Christine Downing | |
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 Downing in 2008 | |
| Born | Christine Downing March 21, 1931 |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation(s) | Educator, Writer |
Christine Downing (born March 21, 1931) is a scholar, educator, and author in the fields of mythology, religion, depth psychology, and feminist studies.
Christine Downing was born in 1931 in Leipzig, Germany. Her mother, Herta Fischer Rosenblatt, was a pharmacist, poet, and co-founder of the Haiku Society of America. Her father, Dr. E. F. Rosenblatt, was a professor of Chemistry at the University of Leipzig. Dr. Rosenblatt, considered Jewish by the Nazi party, lost his professorial appointment in 1933, which prompted the family to emigrate to the United States. In 1935, they settled in New Jersey. Dr. Rosenblatt eventually became president of Engelhard Industries where his laboratory invented the first production catalytic converter in 1973. [1] In 1952, Downing graduated from Swarthmore College with a major in literature. She was the first woman upon whom Drew University bestowed a doctorate, which she earned with a dissertation on the German philosopher and religious scholar, Martin Buber.
In 1963, Downing began teaching in the Religion Department at Rutgers University. In 1974, she transferred to San Diego State University, where she taught for eighteen years, including ten years as Chair of the University's Department of Religious Studies. Also in 1974, Downing became the first woman president of the American Academy of Religion. [2] She delivered her presidential address on “Sigmund Freud and the Mythological Tradition.” While teaching in San Diego, Downing simultaneously served as a core faculty member at the California School of Professional Psychology, inspiring her to obtain a master's degree in family therapy from USIU.
In 1994, Downing assisted in the development of the Mythological Studies program at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, where she remains a core faculty member, teaching courses in Greek and Roman mythologies, Hebrew traditions, and memoir. From 1995 through 2004, she delivered the annual Christine Downing Lectures at San Diego State University. [3]
Downing has been recognized for her ability to blend self-reflective, biographical writing with rigorous scholarship. [4] She has examined how Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung’s notions of the self and the unconscious have transformed autobiographical thinking and writing and has often followed her own dreams as imperative departure points toward personal and scholarly investigations. [4] Downing has written and lectured extensively about the relationship between the personal and the mythic, especially the psychological significance of Greek goddess mythologies, including those focused on Demeter and Persephone, and women's experience of male gods.
In October 2018, Downing received the Distinguished Educator Award from the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education.
Her collection of professional and personal materials is housed at OPUS Archives and Research Center in Santa Barbara, California.
From 1951 to 1978, Downing was married to George V. Downing, a career chemist at Merck & Company, Inc. Between 1953 and 1958 they had five children: Peter Stalker Downing, Eric Steele Downing, Scott Drinker Downing, Christopher Lane Downing, and Sandra Leigh Downing.
When it became legally possible in 2008, Downing married poet and writer River Malcolm.
The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine (Crossroad, 1981)
Journey Through Menopause: A Personal Rite of Passage (Crossroad, 1987)
Psyche’s Sisters: Reimagining the Meaning of Sisterhood (Harper & Row, 1988)
Myths and Mysteries of Same Sex Love (Crossroad, 1989)
Women’s Mysteries: Toward a Poetics of Gender (Crossroad, 1992)
Gods In Our Midst: Mythological Images of the Masculine, A Woman’s View (Crossroad, 1993)
The Luxury of Afterwards (iUniverse, 2004)
Preludes: Essays on the Ludic Imagination, 1961-1981 (iUniverse, 2005)
Gleanings: Essays 1982-2006 (iUniverse, 2006)
Mythopoetic Musings, 2007-2018 (2018)
Editor, Mirrors of the Self (Tarcher, 1991)
Editor, The Long Journey Home: ReVisioning the Myth of Demeter and Persephone For Our Time (Shambhala, 1994)
Editor, Disturbances in the Field: Essays in Honor of David L. Miller (Spring Journal Books, 2006)
In ancient Greek religion and mythology, Demeter is the Olympian goddess of the harvest and agriculture, presiding over crops, grains, food, and the fertility of the earth. Although Demeter is mostly known as a grain goddess, she also appeared as a goddess of health, birth, and marriage, and had connections to the Underworld. She is also called Deo. In Greek tradition, Demeter is the second child of the Titans Rhea and Cronus, and sister to Hestia, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus. Like her other siblings except Zeus, she was swallowed by her father as an infant and rescued by Zeus.
Hades, in the ancient Greek religion and mythology, is the god of the dead and the king of the underworld, with which his name became synonymous. Hades was the eldest son of Cronus and Rhea, although this also made him the last son to be regurgitated by his father. He and his brothers, Zeus and Poseidon, defeated their father's generation of gods, the Titans, and claimed joint rulership over the cosmos. Hades received the underworld, Zeus the sky, and Poseidon the sea, with the solid earth available to all three concurrently. In artistic depictions, Hades is typically portrayed holding a bident and wearing his helm with Cerberus, the three-headed guard-dog of the underworld, standing at his side.
Joseph John Campbell was an American writer. He was a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College who worked in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work covers many aspects of the human experience. Campbell's best-known work is his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), in which he discusses his theory of the journey of the archetypal hero shared by world mythologies, termed the monomyth.
In ancient Greek mythology and religion, Persephone, also called Kore or Cora, is the daughter of Zeus and Demeter. She became the queen of the underworld after her abduction by her uncle Hades, the king of the underworld, who would later also take her into marriage.
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in the psyche, through dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst, and the distinctive theory of mind and human agency derived from it.
Alfred Ernest Jones was a Welsh neurologist and psychoanalyst. A lifelong friend and colleague of Sigmund Freud from their first meeting in 1908, he became his official biographer. Jones was the first English-speaking practitioner of psychoanalysis and became its leading exponent in the English-speaking world. As President of both the International Psychoanalytical Association and the British Psycho-Analytical Society in the 1920s and 1930s, Jones exercised a formative influence in the establishment of their organisations, institutions and publications.
The Eleusinian Mysteries were initiations held every year for the cult of Demeter and Persephone based at the Panhellenic Sanctuary of Eleusis in ancient Greece. They are considered the "most famous of the secret religious rites of ancient Greece". Their basis was a Bronze Age agrarian cult, and there is some evidence that they were derived from the religious practices of the Mycenean period. The Mysteries represented the myth of the abduction of Persephone from her mother Demeter by the king of the underworld Hades, in a cycle with three phases: the descent (loss), the search, and the ascent, with the main theme being the ascent of Persephone and the reunion with her mother. It was a major festival during the Hellenic era, and later spread to Rome. Similar religious rites appear in the agricultural societies of the Near East and in Minoan Crete.
A taboo, also spelled tabu, is a social group's ban, prohibition, or avoidance of something based on the group's sense that it is excessively repulsive, offensive, sacred, or allowed only for certain people. Such prohibitions are present in virtually all societies. Taboos may be prohibited explicitly, for example within a legal system or religion, or implicitly, for example by social norms or conventions followed by a particular culture or organization.
In ancient Greek religion and myth, Dionysus is the god of wine-making, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre. He was also known as Bacchus by the Greeks for a frenzy he is said to induce called baccheia. As Dionysus Eleutherius, his wine, music, and ecstatic dance free his followers from self-conscious fear and care, and subvert the oppressive restraints of the powerful. His thyrsus, a fennel-stem sceptre, sometimes wound with ivy and dripping with honey, is both a beneficent wand and a weapon used to destroy those who oppose his cult and the freedoms he represents. Those who partake of his mysteries are believed to become possessed and empowered by the god himself.
In ancient Greek religion and Greek mythology, Minthe is an Underworld Naiad associated with the river Cocytus. She was beloved by Hades, the King of the Underworld, and became his mistress. But she was transformed into a mint plant by either his wife Persephone or her mother Demeter. The plant was also called by some as hedyosmos, which means "sweet-smelling".
Creiddylad, daughter of King Lludd, is a minor character in the early medieval Welsh Arthurian tale Culhwch ac Olwen.
In ancient Greek religion and mythology, Pluto was the ruler of the Greek underworld. The earlier name for the god was Hades, which became more common as the name of the underworld itself. Pluto represents a more positive concept of the god who presides over the afterlife. Ploutōn was frequently conflated with Ploûtos, the Greek god of wealth, because mineral wealth was found underground, and because as a chthonic god Pluto ruled the deep earth that contained the seeds necessary for a bountiful harvest. The name Ploutōn came into widespread usage with the Eleusinian Mysteries, in which Pluto was venerated as both a stern ruler and a loving husband to Persephone. The couple received souls in the afterlife and are invoked together in religious inscriptions, being referred to as Plouton and as Kore respectively. Hades, by contrast, had few temples and religious practices associated with him, and he is portrayed as the dark and violent abductor of Persephone.
Mother Nature is a personification of nature that focuses on the life-giving and nurturing aspects of nature by embodying it, in the form of a mother or mother goddess.
Archetypal literary criticism is a type of analytical theory that interprets a text by focusing on recurring myths and archetypes in the narrative, symbols, images, and character types in literary works. As an acknowledged form of literary criticism, it dates back to 1934 when Classical scholar Maud Bodkin published Archetypal Patterns in Poetry.
In Greek mythology, the underworld or Hades is a distinct realm where an individual goes after death. The earliest idea of afterlife in Greek myth is that, at the moment of death, an individual's essence (psyche) is separated from the corpse and transported to the underworld. In early mythology the dead were indiscriminately grouped together and led a shadowy post-existence; however, in later mythology elements of post-mortem judgment began to emerge with good and bad people being separated.
There are several real or apparent name conflicts between different Solar System bodies, in spite of efforts to give every named body a distinct name. Most of these conflicts are between asteroids and natural satellites of planets, which are named according to different but partially overlapping schemes. Most satellites are named after people and divinities in Greek and Roman mythology; this is rarely true of asteroids currently, with the exception of centaurs and Jupiter trojans, but formerly many asteroids had mythological names, which consequently came into conflict with the names of natural satellites.
Despoina or Despoena was the epithet of a goddess worshipped by the Eleusinian Mysteries in Ancient Greece as the daughter of Demeter and Poseidon and the sister of Arion. Surviving sources refer to her exclusively under the title Despoina alongside her mother Demeter, as her real name could not be revealed to anyone except those initiated into her mysteries and was consequently lost with the extinction of the Eleusinian religion. Writing during the second century A.D., Pausanias spoke of Demeter as having two daughters; Kore being born first, before Despoina was born, with Zeus being the father of Kore and Poseidon as the father of Despoina. Pausanias made it clear that Kore is Persephone, although he did not reveal Despoina's proper name.
Sigmund Freud's views on religion are described in several of his books and essays. Freud considered God a fantasy, based on the infantile need for a dominant father figure. During the development of early civilization, God and religion were necessities to help restrain our violent impulses, which in modern times can now be discarded in favor of science and reason.
This is a list of writings published by Sigmund Freud. Books are either linked or in italics.
Barbara Mor was an American poet, editor, and Feminist of the twentieth-century Goddess movement. She became most widely known for The Great Cosmic Mother, a cross-disciplinary study that cites numerous archaeological, anthropological, historical and mythological texts and artifacts as evidence of women's role as creators and first practitioners of humanity's earliest religious and cultural belief systems. She was published by Athena Press, WomanSpirit, Second Porcupine Press, Harper & Row, and The Oliver Arts & Open Press. Her poetry was included in Fired Up with You : Poems of a Niagara Vision, edited by the poet Will inman
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