Rebecca Armstrong, D.Min is a storyteller, minister, teacher and mythologist. She knew Joseph Campbell as “Uncle Joe” during her teenage years when the late mythologist was a frequent guest at the family home. Shortly after his death in 1987 Rebecca received the blessing of his widow, Jean Erdman, to form a Joseph Campbell Society in Chicago which quickly attracted over 200 members. When Campbell’s publisher suggested that the body of posthumous work would require a Foundation to oversee its release, Rebecca was invited to merge her membership group into the new Foundation and she spent the next 12 years traveling around the world presenting workshops and supporting the local Mythological RoundTables where people explored the ideas of Campbell’s mythological vision.

Rebecca collaborated on designing and leading the annual Joseph Campbell Week at Esalen from 1991 to 2004 and has been a keynote speaker at the Parliament of the World’s Religions, the Mythic Life Conference in New York, Mythic Journeys Conference in Atlanta, Int’l Conference on the Child in Malaysia, the Int’l Humanistic Psychology Conference in Lithuania, The European Unitarian Universalists Conference in The Hague, Pallas Athena Center in Brazil, The Center for Integral Development in Ecuador, Centro Integral de Psicología in Mexico – among other venues.

Rebecca has graduate degrees from the University of Chicago, the Unitarian-Universalist seminary and Chicago Theological Seminary. For the past fifteen years she has been teaching courses in religion, philosophy and ethics at DePaul University in Chicago and at Indiana University. She continues to preach, lecture and give workshops in the U.S. and abroad.

Rebecca gave a webinar lecture for The Jung Society of Atlanta in April.
To view a recording of the webinar or access the powerpoint from the presentation, click here.

CURRENT LECTURES & WORKSHOPS

Rebecca presents in-person lectures and workshops and can also work online with your webinar tool - Zoom, Google Meet, GotoMeeting, WebEx, Adobe Connect, etc. Workshop materials can be made available for download as well as suggestions for follow-up activities.

Speaker fees are on a sliding scale commensurate with the size and purpose of the hosting organization.

New themes are always being introduced and you may request a certain topic that would be relevant to your church, school, club, company, library, or social organization.

CAMEO APPEARANCES

Is Everyone Supposed to be a Hero?

Joseph Campbell’s influential book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, inspired tens of thousands of readers to seek their own hero journey. But what if your life is not at that level of drama? What if your personality is not the heroic type? In this sideways look at the “hero journey” phenomenon I explore small but significant moments where – simply by showing up – you are able to make a cameo appearance in someone else’s life journey.

From my own years working as International OutReach Director for the Joseph Campbell Fndtn, I picked three “cameo appearances” – one at the Dalai Lama’s monastery in India; one in Capetown, South Africa; and one in Vilnius, Lithuania – each of which illuminates this other way of living a mythic life. I advance the idea that for the vast majority of us, what life calls us to is this humbler form of heroism, where showing up and paying attention is what the story requires.

CENTERING HOME: PILGRIMAGE TO THE SOUL OF THE CITY

How do I create a more dynamic relationship between myself and the place I call home?

My doctoral work focused on the use of ritual and pilgrimage in contemporary spirituality and took me to cities in Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, the Netherlands and the United States. In this talk I explore the relationship of the individual to his or her city in its symbolic and mythic dimensions.  I also look at the archetype of the city in myth, folklore and public imagination from the last 3000 years of humanity’s search for meaning.

Finally, I share some of the latest research from the Santa Fe Institute on the curious fact that unlike mammals and corporations with their limited lifespans, cities can endure for millennia. What do myths and modern logarithms tell us about cities and soul?

Sacrifice & Bliss: What Joseph Campbell Really Meant

What is Bliss for an Individual of the Western world and why is it the least selfish path I could take?

When Joseph Campbell coined the term, Follow Your Bliss, he could not have foreseen the impact it would have on the American psyche. When the phrase first caught on in the 1980s with an American public eager for reasons to pursue their individuality and personal passions, some began to find fault with what appeared to be an excessively selfish pursuit of hedonistic pleasure.

 But this “If-it-feels-good-do-it” interpretation of the Campbell quote misses the mark. In fact, it is almost diametrically opposed to what Joseph Campbell really meant. In his later years, Campbell was often heard to lament, “I should have said ‘follow your blisters’.”

 Finding the path of bliss requires self-reflection and the courage to act upon what one sees when looking into the deep heart’s core. Campbell’s advice to those who would seek this path was:

“When you follow your bliss -- and by bliss I mean the deep sense of being in it and doing what the push is out of your own existence -- it may not be fun, but it's your bliss and there's bliss behind pain too.”

As both Campbell and Jung discovered, the methods for following the pathways to bliss have always been known to the initiated, and the maps through the psyche are to be found in the great myths, fairytales, and religious stories that have been handed down from time immemorial. But like all great truths, these are encoded in image and metaphor and require a different set of skills to hear anew the voices of the wise animals offering their aid, or see the magic amulet provided by the wise old man or wise old woman and recognize it in its new form.

Every generation comes with its own thirst to the great ocean of story, and it is our task to fill the cup and drink the elixir, and then dream the dreams that will come to those who are ready for the quest.

Entrepreneurs & the Elixir of life

What can the hero journey tell us about business?

Coming from a long line of self-employed artists Rebecca can speak from personal experience about the terrors and joys of striking out on a solo path. An understanding of the hero’s journey and the mythic life as described by Joseph Campbell can serve as an excellent guide for the challenges of leaving behind the 9-to-5 cubicle and striking out on your own.

Whether the goal is to be doing full-time what you love, or to pursue your dream of starting a company or a social movement, being able to read the signs and seasons of interpersonal relationships and commercial interactions is an essential skillset every entrepreneur needs. Myth, it turns out, has a lot to say about how to navigate this adventurous, and sometimes treacherous, terrain.

This talk introduces you to the archetypes of commerce as well as helping you discover what the deep boon or treasure is that you are supposed to bring to the world.

The Feminine Face of God

Why is there no goddess in Christianity and how do we find the missing feminine in the Divine?

When Joseph Campbell wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces he was quite explicit that his research pertained specifically to male heroes and that the female journey had yet to be explored. I have made a study of the central archetypes of the female journey that I explore through myth and poetry which includes: The Goddess of the Hinge, (She Who Opens the Shut Door); Kali, (She Who ends All Things); The Flower Maiden, (She Who Brings the Beauty of the World); and The Naming, (She Who Bears the Sorrows of the World.)

We have been fortunate to have had many wise women in the past generation who have followed the Ariadne thread into the labyrinth of stories of women’s ways, and being many of these voices into my talk: Marie-Louise von Franz, Marion Woodman, Helen Luke, Mary Oliver, Hannah Arendt, Jean Shinoda Bolen.

Gender identity is tethered to mythology in very deep ways and only by exploring the outliers in the ocean of stories can we expand our vision of who we might be. Speaking to the feminine face of god in each of us, this talk is definitely not just for females!

 

The Third Mask: The Catharsis of Tragedy,
The Transcendence of Comedy

Many traditions have trickster gods - What is their role and how do find that in the Western world?

Humans have long languished at the perilous intersection of these two great ideas: that God is Good, and, that Life is Suffering. The difficulty of reconciling these two impossible companions has turned many a traveler into a confirmed atheist, a cynic, a fundamentalist, or worse - has shut down the soul altogether in despair.

The way out of the conundrum has always lurked nearby in the shadows - for the crossroads is where the Trickster makes his or her abode as well! Rebecca takes you through the great lore and literature of the diabolical – the dualism of the material world – and shows you how to master the mythic energy that turns the tragedy of life into divine comedy by finding the trickster within.

Recovering the Soul of the World

What is the Essence of Beauty and why do I need it for my Wellbeing?

The Greeks diagnosed a disorder that they called cyclothymia – an interruption of emotional rhythms due to lack of beauty in the environment. If we moderns had more sensibility, we might recognize that the majority of us now suffer from cyclothymia! And yet, there is hope. For the sages also said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We, each of us, can find the hidden beauty of the world and by honoring its soul, recover our own.

Soul has many attributes; secrecy and beauty are two of the essentials. The soul of a person hides behind their eyes, within a gesture, between the lines of a love letter. Where does the soul of the world reside? In its beauty – in all of its hidden manifestations of beauty. Through the use of mythic image and poetic line, this talk probes into the recesses of the mind that we rarely have a chance to access and reveals their enormous potential to renew and transform.

Longing for a seat at the table

How can I turn loss and disappointment into food for the soul?

Joseph Campbell spent most of his adult life teaching at a college on the east coast, yet he was never fully accepted by the academic community: he was not in demand as a speaker at academic conferences; his books were not cited and lauded in academic journals (though they were ridiculed and attacked for awhile); his ideas were not embraced and made mainstream by the departments of religion or literature or history or cultural studies. For someone whose name has become synonymous with an entire field of study – comparative mythology – he is strangely a stranger to the powers of the ivory towers…. and it doesn’t matter a bit.

Many of history’s great men and women took to their graves the sense that they had failed to find a place of belonging in a world that was indifferent or actively hostile to their contributions. So frequent is this occurrence that we could name this the Archetype of the Outsider. This talk addresses the misunderstanding of “the hero” as someone rewarded by society, rather than the person taken out of the circles of ordinary communal life and set on a difficult path. Then it asks the central question: What kind of heroes does America need? … and uses the wisdom of myth to point towards an answer.

The Lost Atlantis of the Coordinated Soul

What can a 6000-Year-Old Fairytale Tell Us about the New Mythology?

This lecture incorporates storytelling to explore the important new research on the Bronze Age origins of some of the Grimm’s Fairytales. Why have they endured for so long, and what messages have they been hiding in plain sight for all these millennia?

Joseph Campbell was convinced that mythology was not merely a cultural artifact - he saw it as an essential, biological part of our creaturehood. In The Flight of the Wild Gander he sets forth what he calls his basic thesis: “…that myths are a function of nature as well as of culture, and are as necessary to the balanced maturation of the human psyche as is nourishment to the body.”

Then, in the closing chapter of his most famous book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell offers this stirring call to action: “The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light the lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul.” What that coordinated soul looks like, and how the stories can guide us towards a reconciliation with the opposites within us, is the focus of this offering.