Aphrodite remains for the majority of us the Great Unknown Goddess, as we have so wrongly identified her with commercialized sex and beauty. The documentary attempts to reveal and reinstate the essence and truth of this universal female principle, as the sound of the primordial drum vibrates deeper and deeper into the ancient stones and ground of the temple, taking us back along a continuum of time when the Kypris kept changing shapes and forms under the influence of neighboring civilizations.

Part 2 of James Hillman’s interview with Pythia Peay on the Huffington Post is available. In it he touches on some important themes worth pondering including the ability to take a classical stance to the chaos of the times and look backwards upon what is decaying as opposed to scanning the horizon for what is new – the ner myth, the new plan, a particularly American vice he says.

Hillman also calls for a deeper thinking on the idea of freedom – not teenage freedom which is an independence from daddy or momma(government, law, big business)…but freedom as the ability to hold open space. “I’m saying that we haven’t thought about the idea of freedom enough. It needs to be internalized as an inner freedom from “demand” itself: the kind of freedom that comes when you’re free from those compulsions to have and to own and to be someone.”

Frog Goddess, Hacilar Anatolia 6th mill. B.C.E.

It’s a soft rain swept morning in Santa Barbara, perfect weather for aquatic beings and hidden creatures. The imagination finds footing in ancient imagery and the Frog Goddess rises up and out of Marija Gimbutas’ Neolithic world, fecund and symbolically paradoxical. Gimbutas writes that the frog was both a funerary and life symbol, equated to “the uterus of the life-giving, regenerating, and transforming Goddess”(Language of the Goddess, 251).

The archetypal resonance of regeneration and the female form is astounding, repeated through time and across cultures. Here this hybrid frog/woman ceramic piece is from the end of the 6^th millennium BCE in Anatolia. Remarkable.

Here’s a parallel, dare I make it, to Lady Gaga and the egg she rode within to the Grammy Awards, only to emerge (hatched) on stage.

Lady Gaga emerging, regenerated...

Lady Gaga in Egg

(Lady Gaga is a pop Goddess of epic proportions drawn from the powerful line that includes Madonna, the Great Goddess of the 80’s and 90’s.)

A symbolic constellation presents itself – frogs, eggs, female form, fecundity, regeneration, renewal, archetypal feminine, and it is as ancient as it is radical and edgy.

“Creative imagination that bespeaks the imaginal realm results from vitality and passion. It is born in blood from the awakened, not the dreaming, psyche. True imagining is neither an introverted retreat to fantasy nor a manic extroverted notion of creativity as physical productivity. True imagination may use the mirrors of reflection, but its  emotional impulse is the creative instinct” (James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis, 85).

Marc Chagall "Tribe Benjamin" stained glass for the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem

Tārā (Sanskrit: तारा), ‘she who delivers’ and ‘star’. Tārā is a female Bodhisattva and most important Buddhist Goddess. The mythology holds that she was born from the tears of Avalokitesvara, the Bodhisattva that will lead all beings to enlightenment. Tradition says Tārā became his consort, the principle of shakti which is the feminine counterpart of the embodied humanized divine energies.

There are 21 forms of Tārā which are distinguished by colors and sacred items, including the lotus. The Red Tārā represents the fierce aspect of the Goddess and is associated with magnetizing all good things.

Red Tārā

Announcing the CDDF application deadline May 15th, 2011.
Click here for full details.

New year, new Campbell book to dive into at our Mythological RoundTable® Group at OPUS! The book is The Mythic Dimension and contains a selection of essays that Campbell wrote between 1959 and 1987. The two main topics in this volume are mythology and history and mythology and the arts – this is going to be fun!

Thursday, March 10th 2011 – The Mythic Dimension, chapter titled “The Mystery Number of the Goddess” Part 1

Event Info:

OPUS Archives & Research Center on the Ladera campus of Pacifica Graduate Institute
801 Ladera Lane
6:30-8:30PM
For more information or questions, contact OPUS at info@opusarchives.org or 805-969-5750.

This event is free and open to the public.
2011 Group Dates will be emailed out when confirmed.

“That’s it: You have to let the wild reveal itself on its own say-so. The wild animal will deign to show itself when it is ready, when it has weighed the situation, this way and that way and its way. Like the dream messages or the wind or whatever belongs to the wild, the animal comes in its own time and place. Not yours. You never have the control. The animal’s choice controls you. If you do not respect the wild, you will see nothing. Even sometimes when you do, the denizen still is not ready to show itself. That is the experience I know best: days and days and days, nothing appears. Then, without reason or rationale or one’s deserts, or God knows why, the coyote, the fox, the puma, the bobcat, will glide by for a matter of seconds, within your sight. The fatalistic, timeless, spaceless happening comes when it will: not because of you. And that is what makes it so treasured.” Jane Hollister Wheelwright and Lynda W. Schmidt The Long Shore, Typescripts, pg. 6, Chapter 20.

THE NEW MYTHOS RESEARCH GRANT – 2010

It’s all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it is no longer effective….Our challenge is to create…a new sense of what it means to be human. Thomas Berry

The old gods are dead or dying and people everywhere are searching, asking: What is the new mythology to be, the mythology of this unified earth as of one harmonious being? … The only myth that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet and everything on it. Joseph Campbell

In 2010 OPUS hosted 13 recipients of the first New Mythos Research Grant. These individuals were not only scholars but also artists and writers, a composer and dancer.  They, and 150 others, responded to the call in 2009 for articulations of the new mythic threads, the stories of meaning that are rising in the culture and these stories had to be built on the strong foundations of the scholars whose collections we have here in the archives.

In the original announcement for the New Mythos Grant we wrote “Campbell’s call [what is the new mythology] has been taken up by many and now we find ourselves in a time when the cry from most every quarter is for a new story, a new narrative, the new mythos that he wrote about. We humans are in search of a way to understand the patterns underlying the profound transformation we are currently experiencing in relationship with each other and our planet.  From whence will this new mythos come? Who will tell the story?  How will such a search be resourced?”

This grant cycle is officially over and we have been gathering the initial gleanings and thoughts by the researchers. We have been host to these incredible projects by the 13 individuals who participated in this call for the new stories and almost all of the preliminary research essays are available for you to read now on our website. As final projects come in, like Daniel Lentz’s Oratoio, we will share those as well.

Click here to read the New Mythos 2010 preliminary research reports

The collections held by OPUS Archives and Research Center provide treasures by visionary thinkers, scholars, writers and teachers. These individuals dedicated their lives to exploring the origins of cultural stories from pre-history (Marija Gimbutas), through ancient and classic history (Joseph Campbell and Christine Downing), and into contemporary culture (James Hillman, Jane and Joseph Wheelwright and Marion Woodman), thereby laying the foundation for new research that fosters meaning and guidance for the questions held by our modern world.

Saint Sarah, Sara-la-Kali (Sara the Black) is the mythic patron saint of the Roma (Gypsy) people. Sarah and Kali are both images of black feminine divinity, this connection arising through the Romani peoples having originally come from India.  Saint Sarah is said to have been a servant of the Three Mary’s and accompanied them to Gaul, modern day France. Another version says Sarah was the chief of her tribe on the Rhone and had a vision of the Three Mary’s nautical arrival and welcomed them to land.

Shrine to Saint Sarah at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer