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

“To feminine consciousness, the spiritual and the physical are two aspects of one totality. Spirit confirms body, articulates body’s wisdom. Spirit is immediate and actual, not something arrived at, as in Plato, through dialectical ascent. ‘As above, so below’ translates into ‘as in the head, so in the belly’; the two are simultaneously present, not dialogically opposed.”

Marion Woodman Conscious Femininity, 8.

"La Danse (I)" Henri Matisse

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Please join OPUS and La Casa de Maria for a screening of Marion Woodman: Dancing in the Flames with guest Andrew Harvey

Sunday, July 31st, 4:30-6:30pm                                                                                                                                                                                  at La Casa de Maria ~ 800 El Bosque Road, Santa Barbara

Tickets are $25 pre-register/$35 at door

To purchase tickets online, click on the film poster above. This will take you to our “Supporting Opportunities” webpage.  Fill out all required information, and under “Gift information” enter $25 times the amount of tickets you wish to purchase, for example, enter $50 to purchase two tickets.

You may also call us to purchase tickets by phone at 805-969-5750

“There’s nothing you can do that’s more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way, you will find, live, and become a realization of your own personal myth”.

Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss

Thursday, July 7th 2011 –

Guest Lecturer April Heaslip, MA – “Rocks, Paper, Scissors: Women & Mythology Since Marija Gimbutas”

April will introduce us to archaeomythology, a field that Gimbutas pioneered in her groundbreaking work on the Goddess. A scholar working in women’s studies, archaeology and myth, April will share what is going on in the field today, how it bridges with third wave feminism, and what cultural reverberations we can see manifesting.

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.

Wow. I am back from the These Women Conference that Lori Pye and the ICC put on over the weekend and it was truly an historical event. What was the common thread through all of the women’s stories? Eros, connectedness, the intimacy of an I and Thou…

Dionysus & Ariadne

Detail of Dionysos and Ariadne sitting on a vineyard hill, from a vase depicting the retinue of the god.

We know certain things: that power and fear are cast out by love, that relationships cannot advance without frankness and integrity, that a man must have honor, that self-deception leads to catastrophe. James Hillman

OPUS Archives and Research Center. James Hillman Collection, Box 130. Series: Feeling Function—Notes on various lectures.

“Pallas”

Athena ~ Susan Seddon Boulet

They said:

she is high and far and blind

in her high pride

but now that my head is bowed

in sorrow, I find

she is most kind.

~H.D. (Selected Poems, New York: Grove Press, 1957)