CANCELED: “The Next Mythogenetic Zone: The Forest”
This presentation explains the circumstances that have led to the Aokigahara Forest in Japan becoming known as “the perfect place to die.” Ancient cultural practices mythologize the Jukai forest, a sacred cultural realm of the metaphorical, liminal, physical, and psychological realm. I will discuss the perception of suicide in Japan. By its very nature, this research requires an examination of the concept of the underworld and deep psychological engagement, especially in the difference between Eastern and Western psychology.
While watching the film The Sea of Trees, written by Chris Sparling, I was profoundly affected by the main character, Arthur Brennan’s deep psychological pain and his inability to recover without a deep immersion in the physical landscape and his own shadow. The Jukai Forest is a complex alive matrix where old myths are pivoting in place. Forests are both sacred and profane in the individual and collective consciousness. The Suicide Forest, as well as all forests, are living mythogentic zones capable of reciprocity that possess positive implications for humans, and the environmental problems we are now experiencing. Shinrin-Yoku, or forest bathing, is a new form of ritual, spreading throughout the world, sending droves of humans back to the forests seeking communion and healing. As a ritual, forest bathing can create new narratives with matrixial capacities that contain eco-psychological transference fields we as humans may enter and use to address our disassociation from the more than human Earth, offering adaptive theories for the many plagues confronting our suffering contemporary world.
About Emily
Emily E. Miller earned a BA double major in Philosophy and English and did graduate work in the Master of Education program at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, with a Philosophy Department Scholarship. She studied in Ireland in 1992. She owned Greensweep Landscape and Design for 20 years in Nashville. Before returning to earn her MA in Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute, she was a successful fine artist of acrylics on canvas and board in local galleries and shows in Nashville and Florida, and many of her works are in Nashville private collections. She has published poetry in Rising to the Dawn, “The Writer’s Journal,” and “The Awakening’s Journal” with Chicago Press. Emily is currently working on an autobiography of her struggles before and after finding her father on ancestry.com at 53 titled, When Death Would Not Have Me. She maintains a Joseph Campbell Scholarship and is writing her dissertation on “Eurydice in the Contemporary Female Imagination.”