Mythology and the Golden Dawn, through the Eyes of Joseph Campbell and Thom Cavalli.

Without any doubt, the two greatest influences on my work with myth and the Golden Dawn have been Joseph Campbell and, more recently, Thom Cavalli. Both have shaped my thinking in profound ways, yet they approach mythology through very different lenses. Campbell offers the sweeping, unifying vision, a grand narrative that ties the world’s stories together into a single heroic arc. Cavalli, by contrast, approaches myth as an alchemical process, layered, symbolic, and psychologically transformative. Where Campbell seeks the universal pattern, Cavalli seeks the symbolic depth. Their perspectives do not cancel each other out; instead, they create a productive tension, a polarity that invites deeper exploration.

When you look at mythology through the historical lens of the Golden Dawn, you quickly discover that the tradition itself is full of vagaries, contradictions, and overlapping symbolic systems. Trying to choose a single model to work with can feel like trying to pick one thread out of a tapestry without unravelling the whole cloth. The Golden Dawn drew from Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew, Hermetic, Rosicrucian, and alchemical sources, often layering them without explanation. This makes the system rich, but it also makes it difficult to navigate if you are searching for a single interpretive key. Myth, in this context, becomes a shifting landscape rather than a fixed map. Campbell’s clarity and Cavalli’s symbolic density both offer ways to orient yourself, but neither alone can fully account for the complexity of the Golden Dawn’s mythic architecture.

What I have done in this post is to select these two particular models, Campbell’s narrative mythos and Cavalli’s alchemical‑psychological mythos, as complementary tools for understanding mythology in layers. Campbell helps us see the broad arcs, the structural rhythms, the heroic patterns that underlie many Golden Dawn rituals and teachings. Cavalli helps us see the symbolic operations, the inner transformations, the psychological fires that burn beneath those patterns. By placing these two approaches side by side, we gain a multidimensional view of myth, one that honours both the story and the symbol, both the journey and the transformation. From this layered viewpoint, you are free to expand, adapt, and ultimately craft your own system or systems, shaped by your experience, your intuition, and your relationship with the work. After all, myth is not a fixed doctrine; it is a living language, and each practitioner must learn to speak it in their own voice.