I thoroughly enjoyed the presentation and will review the slides once again soon. The experience had me realize that the information and concepts, intersecting ancient and modern myth with historical and contemporary events with my tendency to link personal experiences with those of my role as a therapist left me needing time to process and reflect before being able to generate thoughtful questions on the spot. This will be an exercise of dissecting massive amounts of fascinating and meaningful information into a variety of sizable pieces....and it will require some time.

 As to avoid an essay here…I think I will address one aspect that I found surprising. I was taken with vast amount of images that were emerging for me both during the session and during my reading, particularly of  “A Brief Mythology of Petroleum”. Once again…across time and medium and myth and actual world events. I’ll mention just a few.

 One that was rather humorous, I suppose, was when I saw the comparative images of Pluto and the elder Rockefeller, I immediately thought of  "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named" the Dark Lord Voldemort ("mort" means death in French) from my oldest daughter’s passion…the Harry Potter series. The aging Rockefeller is a spitting image for the movie character. LOL. Was this intentional by the filmmakers?

 More seriously, I recalled the iconic paintings like “The Fall of the Rebel Angels” and others depicting a heavenly war and God casing Satan down into hell.  Images of St. Michael the Archangel, again typically depicting St. Michael keeping Satan “down” in hell which had me see images of those brave crews of specialized firefighters extinguishing the oil wells burning in the Kuwait Gulf War zone, one at a time stuffing the oil back down into the charred earth.

I saw “the horror” of the closing scenes of Apocalypse Now with napalm bombs (made with gasoline) creating a hell on earth (a study of what is a barbarian and what is a civilized society). Phlegethon images and the Valdeze. I saw awful images of jet-fuel soaked towers burning and falling back below the surface and the terrible death and destruction associated with it.  These images all associate with what evil lurks below the surface (there’s a metaphor).

I hail from a city that has the largest iron statue in the world. It is of Vulcan, the God of Fire and of the Forge. He sits high on a mountain (Red Mountain named because it is so full of iron ore that the soil is red) and I see him nearly daily. Depending on if one studies the Roman or Greek version of Vulcan, he appears to represent both the negative and positive aspects of fire. He was also cast out of heaven and fell to the depths of the sea by an embarrassed and disgusted Juno because Vulcan was born ugly and disfigured (he gets her back later). Vulcan learns to control fire and uses it to craft beautiful objects that are highly desired by the Gods.   

I love the concept of myth and responsibility. I love the idea of using myth and history to warn and advocate for a sustainable future. There is no mistake that the collective contains so many images. The possibility of using myth in therapy are well-known and well-used by me, but new ideas are emerging already for my work and personal life.

I’ll stop here. Looking forward to more.