Tag: Aphrodite

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Mythologium 2023 welcomes Johanna Fisher

Johanna’s presentation is called “Three Faces of Love”

The heart is a biological organ and metaphorical receptacle of love. It has inspired great art, great music, great poetry, stories, great passion, and at times, responses to suffering. The heart is a great mystery, however, it is the center of what it means to be human, to be alive, or to be a god. There are many myths of creation, marriage, and revenge that suggest how we might understand this organ, this
receptacle of love. Myths that tell us that goddesses and gods “so loved the world” they created the earth and all that sustains us. These are acts of love. Yet, the heart that is violated or hurt could be motivation to destroy the world, humankind. The myths tell us this as well. In reading myths, we come to see the complex and universal expressions of love, heart-center expressions that point to rapture, agape, eros, and sometimes redemption.

This paper will trace these expressions of love in three powerful myths, the myth of Isis, the great Mother Goddess of the Universe, Aphrodite, the queen of heaven and earth, and Freyja, the Germanic goddess of love and war.

About Johanna

Johanna Fisher is professor of English at Canisius University. She also serves as co-director of Women and Gender Studies. Johanna lives in both U.S. and Germany. She writes extensively for Europeana, an online repository for digital images from leading museums in Europe. Currently, she is writing a series of articles about the place of public memorials and art with a focus on the work of German public artist, Gunter Demnig. Johanna is also a poet and dancer who has taught ballet to young adults for many years.

2023 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2021 welcomes Kathryn Makeyev

Kathryn’s talk is called “Once Upon a Wounded Time”

Once upon a time there was an opportunity for homo sapiens to come together. The first step in healing a divide is to acknowledge the wounds that we have as well as those we have given to others. Make no mistake, social injustice, global warming, and the pandemic are wounds. Real forgiveness begins by giving up hope that the past could have been any different.

James Hillman told me (ok, not me) that Aphrodite is missing in the pantheon of the United States. This lack of beauty has caused depression, mental illness and anxiety. I think that if she were present she would tell us: “your place is a dump—clean it up!” But a failure to acknowledge our shortcomings has been one of our serious problems. Therein lies a trail.

We are being called to find our beauty again (not to make America great again). The quest is to re-enchant our cosmos. Not only is this possible, it is not particularly difficult because the cosmos is on our side. Separation is the real illusion.

Let it be told about the Age of Aquarius: Once upon a time there were wounds.

About Kathryn

Kathryn has lived for over 30 years in San Luis Obispo, home of the Slo Transit Company, the Slo Real Estate Development Company, the Slomotion Film Festival, and likes it more each day. She is finishing a novel (slo-style) about reincarnation through history, and is currently recovering from the PTSD brought about by the Trump administration.

2021 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2021 welcomes Patricia von Papstein and Kristina Dryža

Patricia and Kristina’s talk is called “Trickster Energy as a Healing Force?”

The Trickster is a beautifully iridescent archetypal character in mythology. In contrast to its liberating behavior qualities, it’s been much maligned and demonized throughout history. By decrypting the Trickster archetype in its multi-dimensional ability to peek behind the curtains, the two presenters will discuss how those in the business world can engage mythology and psychology to ensure that their products and services are ‘Trickster worthy.’

Drawing on the archetypes of the goddess queens Aphrodite and Persephone, Patricia and Kristina will illustrate how both, facing growing and decaying are essential for meeting the Trickster at the threshold. We live in a time where we experience ourselves and the world as fragmented – outside perhaps solid, but on the inside atomising. Travelling between the upper world and the under world like a trickster, not like a charlatan, is a fresh approach to healing.

About Patricia and Kristina

Patricia von Papstein is a business woman, a clinical and organizational psychologist and a lover of technology and the arts. Following through to her credo “Bliss to Business!” she challenges business and capital owners to refine their unconventional talents and to market products that keep a secret, spread self-irony and celebrate the spirit of contradiction. Currently she has accepted to become a jury member of the Berlin science fiction festival. You can visit her website at www.blisstobusiness.com.

Kristina Dryža is recognized as one of the world’s top female futurists and is also an archetypal consultant and author. She has always been fascinated by patterns and feels we are patterned beings in a patterned universe. Her work focuses on archetypal and mythic patterns and the patterning of nature’s rhythms and their influence on creativity, innovation and leadership.

2021 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Dr. Joyce McCart

Joyce’s talk is called, “Chasing Aphrodite . . . Manifestations of Desire”

Our recourse is to Aphrodite, and our first way of discovering her is in the disease of her absence. (Hillman, The Thought of the Heart 41)

The ancient Divine Feminine’s energetic re-emergence in western culture’s 21st century—through the diverse cacophony of women’s political voices, the fracturing of binary gender identity, the break-through genetic research of the double-X chromosome, and the focused rage of Millennials’ warrior energy—aids in neutralizing hubristic, Oedipal, and ancient core causes of resistance to the Divine Feminine that move Her from sacred to profane into alterity. Theorized as desire for a sublime embrace with the Divine, “Chasing Aphrodite. . .” looks into the opaque underrealm of humanity’s virginal psyche, where penetrating truths and undifferentiated values collide.

Hubris shadowing the feminine camouflages the Soul’s desire for anima consciousness and manifests resistance to psyche | soul | anima as a vehicle of distress within humanity’s collective unconscious. Insight into what underlies such resistance is embedded in the prolific writings and lectures of archetypal psychologist James Hillman, and the revelatory writings of archetypal psychologists Patricia Berry and Rafael Lopez Pedraza.

The layered complexity within Berry’s book of essays entitled Echo’s Subtle Body informs that desire-for-embrace commences with The Mother, and illuminates resistance as undifferentiated impersonal values imprisoned within a virginal psyche. Berry’s clarification of virginal resistance as archetypal, Lopez-Pedraza’s mantra “stay with the image,” and Hillman’s writings on soullessness as an absence of anima advocate the power of listening to hear—a meta-hodos to hear what the Soul wants, and diffuse heuristic methods of resistance maintained within postmodern western cultures.

“Chasing Aphrodite. . . Manifestations of Desire” offers interpellations exposing ancient methods, subjectivation, and codified hubris normalized within the ethos of western thought and its monomythic socio-political culture; clarifies core causes of resistance that feed western culture’s virginal psyche; and re-deposits the paradox that western culture’s resistance to the Feminine replicates an Oedipal heroic style (see Hillman, “Oedipus Revisited” 97), which is also soul-making.

About Joyce

Dr. Joyce McCart is a research scholar whose formative inquiry tracks core causes of resistance to the feminine Other and the methods and values that feed/sustain hubristic resistance to the feminine. Her research focuses on western culture’s enigmatic obsession with “Chasing Aphrodite” as desire to embrace the Feminine Divine. A mother of two adult daughters and grandmother to three grandsons, Dr. McCart infuses her professional work with socio-political activism through engaged witnessing, applied educational methodologies, and open dialogues to illuminate discriminatory practices by policy makers. As an artist, she is an accomplished educator, theatre director, playwright, essayist, and poet. Dr. McCart holds a B.A. in Literature and advanced degrees in Theatre and Mythological Studies with emphasis in Depth Psychology. She lives in Austin Texas and the coastal Redwoods of northern California.

2020 Mythologium program