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The Mythologium 2023 experience

A celebration of community connections

2023 marks the fifth anniversary of the Fates and Grace Mythologium. This year will also be our first in-person gathering since 2019. And for the first time ever, the event will be held on the Lambert Campus of Pacifica Graduate Institute, with a streaming option for online attendees. These reasons alone are enough to guarantee that the Mythologium 2023 experience will be different than other years.

But that’s not all! More fun changes are in the works as well.

For one thing, we can only stream the myth feed from one location on campus, which means we’ll only have one track this year. We’ll all be together, for all the presentations, online or in-person.

What’s more, the community of mythologists submitted more proposals for presentations this year than any other year yet.

So how can we have a conference with more presentations but fewer time slots for panels? By designing an experience around community connections and celebration. Here’s the plan.

Introducing… MythFlix!

At the 2023 Mythologium:

  • Each presenter will make a video recording of their 20-minute presentation ahead of time.
  • We will post the presentations a week before the Mythologium, in a video collection we’re calling MythFlix, so that all registered attendees have time to preview the presentations.
  • Then, at the Mythologium itself, July 28-30, each panel will have a 30-minute spotlight session. Each presenter will give us a 5-minute summary of their video, then we’ll have 15 minutes for the panel’s Yes-And discussion. Panels with online presenters will be projected onto the big screen for the in-person audience.
  • We will not record the live Mythologium, but all registered attendees will have access to the 2023 MythFlix video catalog before and after the conference.
Register today

More mythic merriment in person

The in-person 2023 Mythologium experience will also include a happy hour on Saturday night, long lunch breaks to facilitate conversations, and a vocation fair with walk-up marketing consultations and a photographer to take headshots for attendees.

We are also offering an optional workshop the day before the Mythologium called Your Soul’s Resume. The workshop will be in-person on Lambert campus on Thursday, July 27. Plan on a full day to deep-dive into creating or updating your Soul’s Resume. We won’t stream or record the workshop, so only register if you can attend live!

We can’t wait to connect and celebrate with you and the community!

Mythologium logo showing a line drawing of a goddess's head.

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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.

Register today
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Mythologium 2023 Theme

The 2023 Mythologium will be held July 28-30, 2023, and the theme will be Myth and the Heart.

Myth and the Heart

“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of the Imagination.”

– John Keats

Your physical heart beats the rhythm of your life. Your metaphorical heart beats the rhythm of your soul. We speak of broken hearts, open hearts, heavy hearts, full hearts. Metaphorically, the heart represents love, warmth, courage, passion – and a machine-like pump. The literal heart, however, is a muscle, which means it is strong. It creates an audible beat, which means it’s musical. The heart changes tempo in different situations, which means it is responsive. 

What does myth say about the heart’s presence and powers? What ancient and contemporary myths help us take the heart seriously, heeding the heart and practicing heart care? How do myth and the heart relate to current events and life challenges? Following James Hillman, what archetypes visit when we inhabit heart space? Following Martin Buber, how might we meet the heart not as an it but as a thou? 

Areas of Focus

We are especially interested in presentations about myth, the heart, and: 

- social justice & BIPOC voices
- environmental issues
- technology
- feminism
- gender
- politics
Register today
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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 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.

To hear Kathryn’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 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.

To hear Jonathan’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 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.

To hear Kate’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 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.

To hear Kirsten’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 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.

To hear Raïna’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 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.

To hear Chanti’s and Tiffany’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