Becca Tarnas

Archetypal cosmology, depth psychology and the imagination are the fields of scholar and teacher Becca Tarnas. Raised in Big Sur, California, she attended the San Francisco Waldorf School and then Mount Holyoke College, where she studied environmental studies and theatre. At CIIS, the California Institute of Integral Studies, she took a master's degree in Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness and a PhD in Ecology, Spirituality and Religion. Her dissertation, The Back of Beyond, set the 'Red Books' of Jung and Tolkien side by side as two journeys into the imaginal realm. She now teaches in the CIIS Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness programme as an Assistant Professor.

Her graduate courses cover Jung, archetypal astrology and Stanislav Grof's research, and she lectures widely, mostly online, for Jung societies and institutes on the Red Books, synchronicity and archetypal astrology. She is one of the editors of Archai, a journal of archetypal cosmology, and wrote Journey to the Imaginal Realm, a guide for readers of The Lord of the Rings. She narrated the audiobooks of Grof's The Way of the Psychonaut and When the Impossible Happens, and is now writing his biography. She and her family live in California, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.