Mythic Christ Podcast

The Imaginal Age: Awakening Mythic Imagination Yearlong

Friends, It is my pleasure to introduce our next Awakening Mythic Imagination: Eco-Depth Yearlong program coming August, 2025. This worldview shifting and life-changing certificate course is back with some new changes to content platform and practices rooted in my upcoming book. 
The introductory online intensive that begins the yearlong is August 1st thru 3rd, 2025. Registration will close in June of 2025, and there are limited spots available. This short episode is a brief introduction to the yearlong course. Enjoy!
For more information visit: www.mythicchrist.com/yearlong
There is a 25% off holiday promotion now thru December 31st. If you are interested in payment options, scholarships, or have logistic questions please RSVP to the free online webinar "Awakening Mythic Imagination Q & A"
To register you simply fill out the yearlong application and pay a $350 deposit to reserve your spot. If you register before Dec 31st, 2024, the promotion discount will automatically be applied to the total program cost. Visit website for details.
 
 

Mythic Meditation - The Water of Life

A Mythic Meditation - The Water of Life
It is possible that the next story that finds you might just be more than a story. The emergent edge of myth touches the creative powers of the cosmos, for mythtelling at its root is about world-making. We have been story-tellers for hundreds of thousands of years. In the Awakening Mythic Imagination Eco-Depth Yearlong program we inhabit the world of dreaming, while cultivating our capacity for perception and attention to archetypes and mythic themes as they arise in the field. This mythic meditation is a kind of introductory invitation to consider ways you might grow your own capacity to perceive the world around you, and the stories that weave you into the world. I invite you to listen from a relaxed posture in place of stillness and quiet.

The Way Home, An interview with Ben Katt

In this episode I interview Ben Katt about his new book "The Way Home" tracing his own "hero's journey" to wholeness at midlife, including stories of change and personal transformation. I hope you enjoy! You can find him at:
thewayhomebook.com
benjaminkatt.com
 

SPECIAL EPISODE: An Interview with Awakening Mythic Imagination Yearlong Participants

On this episode of Mythic Christ Podcast, join host Matt Syrdal as he reflects on the transformative and intimate experiences of the Awakening Mythic Imagination year-long program. Spanning nine months and following the seasonal cycles, this program invites participants to tune into the Earth's rhythms and engage with world mythologies, great mythic stories, and the Judeo-Christian scriptures from an archetypal lens. In this episode, Matt will be interviewing five participants who will share their unique experiences. They will discuss what surprised them about the program, the central practices that shaped them, and any numinous experiences they had. The participants will also delve into how the program has influenced their vocation, sense of purpose, and the ways in which their lives have changed and shifted. Stories include encounters with dreams and the deep imagination, reconnecting with the feminine aspect of the Mystery, and profound symbols that have become a wellspring of new life for the participants. This interview explores how integrating different parts of oneself and embracing the trickster archetype can lead to personal integration and a celebration of the whole self. Throughout the episode, Matt emphasizes the importance of poetic imagery and the language of the soul, as well as the power and symbolism of scriptures in guiding one's journey. Join Matt as he dives into questions of shared mysticism, participatory consciousness, and magical experiences with the participants, exploring the ongoing conversation and attention required by living into one's calling. Through these conversations, Matt and his guests invite listeners to reimagine the world, pay attention to all aspects of their calling, and find a sense of belonging and connection with others who have similar longings and experiences of the Mythic Christ. Don't miss this captivating episode of the Mythic Christ Podcast, where Matt and his guests share their profound and transformative experiences from the Awakening Mythic Imagination year-long program.
The listening podcast community can claim a special discount shared in the episode for upcoming online intensive "Green Christ: Wild Sacrament & Mycelial Imagination" this September 6, 8, and 10th. For more information visit www.mythicchrist.com/intensives
If you would like to support the work of this community and the Mythic Christ Podcast, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter at: https://www.patreon.com/mythicchrist

REPOST: Shaman Christ - Part I: Jesus, Awakening & Vocation

Across cultures through time, the Tree is the mythic image of the cosmos, one of the oldest and most deeply rooted of the archetypes. The Tree is a mythic map of whole imaginal realms of visionary and psychic experience holding the mysteries of creation, renewal, life and death, secret knowledge, and initiatory memory. The Great Tree. Our ancestors have hung the bodies of their dead in trees, like a cradle in boughs awaiting rebirth, curled up like embryo ornaments hung in the hollowed-out trunks, for the tree was believed to be a vehicle to the gods, a vessel of regeneration, that could pierce the eternal realms of the heavens and the underworld. 
Mircea Eliade, in his seminal work Shamanism, explores the Tree as an archetypal image of shamanic states of consciousness, found across indigenous peoples from Siberia to Sapmi in Northern Scandinavia, to North American indigenous peoples. And that this archetypal image of the tree, is not only one of the oldest archetypes across the world, but is a map of the trance-states, of those masters of techniques of ecstasy, we refer to as shamans.
Jesus of Nazareth, a personage enshrouded in mystery, one of the few great figures who continues to stir controversy, fascinate deep discourse, and allure spiritual seekers and mystics, even from different faiths, perhaps even more today than ever before. Scholarship has opened new doorways and possibilities into understanding the life of this mysterious holy man. A whole new paradigm of exploration is departing dramatically from modern scholarship, rewilding the ground of Christianity and returning religion to its most ancient numinous grounds of animate experience.
This episode introduces the underlying issues of modern historiography undergirding the Jesus of history and faith, tracking the origins of the shamanic archetype emerging into our collective consciousness, and reimagining an Earth-based spirituality that might rediscover the journey of descent to soul for the greater healing of the Earth community.

Bonus Episode: A Poetic Journey - ”Sky Kiva”

Special Bonus Episode: Poetic Journey - "Sky Kiva" by Matt Syrdal.
This month I wanted to offer a special bonus episode, a poetic journey based on a poem I wrote years ago in Sage Canyon, Colorado called "Sky Kiva." I hope you enjoy! Patreon supporters receive special bonus episodes like this one, guided downloadable spiritual practices, and discounts on programs and immersions. Please consider supporting this vision by becoming a Patreon supporter today.
Wildly and with wonder, 
Matt

Unitive Christ: Part I - ”Wisdom-Sophia”

Over countless millennia, humans have longed for freedom from bondage to the limits of the physical realm of suffering and death… Longed for a portal to the stars, cold, distant, keepers of ancestral wisdom and ancient secrets into the mysteries of the cosmos itself. Behind the primal Mother Goddess stood a void that could not be breached, a holy darkness that was the origin and source of all. Light ineffable, a radiance pure, virginal. A quest for a cosmic innocence, a primeval dawn, that held light and darkness in balance, that both included and transcended masculine and feminine yet birthed both energies into the world of form and time. 
Most origin myths are stories of the cosmos. In the first century these stories were shaped by a belief in an intelligence, a wisdom behind and within the universe. A soul within the world itself, that gave rise to our human capacities for knowledge and  culture and devotion.
This episode "Unitive Christ: The Dissolver" Is part one of a series that explores the paradox of Wisdom Christ, and the ancient counterpart Sophia, the union of opposites, as well as the Sacred Fool and Trickster archetypes.

Green Christ: Myth, Mystery, and Mycelia - Part I

"When I lean over the chasm of myself— / it seems / my God is dark / and like a web: a hundred roots / silently drinking.” - Rilke trans. Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy
When we move from the monologue of modern theology and patriarchal cultural values to the myco-logue of mythic consciousness and entangled identity, we discover a whole living root-system of ecstatic participation. Deep in the primordial ground beneath the temple stones of power, priesthood and doctrine, something mycelial is silently drinking. In the dark soil can you feel something fruiting up around you? In mythic memory vegetation goddesses and gods who thundered through animistic traditions, once watered particular visionary ways that gave birth to religion and culture. These roots still live, they still weave through the hollow ruins of our empty religious symbols and institutional structures even today.
Western culture was traumatically uprooted long ago from sacred land and place, from storied landscapes that once shimmered with mystery. These once healthy ecosystems of oral stories connected the deep imagination and sacred place, were eventually torn up. Before the living Powers of the cosmos were abstracted and locked away into distant heavens, before the wild goddesses were domesticated and absorbed into monotheism, the sacred Powers were once tasted in plants, experienced in Earth and elements, felt in the ecstasy of lightening and the voice of storm, moved through bodies in dance, held by ritual and story and known intimately in trance states. Many of the Greek gods were vegetal in nature, intimate and embodied they could be touched, handled, experienced—focalized in something alive through myth and story into the practical needs, longings, and mysteries of daily life. As a society of consumers we can no longer touch and taste the Mysteries, or feel the world that is our only home.
In this episode “Green Christ” we will explore an ancient archetype of the divine that takes us “out of the mind” so that we can return to the body, deep in the somatic, erotic, and the instinctual polyphonous flesh of the world, a wilder incarnation. Jesus appearing like a vegetation god, the true Vine of experience cstasy and invasive Life who was seen as a new Dionysus, offering true Bread in the dismemberment and scattering of his mystic body for harvest like the grain cycle of Demeter. One in whom activated something in the deep, unseen mythic mycelia across Mesopotamia, Greece, Egypt, and Persia alike. An elemental Christ archetype of stone, and fire, Earth and water weaving through Hebraic myth and mystic experience, that grew through the peaty soils and loamy memory of the ancient Celts, and other Earth-based and animistic traditions in which Mystery was truly alive and intimate to daily life and place, livelihood and culture. Human, Animal, Vegetal, Mineral—Green Christ.

Awakening Mythic Imagination

Our greatest ability and gift as a species is the imagination. We imagine new possibilities. We imagine ourselves into new futures. Human imagination is uniquely forward reaching, and world creating. The imagination is an inner mirror upon the world itself, reflecting back to us who we really are what the world really is. We are homo poeta, human meaning makers. We bear the burden and gift of this capacity for mythic imagination.
Myth is not a ‘persistent lie’ or a fantasy, it is the “wildest way of telling the truth”, in the words of mythologist Martin Shaw. Myth is not just old stories that held the morals, beliefs, and identity of peoples past. But it is a living speech, an infinitely creative and deep pattern, a root system of the imagination of the world of which we are intimately a part.
Today, mythic imagination has been all but lost to us. Our collective imagination today has become unmoored from these ancient mythic root systems, it has become paralyzed and pathological. Religion has abstracted and disembodied what was once intimate knowledge and rapport with the animate forces of a mysterious world. Our exile today is a loss of consciousness with catastrophic results on our ecosystems and biosphere, alienation from a living and dreaming Earth. Only mythic imagination can help us navigate this dangerous and initiatory moment. 
To awaken mythic imagination is to return to the headwaters of meaning and purpose latent in Earth for us as a species. The mythic wellspring of religion and culture.
In this episode “Awakening Mythic Imagination” we will explore the nature of myth as a conversation between the Earth, humanity and the divine. Myth is the only language large enough to contain the initiatory energies that alone can reforge human consciousness. Mythic imagination is what gives life meaning and depth, it is the heart of community, offers a path of individuation and growth. And truly represents what Jung called the “religious function” re-connecting the mundane with the sacred.

Surge: Deluge of the Divine

"Surge: Deluge of the Divine" will be released, September 19th.
Have you noticed a rising and frenetic consumption of information, a frenzied thirst for soundbites and images, that keep our thumbs swiping down our small black glass screens? Something deep and archetypal has been activated in the primal, instinctual layers of the human psyche. Something deep under the surface has been rising exponentially over the last two and a half years…
A surge...
In our age of QAnon and the outbreak of archetypal fantasy, we are lured instinctively with an addiction response to fear and adrenaline. A gravitational pull to catastrophic traumas in culture and the ecology like a moth to fire.
Surge is a fear of what lurks below in the depths, those unknown forces and powers that overwhelm the conscious personality, flooding the collective psyche of a people, with a sense of total loss of control submerged in the irrational.
"Surge" symbolizes the rising return of the Primordial Flood at a species level. It is an archetype found in nearly all of the world religions from Mesopotamia to China.
On this episode "Surge: Deluge of the Divine," we explore the myth of the Flood and the living nature of the archetypes as an inquiry into our archetypal god-images that have become unmoored in our culture. We will consider the difference between image and archetype, exploring the deep imaginal origins of water and the ritual of immersion.