“Truth, Lies and Possibilities: Writing the Story of Buddha’s Wife”

with Barbara McHugh

Thursday,  November 21, 2024 at 3 PM Eastern Time  

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Recently, especially since the pandemic, many fiction writers have been soul-searching: In these times, why write made-up stories? Don’t we have enough of them already? Perhaps only narratives of actual people in real situations are important for our sense of reality. In this presentation, Barbara McHugh talks about what is unique to stories as an art form and why we need to keep making them up. Using her novel, Bride of the Buddha, and other examples, along with what she’s learned in countless fiction-writing workshops, she shows how stories—from folk tales told by grannies to modern narratives created by so-called solitary geniuses—embody our values and thereby enlarge our felt sense of who we are and what our relationship is to the
universe. She also discusses the necessity of story variants to keep us from getting trapped in any single narrative, including the ones we invent to make sense of our lives.

Bride of the Buddha began as a response to the refusal of many of the author’s women friends to bother with Buddhism at all, because its founder had abandoned his wife and child. She wanted to explore the story from the point of view of the deserted wife in a way that, even if the Buddha isn’t exonerated, the practice of Buddhism is. The more research she did, and the more she wrote, the more she felt compelled to make a radical change to the story. She ended up having the Buddha’s wife disguise herself as a man in order to join her former husband’s all-male monastic community. That got the author into trouble, but it also convinced her of the importance of story-making in all its forms.

Barbara McHugh is a poet and novelist with an interdisciplinary PhD from UC Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union. To support herself as a student, she did everything from assembly line jobs to door-to-door sales and social work in all kinds of neighborhoods. She also has worked as a book doctor/writing coach and taught graduate courses on subjects such as the relationship between evil and the attempts to annihilate it. Her novel Bride of the Buddha (Monkfish Books, 2021) won awards for literary and general fiction. Her poems have appeared in the Berkeley Poetry Review, The Magnolia Review, Steam Ticket, Brushfire, Straight Forward Poetry, and others. She enjoys hiking, traveling, and chasing total eclipses of the sun.

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Save the date and watch for details :

Scholar Salon #80, January 7 2025 at 3:00 PM Eastern Time, 

with Vicki Noble

This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event. 

 

“Goddesses of Healing of Ancient Greece”

with Eftyhia Leontidou

Thursday,  November 7, 2024 at 12 NOON Eastern Time  

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Anyone who has visited Greece would probably be familiar with the most common Greek expression, «γεια σου», meaning “to your health!” This phrase is used as a greeting, as a wish, as a blessing, or as a toast when raising glasses. «Γεια» or -more correctly- «υγεία», meaning health, is personified by the ancient Greek Goddess Hygieia; and is the root of many words used in different languages in association with health, cleanliness and sanitation, e.g. hygiene. Hygieia is the most well-known ancient Greek Goddess of healing, but there are quite a few more, e.g. her four sisters, daughters of the god of medicine Asclepius (Panacea, Iaso, Aceso and Aegle). Other healing Goddesses are exclusively associated with birthing/childbirth, e.g. Eileithyia, or with decent and painless death, e.g. Artemis.  I will unfold their stories and their symbols, particularly the snake, whose venom can kill or heal. These Goddesses of medicine promote health on the physical, emotional and spiritual plane; but emphasis will also be placed on the healing needed by our relationships, our societies, and our planet, Mother Earth, all of them wounded by millennia of patriarchy. 

Since the earliest matriarchal human societies of prehistory, healing has been a women’s art. Nowadays, although female healers outnumber their male colleagues, they still fight to earn their rightful acknowledgement in the health system. But the medicine women of our times also have to be warriors, as they fight for women’s rights; against the trauma of violence against women; for the healing of the planet and against destructive acts and practices. In this war they are guided by the archetype of the Goddess Athena, who was worshipped as healer and warrior, among her other qualities.

Dr. Eftyhia Leontidou MD, is a Greek Obstetrician- gynecologist, who has spent all her life healing and empowering women, as a health professional, as an author and as a feminist activist. A lover of music, archaeology, mythology, travel, photography, and Tai chi, and a member of the Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights, she owns a well- informed archive of various kinds of documents on women’s issues. Eftyhia has written and translated many articles on women’s rights and health issues for medical and feminist magazines in Greece and abroad. She has also coedited and contributed as an author, translator and photographer in many collective women’s books. Her activities include lectures, seminars and workshops for doctors, medical students, women’s groups as well as battered, unemployed, immigrant and socially excluded women, in collaboration with women’s and cultural organizations, groups, schools, parents’ unions, local authorities, and the European Union; in addition she has taken part in training programs for the police on violence against women.

For more than 50 years she has been active in the autonomous women’s movement being a member of self-examination, feminist activist and feminist spirituality groups in Athens. The last two years, 2023 and 2024, she contributed to the Glastonbury Goddess Conference as a presenter. Her latest project, called Feminist Gynecology, consists so far of three books: 1) Goddess in Action – Childbirth, 2) Female Sexuality – From Flesh to Spirit, and 3) Female body – A Mystical tour.

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Scholar Salon #79 November 21 at 3:00 PM Eastern Time

Truth, Lies and Possibilities: Writing about Buddha’s Wife 

with Barbara HcHugh

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Save the date and watch for details :

Scholar Salon #80, January 7 2025 at 3:00 PM Eastern Time, 

with Vicki Noble

This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event. 

 

“Exploring Matriarchal Societies: Encounters and Insights from Around the World”

with Maria Haas

Thursday,  October 10, 2024 at 12 NOON Eastern Time  

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In her lecture, “Exploring Matriarchal Societies: Encounters and Insights from Around the World,” Maria Haas takes the audience on a captivating journey through the matriarchal cultures she has visited and documented. She shares her personal experiences and encounters with the Minangkabau in Indonesia, the Khasi in India, the Mosuo in China, and other matriarchal societies.

Maria Haas highlights the similarities and diffrences between these cultures, drawing out the unique characteristics of each society. She delves into the key parameters that define matriarchal cultures, from social organization and the role of women to cultural and spiritual aspects. The lecture offers a unique insight into the diversity and distinctive structures of these extraordinary communities.

Maria Haas is a renowned photographer based in Klosterneuburg near Vienna, Austria. After graduating from the College of Photography at the Higher Graphic Teaching and Research Institute in Vienna in 1990, she founded her own photography studio, initially focusing on travel and reportage photography. In 1996, her work took her to New York, where she attended workshops at the International Center of Photography and exhibited her works in cities such as New York, Vienna, Florence, and Tampere. Over the years, Maria Haas’ interest shifted towards documenting societies that do not conform to Western norms, with a particular fascination for matriarchal cultures. She has studied and photographed these unique societies across the globe, producing acclaimed photo books like MATRIARCHS (2020) and MATRIARCHS 2 (2022), which explore the roles and significance of women in these communities. Her recent projects include documenting women affected by female genital mutilation (FGM) in Kenya and photographing shamans in Peru.

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Save the Dates for future Salons:

 Thursday, October 24, 2024 at 3 PM Eastern Time (Rescheduled) 

“Feasting on a Hekate Supper at the Crossroads” with Kay Turner

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Thursday, November 7, 2024 at 12 NOON Eastern Time

“Healing Goddesses of Greece” with Eftyhia Leontidou

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Thursday, November 21, 2024 at 3 PM Eastern Time

“Truth, Lies and Possibilities: Writing about Buddha’s Wife” with Barbara McHugh

This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event. 

 

“Feasting on a Hekate Supper at the Crossroads”

with Dr. Kay Turner

Thursday,  September 26, 2024 at 3 pm Eastern Time  

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Hekate has often been called the Goddess of Witches. She was and is that, but also so much more. In ancient Greece her worship took place in temples and also at crossroads shrines dedicated to her where devotees gathered to feast and make petitions for her intercession. I propose a Hekate Supper!  Join me to feast on knowing the many facets of Hekate through her lineage, her epithets, her invocations, her rites, her symbols, her realms, and her alliances. I highlight Hekate’s recognition and repair of brokenness as seen in her role in the myth of Demeter’s separation from Persephone. Hekate heard the cries of Persephone and lighted the way to her recovery.

To repair brokenness is her moral charge. She urges commingling, links worlds together, threads connections. A goddess sought after to repair brokenness, her work was made most potent through her union of the living and the dead. My lecture works with materials from primary sources such as Hesiod’s Theogony and The Chaldean Oracles, and from the interpretive work of Hekate scholars such as Sarah Iles Johnston and Froma Zeitlin. Participants in the meeting will also join me in a bit of invocation.

 

I wrote this evocation in 2022 to recite at the ruins of Hekate’s temple at Eleusis, outside Athens, the site of the Great and Lesser annual rites of Demeter and Persephone. I will touch on a number of the themes presented here:

Hekate: Invocation by Kay Turner

Eleusis: the place of Happy Arrival

Completion brings return

Pomegranates buried in the depths of death

unearthed:

If all we know is this cycle,

It is enough.

 

Hekate of earth, air, water, and fire,

Light our way with your double torches,

Open the gates with your keys,

Accept our offerings,

Brought to Trivium.

 

Lead us down the third road

To epiphany,

Greeted by “the grinning one.”

Mother Demeter, Daughter Persephone

Hekate Escort,

Take us with you.

Kay Turner is an artist and scholar working across disciplines including performance, writing, music, and folklore. Since 2012 her performance works and writing have revolved around an exploration of the witch figure in folklore and history. She has worked with artist Elizabeth Insogna on several projects exploring the Greek goddess Hekate including “Healing Persephone Wounds” and “A Hekate Supper,” Parts 1 and 2.  Kay is the founding editor of Lady-Unique-Inclination-of-the-Night, a journal of art and the goddess published from 1976-1983. Her books include What a Witch: Before and After (with Zini Lardieri,), Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms (with Pauline Greenhill), and Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars. She taught for 20 years in the Performance Studies Department at NYU and is a past president of the American Folklore Society.

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Save the Dates for future Salons:

Thursday, October 10, 2024 at 12 NOON Eastern Time

“Exploring Matriarchal Societies:  Encounters and Insights from Around the World,” with Maria Haas 

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Thursday, October 24, 2024 at 3:00 PM Eastern Time

“Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers toward Truth, Healing, and Repair” with Hilary Giovale

 

This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event. 

 

“Decoding Delphi: Reconstructing the Technology of Divination“

with Dr. Vivien Monroe

Thursday,  September 12, 2024 at 3 pm Eastern Time  

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In ancient Greece there was an oracle so famous for her accurate,  enigmatic, and poetic pronouncements that kings, generals, and pilgrims flocked  from across empires to consult her. The oracle remained in operation for more  than 1,000 years and counted among its supporters the philosopher Socrates and  the mathematician Pythagoras. She was the Pythia of the Delphic Oracle. 

My research questions are: What were the spiritual technologies used at  the Delphic Oracle? How did the Greeks understand that the Oracle worked, and  what role, if any, did gender play in the successful operation of the oracle? In  order to answer these questions, I explore living divination traditions from West  Africa. My decision to explore African systems of divination stems from my  experience of witnessing numerous divinations in the tradition of the Dagara  people of West Africa over a five-year period, including my own initiation as a  diviner within this tradition.  

Over the course of my exposure to Dagara divination technology, I noticed  striking parallels between the Dagara tools and artifacts and chronicles of Delphic  tools and artifacts. Because writers living contemporaneously with the Delphic  Oracle did not discuss the details involved in the process of prophecy, we need to use living traditions to help reconstruct those that have been lost over the course  of time. As I show in my dissertation, there is a scholarly tradition for utilizing  comparative analysis. 

I use archaeomythology and feminist theory to provide an original interpretation, deeper exploration, and advanced understanding of those archaeological artifacts that pertained to divination at Delphi. I offer one theory of the spiritual technologies in use at Delphi and hypothesize how these technologies may have facilitated one of the ancient world’s most accurate oracles. The significance of my findings is that by better understanding the spiritual science of divination at the Delphic Oracle, the modern West can better understand its ancient epistemological connection with divination and possibly reintegrate divinatory tools and practices into more of our modern life.

Vivien Monroe, PhD is an accomplished scholar and educator with a Ph.D. in Women’s Spirituality. Her area of expertise is divination, specifically focusing her dissertation on reconstructing the spiritual technology of the Delphic Oracle. Vivien’s experience extends beyond academia, as she is also a practitioner of divination, having been initiated into three styles of divination within the Dagara tradition, and is also a gifted tarot reader. She remains committed to continuing to learn and share about various divinatory practices. Vivien lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her two doggie fur babies, Luke and Lilith.

 

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Save the Dates for future Salons:

Thursday, September 26, 3 PM Eastern Time

“Feasting on a Hekate Supper at the Crossroads,” with Kay Turner

 

Thursday, October 10, 2024 at 12 NOON

“Exploring Matriarchal Societies:  Encounters and Insights from Around the World,” with Maria Haas

 

This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event.