Devon Deimler, Ph.D., is an alumni of the Mythological Studies with an emphasis in Depth Psychology program, and currently Assistant Professor in the Myth program at Pacifica. She is also teaching in the upcoming Applied Mythology Graduate Certificate, June 26 – August 14, 2025. I’m delighted to speak with Devon.
Angela: The upcoming Applied Mythology Graduate Certificate will bring together “expert myth practitioners with participants eager to understand the multiple ways which myth structures not only storytelling, but psyche itself.” I’m curious how psyche could be structured by myth? How do you regard the relationship between the two?
Devon: I don’t hold any exact thesis about the structure of psyche, though I’m stirred by how ideas about any such structure (of which there are many in depth psychology) are mythologies in themselves (in anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s definition of myth being stories we tell ourselves about ourselves). I think this question asks us to define psyche, and/or to define myth and psyche together. I don’t have singular answers for either, which my first lecture especially will show! But I do feel that psyche and myth share very deep graftings with one another, especially concerning our sense of meaning, meaning-making, and the extra-ordinary, those experiences that feel somehow very personal and utterly transpersonal at once. I follow many others, like James Hillman, in considering metaphor as, maybe not a structure per se, but certainly a manner of myth. Metaphor and myth express likenesses across different things (wings and desire, gods and diseases, etc.) and it’s psychologically meaningful, moving, even jarring, to see an aspect of oneself or others or culture in something else. In this sense, myth and metaphor can be empathic phenomena and technologies. And though often situated in the non-literal, this brings in the material dimension of myth, too; metaphor reinstates or reveals the likenesses between psyche and earth, psyche as earth and body and stuff (gods are mountains and evil lurks in ceiling fans, Dionysos is lightning, the scent memory of my dad’s tobacco is as informative upon my sense of soul, is as big a mythic presence in my life than most gods). I’m very interested in psyche’s web of materiality, memory, and fantasy, in that aesthetic nexus, which spins forth and spins out mythic patterns and catches new myths, too.
Angela: Your first lecture for the course will be “Opening into Myth: True Lies and Inspired In-vocations” grounding the learner in definitions of mythology. My attention was caught by “True Lies.” Are myths true lies? Or is this a reference to the movie of the same title?
Devon: Well, yes, kind of! It’s a typical, extremely small bit of fun that academics like to claim, inserting some pop culture reference into titles, and I do often like to have some reference like that in mind, even if it’s not in my title; it just keeps my energy up, keeps me in touch with the mood of what I’m presenting about. And True Lies was the first rated R movie that I saw! I was not supposed to see it. And who knows how it holds up today, probably not well. But there is maybe something there to keep me in touch with that bit of transgression. Myth is transgressive in this “true lies” framing, because mythic expressions of truth are delivered via fictions, images, stories; their truths are emotional, existential; the real as told by the unreal. And this is a quite beautiful thing when we’re talking about literature or art, but it’s a power wielded just as well in politics, business, and any other sort of psychological manipulation, in which mythology is really firing its ideological cylinders. So part of this lecture is about recognizing this wide and protean aspect of myth, too, that it stretches from sacred truths to false advertising.
Angela: The final class of the certificate will be your lecture on “Deep Ends and Near Futures: Myths of Metamorphosis and Many Returns.” I know that Dionysos features in this lecture, and he is an ongoing part of your work. Your dissertation was titled “Ultraviolet Concrete: Dionysos and the Ecstatic Play of Aesthetic Experience.” Can you speak a little about Dionysos and his significance in your scholarship and the certification?
Devon: Dionysos is a mythic figure of ecstatic transformation. He’s a god of lightning and changes and madness and liberation and eroticism, and of course intoxication. So he’s a god who’s got a lot to do with what turns us on and turns our heads. One connection between Dionysos and myth and images (besides the fact that he’s got a lot of both) is that I think he illustrates the affected nature of our being—how we are stirred by our experiences and that we often know that an event is meaningful in our body and senses before the reasoning mind fully “makes sense” of it. So, for me, the Dionysian mythos demonstrates, in a way, the cycle of mythic experience itself: that we are affected by an event, inspired or driven on some level to express it, and then it may affect and be re-expressed by others.
Angela: Having graduated with a Ph.D. in the Mythological Studies specialization, we’re lucky to have your continued participation in Pacifica academics. Currently you are teaching “Dreams, Visions, Myths” and “Cultural Mythologies: Myth as Image & Aesthetic Experience” and “Archetypal Psychology.” What do you find most rewarding in teaching here, and in particular, teaching about mythologies? What makes Pacifica students and the quality of the teacher-student interaction so special?
Devon: It’s an honor to be on the other side of the Pacifica classroom, where the incredible giants who were my own teachers stood and taught. I feel like a tiny being doing my best to fill big shoes and fashion new shoes at the same time, and I have an immense amount of empathy now for the work and even something like faith that goes into teaching. “Dreams, Visions, Myths” is the inaugural class in the Myth program, and it was a significant initiation for me, to have it be the first course I taught in Myth. It’s fun to think of teaching that course as sculpting a large archway with lots of curious and inviting detail. My course on “Myth as Image and Aesthetic Experience” is a course I created, from my wheelhouse, so it’s fulfilling to extend that material to students and keeps me kicking, testing wheels, so to speak. Teaching is very much learning, and in that respect, I continue to be a student as well.
It’s rewarding to teach Pacifica students, because they have a sincerity about the meaningfulness of life, and this sincerity can, should, and does include criticality and playfulness. Since I’ve fairly recently become a teacher rather than a student, I also understand where they are coming from—the hopes and gifts, challenges and sacrifices of being a student, of committing to a study of myth or creativity or depth psychology. What makes teaching myth rewarding is that I find it an exceptionally applicable concept to look at most anything through. Like art, myth is about ways of seeing and expressing and re-presenting images and narratives, whether that concerns our own psychology and life stories, our cultural narratives, or interpreting or making art, or whatever. So myth is genuinely mysterious, which I love, and it’s also such an elemental necessity and ongoing phenomenon in human life that it’s surprisingly practical to study it. It feels important to lean into that.
Angela: You have a chapter in a forthcoming book Truth and Soul, on filmmaker Robert Downey Sr. I assume this is the father of Iron Man himself, Robert Downey Jr.? I admit I didn’t know that his father was a filmmaker. What is it about Downey Sr.’s filmmaking that attracted you to this project and what are you writing about in it?
Devon: I was curating a myth and film screening series called “Cinemyth” at the Philosophical Research Society in L.A., where I chose films from a certain subgenre and either myself or a guest presenter would lead the audience in a myth-focused dive into each film. The idea was to experiment with talking mythically about films and genres that were not the obvious or typical “mythy” choices, but which are totally mythically relevant. My first series was “Revisionist Westerns” and the second was “Myths of Los Angeles.” For the Revisionist Western series, I did a presentation on Easy Rider, a film dear to me since adolescence and even more so since my time working at the Dennis Hopper Art Trust. And it was a fascinating ride into exploring the Western genre from its early days, influences, and problematic themes into the Revisionist period that began in the mid-20th century and continues today. After that presentation, I was invited by a very rad publisher to write about Robert Downey Sr.’s film, Greaser’s Palace, and to do so in relationship to the Revisionist Western genre (and yes, this is Sr., father of the famous Jr.). I fell for his work. It’s experimental filmmaking, distinguished by uncompromising cheekiness and anarchic sense of humor, which challenges cultural norms and repressive systems (Greaser’s Palace pokes at institutional religion and rugged masculinity, and his film Putney Swope challenges racism and capitalism). Greaser’s Palace deals in lots of absurdity and despicable behaviors, but in the way that, like, Daffy Duck says “despicable.” Spending time with things like this that belong to my art worlds but haven’t had a lot of airtime yet in the depth psych/myth worlds is what I find most fulfilling to do.
Angela: Is there anything else on the horizon for you that we might look forward to?
Devon: I’m giving a revamped lecture online for Morbid Anatomy called “A Smile That Lasts Forever: A Memento Mori of Teeth,” which looks at teeth as a bit of death in the everyday, the skeleton smiling through, and then does an interdisciplinary phenomenology of teeth and death from there. I’m also writing a monograph about archetypal psychologist, dramaturg, and extraordinary artist and person, Nor Hall, which I hope to finish this summer. Then I plan to revise my doctoral work, into a book of essays that extends part of the original thesis into the work of David Lynch, who has been one of my greatest teachers of myth and psyche, and myths of metamorphosis, which I’ve given a few talks on in recent years.
Angela: Thank you so much for talking with me. I’m excited to experience the Applied Mythology Graduate Certificate.
Register here: Applied Mythology Graduate Certificate, June 26 – August 14, 2025.
Devon Deimler is a writer, artist, and scholar. She is adjunct faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute in both the Mythological Studies and Depth Psychology and Creativity programs. She is also Curator of exhibits and events at OPUS Archives and Research Center (home to the collections of James Hillman, Joseph Campbell, Marija Gimbutas, and more), Scholar-in-Residence at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, and previously worked as North American Mythological RoundTable Coordinator for the Joseph Campbell Foundation. Devon’s dissertation, Ultraviolet Concrete: Dionysos and the Ecstatic Play of Aesthetic Experience, won the Institute’s Dissertation of Excellence award. She is currently writing a monograph on the work of archetypal psychologist and dramaturg, Nor Hall.
Angela Borda is a writer for Pacifica Graduate Institute, as well as the editor of the Santa Barbara Literary Journal. Her work has been published in Food & Home, Peregrine, Hurricanes & Swan Songs, Delirium Corridor, Still Arts Quarterly, Danse Macabre, and is forthcoming in The Tertiary Lodger and Running Wild Anthology of Stories, Vol. 5.
