Announcing Myth Summer School

Monthly newsletter, July 2025

Please scroll down for news of an exciting Myth Summer School series beginning here at The Art of Enchantment next weekend – and a 25% discount on a paid subscription if you’d like to join us there.

This message is likely to be truncated in your inbox by your email provider (especially if it’s the dreaded Gmail …) so please click on the title to go through to Substack and read the full thing in your browser, or head over to the app if you use it. And while you’re there, do join the conversation and leave a comment!

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Dear friends

For the second year in a row, I spent my end-of-June birthday holed up in The House of Injury. Last year, the day after Summer Solstice, I broke my wrist spectacularly efficiently while rushing around trying to give the dogs their breakfast. This year, the day after Summer Solstice, I tripped over something David had left lying around the house and severely sprained my left ankle. (Yes, he is Very Sorry. Especially since his domestic workload has now doubled.) I was forced to hobble around in a walking boot (a torturer’s contraption, if ever there was one) followed by an ankle brace – but finally, with the help of a brilliant physio, am back on my two normal feet again. Still a bit hobbly. Next year, I would plan to spend the day after Summer Solstice in bed, if it weren’t for the fact that I’d probably find some way of falling out and breaking something else. I suspect the best strategy will be not to whine again about how much I hate summer, but to wax lyrical about all the things I love about it. And then perhaps summer will love me back and leave me alone. I do find all this accident-proneness irritating because I’m actually very fit and flexible, but sadly, even without David’s help, we do live in an old house replete with built-in trip hazards. I just maybe need to learn to walk around it more slowly!

In the meantime, I seem to have turned 64. When I was a child, women of that age seemed unconscionably ancient. I think even my mother seemed unconscionably ancient to me when she was 64, at which point I would have been not exactly a spring chicken myself, at 43. I’ve always been fascinated by that concept of ‘feeling our age’. Back in 2022 the very lovely

sam baker

asked me, in an episode of her brilliant podcast The Shift, what I thought my emotional age was. Which was a really interesting question that I hadn’t really thought about before. Physical age, yes – but emotional? Well, I remember answering that maybe for the first time in my life I thought I’d probably caught up with myself, and my emotional age was actually the age I then physically was. I think for the early part of my life I always felt that my emotional age was a decade or two older; I was one of those irritating children who pretty much always seemed to be a grown-up. (And had to be a grown-up …) On the other hand, with the benefit of hindsight, I’m not at all sure that I was always quite as wise as I imagined, and I’m absolutely convinced that my emotional age regressed by at least four decades when I was deep in the initial, fiery throes of menopause! But maybe in all senses I’ve finally grown into myself now. Accepting of the odd physical limitation that raises its head, while refusing always to just sit on a sofa and wait to die. Happy with my own growing, giving-no-fucks, elder-woman’s wisdom, while not yet quite fooling myself that it’s reached Granny Weatherwax level! (For the uninitiated: the old granite witch in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels on whom I’ve always said I’d model my old age.)

Although I might be quite at home in my own physical and emotional skin these days, I do increasingly wonder, in the context of the wider world, if I’m not something of an anachronism. I find the spirit of the times … challenging. Not just the events, but the values, the behaviour. I find myself nostalgic for le temps perdu. Like Proust, though more in my head than on the page, trying to conjure up the texture of days gone by, to understand not just the formation of experience and our sense of who we are, but what transforms it, in what ways. How we develop our sense of belonging, or not belonging, to the world and the times we live in. I’m not sure I ever really did. I fell out of the prevailing cultural mythology a long time ago – or, more accurately, never fully espoused it. Which is just another way of saying I’ve never loved modernity, and I love it even less now. Still, as I wrote in The Enchanted Life and said in my TEDx talk on the mythic imagination:

‘… if the dominant cultural myth is failing us and failing the planet, let’s transform it. Why not? Humans have always been mythmakers. Carl Jung wrote that when the myths of earlier generations fall into decline, the mythmaking process resides in individuals. The birth of a new personal myth in the imagination of a single individual, or a group of individuals, he said, might lead to the rebirth of new (and more functional) myths in the imagination of the culture.

It’s the people who I call the ‘mythical misfits’, then, who kickstart the transformation of the world, and who begin to imagine more sustainable and meaningful ways of living. Today’s mythical misfits are rejecting a culture which values neither intuition nor imagination, which values neither the living land nor its non-human inhabitants. They’re deserting the stagnant institutions, and creating communities which celebrate life rather than destroying it. The mythical misfits are the ones who choose different stories to live by. Different stories which we can choose to reenchant ourselves, and our children, and so re-enchant the world. Different stories which we can use to reimagine ourselves, our children, and the world. Because if we can imagine it, it’s real.’

I still love that idea of mythical misfits. 54,000+ of them, I suspect, are readers of this newsletter.

In other news, I’m looking forward now to a few months of rest and replenishing my deeply drained well, as that manuscript I’ve been obsessed with for the past year is in its final form, in the happy hands of my longstanding editor Hannah at September/ Duckworth Books, and will soon be winging its way back to me from the copyeditor. This is my favourite stage of authoring: when the hardest part – the writing – is over, and all the fun stuff – getting involved in design, cover, publication planning etc – is still to come. I know you all want to know about the book, but it’ll be a wee bit later in the year before I can give you all the details. I hope you’ll find it worth the wait!

And if you want something storified to nourish you while you wait – read on, for news of an exciting new Myth Summer School here at The Art of Enchantment.

As always, I wish you all the blessings of whichever season – of the world and of your life – you find yourself in right now.

Sharon

Myth Summer School here at The Art of Enchantment – and an associated discount

Talking about mythical misfits, it’s time to feed our souls. To celebrate the freedom and headspace that’s descended on me after handing in that book manuscript, I’m excited to announce a Myth Summer School for you all. I’ve planned a virtual story extravaganza for paid subscribers here at The Art of Enchantment, beginning next weekend and encompassing seven weeks of material and live sessions. And to make attendance more possible for those of you who struggle to afford a paid subscription, please find below a 25% discount on an annual subscription, bringing it down to just £1 a week. If that’s still too much, you can of course just subscribe on the usual monthly basis and then you’ll have access to everything while your subscription is active. Please note that to accept this discount offer you’ll need to sign up before July 11, the day before the first instalment of the Summer School series will go out to you.

So – here’s what I have planned. We’ll work with each of the three complex mythic tales I’ve chosen over a two-week period. For each story, one Saturday morning you’ll receive an emailed post with the story text (audio), notes on the story and its context, and my thoughts on why the story matters to us now. Then, the following weekend, we’ll gather together on Zoom from 16.00 to 17.00 UK time to have a conversation about it all. For the final story, there’ll be an additional week of material. Throughout, we can continue exchanging ideas on these and related stories in the comments section of the articles.

If you’re gallivanting around and about the world over the summer holiday period, never fear: all live sessions will be recorded and if you miss one, you can watch it at your leisure when you return home.

Here are the three stories we’ll be working with, and the relevant dates. (Those of you who are already paid subscribers, please note a date change from July 12 to July 19 for our monthly live story session; you can confirm all current Myth & Fairy Tale Salon dates on the Calendar page here.)

Saturday July 12 and Saturday July 19 (live session) – ‘The Wooing of Étaín’ (Ireland).

This very old and strange Irish story is one I’ve kept circling back to over the last couple of decades. With its emphasis on transformation and reincarnation, and its insight into the nature of the Irish Otherworld, it’s one of the most beautiful woman-centred stories in the Celtic canon. And there are strange resonances with the third of our stories – see below.

The statue of Étaín and Midir, in Ardagh, Ireland

Saturday August 9 and Saturday August 16 (live session) – ‘Gorlagon the Wolf-king: questing for the nature and heart of a woman’ (England).

I came across this lovely though rather obscure story many years ago, in the depths of my immersion in Arthurian Studies. I almost put into If Women Rose Rooted in place of the better-known tale of Sir Gawain and Lady Ragnelle – which won out in the end because of its focus on sovereignty, which is what I was writing about. This story will form part of the Arthurian theme that I promised to introduce into our monthly Myth and Fairy Tale Salons at the beginning of this year (and which began with ‘The Lady of the Well’ back in February). Although it’s possible to claim that it’s focused around a quest undertaken by Arthur, it’s really focused around one of those fundamental questions that Arthurian tales love to ask – a question posed to Arthur by a decidedly disgruntled Guinevere: ‘What is the nature and heart of a woman?’ Which seems like an excellent question for this community of heartfelt women (and a few good men!) to explore right here and right now.

Guinevere, by John Collier

Saturday August 23, Friday August 29 (live session) and Saturday September 6 – ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’ (Greece; also England and Brittany).

This story will need no introduction for many of you. I’ve been fascinated by it ever since I first read it, as a very small child, in a beautifully illustrated old book of Greek myths. There’s always been emphasis on the character of Orpheus, but maybe it’s time for Eurydice to have her day too. Working with this beautiful old myth will allow us to explore the archetypical Journey to the Underworld just as we hover on the threshold of autumn and the darkening days, here in the northern hemisphere. We’ll delve into the Orphic mystery tradition which is associated with it, and the way it inspired so many artists and poets – including Rainer Maria Rilke and his gorgeous ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’. And on Saturday September 6 we’ll explore those strange resonances with the old Irish myth of Étaín that I mentioned earlier – and how they’re both brought together in another old text which blends both English and Breton traditions.

‘Wounded Eurydice’, by Jean Baptiste Camille Corot

It won’t, of course, all end with Orpheus: there’ll be three more monthly Myth and Fairy Tale Salons before the year staggers to a silent close, and we begin a fresh new cycle next January. Meanwhile, for our Temenos explorations over at The Hearth (i.e. for founding members), we’ll soon be taking a dive into the world of the Irish immrama: stories of ‘rowing about’, of spiritual voyages to strange and magical island Otherworlds.

A handful of reminders

Special 20% pre-order discount on the paperback edition of Wise Women

A reminder that I’m delighted to be able to offer readers of this Substack a special pre-order discount from the publishers: you can pre-order from Virago here at their online store and, by using the code WISE, you can get 20% off the RRP of £10.99 all the way through October 1 at 11.59pm UK time.

Just a note that this edition is from the book’s original UK-based publishers and is for the worldwide market outside of North America; I don’t believe there are any plans for a new edition by the publishers there. However, you can still order this new paperback for delivery anywhere in the world, including free international shipping, from Blackwells in the UK, at this link.

And if you’re a very new subscriber, you’ll have missed last month’s newsletter, in which I offered up an audio recording of an all-new wise woman story from the north of England. Listen to the story here.

‘Goddess-Makers in an Age of Autocrats: the power of the creative feminine to re-shape the world’

Mark your calendars for this most excellent forthcoming event which will be hosted by Pacifica Graduate Institute, California, and for which I’m thrilled to bits to be giving a keynote. It’s taking place from August 29–31, and you can either register for the live event, at Pacifica’s lovely Ladera Lane campus in Santa Barbara, or for the livestreamed version. (Sadly this time I can’t be there in person but they will be livestreaming my talk into the main event space.) Event description:

This conference invites scholars, artists, activists, and visionaries to engage in a rich dialogue on how the feminine, in its many mythic and embodied forms, catalyzes personal and collective transformation. Drawing upon Jungian and archetypal psychology, feminist theory, mythology, and the arts, we will explore how figures like Enheduanna—and the goddesses, muses, and creators who followed—continue to inspire movements for justice, healing, and rebalancing power. In an era marked by the resurgence of authoritarianism, the creative feminine emerges as a force of transformation, resistance, and renewal. Goddess-Makers in an Age of Autocrats explores the depth psychological dimensions of the archetypal feminine—its capacity to shape culture, inspire justice, and reimagine collective futures in the face of oppressive systems.

‘The Soul’s Code: Calling and Its Necessary Angels’ – a new short course

The Kosmos Institute (online), four Thursdays from 16.00 – 17.30 UK time, October 9 – 30, 2025

The Kosmos Institute is a new ‘academic locus for the transformation of individual and collective consciousness which occurs through engagement with emergent and ancient knowledge systems within the interdisciplinary precincts of Mythology, Esotericism, and Archetypes.’ One of its key areas of study focuses on the work of James Hillman, the prominent post-Jungian thinker and writer who was the primary founder of the depth psychological approach known as Archetypal Psychology. As those of you who’ve been around my work for a while will know, Hillman’s writing on the primacy of the image has been one of my greatest influences. So I’m delighted to be teaching on this extensive curriculum centred on his work, by offering a four-week online program in the autumn. Although I’ve been writing and teaching on the concept of ‘calling’ for many years now, this will be a very much deeper dive into the ideas around it – from Plato to Hillman and beyond. I’m really looking forward to this one; calling is a subject I’m especially passionate about. Here’s the course description:

In his bestselling book The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, archetypal psychologist James Hillman declared: ‘Each person enters the world called.’ Each of us, in other words, has a ‘calling’: we came into the world – to this particular place, at this particular time – for a reason.

In this four-week program, we’ll delve deeply into the concept of calling, and work with ways of revealing and remembering what it is that we’re here for. To express our calling is to allow ourselves to uniquely express one mode of being, one unique way of embodying what it is to be human, one facet of the creative life force of the universe. How might we uncover the unique gift that we each bring to the world at this time?

Complete program description, registration and other info here: https://www.kosmosinstitute.org/the-souls-code-calling-its-necessary-angels

(All enrolment and related queries to the Kosmos Institute please, at the email address on their website – not to me nor in the comments.)