Course Descriptions: M.A./Ph.D. in Mythology and Religious Studies (fully online)

Joseph Campbell wrote that myth has the capacity to touch and exhilarate the deepest energies within the psyche, catalyzing creative expression in areas as diverse as depth psychology, history, anthropology, religion, art history, music, dance, and literature. This course focuses on the precursors of Jung’s idea of individuation in a wide range of cultural mythologies, such as the Grail Romances of the Middle Ages, the Modernist works of James Joyce, Thomas Mann, and Pablo Picasso, and many others.

This course explores the important and evolving contemporary approaches to the study of classical mythology. Its focus on how the poets of ancient Greece and Rome reworked inherited mythic themes and plots entails close readings of the cultic, bardic, dramatic, and lyric poetry of the Greek archaic period, such as Sappho, Homer, Euripides, and Hesiod, through Roman understandings of myth conveyed in the epic and lyric poems of such authors as Vergil and Ovid. Attention is given both to the role these myths played in their original historical context and to their ongoing archetypal significance.

This course explores the changing faces of the mythologies associated with the underworld, in representative Ancient, Classical, Medieval, 166 Romantic, Victorian, and Modern texts. What was the primary focus of the myth in each of these periods? How does it reflect the changing spiritual, psychological, intellectual, and social issues of these periods? The course emphasizes the syncretic aspect of the mythologies of the underworld, which typically bring together motifs from a wide range of artistic, literary, and spiritual traditions.

What happens after death? Can the dying process be stopped or altered? What do religions and science say about reincarnation? Students will encounter comparative cultures through a poignant exploration of a shared human experience, through the lens of dying and death, as it has been interpreted in a Buddhist tradition. Thus, this course covers theories of dying, death, post-death, and reincarnation in Asian and American interpretations. Particularly, students will focus on the rich history and philosophy of Tibetan and Indian Buddhism’s traditions around death, the history of so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead, Jung’s interpretation of it, as well as American and scientific interactions with these traditions. Students will read primary and secondary texts, watch films, look at ancient art, and listen to podcasts to think carefully about how a worldview is translated into funerary rites and eschatological views.

This series is an exploration of critical issues pertaining to the study of myth in relation to religious traditions, literature, depth psychology, and culture. The course is based on a guest lecture by a major scholar in the field of mythology. Pass/No Pass

In his Poetics, Aristotle defines tragedy as a mimesis praxeos, or an “imitation of action.” This course will explore tragedy as myth enacted, through attunement to the verbal and embodied language of a selected Greek tragedy in its historical context; its transmission and translation history; and contemporary theoretical approaches to studies in Greek tragedy. These concepts will be applied to exercises in creative practice and scene work. From this combined perspective of historical grounding, theoretical influences, and arts-based research, we will explore tragedy as a vehicle for some of the most powerful human stories that have been adapted and transformed by theatre-makers, scholars, and storytellers around the world. Our critical and creative investigation will engage tragedy’s timeless questions of fate versus free will, intergenerational narratives as determinants of individual action, conflicts between the laws of the gods and those of the state, and the relationships between self, kin, and community.

The word “yoga” has been so thoroughly absorbed into contemporary Western culture that it is easy to forget how strange and radical its origins are. Long before yoga meant a studio class or a wellness brand, it meant the deliberate transformation of the human body into a vehicle for liberation — through breath manipulation that could stop the mind, inner fire practices that could melt the architecture of ordinary perception, and physical disciplines designed not for flexibility but for the realization that the body itself is a sacred text written in channels, winds, and luminous drops. This course recovers the depth and diversity of the world’s yoga traditions by tracing their development across two of the richest contemplative cultures on earth — India and Tibet — and examining how those traditions have been translated, transformed, and sometimes unrecognizably altered in their journey to the modern West. In the Indian traditions, students engage with foundational texts including Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras, the Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā, the Gheraṇḍa Saṃhitā, and the Śiva Saṃhitā, exploring the philosophical frameworks of classical yoga, the emergence of haṭha yoga’s radical body-positive soteriology, and the tantric contexts from which physical yoga practices originally emerged. In the Tibetan traditions, we turn to the figure of the ngakpa — the non-monastic, often householder tantric yogin and yoginī whose practice lineages have transmitted some of Buddhism’s most powerful contemplative technologies for over a thousand years. Students will study the Six Yogas of Nāropa, tummo (inner heat) practice, the yoga of the subtle body in Vajrayāna, and the distinctive role of the ngakpa and ngakma as practitioners who carry realization not through renunciation of the world but through full engagement with it. The course then turns to the dramatic story of yoga’s arrival and adaptation in the United States — from Swami Vivekananda’s address at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions to the postural yoga revolution of the twentieth century to the contemporary landscape of yoga 162 studios, teacher trainings, and wellness industries. We ask difficult and necessary questions: What was gained and what was lost when yoga crossed the ocean? How did a contemplative discipline rooted in liberation from cyclical existence become a fitness practice? What are the politics of cultural translation, appropriation, and authenticity when a living tradition enters a global marketplace? And what happens when practitioners in the West begin to reach back toward the esoteric roots that were left behind — seeking out the very tantric, subtle-body, and meditative dimensions that were stripped away to make yoga palatable to modern consumers? Students will read the classical primary sources in translation alongside contemporary scholarship in religious studies, postcolonial theory, and the anthropology of globalization, developing the critical and interpretive skills to understand yoga not as a single thing but as a living, contested, and continually reinvented family of traditions that raises some of the most urgent questions in the study of religion today — about bodies, about power, about who owns a tradition, and about what it actually means to wake up. Whether you are a scholar, a practitioner, a teacher, or someone who has sensed that there is something far deeper beneath the surface of what you have been taught to call yoga — this course takes you there.

The myths and rituals of Africa are a rich legacy, still vital today. Moreover, they endure in adaptive form, in Vodou, Santeria, and other religions of the African Diaspora. The course explores common mythic characters, themes, rituals, symbolic systems, and worldviews in Africa and traces their connection to New World Traditions.

The depth psychology of C.G. Jung and his successors enables us to see how mythology expresses psychology and how psychology may be understood as mythology. Key Jungian concepts such as the collective unconscious, archetypes, and the individuation process are surveyed with attention to the evolution of these theoretical constructs. The influence of Jung’s ideas on the arts, literature, and religious thought is explored. The course also covers dimensions of post-Jungian thought, chiefly James Hillman’s archetypal psychology, including the notions of personifying, pathologizing, psychologizing, and dehumanizing. The works of other post-Jungian writers are also examined to exemplify selected aspects of the archetypal approach.

This series is an exploration of critical issues pertaining to the study of myth in relation to religious traditions, literature, depth psychology, and culture. The course is based on a guest lecture by a major scholar in the field of mythology. Pass/No Pass

The purpose of this course is to enable students to consolidate and integrate their learning during the second year of the program. The course also serves as the Comprehensive Exam in the program. Students must successfully pass this exam to be eligible for the M.A. degree. The exam allows the faculty to assess students’ understanding of theoretical perspectives on myth, and their ability to apply these perspectives to a particular cultural tradition; their understanding of myth and literature; and how depth psychological perspectives may be utilized to understand cultural phenomena. Prerequisite: Five full quarters of coursework and good academic standing with no failing grades; Pass/No Pass

In the eighth century, a tantric master from India was invited to Tibet to tame the demons obstructing the construction of the country’s first Buddhist monastery. He was poisoned, burned, drowned, and buried alive — and survived every attempt on his life. His consort, a Tibetan princess turned yoginī, went into solitary retreat on a glacier, mastered the energies of death, and emerged as one of the most powerful figures in Tibetan religious history. The stories of Padmasambhava and Yeshe Tsogyal are among the most dramatic, symbolically rich, and politically charged narratives in world mythology — yet they remain virtually unknown outside of Buddhist studies. This course brings the full toolkit of mythological studies to bear on these extraordinary texts such as Jungian and archetypal readings of the indestructible hero and the feminine descent; Campbellian comparative analysis alongside parallel myths of death and resurrection; structuralist examination of the binary inversions that drive tantric 164 transformation; feminist approaches that ask how power is constructed and disrupted; and decolonial perspectives that situate these stories within Tibet’s complex negotiations with Indian Buddhist authority, indigenous Bön traditions, and imperial politics. Students will work with primary sources in translation, engage contemporary scholarship, and develop their own interpretive arguments — discovering in the process that a single myth, read through multiple lenses, can yield insights that no single method could produce alone. No prior knowledge of Tibet or Buddhism is required — only a willingness to encounter some of the most extraordinary stories you have never heard.

This course examines the mythic aspects of two literary genres (memoir and autobiography) and engages questions concerning the relation of memory and the imagination, the individual and the archetypal, self and others, and narcissism and guilt. Attention is given to classic examples of the genres, as well as reflections on the defining characteristics of these genres by literary critics, depth psychologists, and feminists. Pass/No Pass

This course examines dissertation research options supported by the program including theoretical studies in the humanities and production style projects. It explores the technical aspects of conducting research such as style, rhetoric, and utilization of library resources. The psychological aspects of research and writing processes are also addressed. Pass/No Pass

The issues, tasks, and processes of conducting research and drafting initial concepts are addressed. This course provides the framework for implementing a research idea and writing the concept paper which serves as the basis for the dissertation proposal. The classes also teach strategies and techniques for research and completion of the concept paper. Pass/No Pass. No incompletes are allowed in MR 733.

This series is an exploration of critical issues pertaining to the study of myth in relation to religious traditions, literature, depth psychology, and culture. The course is based on a guest lecture by a major scholar in the field of mythology. Pass/No Pass