Mythic Christ Podcast

"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.

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" 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.

We have lost something as a culture difficult to describe or even to feel. We have lost the language and the ritual container we need to even become conscious these ambiguous losses and the untended grief buried in the body, both individually and collectively. We might sense that Reality itself is on the line. Guy Debord in landmark work, The Society of the Spectacle, written in 1967, tracks the shift from the early stage industrial revolution when we exchanged a depth of “being” for an obsession with “having.” Exiling ourselves further as a collective from the real world. Now in the Anthropocene, marked by late stage capitalism, we are plunging further into existential exile, exchanging “having” for “appearing.” Catastrophic loss of meaning, hope, and connection. Debord explains, “the spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life.”
This episode is a teaser for the official launch of the Mythic Christ podcast in September 2022—featuring exploration of the Christ myth that has become domesticated, which is to say deanimated, disembodied, abstracted and universalized from local enfleshment in sacred place and the stories of place. Up until this modern industrial age, for many Earth-based peoples, place has always had a face. The original Hebrew creation myths express this idea that the Earth herself has a face and the divine-human face is itself the icon of creation. We will explore the poetic image of the face of the ground, as ultimately an invitation to return to an animacy that involves reawakening a mythic consciousness we need to forge a new path ahead in this age of ecocide. The “flesh” of bodies are living interfaces, apertures to “knowing and being known” open gateways of erotic touch, ecstatic feeling, emotive expression, imaginal depth, sentience, memory, and interiority that modern culture has been exiled from. The face represents the animacy of the cosmos and our own animate, emergent rootedness in this vast, sentient web of creation.
Mythic Christ Podcast operates because of the generosity of its growing Patreon community. To become a patron supporter of this podcast, in service to this emerging vision and in support of greater cultural transformation, please visit ​patreon.com/mythicchrist 
To join an online community of exploration and practice offering multi-day immersions  or to explore soul-oriented mentoring including guided dreamwork, deep imagery, self-designed ceremony, myth-work, storytelling, ritual embodiment, coaching and more, check out our website to learn more: www.mythicchrist.com