Becca Tarnas

I am a scholar, artist, and counseling astrologer, and I am an editor of Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology. I received my PhD in Philosophy and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco. My dissertation is titled The Back of Beyond: The Red Books of C.G. Jung and J.R.R. Tolkien. I now teach at both Pacifica Graduate Institute and CIIS, as well as several other online education platforms. I have published one book thus far, titled Journey to the Imaginal Realm: A Reader’s Guide to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

My first home was in Big Sur, California, which has always been the greatest inspiration for my deep love of the natural world. I was educated at the San Francisco Waldorf School for thirteen years before pursuing Environmental Studies and Theater Arts at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. I returned to the Bay Area to get my master’s degree in Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness at CIIS. I now live in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California so that I can be closer to the natural world. My research interests include depth psychology, archetypal studies, literature, philosophy, and the ecological imagination.

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Becca Tarnas