Author: Elspeth Newton

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Mythologium 2023 welcomes Amy Beth Katz

Amy Beth’s talk is called “The Heart of Mythic Mirroring”

Mythology heals, teaches, empowers. But how? There is a way of listening from the heart; an ancient, cross cultural way of listening on mythic levels that elevates spirit and marries the forces of nature to the storyteller within. There is a way of “jumping through the portals” of experiences and retelling from the heart, which both reflects and invokes the deepest, mythic and archetypal core of a quester’s experience.

When we listen from the heart and speak from the heart in sacred story telling council, we mythically amplify the mundane; we elevate mere human experience to that of the archetypal Gods and Goddesses. Our stories then become infused with all the deities, demons and angels, heroes and villains, animals and mystical creatures that dwell in collective imagination. Whether we mirror in word, song, silent gesture, art, ritual— we speak the most beautiful spontaneous poetry directly to the initiate’s soul, and these poems herald us into new consciousness; they heal and transform them, and us.

Through demonstration and examples a tool set will be offered for bringing together one’s knowledge of myth (gained through academic studies, faery tales, film, pop culture and Mythologiums!) with the every day occurrences of self and other. Mythologists, rites of passage guides, therapists, parents and friends can use these techniques subtly or explicitly to bring myth to life from the inside out: over coffee with your besties, with clients in consulting rooms, in the forest sitting in sacred group ceremony, and anytime with yourself to overcome trauma, amplify dreams, and re-story your life for greater meaning and vision.

About Amy Beth

Amy Beth Katz, M.A. is Founding Director of The School of Living Dreams, Santa Barbara Psychics and Living Dreams Press. She is a vision quest guide, clairvoyant, tarot reader, depth-crisis counselor, and soul guide. Her dreams and intuitions led her to become a photojournalist, contracted with Zuma Press. She utilizes dreams, synchronicities and signs that emerge in cyberspace, nature and casual conversation to get the “winning image,” and her captioned photographs and video clips appear in over 70 print and media publications, including the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Independent, Time magazine, ABC News, NBC, Good Morning America, New York Daily News, People Magazine Royal’s Edition, China News, and more. She specializes in protests, environmental crisis and recovery efforts, social movements, nature and celebrity Red Carpets.

Amy has published three books of poetry. She is currently finishing her book CyberDreamWeaving™ about her methods and experiments with “Intentional and Applied Synchronicity”, online and out in the world. Amy is the 2022 Recipient of the “Tikkum Olam” Community Service Award through Congregation B’nai B’rith for her leadership in serving the homeless during the Covid Pandemic. Amy holds a Master of Arts Degree from Southern Illinois University and was granted a special “Certificate of Completion” from Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Community, Liberation and Eco-Psychology doctoral program.

For more information, see http://www.schooloflivingdreams.com and
http://www.photojournalist.us.

2023 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Dr. Kate Rittenhouse

Kate’s talk is called “Memories of the Ice Age in Beasts of the Southern Wild: Climate Change and Adaptation”

In her play Juicy and Delicious, Lucy Alibar’s heroine is a child facing a herd of aurochs, “as seen in cave paintings at Lascaux.” A metaphor for the child’s overwhelming fear at the imminent death of the father, the aurochs evoke the helpless terror of childhood nightmares. Alibar and director Behn Zeitlin adapted the play for the feature film Beasts of the Southern Wild, in which the theme of world-ending loss is extended to the passing of a way of life due to global warming. In both the play and the film, events in which all is about to be lost necessitate confrontation with the beast from the prehistoric caves. Impossibly distant from the contemporary world in terms of time, the painted images in the prehistoric caves hold memories and messages from the cave painting culture. This presentation reflects on the vision of the world between worlds that the play and movie offer, and on the advice that our civilization could take from the cave painters: adapt or die out.

About Kate

Kate Rittenhouse is an independent scholar and thinker now living in Vancouver, British Columbia. She holds a B.A. from Swarthmore College with a primary area of study in ancient art and culture. After leaving a successful career as a corporate manager (Saturn opposition), she studied couture sewing techniques and has pursued a career in theatrical costuming, working in theatre and film. Fulfilling a lifelong interest, in 2009 she completed a doctorate (Saturn return) in Mythological Studies with an Emphasis in Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Her dissertation, Isis by Any Name: A Study Of All’s Well That Ends Well, explores the animating force of the divine feminine in the mythic and metaphoric structures of the play. Currently a chairperson of the Mythology in Contemporary Culture area of the Popular Culture Association, she writes and speaks on modern epiphanies, revisionings, and reinterpretations of ancient mythological elements.

2022 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Kirsten Ellen Johnsen, PhD

Kirsten’s talk is called “Unsettling our Understandings of Place”

What does it mean to “understand place?” I suggest it is a position of humility and reception. The land holds real spiritual power. The places we live contain and embody ancestral personality. To be in true relationship with place is to recognize the independence of these personalities and ancestries: it is to respect their otherness and agency.

Jung dreamt of a descent through the layers of a house and down through the sediments of the earth below as a way to connect with ancestral and archetypal energies. After visiting America, he noted how white settlers faced a gap in this descent, owing to the discontinuity of ancestry on the land. Several contemporary Jungian scholars also recognize the cultural grief and confusion that settler cultures experience due to ancestral discontinuity, and its deleterious historical effects on both settlers and indigenous peoples.

This workshop is oriented toward the settler-colonial experience. It will discuss the ancestral gap that Jung identified and address how to navigate it with consciousness, compassion, and commitment to counter oppressions.

About Kirsten

Kirsten Ellen Johnsen lives in relationship with Northern Pomo land in what is now known as Mendocino County. The life-journey this land has asked her to undertake has led her into honest reckoning with deep ancestry. She holds a PhD in Mythology and Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute.

2022 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Dr. Raïna Manuel-Paris

Raïna’s talk is called “Unlearning Not to Speak: The Interconnectedness of Women’s Rights and Earth Rights”

To understand the destiny of women is to understand the destiny of the planet. They are the same. They have both suffered from acts of violence and terrorism. When a woman becomes responsible to her Self, to her body, she becomes responsible to the world around her. The role of woman as agent of her fate, not only victim of her destiny, is linked to the destiny of her community and to the earth herself.

There is a long tradition of the Sybil going back to the Oracle of Delphi, where women act as priestesses of Hestia, of Artemis, when they speak on behalf of the Earth, speaking mostly in warnings about the lack of self-regulation and the catastrophic repercussions for our planet, about women’s social and political identity in such a context. Never more relevant in today’s climate, in the United States in particular, where women are still fighting for rights over their own bodies. They carry the fire of the goddess, because the earth is on fire. They carry the warrior instinct of Artemis, because wild things need to be protected from our insatiable predatory consumption. They have left the hearth because it has died from lack of tending and now they must carry the fire within themselves, re-animate the center of home from a feminine perspective.

About Raïna

Dr. Raïna Manuel-Paris has a multicultural background, born of a French father and a Dominican mother. She was raised in France and England until her early 20’s then moved to the United States. She holds a PhD in Mythological Studies with emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and a Masters Degree in Film from Columbia. She taught Magic and Ritual and Myth and Symbol for 17 years at the Art Institute in Santa Monica. She is also a documentary filmmaker.

She is adjunct faculty at PGI and taught at the Relativity Studio School in downtown Los Angeles. She currently teaches online courses, lectures, and gives seminars at the Philosophical Research Society, PRS.org. Her book The Mother-to-be’s Dream Book was published by Warner Books in 2002. She is also a published poet at Raven Books and various publications. Her documentary The Bridges of My Father was selected for the short film corner at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009. She has written for Psychological Perspectives, the journal of Jungian thought, and for the Joseph Campbell Foundation MythBlast series. She is part of the Joseph Campbell Writers Room, and has lectured for the Joseph Campbell Roundtable, most memorably in a lecture hall that burned down two days later in the Thomas Fire.

Currently Raïna works with both individuals in a mentorship program, and with groups in a process she calls The Cradle and the Crown, assisting men and women in coming to alignment in body, mind, and soul, developing deep aliveness as well as careful listening to the whisperings of their soul’s desire. This work was birthed as a result of her own explorations with the unconscious, plant medicine, and natural horsemanship. Her latest work is a novel/fairy tale, Arabella and the Wise Women, soon to be published. Her work with students, including many veterans, always emphasizes the ways in which one can hold the tension between the inner world and the outer world in a way that engages curiosity and compassion. For more details on current seminars and lectures please see her website at www.rainamparis.com.

2022 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Chanti Tacoronte-Perez and Tiffany D. Johnson

Chanti and Tiffany will present “Ecology of Rest: A Decolonial Approach to Remembrance”

Academia plays a vital role in the co-construction and dissemination of knowledge on local and global fronts. Yet, all too often, within academic spaces, there is an over-separation from our soul and an instinct to reject the integration of our multiple layered selves, leaving an insatiable hunger for extrinsic outcomes that exhaust and breakdown.

To begin addressing this rejection of wholeness, we take a decolonial approach to work (broadly) and knowledge (specifically) by honoring “an ecology of rest.” We center the role of an integrated and whole internal inter-being — and we remain curious. Our session will reflect our desire to privilege embodied practice and non-ordinary ways of knowing by combining theory, practice, and collaboration. Our thesis is that connections with these embodied practices are natural and allow us all to tend a more steadfast and integrated internal ecosystem – so that we may be able to flourish within and throughout our ever-evolving external ecosystem.

In this workshop-style session, Participants will be invited and led through a rest practice. To prepare for this journey we ask you to find a comfortable, pleasurable, and protective space to receive. Imagine building a nest to rest in; bring pillows, blankets, cushions, an eye cover or scarf, and a journal; that said, come as you are.

About Chanti

Chanti Tacoronte-Perez is a Cuban-American creatrix, ritualist, and author. She believes that images speak a profound language; her life’s work is a translator of the unseen and advocates for the imaginal. She holds a Masters in Engaged Humanities, Masters in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and is currently working on her dissertation on, navigating the liminal via a creative-divinatory journey as a map to recovering the marginalized, forgotten, and silenced. Her work and teaching centers, imagination, creativity, and deep rest. She teaches workshops and collaborative training focused on creativity, Yantra painting, dreaming, intuitive movement, restorative yoga, and yoga Nidra. Her passion and aim is to inspire all to rediscover their creative self by weaving the blessings with the wounds while honoring the land and the ancestors.

About Tiffany

Tiffany D Johnson is a researcher, educator, and lover of community. Her research focuses on how experiences of inequity and stigma in the workplace facilitate well-being (or a lack thereof). She works as an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at Georgia Tech and she is the creator of WHOLE, A community for Black and Brown women in Academia.

2022 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Kayden Baker-McInnis

Kayden’s talk is called “Pan, Animal Encounters and Mythic Eco-Consciousness”

Myths are stories that can function as ecosystems that further soul and ground consciousness. The climate crisis, in part, is a mythless engagement with the natural world that erodes eco-consciousness. Our unending climate crisis is fueled by the insistence that humans are separate from nature and the more-than-human world.

The inclusion of animal mythologies to the already potent god / goddess mythologies cultivates a mythic eco-consciousness connected to land and place. Mythically engaging animals unearths our vitality and grounds us in the body as mythic images bring us in touch with life force, instinct, and ecology. Participating in the sensual, natural world enables synchronicity and archetypal encounters with the more-than-human. In Animal Presences, James Hillman reminds us we have forgotten that animals were once gods. We need the animal gaze.

Animal mythologies and encounters will be explored through a mythic eco-consciousness lens that sheds light on the impact of the shadowed Pan and Dionysus archetypes, both gods of nature, that play out in our treatment of the environment and influences our capacity for sustaining a mythic eco-consciousness. It is a mythic eco-consciousness that can move us to what Thomas Berry calls dreaming a new story for the earth.

About Kayden

Kayden Baker-McInnis is a PhD candidate in Mythological Studies with an Emphasis in Depth Psychology working on an ecological dissertation focusing on the Greek figure Dionysus in relation to nature, body, and gender. She teaches language arts to school-aged students and offers adult myth classes. Her workshops in Salt Lake City include a humanities-based writing process engaging comparative mythology, cultural studies, and depth psychology.

2022 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes John Bonaduce, PhD

John’s talk is called “Second Sinai: How Covid-19 Fulfills Campbell’s Fourth Function of Myth”

In former times, civilization was held to principles expressed in foundational myths. As mythology relaxes its grip on our post-Copernican imaginations, a plague has intervened to exercise the same function. Indeed, as I see it, Covid-19 fulfills Joseph Campbell’s fourth function of mythology, the teaching function, the function which integrates the individual to a society.

The fourth function is the psychological force pulling us into community and even nationhood. It has been operant throughout human history: We knew, if we were Pacific Coast Saanish People, that the salmon must be propitiated with song and prayer, otherwise, they might not come back next year. Egyptians knew that the human heart would be weighed against a feather and good deeds must outnumber the bad deeds. If not, the soul would be devoured, consumed at once by a monster. This accountability held the people’s feet to the fire throughout life. In my experience, the behavior of Catholics is a calendar-driven thing of beauty, fasting here, celebrating there and, in accordance with the understanding that a certain hell awaits transgressors, the myth kept us in line, modified us, and above all, identified us. Fourth function, all.

These myths are dying. Egyptians stopped building pyramids a long time ago. Salmon still return to the Pacific Northwest but with a lot less ritualistic fanfare. Catholics, increasingly, think of hell as something more or less symbolic, a not too subtle reminder to be decent.
And now, I suggest we have arrived at the Second Sinai moment. Only this time, everyone is invited to the party. Every is called to join with the “Chosen People.” In fact, some will elect not to. The Second Sinai is about two things: The recognition of nature over the patriarchal God, and the behavior modifications expected of us in the light of our subordination to this awesome and greater power.

In the second part of my presentation, I rehearse some of the foundational statements of our ecopsychological community and come to the inescapable conclusion that Covid-19 has a psychic autonomy and has interjected itself in human history with precise intention just as Elohim’s intervention at Sinai had a precise intention. In both cases, we witness the birth of a new consciousness and of a new people.

And, if we are not too busy dancing around the golden calf, we may find we may find we’re part of it.

About John

After a successful career as a television writer in the 1970’s and ’80s with such credits as M*A*S*H and Maude, John’s interest in story became increasingly academic. He transitioned to a new field, with a master’s degree in Conducting, then earned a PhD in Mythology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. His lectures on mythobiogenesis continue to attract interested academics in several fields. More information can be found on his website: johnbonaduce.com.

2022 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Chrissy Stuart

Chrissy’s talk is called “The Dark Light of Duende: The Phosphorescence of Death”

At the heart of the mythological and ecological lies ambiguous paradox. The profundity of life and death is bridged by an invisible dimension of experience that we can safely navigate through the mythopoetic image. This presentation will investigate the mysterious eco-theoretical terrain of death through an archetypal analysis of the mythology of light and darkness, as represented in the traje de luces–or “suit of lights” worn by Spanish matadors.

The way death is perceived as an “unseeable” image is a prevalent idiosyncrasy in western and American cultural psyches. This can be witnessed in our lack of community traditions, rituals, and consciousness surrounding death and grief, as illustrated in the global events of the COVID-19 pandemic and the environmental crisis. My objective is to enumerate the many ways in which the pathologized image of death illuminates the beyond. Through the ontological lens of elemental light–a brief presentation of recent light sculptural work and transdisciplinarity research in my field of holography–I will demonstrate the ecological power of the pathological in its capacity for interconnection by bridging light and darkness, the visible and invisible, and life and death. This generative process creates new ways of seeing and being in the world.

About Chrissy

Chrissy Stuart is a light sculpture artist, depth psychological scholar, holographer, and transdisciplinarity researcher. Stuart utilizes light optics and glass casting techniques to record light waves–not ordinarily visible to the human eye–onto transparent objects to explore the invisible dimension of experience tied to the realm of death, the imagination, and the unknown. In her quest to understand the hidden forces beyond our control, complexities of multidimensional reality and universal interdependence are unearthed. Stuart views working with the unconscious as a form of research inquiry, and her light sculpture praxis perpetually reveals that consciousness is transformed by an encounter with the unknown. Stuart’s transdisciplinarity work addresses the notion that it is only in working with the darkness that a luminosity specific to transformation can emerge.

2022 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Dr. Mary Murphy

Mary’s talk is called “Myth and Mother Earth: Exploring the Landscape of the Psyche Through the Eyes of Gaia”

Mother Earth and humans’ relationship to her have been revered and widely recognized throughout time and across cultures. However, she and our relationship with her gradually became shrouded by reductionistic thinking, patriarchal ideologies, and narrow mechanistic mindsets. C. G. Jung esteemed the natural world and was deeply convinced of the psyche–nature kinship and its essentiality to individuation, yet he withheld asserting his sentiments because he could not prove them empirically.

In an era when the planet and her people are imperiled, this presentation calls attention to the archetypal nature of the unconscious and its implicit interconnectedness with the natural world. Considering this relationship through the lens of depth psychology and feminist theory, the presentation also illuminates the reciprocal relationship between psyche and nature, and the critical need to cultivate it, and considers how the ill-treatment of the earth and women are connected. Consequently, it helps deepen our psychological and ecological sensibility, expands the idea of individuation, highlights our biased social structures, and elucidates how the treatment of the feminine is tied to the exploitation of the planet.

About Mary

Mary Murphy is a depth psychologist and life coach in Northeastern, MA, where she maintains a private practice focused on women’s issues that begins with building a relationship with the Self. Mary holds both a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Depth Psychology with emphasis in Jungian and Archetypal Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute and an M.B.A from Northeastern University. She can be reached at mary@hercoach.com or via her website at www.hercoach.com.

2022 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Scott Neumeister

Scott’s talk is called “Myth as a Bridge: The Power of Archetypal Autocritography”

I will illustrate the transformative combination of archetypal analysis and autocritography I have developed as a means of building critical consciousness and empathy across differences of identity. While Henry Louis Gates, Jr., coined the term autocritography, Michael Awkward has employed it provocatively as I have learned and used it—an academic yet intimate critique of literature that uses the personal (autobiographical) to approach the scholarly (critical) along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other areas of difference. Rooted in black feminism, this intersectional critique, united with self-reflection and empathetic imagination, produces autocritography’s dynamism in what Paulo Freire terms “conscientization.”

After elucidating autocritography’s liberatory power, I will demonstrate how, after learning this approach in my graduate English studies, I merged it with Jungian/archetypal criticism—developing an approach that deepens the transpersonal, empathetic lens through which one sees Self in Other, in both literature and life. Having employed this method and taught undergraduates with it, I will attest to its efficacy in fostering allyship via the recognition of our fundamental connectedness with each other, despite identity differences. My presentation will contain both the theory and practice of my technique for scholars, teachers, helping professionals, or anyone interested in “liberatory consciousness.”

About Scott

Scott Neumeister is a literary scholar, author, TEDx speaker, and mythic pathfinder from Tampa, Florida, where he earned his PhD in English from the University of South Florida in 2018. His specialization in multi-ethnic American literature and mythology comes after careers as an information technology systems engineer and a teacher of English and mythology at the middle school and college levels. He is coauthor of Let Love Lead: On a Course to Freedom with Gary L. Lemons and Susie Hoeller, as well as a facilitator for the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Myth and Meaning book club at Literati.

2022 Mythologium program