“A Women’s Psychology: The Wheel of the Year”

with Kim Duckett

Thursday,  October 19, 2023 at 3 PM Eastern Time  

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The Wheel of the Year as an Earth-Based Spiritual Psychology for Women:  (This ain’t your mama’s Wheel of the Year!)

This work came out of my realization that our ancient foremothers developed and applied a shamanic psychology for their people based in the movement of the seasons through time (what we now call The Wheel of the Year). I realized that the Wheel of the Year that we were following in contemporary women’s and goddess spiritualities was a remnant of that ancient psychology.  The Wheel is usually associated with earth-based spiritualities. My work shifts the focus of the Wheel to being a psychology, and specifically a transpersonal and spiritual psychology.  I have discovered that the Wheel is not simply a teaching or illustrative tool about the seasons, or planting, or a backdrop for the agricultural myths of antiquity. I have come to see it as what we have left of those ancient psychologies as well as a spiritual path, and I teach it as such. 

Although in this presentation, I speak in passing about the idea that following the seasons may have been a psychology as well as a spirituality and a way of life for ancient peoples and cultures, proving that is not my purpose in this presentation. My focus is to share the concept of The Wheel of the Year as a helpful contemporary earth-based psychology for women that can be used to recognize, understand, and respond to experiences and processes that occur over the course of women’s lives.

  My work in the Mystery School is enhanced with the beautiful creations of earth-artist Barb Lutz (Tribas) who creates seasonal altars and provides energetic support for the deep work around the Wheel.

Kim Duckett received her  Ph.D in Women’s Studies and Transpersonal Psychology at Union Institute and University. She is the founder of “A Year and a Day Sacred Mystery School for Women,” a three-year feminist spirituality curriculum, established in 1993. Kim taught Women Studies in university for thirty years, including courses on women and psychology. She is a shamanic ritualist, and has presented at a variety of feminist events including RCGI Priestess Gatherings, National Women’s Music Festival, ASWM, Modern Matriarchal Studies conferences, and others. Her book, The Wheel of the Year as an Earth-based Spiritual Psychology for Women can be found at kimduckett.org. Her personal and professional focus is now solely on the psychology and well being of Goddess women. 

Barb Lutz /Tribas creates altars and sacred spaces that augment and enhance the teachings of Kim’s Mystery School and is recognized as an earth-based artist in her own right in Goddess communities. Barb’s work has been exhibited in locations and events including ASWM conferences, and she has given workshops in the creation of altars and ritual spaces from natural materials.

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Save the date for this upcoming ASWM Salon:

Thursday November 2 at 3 PM Eastern Time

“Shâmaran: The Mother Earth Goddess in the Hearts and Mountains of Kurds”  

with Dilsa Deniz

Upcoming Salons also on November 16, 2023.

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

Thursday,  September 21, 2023 at 3 PM Eastern Time  

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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:

Thursday October 12 at 3 PM Eastern Time

“She Who Hunts: Artemis, the Goddess Who Changed the World”  

with Carla Ionescu

Upcoming Salons are on October  19, November 2 & 16 2023.

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

A PaGaian Cosmology: Celebrating Goddess and Cosmogenesis

with Dr. Glenys Livingstone

Thursday,  September 7, 2023 at 6 PM Eastern Time  (September 8th at 7am AEST)

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I was born in the Southern Hemisphere, a white European girl-child, in a land colonized by my people, who had long forgotten their own Indigenous heritage. The Land was no longer a sacred entity for them – it was a place where one travailed, and from which one would be saved eventually by a father god whom they believed in. Most of the texts and graphics explaining the Cosmos to me and all, were drawn from the Northern Hemisphere perspective: Moon in her phases were “backwards”; Sun’s daily movement from East to West was described as being “clockwise”, which it wasn’t; the seasons in the stories were always at odds with real experience. This was never regarded as important enough to mention, yet deep within me there was scribed the cosmic essence of disregarding one’s senses. And then there was the thing of being female, which exacerbated this sense of being “other”, and not worthy of mention. I and many of my Land, were perhaps some of Earth’s most alienated of beings.

From this base I searched for Her, and sought relationship with my place, who was revealed quietly in the Sun and deep dark night sky, and the red soil, which I as a country girl was touched by.

This presentation is an introduction to the PaGaian Cosmology which I authored, and practiced, and documented in doctoral work: and published as a book in 2005. It is a religious practice of seasonal ceremony based in a synthesis of Western scientific understanding of the unfolding Cosmos with female metaphor or the sacred. My new book A Poiesis of the Creative Cosmos: Celebrating Her within PaGaian Sacred Ceremony documents this poetic ceremonial process practiced over decades, as I and others engaged in it. We were making a world (which is what “poiesis” means), a creative context in which She could be expressed and heard. This ceremonial practice is based in the Seasonal Moments of Earth-Sun relationship of the Old European indigenous traditions: that is, specifically the Solstices, Equinoxes and cross-quarter transitions.

Glenys Livingstone Ph.D. is the author of PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion, which fuses the indigenous traditions of Old Europe with scientific theory, feminism, and a poetic relationship with place. This book was an outcome of her doctoral work in Social Ecology.  She was born and lives in country Australia, where she has facilitated Seasonal ceremony with an open community, taught classes, and mentored apprentices. Her education has included an M.A. in Systematic Theology and Philosophy from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, within which she also learned liturgical practice at the Jesuit School there.

Her new book A Poiesis of the Creative Cosmos: Celebrating Her within PaGaian Sacred Ceremony documents the synthesis of her work over the past decades. She is the author of the children’s book My Name is Medusa, and co-editor of the anthology Re-visioning Medusa: from Monster to Divine Wisdom. Glenys has contributed to eleven other anthologies, including Goddesses in World Culture edited by Patricia Monaghan (2011), Foremothers of the Women’s Spirituality Movement edited by Miriam Robbins Dexter and Vicki Noble (2015), and Goddesses in Myth, History and Culture, edited my Mary Ann Beavis and Helen Hye-Sook Hwang (2018). In 2014, Glenys co-facilitated the Mago Pilgrimage to Korea with Dr. Helen Hye-Sook Hwang. She teaches a year-long on-line course “Celebrating Goddess and Cosmogenesis in the Wheel of the Year” for both hemispheres. Her website is http://pagaian.org.

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Save the date for this upcoming ASWM Salon:

Thursday September 21 at 3 PM Eastern Time

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

with Mehealani Ahia

Upcoming Salons are on September 21, October 5 & 19, November 2 & 16.

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

“Tona Ina, the Yoruba ‘sea light’: Community Arcaeomythology in Costa Rica’s Southern Caribbean

with Dr. María Suárez Toro

Thursday,  July 27, 2023 at 3 PM Eastern Time 

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TONA INA (“Sea Light” in Yoruba), is a contemporary African, matriarchal, archetype, created in 2015, in order to tell stories about connections between the waters of Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast and “the deepest roots of identity, ancestral knowledge, and interactive symbiosis of our species as nature.” As the ancestral storyteller, she brings forth hidden historical facts about slavery and predatory patriarchal practices. Tona Ina also speaks for the women, giving voice to their tenacity as the “vital reserves” of our species; it is the women whose holistic thinking supports alternative paradigms such as the maternal gift economy.

African descendants and Bribri/Cabécar native pobladoras claim to see a light in the darkest nights in Punta Cahuita in the Cahuita National Park. In the sea waters near that Point, Afro-descendant and native scuba diving youth are researching two shipwrecks that may have been slave ships. This underwater archaeology project is recovering the history of the place and its people, as well as encouraging divers researching their own identities. By adding the perspective of archaeomythology, we can reclaim myths that are born through the interaction between ancient knowledge and memory, and also highlight present day responses from community members.

Author Dr. María Suárez Toro is member of Centro Comunitario de Buceo Ambassadors of the Sea, director of Escribana feminist media, member of the Maternal Gift Economy Network, Diverse Women for Diversity, the Association of Women Writers in Costa Rica and now of the Association of Women and Mythology.  Maria is the author of many books, the latest two being “Tona Ina: La Misteriosa Cueva de un Pez León en Cahuita” and “Tona Ina: La Luz en el Mar Caribe”, both published by the University of Costa Rica in 2017 and 2021. 

Maria’s discussion will include remarks from  MSc Aaniyah Martin from South Africa and Dr. Joan Marley from the United States to explore the significance of creating a present day ancestral storyteller.

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Save this date for the next ASWM Salon:

Salon 57 : September 7, 2023, 6 PM Eastern Time

“A PaGaian Cosmology: Celebrating Goddess and Cosmogenesis”                  with Dr. Glenys Livingstone

Upcoming Salons are on September 21, October 5 & 19, November 2 & 16.

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