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Join date: Feb 27, 2025
About
Teddy Hamstra, Ph.D., is an author and educator based in Austin, Texas. Teaching English Literature as well as Mythology classes at an alternative K-12 school by day, Teddy also teaches courses on Mary Magdalene, the Eranos Conferences, and assorted mystic topics by night with organizations like Morbid Anatomy, Jung Archademy, and more. Teddy holds a Ph.D. in English Literature & Visual Studies from the University of Southern California, where his dissertation was entitled "Enchantment as a Form of Care: Joseph Campbell & the Power of Mysticism." He is the Joseph Campbell Foundation's Digital Intellectual Property Coordinator, and author of numerous prior MythBlasts.
Posts (5)
Jun 14, 2026 ∙ 5 min
Initiation on Bald Mountain
It’s no small miracle that the VHS copy of Disney’s Fantasia (1940) survived all of the times I rewound it to the Night on Bald Mountain sequence when I was three to four years old. The imagery of the grand demon Chernabog summoning skeletal wraiths from their graves and initiating a frenzied Walpurgisnacht upon an near-volcanic Bald Mountain utterly entranced my childhood psyche.
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Mar 2, 2026 ∙ 6 min
Songs from the Moon: The Mythic Howl of the Mississippi Delta Blues
Three voices from the late nineteenth century miraculously reach out to us through crackling, hissing, scratchy recordings: Charley Patton, Henry Thomas, and Blind Willie Johnson. Blues musicians from the Mississippi Delta and scattered towns of Texas, the recordings of these African-American troubadours strike the modern ear like dispatches from a distant moon.
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Nov 17, 2025 ∙ 7 min
The Zone of Unknowing: Auschwitz and the Cinema of Prophecy
Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) rattled me so thoroughly that I found myself returning twice more to the same theater where I first witnessed it—in December 2023—as if to the site of a haunting. Many films wrestle with the problem of evil, but very few are worthy of being labeled a cinematic theodicy. Cinema, and its sister arts, have reckoned with how—or whether—it is even possible to depict the Holocaust.
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Teddy Hamstra, PhD
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