Myth 101 – Laozi or Lao Tzu, philosopher of ancient China and author of the Tao Te Ching. He is one of the Three Pure Ones who are the Gods of the Taoist pantheon.

Inspired to find a balance in the rush and quickening that seems to mark our personal and collective lives, a few words from Lao Tzu illuminates – “Make haste slowly”.

James Hillman writes about the archetypal qualities of slowness and its wisdom in his essays on the Senex. See Hillman’s Uniform Edition Vol.3 Senex and Puer.

This year’s Mythological ToolBox® Playshop, “Unsung Stories & Evocative Songs,” runs from Sunday evening, March 25 through Friday afternoon, March 30.

If you are willing to re-vision yourself, then join this improvisational ritual of rebirth.Bob Walter will be joined by Caldecott-award-winning author/artist Gerald McDermott (www.geraldmcdermott.com), Tai Ji dancer Chungliang Al Huang (www.livingtao.org), with the musical stylings of Bill Baird’s Diamond Dead.

For more information visit www.jcf.org or click here.

Our February 2012 eNewsletter is now available. Click here to read.

Following her walk along the Camino de Santiago, Christine Downing will teach a class June 11th through the 14th, 2012, at Chartres Cathedral, titled Walking a Sacred Path!! Through deep immersion in the pilgrimage route, land and labyrinth, join her in a retelling of such timeless myths as those of Ariadne, Asclepius, Orpheus and Eurydice, even Demeter and Persephone.

Let the sacred lines of peripatetic path-making guide both body and psyche with the wisdom of Christine Downing!

Stay tuned for more information.

Exordium: Meaning a beginning. “Meeting Erik Erikson had a very profound effect upon me. When I first went to Zurich, I had an ego that was–well, to say that it was loosely put together would be enormously flattering. It was in about the same kind of shape as a dandelion that’s gone to seed. If you went FWOOSH, it blew to the four quarters of the earth. And it’s quite clear that at that stage in my career I couldn’t possibly have withstood the often prevalent, very, very tough reductive analyses that were being dealt out by Freud and his followers…. As Erickson said,  there were a lot of people who get back to somewhere between nothing and five alright, but then they didn’t return to age 71 or 43 1/2 or 29 1/2; they were still shuttling around… in a dazed kind of way. (I don’t think he got overwhelming applause with that kind of comment, but this is a reasonable paraphrase.)” (Joseph B. Wheelwright, Saint George and the Dandelion: 40 Years of Practice as a Jungian Analyst, p. 11) 

Join us on Thursday, February 2nd, for our fourth and final lecture exploring the legacy of Jane Hollister Wheelwright, as Willow Young presents, The Jane Hollister Wheelwright Connection: Research of the Archetypal Feminine.

Please click here for more details!

Salomé, by Henri Regnault (1870)

Salomé – Figure in Christian mythology who won the head of John the Baptist because of her seductive dance of the seven veils. Salomé, alongside the prophet Elijah, appears in C.G. Jung’s Liber Novus (Red Book) as a guide and teacher in his personal mythology. Jung refers to the encounter with Salomé and Elijah as a mystery play and he understood and ultimately related to Salome as an anima (soul) figure who connected him to emotion and feeling. Salomé’s blindness Jung interpreted as a way for psyche to express the feeling mode of the soul which experiences and relates to life through the emotional senses rather than thinking or forethought, which are types of sight oriented processes and are Elijah’s powers.

The previous deadline for the Call for Proposals for the 2012 conference, Creating the Chalice: Imagination and Integrity in Goddess Studies, presented by The Association for the Study of Women and Mythology, has been extended to January 15th.

Click here for important details on submitting your proposal.

Click here to read January’s eNewsletter!

An exciting upcoming retreat to be held at La Casa de Maria on January 20 – 22, 2012.

Norvene Vest explores the personal and social importance of the human possibilities raised by Maria Gimbutas’ mythology and investigates the cultural implications of her vision.Through imagery, meditation, and ritual, a culture and community will be recreated where spirituality is central to life, the female body is seen as sacred sources of life, and earth as the mother matrix of creation.

For more information, please click here.