CENTRE FOR MYTH STUDIES University of Essex OPEN SEMINAR
A Myth, its Metaphors, and its Metamorphoses: Orpheus and Eurydice
Dr Terence Dawson (formerly National University of Singapore)
Thursday 30 October 2025 7.30 – 9.00 pm (GMT)
All welcome
To register for this free Zoom event, please email: [email protected] before 11.30 am on the day (mention CMS open seminar)
Odilon Redon, Orpheus, c. 1903–10. Pastel on brown paper. The Cleveland Museum of Art (public domain).
A myth is defined not by its earliest surviving version, but by the different metaphors that subsequent writers find in its narrative structure. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has been re-formulated more often and re-worked to explore a wider range of concerns than any other Greek myth – from the significance of the creation, through the damage that the abuse of women does to society, to the threat represented by AI. This talk explores the difference between ‘adaptations’ and new ‘versions’ of the myth, with a focus on why it has lent itself to the illustration of such diverse concerns.
Terence Dawson has taught courses on English and European literature from the Renaissance to Modernism at universities in Brazil, the United Kingdom, and Singapore. He has a special interest in the relation between literature and the other arts. His publications include Orpheus and Eurydice in Myth, History, and Analytical Psychology (2025), The Effective Protagonist in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel: Scott, Brontë, Eliot, Wilde (2004) and, co-edited with Polly Young-Eisendrath, The Cambridge Companion to Jung (1997, 2008).
We find ourselves in a disjointed world, where not just time but inner and outer space are split, where our psyche’s space-time is at odds with the world at large. Jung spoke of the exiled gods and naiads, of the “irrational”, of magic, and our attempt to “straighten things up” with our modern logical scrutiny. Instead, we have created collective neuroses and a state of ecological disaster for the entire planet. The chaos of the modern world seems to be increasing by the hour. Whatever happened to the psyche’s connection to the world at large? This is an attempt to understand the beginning of the split between the archaic and the modern psyche, as conceptualized by Jung. I explore the story of the death of the great god Pan as an entry point to the split that has resulted in our current state; i.e. what Jung called “the conflict between the cosmic spirit of nature and the Christian Spirit” (Vision Seminars), and the outcome of Pan’s demonization for the modern psyche. The removal of archaic cultures from the natural world that enclosed humanity is responsible for the transition to linear consciousness. There is, Jung believed, a lot we can learn by remembering and returning to the archaic ways of relating to “forces from within as well as from without” (CW18, para. 553) that comprise our mind’s nature and the world at large. Perhaps we can reimagine a way forward where human consciousness encompasses those mythic precious parts of our psyche that have gone unconscious. And in doing so, we can evoke the return of the great god Pan.
Angeliki Yiassemides, PhD, is a certified Jungian analyst with the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP). She holds an MA and MPhil in Developmental Psychology (Columbia University) and a PhD in Psychoanalytic Studies with a focus on Analytical Psychology (University of Essex). Angeliki has had a long career in the field of education. She is a graduate of Teachers College, Columbia University and worked in various early childhood and primary educational settings in the United States for over a decade. She later founded and directed the non-profit Morningside Montessori Elementary (2017-2022) in Nicosia, Cyprus. Since 2023, she has been in Psychedelic Therapy training with the Mind Foundation, Berlin, with the aim of augmenting the psychoanalytic process via altered states of consciousness. She is the author of Time and Timelessness: Temporality in the Theory of Carl Jung (Routledge, 2014) and editor of Time and the Psyche: Jungian Perspectives (Routledge, 2017). She lives in Cyprus.
CENTRE FOR MYTH STUDIES University of Essex OPEN SEMINAR BOOK PRESENTATION
The Persephone Myth in Young Adult Fiction: From Girl to Woman
Dr Cristina Salcedo González (Complutense University, Madrid)
Thursday 12 December 2024 7.30 – 9.00 pm (GMT) Online
All welcome
To register for this free Zoom event, please email: [email protected] before 11.30 am on the day of the seminar (mention CMS open seminar)
Investigating the widespread but understudied presence of the Persephone myth within 21st-century young adult literature, in her book, which she presents in this seminar on the day of its launch, Cristina Salcedo González analyses six young adult novels which incorporate a reworking of this ancient Greek myth. Through the identification of mythic themes and patterns within these novels, Salcedo González shows that these works evoke the female life cycle and develop current perceptions of the female maturational experience. These novels, all written by women, also inflect or interpret the myth in ways influenced by their contemporary contexts. This book makes original methodological contributions – through its innovative dual perspective of myth criticism and classical reception – to our understanding of the academically neglected genre of young adult literature and the reception of the myth of Persephone. More information: bloomsbury.com.
Dr Cristina Salcedo González is Assistant Professor at the Department of English at Complutense University of Madrid. She holds a PhD in English Studies from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She is part of the national research project “Marginalia Classica IV: Marginalidades clásicas y su recepción en la cultura de masas contemporánea: escapismo y resistencias”, led by Dr Luis Unceta Gómez and Dr Rosario López Gregoris. She has conducted research stays at the universities of Edinburgh, Essex, Durham, and Potsdam. Her academic pursuits primarily involve contemporary literature in English written by women, focusing on the appropriation of classical mythology. She also explores classical reception in popular culture, particularly in children’s and young adult literature, and investigates the construction of female and youth identities. Contact: [email protected].
CENTRE FOR MYTH STUDIES University of Essex ROUNDATABLE DISCUSSION
The Cauldron
Dr Leon Burnett Dr Eirini Apanomeritaki Professor Roderick Main (University of Essex)
Thursday 31 October 2024 7.30 – 9.00 pm (GMT) Online
All welcome
To register for this free Zoom event, please email: [email protected] before 11.30 am on the day of the seminar (mention CMS open seminar)
The Gundestrup Cauldron, National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen, 3rd to 1st century BCE
To complement the gatherings of witches and other scary beings in our streets and skies this Halloween, our first session of the new academic year is devoted to a roundtable discussion of the mythological properties of the cauldron. Of course, witches have not been the only users of cauldrons. In Chinese, Greek, Roman, Norse, Celtic, and other mythologies, as well as in their modern transformations in literature and popular culture, the symbol of the cauldron appears in various guises and with various functions. Our presenters will explore a selection of these, and participants are invited to bring their own knowledge and join the discussion.
Dr Leon Burnett, Dr Eirini Apanomeritaki, Professor Roderick Main, and Dr Ben Pestell are all long-standing members of the Executive Committee of the Centre for Myth Studies at the University of Essex.
This presentation explores the symbolic journey to the Land of the Dead as envisaged through Old Welsh/Cymric cosmogony. Myth making is an archaic form of artistic activity that brings relatively timeless images of the instinctual world into the realm of human history. Relating a myth is a form of contacting the cosmos by identifying and enclosing an area in which human actions and experiences can be established. Mourning the dead and wondering where their souls disappear after death is one such experience and is analogous to imagining the experience of the sun when it sinks, separates and disappears at night time in the west to arise next day as a collective regeneration of the psyche in the east. I speculate that the qualitative journey of the sun to the land of the dead and how the land, itself, is envisaged, is influenced by climate and topography. Whether the sun sinks into an open sea or into a landlocked desert terrain plays an important role in imagining an afterlife and whether a widening of consciousness has occurred.
I describe the unique characteristics of Annwn, the Cymric land of the dead which is found under the sea of the Welsh coastline. Annwn is imagined as containing crystal fortresses, rotating portals and glass ships, giving images of a restless watery expanse of sunken treasure, difficult to access in the moving churning twilight of tidal currents and deep swirling caverns. The glass castles or chairs (Caer) found in Annwn give emotional expression to the complexity of the mourning process, in particular, the shapeshifting, nature goddess Ceridwen’s uterine cauldron of inspiration that brews new ideas mixed with the ancestral memories of the dead. I examine Ceridwen’s co-operative relationship to the Cymric/Welsh sun god, Hu Gadern, depicted as the fiery red dragon’s head (Pendragon) as it sinks in the west. The Cymric/Welsh Otherworld of the dead is a tangible, benign place of mediation between the living and the dead, whereby the dead engender courage, psychic roots and tribal experienced wisdom to the living.
Elizabeth Brodersen, PhD is an accredited Training Analyst, Supervisor and seminar leader at the CGJI Zürich. After earning a BA (comb. Hons) in history and American studies from Birmingham University, UK, she received an MSc in Social Policy and Social Work Studies from the London School of Economics (LSE). In 2008, she received her diploma in analytical psychology from CGJIZ and in 2014, a doctorate in Psychosocial Psychoanalytic Studies from Essex University, UK. Elizabeth presently works as a Jungian Analyst and Supervisor in private practice in Germany and Switzerland and is currently a member of the English Research Commission at the CGJI Zürich. Her publications include a monograph TabooPersonal and Collective Representations, Origin and Positioning within Cultural Complexes, published by Routledge in paperback 2020 and a co-edited book Jungian Perspectives on Indeterminate States, Betwixt and Between Borders published with Pilar Amezaga by Routledge, 2021. Her latest edited book entitled Jungian Dimensions of the Mourning Process, Burial Rituals and Access to the Land of the Dead, Intimations of Immortality is published by Routledge, 2024.
CENTRE FOR MYTH STUDIES University of Essex OPEN SEMINAR
The Sun-Flower: An eco-centric footnote to Book IV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Dr Leon Burnett University of Essex
Thursday 6 June 2024 7.30 – 9.00 pm (BST) Online
All welcome
To register for this free Zoom event, please email: [email protected] before 11.30 am on the day of the seminar (mention CMS open seminar)
George Frederic Watts, Clytië (c. 1868-75). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
At the start of Book IV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the three daughters of Minyas shun the celebration of Bacchus that is taking place outside. One of the sisters suggests “taking turns/ to tell a story to entertain us all/ and fill our idle ears, so that the time/ will pass more quickly”. The weaving of the fleecy wool and the telling of new tales run parallel.
The central story is about the Sun and his lovers. At its core are two transformations: Leucothoë is changed into a white frankincense tree and Clytië becomes a flower, forever gazing on Sol, the god of the sun. This seminar will review some of the complexities, both ecological and aesthetic, of Ovid’s choice of these two “bloodless” plants in the shifting standpoints of the Ancient World, the Early Modern World, and our own times.
Leon Burnett, founding Director of the Centre for Myth Studies at the University of Essex, has held the post of Honorary Senior Lecturer at the same institution since his retirement in 2014. He remains active internationally in the areas of Myth Studies, Literary Translation, and Comparative Literature. He is co-editor of Myth, Literature, and the Unconscious (2013), and Translating Myth (2016).
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: [email protected] 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: [email protected] 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: [email protected] 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.
Essex Myth 