“Bringing The Civilization of the Goddess to Life in The Four Novels of The Earthsong Series”

with Mary Mackey

Wednesday, April 21, 2021 at 3 pm Eastern Daylight Time 

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Over thirty years ago, novelist Mary Mackey received an unpublished manuscript from the Editor-in-Chief of HarperSanFrancisco who suggested she might like to base an historical novel on the author’s research. The author was Marija Gimbutas, and the manuscript was The Civilization of the Goddess. 

In this salon, Mary will discuss how she met personally with Professor Gimbutas, and how, with her blessing, she used that research into the Neolithic cultures of Old Europe to create four bestselling novels–The Year The Horses Came, The Horses at The Gate, The Fires of Spring, and The Village of Bones. These novels evoke the moment in prehistory when marauding nomads brought horses, male deities, and war to a Goddess-worshipping Europe that had known peace for thousands of years.

Travel back to Old Europe with Mary, learn how fiction springs out of nonfiction, and watch the Mother People tend their crops, cook their dinners, make love, and raise their children; and, perhaps best of all, meet Marrah, the brave young priestess who becomes the savior of her people.

Mary Mackey became a writer by running high fevers, tramping through tropical jungles, dodging machine gun fire, being swarmed by army ants, and reading. Her published works consist of fourteen novels including The Village of Bones, which won a 2018 CIIS Women’s Spirituality Book Award from the Department of Diversity and Inclusion; The Year the Horses Came, the first novel in her Earthsong Series; and A Grand Passion, which made The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle best seller lists. Her collections of poetry include Sugar Zone, which won the 2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award; and The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, which won the 2019 Eric Hoffer Award for the Best Book Published by a Small Press. Professor Emeritus and Former Writer in Residence at California State University, Sacramento, Mary received her B.A. from Harvard and her PhD from the University of Michigan. In the 1970’s she founded the Feminist Writers Guild with poets Adrienne Rich and Susan Griffin, novelist Valerie Miner, and author Charlene Spretnak. See Mary’s work on her website and subscribe to her quarterly newsletter.

Save these dates for upcoming ASWM Salons:

May 5at 3pm Eastern Daylight Time
Learning from the “Wild”
Susan Moulton

The Salon recording will also be available to members after the event. 

“Sacred Stones and the Immanence of Life in the Alpine Folk Traditions”

with Mary Beth Moser

Wednesday, March 24, 2021 at 3 pm Eastern Daylight Time 

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The importance of rocks in the traditional culture of the Italian Alps is evident in the archaeology, folk stories and everyday practices. Rock surfaces scraped smooth by receding glaciers in Valle Camonica, a UNESCO world heritage site in northern Italy, bear hundreds of thousands of engravings dating from across the millennia. Direct contact with certain rocks by sliding or rubbing was believed to promote fertility, a practice still remembered in the popular culture. The location of shrines, chapels, and churches in and on rocks acknowledges a continuity of sacred sites. In Piedmont, the chapel that holds the highly venerated statue of the Black Madonna of Oropa is built directly upon a rock.

In the folk stories once told in villages throughout the mountains, rocks are associated with power in the spiritual realm. Imprints on erratics, large boulders left from the ice age, are said to be of saints and the Virgin Mary – or the devil and witches. So-called witches once danced around rocks before the Council of Trent banished them and turned them into stone. A folk remedy for epilepsy, considered a spiritual sickness, utilizes the powder of a certain rock as medicinal. Spring water coming from the rock characterizes sites of fertility rituals. Water held within indentations in the rocks was considered blessed.

Drawing from my on–site research, folk literature, and interviews, I will present specific examples and visual images of rocks in northern Italy that have been regarded as sacred and even life-giving in the folk practices.

Mary Beth Moser is passionate about her ancestral homeland of Northern Italy. She holds a Ph.D. in Women’s Spirituality from the California Institute of Integral Studies, where she has taught and lectured. Her dissertation, “The Everyday Spirituality of Women in the Italian Alps,” received ASWM’s 2014 Kore Award. Her publications in ASWM proceedings include: “Wild Women of the Waters” (2016) and “Submerged Spirituality in the Italian Alps” (2020). Mary Beth lives on an island in the Salish Sea in the Northwest US where she serves as president of the Seattle Trentino Club.  See her work on Trentino ancestry and culture at Ancestral Connections  and on the Black Madonnas Resource Center at DeaMadre.

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Save the dates for upcoming ASWM Salons:

April 7  at NOON Eastern Daylight Time
“Daughter of the Goddess, Sister of Man: Matriarchal Patterns in the International Fairy Tales”
Heide Goettner-Abendroth

April 21 at 3pm Eastern Standard Time
“Bringing The Civilization of the Goddess to Life in The Four Novels of The Earthsong Series”
Mary Mackey

The Salon recording will also be available to members after the event.