Category: 2025 Conference

Friday, March 28, 2025, Westward Look Inn, Tucson AZ

Scholarly and oracular discussions with the living Goddess of the Epic of Gilgamesh

The epic of Gilgamesh, in various versions, is one of the oldest examples of world literature, consisting of  five Sumerian poems about the semi-divine King of Uruk. Presenters on this panel will discuss the roles and influences of goddesses and priestesses in this story of heroic conquest.

• The rejection of the Goddess: How totalitarian agriculture leads to the slaying of the Bull of Heaven, Crystal Woodling
• Chasing the Queen of Heaven and her sacred bull to the Netherworld: Tracing the formation of an underworld in The Epic of Gilgamesh, Adriana Hetram
• “You’re so Vain”—the petty portrayal of Inanna in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Amy Solara-Mackey
• Union with the Goddess: an examination of the pivotal role of Shamhat in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Jessie McKnight

Crystal (formerly Hoffman) Woodling is a scholar, poet, herbalist, translator, and ritual facilitator. She has performed and presented her scholarship on women’s spirituality and the avant-garde at national conferences such as the AWP and ATHE. She co-runs the School of Heaven and Earth and leads the oracular poetry group Sibyl’s Cave. She taught poetry in the land of Humbaba at AUB, where she co-founded Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Arts Review.

Adriana Hetram is an independent scholar who completed her PhD at Queen’s University, Canada, with a specialization in Modernism, Women’s Writing, and Poetics. Her thesis focused on the mature work of Modernist poet H.D. (1886-1961) and evolved a phenomenologically-focused syncretic poetics to look at works conceived in a postwar milieu so haunted by apocalyptically-inflected states of being that a new symbolic dimension of understanding was necessary to open up space for life, consciousness, and coherence to enter once again.

Amy Solara-Mackey has been actively involved in the goddess spirituality community for over a decade, as a participant, priestess and initiator. As a mother of 3 sons much of her work with women revolves around embodying the divine feminine, birth as a rite of passage, sacred sexuality and relationships, and creative feminine expression. An astrologer, tarot reader, yogini and ceremonialist, she is working on her first Goddess Oracle deck and book.

Jessie McKnight is a mother, herbalist, poet, and astrologer. She has a degree in biology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her knowledge and love for the natural world then led her to pursue her passion for herbal medicine, where the plants themselves have been her greatest teachers. She currently serves her community as an herbalist, astrologer, and an educator at Pacific Valley School. She teaches both academics and dance, always with the hope of passing the flame of curiosity, wonder, and stewardship to the next generation.

Read all about the ASWM Conference and register  here.

Friday March 28, 2025, Westward Look Inn, Tucson AZ

Green Daughters Convergence – Sacred Scholarship of the Sentient Earth: Intergenerational Regenerative Visionaries Collaborating for Planetary Flourishing

This panel highlights the wave-crest scholarship of the sacred Earth through placefields, terrains, sacred animals, plant relations, geological beings, biome beings, deep time, mythical and archetypal beings, weather systems, and landforms. The Earth and Her systems are evoking and embodying ancient vitalities and vibrancies that are more necessary than ever. We engage co-poetic and reharmonizing reciprocities with living systems and more-than-human beings imagining regenerative possibilities as we envision flourishing futures. his panel also grapples with intergenerational knowledge sparking future scholars in the field. The session is structured with brief bright spot presentations from 10 mavericks including doctoral faculty and students in the Southwestern College Visionary Practice & Regenerative Leadership PhD program. Interactive presentations will culminate with a dynamic mutual imagining into the future.

• Connecting with our Ancestors: Listening to the Calls of Nature, Angela Palmer
• Embodying Sacred Cottonwood, DeeAnn Morgan-Holt
• Grandchild of the Mother Earth: AI as a New Voice for the Goddess, Vlad Rebek
• Embodied Earth: Reclaiming Earth Energy and the Sacred Connection. Jamie Moon
• Weaving Power: Tricksters Spinning the Web of Change, Justine Mastin
• As I Think Through the Arroyo, the Arroyo Thinks Through Me, Kim Parko
• Grounding with the Slow Steady Rhythm of Rock Consciousness, Ann Filemyr
• Communicating Across Time and Place with Trees, Barbara Bickel
• Wisdom Seeds for Deep Future Flourishing: Regenerative Design of Mythopoetic Processes, Marna Hauk

Read all about the ASWM Conference and register  here.

Friday, March 27, 2025 at Westward Look Inn, Tucson AZ

Unilateral Giving and Receiving from the Template of the Web of Life

Our panel brings together several strands of women’s thinking and experience regarding the maternal gift economy of humans and the maternal gifting and giftedness of nature. In order to heal the huge environmental and ethical rifts that are endangering life on Earth, a shift is necessary towards the understanding of the human as a maternal species, homo donans, the gifting being as opposed to homo sapiens, a knower in denial of the maternal paradigm or homo economicus, a creature of patriarchal capitalism.
Nané Jordan affirms placental ecologies of the mother, Margarita Rosa Tirado
describes living in communication with her ecological preserve in Colombia and,Areeya Marie Sharpe will offer desert stories with sound and postures to open us to new thinking, Genevieve Vaughan discusses the economic and
psychological reasons for the plunder and objectification of Nature.

Dr. Nané Jordan is a community-based scholar, birth-keeper, artist and mother of first-generation Irish-Canadian descent on Turtle Island. Nané is devoted to decolonizing, eco-matrifeminist, birth-gifting streams of community care. Holding a doctorate in Education, an MA in Women’s Spirituality, and SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship with the University of Paris 8, she publishes widely while working as an Aboriginal Infant Development consultant on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish Peoples.

Rev. Areeya Marie Sharpe is a Priestess, Interfaith Minister, US military veteran, Artist and Chef who has worked on Visual and Sacred Sound Art projects, Large Themed Prop Construction and in Private Chef venues for over 20yrs, serving Las Vegas NV and several other locales around the world. She creates recipes of visual/sound art, prayerFull cuisine and sacred scent
honoring the earth, sacred sites and ceremonies. Areeya is the current Resident Priestess at the Temple of Goddess Spirituality Dedicated to
Sekhmet outside of Las Vegas.

Margarita Rosa Tirado Mejia is an environmentalist and founder of La Rosa de los Vientos (Rose of the Winds) nature reserve in Boquia, Salento, Colombia. La Rosa de los Vientos is in an environmentally devastated area and her work focuses on social regeneration of the land. Her special focus is the endangered wax palm, the national tree of Colombia.

Genevieve Vaughan is an independent researcher who has been working on the idea of the maternal gift economy as an alternative to Patriarchal Capitalism for more than half a century. She created the multicultural all-woman activist Foundation for a Compassionate Society (1987-2005) and the network: International Feminists for a Gift Economy (2001 –ongoing). She founded the Temple of Goddess Spirituality dedicated to Sekhmet in Cactus Springs, Nevada (1992 – ongoing). Her books are For-Giving, a Feminist Criticism of Exchange (1997), Homo Donans (2006) and The Gift in the Heart of Language: the Maternal Source of Meaning (2015). She has edited three anthologies and has written three children’s books. She is the mother of three daughters and lives part time in Italy, part time in Austin,Texas.

Read all about the ASWM Conference and register  here.

Saturday March 29, 2025, Westward Look Inn, Tucson AZ

Close to the Ground: Reclaiming Our Relationships with Reptiles & Amphibians

There are innumerable examples of stories in which humans and reptiles or amphibians have complex and ambivalent relationships. But are these primarily modern interpretations obscuring the real and beneficial attributes of these remarkable animals?

• Regenerating stories and women’s connection with the earth through a survey of art featuring the snake and its symbolism, Kristen Calvert
• The Serpent-Guardian of Watery Paradox: The Sonoran Desert Legend of La Corúa, Cheryl De Ciantis
• The White Snake 白蛇傅, Jaclyn Kalkhurst
• Ancient Liminality in Egyptian Frog Symbolism, Kira Kull

Kristen Calvert has a M.A. in Art History and a M.A. in Women’s Spirituality. She is a certified practitioner in Rosen Method Bodywork, a somatic method that engages emotions and body tension simultaneously. She is also a certified Sound Healing Practitioner. She offers these holistic healing modalities under her business name BlueGreen Harmony. She also likes to do nature and spirituality-based art with her photography, music and flower feather jewelry.

Cheryl De Ciantis. Artist, mythologist, educator, organizational learning specialist and values-based dialogue mentor, Cheryl seeks to discern and illuminate the connecting threads between images, stories and lived experience to gain insights from the archetypal energies that continually re-manifest through our individual and collective lives. By training she is an art historian and historiographer and holds a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies with Emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She resides in Tucson.

Born in Hong Kong to an American father and Chinese mother, Jaclyn Ke Yin Kalkhurst grew up immersed in Chinese myths, sparking her passion for storytelling and symbolism. She recently earned a Master’s in Mythology and Depth Psychology, presenting on the Chinese Underworld at Mythologium 2024. Now a PhD candidate at Pacifica Graduate Institute, she focuses her dissertation on creation myths from the Middle East and Asia.

Kira Kull (they/them) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Mythological Studies program at Pacifica Graduate Institute with specialization in Intersex Studies and Decolonial Theory. They serve as a Senior Editor of the Mythological Studies Journal (2023, 2024) and currently live in Los Angeles where they work as a Myth Specialist, Queer Consultant, and line dance instructor. More info at www.kirakull.com & @kkmiracle on Instagram.

Read all about the ASWM Conference and register  here.