Category: Mythologium 2020

Updates about the 2020 Fates and Graces Mythologium, a virtual conference for mythologists.

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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). 

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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. 

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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.

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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.    

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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.

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Kayden Baker-McInnis

Kayden’s talk is called, “Tracking the Dionysus Myth in The Goldfinch Film and Modern Life”

At the heart of the film, The Goldfinch, aspects of the Dionysus myth emerge guiding us back home from loss and death to renewal. Donna Tartt’s substantial novel won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize, now adapted for film. This coming of age story follows the lives of Theo and Pippa, teenagers who survive a bombing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and who continue to live in the deafening aftermath. Through a mythological and depth psychological lens, the underlying mythic structure of this film is explored as a living, vital encounter with Dionysus, what Rafael Lopez-Pedraza calls a culturally repressed and misunderstood archetype. Within Donna Tartt’s carefully curated characters and the director’s choices for image and silence, an archetypal resonance emerges. Central to the storyline is a seventeenth century painting functioning as the archetypal image of irrepressible life, the essence of Dionysus. Theo’s dream to face his mother echoes Dionysus’s journey to the underworld to immortalize his mother. When asked where she found inspiration for this book, Tartt indicates that it is The Odyssey and the Greek tragedians that continue to inspire her. This presentation makes the case that cultivating a mythic consciousness continues to be a modern imperative. 

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 include a humanities-based writing process engaging comparative mythology, cultural studies, and depth psychology in Salt Lake City.

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Kristina Dryža

Kristina’s talk is called, “The Archetypal Necessity for Descending into Hades”

Exploring the myth of Demeter and Persephone, Kristina will ask: How does the soul come to love Hades and that which lives in the underworld? How are we even acquainted with and initiated into this subterranean realm? Why is it necessary to be abducted from our intense identification with Demeter’s life lived on the surface to encounter Hades, and all that lies below? And how, like Persephone, can we belong to, and partner with, both the upper and underworld?

About Kristina

Kristina Dryža is recognized as one of the world’s top female futurists and is also an archetypal consultant and author. Kristina has always been fascinated by patterns and feels we are patterned beings in a patterned universe. She writes and speaks about the patterning of seasonal, tidal, lunar, and circadian rhythms and their influence on creativity, innovation, and leadership. She also explores archetypes and mythology to perceive the patterns in the collective unconscious and their expression within our psyches, society and media. You can view her TEDx talk on ‘Archetypes and Mythology. Why They Matter Even More So Today’ here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o4PYNroZBY&t=8s

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Gelareh Khoie

Gelareh’s talk is called, “A Preliminary Mythology of Disco”

My talk is about the dance music genre known as disco. I will discuss the enduring influence of this movement on popular culture in terms of the mythology and archetypal underpinnings tying it to universal religious expressions such as the sphere of illumination and the liberation of consciousness through ritual, dance, music, and symbolic engagement. In particular, I will discuss the presence in my life of an archetypal image I call the Disco Prophet—a feminine dance, love, and music guru who comes from a magical and mythological world of synthesizers, neon tights, and glitter. Her image is the mirror ball and her land is the mythical dance floor beyond logic, deep in the religious precincts of soul. I will use images, prayer, music, dance, and a mirror ball to re-enact an experience of this mythical world.

About Gelareh

Gelareh Khoie is an Iranian-American artist, writer, scholar, and DJ. She holds a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and two MA’s in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Gelareh is currently enrolled in the Jungian and Archetypal Studies program at PGI, working towards her Ph.D.

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Maryam Sayyad

Maryam’s talk is called, “Outstaring Darkness: The Fellowship of Myth and Psychology in Lord of the Rings, the Film”

The Lord of the Rings is roughly 1100 pages long. Half a million words are devoted to this Lord. Whether the word “Lord” refers to the ring itself or to its maker the dark lord, Sauron, this much is certain: Tolkien named his entire saga after the principle of darkness. In essence, he’s invited us to take a sustained look at darkness–linger a while and dig down into it. Even though I discuss Peter Jackson’s film and not Tolkien’s book, I nonetheless consider Tolkien to be its creator, as well as its main protagonist. I view the film as a projection of what hunts his psyche. In other words, I take a psychological approach to the saga, and instead of amplifying its multitude of images outward by means of the great mythological record, I locate the inward psychological phenomenon they describe. I ask for indulgence as I dare to simplify The Lord of the Rings down to one simple sentence.

About Maryam

Maryam Sayyad, MA, is a dissertation candidate in Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute where she eagerly studied and received her masters degree in the same field. She completed her BA in Philosophy and Art in Athens at the American College of Greece. Maryam has worked in theater since childhood, and run interior design firms for many of her adult years. She’s an academic writer, a poet, lecturer, and myth consultant for storytellers. She is an adjunct instructor at the Los Angeles Studio School teaching philosophy and writing in the myth-based general education department. Aside from her dissertation, her most recent creative project is myth-consulting, co-writing, and set designing for a contemporary theatrical adaptation of Sleeping Beauty. What makes this version special is that it openly discloses the mytho-psychological elements in the story. This play, funded by the Department of Mental Health, is scheduled to go on stage this fall.