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.
To hear Reise’s talk and many others, join us at the Mythologium!
The Mythologium is a conference and retreat for mythologists and friends of myth, held July 29 – 31 via Zoom in the Pacific time zone.