A PGI graduate certificate program in partnership with the Joseph Campbell Foundation

Pacifica Graduate Institute is proud to introduce an enriching Graduate Certificate Program dedicated to the study of Joseph Campbell’s work and its mythic relationship to storytelling. This unique program offers a deep dive into key ideas from Campbell’s expansive body of work, providing students with a nuanced understanding of his influential ideas and concepts, and then applying these ideas to the discipline of storytelling. Each week, a Campbell practitioner will guide participants through Campbell’s work, unpacking core ideas for understanding their mythic relationship to the understanding of storytelling.

What you will receive:

• 12 Live Interactive Discussion Groups (via Zoom) with Q&A (listed in Pacific time)
• 12 Pre-Recorded Learning Sessions with Campbell practitioners
• A Private, online Discussion Forum
• An Advanced Certificate in Joseph Campbell: Myth & Storytelling as a gateway to psyche and soul from Pacifica Graduate Institute

What Our Students are Saying

• This program was incredibly rich and meaningful for me. I came in wanting to understand Campbell more deeply, and I’m leaving with a much wider, more plural lens for engaging myth, story, archetype, and personal meaning-making. I appreciated how the course balanced scholarship with lived experience, and how each instructor brought a different orientation to the material. The discussion boards were especially valuable; hearing how others are working with myths in their lives helped open new ways of seeing and thinking. The teaching team created a welcoming and intellectually alive container. I appreciated the diversity in perspectives. The pacing felt spacious, and the weekly modules built on each other in a way that allowed me to integrate the material rather than rush through it. The emphasis on creativity, multiplicity, and reflective inquiry was exactly what I hoped for. The program offered a strong foundation, a generous community, and a sense of mythic aliveness that I will carry with me. I’m grateful for the experience. Thank you!

• My overall impression of the program is extremely positive. It felt coherent, well-designed, and genuinely transformative. What stood out to me most was the way the course balanced intellectual depth with emotional resonance. The material never stayed abstract. Every week invited me to read myself through myth, and that alone made the experience meaningful. The faculty’s ability to hold space, guide discussion, and keep the content grounded in both scholarship and personal application made a huge difference.

• This was my first time taking a course with Pacifica, and I was genuinely impressed by the richness of the material. Each module came with readings and excerpts that were not only well-curated but also incredibly supportive for reflection. They really expanded my understanding and the contemplative nature of the program.

• What went well was the structure of the journey itself. Each module built on the last in a way that felt intentional, and the selection of readings and videos supported the main themes without overwhelming us. I also appreciated the community aspect – hearing how others interpreted the material often illuminated things I hadn’t considered.

 

Individual Session Descriptions:

Module 1 – Call To Adventure Separation Phase of the Adventure

Week 1 –The Power of Myth: The life, work, and influence of Joseph Campbell

Live Zoom Session: August 18, 2026 – 12:00 Noon – 1:30 PM Pacific Time

Instructors: John Bucher, Joanna Gardner, Bradley Olson, Stephanie Zajchowski

Description: The mythic life and work of Joseph Campbell has continued to draw interest and find audiences around the world since his death in 1987. In this opening session, leaders from the Joseph Campbell Foundation will present and unpack Campbell’s life, the scope of his work, and the impact that it has had in the world.

 

Week 2 –Campbell, modernism, and psychology

Live Zoom Session: August 25, 2026 – 12:00 Noon – 1:30 PM Pacific Time

Instructor: Brad Olson

Description: To properly appreciate and understand Campbell and his work, one must understand modernism. In this course we will explore the influence of modernism on Campbell as well as its influence on psychology, particularly psychoanalysis, itself a production of modernism.

 

Week 3 –Campbell, characters, and archetypes

Live Zoom Session: September 1, 2026 – 12:00 Noon – 1:30 PM Pacific Time

Instructor: Scott Neumeister

Description: In this class, we will explore how Campbell viewed characters in mythic stories as expressions of what psychologist Carl Jung described as archetypes. These recurring patterns or motifs occur in both the characters themselves and the situations they experience. We will cover several of Campbell’s most frequently discussed archetypes, including the hero, the mentor, the threshold guardian, and the trickster.

 

Week 4 –Campbell and creativity

Live Zoom Session: September 8, 2026 – 12:00 Noon – 1:30 PM Pacific Time

Instructor: Joanna Gardner

Description: Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949) won the Contribution to Creative Literature award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the book continues to inspire artists, writers, and creative people from every field. Campbell himself said that he wrote for students and artists, and his own work clearly constitutes an important creative contribution in itself. In this session, you’ll learn about Campbell’s creativity, his creative process, and how his work and his way of working can breathe new life into yours.

 

Module 2 – Mythic Storytelling Initiation Phase of the Adventure

 

Week 5 –Campbell and Arthurian Romances

Live Zoom Session: September 15, 2026 – 12:00 Noon – 1:30 PM Pacific Time

Instructor: Stephanie Zajchowski

Description: Arthurian Romances and stories of the Holy Grail connect with myths from all over the world. In this session, we will trace these connections, paying careful attention to each myth’s particularities while applying Campbell’s comparative lens to explore key themes and patterns. You will gain a greater understanding of the narratives behind the Grail legend and its enduring resonance.

 

Week 6 –Campbell and fairy tales

Live Zoom Session: September 22, 2026 – 12:00 Noon – 1:30 PM Pacific Time

Instructor: Joanna Gardner

Description: “The folk tale is the primer of the picture-language of the soul,” Joseph Campbell writes in his 1944 introduction to Pantheon’s edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Using that essay as a starting point, this session situates Campbell’s ideas in the contemporary study of wonder tales, surveying approaches including depth psychology, decoloniality, feminism, and the new materialism. You’ll learn how to apply these theories as well as Campbell’s four functions of myth to the interpretation of fairy tales, concluding with an analysis of the film Pan’s Labyrinth.

 

Week 7 –Campbell and the Cosmos

Live Zoom Session: September 29, 2026 – 12:00 Noon – 1:30 PM Pacific Time

Instructor: Jason Batt

Description: When the first photographs of Earth arrived from space — a single shining body adrift in darkness — Joseph Campbell recognized a new mythic image being born, one the old literalist religions were unequipped to read. In The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Campbell argues that the cosmos we have reached through technology returns us, inevitably, to the cosmos within, and that metaphor is the vessel that carries us between them. This session takes up Campbell’s distinction between the denotative sign and the connotative metaphor, asking how myth might be read rightly in a scientific age — and what the view from outer space reveals about the inner reaches of the psyche.

 

Week 8 –Campbell and the tales of Homer

Live Zoom Session: October 6, 2026 – 12:00 Noon – 1:30 PM Pacific Time

Instructor: Scott Neumeister

Description: What did Campell’s work reveal about the two greatest epics of the Ancient Greeks, The Iliad and The Odyssey? This week’s class will investigate the two mega-themes of these works—warfare and the return home—as well as Campbell’s insights on how this tale of a Bronze Age war still resonates today.

 

Module 3 – Mythic Journeys Return Phase of the Adventure

 

Week 9 –The hero’s journey, The heroine’s journey, & The collective journey

Live Zoom Session: October 13, 2026 – 12:00 Noon – 1:30 PM Pacific Time

Instructor: John Bucher

Description: Joseph Campbell’s articulation of the Hero’s Journey has had an impact on the world since it was first published in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949. Since that time, alternatives on and amplifications of the journey have found their own resonance. In this session, we will explore Campbell’s Hero’s Journey along with The Heroine’s Journey and a recent model called The Collective Journey.

 

Week 10 –Campbell in the age of metamodernism

Live Zoom Session: October 20, 2026 – 12:00 Noon – 1:30 PM Pacific Time

Instructor: Bradley Olson

Description: Metamodernism is the most recent evolution of Critical Theory and a potentially unifying response to the individualism of Modernism and the fragmentation of Postmodernism. Its attention to identifying novel ways of addressing and recreating the process of personal development, the way in which societies are governed, the need for continued adaptation to an increasingly complex world, and reimagining the human relationship to nature itself, make it an ideal perspective from which to read Joseph Campbell. In some sense, Campbell was made for metamodernism.

 

Week 11 –Campbell and personal myth

Live Zoom Session: October 27, 2026 – 12:00 Noon – 1:30 PM Pacific Time

Instructor: Stephanie Zajchowski

Description: Myths help us see our personal lives within the archetypal patterning of the human experience. Campbell considered such self-revelation the ultimate call to adventure; to bring our unique gifts to the world is the realization of our personal myth. In this session, you will learn about Campbell’s understanding of personal myth, focusing on his fourth function of myth, the psychological function. Applying this approach, you will learn how to interpret your life mythically, developing your own personal mythology as a way to find deeper meaning in your lived experience.

 

Week 12 –Reading Campbell in the 21st century

Live Zoom Session: November 3, 2026 – 12:00 Noon – 1:30 PM Pacific Time

Instructors: John Bucher, Joanna Gardner, Bradley Olson, Stephanie Zajchowski

Description: In this final session, Campbell’s work will be tied together and viewed through the lens of the culture we now live in. While many of Campbell’s ideas continue to be meaningful in the world today, other ideas invite discussion and even critique. Leaders from the Joseph Campbell Foundation will guide students through the nuanced journey of reading Campbell in the 21st century.

 

Learning Objectives:

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

Week 1:

• Evaluate Campbell’s theoretical approaches to myth, including the hermeneutics of depth psychology.

• Evaluate Campbell’s approach to multicultural, ethnic, gender, and racial diversity.

• Develop a critical understanding of the trajectory and influence of Campbell’s life and work.

Week 2:

• Discuss Campbell’s approach to myth through the lens of modernism.

• Discuss the influence of psychology on Cambell’s work on mythology.

Week 3:

• Describe how Campbell used Jung’s concept of archetypes as a fundamental method of describing myths.

• Analyze at a basic level both literary/filmic and personal stories to determine some archetypes that appear in them.

Week 4:

• Develop an understanding of Joseph Campbell’s personal creativity.

• Evaluate Campbell’s efforts to inspire creativity in others.

Week 5:

• Develop a critical understanding of Arthurian and Grail myths from the Middle Ages to Postmodernism.

• Recognize key themes, mythic motifs, and archetypal patterns.

Week 6:

• Develop an understanding of Joseph Campbell’s views about fairy tales in conversation with contemporary fairy tale studies (also called wonder tale studies).

• Apply Campbell’s four functions of myth to the analysis of fairy tale images.

Week 7:

• Develop an understanding of Campbell’s distinction between the denotative sign and the connotative metaphor, and how it reframes the interpretation of religious and mythic imagery.
• Apply Campbell’s correspondence between outer cosmos and inner psyche to read the imagery of the space age — and contemporary science fiction — as living metaphor rather than literal fact.

Week 8:

• Compare Campbell’s views on the overarching themes of The Iliad and The Odyssey.

• Identify at a basic level how both literary/filmic and personal imbalance in pairs of opposites operates just as in Homer’s works.

Week 9:

• Evaluate Campbell’s theoretical approach to myth with intentional emphasis on the Hero’s Journey model.

• Develop a critical understanding of significant models that followed Campbell’s and understand how these models amplified and expanded Campbell’s model.

Week 10:

• Reimagine Campbell’s work and thought in the context of its relevance to contemporary life using critical theory, particularly metamodernism, as a method to amplify and expand Campbell’s work and reconnect to the enduringly salient features of his work.

Week 11:

• Evaluate Campbell’s theory of the four functions of myth with emphasis on the pedagogical and psychological aspects of myth.

• Utilize Campbell’s approach as a basis for interpreting the mythic significance of current experience and constructing a personal mythology.

Week 12:

• Evaluate Joseph Campbell’s work through a multidisciplinary approach based on the concepts presented throughout the course.

• Develop an understanding of possibilities around the present and future of Campbellian studies.

 

Career Competencies:

1. Story Development and Narrative Design
   Develop compelling stories and scripts grounded in universal mythic structures, useful for careers in writing, screenwriting, game design, and content creation.

2. Critical Thinking and Cultural Literacy
   Analyze and synthesize complex ideas across disciplines, enhancing skills for academia, education, journalism, and cultural consultancy.

3. Creative Problem-Solving
   Use mythic frameworks as tools for innovation and transformation, applicable in coaching, leadership development, therapeutic practices, and organizational storytelling.

4. Communication and Interpretation
   Communicate complex theoretical ideas clearly through oral and written formats, with practical applications in teaching, public speaking, and media production.

5. Psychological Insight and Empathy
   Apply mythic and archetypal insights to deepen emotional intelligence, beneficial in counseling, social work, leadership, and other human-centered professions.

 

SCHEDULE FOR LIVE ONLINE LEARNING SESSIONS

Week 1: Zoom Session – August 18, 2026 – 12:00 – 1:30pm PT – John Bucher, Joanna Gardner, Bradley Olson, Stephanie Zajchowski

Week 2: Zoom Session – August 25, 2026 – 12:00 – 1:30pm PT – Bradley Olson

Week 3: Zoom Session – September 1, 2026 – 12:00 – 1:30pm PT – Scott Neumeister

Week 4: Zoom Session – September 8, 2026 – 12:00 – 1:30pm PT – Joanna Gardner

Week 5: Zoom Session – September 15, 2026 – 12:00 – 1:30pm PT – Stephanie Zajchowski

Week 6: Zoom Session – September 22, 2026 – 12:00 – 1:30pm PT- Joanna Gardner

Week 7: Zoom Session – September 29, 2026 – 12:00 – 1:30pm PT- Jason Batt

Week 8: Zoom Session – October 6, 2026 – 12:00 – 1:30pm PT– Scott Neumeister

Week 9: Zoom Session – October 13, 2026 – 12:00 – 1:30pm PT– John Bucher

Week 10: Zoom Session – October 20, 2026 – 12:00 – 1:30pm PT– Bradley Olson

Week 11: Zoom Session – October 27, 2026 – 12:00 – 1:30pm PT– Stephanie Zajchowski

Week 12: Zoom Session – November 3, 2026 – 12:00 – 1:30pm PT– John Bucher, Joanna Gardner, Bradley Olson, Stephanie Zajchowski

 

Required & Recommended Readings:

Week 1 Required Reading:

• Campbell, J. (2008). “Chapter 1: Departure.” The Hero With a Thousand Faces. New World Library. pp. 41-80

Week 1 Recommended Reading:

• Larsen, S, & Larsen, R. (1991). Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind. Inner Traditions.

Week 2 Required Reading:

• Felser, J. M. (1996). Was Joseph Campbell a postmodernist? Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 64(2), 395–417.

Week 2 Recommended Reading:

• Gay, P. (2010). Modernism: The Lure of Heresy. W. Norton & Company.
• Armstrong, T. (2005). Modernism: A Cultural History. Polity Press.

Week 3 Required Reading/Viewing:

• Jung, C.G. (1960). “Instinct and the Unconscious.” In C.G. Jung, Structure & Dynamics of the Psyche. (R.F.C. Hull, Trans.). Collected Works. Vol. 8. Bollingen XX. Princeton University Press. pp. 174-185.
  https://jungiancenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/vol-8-the-structure-and-dynamics-of-the-psyche.pdf
• Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth | Ep. 1: “The Hero’s Adventure”
• https://billmoyers.com/content/ep-1-joseph-campbell-and-the-power-of-myth-the-hero%e2%80%99s-adventure-audio/
• Carolyn Myss- An Introduction to the Power of Archetypes
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VZYrlVHLL0

Week 4 Required Reading:

• Campbell, J. (1991). “Chapter 1: Experience and Authority.” The Masks of God: Creative Mythology. New World Library. pp 3-41.
• Gardner, J. (2024). “To Radiate and Create.” The Practice of Enchantment. Joseph Campbell Foundation. 97-102

Week 5 Required Reading:

• Campbell, J. (2015). “Chapter 7: The Waste Land.” Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth. New World Library. pp. 149-169.

Week 6 Required Reading:

• Campbell, J. (2018) “Chapter 1: The Fairy Tale.” The Flight of the Wild Gander. New World Library. pp. 1-25.
• Gardner, J. (2024). “Entering the Mythscape of Pan’s Labyrinth.” The Practice of Enchantment. Joseph Campbell Foundation. 79-84

Week 7 Required Reading:

• Campbell, J. (2002). “Chapter 1: Cosmology and the Mythic Imagination.” The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion. New World Library. pp. 1–26.

Week 7 Recommended Reading:

• Campbell, J. (2002). “Chapter 2: Metaphor and Religious Mystery.” The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion. New World Library. pp. 26–88.

Week 8 Required Reading:

• Campbell, J. (2013). “Chapter 6: Iliad and Odyssey: Return of the Goddess.” Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, pp. 143-180.
• The Homeric Legends – Joseph Campbell Foundation
  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1MmsHS76HcZ5y9wiwt3GHh7m2GZO1V0d

Week 9 Required Reading:

• Campbell, J. (2008). “Prologue: The Monomyth.” The Hero With a Thousand Faces. New World Library. pp. 1-40

Week 9 Recommended Reading:

• Murdock, M. (2020). The Heroine’s Journey. Shambala.

Week 10 Required Reading:

• Campbell, J. (2017). “Chapter 7, Chapter 8.” The Ecstasy of Being: Mythology and Dance. New World Library. pp. 109-120.
• Olson, B. (2024). The Mythopoetic Impulse. Joseph Campbell Foundation. pp. 136-139, 155-158.

Week 10 Recommended Reading:

• Storm, J.A.J. (2021). Metamodernism: The Future of Theory. U of Chicago Press.
• Gibbons, A, Van den Akker, R, & Vermeulen, T. (Eds). (2017). Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism. Rowman & Littlefield International.

Week 11 Required Reading:

• Campbell, J. (2004). “Chapter V: Personal Myth.” Pathways to Bliss. New World Library. pp 85-108.

Week 12 Required Reading:

• Campbell, J. (2024). “Chapter 5: The Inward Turn.” Myth and Meaning: Conversations on Mythology and Life. New World Library. pp. 139-178