Category: Events

ASWM-sponsored events: conferences and symposia and online events such as film series and scholar salons

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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.

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Conference Papers Available to Members

In order to foster scholarship and collaboration, we offer presenters an opportunity to have their conference papers included in our member-only section of the web site.  We are presently able to include PDFs of the papers themselves, but there is limited space on this site for large files or numerous illustrations.

If your presentation has many illustrations, we urge you to include it on your own blog.  In order to access this site, you have created your own WordPress account, and you are entitled to set up a blog there.  Once you add your paper to the blog, we can easily set up a link to this page, so that other members may read your presentation and see graphics as they were originally included.  We will provide title and abstract information, with a link to a PDF of the text of the paper.

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2010 Conference Summary

The Green Goddess, Our first biennial multi-day conference, was held April 23 to 25, 2010, at Kirkridge Retreat Center, Bangor, PA.

The Labyrinth at Kirkridge Retreat Center
Labyrinth at Kirkridge

Keynote speakers included Max Dashu of Suppressed Histories with a tour de force presentation on female icons, Cristina Eisenberg (a wolf biologist who is actively engaged in ecological restoration that supports sustainability of wildlife communities and of the human spirit), Dr. Ann Filemyr on healing from the nature/culture divide, and Cristina Biaggi on the Great Goddess as a green goddess, through the lens of art and history.

Margot Adler was honored with our first Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality, and the Kore Award for Best Dissertation in Goddess Studies went to Dawn Work-Makinne, Ph.D.

Lydia Ruyle’s inspiring goddess banners graced the meeting space, and she will offered an art workshop. Our film series premiered “Pink Smoke Over the Vatican,” about the ordination of Catholic women priests, and featured ethnologist Sabine Jell-Bahlson’s film on Mammywata.

Topics included lady of the beasts, publishing goddess scholarship, spiritual geometry and the goddess, archaeomythology, the divine feminine as vortex, finding your sacred language, the wheel of the year as spiritual psychology, frog mysteries, and much more.

Poet Annie Finch gave a masked reading; novelist Elizabeth Cunningham read from her Maeve novels; storyteller Diane Wolkstein presented The Monkey King; and singer Ruth Barrett gave a “concert for Gaia.”

The 2010 conference took place at the beautiful Kirkridge Retreat Center, atop the Pocono mountain ridges near the Delaware Water Gap.  Kirkridge is located about 90 minutes from both New York City and Philadelphia.

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Margot Adler Receives 2010 Demeter Award

On April 2010, ASWM conferred the first Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality to journalist and cultural commentator Margot Adler.

Margot Adler is a long-time correspondent for National Public Radio, based in NPR’s New York Bureau. Her reports can be heard regularly on All Things Considered, Morning Edition and Weekend Edition. From 1999-2008, Adler was also the host of NPR’s Justice Talking, a weekly show exploring constitutional controversies in the nation’s courts.

Adler is the author of the ground-breaking study of alternative spirituality in America, Drawing Down the Moon, which introduced nature religions to hundreds of thousands of readers.  She is an active lecturer on pagan studies and women’s spirituality.  The presentation of the first Demeter Award to Adler recognized her influence in changing public perceptions of women’s religions, past and present.

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Green Goddess Conference–A “Life-weaving Web”

Annie Finch at Kirkridge, photo by Ora Wry

Award-winning poet Annie Finch, featured speaker at our ASWM Conference, reflects on the activities of the weekend:

The ASWM conference was truly a life-weaving web–and a life-changing one for me. I have rarely (never?!!) read for an audience that “got” my goddess poems so profoundly–it was humbling. Overall, the quality of so many presentations was so high–and the content so amazing, so rich, so nourishing. I especially remember performances by Elizabeth Cunningham in her bawdy bodice, reciting a Magdalen prologue from memory prefaced and concluded by songs (what novelist ever does that??!); Cristina Eisenberg’s superb keynote presentation on women and wolves; the remarkable world premiere of the film Pink Smoke Over the Vatican; untangling patriarchy over lunch with Oloye Aina Olomo; dancing a raucous Sicilian dance and participating in Betz King’s superb womb-healing ceremony; being inundated, filled, by fantastic presentations exploring images of the Goddess in the form of bee, butterfly, deer, snake, wolf. . . and meeting so many new and established (Margot Adler! Diane Wolkstein!) brave scholars, writers, and artists, who give so much, care so much, do so much to further this much-needed herstory. I wish ASWM a long and flourishing life, since I know that will mean many more astounding conferences!