Hannah: Hi everyone. Just to give a bit of context before I hand over to Charlotte — this workshop is part of Wild Imagination: Exploring Creative Ecology, a course I’ve developed for Advaya. Today, we’re joined by one of our guest teachers, Charlotte Du Cann.
The course is about exploring how creativity can help us attune to the life around us. So I’m going to briefly introduce Charlotte before she begins.
Charlotte Du Cann is a writer, editor, and co-director of the Dark Mountain Project. She teaches collaborative non-fiction and radical kinship with the more-than-human world. Once a features and fashion journalist in London, she spent a decade traveling in the Americas before settling in Suffolk to write a series of books about mythos and reconnection with the Earth, including 52 Flowers That Shook My World and After Ithaca – Journeys in Deep Time. She also writes a Substack column on metaphysical practice for collapsing times called The Red Tent.
Over to you, Charlotte.
Charlotte: Hello, and welcome. This session is called Myth, Knowledge and the Dreaming of the Earth. Quite a mouthful — and quite a bit to cover in under an hour — but we’ll get there.
Let me outline what we’ll explore today. I’ll begin with a short introduction on the role of myth and why I believe it’s vital in these times of ecological and social collapse. Then I’ll share the story of Psyche and Eros, focusing on the four key tasks within it. After that, we’ll reflect on how we might translate this mythic journey into our own creative practices and relationships with place.
Before we begin, I invite you to connect with your body. Myth is an embodied practice — not just an idea to think about. So take a moment: feel your feet on the ground. Imagine your body as a tree. Draw your energy up — it’s May, the sap is rising. Stretch your arms like branches, breathe in deeply, feel the light of the sun. Imagine yourself standing before the sea, the future ahead, the past behind you. Fold your arms like wings, hands on your heart. Sense its rhythm — the tempo of the Earth. Now return your awareness to your feet, and the vast mycorrhizal networks beneath, connecting us all. Breathe. And settle back in.
So — what is myth?
Myth isn’t a single-author story. It’s collective, ancestral knowledge passed through generations. It might arrive as a creation tale, an initiation rite, or a journey through trials — but always with the power to transform. If story is the sugar, myth is the medicine.
The kinds of myths I work with often center female protagonists. Rather than seeking conquest or escape, these stories turn inward, grounding us in the human experience. Myth reconnects us with the Earth — not through logic or data, but through feeling, imagination, and participation.
Realignment with the living world requires more than positive thinking. It’s a deep, often difficult journey. Psyche’s myth shows this clearly. Transformation demands everything — your heart, your will, your courage. But it brings us closer to the world and to ourselves.
Myth also helps us shift from the rational left brain to the imaginative right brain — a space of wild knowing. Artists and writers help us bridge that gap. By engaging with myth, we begin to move differently in the world.
Now, I’ll tell the story of Psyche and Eros, from an ancient Roman novel layered within other stories — a bit like a Russian doll.
Psyche is married to a mysterious being she’s forbidden to look at. One night, she does — and sees he is Eros, god of love. But in that moment of revelation, some oil spills from her lamp onto his wings, and he flees. Psyche is left heartbroken.
She seeks guidance from Venus, Eros’s mother, who sets her four impossible tasks:
- Sort a pile of mixed grains. Psyche despairs — but ants arrive, organizing the grains grain by grain.
- Gather golden fleece from violent rams. A reed whispers advice: wait until evening, then collect it from the bushes.
- Fetch water from the River Styx. Again she is helped — this time by an eagle who gathers the water for her.
- Journey to the Underworld to collect beauty ointment from Persephone. This task is the most perilous. She is told to carry two coins for the ferryman, and two barley cakes for the three-headed dog, Cerberus. She succeeds — but opens the box and falls into a deathlike sleep.
Eros, now healed, finds her and revives her. She is made immortal, and they are reunited at last.
This myth is about transformation — not just romantic reunion, but deep initiation. It shows us how help can come from unexpected places — from ants, reeds, eagles, and stones — and how essential it is to listen, to be receptive, to follow through.
The objects we work with in this course — gathered from your local landscapes — are part of that listening. They’re portals into your place. They help you speak from a deeper source. Through creative expression — drawing, writing, movement — you can give form to your experience, and share it with others.
One of the symbols I work with is the Lemniscate — a figure eight, representing the reciprocal flow between ourselves and the Earth. It's a dynamic of give and take that needs restoring.
Another tool is a pictogram of five concentric circles — a map for understanding your relationship with place:
- Personal – Your immediate, felt connection.
- Lifelong – The story of this place over time in your life.
- Collective – Its social, cultural, or political dimensions.
- Mythic – The symbols and stories attached to it.
- Earth Layer – What the land itself is saying.
By engaging with all five, we begin to perceive place not just as background, but as a living presence. The more we listen, the more we remember that this relationship is ancient, and vital.
I’ll close with a poem from The Eight Fires, which speaks to that deep remembering:
“An Old Sense” by Louise Amelia Phelps
There is an old sense. A very old one. One that was so strong it could carry over an entire ocean and bring stars to earth. ... There was an old sense that fanned the light, and our eyes to they shone like embers. ... This sense has the strength of an ocean bed, and the patience of a mountain waiting there to rise. And they do rise.
Thank you for listening. I hope you have powerful encounters in your own territories. Step into the myth, walk through the tasks — and may you meet Eros at the end of the day.
Hannah: Thank you so much, Charlotte, for taking us on that beautiful journey.
