“Why Brigit was Born at Faughart, Co. Louth”

with Dr. Mary Condren

Thursday,  February 22, 2024 at 12 NOON Eastern Time  

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Following many calls, the Irish government recently instituted a Public Holiday in honour of Brigit: saint, outlaw, goddess, peace weaver, whistleblower, poet, healer and smith worker. As though a long- suppressed substrate had just been unleashed, unlikely combinations of feminist, post-feminist, pagan, goddess devotees, christian, post-christian, atheists, and agnostics collectively gathered offering unprecedented artistic, poetic, musical and ritual forms to celebrate the day. Apart from explicitly Christian events, the question Who is Brigit? was largely ignored. 

Focussing on the question, “Where was Brigit born?” this presentation will explore her relationship to Faughart, County Louth, one of the oldest ritual sites in Ireland, where shadowy figures, such as Flídais, Bláthnait, Monenna, and the Cailleach persist to this day. Many battles, mythic and real, took place at Faughart. In Saint Brigit’s birth stories, could another battle have been fought, that between indigenous ritual traditions, and the emerging Christian church? Did Saint Brigit’s birth at Faughart signify both its matristic importance, alongside the parallel importance of subjugating Irish indigenous traditions, in the interests of an emerging patristic world order?

Mary Condren Th.D., has degrees in theology, sociology, and social anthropology from the University of Hull; religion and society from Boston College, and a doctorate in religion, gender and culture from Harvard University. She is a Research Associate in Women’s Studies at the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, Trinity College Dublin; a former Research Associate in Women’s Studies at Harvard University, and has published widely on issues of feminism and religion, and on the interrelationship between religion, violence and gender.

Mary is the author of The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion, and Power in Celtic Ireland. She is currently completing books on the roles of women and men in the sacrificial social contract.  Mary is also the National Director of Woman Spirit Ireland – The Institute for Feminism and Religion aims to explore a prophetic approach to feminism and religion, inclusive of many traditions and the emerging consciousness in Ireland. The Institute provides opportunities for women to reclaim religion by engaging theoretically and experientially with the issues of feminist theology, ethics, spirituality, and ritual.

 

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Save the date for this upcoming ASWM Salon:

Matriarchy in Bronze Age Crete: Perspective from Archaeomythology and Modern Matriarchal Studies

with Dr. Joan Cichon

March 7, 2024 at 3pm Eastern Standard Time

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

“Shepenwepet II Kushite God’s Wife of Amun”

with Dr. Solange Ashby

Thursday,  February 8, 2024 at 3 PM Eastern Time  

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Early European visitors and researchers viewed their findings in Egypt through a narrow lens of cultural assumptions. Dr. Solange Ashby provides us with a corrective to persistent but outmoded theories, making clear that Nubian women held roles of ritual, political, and economic power in the Twenty-fifth Dynasty.

Shepenwepet II was a royal woman of the Kushite dynasty from ancient Nubia (now northern Sudan) who arrived in Egypt during the time of her family’s reign as Egypt’s Twenty-Fifth Dynasty (747-656 BCE). She was the daughter of king Piankhy and sister of the pharaoh Taharqa. Shepenwepet herself held the powerful religious and economic role of the God’s Wife of Amun (GWA), the highest-ranking religious leader of the preeminent temple of Amun at Karnak (Thebes/Egyptian: Waset).

This paper will explore the religious rites performed by the GWA as related to the Beautiful Feast of Valley and the Decade Festival. Both of these celebrations consisted of processions from the temples of the east bank of the Nile (primarily Karnak) across the river to visit various temples on the west bank of the river (Small Temple of Amun, funerary complex of Hatshepsut at Deir el Bahari, and the temple-tombs in the Asasif and South Asasif areas). The Kushite revival of the office of God’s Wife of Amun, created for the earlier queens of the Eighteenth Dynasty (ca. 1520 BCE), incorporated new elements of the central role played by royal women in Kush. Shepenwepet II represents the trifecta of power – ritual, political, and economic.

Solange Ashby received her Ph.D. in Egyptology from the University of Chicago. Dr. Ashby’s expertise in sacred ancient languages, including Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Meroitic, underpins her research into the history of religious transformation in Northeast Africa. Her book, Calling Out to Isis: The Enduring Nubian Presence at Philae, explores the temple of Philae as a Nubian sacred site. Her second book explores the lives of five Nubian women from history including queens, priestesses, and mothers. Dr. Ashby is an Assistant Professor in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA where she teaches Egyptology and Nubian Studies.

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Save the date for this upcoming ASWM Salon:

Why Brigit was Born at Faughart, Co. Louth with Dr. Mary Condren

February 22, 2024 at 12 NOON Eastern Standard Time

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

“Strength, Creation, Love, and Transformation: Telling the African Goddesses“

with Vanessa Johnson

Thursday,  January 25, 2024 at 3 PM Eastern Time  

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“Women who speak for themselves have the authority to control their lives. By telling our stories, women talk themselves out of the world of silence and invisibility, and into the world of strength, creation, love, and transformation. Our voices center our existence in the eternal line of creation that the first African women birthed on this planet.  Telling the stories and legends of African Goddesses rejects patriarchy as the central power of spirituality and shifts traditional male bound forms of spiritual discourse. Remembering the voice of the African Goddesses is a transformative process which reclaims the African roots of our female existence.” Vanessa Johnson shares these powerful stories and legends of African Goddess of the Motherland and of the African Diaspora.

Vanessa Johnson is a Griot, a Storyteller in the West African Tradition.  She is a Writer, a Playwright, an Actor, a Fiber Artist, Museum Consultant, Community Activist, Historian, an Educator and Teaching Artist. In addition to many projects as a visual artist and activist, she has acted in numerous plays and has written, directed, and produced children’s plays; her own play “Doors” was produced in May 2014, by the Paul Robeson Performing Arts Company of Syracuse. She is the Founding Director of Syracuse Africa Bound, which provides youth from 12-18 years old the opportunity to explore African Cultures, and to take part in educational travel and service opportunities in Ghana West Africa. Vanessa is the Artist in Residence for the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation in Fayetteville, N.Y., and as a consultant, designed the museum’s Underground Railroad Room. She has served as the Gage Foundation Community Liaison for their Girl’s Ambassadors for Human Rights Program. She has been the Gage Ambassadors for Human Rights Program Director from 2016 to the present. She is the recipient of a Melon and Ford Foundation Creatives Rebuild NY Grant for 2022-2024.

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Save the date for this upcoming ASWM Salon:

Thursday February 8 at 3 PM Eastern Time

“Shepenwepet II Kushite God’s Wife of Amun”  with Dr. Solange Ashby

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

“Matriarchal Societies of the Past and the Rise of Patriarchy”

with Heide Goettner-Abendroth

Thursday,  January 11, 2024 at 12 NOON Eastern Time  

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This new book by Dr. Heide Goettner-Abendroth is about re-writing the history of cultures from a non- patriarchal perspective, bringing the forgotten matriarchal epoch to light again. It is based on her pioneering anthropological research on still extant matriarchal societies worldwide, which provided her with a new definition of “matriarchy” as mother-centered, consensus based, and thus egalitarian societies.

This is her background for re-examining the history of cultures. She criticizes patriarchal prejudices which abound in archaeological interpretations, and their blindness toward the great variety of human social forms. By going deeper into this material and including new archaeological finds, she is able to develop a completely different picture of the earliest cultural epochs, which were decisively formed by the inventions of women, by motherhood and maternal values.

Additionally, she gives a logical and detailed explanation for the rise of patriarchy, which is based on archaeological field work and not on speculation and, therefore, has a high degree of validity. She also shows by the examples of the Eurasian Steppe and Europe as well as Mesopotamia that patriarchal patterns developed in very different ways in different cultural regions, so that patriarchy did not arise once, but manifold in different countries and continents, and at different times. In these cultural regions, the range of the book includes the development from the Palaeolithic via the Neolithic and the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. In this vast field, the author creates revolutionary new insights.

Heide Goettner-Abendroth is a mother and a grandmother. She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy of science at the University of Munich where she taught for ten years (1973-1983).  She has published on philosophy of science, and extensively on matriarchal society and culture, and through her lifelong research on matriarchal societies has become a founder of Modern Matriarchal Studies. Her first magnum opus: Matriarchal Societies. Studies on Indigenous Cultures across the Globe, defines the topic and provides a world tour of examples of contemporary matriarchal cultures. It has been translated and published in several languages.

With her new book, her second magnum opus: Matriarchal Societies of the Past and the Rise of Patriarchy, she broadens her research, bringing the forgotten matriarchal epoch in early history to light again. She has been visiting professor at the University of Montreal in Canada, and the University of Innsbruck in Austria. She lectured extensively at home and abroad. 

In 1986, she founded the “International ACADEMY HAGIA for Matriarchal Studies and Matriarchal Spirituality” in Germany, and since then has been its director. In 2003, 2005 and 2011 she organized and guided three World Congresses on Matriarchal Studies in Europe and the U.S.A. She has twice been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2005 by a Swiss initiative and in 2007 by a Finnish initiative.

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Save the date for this upcoming ASWM Salon:

Thursday January 25 at 3 PM Eastern Time

“Strength, Creation, Love, and Transformation: Telling the African Goddesses”  with Vanessa Johnson

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

“Shapeshifting Lands of Lāhainā, Maui: Mo’o and Moku’ula”

with Mahealani Ahia

RESCHEDULED

Thursday,  November 30, 2023 at 3 PM Eastern Time  

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We are pleased to be able to offer this Salon again following technical failures during the original event.

Following the devastating fires on August 8, 2023, in Lāhainā, Maui, there has been a call for a restoration of the sacred lands of Mokuʻula, once the seat of Hawaiian government and home to the great akua moʻo (reptilian water deity) Kihawahine. In this kairotic moment, my dissertation research entitled “Shapeshifting Hawaiian Biography: The Life and Afterlives of Kihawahine” intends to share a longer and richer story than tourist and colonial myths have perpetuated of this famous site. My project is an Indigenous Hawaiian biography centering Kihawahine —daughter of 16th century Maui high chief Piʻilani— who was ritually deified into a guardian akua moʻo and later elevated to island-wide worship under Kamehameha. Shapeshifting moʻo are kiaʻi wai, the most revered and feared water protectors. The study of Kihawahine’s life, afterlife, and multiple body forms—giant lizard, white dog, spider—invites deep examination of Hawaiian history, religion, politics, culture, art, and language.

By historicizing various re-tellings and interpretations of her story across time and region, I map the meanings and intentions behind keeping her image alive for each successive generation. The story of Kihawahine is found in many sources including Hawaiian-language newspapers, missionary journals, ship logs, archaeological reports, oli (chant) and hula (dance). Her kiʻi (ritually carved wooden image) is currently sailing around the world aboard the Hōkūleʻa voyaging canoe. Unfortunately, another kiʻi sits behind glass in the Berlin Ethnological Museum. By sharing these stories, Kānaka ʻŌiwi hope our voices will aid in the repatriation of our ancestral kiʻi, restoration of sacred Mokuʻula, and return of our life-giving waters.

Māhealani Ahia is a Los Angeles-born Kanaka ʻŌiwi artist, scholar, activist, songcatcher and storykeeper with lineal ties to Lāhainā, Maui. With a background in theatre arts, writing and performance from U.C. Berkeley and U.C. Irvine, Māhea is committed to creating artistic and academic projects that empower Indigenous feminist decolonial research. Her Master’s Degree in Mythology and Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute focused on cultural trauma and the power of stories and chanting to heal. As a PhD candidate in English (Hawaiian Literature) and a graduate certificate student in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, her dissertation research “Shapeshifting Hawaiian Biography: The Life and Afterlives of Kihawahine” inundates biography’s genre boundaries as it theorizes feminist power and leadership within the moʻo (reptilian water deity) clan. Māhea teaches courses like Indigenous Feminisms, Island Feminisms, Creative Writing for Healing. She serves as editor for Hawaiʻi Review and ʻŌiwi: A Native Hawaiian Journal and is co-organizer of the Mauna Kea Syllabus Project.

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Save the date for this upcoming ASWM Salon:

January 11, 2024  NOON Eastern Time

“Matriarchal Societies of the Past and the Rise of Patriarchy”

with Dr. heide Goettner-Abendroth

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