Category: Keynote

Keynote speakers at the Fates and Graces Mythologium, a virtual conference for mythologists.

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Mythologium 2023 welcomes our keynote speaker, Dr. Emily Lord-Kambitsch

We are thrilled to announce that the keynote speaker for the 2023 Mythologium will be Dr. Emily Lord-Kambitsch. Building on last year’s theme of ecological consciousness, and directly addressing this year’s theme of Myth and the Heart, Emily’s presentation will discuss Ovid’s Metamorphoses from an ecopsychological and posthumanist perspective. We appreciate how posthumanism takes humans and non-humans into account, embracing a world far bigger than just us people. Read on for the abstract of Emily’s talk.

Becoming Heart-less: Mythic Metamorphoses and the Posthuman

As humans, we are heart-carriers, and there is a certain anthropocentrism inherent in the human quest for a heart-centered relationship with the world through story. But the world we inhabit contains countless sensate organisms who do not have hearts, but whose subjective experience is nevertheless imagined, recorded, and transmitted through myth and folklore in sensory, psychological, moral, and spiritual terms that we can understand.

The Roman poet Ovid’s epic, Metamorphoses, offers many tales of human or humanoid creatures undergoing transformation into non-human (and some heart-less) beings. Treating examples from this text through a dual perspective of ecopsychology and posthumanism, we will seek to understand how myths offer a way for us to observe ourselves in contact with the mysterious subjectivities of the “heart-less” beings in our world, from plants and stones to the ever-listening Amazon Alexa housed in the corner of the living room, through the capacities of the human heart.

About Emily

A lifelong poet-storyteller and student of ancient Mediterranean languages and literature, Emily Lord-Kambitsch, PhD is Co-Chair and Associate Core faculty in the Mythological Studies program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She teaches courses in Greco-Roman myth, ritual studies, memoir and self-writing, research approaches, and dissertation formulation. Outside of Pacifica she leads workshops in “Mythic Movement,” a practice of personal myth-making through deep listening and intuitive movement. Emily is passionate about supporting students’ connection with the perennial stories that call to them through academic, artistic, and personal lenses.

2023 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes our keynote speaker, Dr. Craig Chalquist

In keeping with the 2022 theme of Myth and Ecological Consciousness, we are thrilled to announce that this year’s keynote speaker will be Dr. Craig Chalquist. Craig is a professor, author, storyteller, and consultant who writes and teaches at the intersection of psyche, story, ecology, and imagination. His Mythologium keynote is called “Terragnosis: Yesterday’s Folklore, Today’s Earthly Wisdom.” Welcome, Craig!

Terragnosis: Yesterday’s Folklore, Today’s Earthly Wisdom

What do the old stories tell us about how to relate to nature, place, element, animals, and planet—and how not to? What are the warnings and wisdoms we discover in the ancient tales when retold for our time? Drawing on the framework of Hermeticism, an Earth-honoring wisdom path originating in Egypt and infusing alchemy, Islamic gnosticism, European Romanticism, depth psychology, spiritual ecology, and now terrapsychology, we will learn how the Way of the Mage can guide our understanding as tales once told around the world return to life in an ecologically troubled time.

Craig Chalquist, PhD is a depth psychologist and ecopsychologist whose teachings and books focus on the intersection of folklore, story, place, nature, and psyche. The former Associate Provost of Pacifica Graduate Institute, he is core faculty in the Department of East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. His most recent book is Terrapsychological Inquiry: Restorying Our Relations with Nature, Place, and Planet (Routledge, 2020). He is also author of Myths Among Us: When Timeless Tales Return to Life (World Soul Books, 2018). Visit his website chalquist.com. 

2022 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2021 welcomes our keynote speaker, Dennis Patrick Slattery, PhD

Our Mythologium 2021 keynote speaker will be Dennis Patrick Slattery, PhD. In keeping with our theme of myth and healing, Dennis’s talk is called “Healing into Wholeness: Healing as Myth and Method.” If you already know Dennis’s work, you’ll understand why we’re so thrilled to have him join the program. If you don’t know his work yet, your soul is in store for a treat.

Healing into Wholeness: Healing as Myth and Method

Indeed, healing may not necessarily be identical with saving or preserving life. – Edward Whitmont, The Alchemy of Healing

We are each a series of paradoxes — patient and  healer, infected and inflected, afflicted and blessed, a wound and a wonder. At times it seems that most mythologies and stories that accrue from them are concerned with qualities of being bloodied and blessed, scourged and saved at the same time.  Each of these ands involves a myth seeking expression, shaping our plot-line and infusing our embodied blood-line, a vehicle for the flow of our life’s energy. Every healing is haunted by the shadows of an earlier infection.

This presentation will explore the power of a contagion as a large encompassing metaphor, to heal as it wounds. Such a pollution can be an occasion, even opportunity, for the gods to enter the arena to provoke us into a level of awareness that we could not have understood without an invasive infection that inflects our lives into a greater mytho-spiritual consciousness.

About Dennis

Dennis Patrick Slattery, Ph.D. has been teaching for 52 years, the last 26 in the Mythological Studies Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California, where he is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus. He is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of 30 volumes, including 7 volumes of poetry and one novel co-authored with Charles Asher. His most recent titles include Deep Creativity: Seven Ways to Spark Your Creative Spirit, co-authored with Deborah Ann Quibell and Jennifer Leigh Selig, and From War to Wonder: Recovering Your Personal Myth Through Homer’s Odyssey. His most recent collection of essays is An Obscure Order: Reflections On Cultural Mythologies. In addition, he has published over 200 articles, book reviews and op-ed pieces. He offers writing retreats on C.G. Jung’s The Red Book as well as on Writing One’s Personal Myth through the works of Joseph Campbell and other mythologists. He has been taking painting classes in water color and acrylics for the past 8 years. For recreation he enjoys the pleasures of walking in nature, lap swimming at a local recreation center, and riding his Harley Davidson motorcycle with his sons Matt and Steve in the Texas Hill Country.

Dennis’s email is dslattery@pacifica.edu and his new website is available at www.dennispatrickslattery.com.

2021 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2020 welcomes our keynote speaker, Glen Slater, PhD

We are thrilled to announce that, in keeping with our 2020 theme of myth and cinema, our keynote speaker at this year’s Mythologium will be Glen Slater, PhD.

Cinema Magic and the Cosmological Function of Myth

The mythic dimension of cinema is widely recognized. Heroes venture forth, soulmates search for each other, ordinary people are caught in battles between good and evil. The gods reappear in enduring themes like love and war, in the urging of spiritual quests and in the arrangement of underworld abductions. Whereas some find all this merely entertaining, others experience a form of immersion in divine drama. 

In this presentation, I will suggest that the mythic quality of a film is not only attributable to the themes and characters that comprise the screen story, but has to do with the way the story is conveyed. That is, what largely generates mythic quality is the art of filmmaking itself. 

I will focus on the way film portrays an ordered and meaningful cosmos. It does this by mixing several powerful elements that engage and guide our imagination. Four such elements—setting, cinematography, editing and music—and the role they play in conveying the more-than-human quality of existence will be highlighted. 

About Glen

Glen Slater teaches at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California, where he is Associate Chair of the Jungian and Archetypal Studies Program. He has written for a number of Jungian publications, edited the third volume of James Hillman’s Uniform Edition, Senex and Puer, as well as the essay collection, Varieties of Mythic Experience. He regularly uses film in his classes to illustrate and explore archetypal patterns, teaches a course on mythology and cinema, has published many film reviews and is the past film review editor of Spring Journal.      

2020 Mythologium program
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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.