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 2020 welcomes J. Emile Moss

J. Emile’s talk is called, “Psychic Reality Lost & Found: Evocations in Language and Vision”

The term “psychic” is as fraught as it is interesting: connoting both the neon-lit side street phenomenon of the tarot card reader as well as the complex conceptions of the human psyche found in the psychological tradition, that which is psychic draws a huge range of associations and intellectual responses. C.G. Jung famously asserted that “only psychic existence is immediately verifiable. To the extent that the world does not assume the form of a psychic image, it is virtually non-existent.” In essence, all that we perceive is psychic reality. Through the diverse lenses of divinatory poetics, new comparative mysticism, and depth psychological thought, this presentation begins to explore the primacy of psychic reality and calls for the necessary reinstantiation of the psychic as a broad mode of conception.

About J. Emile

J. Emile Moss is an interdisciplinary poet, musician, mythologist, educator and psychospiritual intuitive based in Portland, Oregon. The J. is for Jesse (they/them, he/him). Jesse received an MA in the study of Mythology with an emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, as well as a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They are currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Pacifica exploring the jazz musician Sun Ra’s personal mythology. At the core of Jesse’s work is the belief in the deep power of the psyche, the guidance of dreams, the living force of language and poesis, and the revelatory capabilities of narrative – both personal and collective. 

The Mythologium welcomes our keynote speaker, Dr. Safron Rossi

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Safron Rossi will deliver the keynote speech at the Fates and Graces Mythologium. Read on for more, and register today to reserve your spot.

In Ananke’s Lap: Finding Beauty Through the Mythic Perspective

To invoke the Fates and Graces means reflecting on the twin themes of necessity and beauty in the mythic perspective. If we open up to what Hillman called ‘archetypal necessity,’ personified by the goddess Ananke who was mother of the Fates, we invite more grace into our lives. We learn to be graceful — supple, agile and receptive — by being more attuned to the deep patterns of the psyche and cosmos, and myth is what helps us do this.

Safron Rossi, Ph.D., is Associate Core Faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute in the Jungian and Archetypal Studies MA/PhD program, teaching courses on mythology, archetypal symbolism, and research. For many years she was the Curator at Opus Archives, which holds the Joseph Campbell and James Hillman manuscript collections. Her writing and scholarly studies focus on Greek mythology, archetypal psychology, astrological studies, alchemy, goddess traditions, and feminist studies. Safron is editor of Joseph Campbell’s Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine (2013), and co-editor with Keiron Le Grice of Jung on Astrology (2017). Safron has published articles in Jungian, Archetypal, and astrological journals and lectures across the US and internationally in Europe, Brazil and Australia. 

You can connect with Safron through her website, www.thearchetypaleye.com, and on Instagram.

The Mythologium welcomes Dr. Dori Koehler

Dori’s presentation is titled, “Roger’s Labors: The Resonance of Eros and Psyche in Outlander”

In his seminal work Amor and Psyche, Erich Neumann suggests that Psyche’s story offers a key to understanding the process of coming to know and fall in love with one’s own soul. This depth psychological approach shows how stories activate divine energies in the world around us, making the mythic gods real as they walk in our imaginations and in our interactions with others. We see the resonances of these myths in the stories we continue to tell and retell. My presentation will look the relationship between the characters Brianna Randall Fraser and Roger Mackenzie Wakefield in season four of the Outlander television series. I will explore the presence of motifs connected to Eros and Psyche as I discuss how the activation of these archetypal energies helps to illuminate ways we might think about deepening our relationships with others and with ourselves.

About Dori:

Dori Koehler, Ph.D. is a cultural mythologist and scholar of American popular culture. She is a professor of Humanities and Popular Culture at Southern New Hampshire University. Her book The Mouse and the Myth: Sacred Art and Secular Ritual is available on Amazon. Her latest article on Walt Disney as a manifestation of the trickster archetype will be published in a forthcoming collection of essays through John Libbey Publishing. She lives in Santa Barbara with her husband and their cocker spaniel, Sorcha.

To connect with Dori, visit her blog, Of Myth and (Hu)Men: Myth and Ritual of our Time.