Tag: James Hillman

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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Dr. Beth Anne Boardman

Beth Anne’s talk is called “A Poetics of Silver”

This poetry workshop flows from ideas of ecopsychology, developing a theme of nature as alchemical container for the silvering of human artistic, emotional, psychic transformation.

In “Silver and the White Earth,” James Hillman writes about the albedo phase of the work. After the dissolving and fermenting of the nigredo, when we may explore our deepest shadows and pain, a phase of drying and cooling comes along, which Hillman says fosters reflection, like silvering on a mirror. During the albedo we take stock, observe, without judgment or passion. A rest from the rigors of diving into our darkness and bringing up materials to cook and render, the albedo distills, giving us time to separate the fluid of emotions from the sparkling powdery substance left behind. These are not hardened insights or spiritual truths, but different kinds of reflections which have dimensions and shadows of their own, like shadows on snow. Hillman sees them “as blues, as creams, as the wan and pale feelings of grey.”

This workshop offers participants a chance to explore their own silvering through writing about nature, poetry, fantasy, whatever mystic realm calls. We will use prompts, images, poems as starting points for our own silver word-dance.

About Beth Anne

Beth Anne Boardman, RN, MA, PhD lives in California and New Hampshire. She travels and lectures on the Mythology of Sport, Women and Myth, and the Alchemy of Adolescence (her dissertation topic), in addition to consulting as a writer to websites.  Recently, Beth has served on the board of the Pacifica Graduate Institute Alumni Association and as Regional Coordinator for local alumni. Her career spans work as a registered nurse, the study of world dance and music, and the profound joy of raising two children. Beth’s writings may be found at http://otherworldpoetry.blogspot.com and https://mythmuse.wordpress.com 

To hear Beth Anne’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.

Learn more and register
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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.

To hear Kayden’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.

Learn more and register
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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.

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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.