Mythologium 2023 welcomes Dr. Fujio Mandeville

Dr. Mandeville’s presentation is called “A Tale of Two Stories: From Eden to Managuara”

The story of the progenitors of the Lenca people and how they were created starkly contrasts with the attitudes of Western thought regarding Nature. The history of these attitudes, covered by surveying the views of Nature from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and then into the modern era, form a backdrop to the Lenca myth of the Mother Goddess, Ish-Managual who creates the Lenca people in the land of Managuara. The Lenca myth, passed down orally to Leonel A. Chevez by his grandmother, is described in his book Ti Manauelike: The Lenca Taulepa Chief. This story focuses on the Mother Goddess, whose mission is to come down from the heavens to Managuara, create the first humans, and then return once she has accomplished her task. She forms the shape of a human with dough made from corn grown in the milpas, seeds, bark, and leaves. She then calls upon six forest creatures: armadillo, rabbit, jaguar, turtle, monkey, and finally, eagle. Each creature sacrifices a particular characteristic of itself in making the first human. However, after seeing that her first creation is too weak to survive the harsh environment, she creates another being who is stronger and more adaptable to the jungles of Managuara. After she has finished, she must return to the heavens, but rather than leave her beloved creation, she sends the weaker of the two in her place. She then sacrifices her very being by infusing her spirit into all of Nature. This story is a love story between the creatrix and her creation. This myth speaks of love, sacrifice, and compassion. It also illustrates the intricate relationship between the divine, Nature, and humanity.

About Dr. Mandeville

Fujio Mandeville is a linguist, mythologist, and technologist. He holds a bachelor’s in linguistics with a minor in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. His focus there was on natural language acquisition and comparative linguistics. He also holds a doctorate from Pacifica Graduate Institute in mythological studies with emphasis in depth psychology. The title of his dissertation is Complexity Theory and Creativity: Seeing Through to the Mythic Leonardo da Vinci, in which he used a transdisciplinary framework to demonstrate that Leonardo da Vinci was a mythic figure and a complexity thinker. Fujio is also a software application manager and solutions architect for a major telecommunications company. His main interests are the intersection between myth, complexity thinking, technology, and its effect on culture, the usurpation of mythology for political ends, and transhumanism. His current work centers on the indigenous creation myth of the Lenca and its implications on Western thinking. His writings inform various disciplines, including art history, depth psychology, mythology, complexity theory, mathematics, and historical hermeneutics. He has lived in Germany and Japan. He lives in Washington State with his wife, Monica.

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.

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.

Mythologium 2022 welcomes Sarah Drew

Sarah’s talk is called “Myths of Regenesis: Co-Creating a Fertile Earth”

How do we activate living myths for our times, vital stories that regenerate and inspire our cultural psyche and deepen our interrelationships with our living Mother Earth? Stories that unlock the teaching codes of old, and also allow us to collectively dream and create a future that nourishes and honors all sentient life?

This query and mandate have been central to my life’s work. I am the author of Gaia Codex, a globally popular eco-feminist novel which tells the tale of an ancient lineage of women, the Priestesses of Astera who through the rise and fall of cultures have held regeneration codes for the Earth. In this mythos, these women come together in times of cultural and environmental crises to help birth the world anew.

My presentation explores how we are each keepers of inter-generational wisdom and creators of new myths inspiring a vital future. Our collective mandate is to create, in multiple mediums, stories of regeneration and well-being and models of civilizations that live harmoniously with our Mother Earth. It is time to break the spells of inevitable dystopian collapse.

About Sarah

As the visionary author of the eco-feminist novel, Gaia Codex, Sarah Drew catalyzes powerful blueprints for the future deeply rooted in the gnosis of the past. Sarah has been a featured speaker at the graduate level and at organizations such as Google, ABC, Deepak Homebase, and Bioneers, and she is currently a popular teacher and mentor for women worldwide on topics such as Feminine Wisdom, Evolutionary Culture, and Regenerative Technologies. Learn more at www.SarahDrew.net and www.GaiaCodex.com.

Mythologium 2022 welcomes special guests from the Joseph Campbell Foundation

This panel’s title is “Myths to Live (and Die) By: Hands-On Work at the Intersection of Myth and Ecology”

Mythic work often lives at the intersection of the individual and the collective. There is perhaps no place where this is more profound than in work that involves ecological consciousness. Joseph Campbell once said, “When you are in accord with nature, nature will yield its bounty. This is something that is coming up in our consciousness now, with the ecology movement, recognizing that by violating the environment in which we are living, we are really cutting off the energy and source of our own living.

In what ways do we see the energies of our own living being cut off? What is the mythic relationship between the earth and human beings? What narratives have held warnings about violations of that relationship? What challenges exist when attempting to live from a place of both mythical and ecological health?

In this panel, Maria Souza, Dr. Lori Pye, and Robert Walter discuss their personal work with myth and ecological consciousness. Dr. John Bucher from the Joseph Campbell Foundation moderates.

About Maria

Maria Souza is a Brazilian mythologist, educator and writer. She holds a postgraduate degree in Ecology and Spirituality, and she worked for seven years in the Amazon with indigenous people. Maria fell in love with mythology during her studies in the UK in 2015, and since then she has begun a personal and academic exploration of the topic. Her book, Wild Daughters, draws from mythology and time-worn tales while illuminating the challenges, dangers, beauty, and reality of the first initiations of a woman’s life. Blending ancient wisdom with contemporary culture, Souza’s writings reflect a woman in search of depth in times of superficial ornaments. She runs a mentoring program based on Clarissa Pinkola-Estés' Women Who Run With The Wolves and is the creator and host of the Women and Mythology podcast, hosted as part of the Joseph Campbell Foundation's MythMaker℠ Podcast Network.
About Lori

Dr. Pye is the Founder and President of Viridis Graduate Institute and is a leading voice in  the field of ecological psychology (ecopsychology) as an approach to the interconnected challenges of our times. As executive director for international marine organizations, Dr. Pye worked with numerous NGOs to co-develop the Eastern Tropical Pacific Biological Seascape Corridor with the Ministers of the Environment from Costa Rica, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador. As an educator, Dr. Pye teaches internationally and at leading international conferences on diverse cultural issues such as Nature and Human Nature, The Mythology of Violence, and The Aesthetic Nature of Change. Dr. Pye has multiple publications in peer-reviewed journals and continues to contribute to the growing field of ecopsychology. She is a member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Commission on Education and Communication (CEC), European Ecopsychology Society (EES), International Society for Environmental Ethics (ISEE) and serves on the Editorial Board for Ecopsychology Journal. Dr. Pye serves on Harrison Middleton University's Humanities Advisory Council and is a board member of From the Heart Film Productions, and Project Satori that aims to provide mental health treatment services to sex trafficking survivors and their families. Dr. Pye serves as faculty at Viridis Graduate Institute and the University of Santa Barbara (UCSB). She formerly taught ecopsychology at Kaweah Delta Mental Health Hospital Psychiatric Residency Program. Her textbook Fundamentals of Ecopsychology is forthcoming from Routledge in 2022.
About Bob

In 1979, Robert Walter began work with Joseph Campbell on several projects, including Campbell's  multivolume Historical Atlas of World Mythology, for which Bob became editorial director. As Campbell’s literary executor, following the famed mythologist’s death in 1987, Bob completed  and supervised the posthumous publication of the Historical Atlas. In 1990, when Bob and  Joseph Campbell’s widow, Jean Erdman, together with his family and close friends, founded the Joseph Campbell Foundation (JCF), Bob was named vice president and executive director.  He was appointed JCF president in 1998. He has spoken internationally about the connections between myth and healing.

John Bucher, PhD, moderator

John Bucher is a mythologist and storyteller based out of Hollywood, California. He serves as Creative Director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and is also an author, podcaster, and speaker. He has worked with companies including Atlas Obscura, HBO, DC Comics, The History Channel, A24 Films, The John Maxwell Leadership Foundation and served as a consultant and writer for numerous film, television, and Virtual Reality projects. He is the author of six books including the best-selling Storytelling for Virtual Reality, named by BookAuthority as one of the best storytelling books of all time.  Disruptor named him one of the top 25 influencers in Virtual Reality. John teaches writing and story courses in the Los Angeles area and around the world.  He holds a PhD in Mythology and Depth Psychology and has spoken on six continents about using the power of story and myth to reframe how individuals, organizations, cultures, and nations are viewed. For more about John’s work, visit tellingabetterstory.com

Mythologium 2021 welcomes Selena Madden

Selena’s talk is called “Reintegrating with Nature Through Our Body and Magickal Rituals”

Our connection with nature has been lost amidst the chaos and hustle of modern Westernized society. Not only has this disconnect separated us from our natural environment, it has created disharmony with our own bodies and our sense of peace and fulfillment, and weakened our ability to traverse life’s obstacles. To be estranged from nature creates discord within ourselves, for we are of nature and not separate entities. You cannot have a relationship with your body if you do not have a relationship with nature. Spiritual traditions from many cultures are rich with practices that foster coalescence with nature. One such tradition is witchcraft, and I will examine modern witchcraft rituals that can be utilized in today’s society by those who feel disconnected. Additionally, I will address specific deities who cultivate methods of connecting with our natural divinity. I will share insights from particular movement arts that foster intention, awareness, and mindfulness. Utilizing my extensive experience as a dancer, martial artist, and practitioner of traditional witchcraft I will offer tools to reintegrate mindful movement, reverence to nature, and reverence for ourselves into our lives.

About Selena

Selena Madden believes magic is a part of all of us and can guide us through life’s obstacles. She believes in fostering connection with one’s intuition, which to her, is akin to connecting with the divine. She carefully and respectfully works with deities from various pantheons, such as Hindu traditions, Celtic, Egyptian, Greek, and Yoruban.

As a trained dancer and martial artist, she has cultivated her learnings and passion into a shareable practice designed to help women (re)connect with their inner warrior, lover, and other archetypes. Her training stems from bellydance, snakedance, ballet, Capoeira, Filipino Lameco, Kung Fu, and Aikido. She is actively working on her dissertation for her PhD in Mythological Studies with an emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, where she earned her M.A. Pacifica has provided her the academic foundation to support her array of spiritual practices and holistic approaches for cultivating a powerful, loving, and nurtured feminine. She is currently working with her partner, Orpheus Black, in his thriving coaching practice around sexuality, intimacy, kink, and interpersonal power dynamics.