Opus Archives and Research Center Awarded Prestigious Grant
from the Institute of Museum and Library Services

Thanks to a grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Opus, located on the campuses of Pacifica Graduate Institute, has been able to transfer the original 16 millimeter film for popular mythologist Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey: The World of Joseph Campbell from steel containers into superior fire and water proof archival quality canisters. This grant ensures that Campbell’s words and work will continue to be accessible to the community, preserving and furthering research into the deeply embedded language of myth that influences a growing understanding of and empathy for the rich and diverse cultures and communities found throughout the world.

Old Film Canisters

New Archival Canisters

“We are very proud to have been awarded this grant which allows us to care for these delicate materials in the Joseph Campbell collection. This grant is the first that Opus has been awarded and we are honored by the opportunity.”

-Safron Rossi, Ph.D., Director of Opus Archives

Reminding you to celebrate Jane’s birthday by attending the next in the Jane Hollister Wheelwright Lecture Series on Thursday, September 9th, from 6:00 – 8:00 PM on the Ladera campus of Pacifica Graduate Institute! Come listen in to Lou Ann Wallner’s fascinating lecture, Beyond the Ranch Papers: The Dream of Tepitates. Meaning ‘sacred, high place,’ Tepitates was the Chumash name for the Hollister Ranch, Jane’s home and lasting legacy. RSVP to rsvp@opusarchives.org. See you there!

“Listening to the storm gave me time to reminisce about our seacoast. The breakers, whatever their intensity, are indicators of the state of things. They also convey messages from distant lands–taking up the pressures from foreign storms thousands of miles away to spend them against our cliffs. The ocean limits the surrounding elements with its own mighty voice. So alive, it is like a faithful companion, a protector in the night….

Hurricane Irene

That night, violence was only a variation on the theme–the ocean’s other side. It comforted me in my snug hideout, promoting sleep.”  Jane Hollister Wheelwright, The Ranch Papers, p. 82

In many cultures, it is not only the gods and goddesses to cause earthquakes.  Animals too, with restlessness, anger, fatigue, or just plain curiosity, cavort and roll about, instigating the great ruckus of earthquakes felt by we who live above.  For instance:

Namazu

• In Japan, the monstrous catfish Namazu grows fidgety when deserted by the god appointed to his restraint. His thrashing about causes the destruction above ground.

• A great mole, burrowing through the soils of India, creates its myriad of subterranean highways, shaking and reshaping the surface features of the landscape.

• Triggering upheaval by an earthquake, the noble Tortoise of Algonquin myth, grown weary with supporting the planet, moves about in order to find a more comfortable position.

• Finally, though perhaps not animal at all, various Asian stories are told of a different race living beneath the Earth’s surface, and with nothing less than curiosity, rattle the ground simply to discover whether anyone lives up above. (Andrews, T. (1998). A Dictionary of Nature Myths, pp. 62-63.)

Thus both the animal and animal figure is found to live richly beneath the organic surface of our planet and deep within the crevasses of our collective psyche. When the earth moves beneath us — on the surface or in our dreams — we might pause to wonder:  What — or who — within our imagination is also moving, stretching, asking for attention?

“I had my first rock and roll experience at a performance of the Grateful Dead…. Rock music had always seemed a bore to me, but I can tell you, at that concert, I found eight thousand people standing in mild rapture for five hours. The place was just a mansion of dance. And I thought, ‘Holy God! Everyone has just lost themselves in everybody else here!'”

( Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Dimension, p. 185)

Bri Leith, Co. Longford (and others), Land of Eire

Wild Pathway up to Bri Leith

Bri Leith is a paradoxical place of movement and stasis. Some place it in County Longford, some in Westmeath, and some in a variety of other locales upon the green isle. It appears that Bri Leith desires, for the most part, to locate itself near to the heart of Ireland, the enchanted and politically relevant Hill of Tara. In itself, Bri Leith is a sidhe (faerie) mound, resting hidden amid the upper slopes of a hilltop forest. Should you go in search of the place in County Longford, near the village of Ardagh, you will find few to no signs pointing the way. Instead, the mound is found by walking, climbing, breathing greenly (vibrantly), embodying a relationship to the shifting landscape itself. More, should you ask directions, you might receive a living, pointing finger and a wry grin. Does the grin give a nod to that very Celtic consciousness, or are you simply another soul searching for the way-marker to the Otherworld? Does it even matter? Do walk up and into the forest. While there are no guarantees the place will be found, it is almost certain you will be.

Midhir & Edain in Ardagh

It is named for Bri, daughter of Midhir, (pro. Mith-ir) king of the Tuatha de Danaan. Predominantly associated with the myth of Midhir and Edain — being the fortress where Edain was brought after having been abducted from her human husband — Bri Leith tells another, less-heard tale. Bri’s story is that of love and loss. Leith, while in some translations and spellings means the color grey, is Bri’s warrior lover, the sworn enemy of Midhir and the Tuatha de Danaan. (Interestingly, some renditions of the narrative give Bri as the warrior and Leith the faerie princess.) Midhir refused to have his daughter united with such a rival, thus in heated battle killed her would-be mate. In her responding grief, Bri took her own life, perhaps her own act of retaliation. For Midhir was indeed deeply saddened by his loss.

As is the shifting character of many sacred places in Ireland, Bri Leith has a simultaneity: a mournful yet vibrant aura. Covered in that unique shade of Irish green, as can only be found in a land of effusive mist, quickly-changing weather patterns, cool winds, the forest has a darkly green presence so eloquently evoked by Emerson as he observed, “Night hangs forever in the boughs of the fir tree.” We can, of course, muse on whether it is Bri’s echoing lamentations for her lost love that have seeped into the very soil of the forest, casting it in a shaded and darkly green veil; or perhaps it was her melancholic nature attracting her to a warrior whose very name suggests a certain ennui. In either case, though hard-won by the human visitor, arriving at the foot of the mound gives one a sense of a myth very much alive and thriving in the landscape, place, and vitality of its surrounds and human co-inhabitants. The myth lives in the story, yes, but also within the rich hummus of deep time and human response-ability.

“Money is a psychic reality… devilishly divine.… To find the soul of modern man or woman, begin by searching into those irreducible embarrassing facts of the money complex, that crazy crab scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

James Hillman, City and Soul, (pp. 358 – 366)

Please join us for the second lecture titled Beyond the Ranch Papers: The Dream of the Tepitates.

Presented by Lou Ann Wallner

Come join us on Jane’s birthday!

Friday, September 9th, 2011, 6:00 to 8:00 PM.

(Pacifica Graduate Institute, 801 Ladera Lane, Santa Barbara, CA)

Please RSVP to Gabrielle Milanich at gm@opusarchives.org

Serpent Goddess figurine from the Christine Downing Collection

This Serpent Goddess has been a figure that has sat on Chris’ desk, symbolizing the goddess energy that has inspired her writing. It is on display in our exhibit titled “Little Treasures”.

“The whole problem of mythology is how to contact immortal forces with our mortal forms. What is mortal will be transformed.”

Joseph Campbell,  L130 “Cosmogonic and Hero Cycles” 11/30/65, Sarah Lawrence