WomenandMyth

March 4, 2011January 9, 2024

ASWM Honors Layne Redmond with Brigit Award (2011)

We are honored to announce that we will present our first-ever Brigit Award for Excellence in the Arts to Layne Redmond at our East Coast Symposium on March 12.

Layne Redmond

In the 1980’s, while working with percussionist Glen Velez and conducting research on the history and playing styles of the frame drum (a small hand-held drum of which the tambourine is one notable example), Layne Redmond began to notice that virtually all ancient Mediterranean and middle eastern images featuring this drum showed the player as a woman in a ritual setting. This discovery led to her lifelong work of sharing this knowledge and reviving the practice of goddess priestessing with frame drum. For fifteen years, she researched the history of this drum in religious and healing rites in the ancient Mediterranean world.

ne fruit of Layne’s work, When the Drummers Were Women, a Spiritual History of Rhythm, was published by Random House in 1997 to great acclaim. This book, a masterful example of independent scholarship, continues to inspire both scholars and musicians. This book details a lost history of a time when women were the primary percussionists in the ancient world and also explains why they are not today.

Layne assembled, taught, and led The Mob of Angels, a group of women who conducted deeply moving public ritual performances throughout the 1990s and New York City and beyond.

She has numerous exceptional recordings to her credit. Invoking Aphroditefeatures the poetic works of Sappho, the Pythia Priestesses of Delphi, and the Epitaph of Seikilos (the oldest notated musical composition found to date).

Layne has taught at venues from colleges to retreat centers to gatherings of professional percussionists.

In recent years, she made pilgrimage to Cyprus, where her workshops and retreats have resulted in Cyprian women’s reviving the worship of great goddess Aphrodite via rituals with frame drum.

Layne has also researched and revived the “sacred path of the bee,” the tools of the ancient bee priestesses, and has released Hymns from the Hive, a CD celebrating this path.

Most recently, she has released a 6-DVD Frame Drum Intensive Training Program.

More information about Layne Redmond can be found on her website, throughmany youtube clips, and on her Facebook page.

January 28, 2011January 9, 2024

“Things We Don’t Talk About”: Women’s Wisdom from the Red Tent

“Things We Don’t Talk About” is a groundbreaking feature-length documentary film that is currently being produced by filmmaker (and ASWM member) Isadora Gabrielle Leidenfrost, as part of her dissertation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The film weaves together healing narratives from the Red Tent — a red textile space where women gather to share deep and powerful stories about their lives. The Rent Tent movement is changing the way that women interact, support each other, and think about their bodies. “Things We Don’t Talk About” seeks to humanize the stories in the red tent—to put a face on the space.

What is the Red Tent?

The Red Tent is a phenomenon and a movement that is unique to women. Inspired by the bestselling novel of the Old Testament, The Red Tent (1997) by Anita Diamant, women have spontaneously created a contemporary tradition of red fabric “tent” spaces that honor and promote women’s healing.

Neither the Red Tent movement nor “Things We Don’t Talk About” is affiliated in any way with Anita Diamant’s excellent novel of the same name. Nonetheless, Diamant’s description of the traditional menstrual hut used by women in the book inspired, in part, the idea of the Red Tent as a special space and a healing practice.

Isadora describes the Red Tent this way:

With its ability to address social problems, reflect values, knowledge, and the basic feelings of women, the Red Tent fulfils a constellation of gendered societal needs: To create a place that honors and celebrates women; enable open conversations about the things that women don’t want to talk about in other venues; promote positive ideals for womanhood; educate women about their bodies; educate women about natural menstrual remedies; create an open dialogue about sex; share birthing information; discuss issues of body image and self-acceptance; provide a place where women’s voices can be heard; to provide a spiritual place for women where they can laugh, cry, sing, dance, give each other back or foot rubs, play with face and body painting, give or receive massage and other types of body work, tell stories, eat soup, drink tea, sleep, meditate, journal, share poetry, create artwork, knit … just to name a few!

‘Things We Don’t Talk About” will be released in May 2012. For more information visit http://www.redtentmovie.com and http://www.facebook.com/redtentfilm

January 28, 2011January 9, 2024

Call for Writers: The Red Tent Anthology

Call for Writers

Womanspace, a not-for-profit organization in Rockford Illinois is seeking submissions to be part of their “Red Tent Anthology” of women’s poetry and non-fiction to be published in time for the Red Tent Events, June 21-26, 2011. These Events are to be held in conjunction with the forthcoming documentary “Things We Don’t Talk About–The Red Tent Movie,” by Isadora Leidenfrost.

There is no entry fee for submissions, but you do have to submit your entry by March.

If you want more info or the application visit: http://www.redtentmovie.com/red_tent_anthology.html

September 21, 2010January 9, 2024

Engaging Living Traditions

by Kathryn Henderson, Ph. D.

Goddess Spirituality is eclectic in that we pursue scholarly research about female deity from traditions spanning time, cultures, and space and use that information in our spiritual practice. We draw on many sources, ranging from scholarly research generated from the study of ancient surviving images and texts, to oral tradition mythologies, to our own intuitional or psychic connection to sacred energies. We also draw on contemporary spiritual traditions, our own and others. Engagement of Deities and religious practices of living traditions outside our own raises the thorny issue of balance between attempts at cultural inclusiveness and cultural appropriation.

Read PDF article: Engaging Living Traditions by Kathryn Henderson

September 21, 2010January 9, 2024

Deity in Sisterhood: An Introduction

Deity in Sisterhood: A Brief Introduction to the Collective Female Sacred in Germanic Europe

Deae Matronae of the UbiPopular imagination often portrays pre-Christian Germanic religion as stereotypically patriarchal and violent. It is true that both pre-Christian and Christian Germanic religious expressions are principally male-centered, and much of the literature from the age of the Viking lore depicts the actions of violent men and families. However, alongside and within these stories, histories and religions runs a counter-view of the divine as collective and female. There are groups of goddesses and groups of female saints, often in collectives of three, but just as often unnumbered. Although it is not a requirement that collective deity be female, in Germanic Europe it is overwhelmingly the case. Collective goddesses and the collective female sacred can therefore be a subset of a larger concept, that of collective deity. For my purposes, collective deity is (1) a group of sacred or supernatural beings (2) collected under one group name (although they may carry additional individual names or epithets) (3) but not conflated into a single being; (4) worshipped collectively; (5) who act and wield their powers collectively and consensually.

The collective sacred female is an underrecognized theme that winds through Germanic religious history, pre-Christian and Christian. The earliest example of the Germanic collective goddesses is the Deae Matronae, Roman-Celto-Germanic goddesses of the Roman Era Rhineland, at the beginning of the Common Era. These goddesses are always a threesome, and when they are depicted in artwork, show two goddesses with the large bonnet headdresses of the married Ubii tribeswoman, along with one goddess wearing the long, flowing hair of the unmarried Ubii woman. The artwork depicting the goddesses clusters around the century beginning 164 CE. Though the goddesses were those of a Germanic tribe, they were worshipped in a Roman manner, and the artifacts that remain are those carved by Roman stonecutters, remnants of the Roman vota ceremonies. The artifacts do not reveal the content of the vows fulfilled by the goddesses, but they do reveal the names and epithets of the Matronae goddesses: names speaking of the landscape, the peoples, the rivers, the animals and the bountiful nature of the goddesses.

It is almost a thousand years before the next collectives of goddesses appear in the Germanic historical record, and these are in Old Norse-speaking Iceland. Continue reading “Deity in Sisterhood: An Introduction”