Tag: Joseph Campbell
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Voices in the Wilderness of Time and Space?
“Welcome to planet Earth – a place of blue nitrogen skies, oceans of liquid water, cool forests and soft meadows, a world positively rippling with life. In the cosmic perspective it is poignantly beautiful and rare; but it is also, for the moment, unique. In all our journeying through space and time, it is, so…
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Heart on (heretical) Sleeve
After sharing some thoughts with a friend, I want to try to put into words what ‘religion’ means to me. It’ll make sense to some, though not perhaps to all. Joseph Campbell describes the “game of belief” that leads to a “divine seizure”, his use of the word ‘game’ (as in Wittgenstein’s philosophy) not meaning…
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Jonah – A Good-Fun Read (iii)
We lost sight of Jonah when, on our hero’s uncompromising insistence, the good-hearted sailors very reluctantly tossed him into the sea. At once the inestimable power of Jonah’s God was demonstrated, in the immediate and complete calming of what had been an overwhelmingly tempestuous sea. No great surprise then, that in the New Testament, Jesus…
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Myth, Religion and Kaleidoscopes
Because I’m interested in religion (though not a paid-up member) I’m interested in mythology. Religion and mythology, being bed-fellows, inter-penetrate. Both paint pictures that can be felt to convey deep-seated truths about ourselves and our world – which unadorned and prosaic literalism would seem to have much less ability to convey. The same is true…
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A Credo and a Plea …
While contemplating my current series of posts on Genesis, I felt the need to remind myself, (and explain to any interested reader), where I’m coming from, and what is one key source to which I keep returning. Here’s an edited quote from the Prologue to Volume One of “The Masks of God” by Joseph Campbell.…
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Rethinking Jesus (04) The Hero’s Journey
After Jesus was baptised by John , what happened next? We’re told that he took himself off into the ‘wilderness’ for the standard biblical “forty days and forty nights”, (meaning a long, but indeterminate time), during which he was both menaced by “wild beasts” and also protected by “angels”. He was also subjected, by the…
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Jung, Archetypes, Arts, Religion
Arising from recent dialogue with a friend, I’m posting this one-off to try to clarify my thinking about Carl Jung, archetypes, the arts and religion. In Jung’s view, the human psyche has three different but interacting ‘levels’, which should not be thought of as separate ‘compartments’. There is consciousness, which enables us to perceive, and…
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The Gospels (1) ‘Jesus as Archetypal Hero’
Recently, I began to look at the Gospels – books that should be regularly read, but in the right way. What I share here are my current views, which are as fallible and changeable as anyone else’s. My aim is not to convince you that I’m right, but to invite you to check out your…
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