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Edward F. Ricketts sought to parlay his midwestern work ethic and his University of Chicago experiences into a career built on nature. After he left Chicago in 1923, Ricketts and his new family settled on the Monterey Peninsula. The year before, Libbie Hyman, a member of the faculty at the University of Chicago, had studied at the Hopkins Marine Station there, and Joel Hedgpeth speculates that it may have been her accounts of the rich seashore life that prompted Ricketts and Albert E. Galigher to choose the region for their biological supply business. As with any business where customers are distributed, Pacific Biological Laboratories needed a catalog, and Ricketts assembled one. He became friends with John Steinbeck, with whom he shared his ideas on biology, ecology, and philosophy, as well as any other topics that arose. The story of Ricketts's maturation intertwines and tangles with those of Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell. Xenia Cage, the wife of the avant-garde composer John Cage, was an important link among members of Ricketts's Lab.

In classical Hinduism, the concept of samsāra was cosmological. A person lived in a universe with no beginning or end, assuming innumerable forms of life until he attained moksa. The concept of samsara in classical Hinduism involved vast temporal dimensions, a sense of which is clearly explained by Joseph Campbell. In modern Hinduism, the approach to samsāra is more psychological since psychic dispositions are the basis of this involvement in the temporal process. This explains the aphorism ‘samsāra is samsāra’. Aside from psychologizing the process, modern Hinduism also tends to subtilize it because the flow of samsāra from one life to another is not much different from the way one day flows into another, or even the way one moment flows into another. Samsāra is essentially associated with this flux. Scholars have acknowledged this shift of the concept from classical to modern Hinduism.

This chapter examines the transformation of Cage’s temporal–mathematical compositional strategies in light of the audiovisual experience of the accompanied dance and its relationship to early theories of cinematographic reality in American avant-garde cinema. This chapter moves from the interactive kinetic art of Hungarian polyartist László Moholy-Nagy, to the temporalized and detemporalized narrative space in the films of Maya Deren, and to the difference and irony in the works of Marcel Duchamp. Cage’s interaction with each of these figures informed several collaborative audiovisual works, including his radio play The City Wears a Slouch Hat (1942), his cameos in Deren’s films and close dialogue with the postwar Greenwich village community surrounding comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, and his perennial fascination with the historical avant-garde strategies of Marcel Duchamp. For the latter, Cage’s music for a Duchamp section of German filmmaker Hans Richter’s feature-length avant-garde film, Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947), brought together the myriad of issues surrounding his move to chance in the following decade.

Projections of scientific universal history amplified and made more customary the understandings of “myth” and “epic” as products of science rather than its obstacles. The 1980 series Cosmos structured and spread the account that Sagan had already expressed as the scientific consensus. The series was only the most prominent example of efforts to produce and relate such universal history as consensus among students, scientists, and a wider public. Stitching together “epic” and “myth,” Sagan and his coproducers broadcast an alliance of the terms with each other and with science, the broad fact of that association more culturally resonant than the specific conceptions making that association possible. Attention to contemporaneous thinkers who studied myth and epic, including Northrop Frye, Joseph Campbell, and Hans Blumenberg, further elucidate motivations for establishing the epic-mythic science of Cosmos and beyond. Their work clarifies the structure of the accounts that resulted, and the resistances “myth” and “epic” bear not only to “science” but to each other. These self-consciously produced myths mixed authorial and heroic codes, signaling the possibility that an evolutionary process could render their mythic truths invalid in time, should their human authors evolve in a way modifying beliefs in their own evolutionary story.

Edward F. Ricketts drafted and revised his essay “The Philosophy of Breaking Through” throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, often after discussions and correspondence with friends such as John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell. The version included in this chapter is from a typescript marked “Revised July 1940, Mexico City,” composed of fifteen double-spaced pages, and it reflects a number of suggestions Campbell made in a 1939 letter. Ricketts's notion of breaking through derived largely from his readings of the Tao Teh Ching, T. D. Suzuki's Essays in Zen Buddhism, and Robinson Jeffers's Roan Stallion, but as with most of his ideas, he integrated concepts from many sources and disciplines.

The Negro Soldier was produced and distributed in 1943 by the Signal Corps to generate African American support for the war. It was highly successful in unifying both black and white Americans in the common cause of victory. This chapter examines the film itself, the central narrative strategy of conversion it invoked, and the impact of the film on its immediate audiences.

This chapter reflects on how we can use myths to explore and illuminate the inner landscape through which we journey, and in which we are, inevitably, often lost. It describes the Untermyer Gardens in Yonkers, New York, and its centerpiece: the Walled Garden, or “Garden of Eden.” A brainchild of Samuel Untermyer and designed by William Welles Bosworth, the Untermyer Gardens also features the Lion's Gate and the Tree of Knowledge. In the same way that Untermyer and Bosworth grew a garden by mythologizing a place, we can start to “grow a soul,” as anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff once put it, by mythologizing our lives. The trek through the gardens invites us to consider our inner journeys where ancient myths entwine with our own life stories. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell writes about the patterns in ancient mythology, offering as examples Prometheus and Jason. These ancient myths resonate not just in our popular culture but as metaphors in our own lives.

This chapter examines how we can apply the monastic model to our secular organizations in order to reverse the tide of employee disengagement by asking what we all really want from our lives, careers, and businesses, and why we are having so much trouble finding it. It first considers the concept of employee engagement and the role of engagement in the remarkable economic success of Mepkin Abbey and of Trappist monasteries all over the world. It then describes the concept of “dollar votes” in sales and marketing and proceeds by discussing the ideas of Joseph Campbell as articulated in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. More specifically, it explores what Campbell calls Hero's Journey as a transformational journey from selfishness to selflessness. The chapter also outlines three types of transformation: transformation of condition, transformation of circumstance, and transformation of being.

Edward F. Ricketts developed his “Essay on Non-teleological Thinking” during the early years of his friendship with John Steinbeck, a period also marked by collaborations with Joseph Campbell, Henry Miller, and other friends and colleagues. At the heart of Ricketts's desire to articulate non-teleological thinking is his struggle to put into language that which by its very nature eludes definition. Deeply philosophical, Ricketts's essay is at times convoluted, but the significance of non-teleological thinking is of primary importance to his unified field hypothesis. Through “his thinking,” Ricketts believes, an individual may better accept and understand the world and ultimately “break through” or transcend. Ricketts and Steinbeck's 1940 expedition to the Gulf of California was inspired in part by their desire to integrate scientific inquiry with non-teleological thinking, and Steinbeck later included a revision of the “Essay on Non-teleological Thinking” in Sea of Cortez. The seventeen-page version included in this chapter, marked “Typed by Toni, March 1941, original to John,” is likely the draft the latter worked from while writing Sea of Cortez.

What makes a story timeless? Why are there certain story arcs people want to visit again and again? This chapter examines how the human experience is inextricably linked to stories. It considers how imagination factors into people’s ability to relate stories to their own lives, including through their dreams and daydreams, the elements of a story that make them sit up and pay more attention, and how stories can lead to emotional catharsis. The chapter also delves into the way people’s evolutionary imperatives for reproduction and survival impact the kinds of stories they find compelling and how supernatural elements can make a story easier to remember. The end of the chapter turns things over to a fiction writer for his perspective on crafting fictional stories, including the way Aristotle’s three-act paradigm and Joseph Campbell’s monomyth of the hero’s journey fits into the process.

The purpose of this chapter is to explain the relationship between pedagogic and aetiological value within the criminology of narrative fiction. The chapter’ focus is on criminological cinema – Hollywood feature films that take crime or social harm or the control of crime or social harm as their subject – on the basis of the relevance of audience size to pedagogic value. Pedagogic value is a function of accessible communication and audience engagement and both of these features are enhanced by the characteristic realism of the cinematic mode of representation and the mythic storytelling characteristic of the Hollywood film industry. The chapter concludes with a demonstration of pedagogic value that employs Martin Brest’s Beverly Hills Cop (1984) as a case study.

This chapter recounts the intertwined dramas of May’s personal and professional life in the early 1960s, one that sees him participating in the founding of the Association for Humanistic Psychology and participation in the arts scene of New York even as his marriage deteriorates and reflects in some sense trends in the culture.

This chapter introduces the concept of reciprocity and its relevance in rites of passage, which in western society are typically focused on individual transformation. An ongoing debate in evolutionary biology recognizes the tension between the role of the individual and community in the survival of human beings. This chapter lays the foundation for exploring the relationship between rites of passage and the psychological sense of community. It introduces each concept and their relationship by focusing on how an individual’s initiation strengthens the bonds between citizens that increase both social capital and a community’s capacity for adaptation, which serves survival.