Category: Events

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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Dr. Jennifer Degnan Smith

Jennifer’s talk is called “Mythic Places of Greece Speak of our Ecological Ills”

The ancient Greeks recognized the deep connection between myth and place. The sacred places of myth were often the locations of rituals to honor the gods and goddesses. Perhaps there is something about these places that, even in modern times, holds the archetypal energies of the deities who were worshipped there.

Engaging the mythic places that hold archetypal energies around ecological consciousness through a terrapsychological lens (Chalquist, 2007) may provide insight into modern-day ecological and psychological ills. Terrapsychology explores how our outer landscapes reflect our inner landscapes, and vice-versa. We can access a place’s wisdom by listening empathetically to it through its symbols and images.

Engaging with mythic places may reveal the “health” of the archetypal energies of the gods and goddesses who were once worshipped there. For instance, Eleusis, once the place of the sacred mysteries of Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, is now a major industrial area with severe environmental issues. The River Ilissos in Athens, once the river of the gods, has been cemented over. These sacred places may provide wisdom about our ecological crisis and consciousness if we pay attention. 

Work Cited
Chalquist, C. (2007). Terrapsychology: Reengaging the soul of place. New Orleans, LA: Spring Journal Books.

About Jennifer

Jen Degnan Smith has a Ph.D. in Jungian and Archetypal Psychology. She explores sociocultural issues, particularly healing and empowering the feminine within individuals and the collective. Her 20-year career in organizational consulting and university teaching spans the United States and Europe. She spent eight years traveling extensively to Greece exploring ancient myth and the modern economic crisis.

2022 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Dr. Geoff Berry

Geoff’s talk is called “Ecomythic Light”

Our relationship with our more-than-human kin–the other animals, plants and elements we share this planet with–has been inscribed in countless animistic myths. Cosmologies of a living world can help us to practice deep listening to other forms of intelligence, creating breathing space for our embodied forms of consciousness as self-aware primates.

But we humans also dream up visions of a realm beyond the physical universe. In this endless imaginal dreaming of life beyond the limits of materiality, light holds a special place for the metaphorical potential it embodies. Light is both physical phenomena and a vehicle of meaning. This presentation offers an “ecomythic” way to balance and clarify our focus on these two streams of embodiment and gnosis at the same time. On the one hand, we consider the spiritually liberating nature of light, as it symbolises freedom and hope; and on the other, we breathe into the body of our physical paradigm, exploring how we might live in “right relation” with our kin on planet earth.

About Geoff

Dr. Geoff Berry’s PhD dissertation traced the way human relationships with nature could be interpreted through the way we inscribe meaning upon light (Monash University 2010). His previous MA explored the nexus between personal dreams and collective mythologies, again from an ecophilosophical perspective (Deakin University 2005). Geoff trains psychotherapists and ecotherapists with the Metavision Institute. He is the Australian Representative to the International Ecopsychology Society and has served as the Chairperson of the Melbourne Zen Group and CEO of the South Coast NSW Aboriginal Elders organization.

2022 Mythologium program
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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 Danielle Alexander

Danielle’s talk is called “Remembering Eve: How the Myth of Seven Sisters Connects Homo sapiens and Could Be an Avenue for Empathy Across Cultures”

The mythology surrounding the Pleiades is almost canonical, despite tales emerging from various cultures across time and space. Myths of the Seven Sisters are found in ancient Greece and Aboriginal Australia, and variants of the tale are found in Incan, Mayan, and eastern European cosmology. Even in locations where the story is not clear, such as in the Canary Islands, the Lascaux caves, and pre-Islamic Arabia, the Pleiades were culturally influential features of the sky.

It has been proposed that this mythos predates the Homo sapiens migration out of Africa 100,000 years ago when the tale of the Seven Sisters began crossing Europe and Asia. This would mean that the mythos of the Pleiades is one of if not the oldest story told by humans. The tale could be a means for all of humanity to connect to their shared ancestry, regardless of culture, politics, or religion. I seek to highlight how this mythos could encourage empathy by creating a space where diverse voices and traditions can connect through shared mythology and ancestry.

About Danielle

I am an English woman who lives in near Glastonbury, Somerset, United Kingdom. I have received a first-class Bachelor’s degree in Ancient Civilisations and I am currently studying for a Master’s in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology; both degrees are with the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Lampeter. Mythology has been a keen interest since I was young, and going to university to study the ancient world only affirmed my love for the mystical tales, practices, and traditions from around the globe. My main interest lay in architecture and the Neolithic or Early Bronze Age periods. I am also a cat-lover and enjoy sky-watching, both day and night.

2022 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Reise Eiseman-Sanchez Tanner

Reise’s talk is called “Baba Yaga and the Dark Forest: Engendering Truth and Wildness at the Thresholds”

Mythologist Martin Shaw has written that “myth is a wild way of telling the truth.” In these challenging times, both truth and the wild—in ourselves and the natural world—are endangered. Might the old stories be a way to preserve them and find our way forward? With their symbolic images and archetypal figures, myths are doorways to the collective unconscious. They are the voices of wild nature and the ancestors telling us who we are and how to be in the world even when we seem to have severed our connections to them.

Echoes of mythic figures are everywhere—embedded in pop culture, media and merchandise—reminding us that they are still present and can’t be silenced. One such figure that seems to be appearing is Baba Yaga, a wild witch of the woods in Slavic cultures. Depicted as an old woman or hag, her ambiguity, association with natural cycles, and status as a psychopomp inhabiting threshold locations suggest a connection with more ancient goddess traditions and an ecological consciousness. Perhaps her image shows up because it is time to listen rather than attempt to control and contain, to risk the unknown of apprenticeship with truth and wildness.

About Reise

Reise Eiseman-Sanchez Tanner is a PhD student focused on the practices of decolonial depth psychology, ecopsychology, and applied mythology at the crossroads of women’s spirituality, Indigenous traditions, and liberatory methods. Her research positions birthwork as sacred activism and mothering in feminist discourse while exploring archetypes of the Feminine, centering what has been marginalized, and finding ways to reconnect with the natural world. She is also a mother, storyteller, seasoned doula, perinatal educator, Certified Empowerment Coach, Maya Abdominal Therapy practitioner, and creator of multiple group programs who has attended hundreds of births and supported thousands of people through initiations and life cycle events.

2022 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Jason D. Batt

Jason’s talk is called “Do This in Remembrance of Me: Bits and Pieces in Re-membering the Body”

A third testament of the Christian tradition was never canonized. However, two works explore the fresh manifestation of a divine revelation of community within the natural world. These new scriptures guide us towards “re-membering” new bodies of community within a natural environment. Written 136 years apart, Moby Dick by Herman Melville and Beloved by Toni Morrison explore this transformation within the evolving American landscape. Each work’s Biblical allusions and narratological structure beg to be seen as a third testament, one which incarnates the collective community within the new sacred space of the natural world.

Ultimately, these scriptures guide the development of community firmly rooted in an ecological understanding. In Beloved, Baby Suggs is the manifestation of the divine and her chapel is that of the wild forest, far from the walls of standard temple or church. In Moby Dick, Queequeg is the Word incarnate and his prophet, Ishmael, extends the sacred space to the whole of the Earth: “I mean, sir, the same ancient Catholic Church to which . . . all of us . . . belong; the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole worshiping world . . . in that we all join hands.” The two works, in concert, present a path through myth towards community empathy.

About Jason

Jason D. Batt is the co-founder of Signal Hill Road Publishing. He serves as the Creative and Editorial Director for the 100 Year Starship and is the founder and organizer of the annual Canopus Award for Excellence in Interstellar Writing. His novels include Onliest, Young Gods, and Dreamside, and his short fiction has appeared in Perihelion, Bastion, Bewildering Stories, A Story Goes On, and other periodicals. Most recently he edited the science fiction anthology Visions of the Future, published through Lifeboat Foundation and Strange California, a successful Kickstarter through Falstaff Books.

2022 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Sophie Strand

Sophie’s talk is called “Myth and Mycelium”

I have been thinking of myths as the “fruiting body mushrooms” of underground mycelial mythic systems. I have come to the conclusion that you can only understand a myth in its particular ecosystem. Just like mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of underground mycelial systems, so are myths the particular above-ground mushrooms of a specific ecology. We can think of mythologems and mythic figures as being like the giant (perhaps 7,000-year-old) honey fungus in Oregon. It stretches for miles underground and fruits up as mushrooms that superficially look like individuals.

The cattle cults that spread across the Mediterranean during the Bronze Age are like the honey fungus. Orpheus and the Orphic hymns are now treated more as a title than a specific mythic figure. Lyric prophets stepped into the role of Orpheus. Perhaps my favorite example is Dionysus. Dionysus “fruits” up across the Mediterranean, in different cities, often looking different, offering a variety of fermented beverages as suited to the different ecologies. But the real Dionysus is the mycorrhizal system of vegetal gods underground, weaving a net that is ready to pop up and proliferate wherever nature-based, ecstatic wisdom is needed.

About Sophie

Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine will be published by Inner Traditions in Fall 2022 and is available for pre-order. Her eco-feminist, historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions in Spring 2023. Subscribe for her newsletter at sophiestrand.substack.com, and follow her work on Instagram (@cosmogyny) and at www.sophiestrand.com.

2022 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Ash McKernan

Ash’s talk is called “The Völuspá and the Nature of Wyrd Consciousness: A Presentation on the Prophetic and Magical Potential of Ecological Consciousness”

I invite you to join me on an extra-ordinary exploration of a form of ecological consciousness that has been around for more than 1500 years, called wyrd consciousness. Wyrd—the progenitor of the word weird—was an ancient Northern European concept used to point to the mysterious happenings of fate, destiny, nature, magic, soul, and becoming. Wyrd consciousness, as well as being other things, is the experiential awareness of the interweaving of these threads. It is the consciousness represented and embodied by the Norns (the Norse Fates), by Nature, and by both ancient and modern practitioners of the divinatory and mystic nature-magic known as seiðr (pronounced say-thr).

Using as a touchstone the 10th century Norse poem, Völuspá—in which an unnamed “seiðr-woman” reveals the creation, destruction and rebirth of the cosmos to the “seiðr-man” and ecstatic god, Odin—I will facilitate an inquiry into the nature of seiðr, wyrd, and wyrd consciousness, and discuss how wyrd consciousness—as well as every form of eco-consciousness—is not only naturally revelatory, healing and transformative, but also inherently prophetic and magical. Considering the ecological-soul-crisis of our zeitgeist, this makes the mythos of Völuspá, the concept of wyrd, and the phenomenon of wyrd consciousness profoundly relevant. After all, one must see the strings of fate before one may pull the strings of fate. Wyrd consciousness can help us do both.

*This presentation will be based on material from my forthcoming book, Wyrdcraft: Healing Self and Nature through the Mysteries of the Fates, to be published by Llewellyn Publications, January 2023.

About Ash

Ash McKernan is a psychotherapist (MFT), ecotherapist, bard, pagan, and life-long explorer of wyrd. He earned his BA in anthropology from the Ohio State University with a focus on the evolution of consciousness, and his MA in Integral Counseling Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies with a focus on transpersonal therapy, Gestalt therapy, and ecotherapy. Before this, Ash worked for many years at the Arc of San Francisco as a direct-support professional for and with people with developmental differences/disabilities. He loves to spend time at the crossroads where psyche, magic, and healing intersect. You can visit his website at www.wyrdwildweb.com.

2022 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Courtney Kleftis

Courtney’s talk is called “Nymphs and Nymphomania: Reclaiming Kallisto as the ‘Bride’ of Artemis and the Sacred Wilderness”

The Greco-Roman pantheon is littered with understudied and oft-forgotten divine figures including its wealth of nymphs: “minor” goddesses associated with the innate faerie-like enchantment of the natural world. Kallisto, daughter of the Arcadian nymph Nonakris, whose name means “most beautiful,” is one of Zeus’s many rape victims. Her story traditionally functions as a cautionary tale against being too alluring for the lustful gods as she is victim-shamed by her own mentor, Artemis, and punished for the rapist’s crime against her.

Although “nymph” originally meant young, nubile bride, by the Victorian era nymphs resurfaced in the concept of nymphomania which pathologized women’s sexuality and their supposedly excessive lust. In this paper, I propose a queer remythologizing of Kallisto’s story by reclaiming her “nymphomania” as a positive expression of the endlessly erotic and creative potential of both women’s bodies and the earth Herself. Drawing inspiration from Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s Women Who Run with the Wolves, I depict Kallisto as the “bride” (nymph) of Artemis and by extension of the untamed wilderness overseen by this Hellenic goddess of the hunt. This retelling restores to both Kallisto and the earth Herself agency and sovereignty while celebrating sapphic love and queer women’s desire.

About Courtney

Dr. Courtney Kleftis is a former musicologist, music librarian and the founder of The Goddess Foundation (www.thegoddessfoundation.org) library, archive, and online spiritual center (established September 2021). Courtney is dedicated to rewilding women’s sacred and sexual experiences. In addition to her Artemisian research, she is in the process of developing TGF’s pilot initiative: an oral herstory project dedicated to exploring women’s experiences of the divine feminine within the traditionally patriarchal Abrahamic religions.

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