Mildred Harris 2024: Let's Do Social Media Like It's 1487 with Susan Rowland

Friday, October 18 from 7 - 9 pm

(This program will be recorded and sent to registrants)

C. G. Jung recognized that modernity was sick because it had split off so much that was ‘other,’ calling it by various names, the feminine, the body, nature, other cultures etc. Late in his life, he saw that weapons of mass destruction came from such a splitting, calling nuclear bombs the disastrously split-off dark side of God. Fortunately, Jung also spent his career showing how resources to heal the split both were and could be at work in the world today. In ancient alchemy, he saw how dark matter, the prima materia, could be rescued from the unconscious by means of creativity that spanned the cosmos.

Spiraling back from Jung’s lifetime, the lecture will look at examples of how technology is made demonic by being created through disastrous splitting, yet the same technology can be redeemed through ensouled creativity. Examples include the printing press, which required intense efforts of the soul in feminine manifestation to recall it from the dark excesses of the paternal spirit. This feminine took material form in the development of the novel. My own detective series animate the questing hero as the triple goddess in the Mary Wandwalker mysteries. Book three, Murder on Family Grounds is published in 2024. It is an alchemical revisioning of the patriarchal family.

Finally we will discuss the challenges of technology, social media artificial intelligence, and the internet in our own age. With Frankenstein’s creature now living among us as AI, Jung’s understanding of myth and consciousness is more prescient than ever!

Susan Rowland, PhD, teaches at Pacifica Graduate Institute and is the author of ten books on Jung including with Joel Weishaus, Jungian Arts-Based Research and the Nuclear Enchantment of New Mexico. For decades Susan has been working on a project to examine feminine heroism as a way to cultural renewal. This JABR project has resulted in the Mary Wandwalker mysteries series, the third of which Murder on Family Grounds: A Mary Wandwalker Mystery was published in March 2024. Susan lives in Oregon with poet, Joel Weishaus. Her website is: susanrowland-books.com