“If you live with the myths in your mind, you will find yourself always in mythological situations. They cover everything that can happen to you. And that enables you to interpret the myth in relation to life, as well as life in relation to myth.”  —Joseph Campbell

“We are all part of the old stories; whether we know the stories or not, the old stories know about us.”  —Leslie Marmon Silko

The Advanced Training Certificate in Applied Mythology brings together expert myth practitioners with participants eager to understand the multiple ways which myth structures not only engage with storytelling, but psyche itself.  Recorded learning sessions will usher you into the world of mythology, where deep sources of wisdom can illuminate contemporary turns of life and fate. Live, weekly interactive sessions with master teachers will help you learn to recognize the mythologic patterns that are influencing not only world events, but your own individuation process.

Drawing on the sacred stories of many times and places, this Advanced Training Certificate invites you to apply what you learn to a variety of life areas, including self-development, love and family life, work and career, spirituality, consciousness, and personal creativity. You will also learn and practice the crafts of storytelling, including the science behind why it’s so effective, and ceremony creation for workshops and professional presentations.

Explore the inner, storied dynamics of current events: politics and power, science and technology, the media, the environment, religious and spiritual traditions from around the world, all from the standpoint of ready comprehension (no academic expertise required), everyday relevance, and practical application.

This online, 7-week Certificate course is designed so that both clinicians as well as story lovers from any location or time zone can participate.

What you will receive:

• 7 Interactive Live Webinar Sessions with world recognized Myth Practitioners
• 7 Video Learning Sessions to watch at your convenience
• A Learning Resource Guide with links to suggested books, articles, films
• A Private, on-line Discussion Forum
• Pacifica Graduate Institute Advanced Training Certificate upon successful completion of the course

 

This course is ideal if:

• You are a student or practitioner of depth psychology, psychoanalysis or have an interest in deepening your mythic literacy as a way of decoding the social messages and deeper meanings behind the complex constellations of symbolic events emerging in a radically changing world.
• You are a Myth-Lover who would like to deepen your understanding of how the Mythic collaborates with the creative instinct to influence and shape the creative process.
• You are a student or practitioner of depth psychology, psychoanalysis or a healer who is looking to deepen your own work by identifying and integrating the mythologic patterns that influence the individuation process as well as world events.

 

Individual Session Descriptions

Week 1: The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Past Lives and Future Reincarnations of Mythology Studies

Instructor: Kali Cape, PhD

Live Zoom session Thursday, June 25, 2025, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM PT

This module explores a history of Western and European reception of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It examines how Jung’s groundbreaking psychological interpretation of the Bardo Thodol both illuminated and obscured the text’s profound wisdom about death, consciousness, and transformation, reflecting the colonial tendency to translate indigenous wisdom into Western psychological categories, potentially diminishing its original cultural and spiritual context. Drawing on contemporary indigenous studies frameworks and decolonial approaches to mythology, we’ll explore how the future of mythological studies lies not in appropriating traditional narratives but in learning to engage respectfully with diverse ways of knowing while recognizing how sacred stories continue to offer frameworks for understanding death, transformation, and collective healing in our contemporary world. Through interactive discussions connecting ancient Tibetan wisdom to modern research on awe, community, and consciousness, participants will experience how mythological studies can honor indigenous knowledge systems while generating new insights for personal and collective transformation.

 

Week 2: Encountering the Angel

Instructor: Dr. Maryam Sayyad

Live Zoom session Thursday, July 11, 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM PT

Across cultures, myths remember encounters with beings of light. These angelophanies suggest a recurring mythic motif: a luminous presence that inhabits a realm between the material and the immaterial, appearing at moments when the visible world opens up to reveal another, invisible order. Among the luminous daemons of this intermediate realm is the personal angel, one who responds to our longing, invocation, or command– and grants our dearest wishes.

In this module, we explore the motif of the wish-fulfilling angel in the djinn of Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp and the Holy Guardian Angel depicted in the film, A Dark Song. Keys to this motif are found in Solomonic magic, Zoroastrian angelology, and the philosophy of light present in Western and Eastern esoteric traditions. Drawing on the work of philosopher Henry Corbin, we consider how encounters with such beings belong to what he called the imaginal world: an intermediate realm where archetypal figures become visible to a mode of consciousness capable of perceiving them.

Applied mythology begins when we recognize that such encounters are not merely supernatural tales but symbolic expressions of a profound human experience: the moment when a hidden order of reality seems to answer the call of the seeker.

 

Week 3: The Collective Heroic Journey

Instructor: Dr. John Bucher

Live Zoom session Thursday, July 16, 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM PT

While the significance of our individual journeys will always remain, we are entering a new landscape of mythic consciousness. The journey of our collective has taken on increasing significance. In this module, we will explore how we might navigate a journey together as an ensemble, what we can learn and bring with us from our individual heroic journeys and what must be left behind. Building on the work of Joseph Campbell, Maureen Murdock, and others that have offered frameworks for how we might understand our passage through the various phases of mythic development, we will consider what a future mosaic of meaning could look like. Through investigating models offered by various narratives in literature, film, television, comics, and other popular culture, we will discover symbols, mythic motifs, and archetypal patterns leading us toward a new story.

 

Week 4: New Times, New Heroes: Reimagining Myth Through the Heroine’s Journey and Afrofuturism

Live Zoom session Thursday, July 23, 2026 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM PT

Instructor: Li Sumpter, PhD

Myths shape and inform reality through the power of archetype and symbol. Each generation takes a turn at retelling timeless tales and reimagining old symbols that reflect the collective imagination and resonant signs of the times. The Hero embodies the hopes and fears, strengths, and weaknesses of the people. But when it comes to the representation of our cultural heroes in history, myth, and the media, there is not always equity and inclusion. This module compares the classic Hero’s Journey to emergent narrative models like the Heroine’s Journey and the Quantum Quest in contemporary film, graphic novels, and animation. We will examine art and media through the lens of “archetypal aesthetics” and the historic experiences, future visions, and marginalized perspectives of BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of color) and female-identifying peoples and protagonists. Through “mythic literacy” we will decode the social messages and deeper meaning behind the complex constellations of vital symbols, active archetypes, and rising stars illuminating new myths for a radically changing world.

 

Week 5: Echoes of Eternity: Mythic Patterns in a Changing World

Instructor: Stephanie Zajchowski, PhD

Live Zoom session Thursday, July 30, 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM PT

Myth pulsates throughout the contemporary world for those attuned to its presence. Amid unfolding events, myth offers grounding in a larger story and deeper meaning to lived experience. A mythological lens reveals mythic patterns in Margaret Atwood’s haunting dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale; the gravity-defying cinematic adaptation of Wicked; and the transformative innovations of artificial intelligence. Exploring myths of the underworld, boundary crossing, and apocalypse, this course illuminates contemporary expressions of enduring mythological themes and their ongoing cultural resonance.

 

 

Week 6: Aztec Creation Mythology and the Kairos

 Instructor: Sandra del Castillo, PhD

Live Zoom session Thursday August 6, 2026 12:00 PM – 1:30PM PT

“As the individual in search of his or her soul soon discovers, the soul is entangled in myths…to know ourselves we must know the gods and goddesses of myth-we must face the gods.” –  James Hillman

Mythology is the language of the soul cloaked in the culture of a people. As Jung tells us, myth springs to life when read or re-enacted. Myth guides, compensates, and brings order to the inner chaos and its outward manifestations. Like the mythic heroes of old, myth serves civilization. In our module, we bring these Jungian and archetypal perspectives to the Aztec creation myth of the Five Suns, where looking deeply, we find ourselves, “entangled in myth.”  Within these stories of the rise and fall of the different worlds, we consider the kairos, a Greek concept of time inferring an opportune moment; anticipating the peril humanity faces, Jung understood that those alive today would be experiencing a kairos– the right moment, as he saw it, for a change of worldview.

 

Week 7: Myth and Ecopsychology from Ovid to Calvino

Instructor: Emily Lord-Kambitsch, PhD

Live Zoom session Thursday, August 13, 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM PT

Myth frequently presents us with non-human subjectivities, or the consciousness, intelligence, and psychosomatic experience of animals and plants. This session will employ an ecopsychological lens to discuss how myths aid us in understanding and tending relationships between human and other-than-human beings in a shared ecology. Our case studies come from anthologies of myth and folktale produced in ancient and modern Italy. 1^st-century-BCE Roman poet Ovid framed his epic compilation of Greco-Roman myths, Metamorphoses, on the theme of cross-species transformations, where consciousness, memory, trauma, and emotion travel between human, animal, and plant bodies. Italo Calvino’s 1980 anthology, Italian Folktales, features many stories in which humans and animals collaborate and communicate, often in ingeniously resourceful ways. This session will encourage participants to apply a mythic and symbolic vocabulary that brings us to new horizons of other-than-human perspectives.

***Content Forecast: Some of the myths we are reading for this session involve sexual violence, slavery, and other themes of a sensitive nature. Learners are advised to engage mindfully with this material.

 

Learning Objectives:

By the End of This Course You Will Be Able To:

1. Identify how mythic motifs recur in contemporary technology.
2. Experience your own relationship with myth as a useful metaphor for exploring the psyche and its teleology toward wholeness.
3. Increase your attunement to the mythic world around you and its impact on you (intrapersonally, interpersonally and transpersonally)
4. Better understand the dynamics of mythic sensibilities and how they manifest in times of chaos, inspiration and transformation.

5. Have insights into the changing ways that myths are interpreted from early perspectives to contemporary perspectives

1. Become acquainted with the spectrum of qualities myth presents and the context of a mythic pantheon.

7. Critically and creatively apply an analytical lens the transformative encounters of one’s own life and/or the challenges of our contemporary and future world.

1. Transcend popular and established mythic models of consciousness and human journey with the intent of moving from an individual structure to a collective structure.
2. Survey narratives focused on collective journeys that have been recurrent in popular culture through the framework of mythic cycles frequently explored in mythological studies.

 

Career Competencies:

1. Mythic Literacy and Symbolic Interpretation:
   • Competency: The ability to recognize and interpret mythic motifs, archetypes, and symbolic patterns within contemporary events, media, and personal experiences. This competency enables individuals to decode complex societal messages and identify the deeper meanings of stories that shape our world.
   • Application: Useful for professionals in storytelling, marketing, media, psychology, and leadership, as well as those working in fields that require understanding the unconscious drivers of behavior and social dynamics.
2. Creative and Transformative Leadership:
   • Competency: The skill to incorporate mythological frameworks, such as the Heroine’s Journey or collective mythic motifs, to guide individuals or groups through personal and professional transformation. This competency emphasizes empathy, narrative-driven leadership, and visioning for collective growth and change.
   • Application: Ideal for leaders in business, education, or community organizations who seek to foster transformation, inclusivity, and creative problem-solving within teams or larger societal contexts.
3. Storytelling and Narrative Crafting:
   • Competency: The ability to craft compelling stories that tap into the power of myth and archetype, enhancing communication in personal, professional, and therapeutic settings. This includes understanding the science behind storytelling, structuring narratives effectively, and creating impactful ceremonies or presentations.
   • Application: Beneficial for professionals in public speaking, writing, marketing, therapy, education, and arts-based careers, where effective communication and emotional resonance are key.
4. Cultural Sensitivity and Diversity Integration:
   • Competency: The capability to critically engage with and integrate diverse cultural perspectives and mythologies into contemporary contexts, particularly regarding underrepresented groups. This competency helps professionals engage with and support marginalized voices and experiences in a meaningful way.
   • Application: Crucial for those working in social justice, media, education, human resources, and policy-making, as it fosters an inclusive environment and an understanding of the cultural and historical narratives that shape modern identities.
5. Applied Mythology in Healing and Personal Growth:
   • Competency: The ability to apply mythic concepts, such as the Hero’s Journey or creation myths, to personal growth, therapy, and healing practices. This includes integrating mythic storytelling into clinical work, self-development, or community healing practices to facilitate transformation and individuation.
   • Application: Beneficial for therapists, healers, coaches, and anyone involved in personal development or clinical psychology, where understanding myth’s role in shaping identity and psychological well-being can be transformative.

 

SCHEDULE FOR LIVE ONLINE LEARNING SESSIONS

Week 1: Zoom Session – Thursday June 25, 2026, 12:00 – 1:30pm PT – Kali Cape

Week 2: Zoom Session – Thursday, July 9, 2026, 12:00 – 1:30pm PT – Maryam Sayyad

Week 3: Zoom Session – Thursday, July 16, 2026, 12:00 – 1:30pm PT- John Bucher

Week 4: Zoom Session – Thursday, July 23, 2026, 12:00 – 1:30pm PT – Li Sumpter

Week 5: Zoom Session – Thursday, July 30, 2026, 12:00 – 1:30pm PT- Stephanie Zajchowski

Week 6: Zoom Session – Thursday, August 6, 2026, 12:00 – 1:30pm PT- Sandra del Castillo

Week 7: Zoom Session – Thursday, August 13, 2025, 12:00 – 1:30pm PT- Emily Lord-Kambitsch

 

Required & Recommended Readings:

Week 1: Kali Cape

Required Readings:

Dorje, G. (Trans.). (2012). The great liberation by hearing: The intermediate state of the moment of death. In The Tibetan Book of the Dead (pp. 32-112). Penguin Classics. (Original work by Padmasambhava & Karma Lingpa, 8th century)

Jung, C. G. (1978). “Psychological Commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.” In Psychology and the East (R. F. C. Hull, Trans., pp. 59-76). Princeton University Press. 1978

 

Week 2: Maryam Sayyad

Required Viewing:

Gavin, L. (Director). (2016). A dark song [Film]. Samson Films; Tall Man Films.
Free streaming: https://watch.plex.tv/movie/a-dark-song
Runtime: ~92 minutes.

Required reading:

Voss, A. (2013). Becoming an angel: The mundus imaginalis of Henry Corbin and the Platonic path of self-knowledge. In A. Cheak (Ed.), Alchemical traditions from antiquity to the avant-garde (pp. 421–433). Numen Publications.
Read sections: “Cosmology,” “Mundus imaginalis,” “The angel,” and “Himma” (PDF pp. 4–11).

Recommended Readings:

Dawood, N. J. (Trans.). (1954). Aladdin and the enchanted lamp. In Tales from the Arabian nights (pp. 165–236). Penguin Books.
Recommended reading: pp. 230–236 (Roc’s egg and origin of the jinn).

Noll, R. (1987). The presence of spirits in magic and madness. In S. Nicholson (Ed.), Shamanism: An expanded view of reality (pp. 47–61). Theosophical Publishing House.

Lafrate, A. (2019). Bottles for the demons. In The long life of magical objects: A study in the Solomonic tradition (pp. 60–79). Pennsylvania State University Press.

White, D. G. (2021). Daemonology. In Daemons are forever: Contacts and exchanges in the Eurasian pandemonium (pp. 1–22). University of Chicago Press.
Recommended reading: pp. 1–4 (portion of Chapter 1).

 

Week 3: John Bucher

Recommended Readings:

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New World Library, 2008.

Murdock, Maureen. The Heroine’s Journey. Shambhala, 2020.

 

Week 4: Stephanie Zajchowski

Required Readings:

Downing, Christine. The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine. Crossroad, 1981, 1-29: “Preface; Chapter 1: To Start Us Imagining: The Goddess.”

Hillman, James. Archetypal Psychology. Volume 1 Uniform Edition. Spring Publications, 2013, 1-24: “Chapter 1: Sources of Archetypal Psychology; Chapter 2: Image and Soul: The Poetic Basis of Mind; Chapter 3: Archetypal Image.”

Week 5: Li Sumpter

Required Readings:

Heroine’s Journey Afrofuturism Viewing Guide (PDF)

Burke, Brianna. “Beasts of the Southern Wild and Indigenous Communities in the Age of the Sixth Extinction”. Iowa State Digital Repository. pp 1 -25. 

Recommended Readings:

The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness, Maureen Murdock

 From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine’s Journey through Myth and Legend, Valerie Estelle Frankel

The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell

Tatar, Maria, The Heroine with 1001 Faces.

hooks, bell. Art on My Mind: Visual Politics.

Romare, Ingela. “The Feminine Principle in Film: Reflections on Film and Its Relation to the Human Psyche”,  in Spring 73: Cinema and Psyche. pp 90 -100. 

Nyong’o,  Tavia, Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World. 

Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures, National Museum of African American History and Culture

Kelley, Robin D.G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

 

Week 6: Sandra del Castillo

Required Readings: 

del Castillo, (2020) “The Mesoamerican Cosmovision” (pp. 85-107)

del Castillo, Kairos glossary, pdf

Hillman, J. (2007) “Joseph Campbell, Myth as Hero” (pp. 1-13)

Taube, K. (1993) “Aztec Mythology” (pp.31-44)

von Franz, M. (1972/1995) “The Creation Myth” (pp. 28-37)

YOUTUBE VIDEO

Amlin, P. & Taube K. (2023) “The Five Suns: The Sacred History of Mexico”

https://youtu.be/A8e1fyzNU-c?si=fkDFFGfsrT_OxVbi

Recommended Readings:

Hillman, J. (1982) “Anima Mundi” (pp. 1-13) from “Spring Journal”

Jung, C. G. & Segal, R. (1998) “Introduction” (pp. 3-49)

Tarnas, R., (2001). “Is the Modern Psyche Undergoing a Rite of Passage?” (pp.1-24) revision-rite-of-passage.pdf

Week 7: Emily Lord- Kambitsch

Required Readings:

a Marca, Pablo (2020). Fairy-Tale Metamorphosis and Becoming–Animal: The Posthumanism of Italo Calvino’s Fiabe Italiane. California Italian Studies, 10(1), 1-16.

Calvino, Italo (1980). Introduction; The Parrot; Animal Speech; Body-Without-Soul; First Sword and Last Broom; The Fine Greenbird. Italian Folktales. Translated by George Martin. Harcourt, Inc.

Lord-Kambitsch, Emily (2025). Reading and Teaching Ovid’s Metamorphoses with Ecopsychology. Classical Journal 121.1, pp. 201-232.

Ovid (2023) Introduction (by Stephanie McCarter); Proem; Apollo Attempts to Rape Daphne; Phaethon; Reactions to Phaethon’s Death; Jupiter Rapes Callisto; The Labyrinth; Orpheus and Eurydice; Orpheus Charms the Trees. Metamorphoses. Translated by Stephanie McCarter. Penguin Books.

 

Recommended Readings:

Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Environmental Imagination (2023). Edited by Giulia Sissa and Francesca Martelli. Bloomsbury Academic.