Christine Downing | |
|---|---|
 Downing in 2008 | |
| Born | Christine Downing March 21, 1931 |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | 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 grains and the fertility of the earth. Her cult titles include Sito (Σιτώ), "she of the Grain", as the giver of food or grain, and Thesmophoros, "giver of customs" or "legislator", in association with the secret female-only festival called the Thesmophoria.
Hades, in the ancient Greek religion and myth, 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 the last son regurgitated by his father. He and his brothers, Zeus and Poseidon, defeated their father's generation of gods, the Titans, and claimed rulership over the cosmos. Hades received the underworld, Zeus the sky, and Poseidon the sea, with the solid earth, long the province of Gaia, available to all three concurrently. Hades was often portrayed with his three-headed guard dog Cerberus.
In Greek mythology, Persephone, also called Kore or Kora, is the daughter of Zeus and Demeter. She became the queen of the underworld after her abduction by Hades, the god of the underworld, with the approval of her father, Zeus. The myth of her abduction and return to the surface represents her functions as the embodiment of spring and the personification of vegetation, which sprouts from the earth in spring and disappears into the earth after harvest. In Classical Greek art, Persephone is invariably portrayed robed, often carrying a sheaf of grain. She may appear as a mystical divinity with a sceptre and a little box, but she was mostly represented in the process of being carried off by Hades.
Proserpina or Proserpine is an ancient Roman goddess whose cult, myths and mysteries were combined from those of Libera, an early Roman goddess of wine. In Greek she is known as Persephone and her mother is Demeter, goddesses of grain and agriculture. The originally Roman goddess Libera was daughter of the agricultural goddess Ceres and wife to Liber, god of wine and freedom. In 204 BC, a new "Greek-style" cult to Ceres and Proserpina as "Mother and Maiden" was imported from southern Italy, along with Greek priestesses to serve it, and was installed in Libera and Ceres' temple on Rome's Aventine Hill. The new cult and its priesthood were actively promoted by Rome's religious authorities as morally desirable for respectable Roman women, and may have partly subsumed the temple's older, native cult to Ceres, Liber and Libera; but the new rites seem to have functioned alongside the old, rather than replaced them.
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 the "most famous of the secret religious rites of ancient Greece". Their basis was an old 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 (άνοδος) 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 Near East and in Minoan Crete.
Creiddylad, daughter of King Lludd, is a minor character in the early medieval Welsh Arthurian tale Culhwch ac Olwen.
Pluto is the ruler of the underworld in classical mythology. The earlier name for the god was Hades, which became more common as the name of the underworld itself. In ancient Greek religion and mythology, Pluto represents a more positive concept of the god who presides over the afterlife. Ploutōn was frequently conflated with Ploutos, 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.
Fertility rites are religious rituals that are intended to stimulate reproduction in humans or in the natural world. Such rites may involve the sacrifice of "a primal animal, which must be sacrificed in the cause of fertility or even creation".
In Greek mythology, Medusa also called Gorgo, was one of the three monstrous Gorgons, generally described as winged human females with living venomous snakes in place of hair. Those who gazed into her eyes would turn to stone. Most sources describe her as the daughter of Phorcys and Ceto, although the author Hyginus makes her the daughter of Gorgon and Ceto.
The Triple Goddess is a deity or deity archetype revered in many Neopagan religious and spiritual traditions. In common Neopagan usage, the Triple Goddess is viewed as a triunity of three distinct aspects or figures united in one being. These three figures are often described as the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone, each of which symbolizes both a separate stage in the female life cycle and a phase of the Moon, and often rules one of the realms of heavens, earth, and underworld. In various forms of Wicca, her masculine consort is the Horned God.
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 the mother.
In mythology, the Greek underworld is an otherworld where souls go after death. The original Greek idea of afterlife is that, at the moment of death, the soul is separated from the corpse, taking on the shape of the former person, and is transported to the entrance of the underworld. Good people and bad people would then separate. The underworld itself—sometimes known as Hades, after its patron god—is described as being either at the outer bounds of the ocean or beneath the depths or ends of the earth. It is considered the dark counterpart to the brightness of Mount Olympus with the kingdom of the dead corresponding to the kingdom of the gods. The Underworld is a realm invisible to the living, made solely for the dead.
Melinoë is a chthonic nymph or goddess invoked in one of the Orphic Hymns and represented as a bringer of nightmares and madness. Melinoë is the ancient Greek goddess of Propitiation--the offerings made to the deceased by family and friends. She is said to have wandered the earth every night with a train of ghosts, scaring anyone in their path, hence her role as a 'bringer of nightmares and madness'; similar to Hecate and her entourage of Lampades. By extension of her purview as the goddess of propitiation, Melinoë is also the goddess of the restless undead; those whose bodies were never buried, were never given proper funerary rites, or-else were outright cursed to wander the earth to plague the living, unable to find peace. The name, "Melinoë", also appears on a metal tablet in association with Persephone, like an epitaph. The hymns are of uncertain date but were probably composed in the 2nd or 3rd century AD. In the hymn, Melinoë has characteristics that seem similar to Hecate and the Erinyes, and the name is sometimes thought to be an epithet of Hecate. The terms in which Melinoë is described are typical of moon goddesses in Greek poetry.
Persephone, the daughter of Zeus and Demeter in Greek mythology, appears in films, works of literature, and in popular culture, both as a goddess character and through the symbolic use of her name. She becomes the queen of the underworld through her abduction by Hades, the god of the underworld. The myth of her abduction represents her dual function as the as chthonic (underworld) and vegetation goddess: a personification of vegetation, which shoots forth in Spring and withdraws into the earth after harvest. Proserpina is the Roman equivalent.
In Greek mythology, Despoina was the daughter of Demeter and Poseidon and sister of Arion. She was the goddess of mysteries of Arcadian cults who was worshipped under the title Despoina, alongside her mother Demeter, one of the central figures of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Her real name could not be revealed to anyone except those initiated to her mysteries. 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.
In ancient Greek religion and myth, Eubuleus is a god known primarily from devotional inscriptions for mystery religions. The name appears several times in the corpus of the so-called Orphic gold tablets spelled variously, with forms including Euboulos, Eubouleos and Eubolos. It may be an epithet of the central Orphic god, Dionysus or Zagreus, or of Zeus in an unusual association with the Eleusinian Mysteries. Scholars of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have begun to consider Eubuleus independently as "a major god" of the mysteries, based on his prominence in the inscriptional evidence. His depiction in art as a torchbearer suggests that his role was to lead the way back from the Underworld.
Sigmund Freud's views on religion are described in several of his books and essays. Freud regarded God as an illusion, based on the infantile need for a powerful father figure; religion, necessary to help us restrain violent impulses earlier in the development of civilization, can now be set aside in favor of reason and science.
This is a list of writings published by Sigmund Freud. Books are either linked or in italics.
Lore Olympus is a romance webcomic created by New Zealand artist Rachel Smythe. The comic is a modern retelling of the relationship between the Greek goddess and god Persephone and Hades. It began publishing weekly on WEBTOON in March 2018. Lore Olympus is currently the most popular comic on the WEBTOON platform; as of January 2020 it had 299 million views, and as of August 2020 WEBTOON reported that it had 4.1 million subscribers. The comic has been nominated for an Eisner Award and a Ringo Award, and a television series based on the comic is under development.
