About the Myth Reading Group

Here is a night that is very long, it is endless. It is not time yet
to sleep in the palace. But go on telling your wonderful story.
I myself could hold out until the bright dawn, if only
you could bear to tell me, here in the palace, of your sufferings.
—Homer, Odyssey xi, trans. Lattimore

That passage is strewn with corpses. The mute, the sacrificial victim is part and parcel of the religious rite. But the myth claims other victims for itself, those who fall around the place of sacrifice, iron filings in the magnetic field. Out of the sacrifice, together with the blood, stream the stories.
—Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, trans. Tim Parks

Stories only live in their being read and shared together. The Myth Reading Group opens a space for such activity, breathing life into myth. Like Odysseus, we are conducted over international and stylistic boundaries: no topic is off-limits, and the definition of myth is never rigidly fixed. Details of past, present, and future events can be found here.

We meet every Thursday in term time, between 12:00 and 1:30 p.m. at the University of Essex Colchester Campus. Check out our programme for the range of themes & topics we have explored since the foundation of the centre, and for details of our Spring & Summer term sessions on Trees & Forests.

Everyone interested in myth is welcome to attend. Essex email users can join the mailing list via this link. Non-Essex users can join by sending a request to mythic@essex.ac.uk

If you wish to introduce a topic for one of our sessions, please send proposals to mythic@essex.ac.uk. We are currently accepting proposals for the Autumn term Myth Reading Group on the theme of  ‘Animals & Mythical Creatures’ (proposals by 15 September 2018). We can arrange video conferencing for those who cannot travel to Colchester.

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