Courses:  The weekend courses run from Friday evenings to Sunday evenings. They are intensive, but also fun and informal, and everyone is welcome to participate.

Speakers:  The principal speakers are Jules Cashford and Patrick Harpur. Both have spent lifetimes studying the tradition in its various forms, and have written and lectured extensively on it. Other facilitators and guides include Louise Hodgson and Merrily Harpur, and guest speakers from related fields of interest will be invited from time to time.  More...

Talks:  The talks are illustrated with slides and Power Point projections as appropriate. They include time for questions about the subjects introduced by Jules and Patrick, and participants are warmly invited to discuss those ideas with them.

Location:  The courses takes place in Cattistock, a peaceful village in deepest West Dorset, England, designated a national area of outstanding natural beauty.

Explorations: The West Dorset landscape is not only unspoilt but rich in prehistory, history and myth. Its architecture, history, legends, churches, megaliths and sacred sites reveal an almost lost perspective on landscape - but one which can still be glimpsed. Louise Hodgson and Merrily Harpur guide explorations of these visionary landscapes, focusing especially on those aspects relevant to the day's talks. 
There are two trails each weekend, but the timing and locations are slightly variable, depending on the weather. Most include short walks - but this is not absolutely necessary and if you have mobility problems we can adjust the schedule slightly. Similarly longer guided walks can be included for the energetic, again depending on weather.

Requirements:  No requirements are necessary for the courses except interest, a notebook and pencil and a pair of walking shoes or wellies. Everyone is welcome whether or not you are familiar with the subjects covered - but if you have read some of Jules's and Patrick's books this may help you to get the most out of the weekend. You might also want to glance at these four quick myths!

Books by Patrick Harpur:
Daimonic Reality: a Field Guide to the Otherworld
The Philosophers' Secret Fire: a history of the  Imagination
Mercurius: or, the Marriage of Heaven and Earth
A Complete Guide to the Soul published by Rider, June 2010. [Published in the USA October 2011 as The Secret Tradition of the Soul by Evolver Editions, an imprint of North Atlantic Books.]

Books by Jules Cashford:
The Moon: Myth and Image
The Homeric Hymns
The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image

Googling the titles is probably the best way of finding the best value or secondhand copies. Alternatively they are available from libraries.

Other reading:  No reading is essential, but it might be helpful to have looked at some mythology in advance (skim through these for instance!) notably the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris; the Greek myths of Apollo and Hermes, Dionysos, Demeter, Artemis and Athena; the story of Eros and Psyche (in Apuleius’ The Golden Ass);  the Norse myth of Sigurd and Brynhild.

It will make the courses even more enjoyable if you have also read any Plato, but notably The Phaedrus and The Timaeus; any poetry by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake and W. B. Yeats; or any C. G. Jung, the Swiss psychologist – the most accessible being Modern Man in Search of a Soul and his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections. 

Course 3, Transformation, includes talks on Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, Shakespeare's King Lear and 'East Coker' in T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, but we stress that you don't have to be familiar with the texts mentioned in the talks' titles - the talks will be self-explanatory.

'...Call the world if you Please "The vale of Soul-making". Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature admitting it to be immortal which I will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it). I say 'Soul making' Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence - There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions - but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. Intelligences are atoms of perception - they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God - How then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them - so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one's individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? '  ~  John Keats, letter 14th February 1819