One of the challenges of developing this symbol was to incorporate a series of diverse cultural and philosophical ideas which could start to represent the richness of Joseph Campbell's views on the power of myth in contemporary culture. What follows is a brief outline of the specific symbols that were incorporated into the mark.

(From The Power of Myth)

BILL MOYERS: I remember a lecture in which you drew a circle, and you said "That's your soul."

CAMPBELL: "Well, that was simply a pedagogical stunt. Plato said somewhere that the soul was a circle. I took this idea to suggest on the blackboard the whole sphere of the psyche. Then I drew a horizontal line across the circle to represent the line of separation of the conscious and unconscious. the center from which all our energy comes I represented as a dot in the center of the circle, below the horizontal line.

Now, above the horizontal line there is the ego, which I represent as a square: the aspect of our concoiusness we identify as the center. But, you see, its very much off center. We think that this is what's running the show, but it isn't."

I began with Mr. Campbell's diagram (which is actually an adaptation of one of Carl Jung's drawings) as a "skeleton." The dot representing the "center" was changed to a triangle as a way of incorporating the triangle, circle and square: elemental symbols of Western reason. A Chinese calligrapher was comissioned to create the outer circle; the idea being to create tension between Western and Eastern ideas, a theme seen in much of Campbell's work. To make the mark more dynamic and organic, a decision was made to move the "ego" slightly to the left; making the "center" a sort of fulcrum on which it balances more precariously than in Campbell's drawing.