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, April 14th 2011 – The Mythic Dimension, chapter titled “The Mystery Number of the Goddess” and the 9 Muses.

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.

Dennis Patrick Slattery has just released his newest book titled Day-To-Day Dante: Exploring Personal Myth Through The Divine Comedy. Dennis has contributed articles on Joseph Campbell to our website and I invite you to check them out here.

Overview

The premise of this series of 365 meditations on Dante’s poem of the 14^th. century is that his journey outlines the complex and rigorous process of individual maturation on several levels simultaneously. In addition, not a contemporary guide is the focus but rather the great poet of the Middle Ages who has crafted a work most have heard of but few have read, his Commedia, which was in circulation by 1314. It is the story of one soul, lost in a dark wood, who, with guidance from several sources, finds his way into what might be called the mythic and mystic sense of his life, in harmony with the larger created order. It is a poem, Dante wrote of it himself, “not for speculation but for implementation.” It is intended for those interested in using it to meditate on their own pilgrimage and to gain insights by the power of poetic analogy of the process of coming into wholeness within themselves.

A colleague of Dennis’ posted a synopsis of the book on her website and you can read that by visiting this link here.

To order the book contact Dennis Patrick Slattery directly at dslattery@pacifica.edu or purchase it at the Pacifica bookstore.

OPUS is honored to announce the arrival of the Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig collection to the archives. Dr. Guggenbühl-Craig’s magnificent collection of articles, lectures and correspondence sits alongside James Hillman’s, long time colleagues and friends.  Dr. Guggenbühl-Craig’s collection fortifies the level of intellectual depth and inquiry that has been collecting in the archives over the years and is also a significant bridge between the European and American depth psychology communities. For more information on Dr. Guggenbühl-Craig’s life and work visit our website.

Dr. Guggenbühl-Craig

Announcing the addition of an online archive of our E-Newsletter, “The Root and the Bloom”. Click here to access the archives and read the March, 2011 E-Newsletter or browse through older newsletters and read about past events and news from OPUS!

Thresholds, a place of liminality, a moment of endings and beginnings. Thresholds are a consequence of the unfolding of time as any movement will lead one to places of crossing. Orpheus looking back, Amaterasu emerging from her cave.

Moon Gate - a boundary and at the same time an opening

Bob Walter, Executive Director of the Joseph Campbell Foundation is on Karen Tate’s “Voices of the Sacred Feminine” radio show today.

She writes that they will be discussing “what it means to be a “mythic activist”, the importance of Joseph Campbell’s work in the  world, the hero/heroine’s journey, and how rational thought, and the I versus WE mentality, replaced Goddess. I also plan to ask Bob: What happens when myths become not metaphors but fact (aka religion) and how it contributes to the agony of the world. When one understands the psychology of myth and it’s role in religion where does that leave most people on the subject of God/ess? The Athiest? Can we reconcile believing in God/ess with understanding myth and how can we reconcile myth with your own spirituality/religion? And more….”

Sounds terrific – tune in!

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/voicesofthesacredfeminine

Akeso (Greek “akesis”) is the goddess of healing wounds and curing illnesses. She represents the process of healing, not the cure itself.  Akeso is the daughter of Epione the goddess of soothing of pain and Asklepios the god of medicine. I could find no images of Akeso though I read that she is often depicted with her father. Perhaps she is the surging of the ocean or the breeze upon the air – movement.

This invocation of Akeso is for JH.

“What myth does for you is to point beyond the phenomenal field toward the transcendent. A mythic figure is like a compass with one leg in the field of time and the other in the eternal. The image of god may look like a human or animal form, but its reference is transcendent to that.” Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss

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.”