Winter Fun

Floating through powder is one of the coolest feelings ever

Anonymous

One of the leaders of hacker collective Anonymous pictured here in a primitive structure he built. He is known as Commander-X and has been involved in some of the greatest hackings of the year.  Anonymous proves that anyone with a sharp mind and conviction can make a difference.

Photo of the day--Theories

Dick Durrance--Keynote Speaker

Dick is a friend of BMG. He is a profound speaker with incredible life experience. Below see some highlights from his site www.DickDurrance.com

1. Link the logical and the creative sides of your minds to identify your natural talents and imagine the many wonderful things that you can do with your gifts. If you develop those talents into skills with unrelenting tenacity, you will open the door to opportunities in every facet of your life … your professional life and your personal life.

2. Venture out of your comfort zone and connect with people from other walks of life, people who can broaden your horizons, so you develop an understanding of people that will serve you well as your reach out to connect with family members, friends, prospects and clients.

3. Journey deep into your self to that private place where your core values live so you can be sure that you are harnessing your talents and your skills to those core values, so that you bring out the very best your have to offer.

Shining Mountain Herbs -- Nutrition

Organically grown in Colorado, Shining Mountain Herbs makes quality nutrients to support a healthy, active and enlightened lifestyle. To live a high performance lifestyle, you need the right fuel, to this end BMG adds health & nutrition to our core values. SMH's slogan says it all: "High on life, High in Altitude"

Optimal Living

Optimal Living 

Optimal Living teacher Brian Johnson is an inspiration to BMG.  He is well read in the philosophers of the ages from the ancients to the moderns. BMG is made up of people like Brian who describes himself on twitter simply as "50% philosopher.  50% CEO.  100% Inspired."

Please support Brian Johnson and entheos by getting the philosophers notes and optimal living 101. It's worth it...

Follow Brian on twitter at:
@_Brian_Johnson

Follow Brian on facebook at: 

http://www.facebook.com/BrianthePhilosopher

Credit:   http://www.entheos.com/optimal-living-101/principles

Optimism

It all starts with Optimism. If we can’t tame those gremlins in our minds and learn to shape the contents of our consciousness, the rest of this stuff doesn’t matter. We’ll start by learning what optimism isn’t (that’d be helplessness!) and we’ll take a quick peek at the results of a disempowered mindset (that’d be depression/anxiety/ick). Then we’re gonna explore what a range of great teachers have to say about how to Get Our Optimism On—from Marcus Aurelius and the classic Stoic philosophers to Buddha and modern Zen teachers plus Viktor Frankl, Byron Katie, Esther & Jerry Hicks and Positive Psychologists. By the end of this section, you’ll have the tools you need to de-gremlin-ify your mind and Rock Your Optimism!

Purpose

Purpose. All the great teachers talk about it. Confucius tells us that an army can lose its commanding officer but even an average person is in trouble without a purpose while the Bible, the Gita, the Stoics and everyone else echoes the sentiment. We’ll explore Maslow’s need to self-actualize and his directive that “What one can be, one must be!” along with Deepak’s 7th Spiritual Law of Success—the Law of Dharma—as we have fun discovering our Highest Goal, holding the Dynamic Tension between our ideals and our current reality and celebrating both our Being and our Becoming. Good times!

Self-Awareness

It’s hard to figure out our Highest Purpose without a deep sense of Self-Awareness. As Socrates says, we’ve gotta know ourselves, eh? In this section, we’ll walk through transformative journaling exercises as we Discover Your Signature Strengths (using these daily is a scientific key to happiness), Begin with the Ultimate End in Mind, and learn to Be in Integrity (or Disintegrate). We’ll also meet our Angel’s Advocate, 110-Year Old You, make Five Wishes, take The Big Leap into your Zone of Genius and ponder 100 Questions + 10 of THE Most Powerful Questions I know. It’s time to Know Thyself, yo! (Socrates would be proud. :)

Goals

Goals. Goals. Goals. Whether it’s living with love/appreciation/joy/ kindness/generosity/and-all-that-goodness or starting a business, competing in a triathlon or creating financial freedom, Goals are (super!) important. And so are Intense Desires (minus the attachment, of course). We’re gonna look at Rat Racers vs. Hedonists vs. Nihilists vs. Happy Peeps, revisit our Highest Goal then go on a little Goal Bonanza as we imagine all the things we want to Be, Create, Do and Have (in that order) in our precious hero’s journeys. We’ll also create a Treasure Map, do a little Rocking Chair Test and bring it all home with our #1 Now Goal! Oh, yah. We’re also gonna remember that Outcomes Are By-Products of consistently rockin’ it. Which brings us to…

Action

As the Greek guru Nike tells us, at some point it’s time to just do it, eh? Indeed it is. We’re gonna spend a lot of time thinking about how to best Diligently, Patiently, Persistently and Playfully crush it as we create the life of your dreams. It all starts with Commitment and Re-Commitment, Consistency on the Fundamentals, knowing that 99% Is a Bitch & 100% Is a Breeze, Acting As If, developing Blissipline, taking One Small Step (then another and…), practicing Kaizen and a bunch of other goodness. You shall be an Action Superhero by the end of this. (Well, actually, it won’t be official till you put in your 10,000 Hours of rockin’ it but you’ll have the sweet cape and tight costume and all that… then it’s up to you! :)

Energy

We’re gonna have a hard time living at our Highest Potential if we have a hard time getting out of bed, eh? That’s why we’ve gotta create Radiant Mind/Body/Spirit Health so we’ve got the mojo to rock it! This section’s split up into four key categories for Energy Optimization: 1. Exercise + 2. Nutrition + 3. Rejuvenation + 4. Money. We’ll learn how Exercise can be just as effective as Zoloft in treating depression (why isn’t that every other commercial on TV?), how Nutrition and lifestyle choices affect our well-being (or destroy it), how to get on The Rave Diet to prevent and reverse disease, why Meditation is a good thing (and how to tap into “The Relaxation Response”), and how to create the consciousness that attracts wealth of all kinds into our lives. Ye shall be an Energizer bunny by the end of this!

Wisdom

Wisdom. Wisdom. Wisdom. (Wisdom. Wisdom!!) Wisdom is all about taking what we know and making that the essence of who we are and what we do. We’re going to explore The Power of Mastery, the moment-to-moment choice of Stepping Forward Into Growth or back into safety (and the consequences of those choices on our destiny) plus Positive Negativity (it’s a good thing to see when you’re off course!), Higher Highs + Higher Lows, Pain Bodies & Concrete Gardens, turning Shoulds into Coulds, and the Spiritual Farts you’re gonna be stinking up your life with if you don’t actually live what you know to be true! (You will also be officially ordained a Philosopher (aka a “Lover of Wisdom”) at the end of this section! :)

Courage

Did you know the word courage comes from the Latin word for “heart”? Yep. Just as the heart is the organ that pumps blood to all the other organs, Courage is the virtue that vitalizes all the other virtues. Fact is, without the Courage to fully express ourselves and live our ideals we’re powerless. We’re going to look at The Source of Fear (it all comes down to expectations!) and my #1 most effective way to address it. We’re also going to recognize that everyone we admire experiences their own set of fears and how it’s not about getting rid of the fear but developing the Courage to move forward in sprite of the fear! (Aristotle will also make a guest appearance and tell us about his Virtuous Mean and where Courage fits in to his philosophy. :)

Love

Ah, Love. All of the above is great but without love? Not worth a whole lot. We’re going to explore two key themes here:

1. You can’t get what you don’t have—to Love others and the world, you’ve gotta start by loving yourself. And,
2. If you want to master Love, you’ve got to study and practice with the same Diligence, Patience, Persistence and Playfulness you’d study and master a sport or a musical instrument or anything worth rockin’!!

We’ll get our Love on by learning to say the “I” in “I love you,” doing some tricks with the Magic # of Love, Retiring from Shadow Boxing, Mining the Goldmine of Golden Rules, honoring The Platinum Rule and writing Love Letters to our ideal partners and our ideal selves. Sweet! :)

en*theos

Spirit. God. Divine Intelligence Universal Mind. Whatever you call that ineffable force that beats our hearts and keeps the planets in line, it’s a (very) good idea to align with it. In fact, that’s what the previous sections are all about—helping us more fully Connect To and Express the Divine within us. When we do that? God (theos) is within us (en) as we shine with a Radiant Enthusiasm that lights up our world! And that, ultimately, is what Optimal Living is all about, eh? :)

Credit:   http://www.entheos.com/optimal-living-101/principles

Dr Suess Burning Man style

Oh the places you'll go!

Quote of the day

“If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.” 
― Hunter S. Thompson

photo of the day -- stingray photobomb

quote of the day

‎"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life, is when men are afraid of the Light." ~ Plato

interview with joss whedon

Interview with Joss Whedon a director on fire! 

David Lynch: quote of the day

“The world to me is a mixture of the two. Intuition is thought and feeling working together. You intuit things in life, right? The language of film is so perfect for this intuiting; it’s just beautiful. So you have what they call an “inner-knowing” whether you realize it or not. Right after seeing the film with somebody else, you could argue and say, “No, no, no, that’s not how I see it.” You’d be surprised how much the mind has figured out, and by talking, other things come out. Words are a poor way to say certain things. You realize you know more than you can speak." 

– David Lynch, excerpted from Creative Screenwriting, November/December, 2001

Epic Win compilation video

The videos speak for themselves 

take off and landing of Xombie rocket

Remarkable stuff from Masten rocket technology innovators 

quote of the day

“Creativity can solve almost every problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.” -George Lois

Daily Quote

To think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted

- George Kneller -

Sun Explosion

Science is cool it can let us see how the sun explodes. 

Inspiration

There can be no bad days, if he can do the Spartan Race

BMG films team-building exercise for Comcast and others

Colorado Wilderness Rides and Guides built a custom team-building exercise for Comcast senior staff that incorporated sightseeing, and team challenges around Estes Park and Rock Mountain National Park.  Here is a still taken from a GoPro of Anders of BMG at the alpine visitors center near the top of the park around 12,000 feet.

BMG will include an array of team-building challenges to ensure cohesion of its teams around the world.

Another picture of team-building exercises from an earlier course also developed by CWRAG near Eldorado Springs Colorado

BMG attends developer pitch with Ghana Ocean Racing

BMG hits the road with Ghana Ocean Racing to find a developer at this pitch in Denver Colorado.  Since this time GOR has found a developer in boulder and the website is now live, have a look: http://ghanaoceanracing.org/
http://takebackourroutes.org/

Lessons from Einstein

Music Video by Cold Play "Paradise"

Watch Cold Play's "Paradise" its not what you would expect.  

Human flight history being made

A solar powered plane will make it around the globe in a few years. Have a look at the video.

Quote of the Day by Ed Abbey

‎"One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast... See More… a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.” Ed Abbey

"The man of consequence"

Robert Woodruff of Coca-Cola

An advertising guru in the early days of the consumer revolution took sugar water and made it into a global brand.  Also he was a college drop out.   He was a "man of consequence" who could close the deal.  Following is a bio of this extraordinary man.   BMG wants men (and women) of consequence capable of creating products and ideas that will change the world as Woodruff did many years ago.  From a book on the history of Business called Money and Power , "he also possessed a confidence and comfort in dealing with top brass that many of his competitors lacked." Another quote from Money and power "they understood that brand gets built both externally, through customer interaction with the product and its messages, and internally, through the myths the company tells about itself."  This is what BMG recognizes as key to success.  Have great products, work with customers well and create a legendary company culture that is irresistible to followers and employees alike (think Google-esque).  This is the purpose of this blog, to give people involved a view into what makes a good company culture through examples in art, culture, history, etc.

Other quotes
"the spirit of the slogan was there before the slogan every arrived."

"it isnt what a product is but what it does that interests us,"  Archie Lee had written Woodruff, and the one thing Coke did was tie itself relentlessly, and in the best possible light, to the seminal moments of American life and history.



BIO of Woodruff

Early life

Woodruff was born in Columbus, Georgia, the son of Ernest Woodruff, an Atlanta businessman who, among other things, was leader of the group of investors who bought The Coca-Cola Company from Asa Griggs Candler in 1919. His grandfather was Atlanta manufacturing magnate Robert Winship.

After graduating from the Georgia Military Academy he attended Georgia Tech, where he failed out; and then the Emory University campus at Oxford, Georgia, for one term, where he excelled at "cutting classes and spending money".^[1]

[edit]Career

Spurning his father's work offers, in February 1909 at age 19 he began work as a laborer at the General Pipe and Foundry Company foundry in Inman Park, Atlanta. For a week he shoveled and shifted sand, then worked a lathe as a machinist's apprentice. After a year he was fired. But then he was rehired by General's parent company, General Fire Extinguisher where he worked his way into sales. He then accepted a job offer from his father at Atlantic Ice and Coal Company but left after differences with him. Woodruff parlayed his love of early automobiling into a sales position at White Motor Company based in Cleveland, Ohio, and quickly rose to become vice president of that company. During World War I, Woodruff joined theUS Ordnance Department where he promoted a truck design that only White Motors could fulfill, giving the company huge war-time sales.

When Coca-Cola got into financial difficulty, the board elected Robert Woodruff as president at the age of 33. Woodruff built Coca-Cola into an international company, establishing a foreign department in 1926. He stepped down as president in 1954, but remained on the board of directors until 1984. He died in 1985 and was buried at the Westview Cemetery in southwest Atlanta.

Woodruff's personal chauffeur was Luther Cain, Jr., father of businessman and 2012 Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain.

[edit]Legacy

In 1979, Woodruff and his brother George W. Woodruff gave $105 million to Emory University and would eventually give a total of $230 million dollars. Several buildings on the Emorycampus are named for him and members of his family. The Robert W. Woodruff Professorships are named for him.

He also gave large sums of money to other area colleges and universities and to Woodward Academy (formerly Georgia Military Academy) in College Park and the Westminster Schoolsin Atlanta. A boy scout camp in Blairsville, Georgia named the Robert W. Woodruff Scout Reservation, which is run by the Atlanta Area Council, was built following major donations from the Woodruff Foundation and Coca-Cola. Atlanta's largest cultural institution, the Woodruff Arts Center, benefited from his gifts and is named for him, as is Woodruff Park. The Robert W. Woodruff library is located in the Atlanta University Center and services Morehouse College, Spelman College, and Clark Atlanta University. (Woodruff Dam is not named after him, but rather for Jim Woodruff.)

Mr. Woodruff was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1977.

Woodruff was instrumental in making a success the dinner held in Atlanta honoring The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after King received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. Ticket sales were lagging until Woodruff signaled his support for the dinner. ^[2].

On the Future

People who can create the future make the market and shape the world.  BMG operates this way.

Colorado's most costly wildfire

Here is a photo of the now $20 million plus fire that is currently 70,000 acres and 55% contained.  This photo was taken outside Estes Park looking towards Fort Collins.  The fire was started by lightening strike.   Mother nature is a powerful thing to be respected.  BMGs feelings go out to the residents of this area who have lost during the fire.

Human powered helicopter

The messiah

Stradivarius violin from 1716 is considered the only as new Stradivarius.

Einstein

BMG Hero: Joseph Campbell

BMG Hero 

This section will have biographies of people who inspire BMG.   Anybody from any discipline and of any time can be included.

Joseph Campbell 

Joseph Campbell studied mythology and comparative religion.  He focused on similarities of the human experience across the globe.  Joseph Campbell is an inspiration to BMG because he thought in new ways and was interdisciplinary in his approach (psychology and anthropology).   BMG is looking for more people who think on the plane of this great man.  

The following taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell

Psychology and anthropology

Frobenius

Frazer

Spengler

Campbell's thinking on universal symbols and stories was deeply influenced by James Frazer (The Golden Bough), Adolf Bastian, and Otto Rank (The Myth of the Birth of the Hero), among others.

Anthropologist Leo Frobenius was important to Campbell’s view of cultural history. Campbell was also influenced by the psychological work ofAbraham Maslow and Stanislav Grof.

Campbell's ideas regarding myth and its relation to the human psyche are dependent in part on the pioneering work of Sigmund Freud, but in particular on the work of Carl Jung, whose studies of human psychology, as previously mentioned, greatly influenced Campbell. Campbell's conception of myth is closely related to the Jungian method of dream interpretation, which is heavily reliant on symbolic interpretation.

Jung's insights into archetypes were in turn heavily influenced by the Bardo Thodol (also known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead). In his book The Mythic Image, Campbell quotes Jung's statement about the Bardo Thodol, that it "belongs to that class of writings which not only are of interest to specialists in Mahayana Buddhism, but also, because of their deep humanity and still deeper insight into the secrets of the human psyche, make an especial appeal to the layman seeking to broaden his knowledge of life... For years, ever since it was first published, the Bardo Thodol has been my constant companion, and to it I owe not only many stimulating ideas and discoveries, but also many fundamental insights."^[19]

In 1940 Campbell attended a lecture by Professor Heinrich Zimmer at Columbia University; the two men became friends, and Campbell looked upon Zimmer as a mentor. Zimmer taught Campbell that myth (rather than a guru or spiritual guide) could serve in the role of a personal mentor, in that its stories provide a psychological road map for the finding of oneself in the labyrinth of the complex modern world. Zimmer relied more on the meanings of mythological tales (their symbols, metaphors, imagery, etc.) as a source for psychological realization than upon psychoanalysis itself. Campbell later borrowed from Jung's interpretative techniques and then reshaped them in a fashion that followed Zimmer's beliefs—interpreting directly from world mythology. This is an important distinction, because it serves to explain why Campbell did not directly follow Jung's footsteps in applied psychology.

Comparative mythology and Campbell's theories

[edit]Monomyth

Main article: Monomyth

Campbell's term monomyth, also referred to as the hero's journey, refers to a basic pattern found in many narratives from around the world. This widely distributed pattern was first fully described in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949).^[20] An enthusiast of novelist James Joyce,^[21] Campbell borrowed the term from Joyce's Finnegans Wake.^[22] As a strong believer in the unity of human consciousness and its poetic expression through mythology, through the monomyth concept Campbell expressed the idea that the whole of the human race could be seen as reciting a single story of great spiritual importance, and in the preface to The Hero with a Thousand Faces he indicated it was his goal to demonstrate similarities between Eastern and Western religions. As time evolves, this story gets broken down into local forms, taking on different guises (masks), depending on the necessities and social structure of the culture that interprets it. Its ultimate meaning relates to humanity's search for the same basic, unknown force from which everything came, within which everything currently exists, and into which everything will return and is considered to be "unknowable" because it existed before words and knowledge. The Story's form, however, has a known structure, which can be classified into the various stages of a hero's adventures like the Call to Adventure, Receiving Supernatural Aid, Meeting with the Goddess/Atonement with the Father andReturn. As the ultimate truth cannot be expressed in plain words, spiritual rituals and stories refer to it through the use of "metaphors", a term Campbell used heavily and insisted on its proper meaning: In contrast with comparisons, which use the word like, metaphors pretend to a literal interpretation of what they are referring to, as in the sentence "Jesus is the Son of God" rather than "the relationship of man to God is like that of a son to a father".^[23] According to Campbell, the Genesis myth from the Bible ought not be taken as a literal description of historical events happening in our current understanding of time and space, but as a metaphor for the rise of man's cognitive consciousness as it evolved from a prior animal state.^[24]

Some scholars have disagreed with the concept of the "monomyth" because of its oversimplification of different cultures. According to Robert Ellwood, "“A tendency to think in generic terms of people, races... is undoubtedly the profoundest flaw in mythological thinking.” ^[25]

Campbell made heavy use of Carl Jung's theories on the structure of the human psyche, and he often used terms like "anima/animus" and "ego consciousness".

[edit]Function of Myth

Campbell often described mythology as having a fourfold function for human society. These appear at the end of his work The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, as well as various lectures.^[26]

• The Metaphysical Function: Awakening a sense of awe before the mystery of being
  According to Campbell, the absolute mysteries of life cannot be captured directly in words or images. Myths are "being statements"^[26] and the experience of this mystery can be had only through a participation in mythic rituals or the contemplation of mythic symbols that point beyond themselves. "Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of reason and coercion.... The first function of mythology is to reconcile waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of this universe as it is."^[27]
• The Cosmological Function: Explaining the shape of the universe
  Myth also functions as a proto-science, bringing the observable (physical) world into accord with the metaphysical and psychological meanings rendered by the other functions of mythology. Campbell noticed that the modern dilemma between science and religion on matters of truth is actually between science of the ancient world and that of today.
• The Sociological Function: Validate and support the existing social order
  Ancient societies had to conform to an existing social order if they were to survive at all. This is because they evolved under "pressure" from necessities much more intense than the ones encountered in our modern world. Mythology confirmed that order and enforced it by reflecting it into the stories themselves, often describing how the order arrived from divine intervention.
• The Psychological Function: Guide the individual through the stages of life
  As a person goes through life, many psychological challenges will be encountered. Myth may serve as a guide for successful passage through the stages of one's life. For example, most ancient cultures used rites of passage as a youth passed to the adult stage. Later on, a living mythology taught the same person to let go of material possessions and earthly plans as they prepared to die.

Campbell believed that if myths are to continue to fulfill their vital functions in our modern world, they must continually transform and evolve because the older mythologies, untransformed, simply do not address the realities of contemporary life, particularly with regard to the changing cosmological and sociological realities of each new era.

[edit]Evolution of Myth

Campbell's view of mythology was by no means static and his books describe in detail how mythologies evolved through time, reflecting the realities in which each society had to adjust.^[28]Various stages of cultural development have different yet identifiable mythological systems. In brief these are:

• The Way of the Animal Powers: Hunting and gathering societies
  At this stage of evolution religion was animistic, as all of nature was seen as being infused with a spirit or divine presence. At center stage was the main hunting animal of that culture, whether the buffalo for Native Americans or the eland for South African tribes, and a large part of religion focused on dealing with the psychological tension that came from the reality of the necessity to kill versus the divinity of the animal. This was done by presenting the animals as springing from an eternal archetypal source and coming to this world as willing victims, with the understanding that their lives would be returned to the soil or to the Mother through a ritual of restoration.^[29] The act of slaughter then becomes a ritual where both parties, animal and mankind, are equal participants. In Mythos and The Power of Myth,^[30] Campbell recounts the story he calls "The Buffalo's Wife" as told by the Blackfoot tribe of North America. The story tells of a time when the buffalos stopped coming to the hunting plains, leaving the tribe to starve. The chief's daughter promises to marry the buffalo chief in return for their reappearance, but is eventually spared and taught the buffalo dance by the animals themselves, through which the spirits of their dead will return to their eternal life source. Indeed, Campbell taught that throughout history mankind has held a belief that all life comes from and returns to another dimension which transcends temporality, but which can be reached through ritual.
• The Way of the Seeded Earth: Early agrarian societies
  Beginning in the fertile grasslands of Europe in the Bronze Age and moving to the Levant and the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia, the practice of agriculture spread along with a new way of understanding mankind's relationship to the world. At this time the earth was seen as the Mother, and the myths focused around Her life-giving powers. The plant and cultivation cycle was mirrored in religious rituals which often included human sacrifice, symbolic or literal.^[31] The main figures of this system were a female Great Goddess, Mother Earth, and her ever-dying and ever-resurrected son/consort, a male God. At this time the focus was to participate in the repetitive rhythm the world moved in expressed as the four seasons, the birth and death of crops and the phases of the moon. At the center of this motion was the Mother Goddess from whom all life springs and to whom all life returns. This often gave Her a dual aspect as both mother and destroyer.
• The Way of the Celestial Lights: The first high civilizations
  As the first agricultural societies evolved into the high civilisations of Mesopotamia and Babylonia, the observation of the stars inspired them with the idea that life on earth must also follow a similar mathematically predetermined pattern in which individual beings are but mere participants in an eternal cosmic play. The king was symbolised by the Sun with the golden crown as its main metaphor, while his court were the orbiting planets. The Mother Goddess remained, but her powers were now fixed within the rigid framework of a clockwork universe.
  However, two barbarian incursions changed that. As the Indo-European (Aryan) people descended from the north and the Semites swept up from the Arabian desert, they carried with them a male dominated mythology with a warrior god whose symbol was the thunder. As they conquered, mainly due to the superior technology of iron smithing, their mythology blended and subjugated the previous system of the Earth Goddess. Many of mythologies of the ancient world such as that of Greece, India, and Persia are a result of that fusion with gods retaining some of their original traits and character but now belonging to a single system. Figures such as Zeus and Indra are thunder gods who now interact with Demeter andDionysus, whose ritual sacrifice and rebirth, bearing testament to his pre-Indo-European roots, were still enacted in classical Greece. But for the largest part the focus was heavily shifted toward the masculine, with Zeus ascending the throne of the gods and Dionysus demoted to a mere demi-god.
  This demotion was very profound in the case of the Biblical imaginary where the female elements were marginalized to an extreme. Campbell believed that Eve and the snake that tempted her were once fertility gods worshiped in their own rights with the tree of knowledge being the Tree of Life.^[32] He also found the biblical story of Cain and Abel telling, with Cain being a farmer with his agrarian offering not accepted by God while a herder's animal sacrifice is. In the lecture series of Mythos Campbell speaks of the Mysteries of Eleusis in Ancient Greece, where Demeter's journey in the underworld was enacted for young men and women of the time. There he observed that wheat was presented as the ultimate mystery with wine being a symbol of Dionysus, much like in the Christian mysteries where bread and wine are considered to incarnate the body and blood of Jesus. Both religions carry the same "seeded earth" cosmology in different forms while retaining an image of the ever dying ever resurrected God.
• The Way of Man: Medieval mythology, romantic love, and the birth of the modern spirit
  Campbell recognized that the poetic form of courtly love, carried through medieval Europe by the traveling troubadours, contained a complete mythology in its own right.^[33] In The Power of Myth as well as the "Occidental Mythology" volume of The Masks of God, Campbell describes the emergence of a new kind of erotic experience as a "person to person" affair, in contrast with the purely physical definition given to Eros in the ancient world and the communal agape found in the Christian religion. An archetypal story of this kind is the legend of Tristan and Isolde which, apart from its mystical function, shows the transition from an arranged marriage society as practiced in the Middle Ages and sanctified by the church, into the form of marriage by "falling in love" with another person that we recognize today. So what essentially started from a mythological theme has since become a social reality, mainly due to a change in perception brought about by a new mythology.
  Campbell believed that in the modern world the function served by formal, traditional mythological systems has been taken on by individual creators such as artists and philosophers.^[34]In the works of some of his favorites, such as Thomas Mann, Pablo Picasso and James Joyce, he saw mythological themes that could serve the same life-giving purpose that mythology had once played. Accordingly, Campbell believed the religions of the world to be the various culturally influenced “masks” of the same fundamental, transcendent truths. All religions can bring one to an elevated awareness above and beyond a dualistic conception of reality, or idea of “pairs of opposites” such as being and non-being, or right and wrong. Indeed, he quotes from the Rg Veda in the preface to The Hero with a Thousand Faces: "Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names."

Works 

[edit]Early Collaborations

Main article: A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake

The first published work that bore Campbell's name was Where the Two Came to Their Father (1943), a Navajo ceremony that was performed by singer (medicine man) Jeff King and recorded by artist and ethnologist Maud Oakes, recounting the story of two young heroes who go to the hogan of their father, the Sun, and return with the power to destroy the monsters that are plaguing their people. Campbell provided a commentary. He would use this tale through the rest of his career to illustrate both the universal symbols and structures of human myths and the particulars ("folk ideas") of Native American stories.

As noted above, James Joyce was an important influence on Campbell. Campbell's first important book (with Henry Morton Robinson), A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944), is a critical analysis of Joyce's final text Finnegans Wake. In addition, Campbell's seminal work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), discusses what Campbell called the monomyth — the cycle of the journey of the hero — a term that he borrowed directly from Joyce's Finnegans Wake.^[58]

[edit]The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Main article: The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Originally titled How to Read a Myth, and based on the introductory class on mythology that he had been teaching at Sarah Lawrence College, The Hero with a Thousand Faces was published in 1949 as Campbell's first foray as a solo author; it established his name outside of scholarly circles and remains, arguably, his most influential work to this day. Not only did it introduce the concept of the hero's journey to popular thinking, but it also began to popularize the very idea of comparative mythology itself—the study of the human impulse to create stories and images that, though they are clothed in the motifs of a particular time and place, draw nonetheless on universal, eternal themes. Campbell asserted:

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history, mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives becomes dissolved.^[59]

[edit]The Masks of God

Written between 1962 and 1968, Campbell's four-volume work The Masks of God covers mythology from around the world, from ancient to modern. Where The Hero with a Thousand Faces focused on the commonality of mythology (the “elementary ideas”), the Masks of God books focus upon historical and cultural variations the monomyth takes on (the “folk ideas”). In other words, where The Hero with a Thousand Faces draws perhaps more from psychology, the Masks of God books draw more from anthropology and history. The four volumes ofMasks of God are as follows: Primitive Mythology, Oriental Mythology, Occidental Mythology, and Creative Mythology. In Occidental Mythology he speculates that Yahweh may have originated as a serpent consort of the Earth Mother goddess Asherah - though this theory is not supported in Ancient Near East scholarship.

[edit]Historical Atlas of World Mythology

Main article: Historical Atlas of World Mythology

At the time of his death, Campbell was in the midst of working upon a large-format, lavishly illustrated series entitled Historical Atlas of World Mythology. This series was to build on Campbell’s idea, first presented in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, that myth evolves over time through four stages:

• The Way of the Animal Powers—the myths of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers which focus on shamanism and animal totems.
• The Way of the Seeded Earth—the myths of Neolithic, agrarian cultures which focus upon a mother goddess and associated fertility rites.
• The Way of the Celestial Lights—the myths of Bronze Age city-states with pantheons of gods ruling from the heavens, led by a masculine god-king.
• The Way of Man—religion and philosophy as it developed after the Axial Age (c. 6th century BC), in which the mythic imagery of previous eras was made consciously metaphorical, reinterpreted as referring to psycho-spiritual, not literal-historical, matters. This transition is evident in the East in Buddhism, Vedanta, and philosophical Taoism; and in the West in theMystery Cults, Platonism, Christianity and Gnosticism.

Only the first two volumes were completed at the time of Campbell's death. Both of these volumes are now out of print.

[edit]The Power of Myth

Main article: The Power of Myth

Campbell's widest popular recognition followed his collaboration with Bill Moyers on the PBS series The Power of Myth, which was first broadcast in 1988, the year following Campbell's death. The series discusses mythological, religious, and psychological archetypes. A book, The Power of Myth, containing expanded transcripts of their conversations, was released shortly after the original broadcast.