Tag: Heroine’s Journey

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Mythologium 2023 welcomes Alyssa Herzinger

Alyssa’s presentation is called “A World of One’s Own: How Fantasy Facilitates the Development of the Inner Voice of Women”

This presentation will explore how the liminality of the fantasy genre and the labyrinthine Heroine’s Journey support the development of women’s inner voices and identities. Both provide space for women authors to explore new worlds of possibility while also providing examples and role models for women readers to emulate in their own lives.

Fantasy is where a woman can create not only a “room of one’s own,” but an entire imaginary world of her own. This space of possibility — for writers, readers, and characters, is inherently a liminal one, reflected in the physical settings of many of these stories. It is not a coincidence that so many myths, fantasy stories, and tales of women finding themselves happen so often in extreme parts of nature, especially where the earth meets the sea — where a cliff and a breeze threaten a fatal fall.

About Alyssa

Alyssa Herzinger, MFA is a writer, actor, musician, researcher, and creative facilitator focused on women’s experiences and identities. Her career has spanned academia, the arts, startups, social work, and tech, which she has brought together through her focus on helping women find and use their voices to advocate for themselves and others.

As a Master’s student in Actor-Musicianship, she co-developed a compositional and divinatory technique called Musicomancy, which she used to compose the Tarot-based album, Lilies in the Bardo. She is the author of Pioneer: Creating Your Own Path After Mormonism, and she has written and co-written several plays, including Devout, an autobiographical story about leaving a high-demand religion; Killer Boss, a musical comedy about modern workplaces, and Full Fathom Five, a musical prequel to The Tempest. She is currently developing an actor-musician play about a 19th-century composer.

2023 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2023 welcomes Dr. Jody Bower

Dr. Bower’s presentation is called “The Heart of the Hero: How Superhero Movies are Re-Imagining the Hero’s Quest Story”

Joseph Campbell tells us in The Hero With a Thousand Faces that once a hero has faced all his trials and succeeded in completing his quest, he can earn the boon of being loved by the feminine, as represented by the Princess—a vague figure who represents “the goddess who is incarnate in every woman . . . mother, sister, mistress, bride.” She is all women, not an individual in her own right.

Marie-Louise von Franz warns us that feminine figures in folk and fairy tales and myths are usually “not a woman’s idea of femininity but rather what Jung called the anima,” and so represent the psychology of men. When Campbell’s hero wakes the sleeping woman, he is awakening his own feminine side that he has suppressed. But awakened or not, he still projects it onto someone else. The feminine remains Other while the hero perceives love as coming from outside him, a gift bestowed on him. He is passive, receiving; love is not something he does.

And yet the archetype of the hero is all about doing!

Our modern myth-making modalities of comic books, film, and television are redressing this issue in origin stories about superheroes. In the new version, love is no longer a reward given to the hero—or the heroine, for modern female superheroes follow a similar story arc—after the quest is finished. Instead, the climactic moment often hinges on the heroic person’s ability to draw upon their innate capacity for love.

In her presentation, cultural mythologist Jody Gentian Bower looks at the origin stories of superheroes, including Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Starlord, Diana the Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, Jake Sully, and Harry Potter, as examples of this new version of the hero whose greatest power comes from the heart.

About Dr. Bower

Jody Gentian Bower is a cultural mythologist who earned her PhD in Mythological Studies with a Depth Psychology Emphasis from Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2013. She is the author of Jane Eyre’s Sisters: How Women Live and Write the Heroine Story (Quest 2015), based on her dissertation about how women (and some men) have been telling a similar story about female protagonists in novels since the 15th century. She also wrote The Princess Powers Up: Watching the Sleeping Beauties Become Warrior Goddesses (Mandorla 2020), which traces the evolution of fantasy heroines over the last century. She lectures and leads workshops on hero/heroine journeys and blogs about popular culture on jodybower.com.

2023 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Colleen Salomon

Colleen’s talk is called “The Path of Ashes: Journeying to the Underworld in ‘The Robber Bridegroom'”

The tale, “The Robber Bridegroom,” is a strange and dark story, one collected by the Brothers Grimm in the early 19th century, but with roots that go back thousands of years. Not surprisingly, this eerie account of a young woman’s solitary journey into the forest and her courageous escape after a traumatizing ordeal has not enjoyed the attention of the Grimms’ more popular stories. It is considered by many scholars to be a “Bluebeard Tale”—a warning to young women about the dangers of marriage. While I do not dispute that conclusion, I believe the story holds a great deal more: in fact, it harbors ancient knowledge of the passage into the Underworld. In this presentation, I will demonstrate that there are secrets woven into the story regarding the use of poison and trance that reveal the maid’s motivations for her journey, which link her self-empowerment with a willingness to risk her life for her clan.

About Colleen

Colleen holds a master’s degree in Mythological Studies with Emphasis in Depth Psychology and is current pursing her PhD in the same field. After studying art history and studio arts at Purdue University, including studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, Colleen continued her academic work at the University of Hamburg, Germany. During a decade of living in Europe, Colleen had the privilege of hearing many stories of the trauma of the twentieth century told by the people who had lived through the events. She witnessed the healing that emerged through the telling of the stories. In this way, she learned about the fundamental necessity of myth to the individual. Having returned to the US and earned a master’s degree in psychology, Colleen was drawn to Pacifica to study mythology with a particular emphasis on the role of myth in the healing of trauma. Her dissertation focuses on the ancient knowledge of trauma contained within the old stories still told in Germany.

2020 Mythologium program
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The Mythologium welcomes Dr. Stacey Simmons

Stacey’s presentation is called, “Not a Heroine’s Journey”

For years we have been told about the Hero’s Journey. In 1988 when Bill Moyers interviewed Jospeh Campbell for The Power of Myth, Moyers asked him about a monomyth for women. Campbell replied that he was sure that there was one, but he had dedicated his life to the Hero’s Journey, so had not found it. The Hero’s Journey has been adapted for women, but it is not a woman’s story. There IS a monomyth for women, that has been discovered in every story with a female protagonist from the descent of Inanna to Wonder Woman. The core of this monomyth tells the story of a divided woman who traverses a path of difficulty, the way markers of this path depend on her separation. She is divided into one of two groups, and treated by family and culture dependent on this lane. As she faces the challenges ahead of her she is offered the end of the journey through symbolic death, either through a “Happily Ever After” life of marriage and children, or through the abjection and isolation of wielding power. If she doesn’t choose one of those terminal points, she has the option of becoming a “Queen” where she must overcome the divide, heal the disparate parts of herself rendered piecemeal in the divide, and then re-emerge, reunited with full self-sovereignty.  Put your ruby or glass slipper on the Path of the Queen.

View Stacey’s PresentationDownload

About Stacey:

Stacey Simmons, MA, PhD, LMFT is a writer, psychotherapist, and former entertainment executive. She studies social psychological phenomena through a mediated lens, and is particularly passionate about women’s stories and animation. Her current research focuses on the discovery of a monomyth for women that is an analog to the Hero’s Journey.  Stacey holds a PhD in Urban Studies with a focus in media psychology, from the University of New Orleans, and an MA in Counseling Psychology with a focus in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. 

You can connect with Stacey through Facebook or her website, www.writewomen.com.

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The Mythologium welcomes Dr. Jody Bower

Jody’s presentation is called, “Hero Quests and Heroine Journeys Degendered“

Who embarks on the hero’s quest or the heroine’s journey, and why? Looking at these mythic patterns through the lens of such questions allows us to rename them in non-gendered language. In this presentation, Jody Bower recasts Joseph Campbell’s Hero as the Protector, Maureen Murdock’s Heroine as the Pathfinder, Kim Hudson’s Virgin as the Integrator, and her own Aletis as the Seeker. Bower discusses how the journeys differ in pattern and outcome, and how each allows the journeyer–whatever their gender identity–to heal what must be healed for true Selfhood.

Download Jody Bower’s Four JourneysDownload

About Jody:

Jody Gentian Bower earned her PhD in Mythological Studies with a Depth Psychology Emphasis from Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2012. She is the author of Jane Eyre’s Sisters: How Women Live and Write the Heroine Story, a nonfiction book that examines the Aletis (Greek for “wandering heroine”) story that has been told by women—and a few visionary males including Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and J.R.R. Tolkien—for centuries.

You can connect with Jody through her website and LinkedIn.