ABOUT US
Mythic Imagination Institute offers conferences, performance festivals, courses, exhibitions, concerts and workshops to encourage a creative response to life -- our own individual lives and our lives as families, 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. The enlivened imagination cultivates insight and understanding of nature and human nature. This knowing exists universally in myths, folktales, sacred stories, and wisdom stories. It exists within the structure of story itself.
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 the questions of how to live, what to do, what is right by connecting first to the wisdom our ancestors have left us about the natural world, about our social world, about our own souls in stories. Narrative, metaphor and myth are a language, an accessible, pleasurable medium to bring us toward understanding each other and our own place and meaning in the world. Mythic Imagination Institute's events are full of life because they are full of people who do fascinating, provocative, useful and powerful work in the world. The roster includes Nobel Peace Prize Laureates and Mayan shaman, US senators and organic farmers, musicians and NGO workers.
The Institute continues to create ways of connecting people to wisdom, solace and creativity. Quarterly the e-magazine, Mythic Passages, with contributions from poets, scientists, novelists, psychologists, mythologists and more arrives. We also preserve a growing library of our radio shows, podcasts, lectures, conferences, film and performance festivals in books, CDs and DVDs.
As storyteller Idries Shah says, wisdom, like water, is everywhere. Yet, form is everything. You can put a sponge on a pile of ice—but no exchange takes place. If you take care to melt the ice, the substance is taken up right into the very capillaries of the interior. This is what stories do.
• Mythic Journeys '06 continued the exploration with celebration, reflection and creativity. In December 2006 and March 2007, we partnered Alliance for a New Humanity to create the Human Forum.
• In 2007 and 2008, we created a certificate program in Applied Mythology at the Open Center in New York, featuring prominent guest teachers from many fields, guided by the Institute's Creative Director, Honora Foah. Earlier this year, filmmakers Steven and Whitney Boe premiered their documentary Mythic Journeys at film festivals all across the United States to great acclaim. Filmed at the Mythic Journeys '06 conference and co-produced by Mythic Imagination Institute, the film encourages viewers to foster their own creative responses through myth.
Mission Statement
The purpose of 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