Mythic Journeys

The Mythic Imagination Institute's events are full of life because they are full of people who appreciate being alive, who understand how is short our time together, and who are doing fascinating, provocative, useful, powerful work in the world.

Mythic Imagination Institute offers conferences, performance festivals, and lectures as part of its larger purpose: the encouragement of creative response to life, our own individual lives, and our lives as families, tribes, communities, nations and as a world.

Our purpose is to enliven the imagination. Imagination is the root of empathy, innovation, problem solving, art, and science. Our way toward imagination cultivates the ground from which it springs: the observation and understanding of nature and human nature. This understanding exists universally in myths, folktales, sacred stories, and wisdom stories. It exists within the structure of story itself. It speaks through the images within the stories.

The Mythic Imagination Institute creates experiences of the mystery and metaphor in myth and story through art, hands-on activity and cross-disciplinary conversation. We gather together artists, scientists, business people, psychologists, scholars, performers, educators, philosophers, writers, astronauts, farmers and anyone else who'd like to be part of it, through the common medium of story. Together we discover, experience and discuss narrative, metaphor and myth as a language of understanding each other and our own place and meaning in the world.

In 2004, we held the first Mythic Journeys conference and performing festival. James Hillman called it 'a Spiritual Spoleto Festival'. Occuring every two years in Atlanta, Georgia, Mythic Journeys '06 continued the exploration with celebration, reflection and creativity. In December of 2006, we'll assist the Alliance of the New Humanity in the presentation of their Human Forum, and in March of 2007 we'll be taking the experience on the road to Guatemala!

The Institute is creating other ways of connecting people to myth. We're preserving our radio shows, podcasts, monthly e-magazine, lectures, conferences, film and performance festivals in a library of books, CDs and DVDs.

Mission Statement:

The purpose of the Mythic Imagination Institute is to reunite people to the accumulated wisdom of humankind that lives in stories and mythology, and thereby to:

* Encourage creative response and imagination
* Help to make sense of our individual lives by seeing the stories within them
* Engender understanding and respect for others
* Serve as a free zone for inter-disciplinary conversation and activity
* Foster a diverse community whose common knowledge of the world's stories creates an unusual ability to transcend boundaries and take pleasure in difference
* Nurture and grow the imagination through the understanding and the making of metaphor
* Cultivate experiences and activities of mythology, archetype, and narrative
* Make friends and
* Have a good time!