Review: “Creating Buddhas”

by Lydia Ruyle

Creating Buddhas, The Making and Meaning of Fabric Thangkas

a film by Isadora Gabrielle Leidenfrost

Creating Buddhas is a documentary film by Isadora Gabrielle Leidenfrost featuring an artist who makes Buddhas out of silk, Leslie Rinchen-Wongmo. Trained in Dharamsala, India for nine years, Leslie is one of the few female fabric thangka makers in the world.

At work on the Green Tara Thangka

Thangka, which means a rolled up image made of silk cloth, helped spread Buddhism throughout Asia. Viewing a thangka sacred image is a Buddhist spiritual practice which helps sentient beings move in the direction of enlightenment.

In the Tibetan cultural tradition, fabric thangka making is the highest form of art. Thangkas are made of precious materials; pure silk, gold threads, ornaments. There is a geometrical, artistic and spiritual canon to follow. It is a challenge to learn and practice the art form.

The beautiful film follows the process of making a Green Tara thangka from its beginnings to completion over six months later. The process is both a spiritual one and an artistic one–both the making of thangkas and the making of movies.

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Review: “Pink Smoke Over the Vatican”

by Patricia Monaghan, Ph.D.

One of the most thrilling moments of the first national ASWM conference in April, 2010, was the world premiere of the documentary “Pink Smoke Over the Vatican” by California filmmaker Jules Hart.

Women priests featured in film

Four years in the making, this surprising and moving film traces recent developments within the Roman Catholic Church.  Catholicism holds that priests must be ordained “in apostolic succession,” meaning that each priest is ordained by a bishop whose heritage can be traced all the way back to the original apostles of Jesus Christ—a two thousand year link to the founding fathers of the church. Continue reading “Review: “Pink Smoke Over the Vatican””

Review: A Modern Mythmaker in Wyoming

A Woman to Match A Mountain: Neal Forsling and Crimson Dawn.

Film review by Sid Reger, Ed. D.

Neal Forsling

Are myths and legends only available from ancient sources?  This charming biographical film proves that it’s possible for a modern woman to single-handedly build a myth tradition that continues to thrive in Wyoming 80 years after its creation.  Neal Forsling was herself the stuff of legend, a young woman who divorced in the 1920s and moved with her two girls to homestead on a mountaintop in the rugged land near Casper.  There she not only defied convention as a writer and artist, but in 1930, at her Summer Solstice party, she started a living myth tradition: the Witches of Crimson Dawn.

Witches and lanterns, N. Forsling

Through telling and enacting stories for the children of the mountain, Neal and her friends created an ongoing celebration of fairies, witches, and other mythic characters.  She maintained that the Crimson Witch approached her when she moved to the land, and told her to protect the beautiful mountain and pass its stories on to willing visitors. As the Bohemian group of artists in Casper grew, so did the energy for creating the stories of the witches, (benevolent spirits) elves, and woodcutters. Continue reading “Review: A Modern Mythmaker in Wyoming”

Review: Textbook on Women and Goddesses

Women and Goddesses in Myth and Sacred Text:  An Anthology, Tamara Agha-Jaffar, editor.  New York:  Pearson Longman, 2005.

Reviewed by Johanna H. Stuckey, Ph.D., York University, Toronto, Canada

Women and Goddesses in Myth and Sacred Text

When I was teaching Goddess courses in the 1970s to 1990s, I would have been really grateful to have had access to this textbook. It does what few other such books do: it provides key selections in translation from religious and mythical material pertaining to the goddess/woman being studied. Thus, students can dip into, among others, such works as the Babylonian creation story, the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, the Qur’an, and the Ramayana.

The goddesses and sacred women Agha-Jaffar treats are as follows: Isis, Inanna, Tiamat, Demeter and Persephone, Circe, Medea, Sita, Kali, Amaterasu, Kuan Yin, Lilith, Eve, Virgin Mary, Hawwa, Maryam, Oshun, White Buffalo Woman, and Corn Mother. If I had been picking the ones to include, I probably would have left out two of the sacred women (Circe and Medea) and added the Canaanite/Israelite Asherah and another Greek or Asian goddess or both. However, Agha-Jaffar’s choices reflect the course she was teaching and for which she devised this textbook.

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Review: Mami Wata, Arts for Water Goddesses

Mami Wata circus poster

What do Ganesh, Oshun, Saint Martha, snake charmers and mermaids have in common?  They are all featured elements in the iconography of Mami Wata, the African/Caribbean great goddess of waters.  And they are all well represented in the magnificent art exhibit that bears her name.  This exhibit is on its way to the Smithsonian in April, 2009.

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