American revolution” and “On America’s impending revolution” respectively, are just two examples of a shift in the American zeitgeist. What, exactly, does revolution mean? An online dictionary describes it as “a forcible overthrow of a government or social order, in favor of a new system.” Synonyms include rebellion, revolt, insurrection, and riot. This may be our most common understanding of the word, but it is also defined as “an instance of revolving,” with synonyms such as turn, cycle, and rotate. While the deep divisions in American politics, communities, and households could lead us to a revolution in the first sense, perhaps the second definition holds the most promise. America is revolving; it’s on its own monomythic journey that has its people grappling more than ever with the ideals on which it was founded. The exigencies of the world today are challenging our collective mythology in a way we haven’t seen before. We’re questioning how “all men are created equal” applies to women, LGBTQ+ communities, and immigrants. When does Life begin? What is Liberty if your pursuit of Happiness interferes with mine? How are we to move forward if we cannot find common ground on our core ideals? As Joseph Campbell explains in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, “The community today is the planet, not the bounded nation; hence the patterns of projected aggression which formerly served to coordinate the group can only break it into factions” (388). We saw this in play when the USSR faced a similar challenge in 1990. In this context, could we be heading toward a revolution of that kind? As always, Campbell provides a way forward. He foresaw the shift we find ourselves in today, wherein the existing borders are no longer enough to contain the collective: The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice , and sanctified misunderstanding. …It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 391) Today we are called upon to recognize that, individually, we are the change we seek. The power of the individual, not to stand alone but to ignite a web of change, has been a growing mythology throughout the world. Evidence can be seen throughout pop culture; one example is the film Evan Almighty, wherein God asks Evan, “How do we change the world?” Evan replies, “One single act of random kindness at a time.” We see it in the use of social media: one person at a time becomes a catalyst for the creation of global change. The power of the individual can also be seen in emerging forms of old religions, such as Nichiren Buddhism, which was developed in thirteenth-century Japan but took hold there during World War II and has since spread to 192 countries. It holds as its central tenet that not just the ascetic, but each individual has the creative ability within to overcome any obstacle in our lives and unlock our Buddha Nature, a process called “Human Revolution.” While we grapple with our great ideals here in the United States, our mythology has left our borders and has become a global mythology. We are called upon to take our place in a web that encircles the planet, not as citizens of the United States, but as the creative heroes in our own lives and in a movement that honors those rights throughout the world. When we fully embrace the power of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness as a global ideal, we create a revolution of one: one planet.

Somewhere in the middle of my journey with stories of individuation, as Carl Jung and others would term them, I became curious about where the feminine lives in the story of the self’s becoming. Shortly after asking that question, I was gifted the opportunity to teach Parzival for the myth-based not-for-profit Alchemy Inc., and had the chance to return to Joseph Campbell’s work on the Grail Legends. What I found in Campbell’s interpretation gave priority to the feminine and to the idea of the Hieros Gamos, the sacred marriage, as central to our own becoming. Campbell’s take (which can be discovered in Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth) reminded me to understand love, becoming, the self, and the inextricable relationship between these ideas, as lived experiences. Since then, to find my self’s story, I go back again and again to Campbell on the Grail. And what I’ve learned is that without this middle act of the Hieros Gamos, I can’t become. I don’t think we go to the Grail legends looking for fancy terms like Hieros Gamos or the feminine. I think we go into these stories relating, as I did as a young person, with Parzival’s naivete and failure. From the time I left my father’s house to the time I left the symbolic father’s house of graduate school, my first marriages to careers, men, and a series of identities, failure was the dominant metaphor. I’d been clipped on the heel like Parzival’s horse, having gained access to the Grail Castle, but then failing the adventure. I left a piece of myself at a site of wounding in my early 20’s…and there was no finding my way back. It’s a strange realization in retrospect that we can be both Parzival and the Fisher King at the same time, neither alive nor dead. It wasn’t until I taught Campbell’s Parzival and had a chance to put all my analytical skills to the test in mapping Wolfram von Eschenbach’s text that I discovered, in the structure of the tale, that I’d been stuck in Act I of the story. Parzival doesn’t end in failure. What happens is the story of Gawain takes over—and what Gawain’s tale is, first and foremost, is a love story. Gawain’s story is the discovery of where and how he is quests, ultimately, for the love of one woman, Orgeluse. In the utterly charming Romance of the Grail, Campbell says: This is Woman. Gawain has gone from woman to woman, but this one has transfixed him, and he’s going to remain firmly attached to her no matter what. This is the anima image; it’s the image of the woman by the well that is constantly encountered…these women by the well are something to watch out for. And here is Orgeluse, the one he is ready for. This encounter catapults him into another sphere of the feminine altogether. She is his soul, and she’s a toughie! (Romance of the Grail, 67–68). Only when Gawain totally submits can Parzival’s tale resume. Now we are ready for Act III, the meeting with Parzival’s mirror-image brother Feirefez and of course Feirefez falling in love with the Grail Maiden, converting for her, and the healing of the Grail King and his wasteland kingdom. Failure is resolved by love of a higher order. What a revelation! As a woman, as an embodiment of this feminine principle, my sense is that the feminine is a great big symbol for the principle of relatedness. And that what we are being asked to do in our adult journey after each devastating experience of failure is to identify to both relatedness (the feminine), and to power (I define that as a masculine valenced metaphor). My sense is that the Hieros Gamos is a lived experience of total submission to an individual sense of what a sacred marriage is for you. It’s what you bow down to, as Gawain bows down to Orgeluse. My sense of it is that the experience may often feel romantic. But it’s Eros in a spiritual sense. It’s found where the divine is found for you. For Gawain that’s Orgeluse. For Feirefez, it’s the Grail Maiden. For Parzival, it’s Condwuiramurs — but I think it's ultimately found in his experience of seeing the knights when he is a boy, the meeting that sent him on his personal quest. Reading this month’s recommendation in Romance of the Grail affords a luxurious experience for you to imagine your sacred marriages, and ask what exactly does the phrase Hieros Gamos mean for you? These stories, through the eyes of Campbell, never stop giving. They meet you where you are, whether that’s in failure, or at the moment when you are ready to recognize the divinity of the woman (literal or metaphorical) who is standing at your well. These ever generous grail legends might just help you to understand that you yourself are that woman at the well. That to the extent that our eyes are open and we are asking the questions, we ourselves are the mysteries.

In the field and scope of mythology, those of us who think or work in and around myth often discuss the apparent absence of a contemporary mythology. In conversation, Joseph Campbell sometimes noted that we are living in a mythless age. And this mythlessness makes sense primarily, it seems to me, because myths require a very long time to become myths. Individuals, pedagogies, and entire cultures need to be immersed in mythic narrative, they need to soak, steep, and marinate in the symbols of myth; the mythic images and narratives need to be received unquestioningly as omnipresent facets of daily life. Alas, contemporary life moves and changes too fast, and analyses of events and facts are nearly contemporaneous, too expeditious for mythologies to take root and grow. And yet even still, it may be useful to think about love as a present, living mythology influencing contemporary life. And since the theme at the Joseph Campbell Foundation for the month of June is the Hieros Gamos, the sacred marriage, I thought I’d shine a little light on the abstraction of love. The fact that we generally take love to be a kind of literal miracle, or an overwhelming force against which we are powerless, leads me to think that love may well be an important contemporary mythology informing all of our thoughts, behaviors and mores. But first, let’s look a bit more into how a living mythology is experienced. C.G. Jung was, I think, exactly right when he noted that one really cannot experience a living mythology while looking at it analytically from the outside. The psychic life of those living in a mythology, Jung says, “is entirely concretistic and entirely symbolical at once” (The Structure and Dynamic of the Psyche, 47). The myth and its symbolic expressions appear to simply be a fact of the life one is living or of the world one inhabits, and not regarded in any way as myth. And in his book, The Soul’s Logical Life, Wolfgang Giegerich explains that an immanent or lived experience—an “epiphany” as he calls it—of the mythological isn’t something that happens from the perspective of standing outside of a mythological system; rather, the epiphany comes from the literalization of a mythology: “We might even say that under the conditions of a mythic constitution of experience the more intensely man literalized or concretized events, the more deeply he was in touch with their imaginal essence” (Giegrich, 166). To one completely encompassed by a mythology, the world is understood to be a mysterious, often enchanted, fantastical place of wonder—of horror, too—and of supernatural operations attributed to the particular objects of mythological awe. Regarding the mythology of love, there exist common concepts endorsing beliefs like love is magical, love is healing, love is transformative, etc. When one searches Google for “soul mates,” one gets nearly 73 million results. Typical of the results are articles and videos like “The Science of Soulmates,” “4 Types of Soulmates,” “9 Signs You’ve Found Your Soulmate,” “10 Elements of a Soulmate,” and so on, rarely, if ever, doubting that having a soulmate is an established fact of human relationships and of life itself. Rituals of love abound: marriages, sacred days to celebrate love are set aside, and anniversaries of important love events are marked annually. Love, won or lost, is the theme of most popular music and supplies the plot for most cinematic works. If you think, for example, that the Avengers: Endgame movie is about superheroes or good against evil, well, spoiler alert: it’s also all about love. Even the majority of clients entering psychotherapy do so for reasons (often complicated and subtle) that, in some fashion, usually boil down to questions of love. One begins to question the authority of mythologies only when one sees them beginning to break down, failing to fulfill their promises regarding the structure, the ease, and the satisfaction of living. Eventually one finds that love, like other mythologies, never seems to be able to entirely fulfill its promise. The intoxicating novelty and thrillingly passionate promise of love eventually fades, and what at first seems like unconditional regard devolves over time into demands and grievance. The popularity of marriage is declining. Asexuality is on the rise. Startlingly precipitous declines in empathyare nullifying our social contracts. Eventually, it  dawns on all of us that long term committed relationships—in one form or another—are just hard. Still, there is something that brings us together, a force that makes life without intimacy, warmth, attachment, regard, solicitude, and empathy seem a rather shabby and drab proposition. Perhaps the problem is that the language dictated by the mythology of love is itself impoverished, or perhaps too overdetermined, too monolithic or coextensive to capture the nuanced and multivalenced nature of this immense and immensely overwhelming experience that we call, simply, love. Perhaps developing new myths isn’t the point; perhaps we really need a new and more lively, picturesque, vivid language in order to better describe eternal truths, a new language that makes the experience of life more immediate. If that is indeed the case, the new myths will arise organically from the word that bear them.

Let’s pick up some threads from last week, namely “initiation” as we discussed it, and the modern mediation of myths. This week, we will add to that an engagement with the notion of the Sacred Marriage (in Greek, hieros gamos). This concept has an interesting relationship with sacred narratives that modern mythophiles often deem to be  “proper” myths. Sanctified tales of lore from yore, however, might have been recognized by a historian like Herodotus as hieros logos (meaning a sacred tale, discourse, or account). These marked logoi were closely wedded to specific rituals. An example would be the hieroi logoi of the Orphic Mysteries. One may see here how our dear friend Sallustius may have found accord with his idea of mixed myths, as both are intimately tied to initiatory contexts. As I mentioned at the end of last week’s article, this wedding of form with function, story with game, is one of the leading challenges and exciting tasks of game designers in general, and the mission of game writers and narrative designers in particular. On top of that, we have many fine cases of lore-driven games that are celebrated not for laying out their mythologies upfront, but for luring players into the world and leaving room for the mind to puzzle over, wander, and reap wonders. Take, for instance, the worlds of Demon’s Soul (2009) and Dark Souls 1-3 (2011 - 2015) along with their close siblings, Bloodborne (2015) and, most recently, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019)— all video games created by developer FromSoftware. Known for their signature (and controversial) high level of difficulty, the Souls series sends players on perilous adventures to face seemingly insurmountable enemies, share failures, and die frequently, but eventually (with enough grit) triumph. We can relish these tumultuous experiences together via Twitch or YouTube Let’s Play, celebrating as if we’ve been initiated into an echelon of the rare and few who have understood the mind of the game’s developers. No doubt, game developers have found Campbell’s monomythic structure—and mythologies more generally— to be perennial boons for narrative design (See Guyker, "The Mythic Scope of Journey," 2014). The ambient world of Journey (Thatgamecompany, 2012), itself an homage to Campbell, the monomyth, and rites of passage, draws on the synergy of players engaging in a tacit and terpsichorean voyage together anonymously. Both the Souls games and Journey demonstrate the emotive spectrum and range of monomythic gaming while engaging with a common metaphor of the ceaseless life-death cycle on which sacred tales and mysteries were based. And like the Bronze Age Mystery rites, they utilize both the esoteric and exoteric modalities of their mythologies to entice and enchant their players. Myth playing offers many possibilities culturally and creatively. The rapidly expanding culture of indie video games showcase countless outlets and vehicles for engaging players in various story-types, whilst creating a space for lesser known cultures to share their traditional lore. Such cases as the Iñupiaq-informed game Never Alone [Kisima Inŋitchuŋa] (Upper One Games, 2014), and The Mooseman based on ethnic Perm mythology (Morteshka Studio, 2017) are but a couple. These curatorial games offer creative and culture-specific ways for players to learn about and expand their awareness of underrepresented mythologies. The Taiwanese horror game Devotion (Red Candle Games, 2019) features an intimate and unnerving rendering of the visionary initiation ritual of guanluoyin, or “witnessing of the Yin-world.” Though marred by unnerving geopolitical controversies leading to its withdrawal from international markets, Devotion, as enthusiast and writer Khee Hoon Chan argues, has had a profound resonance: “[Devotion’s] very existence is a boon to Asian representation” (“Wot I think: Devotion”). If we learn not only to wed myths to good design and powerful storytelling across popular media, but also to become more deeply aware of the profound social links that bind and bridge cultures, we might have a tremendous opportunity to cultivate a rich tapestry and web of relations. The renowned anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once referred to myths as “bundles of relations,” but I have in mind something more like a web, a nervous system (a la Bringhurst), a network with nodes—mythodes rather than mythemes. As Joseph Campbell put it, they are bound together, mutually illuminating, like Indra’s Net of Gems from the Athar Veda. Myths are poorly understood in isolation, but thrive in ecology of other stories, and are ultimately vehicles and channels for a wider sense of the world, society, and ourselves. Viewing our engagement with the world as a sacred marriage, in the most generous usage of the phrase, engenders a resonance that can emerge from our immediate encounters and those precarious channels of media—however trivial they may seem. As the renowned media theorist Marshall McLuhan once noted in his classic book Understanding Media, “Whenever any new medium or human extension occurs, it creates a new myth for itself” (1994/1964, p. 252).

My first memories of Joseph Campbell are through my dad’s love for him. Dad played Campbell’s lectures on cassette tapes on long, sun drenched drives to visit our family’s patriarch in the desert. Ironically, what I remember was how Campbell’s storytelling made no sense. He’d jump from the myth of Theseus to a fairy tale about a princess and a frog to existential ideas about sacrifice. My young mind couldn’t find the thread. While Campbell and Dad seemed to be “in on” the secret meaning behind the patterns of connection that held the world together, I didn’t understand.  Campbell told so many different kinds of stories, in so many genres, to talk about words whose meanings I couldn’t fathom. What does a kid know about “love,” “death,” and “transcendence?” What I did know was that this knowing that Campbell had and my Dad treasured…it was the thing that I should be after too. Whatever that knowing was, I imagined it was what it meant to be “Enlightened.”  And this word was what my strange name, ‘Neora,’ in an ancient language, meant. I understood “Enlightenment” as a goal, as the Buddha moment.  As if Enlightenment were a miracle that just happened to a person vs. the continuous epiphanies that characterize the dynamic process of becoming. As if that process of becoming were One story, rather than a series of iterative stages each with unique and discrete knowings. In other words, initiations, into the mysteries of Life/Death. These initiations and the mysteries they open up are in fact plural, multiple, iterative, just like Campbell’s storytelling.This is the pattern. As an adult, as a story analyst, I returned to Campbell and finally saw that secret pattern emerge as a total story, in his monomyth. Campbell’s hero’s journey taught me to look at what stories do and how they do what they do, in the form of an Aristotelian three act structure. What a revelation. Stories, when they function mythologically, “INITIATE.” I’ve spent a lifetime defining this word with Campbell’s help. Myth serves an initiatory function in that it provides “a framework for personal growth and transformation.” In Pathways to Blisss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, Campbell names this as his constant motif resounding through his work over time. Simply put: when we read myth, even the myth of our life story, in terms of initiation, we see the framework of our development. This is also a working definition for “enlightenment.” Here is where I find it helpful to think of initiation simply as a movement from one way of knowing, into another way of knowing; it is developmental. From young to old. From naïve to wise. From unknowing to knowing. From unrelated (to the mysteries)  to related (to the mysteries). The key is, initiation isn’t a general thing. It is always utterly specific. We find the specificity of these initiatory mysteries in Campbell’s description in Pathways To Bliss, in the chapter, "Self as Hero," pages 116–119. Campbell’s monomyth telescopes the four types of initiation required in our journey of becoming. Although we find the total pattern of these four initiations in big culture stories from Parizval to Ulysses, the way we live these initiations is as discrete chapters or stages in our development. The pattern is less linear and more iterative. We remember these stages as a time when we were in a particular kind of developmental challenge. The metaphors of these initiations break down into this taxonomy: Hieros Gamos: Mother. The mystery of feminine power, of relatedness to feminine metaphors of consciousness and ways of knowing. Atonement with the Father: Father. The mystery of the masculine, of power, of legacy, of continuity. Apotheosis: Where you realize you are what you are seeking. The mystery of the Self. Prometheus/Fire Theft: The mystery of stealing something from the underworld or the gods. Here there is no reconciling with the underworld. Bringing back this knowing causes a violent reaction from the depths. You can relate to the metaphors in these mysteries by asking yourself: What initiation am I going through in the story that I am living out, right now? What, in the trouble that is front page news for me, am I being asked to relate to in a new way? What kind of knowing, wisdom, lesson, learning, am I coming into by way of this experience? Undoubtedly, one of these four metaphoric frames will help you to characterize the mystery and name the initiation you are in. You will also discover that the mystery of life/death is in fact mysteries. And to tell this story, you, like Campbell, will need multiple genres, stories within stories, and a “zeal” for the sense making that happens when we share stories about our becoming. As Campbell says, 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. (Pathways to Bliss, p. 133.) My dad likely would have called such a becoming “enlightenment.” My word for this becoming is “wise.”