Tag: Healing

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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Rosalyn Fay

Rosalyn’s talk is called “Expanding Empathy and Cultures of Care by Re-centering the Mother Archetype”

Our planet is in crisis due to the devaluing of the Mother archetype. From the minimal support human mothers are given for raising children, to the mass exploitation of farm animal mothers, to the endless extraction from our Mother Earth, we can see this devaluing everywhere. The culture of commerce, and hero-based narratives idolizing the individual over the collective have effectively replaced ancient narratives of how to live in harmony with the earth and each other. This has bred a narcissistic mindset where we see a dangerous decline in empathic ways of being. No other archetype symbolizes communal care and empathy more than the life-bringing and nurturing Mother. Mother, by very definition, is “life creator.”

Many myths depict the wastelands that ensue when gods or people fail to honor the feminine, including the Lady of Llyn-y-Fan Fach (Celtic mythology), Demeter (Greek), and Nuwa (Chinese). These stories demonstrate the vital importance of re-balancing the feminine with the masculine as well as returning the Mother archetype to her rightful place at the center of communal life. This restoration of the natural order is a key part of the healing process and the rebuilding of cultures of empathy and care.

About Rosalyn

Rosalyn is a writer, herbalist, and ritualist. She resides in the coastal redwoods of northern California where she makes herbal medicines and body care products foraged from the surrounding forest. She also facilitates community grief and earth-based healing rituals. She believes it is women’s grief and anger that can fuel real global change, but she believes women must first reconnect with the earth and re-establish that relationship before they can speak to what is fundamentally missing and leading humanity off course. To that end, she is passionate about leading women back to nature and to their natural, deeply feeling, intuitive states. To learn more, visit www.rosalynfay.com.

2022 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes The Reverend Doctor Pamela D. Hancock

Pamela’s talk is called “Working with Earth Allies to Heal Person and Place”

This year I am releasing the groundbreaking, choose-your-own-adventure myth game for self-analysis called Mythic Mapping. In this presentation I will explore a very specific part of Mythic Mapping: Earth Allies. Inspired by my work with the Irish mythologist, Sharon Blackie, the Earth Allies process encourages us to connect deeply with the world around us for healing both people and place.

This revolutionary process encourages us to identify the parts of our landscape or animals we are attracted to, and then determine what stories they have to share. In order to heal the planet, we need new myths—not only to reconnect us to the planet, but also to discover parts of our selves. In Mythic Mapping, Earth Allies help us do that work. Based in Jung’s theories about archetypes and the individuation process, Earth Allies are plants, animals, minerals, stones, and parts of the landscape on which a person lives. In my presentation I will explore the overall importance of Nature in Depth Psychology and how we can evolve as a result. I will also provide the specific process one can go through to identify their own Earth Allies and create new personal myths for change.

About Pamela

The Reverend Doctor Pamela D. Hancock is the Assistant Professor of Spiritual Practice and Care of the Soul as well as the Director of the Chaplaincy Program at Starr King School for the Ministry. She is an ordained Interfaith Minister, Priestess of the Sisters of Moon and Snow Coven, and holds a masters of divinity from Starr King School for the Ministry (2015). She received her PhD in Depth Psychology with a focus in Jungian and Archetypal Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute in May 2022. Her dissertation focused on the creation of a self-directed program for trauma survivors to embark on an individuation journey, through the creative examination of myth. No stranger to trauma herself, Rev. Hancock is a survivor of sexual violence, as well as a life-threatening kidney disease and a forced Caesarean section that left her with terrible postpartum depression after the birth of her son. She is dedicated, wholeheartedly, to helping people heal, building bridges between communities, bringing people together to honor the sacred in all things, supporting environmental advocacy, and helping women embody all parts of their trues selves. Rev. Dr. Pamela Hancock is a published author and multi-media artist, workshop facilitator, and the Director of the virtual spiritual center, the Sacred Outpost. She lives in the mountains of Southern California with her husband, John, an engineer and musician, and their young son, Hudson. Visit her website for more information: www.RevPamelaDawn.com.

2022 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2021 welcomes Gelareh Khoie

Gelareh’s talk is called “Artemis, Apollo, and the Dance of Oracular Healing“

Living in a world of rapidly refracting kaleidoscopic consciousness, the besieged ego-self tends to become mired in restless seeking that often leads to exhaustion and confusion. By focusing on the healing potential of the ritual of dance portrayed in the mythology of psychocosmic party-starter twins, Artemis and Apollo, I convey an oracular dimension of healing which could, if adopted, facilitate the maintenance of perfect creative tension between ego and Self.

About Gelareh

Gelareh Khoie is an Iranian-American artist, writer, scholar, and DJ with over thirty years of experience as an entrepreneur and creator. Currently a doctoral candidate at Pacifica, she is researching the spiritual potentials of music and dance conveyed through the sociocultural phenomena of the 1970s known as disco.

2021 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2021 welcomes Gabriel Keczan

Gabriel’s talk is called “The Cultural Somatics of Myth & The Crisis of Masculinity”

We are in a crisis of masculinity. As a collective body of culture, we are going through a massive initiation as multiple crises of the world intersect. This is a time of radical reclaiming, healing and transformation. The ancient Russian tale of the Firebird contains clues and guidance on our paths of awakening. In this presentation, Gabriel will carry in the story of the Firebird and, together with the audience, feed the story and explore its relevance in our lives and for this moment in order to turn crisis into a catalyst for courage and growth.

About Gabriel

Gabriel Keczan is a transformational men’s coach, somatic counselor and art therapist living in the mossy, time-bending giants known as the mountains of the Kootenays in Western Canada, the un-ceded homeland xaʔxáʔ tumxʷulaʔxʷ of the Sinixt Nation. He founded Sacred Pathways Foundation to help restore rites of passage for male youth as well as create more initiatory spaces for men using myth, art and connection with nature.

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 2021 welcomes Dr. Katherine J. Bailes

Katherine’s talk is called “Healer and Bringer of Plagues“

Grace Dammann, physician and survivor of a near-death accident once said in an interview: “…I know healing when I am in the presence of it. It’s mysterious, magical and God-given.” Healing is numinous and so, it seems, is sickness; they are part of the same archetypal process. In this presentation, we will explore mythic expressions of ancient divinities known for their gifts of healing and plagues such as the Hebrew god Yahweh-Rapha, the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet, the Greek god Apollo and the Fir Bolg, early chthonic inhabitants of Ireland. We will follow this unitive thread through contemporary perspectives on medicine, vaccines, and viruses to ask: What is the message of the plague as it swirls through humanity? What is the unasked question that can heal us now, individually and collectively?

About Katherine

Katherine J. Bailes, JD, PhD is a practicing attorney and an adjunct professor of mythological studies at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas. Dr. Bailes holds a BFA in painting from the University of North Texas and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Kansas, School of Law. She later obtained a master’s degree and Ph.D. from Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, California. Her dissertation topic entitled “The Themis Principle: Mystery and Irrationality in the U.S. Legal System” focused on the mythological aspects of the law as expressed in ancient cultures through goddesses such as Athena, Themis, Inanna and Maat. She has received numerous awards and served in a variety of leadership positions in art, law and teaching, successfully combining these fields through her understanding of story and the human capacity for myth making.

2021 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2021 welcomes Dr. Karin E. Zirk

Dr. Zirk’s talk is called, “Tackling the Great Divide in American Culture from a Mythological Perspective”

Where logic, reason, and argument fail, mythology provides new possibilities for healing by engaging with individuals using imaginal methods that reveal the deities and/or archetypes at work. Only when we know who is there, can we create relationships that heal the great divide in American culture.

Dr. Zirk conducted a research survey using a mythic questionnaire that collected perspectives on culture, society, and the great challenges of our time. The questionnaire used a combination of free-form and multiple-choice questions that were text and image-based. Then using the methodology of Mythic Amplification on the survey responses, the results were analyzed to identify trends, cultural beliefs, and areas of contention in archetypal motifs.

The mythic artifacts used in the questionnaire are not necessarily grounded in their cultural lineage, but are floating through a multi-cultural, often polytheistic, postmodern world of mix-and-match beliefs and reveal themselves through film, art, fiction, music, and sacred texts. In other words, the responses to the questionnaire were provided by laypeople who used their own knowledge to provide responses to deep questions of identity, “the other,” and the world around them. This often results in cultural appropriation, misunderstandings of cultural mores, and a method of providing mythic responses to the survey questions. However, Dr. Zirk relies on the socio-historic context of the actual mythic figures in the process of Mythic Amplification.

This presentation intends to provide mythologists with methods on using mythic questionnaires in the field of cultural mythology to understand the great divide in American culture and its underpinnings in our mythic perspectives.

About Dr. Zirk

Dr. Zirk earned her doctorate in Mythological Studies with an Emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute where her dissertation focused on enhancing well-being in family caregivers using mythological methods. Her research has been presented at the American Academy of Religion Western Region and National Conferences as well as at the Fates and Graces Mythologium — a conference for mythologists. Her article “The Rainbow Gathering and COVID-19” appeared in Communities: Life in Cooperative Culture, Winter 2020. Her novel, Falling From The Moon, came out early last year. Her recent workshops include “Covid-19 and Mythic Monsters;” “Re-Imagining Our Relationship with Mother Earth;” and “Imaginal Mythology and Climate Change.”

2021 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2021 welcomes Chanti Tacoronte-Perez

Chanti’s talk is called “Honoring Her Tongues: Art as the Language of the Liminal”

Women, marginalized populations, and “othered” cultures live hypnotized under Apollo’s overpowering spell of rigid rules and toxic masculinity. Unable to survive infinite amounts of persecution, oppression, and isolation, we might pack the little we have left and migrate away from the wisdom and sovereignty of the body. We can instead enter the psychodynamic portal of imagination and creativity, partnering with the mythic images of Dionysus and Olokun to express our wounds and explore the process of healing and integration through dismemberment, dance, and collaboration. Healing, a layered continuum central to soul-making, benefits from acknowledging those graven images—both numinous and grotesque.

This presentation invites you on a journey where the images—the art—share the psychic wound and the healing salve. It provides a space for art as a way of knowing, in and of itself. Perhaps we need new ways of presenting and sharing these images—which, too, is healing.

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 as a translator of the unseen and advocate for the imaginal. She holds a Masters in Engaged Humanities and a Masters in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is currently working on her dissertation on the image of woundedness in relation to the imagination and the creative process as a portal 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, dreaming, intuitive movement, restorative yoga, and yoga nidra. Her passion and aim are to inspire all to rediscover their creative nature by weaving the blessings with the wounds while honoring the land and ancestors.

2021 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2021 welcomes Arthur George

Arthur’s talk is called “The Many Levels of Jesus as a Healer”

Jesus was the greatest healer in the Judeo-Christian tradition, whose healings were performed in a mythical setting and described in a mythical text. The stories yield meanings at several levels, which are often as important today as when the stories were first told.

At one level, they are about compassion and love, where the “healer” acting out of such motivations is both developing his/her own spirituality, as well as contributing to social harmony within the community.

At a second level, the healings fit within early Christian theology and thus further the Christian myth. In particular, the stories of healings fit into Jewish and Christian apocalyptic/eschatological mythology whereby the healings, exorcisms, feedings of the multitudes, etc., by Jesus exhibit characteristics of the promised Kingdom of God (e.g., no hunger or disease), meaning that the Kingdom is beginning to appear (called “realized eschatology”).

A third level is that of spiritual healing where the figure of Jesus and his teachings and acts involve concepts of depth psychology that can stimulate individuation and lead to wholeness. In Jesus’s healings, the sick do much of the healing themselves, through faith in what the figure of Jesus represents.

About Arthur

Arthur George is a mythologist, cultural historian, blogger, and winemaker; formerly he was an international lawyer. He has written the award-winning The Mythology of Eden (2014) about the mythology of the biblical Eden story, and before that the leading and award-winning history of St. Petersburg, Russia, entitled St. Petersburg: the First Three Centuries. More recently he has written the peer-reviewed The Mythology of America’s Seasonal Holidays (2021) and The Mythology of Wine. (2021) He has a mythology blog, frequently speaks at scholarly conferences, institutes, JCF Roundtables, and other audiences on mythological topics, and authors articles on the same. You can find his blog and connect with him at www.mythologymatters.wordpress.com.

2021 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2021 welcomes Lucy Dolan

Lucy’s talk is called “A Contemporary Re-imagining of the Ancient Irish ‘Vessel of Everlasting Abundance’: Symbol of Inspiration, Transformation, Healing and Regeneration”

The “Clay-Cup Symbol and Worldview” offers a contemporary re-imagining of the ancient Irish mythological vessel of everlasting abundance: a symbol of inspiration, transformation, healing and regeneration. This numinous vessel symbol resides in the deep ecological roots of the Irish psyche.

This work puts forward that there is an absence of such symbols of wholeness in the modern Western psyche. This has led, in part, to the emergence of the humanitarian, ecological and climate crises of our times. This unique project re-imagines this vessel through a synthesis of the arts, sciences and humanities, conceptualizing the Earth as an earthen vessel broken into many pieces with each broken shard representing an aspect of life: ecology, biology, psychology and mythology.

The work seeks to re-form the vessel, to bring these disparate shards back together into meaningful relatedness in an endeavor to heal the modern fragmented mindset and acknowledge the everlasting nourishment and renewal that their inter-relatedness provides the individual, community, culture and planet. The mythic imagination has the capacity to constellate renewal and healing in the psyche, helping cultures to adapt and evolve in challenging times. This re-imagined vessel symbol is offered in service to the healing, health, and well-being of the whole.

About Lucy

Lucy Dolan holds a B.A. in Ceramics, an M.A. in Ecopsychology, Viridis Graduate Institute, and is currently undertaking a research Ph.D. Her work synthesizes her academic interests in Irish arts, symbols, myth, and culture, as well as depth and ecopsychology, with her practical ceramic work. Lucy lives in County Kerry, Ireland.

2021 Mythologium program