Category: Presenters

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

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Dr. Raina Manuel-Paris

Raina’s talk is called “What Women Want: The modern implications of an ancient tale on the difficulties of being a woman in a man’s world”

Revisiting the legend of “The Wedding of Dame Ragnell and Sir Gawain,” we gain insight into What Women Want, the riddle paused to King Arthur and which he must solve to keep his head. We reveal if it has changed much over the centuries. With an illuminating detour from fairy tales to modern heroines in Cinema and the women who play them, this proposal offers a mytho-poetic approach to the heart of the tension between the feminine and the masculine and whether it can be resolved.

About Raina

Raina Manuel-Paris, Ph.D. has a multi-cultural and multi ethnic background. She holds a Masters degree from Columbia University in screenwriting and directing and a Ph.D. from Pacifica Graduate Institute in Mythological studies with an emphasis in depth psychology. Her work as a poet and writer, filmmaker, teacher and speaker illuminates the various paths to spiritual transformation, the relationship to ourselves and others, to love and compassion, to light and shadow. She is a published author of books, (The Mother-to-be’s Dream Book, published by Time Warner), and articles ( Trauma,War, and Spritual Transformation for the Magazine of Jungian thought, Psychological Perspectives) and has been a professor of Myth and Symbol, Magic and Ritual for the past seventeen years. She is a meditation guide and a speaker. She has lectured on the Goddess: from ancient times to the #metoo movement, Love as Primal Agent of Change, Love and Sacred Medicine, the Handless Maiden: a mytho-poetic guide to wholeness, on the Tarot as a guide through the
cycles of life and death. Her latest lecture on The In-Between, Liminality in Uncertain Times, as well as other lectures and writings, can be found on Youtube.com, through PRS.org, on the Joseph Campbell foundation website (jcf.org) and on her website
www.rainamparis.com. Her poetry can be heard on NPR, All Things considered, Poetry month. And was selected for the commemorative edition of Solo Novo, Psalms of Cinder&Silt. She is currently working on a novel.

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Colleen Salomon

Colleen’s talk is called “The Path of Ashes: Journeying to the Underworld in ‘The Robber Bridegroom'”

The tale, “The Robber Bridegroom,” is a strange and dark story, one collected by the Brothers Grimm in the early 19th century, but with roots that go back thousands of years. Not surprisingly, this eerie account of a young woman’s solitary journey into the forest and her courageous escape after a traumatizing ordeal has not enjoyed the attention of the Grimms’ more popular stories. It is considered by many scholars to be a “Bluebeard Tale”—a warning to young women about the dangers of marriage. While I do not dispute that conclusion, I believe the story holds a great deal more: in fact, it harbors ancient knowledge of the passage into the Underworld. In this presentation, I will demonstrate that there are secrets woven into the story regarding the use of poison and trance that reveal the maid’s motivations for her journey, which link her self-empowerment with a willingness to risk her life for her clan.

About Colleen

Colleen holds a master’s degree in Mythological Studies with Emphasis in Depth Psychology and is current pursing her PhD in the same field. After studying art history and studio arts at Purdue University, including studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, Colleen continued her academic work at the University of Hamburg, Germany. During a decade of living in Europe, Colleen had the privilege of hearing many stories of the trauma of the twentieth century told by the people who had lived through the events. She witnessed the healing that emerged through the telling of the stories. In this way, she learned about the fundamental necessity of myth to the individual. Having returned to the US and earned a master’s degree in psychology, Colleen was drawn to Pacifica to study mythology with a particular emphasis on the role of myth in the healing of trauma. Her dissertation focuses on the ancient knowledge of trauma contained within the old stories still told in Germany.

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Dr. Dolores Aguanno

Dolores’s talk is called “Tracing the Divine Feminine in the Lands of Oz”

When characters of mythic narratives descend into the underworld, they often return transformed and bearing treasures of the dark, gifts of the Divine Feminine. This presentation will explore various aspects of the Divine Feminine and how its presence through various personifications of the Goddess archetype morphs in the musical narratives of Oz: The Wizard of Oz (1939 film version), The Wiz (1979 film) and Wicked (2003 Broadway musical, film to be released in 2021). As the characters ease on down the road or trip onto their demise, the Goddess also dances and weaves her influence throughout their journeys. Whatever path they take, all are changed. Dorothy’s journey in The Wizard of Oz and The Wiz are both quintessential examples of the mythic structure of the Hero’s Journey. Wicked, the Musical, offers the possibility of another mythic structure: the Eternal Return, a pattern of the cyclical nature of sacrifice, death, and rebirth. In it we follow Elphaba, Dorothy’s shadow persona, in her soul journey, rather than an egoic journey of the hero. She does not return to her community as the Hero with the elixir, but rather she descends back into the Underworld, the unconscious, with her new wisdom. Using audio and video clips, photos, and graphic images in this presentation, we will see how these personified archetypal images of the Divine Feminine act as transformers bringing conscious awareness to what was previously unconscious in the psyche of both the characters and their audience. 

About Dolores

Dolores Aguanno, PhD. is a cultural mythologist, theatre educator, actor, spiritual counselor, student of bioenergetics and yoga, and the mother of two recently married daughters! Dr. Aguanno holds a Ph.D from Pacifica Graduate Institute (2010) in Mythological Studies with an Emphasis in Depth Psychology where she wrote her dissertation on Musical Theatre and the Mythic Imagination. She is the founder and artistic director of dee-Lightful Productions, a musical theatre education program for kids ages 7-17, in Culver City, California, now celebrating its 20th anniversary. She has produced and directed over 80 productions, with hundreds of children, many of whom have gone on to careers in the performing arts, theatre and film tech, and performing arts education.  She is also an actor and has directed and taught adult actors, having had her training and start as an acting teacher at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in New York. She has been a licensed spiritual practitioner with the Agape International Spiritual Center in LA, under the mentorship of Rev. Michael Beckwith since 1995, where she has taught numerous workshops on spirituality and the arts. Most recently, she became a Certified Master Trainer of the Energy Codes with the Morter Institute for Bioenergetics, under the tutelage of Dr. Sue Morter, bridging science, spirit and human possibility. Always an avid student and adventurer, her life has been one long mythic journey so far, traveling many different roads. She plans to take the next few decades of her life to continue to weave together and integrate all of the wonderful things that she’s passionate about.

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Dr. Karin Zirk

Karin’s talk is called “Starting a Conversation on Decolonizing Mythology”

Oftentimes as mythologists, a narrative or an image enchants us and we forget that mythic artifacts do not exist in isolation but are embedded in human culture with all the problematics that entails. This discussion starter aims to reveal issues, problems, and potential methods for decolonizing our field. As a field of inquiry, Mythology comes into existence during the cultural juxtapositions created by colonialism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The colonized became objects of study for Europeans, who documented the cultural habits, sacred beliefs, arts, and other cultural artifacts of non-European cultures even as the Europeans strove to Westernize and destroy these cultures. In many instances, the mythic artifacts mythologists explore come from the ongoing exploration of native people, people from non-Western backgrounds, and other marginalized cultures. I intend to provide a brief background on the theoretical work by Faye V. Harrison on decolonizing anthropology, David Miller on mythoclasm, and Joel P. Christensen on decolonizing a myth class for what I hope will be a brainstorming session using the Kumeyaay Birds Songs as our mythic artifact and addressing the problematics inherent in my own mythic exploration of this tradition.

About Karin

Karin Zirk, Ph.D. is a mythologist, activist, and writer, whose first novel, Falling From The Moon, was released in early 2020. She earned her doctorate in Mythological Studies with an Emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute where her dissertation focused on using mythic artifacts and journal writing to enhance well-being in family caregivers. She facilitates in-person and online workshops using mythic artifacts and creative expression to explore both individual and cultural challenges facing the world. Her collection of poetry, Notes from the Road, chronicled her years traveling the USA in a Volkswagen camper van. She is a longtime advocate for a Southern California creek and attends peace and healing gatherings. When not engaged in her passions, she works in Information Technology.

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Dr. Leigh Melander

Leigh’s presentation topic is “A Networked Imagination: Myth-Making in Fan Fic’s Story and Soul”

While movies can feel deeply mythic, they are tightly authored and frozen, outside of the volk culture that underscores how myth moves through the collective unconscious. The story-making in fan fiction challenges the idea that any story should be frozen, that its ownership rests in individual authors, and that there is a hierarchy of how, what, why, and by whom the story is crafted. By creating story in this way, within the particular shapes of community co-creation and ongoing arcs, fan fiction creators of all mediums become mythmakers. In a dance between insider/outsider, individual/collective; this co-created world emerges and is always emerging as a never-ending story. Its connection between people and ideas that are simultaneously liminal, canonical, mnemonic and imaginal; all sitting in servers that may archive well or may not; brings a life force to story-telling that hums more deeply than simple fiction. Made up of so many exquisitely human, intimate, microcosmic moments and, at the same time pulsing with a broad archetypal energy – fan fiction is, in a word, mythic. 

About Leigh

Leigh Melander, Ph.D. has a doctorate in cultural mythology and psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, and has a background in writing and the performing arts, marketing and strategic planning, and strengthening communities nationally and internationally. She has served as a board member for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and on the academic advisory board for  Spring Journal for several years, was featured on the on the History Channel as an expert on myth and story, and hosted Myth America, a weekly radio program on myth and imagination on an NPR affiliate in New York for four years. She was the founding editor of the Joseph Campbell Foundation MythBlast essay series, and has been published in Spring Journal, the award-winning Routledge International Handbook of Jungian Film Studies,and just released her first book, Psyche’s Choice. Leigh works with individuals, communities, and organizations to imagine past what they think as possible, and she and her husband own Spillian: A Place to Revel, a regenerative center for imagination and creativity on the historic Fleischmanns Yeast family estate in the Catskills.

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Quan Dieu (Dante) Luong

Dante’s talk is called “Interpreting the Norse God ‘Thor’ in Novels and Movies”

With the rapid growth of popular cultures, the Norse god Thor has become an endless inspiration among screenwriters, novelists, and game designers. However, most previous studies only evaluated this figure within the same sources, namely between books, instead of between different forms of media. Henceforth, this theoretical research applying Diffusion Theory aims to fill in these limitations by analyzing the interpretations of Thor’s mystical identity and appearance in the two most popular leisure resources: movies and novels. Previous studies described Thor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) as the symbol of both ancient power forces and post-human ability as he expressed normal human emotions (e.g. arrogance and love) or performed humanistic activities (e.g. flying planes or using phones). On the contrary, novels like Neil Gaiman’s American Gods placed the mighty Thor as a supporter of the protagonist on a mystical quest. The results suggest film producers, game creators and novelists view Thor at different angles during content development. Mythologists are encouraged to view his story and companions critically to develop new scientific theories.

About Dante

Quan Dieu “Dante” Luong” holds a bachelor’s degree in English Studies, specializing in English Language Teaching (ELT) at Hoa Sen University, Vietnam. He will soon receive his master’s degree in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages). Dante is an educational researcher who has been conducting many projects on English teaching methodologies and innovations in students’ attitudes and beliefs towards this subject. His contributions to and efforts in such academic words have been recognized and inspired by his colleagues and students. Dante also has a keen interest in myths, cryptids, legends, and fairy tales around the world. Having seen several mythological-based televisions, reading topic-related books, and teaching mythology as a higher education’s practicum project, he realized that there are fantastic stories across the globe that have been forgotten by time and wait to be explored by compassionate mythologists or myth hunters. Despite his experience in doing research and presenting his works at many conferences, this is his first time presenting his works at the Fates and Graces Mythologium, where he can give his favorite research topics and work toward his future goal of pursuing the degree of mythological studies.

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Rev. Pamela Dawn Hancock

Pamela’s presentation is called, “Birth Trauma, Medusa & Me: Soul-Healing and the Poetics of Mind”

My revolutionary presentation will dream the Medusa myth onward, by examining, “On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery” by Percy B. Shelley, through the lens of depth psychology.  My story starts in the Spring of 2018 when Medusa charted her course for me.  Although I had planned every detail of the birth of my son, his cesarean delivery abolished an old way of being.  From that moment on I became a new alchemical being—born in the nigredo of one of the darkest moments of my life.  Albeit feeling emotionally and psychically beheaded by the process, it was looking towards the works of James Hillman, C. G. Jung, and James Hollis that brought me back to life once again.  This presentation will examine my imaginal “dismemberment” by way of the poem in which I found a mirror to my pain.  By reflecting on the tragedies and following the synchronicities presented to me I was led to a cure for my aching heart.  I will show how following the archetypal thread that led me into the center of a serpentine goddess’ puzzle, provided me with soul-healing and the opportunity to illuminate the dark recesses of birth trauma through myth and metaphor. 

About Pamela

I was born and raised in Southern California where I currently reside with my husband and children. As a child I found the Sacred at the lake near my parents’ cabin. The big pine trees surrounding it were my sacred space—my church. It was there that I began to understand that we are all part of the Divine Web of All Creation. At the age of twelve I sought comprehension of that Web by starting my study of the World’s Religions. While obtaining my B.A. from the University of Redlands, Johnston Center, I delved into Feminist Spirituality, Hinduism, Taoism and Buddhism. I moved in and out of different spiritual practices after College, weaving together the energies of all of the Archetypal-Forces with whom I entwine. In 2011 in ritual with the group I led, I heard the call: Nourish others’ understanding of their connection to the Sacred in all things! So off I went to Starr King School for the Ministry (a Unitarian Universalist Seminary) where I received my Master of Divinity, and the Chaplaincy Institute for Ordination as an Interfaith Minister. Having battled a long-time kidney illness, I almost died of an infection after completing Seminary–but found solace in finding my true path of Alchemy and Depth Psychology during this difficult ordeal. After a full recovery I began the adventure to obtain my PhD. in Depth Psychology with a specialization in Jungian & Archetypal Studies, from Pacifica Graduate Institute—where I am now dedicating my dissertation work towards designing a program for Trauma Survivors to embark on an individuation quest. I am dedicated to building bridges between communities, bringing people together to honor the sacred in all things, supporting environmental advocacy, and helping women embody all parts of their true selves. 

Visit my website at www.revpameladawn.com.

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Dr. Andrea Slominski

Andrea’s talk is titled “Social Distancing and Our Return to Hestia: Our Collective Heroine’s Journey to the Underworld, to Heal, Liberate, and Reclaim the Archetypal Feminine”

Hestia’s realm and energies spring from the archetypal feminine. Attributes contained within the archetypal feminine include relationship, intuition, creativity, nurturance, compassion, the cycles of the natural world, nature itself, and the immanence of divinity.

The world has been driven back to Hestia when our lack of relationship and compassion are destroying the ecosystems that sustain our lives.

At home, in retreat from a deadly pandemic, we are face to face with our own mortality. We are terrified for those we love. Confronted with our frailties and personal faults, fear, panic, and uncertainty are forcing us into the mythic underworld of our worst nightmares.

Our collective Heroine’s Journey, launched from the realm of Hestia, is forcing us to evaluate our relationships with each other and the planet. We are being taken together, down, and within. Covid-19 forced us to see that we are all connected and dependent on one another for survival.

The conscious feminine must be honored and reestablished in our experience of life. We must embrace intuition, creativity, compassion, nurturance, relationship, and the ecological balance of nature if we are to survive.

About Andrea

Andrea M. Slominski, Ph.D. is a cultural mythologist, women’s midlife coach, author, teacher, and speaker. “Dr. A.” is the creator of The Midlife Re-Boot! Method, a program developed to guide women to recreate themselves and rediscover their True North at midlife. She has been a featured workshop facilitator and speaker at women’s events and conferences. “Dr. A.” also teaches women’s entrepreneurship for Women’s Economic Ventures in Santa Barbara, CA. Her most recent published work includes a guest blog, “The Rise of Regency,” for Dr. Carol Pearson, and “Bearing the Unbearable,” an essay in  If I Don’t Make It, I Love You: Survivors in the Aftermath of School Shootings, edited by Amye Archer and Loren Kleinman. You can find her via social media and her new web site, www.drandreaslominski.com. Her podcast “ The Regent’s Room,” is launching soon.

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Dr. John Bonaduce

John’s presentation is titled “Mythobiogenesis: The Cellular Origin of Myth, Religion, and Ritual”

Mythobiogenesis seeks the origin of myth, religion, and ritual not only in the vastness of human history, but in the confining nucleus of a human cell. This place of origin is by no means obvious and we refer to it simply as a “trysting place,” the secret rendezvous of mind and body. Data in support of the existence of such a trysting place abound. These data exist in the forms of our most transcendent myths, our most sacred scriptures, and even in our most cherished bedtime stories. Such is the production line of psyche and soma. It is a fruitful collaboration: Psyche (which is the totality of human consciousness) and soma (that is the human body as defined by its elements) are partners in a seamless division of labor. The human psyche donates lavishly from her store of culturally-conditioned imagery ranging from pretty portraits to terrifying monstrosities. But the story structure is lifted straight from the human body. Those step-outlines which govern the cell cycle turn out to be very fine narrative formats as well. Larger-scale cellular processes, like the struggle of male gametes to survive in their advance toward an egg, also make fine story templates, structurally complete with beginning, middle, and end.

Mythobiogenesis presupposes a powerful interpenetration of mind and body in an intimate collaboration of psyche and soma. Biological events too small for the unaided eye are translated into the greatest of epics and the most compelling of our rituals. The results include the sacrament you received at Mass last week and the fairy tale you will tell to your daughter this evening.

About John

For twenty years, John Bonaduce has served as choirmaster in several Los Angeles Parishes. His contemporary ensemble, Shantigarh, can be heard in various platforms including Spotify and iTunes. John graduated with a degree in history from UCLA, obtained his masters in conducting at CSULA and, realizing he needed something practical to fall back on, pursued mythological studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute, receiving his PhD this year.

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Dr. Amy Lawson

Amy’s talk is called “Dorothy’s Dream Cure: The Asclepian Temple of Oz”

In ancient Greece, the incurably sick made pilgrimages to Asclepian temples in search of healing through dreams. Removing themselves from daily life, they traveled to these holistic healing centers where they utilized amenities such as exercise facilities, massage, healthy food, and arts-based practices to restore health and balance until they were ready for the culmination of their journey: a night of incubation in the temple during which Asclepios would gift them with a curative dream or vision.

In The Wizard of Oz, an orphaned and disconnected Dorothy Gale travels in dream to the land of Oz, accumulating friends along the way, in order to ask the Wizard to send her back home. Although he turns out to be simply a man, the Wizard helps Dorothy and friends realize that they possess within themselves what they have been searching for all along.

This paper examines the parallels between Dorothy’s journey and the pilgrimages of the ancient Greeks, arguing that Oz can be seen as a modern-day Asclepian temple and the container for Dorothy’s dream cure.

About Amy:

Amy Lawson, M.D., is a practicing pediatrician in the San Francisco Bay area. She is writing a dissertation combining medicine and mythology for a Ph.D. in Jungian and Archetypal Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California. She is interested in ways depth psychology can be used to reconnect modern medicine with its roots, improve patient experiences, and decrease physician burnout through creation of meaning.