As we enter the month of June remember that this month, her birth month, is named for Juno, the Roman goddess married to Jupiter (who is also her brother), and who has traditionally been concerned with all aspects of women’s lives—no easy responsibility in the ancient world. Juno was also a powerful military goddess, and seems to have had oracular powers as suggested by one of her names, Juno Moneta (the verb monere means to warn, hence Juno the Warner). She is a tremendously complex figure, and this complexity coupled with the great accumulation of epithets she bears suggests to me a goddess of great age and power. For example, she is mentioned with Hercules in an inscription consecrating the Temple of Hercules at Lanuvium, a very ancient site, and it appears the two of them together assisted women and infants in the perilous proposition of childbirth. In the Greek tradition they are bound together in a difficult, contentious relationship. One epithet I find particularly compelling is Juno Lucina who in her relationship to the moon—generally speaking it’s safe to say that goddesses who are associated with the moon are also associated with some aspect of childbirth—represents the cyclical, renewing nature of cosmic time, just as the menstrual cycle articulates cycles of biological time. Her role in renewing time puts her in relationship with Janus; he presides over the passage of time from the previous to the subsequent month while she helps the month thrive by lending it the strength of her vitality. Some scholars suggest that Juno’s original spouse was Janus, not Jupiter. Juno and Janus seem to have much more in common and, perhaps, if that “relationship” had survived Juno would have been a much more happily married goddess. Once again, in Juno/Hera’s mirthless, troubled marriage, one finds the mythic mirror reflecting contemporary truths about gender roles and relationships between wives and husbands. She would have been, I’m sure, among the first in line to buy and read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique when it first became available: The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of […] women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning […]. Each [woman] struggled with it alone. As she [went about the mundane tasks of her daily existence] she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question— “Is this all?” Hera seems to me the most human-like of the gods in her frustrations, her regrets, in her deep longing and aspiration. Unlike her profligately promiscuous husband she was scrupulous in her refusal to dishonor marital fidelity and she’s repaid by living in myth as a harridan or a shrew, a competitive battle-ax who wants nothing more than to control her hard working and hard playing husband. We tend to be unable to see behind her frustration to the deep wound she bears, a wound that contemporary human beings should recognize as a metaphor for human existence. Hera received her wound, Homer tells us in the Iliad, when Herakles struck her in the right breast with an arrow. If we can read mythically, the wound in her breast and its periodic relationship to the moon suggests an incurable wound to the feminine that seems at times to be non-existent and at others to inflict unimaginable agony, an apt description of Juno’s psychological suffering. She was admired, envied, lusted after, betrayed, humiliated, and abused until she was sick of it and lashed out in a bitter, all too human way. Juno’s wound is entwined with her existence, existential and incurable, just as human beings cannot be cured from an existence that ends in death, and sharing with Her the existential dread of the incurable wound forges a deep bond indeed between the goddess and human beings. Thanks for taking the time to read this MythBlast.

As I watch the renewing, generative energies of spring wrestle with the lingering insistence of winter in the mountains of Northern Arizona it might be apt to remember Freyja, the most familiar and powerful of the Norse goddesses and whose beneficent influence in the concerns of love, beauty (particularly gold) and fertility was popularly sought after. She is a conspicuous figure in The Poetic Edda, the sagas of great tragic poetry compiled and set down from older traditional sources in the period from 1,000-1300 A.D., and from which J.R.R. Tolkien drew a great deal of inspiration. Freyja is the most glorious of the Norse goddesses and most kindly disposed to humankind, particularly lovers, and finds herself mediating disputes between mortals and gods alike. When she travels, she is carried in a chariot pulled by two cats; another remarkable mode of transportation for Freyja is her cloak of feathers which she often loans to other gods, notably Loki and Thor, to aid them in their efforts. In the Eddas (in addition to The Poetic Eddas, a Prose Edda exists, written in the late 13th or early 14th Century and attributed to Snorri Snorrelson), there are many commentaries on Freyja’s beauty as well as her generative powers. She is described as flying over the earth sprinkling morning dew, spring flowers falling from her hair and, in a trope made famous by poets, weeping tears that turn to gold. Many plants in Scandinavia were once named for her (Freyja’s Tears and Freya’s Hair are familiar examples), and despite being relegated during the process of Christianization, Freyja continues to be influential in Scandinavian folklore and art. It seems to me there is something quite modern—and necessary to modern life—about Freyja; there is something indomitable, civilizing, and empowering to be found in her strength, her compassion, and in her wisdom. The tears she cries are tears of loss and grief, and when fallen to the earth turn to gold, a precious gift to humans from the goddess. Freyja's strategic martial and political gifts seem essential in creating balance and restraint in the midst of her often hot-tempered Aesirian brethren. Her spirit may easily be re-imagined at work in contemporary life attending to issues of poverty, domestic violence, illiteracy, sanitation, food supply, and championing reproductive and human rights through a movement that has proved to be a most efficacious way to rapidly raise the quality of life in countries afflicted by prolonged conflict, abysmal health care, and profound poverty: the empowerment of women. When women are empowered in developing nations, the society itself blooms. It flowers not necessarily because women are inherently wiser, more compassionate, or more efficient than men but rather because half of its members are restored to the life of the society, and all its members can commit to the ideal of becoming more humane, more educated, more dignified, no longer living feral lives of mere subsistence and survival. Self-expression, innovation, art, social reciprocity, practical reason, and conviviality—all those things that make human beings value being human—begin to flourish and, as Aristotle said, the noble shines through. Individuals begin to be seen as having goals, activities, aspirations, and plans, thereby causing the old ideas that previously regarded people as pawns or property serving another’s ends, to be cast in an abhorrent light. In her book, Women and Human Development, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, writes that “…fully human functioning requires affiliation and reciprocity with others…” and affiliation and reciprocity are surely among the most highly developed of Freyja’s values. Thank you for reading,

What is myth... and why should anybody care? What do you think? I ask this because that one of the most marvelous ways to play with mythology is to assess our own answers to this question.  And I love this question because there are a multitude of answers to it. Here's one... If you look up myth in the dictionary, it generally says something about a myth being a story that attempts to explain a set of beliefs or natural phenomena in a given culture. There is generally an assumption implicit in this definition that the people originating these stories were somehow naïve, childlike, even primitive. They could not scientifically understand the world around them, so they made up nonsense to make sense.While I love the idea of using nonsense to make meaning, this is a limited and largely erroneous view of myth. It also gives rise to the common usage of myth in contemporary Western culture, as least, as something that is simply not true. “Oh, that’s just a myth,” we say when we’re dismissing something utterly, “It’s just not true.” I think this misses the point of myth. The ancient Greeks talked about myth as being that which is, simultaneously, least and most true. And they were on to something. Far from taking myth as literal truth, many cultures that have recognized and embraced their mythology understand even in the weaving and telling of it that it is fiction. And they understand that there is truth behind the fiction. Looking at myth this way forces us deep into the story, delving its deeps for the pieces that ring true to us not on a literal level, but in our psyches. These are truths that cook in ourselves not on the surface, not empirically, but instead on a metaphorical level. The roots of the word metaphor lie in Greek for metapherein – which translates “to transfer.” Metaphors transfer meaning from literal and concrete to intuitive and imaginal. And this is not a small movement – as a prefix, meta suggest something that is comprehensive and transcending. So metaphors transform meaning, their movement into the nonliteral giving us a glimpse of transcendent meaning. This is what myths do. They give us moments of understanding transcendent meaning. It’s why taking myths as literally true is such a mistake – one that our culture intuits when it says “That’s not true, it’s just a myth,” but only intuits part of the movement, and deafens its collective ears to the transcendent truths behind, under, and between the cracks of the myth. And it’s the same mistake in the other direction when people grope towards the comfort of taking myth literally, and tumble over backwards into fundamentalism. The power in any myth of creation, for example, is  not in its literal truth, but in its metaphor – what is it saying about a universe and how it was birthed and the generative, creative, imaginative energy that could create such an exquisite infinity? And populate it with such exquisite minutiae? So, then, for me, myth opens our eyes to seeing beyond what is in front of our faces. These stories, whether they are ancient, beginning of the world tales, or the smaller but equally important stories we tell ourselves about our families, our communities, our values, give us insight.  At least they can when we stop long enough to hear ourselves tell our stories, and let our sight get pulled inward and outward into imagination and metaphor, away from what we perceive as literal truth. Through their fiction, they give us truth. And it that truth, there is meaning.

In April, 1999, I was at a crossroads. I had just left a job that I loved running a theater school because it no longer served my family's needs. I knew that I wanted to start editing again (I had done a lot of freelance editing over the years — mostly for magazines), but wasn't sure where to start.I loved books. I loved stories. I loved myths. I just wasn't sure how to turn those passions into my work. I was, in Joseph Campbell's terms, on the threshold of adventure. Didn't feel like it at the time. Now my wife, Maura Vaughn, in addition to being wonderful and supportive, had  served as the "voice of JCF" for a few years at that point — the announcer for all of the audio lectures that foundation has released. (That's her lovely voice welcoming you at the beginning of every recording and thanking you for listening at the end.) While I was floundering, contemplating my options, Maura was trying to schedule a recording session with the person who at that point ran JCF's media programs: Mark Watts. Usually, Mark was very professional in his dealings with Maura. This time, however, Mark kept changing the times on her — totally out of character. Finally, Maura asked him what was going on. He gave an exasperated sigh and said, "There's this book..." "A book? Mark, you're an audio producer." "I know! But we gave this book to an editor, and he's made a complete mess of the manuscript, and [JCF President] Bob Walter can't take it on so he's handed it to me to fix, but like you said I'm an audio guy, not a book guy, but we need to get this book ready for the publisher—" "Mark," said my wife, "are you looking for an editor?" "YES!" "Well, I may know one. One who knows a lot about myth and Campbell. If I put him in touch with you and Bob, do you think maybe you could schedule a session with me that we can actually keep?" "YES!" That afternoon, I got a call from Bob. He had me work on a chapter of the book — which the editor had indeed made a complete mess of. The next day, he called again and asked me if I wanted to handle the publications program for Joseph Campbell Foundation. I accepted, and have been privileged to continue in that position for the past eighteen years. In his interviews with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (which I watched with Maura when it was first on the air), Campbell says, "Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be" (150). I had no idea just how directly he was speaking to me.

¡Feliz Cinco de Mayo! Cinco de Mayo is a holiday that began to be celebrated in California in the 1860’s marking the Battle of Puebla. It is not, as it is commonly misunderstood to be, the same as Mexican Independence Day, which is celebrated later in the year, on September 16th. At the Battle of Puebla, a much stronger French force was demolished by a smaller, poorly armed Mexican force, a remarkable feat given that in 1861 the French were considered to possess the greatest military force in the world. This Mexican victory reinvigorated a flagging resistance and sparked a fierce patriotism in Mexico as it continued its fight for self-determination. While Cinco de Mayo is not a national holiday in Mexico, it has become an enormously popular celebration of Mexican-American culture in the United States. And with good reason; the U.S. owes its present-day constellation to Mexico’s May 5th defeat of the French because if the French had not been so badly beaten at Puebla, they would most certainly have entered the American Civil War on the side of the Confederacy, drastically shifting the balance of power and altering the destiny of the U.S. But Cinco de Mayo is not only a Mexican-American celebration; in various forms it has migrated around the world: Canada, Jamaica, Australia, and New Zealand all hold Cinco de Mayo celebrations; Europe, South Africa, Nigeria, and even Japan host May 5th celebrations of Latin American culture. Harbored deep in the soul of political revolution is the idea of autonomy, that human beings possess natural, unalienable rights of which they shall not be deprived by governments nor by agreements between governments. The foremost of these natural, human rights is that human beings must be independent and free. In many ways, I think this idea of human freedom is the condition sine qua non, the fundamental subject with which myth wrestles. Regardless of setting, regardless of epoch or era, regardless of culture, the fundamental question of myth becomes how does a human being find freedom and to what degree may she be free? To what degree must I acknowledge and accept limitation, whether that limiting force is imposed upon me by gods, natural forces, or military might? In myth, the exploration of freedom is often accompanied by the emotional experience the French existentialist, J.P. Sartre, calls “anguish.” It is often remarked that freedom is a terrible responsibility and, as such, is often refused. What makes freedom terrible, in large part, is the anguish accompanying it: the anguish of forced choices in the face of uncertainty and ignorance, anguish at the consequences (intended or not) of our decisions, and most of all anguish over the imperative—the human responsibility—to create our own existence. Nowhere is anguish better dramatized than in the tragedies of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides who, for instance, laments “in childbirth grief begins.” It’s not an accident, I think, that in spring a people’s thoughts may turn to revolution. The breaking up and turning over of earth to herald new life can’t fail to inspire thoughts of overthrowing oppressors, autocrats, or absolutisms. So many revolutionary acts occurred in springtime: Lexington-Concord, the Arab Spring, May Revolutions in France and Argentina, and strikingly, the Revolutions of 1848 across Europe and known variously as People’s Spring, Spring of Nations, and Springtime of the Peoples. In springtime, there is also a call to personal revolution, to live a new life that is richer, deeper, and somehow more meaningful. Revolutions, as Marx suggested, may well be the locomotives of history but personal revolutions are the locomotives of living. Thanks for reading,

American poet T.S. Eliot opens his masterpiece The Wasteland with a section titled "The Burial of the Dead": APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. (T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland, section 1, lines 1-4) What did he mean by that opening phrase? When we think of April, we (in the Northern Hemisphere, at least) think of spring at its most glorious: new life rushing forth, covering "the dead land" in fresh, green life. Yet Eliot, gloomy modernist and mytho-poet, is looking at the agony of rebirth. The birth of the new, after all, reflects the death of the old. The snows recede, revealing dead, cracked earth below, while the spring rain stirs the "dull roots." His poem makes it clear that life in the Waste Land — dead, blanketed in the snow of oblivion — has the advantage of being, at the very least, painless. As any mother can tell you, and as any newborn could reaffirm if given the power of speech, birth is a painful process. Eliot wasn't just being gloomy when he called that section "Burial of the Dead." Not just. While celebrations of spring in today's culture generally are fairly benign, featuring dancing children, sales on garden supplies, and brightly colored bonnets, festivals of the season traditionally had a matching darker side. Tradition tells us that the today's Queen of the May may be a folk memory of ritual human sacrifice in earlier times. Two of the major religious festivals of the season reflect this ambivalence. Both Passover and Easter are joyous, life-affirming holidays. And yet at their hearts, they concern a sacrifice. In the Jewish festival, a burnt lamb bone represents both the lambs whose blood was used to mark the doors of the Hebrews and the dead Egyptian first-born whose doors were not so marked. The Christian festival — which consciously borrowed from the symbolism of Passover — makes the crucified Jesus that lamb whose blood redeems humanity. In talking about these holidays, Joseph Campbell pointed this out: One must remember the central truth... about Easter and Passover. We are all called out of the house of bondage, even  as the Jews were called out of their bondage in Egypt. We are called out of bondage in the way in which the moon throws off its shadow to emerge anew, in the way that life throws off the shadow of death.  (Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That, 104). Passover and Easter, then — the ultimate springtime festivals in the Jewish and Christian faiths, the ultimate April holidays — are at their hearts rites of death and rebirth. Just as the stories that follow what Campbell called the Hero's Journey include at their hearts the symbolic or actual deaths of the heroes, these festivals invoke an explicit and transformative encounter with Death. In order for the new to be born — the new season, the new spirit, the new generation — the old must pass away. And that's why April is the cruelest month.

A few nights ago, spring returned. In the Catskill Mountains of New York state, where I live, it’s a distinct moment, at dusk on the night when the spring peepers erupt into song. If you’ve not had the pleasure of experiencing peepers, they are tiny little woodland frogs that spend much of their lives living on the forest floor. Every spring, on the first warm night, they wend their way across leaf mold and even snow to find the nearest pool of still water.  And then they sing, with haunting shrill voices, loudly enough that if there are enough of them, you can feel your heart pound with the noise. Frogs emerge in cultures across the world as symbols of life and fertility, fortune, resurrection, and magic. They are both familiar and deeply strange, of both water and land, with faces and fingers that look, at different moments, both oddly human and oddly alien.  We are fascinated by them, at times squeamish of them, and at times amused by them. In the case of the Frog Prince, we may agree to kiss them, as the good little princess of Disney versions does, or hurl them against the wall in a last ditch effort to retain our autonomy as the not-so-good little princess of the Brothers Grimm version does. Or, in the Hindu version of frog and royalty, we may look on in horror as the frog maiden Bhekî’s king husband does when he gives her the water she told him never to give her, and she disappears, like the sun at night, back into the water where she was birthed. In Egyptian mythology, the Frog Goddess Heqet is a creator of life as the force that brings life into the womb, mirroring the regenerative life of the Nile as it blew past its banks each spring, bringing with it not only water and rich soil, but thousands of spring frogs. She was the patron of midwives, who called themselves ‘Servants of Heqet’ and protector of women giving birth, who often wore amulets of her as they went into labor.  But not simply a fertility and birth goddess, Heqet became a symbol of resurrection as she breathed life into Horus at the moment of his birth and his father Osiris’ death at the hand of his brother in the central myth cycle of Egyptian culture. Frogs are creatures of metamorphosis, beginning from egg to tadpole with tail and gills, and then on to frog with legs and lungs as they move from their watery womb birthplace onto land.  What an extraordinary process to muse on, and to break open our imaginings of how we may shift in our life times, finding fluid fluency in our shifting understandings of ourselves and the world around us. And in winter frogs hibernate, but it is no simple sleep of a tucked-in bear dreaming of summer berries. Instead, frogs freeze solid as rocks - a trick of glucose and ice crystals forming outside cells - and when they thaw on an early warm spring evening, make their way across the forest floor and find a pond or vernal pool. Literally and metaphorically, frogs rise from what looks and feels like death to sing spring into being. I hope you have a chance to hear the peepers this spring, and as you listen, hope that you might take a moment to imagine how the frog might sing of resurrections in your own life and world.

The most important and oldest date on the Christian calendar is the celebration of Easter, the death and resurrection of Christ. The whole of Christianity rests on this event and without it, Christian mythology simply doesn’t work. The name, Easter, is probably derived from a pagan German goddess named Ēostre, in whose name festivals were celebrated in a month that corresponds to April. Other traces of pagan spring fertility rites are evident in the warren of rabbits and the clutch of eggs attending Easter celebrations. And dying and rising gods were something of a commonplace in ancient times: Mithras, Adonis, Dionysus, Osiris, just to name a few. What sorts of insights might we take away from this familiar, nearly ubiquitous metaphor of dying and resurrecting gods? Some of course, like the Sumerian god Dumuzi, were linked to the seasons and were reborn in springtime, emergent new life personifying the seasonal cycles of vegetation. But the gods are not merely personifications of nature, they can be understood as symbolic psychic energy as well. In fact C.G. Jung writes, “Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings” (Jung, The Psychology of the Child Archetype, 154). In other words myths, for Jung, connect contemporary man to his own inner world, the world of personal meaning. This deeper discovery of self is the opportunity offered in central event of the Easter narrative, the crucifixion. Myth is impoverished when it is projected onto the material world as historical fact and reality; it loses its relevance, its power, its fascination, and the Christian myth is certainly no exception. Read symbolically and psychologically, the crucifixion of Jesus reflects an archetypal journey undertaken to realize the self. The self is fertilized, one might say, by a harrowing of psyche that includes polar, diametric shifts and reversals in perceptions and beliefs, sometimes so extreme that one loses any sense of subjective self-identity; ego functions are suppressed and familiar reference points are annihilated; panic may overcome rational thought, and death seems possible. However, if properly managed, a merging with the transcendent or the numinous may be the end result of the experience. The dynamism of the ongoing “harrowing” eventually equilibrates a well-balanced system; one feels as if one has been reborn. As a matter of fact, Jesus refers to the rite of baptism as a form of rebirth and to his death on the cross as a baptism: “But I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how I am straightened till it be accomplished” (Luke 12:50). Jesus compares the woe of his own death to the pangs and hardships of birth. But this new life isn’t simply a new physical, material existence, rather it is a psychological rebirth facilitated by introspection and reflection—attitudes that are commonly illustrated by the motif of descent. One may make the argument that it was a psychological hell to which Jesus descended and remained in for three days after surrendering to the process. New life coalesces in one’s own depths, and these depths constitute a form of psychological hell. “The dread and resistance which every natural human being experiences when it comes to delving too deep into himself is, at bottom, the fear of the journey to Hades” (Jung, Religious Ideas in Alchemy, par. 439). During the late 350’s C.E. the Apostles’ Creed was solidified and the words agreed upon to describe Christ’s descent into hell were “…decendit ad inferna,” descent into the grave (the word grave may mean serious and dangerous, and gives itself to the word gravid, or pregnant) rather than the more literal decendit ad infernos, decent into hell. Jung’s Hades and the use of the word inferna are non-literal moves to describe a decent into serious, dangerous psychological territory, a place of rebirth and a new life, new life that we may have more abundantly. I hope you enjoy the Easter season and the call into your own depths.

April 1st, April Fool’s Day, is a day traditionally set aside for playing tricks on people or hoaxing. Pranks and hoaxes range from the very clever, like the BBC’s “spaghetti harvest" or an article in the April 1998 issue of New Mexicans for Science and Reason suggesting that the Alabama legislature had decided that Pi should be changed from 3.14 to 3.0 bringing it closer to the "biblical value,” to the old hackneyed pranks of gluing coins to sidewalks or floors or filling Oreos with toothpaste. Celebrations of hilarity and good humor date back to ancient Greece and Rome, but one of the earliest instances of specifically April foolery, poisson d’avril, dates back to the 15th Century and includes attaching a paper fish to an unaware victim’s back; a kind of medieval “kick me” sign. April Fool’s pranks may sometimes have a dark side, it seems, and may smack a bit of humiliation and a, well, smug manipulation of the credulous and the uncomplicated. These two qualities in particular, credulousness and an uncomplicated simplicity, constitute the heart of the fool. In the plays of Shakespeare one finds any number of apparent simpletons who speak incisively and truthfully about the nature of life, of love, and of politics. Like Nick Bottom, fools are often possessed of a “most rare vision,” a vision that makes sense of a mixed-up world, a world that has been turned upside down by greed, cruelty, and fear. The fool, in his nonsense, his glibness, his often slapstick manner, is able to speak uninhibitedly and frankly to the truth, thus setting the world aright again. By identifying the foolish, society’s anxieties find an outlet in laughter as well as a welcome reassurance that one is not, oneself, a fool. But if one looks more deeply, one may find in foolishness a profound critique of the sociopolitical forces that conspire to make one foolish. The fool offers an effective critique of society because s/he understands existence experienced from the inside out rather than the societally sanctioned outside in. The fool is aware (and brings the fact into our awareness, too) that those who judge her have never deeply examined their own lives and have no way of understanding différance except to call it foolishness or asinine. Beneath the fool’s unconventional, sometimes shocking, behavior, one finds a deep wisdom. Marie von Franz connected the fool with “…a part of the personality, or even of humanity which remained behind and therefore still has the original wholeness of nature” (Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 1971). In the Tarot deck, the fool is the first of the major arcana and bears the number zero. Zero first appeared in the early 2nd Millennium B.C.E. in Egypt, and only found its way to Europe in the 11th century. The concept of zero is a little mind blowing in that it presents the apparent paradox of nothing being something, a “nothing” that actually occupies space. Zero is a whole, rational, and real number that has power mathematically and denominatively, and even imaginally. When one considers zero’s circular shape, one naturally imagines ideas such as totality, wholeness, and a universal, all-encompassing vessel within which everything is in harmonious relationship with everything else. A fool, then, is well suited to take on the task of revealing truth—a project so fraught with danger and misunderstanding that who but a fool would propose to do such a thing? And the workshop of the fool, the place in which he conjures his particular reconciling, healing magic, is the human heart; the undiscovered country at the center of the empty circle, zero. The fool’s genius works for all of us, helping us understand that hidden in what appears to be nothing, is a very important something. Apprehended in this way, the fool’s reply to King Lear makes perfect sense: “Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?” Thanks for reading.

In the Zoroastrian religion Nowruz, the new day, is perhaps the most important day on the Zoroastrian calendar (it also marks the Persian new year) and is celebrated on, or near, the spring equinox. Much of what is known about Zarathustra, in addition to his vital dates, has been lost to the mists of time. What does remain is the religion he founded, its traditions, and his followers. Zoroastrianism was once one of the most powerful religions in the world, but is now one of the smallest, probably consisting of less than 190,000 followers worldwide (according to a New York Times 2006 article). By way of comparison, Christian religions as a whole have over two billion followers.  Zoroaster, as he was known to the ancient Greeks, was the “reputed founder of the Persian religion” (Plato, First Alcibiades) and thought by them to be something of a magician. Zoroastrianism was, in all likelihood, the first attempt at monotheism; Zarathustra was its prophet and Ahura Mazda, a creator god, was its divine object of worship. Zarathustra’s teachings focused on free will, heaven and hell, resurrection of the body, final judgement, and an afterlife; teachings which are doubtless familiar to a contemporary monotheistic ear. Zoroastrian tradition holds that Zarathustra lived to 77 years and 40 days, though there is some debate around the manner of his death and even a suggestion that he may have been murdered by a priest of a religion Zoroastrianism supplanted. I first encountered Zarathustra reading Frederick Nietzsche’s philosophical, poetic novel, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book For All and None published between 1883 and 1891. Nietzsche himself was a brilliant classicist/philologist, and surely knew of Zarathustra from his study of ancient Greek texts by authors such as Plutarch, Diogenes Laertius, and Agathias Scholasticus in addition to Plato. I can’t imagine that these references did not spur him on to further study and research into the figure of Zarathustra, especially since it occupies such a place of primacy in Nietzsche’s oeuvre. He writes, “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Ubermensch—a rope over an abyss…,” the Ubermensch being the example of “self-overcoming,” self-direction, and self-cultivation. The Ubermensch is not an end nor the goal of human evolution, but rather is a journey, a journey from one’s animal nature to self-mastery. For Nietzsche, the point of undertaking such a journey is to develop radical self-acceptance, acceptance through which one learns to embrace all the horrors, pains, and joys of one’s life and living; it is a way of living he calls, “Amor Fati,” the love of one’s own fate. In his interviews with Bill Moyers (The Power of Myth) Joseph Campbell referred to the prologue of Thus Spoke Zarathustra to introduce his notion of “following your bliss,” an idea very similar to Nietzsche’s Amor Fati, and a very difficult and challenging path to follow indeed. To live the life of Amor Fati, to follow one’s bliss, means to aspire to live life as consciously as possible, not rejecting any aspect of life or wishing it to have been different, not even in the smallest detail. Living in this way re-enchants one’s world, and such a re-enchantment is possible only when one strives to live at the edges of oneself, fully immersing oneself in the life one has, the only life available for one to live.

Why do we tell stories about quests? In traditional, warrior cultures, such tales make a certain practical sense: they're a way to give a sense of purpose to young men who have nothing to do except wait around until it's time to fight someone else. But that doesn't explain why such stories still have a hold on us. Why are we drawn into stories about adventures? Why the fascination with journeys traveled by characters like Harry Potter or Katniss Everdeen (in the Hunger Games books) or Elizabeth in The Crown or the fabulously named Chiron in Moonlight? Joseph Campbell would tell us that these are all hero journeys, following the schema that he laid out in his ground-breaking book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. His claim was that this story structure is all but literally hard-wired into the human brain — that we tell stories this way because stories that follow this pattern — or acknowledge the pattern before breaking it — release transformative psychological power. But that still begs the question: what, psychologically, do these stories do for us? There are many theories on this subject. Artists often are less concerned by the psychological or physiological causes for the power of the hero journey cycle, and more concerned in the fact that it does work to create transformative experiences. Publishers and film producers and video game companies are simply happy to know that the Hero Journey cycle works to make cash flow in their direction. Yet we still wonder: aside from some accident of neurological structure, where do these stories of quest and adventure come from? One possibility is that it is a symptom of basic human psychology. In life as humans have lived it since we started settling into towns and cities, none of us is ever truly able to experience the full spectrum of the life that we can live. To use a 1960s term that my parents would approve of, we aren't ever able to fulfill our human potential. We make choices — or our psyches push us in certain directions — and those paths we walk close off other paths to us. If we are fortunate, we are at least content if not happy with those paths. If we are less fortunate, all of our hopes and desires come to be frustrated and disappointed. In either case, there comes a time in every life when the world in which we walk — the choices in which we have hemmed ourselves — comes to feel barren. To use Campbell's term, our life begins to feel inauthentic. We are in the Waste Land. And suddenly, up wells the desire to fulfill all of that potentiality that we ignored. Did you focus on love  at the expense of achievement? Family and safety at the expense of adventure? Money at the expense of intimacy? Whatever part of our own psyche we have allowed to lie fallow or whatever dearly held wish has been withheld from us, that now becomes the boon, the treasure that we seek. In reading books or watching movies (or playing games or riding waves or...) we quest for that which we have lost: ourselves.

A week ago, I found myself at that hard moment of freeing my eighteen-year-old cat from a body that was failing her. From the moment of her choosing me at a California animal rescue, our lives have been a dance of longing and fulfillment, of joy and loss. My dogs come to me outstretched and quivering, waiting for my approval, the “house broken, domesticated deities” that never demand anything from us that Belden Lane decries in The Solace of Fierce Landscapes. Mia was innately unbroken, deeply wild, and full of a superb indifference.  She not only resisted being sentimentalized, she outright refused it, often with something that amounted to a glitter of humor at my insecure need to gain her approval.  She never sought mine. But every morning, as the first shards of light began to pierce through my curtains, she would jump lightly on my chest, purring me awake.  I learned to move slowly (if at all) in response to her, gently reaching a hand up to pet her.  If I moved too fast or loved too hard, she would slip flame-like to the floor and be off on her morning adventures.  But if I moved quietly, and offered myself to her rather than trying to take her, we could lay for hours, until our breath became fused and I would be stilled into patience at the wonder of it. Those moments of grace were both of fierce joy and discipline, and began to teach me about the nature of wildness. We cannot want too hard. If we wish too noisily, we scare the fish, the deer takes flight, the clouds scud in heavy over the moon.  We cannot actively seek the moments where our longing for oneness with Nature is fulfilled; we can only place ourselves in the ready, to receive the grace when it comes. In those moments, Mia would become a flash of Artemis herself, seen from the corner of my eyes but never fully realized, stroked but never clutched. Wolfgang Geigerich’s exploration of the myth of Actaeon and Artemis at the bath in The Soul’s Logical Life defines the story as a metaphor for joining the Other and the Self: becoming one with the wildness.  Geigerich suggests that to know that wildness, one must be destroyed in the process, as Actaeon was, but I have not been certain that the gap between what is human and what is wild could ever really be bridged, even with destruction. But there is another lesson: whether inside ourselves or in the world around us, wildness itself insists upon our commitment to metaphor.  We can never bridge the gap literally, not through taming, or destruction, nor any kind of dominion. We can find it, in a sideways glance, through the metaphor itself, and through the mythopoetics of love. That connection invites us not only to breathe into paradox but to celebrate the divine, complex innocence of losing Self and Ego through loving the wildness without expectation.  It is, perhaps, the only way that we can find that oneness. And in the paradoxical manner of the universe, I learn this lesson not by the spectacular, grandiose nature of Nature, but instead the quietly wild nature of a small gray cat.