Category: Presenters

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

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Heather Taylor and Odette Springer

A special panel featuring two mythologist-filmmakers

Joining us at this year’s Mythologium are two documentary filmmakers who are also mythologists: Heather Taylor and Odette Springer. Heather is the writer, director, and producer of the award-winning documentary, Breaking Through the Clouds: The First Women’s National Air Derby. Odette wrote, directed, and produced the critically acclaimed film about the B-movie industry, Some Nudity Required.

The Mythologium is delighted to host an interview and conversation with these visionary members of our community. We will hear about their creative process, their mythological perspectives on film, and their experiences as women in the film industry. We’ll make sure to leave time for audience discussion, so join us and bring your questions.

Breaking Through the Clouds: The First Women’s National Air Derby

Breaking Through the Clouds is the inspiring true story of twenty female pilots — including Amelia Earhart — who defied convention by racing across America in propellor airplanes for nine grueling days in the summer of 1929. With little navigational aide and plenty of public scrutiny, these aviators succeeded as pilots in an era when women rarely drove cars. Facing cultural stereotypes, mechanical failures, threats of sabotage, navigational challenges, and endless chicken dinners, the women persevered. Whether fighting a fire in the cockpit, landing in a pasture full of cows, or facing criticism and demands for the derby to stop after the death of a colleague, the women captured the world’s attention as they rallied to prove this was more than just a race. Despite several heartbreaks and setbacks, there were many moments of joy, laughter, and pure wonder. Wearing breeches and goggles during the day and ballgowns in the evening, the women shared a genuine camaraderie while making a statement in a new era with new technology and new dreams. They became ambassadors of flight in the golden age of aviation, proving women could be independent, competitive, self-sufficient, intelligent, competent, graceful, and above all, really good pilots.

About Heather

Heather Taylor is the producer, director, writer, and researcher of the award-winning documentary Breaking Through the Clouds: The First Women’s National Air Derby. Currently airing on PBS stations across the country, Breaking Through the Clouds has received top honors from more than a dozen film festivals as well as a prestigious award from the National Aviation Hall of Fame, presented by Harrison Ford, Eugene Cernan, and six additional aviation legends of today. 

Heather formed her production company Archetypal Images, LLC to capture and harness the light that comes alive in people’s eyes when they find inspiration and purpose in life. Before starting her own company, Heather worked at Discovery Communications. Heather has a Masters Degree in Producing Film and Video and is currently in her second year of the Mythology Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Heather’s attraction to myth is especially strong regarding finding one’s voice and stepping into stories that promote healing while helping a person find their own genius. Learn more at http://breakingthroughtheclouds.com. 

Some Nudity Required

About Odette

Odette Springer, Ph.D is a writer, independent film producer and classically trained musician. She has been a singer/songwriter and composer for over 25 films for such companies as HBO, Showtime, Paramount Studios and the Disney Channel, as well as numerous international television networks. Her first feature documentary about Hollywood’s B-Movie industry premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. She shot 48 hours of footage and obtained the rights to use clips from over 30 erotic/slasher/action adventure feature films. Her film eventually evolved into 90 hours of footage that became a harrowing personal journey and resulted in the critically acclaimed Some Nudity Required, which immediately secured worldwide distribution.

Currently, Odette teaches writing as part of the Joseph Campbell Writers Room at Studio School in Los Angeles. In addition to publishing her poetry, she has published academic essays in several anthologies and lectures on trauma and the creative process. Her most recent article, “Renaissance,” can be found on the Joseph Campbell foundation website. She holds a B.A. in Piano from Manhattan School of Music and a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies with an emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Her dissertation focuses on trauma and the creative process and is entitled Changing Woman: Calling The Feminine Home. She is fluent in French, Spanish, and Dutch, has traveled extensively around the world, and has a quirky sense of humor.

2020 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2020 welcomes the Joseph Campbell Foundation

Opportunities for mythologists to get involved

Leaders from the Joseph Campbell Foundation will offer a presentation outlining a brief history of the work of the organization, exciting future endeavors, and how Mythologium attendees can be a part of collaborating with JCF. The panel will include Bradley Olson, JCF MythBlast Editor; John Bucher, JCF Content Curator; and Joanna Gardner, JCF Senior Editor.

The Foundation’s mission revolves around preserving, protecting, and perpetuating Joseph Campbell’s mythic vision. A global community of artists, scholars, writers, educators, and questers, the organization endeavors to create and promote conversations and work in mythology and comparative religion.

About Bradley

Bradley Olson, Ph.D., is a former police officer who returned to school to earn a Bachelor’s degree in psychology and literature, two Master’s degrees in psychology, and a Ph.D. in Cultural Mythology. Dr. Olson is currently a psychotherapist in private practice at Mountain Waves Healing Arts in Flagstaff, Arizona; his work with clients is heavily influenced by his interest in Jungian Analytical Psychology and Mythological Studies. Brad is also the author of the acclaimed Falstaff Was My Tutor blog, which has earned him a nomination for the 2012 Pushcart Prize in nonfiction.

About John

John Bucher, PhD. is the Content Curator for the Joseph Campbell Foundation. He is a strategist, communicator, and cultural mythologist based out of Hollywood, California. He is also an author, podcaster, and speaker.

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 in 2018. John has worked with companies including 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 teaches writing and story courses at the LA Film Studies Center and holds a PhD in Mythology and Depth Psychology. John has spoken on 5 continents about using the power of story and myth to reframe how products, individuals, organizations, cultures, and nations are viewed.

About Joanna

Joanna Gardner, PhD is a writer, mythologist, and magical realist. She is a founder of the Fates and Graces Mythologium. Joanna serves as Senior Editor on the Educational Task Force of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, and as a thought leader with the think tank iRewild, where she works on the Healing Stories initiative. She completed her doctoral degree at Pacifica Graduate Institute in mythological studies with an emphasis in depth psychology. Her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction appear in a variety of venues, available at joannagardner.com/stories. To contact Joanna, email joanna at joannagardner dot com.

2020 Mythologium program
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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. 

2020 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Arthur George

Arthur’s talk is called, “The Mythology of Groundhog Day and the film Groundhog Day“

Our holiday Groundhog Day may seem merely to be simple, trivial fun, but it has a profound mythological underpinning of which most people are unaware. So too does the Bill Murray film Groundhog Day, whose makers understood this mythology and worked it into the film. The myths, which go back to the ancient classical world, are about rebirth and personal transformation. I will argue that the myths underlying the holiday involve the hibernation of that most mythical creature, the bear; oracles and divination (including about the weather); and legendary caves in which historical and legendary people reportedly became enlightened and transformed (e.g., Pythagoras, Zalmoxis, Epimenides, and Apollonius of Tyana). This presentation will explain the underlying mythology and then show how it was used to great effect in this film about spiritual transformation. And you will learn the mythological reasons why a sunny Groundhog Day, when the critter sees his shadow, portends more winter. This presentation is based on the Groundhog Day chapter of my new, peer-reviewed book, The Mythology of our Seasonal Holidays, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan.

About Arthur

Arthur George is a mythologist, cultural historian, blogger, and winemaker; formerly he was an international lawyer. He has written the award-winning The Mythology of Eden (2014) about the mythology of the biblical Eden story, and before that the leading and award-winning history of St. Petersburg, Russia, entitled St. Petersburg: the First Three Centuries. His newest book, The Mythology of America’s Seasonal Holidays: The Dance of the Horae, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in September. He has a mythology blog, frequently speaks at scholarly conferences, institutes, JCF Roundtables, and other audiences on mythological topics, and authors articles on the same. He is currently finishing a book about the mythology of wine, which will be published this autumn.

2020 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Dr. Bradley Olson

Bradley’s talk is called, “Thinking Myth: Seeing the Nothing That is not There and the Nothing That Is”

Using poetry, mythic images and stories, I will demonstrate that the compelling power of myth rests upon nothing. There is a nothing at the heart of myth that is not nothing, but is rather a no-thing. A no-thing is a something that should not be confused with a nothing, but developing this discernment is, as Wallace Stevens’ poem, The Snow Man, illustrates is more than a difficult grammatical task, it is an often arduous intellectual and emotional undertaking. But the no-thingness of myth is often overlooked in favor of understanding gods as things in themselves, or even energies, with which one may have some sort of personal connection. Mythic stories and figures are then amalgamated into a kind of catch all, an ersatz deployment of different traditions, times, and locations against the existential dread which results from living an irreducible and fundamentally subjective human life.

One reason this can be so is that so few contemporary people know these stories. If they are familiar with elements of the story or the culture out of which it arises, they may still be unfamiliar with the details. They will still delight in the story because the no-thingness of myth is so present and so powerful.

About Bradley

Bradley Olson, Ph.D., a former police officer, is a writer and a depth psychologist in private practice in Flagstaff, AZ for the past 25 years, and is also a mythologist with a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Dr. Olson is the editor (and frequent contributor) to the MythBlast series on the Joseph Campbell Foundation website (jcf.org). 

2020 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Dr. Olivia Happel-Block

Olivia’s talk is called, “Frankly My Dear, I Do Give a Damn:  Teaching Film as Mythic Literature”

Film Studies is a field which examines the techniques of storytelling through film and the impact which it has upon society. From the high school classroom to student filmmaking to film festivals, our academic and cultural society is starting to look at what makes a movie great and why we care so much about these films. In my Film Studies course, I hold that a film functions as our “text” much as a novel would in a traditional English course. My students examine film through the lens of literary, dramatic, and cinematic criticism along with Joseph Campbell’s “Hero Cycle”. 

In this presentation, I explore my approach of teaching film as mythic literature in order to gain the skills of summary, analysis, and critique along with an appreciation of the mythic storytelling behind good films. I outline my use of genre and media studies alongside the use of prompt response and my film analysis form. My goal is to share how one may approach teaching film as mythic literature to understand better how to integrate film and myth in teaching key rhetorical skills. 

About Olivia

Olivia Happel-Block, PhD, is a Latin, Mythology, Theory of Knowledge, English, and Film Studies teacher at Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta, CA. There she serves as the Extended Essay Coordinator (a four thousand word research essay composed by IB students over the junior and senior year). She has created her own curriculum for both the Mythology and Film Studies course at DPHS. Her dissertation, That Which Is Not Yet Known:  An Alchemical Analysis of Michael Maier’s Arcana Arcanissima, explores themes of mythology, alchemy, and religion. Olivia serves as the Pacifica Graduate Institute Alumni Association’s Vice President. She has presented at the American Academy of Religion Regional Conference as well as the Pop Culture Association’s Regional and National Conference. Her academic interests include myth, religious studies, alchemy, and classics. She seeks to pursue the #immutablediamondbody throughout her life, scholarship, and career. Follow her on Instagram @doctorhappel. 

2020 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Jane Alvey Harris

Jane’s talk is called, “Fiction and Film: The Winged Serpent and the Journey to Prajna-Paramita”

Reaching the “Wisdom of the Distant Shore” is synonymous with the search for and discovery of our individual manifestations of transcendence, or the universal quest for personal mythology. The act of fictionalizing personal history, including trauma, repressed memories, and/or emotions, allows an author/screenwriter to both unmake and examine situations from a protected distance, and to ultimately reframe experiences from a position of strength. Exploring established cognitive pathways and rerouting responses to triggers through the lens of archetypal psychology empowers writer, reader, and viewer, as they each witness the often painful separation of paired opposites, and celebrate their eventual reunification. The process of crafting a book/screenplay becomes a vehicle on the journey to Prajna-Paramita for the writer. For the audience, the finished product is a tangible incarnation of the Winged Serpent, present in multiple forms and providing catharsis, insight, and entertainment.

About Jane

Jane Alvey Harris is the author of the My Myth Trilogy, a hard-hitting, issue-driven contemporary account of a seventeen-year-old girl whose reality fractures when her childhood abuser re-enters her life. RIVEN, SECRET KEEPER, and PRIMED are fictionalized documentations of a survivor’s journey to make peace with her wounded egos and achieve self-acceptance. Jane writes that through the process of weaving her tale, “I realized I was laying my hands directly on the tattered pieces of a buried map leading to rich interior landscapes I’d never acknowledged or explored before because I considered them ugly, worthless, and humiliating.” Best-selling RIVEN and SECRET KEEPER, the first two books in the trilogy, have won multiple awards. More importantly, they have started an international dialogue about living with PTSD, and ways in which victims of childhood abuse can do more than survive, they can thrive. Book three, PRIMED, will be released in September of 2020. RIVEN has been optioned for a feature film.

2020 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Corinne Bourdeau

Corinne’s talk is called, “The Magic Lantern: An Exploration of Myth, Depth Psychology, and Imagination in Cinema”

The Magic Lantern: An exploration of myth, depth psychology, and imagination in cinema. Cinema provides a gateway into the rich imaginal worlds of psyche and imagination. The Magic Lantern presentation is a dynamic, lively and interactive presentation consisting of film clips, lecture, storytelling, and a suggested viewing list of mythic films that feature archetypes, depth psychology and myth in cinema. The Magic Lantern presentation explores topics such as:

  • The Mythic Filmmaker – filmmakers who weave myth into their films (George Lucas, Guillermo Del Toro, Federico Fellini and Julie Taymor)
  • What Dreams May Come: Dream and Film – a rich exploration of how filmmakers use dreams in their creative process and films
  • Mythic Creatures and Films
  • Films and the Underworld
  • Ecotherapy and Film 
  • Symbol and Imagery in Film
  • Tenemos: The Myth of Place – the exploration of mythical landscapes in films
  • The Enchanted Screen: Fairy Tales and Film

This presentation is based on a book titled The Magic Lantern, consisting of over 400 pages of research in film, myth and cinema. It is also intended to provide thought provoking ideas and content for the upcoming Pacficia film festival and conference in Fall of 2021.

About Corinne

Corinne Bourdeau is the founder and president of 360 Degree Communications, a boutique entertainment marketing firm that specializes in independent films. Under her leadership, the company has worked on hundreds of films including  Boyhood, The Celestine Prophecy, The Way, Fantastic Fungi, Music of Strangers and the Academy award winning films The Cove and Free Solo.  Corinne is also the founder and director of the Esalen film festival.  She has a Master’s Degree in depth psychology and mythology from the Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is currently writing the book The Magic Lantern:  Exploring Myth and Mysticism in Film based on her studies at Pacifica.    

2020 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Dr. Joyce McCart

Joyce’s talk is called, “Chasing Aphrodite . . . Manifestations of Desire”

Our recourse is to Aphrodite, and our first way of discovering her is in the disease of her absence. (Hillman, The Thought of the Heart 41)

The ancient Divine Feminine’s energetic re-emergence in western culture’s 21st century—through the diverse cacophony of women’s political voices, the fracturing of binary gender identity, the break-through genetic research of the double-X chromosome, and the focused rage of Millennials’ warrior energy—aids in neutralizing hubristic, Oedipal, and ancient core causes of resistance to the Divine Feminine that move Her from sacred to profane into alterity. Theorized as desire for a sublime embrace with the Divine, “Chasing Aphrodite. . .” looks into the opaque underrealm of humanity’s virginal psyche, where penetrating truths and undifferentiated values collide.

Hubris shadowing the feminine camouflages the Soul’s desire for anima consciousness and manifests resistance to psyche | soul | anima as a vehicle of distress within humanity’s collective unconscious. Insight into what underlies such resistance is embedded in the prolific writings and lectures of archetypal psychologist James Hillman, and the revelatory writings of archetypal psychologists Patricia Berry and Rafael Lopez Pedraza.

The layered complexity within Berry’s book of essays entitled Echo’s Subtle Body informs that desire-for-embrace commences with The Mother, and illuminates resistance as undifferentiated impersonal values imprisoned within a virginal psyche. Berry’s clarification of virginal resistance as archetypal, Lopez-Pedraza’s mantra “stay with the image,” and Hillman’s writings on soullessness as an absence of anima advocate the power of listening to hear—a meta-hodos to hear what the Soul wants, and diffuse heuristic methods of resistance maintained within postmodern western cultures.

“Chasing Aphrodite. . . Manifestations of Desire” offers interpellations exposing ancient methods, subjectivation, and codified hubris normalized within the ethos of western thought and its monomythic socio-political culture; clarifies core causes of resistance that feed western culture’s virginal psyche; and re-deposits the paradox that western culture’s resistance to the Feminine replicates an Oedipal heroic style (see Hillman, “Oedipus Revisited” 97), which is also soul-making.

About Joyce

Dr. Joyce McCart is a research scholar whose formative inquiry tracks core causes of resistance to the feminine Other and the methods and values that feed/sustain hubristic resistance to the feminine. Her research focuses on western culture’s enigmatic obsession with “Chasing Aphrodite” as desire to embrace the Feminine Divine. A mother of two adult daughters and grandmother to three grandsons, Dr. McCart infuses her professional work with socio-political activism through engaged witnessing, applied educational methodologies, and open dialogues to illuminate discriminatory practices by policy makers. As an artist, she is an accomplished educator, theatre director, playwright, essayist, and poet. Dr. McCart holds a B.A. in Literature and advanced degrees in Theatre and Mythological Studies with emphasis in Depth Psychology. She lives in Austin Texas and the coastal Redwoods of northern California.

2020 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Dylan Young

Dylan’s talk is called, “Logos of Folly, Folly of Logos: The Psychological Difference of Missing the Point in ‘Being There’”

Misunderstanding often presupposes there to be an object of knowing and an imagining of having ascertained its meaning. There is surely something to get by ‘not getting it’, however, or in the failure to understand the joke other than the arrival of tragedy. By missing out on an understanding, knowledge that is in view of something sublated arrives. This presentation stumbles into necessary questions in such a scene: What is the point of knowledge for psychological life, why does the desire for it seem to frustrate ‘getting the point’—especially within human relationships—and who is the psychological benefactor inculcating these questions with expectations for further skullduggery? By reevaluating the Greek notion of logos as legein (known to Heidegger as “gathering”), or listening, this presentation discloses archetypal fools and clowns as the perennial stylers of metaphorical listening and, perhaps, the neglected necessity of errancy that is savior and saboteur to our mis/understandings. The film ‘Being There’ (1979) is discussed to demonstrate the aesthetic qualities of listening as procedures of Roberts Avens’ “new gnosis”—a coniunctio of Hillmanian and Heideggerian imaginings—through which knowledge is occasioned by splitting the (psychological) difference in soul’s presentation to reveal its absolute negativity, in Wolfgang Giegerich’s terms, or what is gathered in and by the film’s audience.

About Dylan

Dylan Andrew Young, M.A., is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist, Associate Professional Clinical Counselor, and solivagant living between Santa Barbara and Santa Fe. He holds a Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology with an Emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and a Bachelor of Arts in Audio Arts & Acoustics from Columbia College Chicago. In addition to making ecologically informed sound art, Dylan is the author of Out of the Blue: An Errant Exploration Into the Imaginational Listening of Aisthesis (2020) and a volunteer archival technician at OPUS Archives and Research Center.

2020 Mythologium program