Category: Presenters

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

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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Dr. Kathryn Makeyev

Kathryn’s talk is called “More Than”

Our first dimension begins with either/or, and our second expands to both/and. I suggest there is a third dimension, the more/than.

Imagine either/or as one black circle and one white circle. Both/and connects these separate two into a mandorla whose eye sees into both, and thus begins one’s awareness of the other. When we evolve to the more/than 3D, the yin/yang tajitu, our consciousness shifts again to a mystical statement of unity, an entanglement that promises to better understand our connections to each other, our environment, and our cosmos.

Mythologists compare a shift of consciousness to walking a labyrinth instead of a maze. Whereas a maze is a bunch of spots that are not connected, seeming like a random play for survival, a labyrinth lays out a path of organized dots to invite contemplation. The drama of twenty-first century life challenges us to survive and to contemplate. But we require more than that to thrive and evolve. When we mythologists remember Plato’s nous and Heraclitus’ flow, Teilhard de Chardin’s omega point and Thich Naht Hanh’s interbeing, we begin a conversation that entangles them all and invites. Let’s also conjure Iain McGilchrist.

About Kathryn

Kathryn has lived for over 30 years in San Luis Obispo, home of the Slo Transit Company, the Slo Real Estate Development Company, and the Slomotion Film Festival, and she likes it more each day. She is finishing a novel (slo-style) about reincarnation through history.

2022 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Jonathan Vaughn

Jonathan’s talk is called “Seeking the Seven: The Lenape myth of Ansisktayèsàk (Pleiades) and Wisdom for a Changing Age”

This paper explores the Lenape myth of Ansisktayèsàk, the constellation known as Pleiades in English and Greek, and looks at four specific symbols that pervade the ancient record and ancestral lands of the Lenape—namely Awèn, Ahsën, Hìtëkw, and Alànkw—or Human, Stone, Tree, and Star (Lenape Language Preservation Project, 2021a; Speck, 1931, pp. 170-173; Hìtakonanu’laxk, 2012, pp. 86-87, 128).

The myth of Ansisktayèsàk reflects the Lenape creation myth, wherein the Great Turtle rose above the waters and on whose back emerged a Great Tree that sprouted both a man and woman, from whom “all humanity descended” (Miller, 2017, p. 1). Furthermore, the myth of Ansisktayèsàk illuminates a belief that humans should be in relationship with Stones, Trees, and Stars. These powerful beings are ancestors whose wisdom and mediation should be sought. Looking at and reflecting on this myth offers both a potent meditation on the importance of human relationships with other forms of life and a model for how to thrive in an age of ecological crisis.

About Jonathan

Jonathan Vaughn, MA, MPA, is doctoral candidate in Depth Psychology—Jungian and Archetypal Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute. He is an experienced nonprofit and university fundraiser, as well as an actor, writer, and photographer. His current research focuses on the psychology of place, particularly in the age of climate crisis.

2022 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Dr. Kate Rittenhouse

Kate’s talk is called “Memories of the Ice Age in Beasts of the Southern Wild: Climate Change and Adaptation”

In her play Juicy and Delicious, Lucy Alibar’s heroine is a child facing a herd of aurochs, “as seen in cave paintings at Lascaux.” A metaphor for the child’s overwhelming fear at the imminent death of the father, the aurochs evoke the helpless terror of childhood nightmares. Alibar and director Behn Zeitlin adapted the play for the feature film Beasts of the Southern Wild, in which the theme of world-ending loss is extended to the passing of a way of life due to global warming. In both the play and the film, events in which all is about to be lost necessitate confrontation with the beast from the prehistoric caves. Impossibly distant from the contemporary world in terms of time, the painted images in the prehistoric caves hold memories and messages from the cave painting culture. This presentation reflects on the vision of the world between worlds that the play and movie offer, and on the advice that our civilization could take from the cave painters: adapt or die out.

About Kate

Kate Rittenhouse is an independent scholar and thinker now living in Vancouver, British Columbia. She holds a B.A. from Swarthmore College with a primary area of study in ancient art and culture. After leaving a successful career as a corporate manager (Saturn opposition), she studied couture sewing techniques and has pursued a career in theatrical costuming, working in theatre and film. Fulfilling a lifelong interest, in 2009 she completed a doctorate (Saturn return) in Mythological Studies with an Emphasis in Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Her dissertation, Isis by Any Name: A Study Of All’s Well That Ends Well, explores the animating force of the divine feminine in the mythic and metaphoric structures of the play. Currently a chairperson of the Mythology in Contemporary Culture area of the Popular Culture Association, she writes and speaks on modern epiphanies, revisionings, and reinterpretations of ancient mythological elements.

2022 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Kirsten Ellen Johnsen, PhD

Kirsten’s talk is called “Unsettling our Understandings of Place”

What does it mean to “understand place?” I suggest it is a position of humility and reception. The land holds real spiritual power. The places we live contain and embody ancestral personality. To be in true relationship with place is to recognize the independence of these personalities and ancestries: it is to respect their otherness and agency.

Jung dreamt of a descent through the layers of a house and down through the sediments of the earth below as a way to connect with ancestral and archetypal energies. After visiting America, he noted how white settlers faced a gap in this descent, owing to the discontinuity of ancestry on the land. Several contemporary Jungian scholars also recognize the cultural grief and confusion that settler cultures experience due to ancestral discontinuity, and its deleterious historical effects on both settlers and indigenous peoples.

This workshop is oriented toward the settler-colonial experience. It will discuss the ancestral gap that Jung identified and address how to navigate it with consciousness, compassion, and commitment to counter oppressions.

About Kirsten

Kirsten Ellen Johnsen lives in relationship with Northern Pomo land in what is now known as Mendocino County. The life-journey this land has asked her to undertake has led her into honest reckoning with deep ancestry. She holds a PhD in Mythology and Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute.

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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Dr. Raïna Manuel-Paris

Raïna’s talk is called “Unlearning Not to Speak: The Interconnectedness of Women’s Rights and Earth Rights”

To understand the destiny of women is to understand the destiny of the planet. They are the same. They have both suffered from acts of violence and terrorism. When a woman becomes responsible to her Self, to her body, she becomes responsible to the world around her. The role of woman as agent of her fate, not only victim of her destiny, is linked to the destiny of her community and to the earth herself.

There is a long tradition of the Sybil going back to the Oracle of Delphi, where women act as priestesses of Hestia, of Artemis, when they speak on behalf of the Earth, speaking mostly in warnings about the lack of self-regulation and the catastrophic repercussions for our planet, about women’s social and political identity in such a context. Never more relevant in today’s climate, in the United States in particular, where women are still fighting for rights over their own bodies. They carry the fire of the goddess, because the earth is on fire. They carry the warrior instinct of Artemis, because wild things need to be protected from our insatiable predatory consumption. They have left the hearth because it has died from lack of tending and now they must carry the fire within themselves, re-animate the center of home from a feminine perspective.

About Raïna

Dr. Raïna Manuel-Paris has a multicultural background, born of a French father and a Dominican mother. She was raised in France and England until her early 20’s then moved to the United States. She holds a PhD in Mythological Studies with emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and a Masters Degree in Film from Columbia. She taught Magic and Ritual and Myth and Symbol for 17 years at the Art Institute in Santa Monica. She is also a documentary filmmaker.

She is adjunct faculty at PGI and taught at the Relativity Studio School in downtown Los Angeles. She currently teaches online courses, lectures, and gives seminars at the Philosophical Research Society, PRS.org. Her book The Mother-to-be’s Dream Book was published by Warner Books in 2002. She is also a published poet at Raven Books and various publications. Her documentary The Bridges of My Father was selected for the short film corner at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009. She has written for Psychological Perspectives, the journal of Jungian thought, and for the Joseph Campbell Foundation MythBlast series. She is part of the Joseph Campbell Writers Room, and has lectured for the Joseph Campbell Roundtable, most memorably in a lecture hall that burned down two days later in the Thomas Fire.

Currently Raïna works with both individuals in a mentorship program, and with groups in a process she calls The Cradle and the Crown, assisting men and women in coming to alignment in body, mind, and soul, developing deep aliveness as well as careful listening to the whisperings of their soul’s desire. This work was birthed as a result of her own explorations with the unconscious, plant medicine, and natural horsemanship. Her latest work is a novel/fairy tale, Arabella and the Wise Women, soon to be published. Her work with students, including many veterans, always emphasizes the ways in which one can hold the tension between the inner world and the outer world in a way that engages curiosity and compassion. For more details on current seminars and lectures please see her website at www.rainamparis.com.

2022 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Chanti Tacoronte-Perez and Tiffany D. Johnson

Chanti and Tiffany will present “Ecology of Rest: A Decolonial Approach to Remembrance”

Academia plays a vital role in the co-construction and dissemination of knowledge on local and global fronts. Yet, all too often, within academic spaces, there is an over-separation from our soul and an instinct to reject the integration of our multiple layered selves, leaving an insatiable hunger for extrinsic outcomes that exhaust and breakdown.

To begin addressing this rejection of wholeness, we take a decolonial approach to work (broadly) and knowledge (specifically) by honoring “an ecology of rest.” We center the role of an integrated and whole internal inter-being — and we remain curious. Our session will reflect our desire to privilege embodied practice and non-ordinary ways of knowing by combining theory, practice, and collaboration. Our thesis is that connections with these embodied practices are natural and allow us all to tend a more steadfast and integrated internal ecosystem – so that we may be able to flourish within and throughout our ever-evolving external ecosystem.

In this workshop-style session, Participants will be invited and led through a rest practice. To prepare for this journey we ask you to find a comfortable, pleasurable, and protective space to receive. Imagine building a nest to rest in; bring pillows, blankets, cushions, an eye cover or scarf, and a journal; that said, come as you are.

About Chanti

Chanti Tacoronte-Perez is a Cuban-American creatrix, ritualist, and author. She believes that images speak a profound language; her life’s work is a translator of the unseen and advocates for the imaginal. She holds a Masters in Engaged Humanities, Masters in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and is currently working on her dissertation on, navigating the liminal via a creative-divinatory journey as a map to recovering the marginalized, forgotten, and silenced. Her work and teaching centers, imagination, creativity, and deep rest. She teaches workshops and collaborative training focused on creativity, Yantra painting, dreaming, intuitive movement, restorative yoga, and yoga Nidra. Her passion and aim is to inspire all to rediscover their creative self by weaving the blessings with the wounds while honoring the land and the ancestors.

About Tiffany

Tiffany D Johnson is a researcher, educator, and lover of community. Her research focuses on how experiences of inequity and stigma in the workplace facilitate well-being (or a lack thereof). She works as an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at Georgia Tech and she is the creator of WHOLE, A community for Black and Brown women in Academia.

2022 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Kayden Baker-McInnis

Kayden’s talk is called “Pan, Animal Encounters and Mythic Eco-Consciousness”

Myths are stories that can function as ecosystems that further soul and ground consciousness. The climate crisis, in part, is a mythless engagement with the natural world that erodes eco-consciousness. Our unending climate crisis is fueled by the insistence that humans are separate from nature and the more-than-human world.

The inclusion of animal mythologies to the already potent god / goddess mythologies cultivates a mythic eco-consciousness connected to land and place. Mythically engaging animals unearths our vitality and grounds us in the body as mythic images bring us in touch with life force, instinct, and ecology. Participating in the sensual, natural world enables synchronicity and archetypal encounters with the more-than-human. In Animal Presences, James Hillman reminds us we have forgotten that animals were once gods. We need the animal gaze.

Animal mythologies and encounters will be explored through a mythic eco-consciousness lens that sheds light on the impact of the shadowed Pan and Dionysus archetypes, both gods of nature, that play out in our treatment of the environment and influences our capacity for sustaining a mythic eco-consciousness. It is a mythic eco-consciousness that can move us to what Thomas Berry calls dreaming a new story for the earth.

About Kayden

Kayden Baker-McInnis is a PhD candidate in Mythological Studies with an Emphasis in Depth Psychology working on an ecological dissertation focusing on the Greek figure Dionysus in relation to nature, body, and gender. She teaches language arts to school-aged students and offers adult myth classes. Her workshops in Salt Lake City include a humanities-based writing process engaging comparative mythology, cultural studies, and depth psychology.

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Mythologium 2022 welcomes John Bonaduce, PhD

John’s talk is called “Second Sinai: How Covid-19 Fulfills Campbell’s Fourth Function of Myth”

In former times, civilization was held to principles expressed in foundational myths. As mythology relaxes its grip on our post-Copernican imaginations, a plague has intervened to exercise the same function. Indeed, as I see it, Covid-19 fulfills Joseph Campbell’s fourth function of mythology, the teaching function, the function which integrates the individual to a society.

The fourth function is the psychological force pulling us into community and even nationhood. It has been operant throughout human history: We knew, if we were Pacific Coast Saanish People, that the salmon must be propitiated with song and prayer, otherwise, they might not come back next year. Egyptians knew that the human heart would be weighed against a feather and good deeds must outnumber the bad deeds. If not, the soul would be devoured, consumed at once by a monster. This accountability held the people’s feet to the fire throughout life. In my experience, the behavior of Catholics is a calendar-driven thing of beauty, fasting here, celebrating there and, in accordance with the understanding that a certain hell awaits transgressors, the myth kept us in line, modified us, and above all, identified us. Fourth function, all.

These myths are dying. Egyptians stopped building pyramids a long time ago. Salmon still return to the Pacific Northwest but with a lot less ritualistic fanfare. Catholics, increasingly, think of hell as something more or less symbolic, a not too subtle reminder to be decent.
And now, I suggest we have arrived at the Second Sinai moment. Only this time, everyone is invited to the party. Every is called to join with the “Chosen People.” In fact, some will elect not to. The Second Sinai is about two things: The recognition of nature over the patriarchal God, and the behavior modifications expected of us in the light of our subordination to this awesome and greater power.

In the second part of my presentation, I rehearse some of the foundational statements of our ecopsychological community and come to the inescapable conclusion that Covid-19 has a psychic autonomy and has interjected itself in human history with precise intention just as Elohim’s intervention at Sinai had a precise intention. In both cases, we witness the birth of a new consciousness and of a new people.

And, if we are not too busy dancing around the golden calf, we may find we may find we’re part of it.

About John

After a successful career as a television writer in the 1970’s and ’80s with such credits as M*A*S*H and Maude, John’s interest in story became increasingly academic. He transitioned to a new field, with a master’s degree in Conducting, then earned a PhD in Mythology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. His lectures on mythobiogenesis continue to attract interested academics in several fields. More information can be found on his website: johnbonaduce.com.

2022 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Dr. Amy Lawson

Amy’s talk is called “Octopus as Other: Lessons We Can Learn from an Underworld Consciousness”

The past decade has brought a resurgence of the octopus. Documentaries, books, and scientific exploration seem to have rediscovered these intelligent-yet-otherworldly beings. What can we learn from them? Turning to myth gives us diverse answers. Norse myth sees the Kraken as a fearsome monster, Native Americans of the Northwest tell stories of the octopus making mortal man her husband, and ancient Hawaiian and Tahitian myths depict Octopus as god of the underworld or as a remnant from an ancient universe. So what is behind this long-held fascination?

This presentation makes the case that Octopus is a symbol for Other and for the unconscious, an alien consciousness that we can experience but never fully understand. We will examine some of the evidence for Octopus intelligence and consciousness, drawing parallels between our conceptions and prejudices about Octopus and the Jungian concept of the Unconscious. When we view Octopus through the lens of ecological consciousness, shining a light on relationships and connections, we can learn more about our relationships with poorly understood parts of nature and of ourselves.

About Amy

I’m a practicing pediatrician with a Master’s in Jungian and Archetypal Studies. I live in San Francisco, and I love interpreting dreams, attending local theater, and experiencing life through a mythological lens.

2022 Mythologium program
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Chrissy Stuart

Chrissy’s talk is called “The Dark Light of Duende: The Phosphorescence of Death”

At the heart of the mythological and ecological lies ambiguous paradox. The profundity of life and death is bridged by an invisible dimension of experience that we can safely navigate through the mythopoetic image. This presentation will investigate the mysterious eco-theoretical terrain of death through an archetypal analysis of the mythology of light and darkness, as represented in the traje de luces–or “suit of lights” worn by Spanish matadors.

The way death is perceived as an “unseeable” image is a prevalent idiosyncrasy in western and American cultural psyches. This can be witnessed in our lack of community traditions, rituals, and consciousness surrounding death and grief, as illustrated in the global events of the COVID-19 pandemic and the environmental crisis. My objective is to enumerate the many ways in which the pathologized image of death illuminates the beyond. Through the ontological lens of elemental light–a brief presentation of recent light sculptural work and transdisciplinarity research in my field of holography–I will demonstrate the ecological power of the pathological in its capacity for interconnection by bridging light and darkness, the visible and invisible, and life and death. This generative process creates new ways of seeing and being in the world.

About Chrissy

Chrissy Stuart is a light sculpture artist, depth psychological scholar, holographer, and transdisciplinarity researcher. Stuart utilizes light optics and glass casting techniques to record light waves–not ordinarily visible to the human eye–onto transparent objects to explore the invisible dimension of experience tied to the realm of death, the imagination, and the unknown. In her quest to understand the hidden forces beyond our control, complexities of multidimensional reality and universal interdependence are unearthed. Stuart views working with the unconscious as a form of research inquiry, and her light sculpture praxis perpetually reveals that consciousness is transformed by an encounter with the unknown. Stuart’s transdisciplinarity work addresses the notion that it is only in working with the darkness that a luminosity specific to transformation can emerge.

2022 Mythologium program