The Light Bulb or the Light? Of Joe Campbell, Mystics, and Masks

 

The Light Bulb or the Light? Of Joe Campbell, Mystics, and Masks

 

Although I have been blessed with many mentors in my life and career, none has had a more profound effect upon my life and work than the comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell. I was first introduced to his work through a set of video-taped lectures I borrowed from the local library in Mesa, Arizona, where I had gone to heal my heart in 1997 after a series of sudden, unexpected, and life-changing events. Following a dark night of the soul, during which, as recorded in one of my poems from that time, “I poised a pen on the edge of death,” I was blessed to find what Jung himself could not, but Joe did in Jean Erdman—a woman who could be both Wife and Muse, a spiritual and material partner in nothing less than a second chance at Life.

I don’t know what drew me to those lectures… although I suspect it was the wide range of cross-cultural material he covered. I have always been a Parallels and Patterns kind of guy. I was also working on my first novel, Jester-Knight, at the time and was voraciously devouring anything to do with European and Middle Eastern history, religion, and culture.

From those initial experiences with his wit and wisdom has blossomed what has been a 28-year journey through his books and lectures, his interviews and inspirations, as I have read what he read, studied what he studied, and slowly but surely, began to Follow My Bliss. Along the way, I have hung his picture in the classrooms where I’ve taught (and in my writing studio in the Creative Cottage, where I am revising this essay, first written seven years ago), had endless hours of discussion with fellow Campbellians, and weaved the main themes of his work ever more tightly with my own. I refer to him often in my book on storytelling, published in 2024. 

In 2002, as I began to focus my theatre career on arts integration and plays and workshops for young audiences, it was a battered, second-hand copy of The Hero with a Thousand Faces that gave me the energy and insights to plumb the depths of the world’s myths and folktales as the stone and sand and water that would mix to become the foundation of everything that was to follow—the co-founding of two arts-education schools and a social justice theatre company; the creation of 17 plays and interactive bullying education and prevention workshops that have reached over 45,000 children and adults; the writing of my four books on using theatre in the classroom; and the publication of 13 novels, two nonfiction books on the paranormal, and many poems, essays, and short stories.

My students—especially the dozen or so mentees who studied all aspects of theatre with me over the course of 15 years—have heard the words of Joseph Campbell spoken over and over. I have give them copies of Hero, and the best DVDs about his work, especially Patrick Takaya Solomon’s Finding Joe (2011). As they have gone out into the world as actors, directors, writers, and teachers, they too have shared the words and works of Joseph Campbell with their students and their peers.

(Thank you to Patrick for publishing the original version of this essay on The Finding Joe Facebook page in 2014)

When I was creating the logo for our theatre company in 2004 [founded as New Mystics before being changed to Seven Stories eight years later], I used as my inspiration Campbell’s exploration of Yeats’ A Vision and the idea of the Primary Mask, and the move from the lunar to the solar, fusing the moon and sun into the comedy and tragedy motif. As I have progressed as a teacher of writing and explorer of the art and importance of Story, I have incorporated the Hero’s Journey ever more extensively into my curricula.

Over the years, as I have studied shamanism, participated in Lakota sweat lodge ceremonies, undertaken a Vision Quest, and gone on countless drum journeys and astral travels to explore the inner caves and bottomless oceans of which Campbell so eloquently spoke, I have continued to ponder what it means to take the Hero’s Journey, to Follow One’s Bliss, to be the Light and not the Bulb… It is an endless cycle, full of ups and downs, full of all the challenges and disappointments that a life fully lived can offer, spiritually charged with an alchemical magic and a connection to Source that I cannot imagine not knowing.

Doors have ever-opened, help has indeed come from the most unexpected of places, and in letting go of the life I had planned before the events of 1997, I have come to know the life that was waiting for me.

I owe so much of it to Joe.

This link will take you to an episode of my podcast, into the Outer Realms, that I did on the life and work of Joseph Campbell:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4NkM0y0GjY&t=8s