CENTRE FOR MYTH STUDIES University of Essex OPEN SEMINAR
Myth and the Physical World: The Case of Wolfgang Pauli
Professor Roderick Main University of Essex
Thursday 16 May 2024 7.30 – 9.00 pm (BST) Online
All welcome
To register for this free Zoom event, please email: pps@essex.ac.uk before 11.30 am on the day of the seminar (mention CMS open seminar)
Wolfgang Pauli in Pontresina, Winter 1931/1932
The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) was a major influence on Carl Gustav Jung’s (1875–1961) later reformulation of his concept of the archetype as “psychoid,” that is, as capable of organizing not only the psychic world but also the physical world. This formulation allows Jung’s theory of myth to “bring myth back to the world” (as the late Robert Segal put it), for it simultaneously involves causally effective divine personalities (personified expressions of archetypes), contributes to explaining the physical world, and remains compatible with modern science. In this paper, I examine some of Pauli’s own engagements with myth—including motifs relating to the Dioscuri, Mercurius/Merlin, and Perseus—and their connections to his developing ideas in physics. I conclude that these engagements were deeply significant for Pauli but were only possible because he implicitly adhered not to a materialist/physicalist but to a dual-aspect monist metaphysics and epistemology.
The ideas in this talk were developed over many years in a spirited dialogue with the great theorist of myth, Professor Robert Segal of the University of Aberdeen, who sadly died earlier this year. The talk is dedicated to his memory.
Roderick Main works in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, where he is a professor and the Director of the Centre for Myth Studies. His most recent book is Breaking the Spell of Disenchantment: Mystery, Meaning, and Metaphysics in the Work of C. G. Jung (Chiron Publications, 2022).
CENTRE FOR MYTH STUDIES University of Essex OPEN SEMINAR
CAUTION: An Archetype!
Ethno-cultural myths as universal tools for self- and ‘enemy’-identity, social mobilization, and manipulation of the masses
Dr Alexey Kholodov Odessa University, Ukraine
Thursday 29 February 2024 7.30 – 9.00 pm (GMT) Online
All welcome
To register for this Zoom event, please email: pps@essex.ac.uk before 11.30 am on the day of the seminar (mention CMS open seminar)
Early twentieth-century illustration for the Song of Roland.
Bearing in mind that since ancient times myths have served purposes of ethnic identification and social mobilization, we shall start from the Song of Roland and approach it as an ethnomyth used for self-identity in a crucial historical moment. We shall also discuss the role of myth in ideological legitimization and trace how an ideological concept can be turned into an image and thus naturalized (Barthes). Since, at a closer look, conflicts of the modern world can be perceived as a fight between different mythologies, we shall compare the nationalist mythological image of Paradise Lost – Paradise Regained with the imperialist notion of The Chosen People. Finally, we shall try to unveil the major myths that stand behind the Russian-Ukrainian war and speak about the danger of myth as a tool for social mobilization and manipulation of the masses.
Dr Alexey Kholodov is Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Literature, Odessa University, Ukraine, and has had a life-long love affair with myth and literature or myth in literature. He has studied and taught in Canada, USA, Germany, and Italy and is the author of a monograph on Mythopoetics in Dostoevsky and Bunin and nine books of fiction, mostly collections of novellas. He has taught a variety of courses such as Myth in Modern Literature and Culture, Semiotics of the Soviet Cinema 1920-1960, and on the history of European literature and on poetics and literary theory. He is the winner of several literary prizes and grants.
CENTRE FOR MYTH STUDIES University of Essex OPEN SEMINAR
The Alchemical Oedipus: Re-Visioning the Myth
Reginald Ajuonuma University of Essex
Thursday 14 December 2023 7.30 – 9.00 pm (GMT) Online
All welcome
To register for this Zoom event, please email: pps@essex.ac.uk before 11.30 am on the day of the seminar (mention CMS open seminar)
‘Death of Laius’, The Delphian Society: The World’s Progress, Part III (W. B. Conkey Company, 1913)
The Oedipus myth is foundational to depth psychology due to Freud’s use of Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex in the creation of psychoanalysis. But analytical psychology’s engagement with the myth has been limited despite the importance Jung also places upon it. The absence of a developed Jungian response to Oedipus means the myth’s psychologically constructive elements have been overlooked in favour of reductive Freudian interpretations. I examine whether analytical psychology can fruitfully re-engage with Oedipus by reinterpreting his story as a paternal rebirth. This is achieved by reincorporating those parts of the myth that occur before and after the period portrayed in Oedipus Rex. Such a move reintegrates Oedipus’ father, King Laius, into the story and unveils important parallels with the alchemical trope of the king’s renewal by his son. Using Jung’s method of amplification, Oedipus is recast as Laius’ redeemer and identified with the archetype of psychological wholeness, the Self. The contention is that such an understanding of Oedipus supports a clearer recognition of the potentially generative quality of human suffering, restoring to the myth the quality of moral instruction it possessed in antiquity.
Reginald Ajuonuma, M.A., M.Phil. Cantab., (UK) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex. His research is interdisciplinary, spanning analytical psychology, phenomenology, and narrative theory. He is a recipient of the David Holt Prize, awarded annually by the University of Essex for outstanding performance on the master’s course in Jungian and Post-Jungian Studies. Reginald’s doctoral research is funded by the Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England.
Figures of authority are often depicted holding a staff. The meaning of such sticks varies according to cultural context, and whether or not you wield it yourself. Perhaps it connotes stability, order and justice, or teleological progress, patriarchal power and state violence. We may think of the Ancient Greek skeptron or the monarchical ball and sceptre. A mysterious example of a staff of authority is found in the Mesopotamian ‘rod and ring’. When the goddess Inanna descends to the underworld, she takes her lapis lazuli rod and her ring of rope, but these are among the attributes that she must surrender to gain access. Is it the same rod and ring that is carved in the famous ‘Queen of the Night’ relief of Inanna’s counterpart Ishtar? Or is the figure depicted in the relief Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld herself? The ‘rod and ring’ is ubiquitous in depictions of Mesopotamian deities, but its precise significance is uncertain. It may be a symbol of divine authority, of political power, or justice. It may have a practical purpose as a measuring tool. It may also evoke a mythical conception of time, in which the linear and cyclical experiences of time are given equal importance. Understanding the rod and ring as a symbol of eternity, and tracing the symbol’s use chronologically, I identify where eternity breaks down, leaving humanity stranded in profane time.
Ben Pestell is an independent scholar and tutor. He has a PhD from the University of Essex where he is Visiting Fellow with the Centre for Myth Studies, and where he co-founded the long-running Myth Reading Group (the forerunner of the present open seminar series). He is co-editor of Translating Myth (Routledge/Legenda, 2016), and his publications address myth in contemporary literature, theories of myth, and contemporary receptions and interpretations of Greek Tragedy. He has taught widely in Adult Education for the WEA and the Mary Ward Centre, leading courses in Greek epic and tragedy, myths from Norse and Mesopotamian traditions, myth theory, comparative mythologies, and literary walks.
CENTRE FOR MYTH STUDIES University of Essex OPEN SEMINAR
Mythical Monsters and the Monstrous in Myth: Harpies and Erinyes in Modern Fiction
Dr Ana González-Rivas Fernández Autonomous University, Madrid
Thursday 2 November 2023 7.30 – 9.00 pm (GMT) Online
All welcome
To register for this Zoom event, please email: pps@essex.ac.uk (mention CMS open seminar)
Monstrous is everything that challenges the normative, that transgresses aesthetic, ethical, and moral laws. Despite our efforts to conceal it, the monstrous ends up revealing itself, scandalizing and terrifying us because it threatens our harmonious conception of the world and confronts us with our darker side. Consequently, the monstrous has been repudiated and expelled from our lives in order to regain a more coherent and stable self-structure. It is then relegated to the vast territory of the margins, a place where everything that endangers what is acceptable according to the hegemonic power ends up. Throughout history, there have been many monsters who have embraced their state of exclusion, experiencing it as a just punishment for their transgressive nature. However, in the postmodern era, a new discourse of empowerment has also been introduced, in which monsters have decided to stop being victims and have begun to reclaim their monstrosity as a mark of identity. Within the framework of this discourse lies the volume Monstruosas [The Female Monstrous], edited by Covadonga González-Pola and Cristina del Toro (Tinta Púrpura, 2019). The work, composed of ten horror stories written by female Spanish authors, narrates the tales of ten female monsters inspired by myths from various cultures. In this presentation, I will focus the analysis on the stories “Wings of the Wind” by Caryanna Reuven (inspired by the Harpies) and “The Stone of Sorrow” by Lola Robles (which delves into the world of the Erinyes). The analysis of these two tales will allow us to observe how classical mythology is employed in the service of a feminist discourse in which the monstrous-feminine functions simultaneously as an instrument of denunciation and identity assertion within a traditionally patriarchal system.
Ana González-Rivas Fernández is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Philology at the Autonomous University of Madrid. She holds a Ph.D. in Philology and bachelor’s degrees in Classical Philology and English Philology from the Complutense University of Madrid. Her doctoral thesis examines the literary and cultural relationships established between Greco-Latin literature and Anglo-American gothic literature. She has undertaken various postdoctoral research stays at the National University of Tucumán (Argentina), Baylor University (Texas, United States), the Open University (London, United Kingdom), and the University of Essex (Colchester, United Kingdom). Her research interests encompass topics related to Anglo-American Gothic and Fantastic Literature, Comparative Literature, the Reception of Greco-Latin Classics, Myth Criticism, Cultural Transfers, Intermediality, and Popular Culture. In her academic publications, she has analyzed the works of authors such as Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Charles Robert Maturin, Edgar Allan Poe, M. R. James, and the Pre-Raphaelites, among others. She currently serves as the secretary of Asteria (International Association of Myth Criticism) and holds positions on the governing boards of SELGYC (Spanish Society of General and Comparative Literature) and EAPSA (Edgar Allan Poe Spanish Association).
The Myth Reading Group will meet on ‘Zoom’ on Thursday 23 March 2023, 5:30-6:30 pm (UK time). The link to join is posted in the comments for this post. All are welcome.
The theme for the Spring Term is Japanese Myth.
The Peony Lantern, illustration from Lafcadio Hearn, In Ghostly Japan (Gutenberg.org)
Continuing our readings of Japanese myth, this week we will look into some of the work of Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), a Greek-British writer who travelled from the US to Japan and finally settled there towards the end of the nineteenth century. Hearn (later known as Koizumi Yakumo after marrying in Japan and obtaining citizenship), explores the supernatural, strange “ghosts” of Japanese culture through a series of essays, stories, poems and fairy tales. In the story of the Peony Lantern, taken from the collection In Ghostly Japan (1899), the ghosts of two women appear as ambivalent, deceitful beings, and harmful to mortals who interact with them. In another “ghost” story from the same collection, the story of the Tengu, a bird-like spirit grants a wish to a priest with disappointing results.
The Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies and the Centre for Myth Studies at University of Essex present an Open Seminar:
Professor Megumi Yama
Kyoto University of Advanced Science
The concept of kami and Japanese creation myth
Thursday 9 March, 5.30 – 7.00 pm
University of Essex, Colchester campus, Room 5A.120
All Welcome
The Kami of Wisdom, Kuehiko Shrine, Nara (Photo: Megumi Yama)
The Centre for Myth Studies, and the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, are delighted to welcome Professor Megumi Yama. This will be the first in-person event hosted by the Centre for Myth Studies since February 2020, so it would be wonderful to see as many of you as can attend.
Although the Japanese word kami is usually translated into English with terms such as deity, god, or spirit, none of these words precisely captures its full meaning. What makes this concept more ambiguous and chaotic is that, due to the syncretization of Japanese religions, the same word kami is used both for god and goddess in Buddhism and the numerous spirits in Shintō. In fact, the ambiguous nature of kami itself is considered to be not only unique in religious and cultural meaning, but also noteworthy in terms of its deep embeddedness in the Japanese psyche. Many Japanese accept the concept of kami without even being conscious of its historical religious basis. We can find these kami in the Kojiki, the oldest Japanese creation myth. In the very beginning, before the appearance of the ‘First Parents’ who created the world, many generations of invisible kami float in and out of ‘being’ one after another. They gradually take kami form, moving from intangible to tangible, from invisible to visible, from abstract to concrete. Although each embodies a separate kami, ultimately, they show orientation as a whole. I would like to argue that through exploring this orientation in a connection of seemingly fragmented images, an important theme may emerge. Such a concept may finally lead to the Buddhist idea of jinen – a state in which everything flows spontaneously, just as it is. If time permits, I would also like to touch on some motifs from the animated film “Your Name” by Makoto Shinkai, which I hope will be helpful for understanding the concept of kami in Japan.
Megumi Yama, Ph.D. is a professor of depth psychology and clinical psychology at Kyoto University of Advanced Science. She is also engaged in clinical work as a Jungian-oriented psychotherapist. She has written many articles and books, including translations, both in English and Japanese. Her books include To the Depth of Words (Seishinshobo, 2003), The Creation of “Black”: A Painter who never Stopped Painting Siberia—the Depth of Creative Activity and his Work of Art (Tomishobo, 2016), Haruki Murakami: Novel as Method—a Decent into the Depths of Memory (Shin-yo-sha, 2019), and A Psychotherapeutic Reading of the Japanese Animated Film “Your Name”: The Power of Invisible Imagery (Shin-yo-sha, 2022).
Katsukawa Shuntei, The Warrior Fujiwara Hidesato Battling the Giant Centipede, ca. 1818 (via Curious Ordinary)
This week we take a break from the Kojiki and Nihongi to discuss the 14th-century Japanese folktale about the 10th-century warrior Fujiwara no Hidesato’s exploits in killing a gigantic centipede that lived on Mount Mikami in Shiga Prefecture and was terrorising the region around Lake Biwa. In addition to the enormous centipede, we shall encounter a metamorphosing snake, a dragon king, an underwater palace, and sundry magical gifts, including the eponymous bag of rice, to provide plenty of sustenance for the mythological imagination.
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Susanoo no Mikoto kills the Eight-headed Serpent, woodblock print triptych, 1887 (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
Last term we encountered the Japanese deity Susanowo in his dealings with the sun goddess Amaterasu. At the end of the tale, Susanowo is expelled from the High Plain of Heaven in punishment for his destructive behaviour.
This week’s text picks up his story as told in the Nihonshoki (‘Chronicles of Japan’, also called Nihongi, completed 720 CE). Here, Susanowo demonstrates his ‘culture-hero’ status as he defeats the ‘eight-forked serpent’ Yamata-no-Orochi. The section here concludes with Susanowo’s descendant Ōnamuji (or Ōkuninushi) completing the creation of the world alongside the diminutive Sukunabikona.
Susanowo’s full name is given as Take-paya-susa-nö-wo-nö-mikötö, and can be translated ‘Valiant intrepid raging male lord’ or ‘Reckless Rushing Raging Man’. This edition transliterates his name as ‘Sosa no wo no Mikoto’. The extract begins with Susanowo announcing that he must return for ever to the Nether Land in obedience to the assembled deities…
The story of the deities Izanami [She Who Invites] and Izanagi [He Who Invites] is told in two eighth-century works, the Kojiki [Records of Ancient Matters] and the Nihongi [Chronicles of Japan]. The two works differ in certain details, but the fundamental account remains the same. The text for the Myth Reading Group is taken from the translation by Basil Chamberlain of the former. It concerns the events that follow on from the death of Izanami after she gives birth to Kagutsuchi [Incarnation of Fire; Homasubi [Fire Producer] in the Nihongi].
The closing paragraphs from Leon Burnett’s ‘Orphic Reflections’, in which he compares the Japanese katabasis to the Orpheus–Eurydice myth. ‘Orphic Reflections’ was a talk given at a Glasfryn Seminar in 2016. The full text can be read at the Glasfryn Project website.
Crucial to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is the moment when Orpheus looks back on his return from the Underworld and loses his wife. Could this moment, however, be a case of wishful thinking or even wilful distortion? After all, transformation is the soul of myth. Instead of an unquestioning acceptance of the canonical version, then, I propose that we should at least entertain the possibility that Orpheus lost Eurydice because he didn’t look back. His journey had been so full of wonder, so full of strange sights and creatures, three-headed dogs and the like, that this poor mortal, a mere human albeit a poet and therefore especially responsive (too responsive?) to nature, living and dead, nature morte as the French say, still life, that he simply forgot why he had ventured into Hades.
In Orphic literature, Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, is regarded ambivalently (“For thine the task according to thy will,/ Life to produce, and all that lives to kill” in Thomas Taylor’s translation of The Initiations of Orpheus). She has even been considered the mother of the Furies, and with good reason, for she has the power to cause oblivion. Theognis, in one of his poems, refers to her as “Persephone who impairs the mind of mortals and brings them forgetfulness”. Orpheus, then, in unfamiliar surroundings simply forgot about Eurydice and mythmakers have attempted ever since Virgil composed his Georgics to cover the traces of this lapse by asserting the opposite, namely that she was too much in his mind and so he looked back. In support of a reversal of the canonical account, one may cite instances elsewhere in mythology of how a true state of affairs is expressed – or suppressed – by a statement to the contrary. The Furies, for example, are referred to as the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones.
Another approach to the issue is to look at a parallel story in Japanese mythology of the descent into the underworld by a husband (Izanagi) in quest of his dead wife (Izanami). In this story, despite the bewildering paraphernalia of the supernatural, there are certain details that ring true. It is so dark in Yomi (the Japanese equivalent of Hades) that Izanagi is unable to see his wife clearly as he implores her to come back with him to the world of the living. She informs him that she will seek permission to return (for, like Persephone, she has eaten the food of the underworld) and forbids him to look at her. After waiting a long time for a response, Izanagi, carrying a burning torch and disregarding the prohibition against setting his eyes on her, seeks out the sleeping Izanami, but he is horrified to find a decomposing corpse and flees without stopping, as we may safely conjecture, to look back at his wife. Izanami had been awakened, however, and sends the hags of Yomi in pursuit of him. Izanagi barely manages to reach the mouth of the cave that leads out into the everyday world and to roll a massive boulder across the opening before his wife arrives at the other side of the rock, threatening him with dire consequences. They have a slanging match, but Izanagi escapes safely, while Izanami remains with the dead.
This simplified (and severely curtailed) account of the unsuccessful recovery of a beloved spouse offers an ur-scenario that has at least as much credibility as the one embodied in the tradition that presents Orpheus as having lost Eurydice by virtue of his failure to obey an injunction not to look back, a tradition which may be traced to Roman times, and is not encountered before the poetry of Virgil and Ovid. Indeed, in one earlier Greek version, the name of Orpheus’ wife was not Eurydice, meaning “wide justice”, first used by Moschus in the second century before the Christian era, but Agriope, which may be translated as “fierce watcher”. Combine this aspect of the Eurydice figure with the frenzied homicide of the Thracian Maenads and you have a composite female threat to Orpheus that is on a par with the pursuit of Izanagi by the menacing Izanami and her horde of hags.
Details of the darkness of the underworld and the decomposition of the dead body in the Japanese version are more plausible in the circumstances and they lend a sense of realism to the story being told, but, to revert to an earlier comparison, it may be that our western sensibilities prefer to have the bitter-sweet romances of Tristan and Isolde, of Romeo and Juliet, and of Orpheus and Eurydice to counterbalance the current craze for rampant vampires. In choosing not to look back to darker times, we are thus able to accommodate a poignant image that is more to our liking, a nymph for the new millennium, and not return empty handed as Orpheus did.
Essex Myth 