“How I Found the Lost Goddesses of Early Greece in the Emergence of the Women’s Spirituality Movement”

with Charlene Spretnak

Thursday,  October 22, 2026 at 3:00 PM Eastern Time  

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During the mid-1970s, interest in women’s spirituality bubbled up in feminist communities across the country. One of the major nodes (the other was Boston) was the San Francisco Bay Area. Charlene Spretnak reflects on the energizing sense of discovery; the collective thrill of exposing the patriarchal grip on our cultural, social, and spiritual history (and pre-history!); and the synergistic flow of creativity and mutual support that yielded diverse works and paths into women’s authentic spiritual experience.

Among the many early books, gatherings, and personal practices that emerged was her book Lost Goddesses of Early Greece (1978), which she feels owes much to that heady time and place. Charlene Spretnak will read a few of the pre-Olympian, pre-patriarchal myths from the book, reconstructed for the first time in more than 2500 years. The first ebook edition of the book was recently published by Women’s Spirituality Studies Press. She will also discuss her article “Goddess Time,” commissioned for The Brooklyn Rail in 2025, which continues the story that began fifty years ago, particularly regarding a prominent scholar and a pioneering Women’s Spirituality artist.

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Charlene Spretnak is the author of nine books on cultural history, religion and spirituality, feminism, Green politics, and ecological thought. Her first book, Lost Goddesses of Early Greece, was among the initial books that sparked the emergence of the Women’s Spirituality movement in the mid-1970s. Goddess spirituality was one of the four orientations presented in her book on modernity and religion, States of Grace (1991). In 2011 her article “Anatomy of a Backlash: Concerning the Work of Marija Gimbutas” was published in the Journal of Archaeomythology. She has brought a focus on dynamic interrelatedness to her engagement with the pre-Olympian mythology of Greece; the emergent Women’s Spirituality movement; the ecofeminist movement; the emergent Green Party movement in Europe and the United States; the spiritual dimension of Green politics; the rising tide of eco-social solutions to the crises of modernity; the cancellation of the symbolic, cosmological, and mystical dimensions of the Virgin Mary when the Catholic Church modernized itself; new discoveries that have led to the Relational Shift in many fields; and the vast spiritual dimensions of modern and contemporary art, which are largely unacknowledged by the professional art world and art history. Her book The Resurgence of the Real was named by the Los Angeles Times as one of the Best Books of 1997. In 2012 she received the Demeter Award for lifetime achievement as “one of the premier visionary feminist thinkers of our time” from the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology. She is a professor emerita in religion and philosophy. She lives in Ojai, California. Website: www.charlenespretnak.com .

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Upcoming Salon

Scholar Salon 105:

Thursday, November 5 at 3 PM Eastern Time

Marija Gimbutas: A Model of Grace and Courage in the Face of Adversity

with Joan Marler and Susan Moulton

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