Announcing Scholar Salon 85: Register for June 12

“Reign Of Power: How the Mythological Horse Holds the Tension of Balance and Transformation”

with Dr. Heather A. Taylor

Thursday, June 12, 2025 at 3:00 PM Eastern Time

REGISTER HERE

Domesticating horses created a major shift in societies as humans climbed on top of the animal for a broader view of the physical world. Harnessing the horse’s power led to crossing boundaries, exploring new terrains, advancements in agriculture, technology, and service. Inevitably conflict arose as cultures clashed when riders ventured into expanding territories, leading to disputes and wars, especially for those who prioritized conquering or controlling people, livestock, and land. Sovereign powers and the wealthy created calvaries as a sign of military strength while individuals who excelled on horseback performed heroic acts, either in battle or as solo warriors. These actions infiltrated our stories, resulting in the rise of the hero archetype.

This shift in civilization created many advantages throughout history and into modern times but the pendulum has swung too far, leading to an overemphasis of the Cartesian mindset in which power over nature and humans is prioritized. Those who do not fit into a narrow definition of what constitutes the best, brightest, strongest, richest, and most powerful in society are often dismissed and disenfranchised. Money, conquering, and domination on a linear and hierarchical level have gained precedence in many aspects of modern daily life, including how we treat and interact with horses. Yet horses symbolize life force, spirit, and balance. Reflected in mythologies throughout time, horses accompany humans, gods, and goddesses, across the realms. Amplifying the physical traits and behavior of the horse can bring an archetypal and metaphoric quality to myth and story, potentially facilitating integration, relatedness, balance, nature, and embodiment.

Hades and Persephone in the Underworld, red-figure krater c 4th B.C.

In this presentation, Dr. Heather Taylor will highlight how Hades’ four immortal horses, who emerge from the ground in the abduction of Persephone, play a role in the goddess’s transformation where she reigns as Queen of the underworld. The images of the horse add movement to the myth illustrating their importance as a symbol of change at a time when we must rebalance, and re-story, our relationship to the earth and showcase different forms of power.

Dr. Heather A. Taylor has a Ph.D. in Mythology with an emphasis in depth psychology and a Masters in Producing film and video. Her award-winning documentary, Breaking Through The Clouds: The First Women’s National Air Derby(BreakingThroughTheClouds.com) earned top honors at many film festivals and continues to air on PBS across America. Dr. Taylor is the co-founder of the International Society of Mythology (SMythology.com).

Dr. Taylor was awarded the Kore Dissertation of Merit at ASWMs conference in April 2025 for Re-Storying A Sense of the Sacred With A Mythological Herd: An In-Depth Study of Horses in Mythology.

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Upcoming Scholar Salons (both at 3pm Eastern Time):

June 26 2025: “Flourishing Kin: Loving the World in Complex Times” with Dr. Yuria Celidwen

August 21, 2025: “Inanna’s Descent: Re-wombing Menstrual Sacrality” with Dr. Annalisa Derr

Save these Salon dates: September 4, September 18, October 2

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

May 8, 2025May 8, 2025

Announcing Scholar Salon 84: Register for May 29

Finding Ourselves “In Our Right Minds”

with Dale Allen

Thursday, May 29, 2025 at 3:00 PM Eastern Time

REGISTER HERE

“The way Dale educates is entertaining and so evocative that it bypasses the left-brain, over-thinking part of ourselves, and instead, we are touched in a very direct, very impactful way.” –Vicki Noble

Dale Allen has for 25 years shared the healing energy of the sacred feminine through her work: “In Our Right Minds,” which has been widely acclaimed at universities, conferences, corporations, theaters, and expos across the US, Canada, from Kauai to Dubai, the UN Commission on the Status of Women, and the Parliament of World Religions. Her new book of the same name, is an Amazon International Bestseller, and the film version has been awarded in 19 Independent Film Festivals worldwide.

“In Our Right Minds,” is “a sweeping journey covered efficiently and clearly,” that in short order judiciously illuminates the history and relevance of the Goddess archetype, as well as its connection to our right-brain intelligence. “In Our Right Minds” garners praise for being well-researched, organized, clear, level, balanced, without blame, and inclusive of all the human family. Dale also presents “In Our Right Minds,” for book clubs, film screening events and as a 6-week course. The Dale Allen Podcast ranks in the top 10% globally.

Dale Allen is a veteran of corporate, commercial, and creative communications. Her extensive resume includes hundreds of voice-over, on- camera, theater and live presentation projects. Described as having the energy of “a Cape Canaveral lift-off,” Dale thoroughly engages and inspires her audience, which ranges from highly educated corporate leaders to teenage girls seeking their place in the world. “Dale’s warmth, empathy and knowledge inspires the wisdom within each of us. That seed is encoded with an intelligence, and we are each its sacred gardener, necessary to futurize our world.”

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Upcoming Scholar Salons (both at 3pm Eastern Time ):

June 12 2025: “Reins of Power: Re-Storying A Sense of the Sacred with A Mythological Herd” with Dr. Heather Taylor

June 26 2025: “Flourishing Kin: Loving the World in Complex Times” with Dr. Yuria Celidwen

Save these Salon dates: August 21, September 4, September 18

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

April 22, 2025March 22, 2025

2025 Conference Panel: Sacred Places, Living Lands and Memory

Saturday, March 29, 2025, Westward Look Inn, Tucson AZ

The Externsteine, in the Teutoburg Forest

Sacred Places, Living Lands and Memory

with Dilsa Deniz, Sarah Chandler, Constance Tippett and Dawn Work-Makinne

Shamir (Diamond Toothed) Worm – Pacifist Slave or Anti-Prophetic Savior: Exploring Ancient and Modern Jewish Myths of Soil and Stone, Sarah Chandler
Herda Dewresh – The Sacred Earth in Kurdish Alevi Tradition, Dilsa Deniz
Moons at Serpent Mound, Constance Tippett
Animism, Indigeneity and Memory, Dawn Work-Makinne

Dilşa Deniz, a Kurdish anthropologist with a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology and an MA in Women’s Studies. Her research focuses on gender, culture, mythology, eco-spirituality, and environmental challenges in Kurdish Alevi communities, addressing racism and internal colonization. In her book Shamaran: The Neolithic Eternal Mother, is one of the oldest Mother Earth Goddesses she introduces.

Kohenet Shamirah Bechirah aka Sarah Chandler is a Brooklyn-based Jewish educator, artist, activist, healer, and poet. She teaches, writes, and consults on issues related to Kabbalistic dreamwork, earth-based spiritual practices, mindfulness, and farming. She has been teaching Jewish eco-ritual weaving for over 20 years. An advanced student of Kabbalistic dream work at The School of Images, she also holds a M.A. in Jewish Education and a M.A. in Hebrew Bible from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and a certificate in Non-Profit Management and Jewish Communal Leadership from Columbia University. As the CEO of Shamir Collective, she coaches high-profile and emergent artists, musicians, and authors to weave portals for the next stage of creativity. She has served on the ASWM board since 2020, both as outreach manager and acting treasurer, as well as a core volunteer since 2019.

Constance Tippett is best known for her “Goddesstimeline that shows 40,00- years of imagery of women and Goddess throughout history. She also makes museum quality clay replications of Goddess statues. She is now working on a project to try and decode the meaning of Serpent Mound, which is an astronomical monument made by the indigenous People of the Americans.

Dawn Work-MaKinne, Ph.D., is an independent scholar interested in animism, the sacred feminine and Germanic Europe. Her work has appeared in Goddesses in World Culture and in ASWM conference proceedings, and she completed the final content-editing of Patricia Monaghan’s last Book of Goddesses and Heroines. She lives, studies and teaches in a forest grove in Des Moines, Iowa.

Read all about the ASWM Conference and register here.

April 2, 2025May 9, 2025

2025 Brigit Award for Excellence in the Arts: Lauren Raine

Awarded on Saturday, March 29, 2025, Westward Look Inn, Tucson Arizona

2025 Brigit Award for Excellence in the Arts Awarded to Lauren Raine

This award given in recognition of her decades of creative endeavor as a temple mask-maker, creatrix of art installations, sculptress, ritual theatre performer, painter, author, visionary, and mythographer.

The award letter for Lauren reads in part:

The Masks of the Goddess Project, perhaps your best-known work, consists of stunning masks crafted in the tradition of Balinese temple-masks. These masks were created to reclaim the stories of female deities from across the world’s cultures, and to empower women to explore each archetype within themselves With the Masks of the Goddess you collaborated with dancers, ritualists, playwrights, storytellers, priestesses, and activists to bring the Goddesses into the world through the words of the women who wore their masks and wrote their stories. Since their creation in 1998, the Masks of the Goddess have traveled throughout the US and abroad, touching and transforming the lives of hundreds of women.

We honor you also for the shrines and icons you have created. Your ongoing series entitled: Earth Shrine, is a product of your lifelong conversation with the numinous intelligence in nature.

Out of that conversation you have also created NUMINA: Masks for the Elemental Powers which is your elucidation of the magical sense of communion with place. As you said, “In the past “Nature” was not a “backdrop” or a “resource” – the World was a conversation.”

In Our Lady of the Shards, you celebrate the forgotten women of history: midwives, wise women, weavers, spinners, Goddesses and priestesses. In Shrine for the Lost: the Sixth Extinction (2022), you created a book, and art installation for the 2023 World Parliament of Religions, emphasizing the magnitude of the loss our biosphere has suffered.

With your four sculptures The Guardians, which symbolize and invoke the Guardians of the Four Directions, as well as the Four Elements, you cast a circle of protection to safeguard us from further ecological loss. In Spider Woman’s Hands you weave, reveal, and remember a vision of a unitive, co-creative world through sculpture, weaving, and performance.

Writing about mythology you have observed: “We’re dancing the future into the world by the stories we tell: like the web of the Native American creatrix Spider Woman, the threads of myth are spun far behind us, and weave their way far into the futures of those not yet born.

“May we dance empathy instead of despair, may we tell the stories that make life sacred and loving, profound and reverent.”

April 1, 2025March 23, 2025

2025 Saga Award for Contributions to Women’s History and Culture: Cristina Biaggi

Awarded on Saturday, March 29, 2025, Westward Look Inn, Tucson Arizona

2025 Saga Award for Contributions to Women’s History and Culture: Cristina Biaggi PhD

ASWM’s Saga Award is given to individuals whose work cuts across disciplines, traditioins, and generations to create work that centers women’s history and promotes the advancement of an all-inclusive, life-affirming feminist culture. This year’s award recognizes Cristina Biaggi, PhD, for her contributions to the world as an artist, scholar, author, teacher, and feminist activist.

The award letter to Cristina reads in part:

The titles of your four major books: Habitations of the Great Goddess, In the Footsteps of the Goddess, The Rule of Mars: Readings on the Origins, History and Impact of Patriarchy, and Activism Into Art Into Activism Into Art give some idea of the vast scope of your scholarship, interests, talents, and vision.

As an author and scholar, you are a respected and recognized authority on Goddess mythology, prehistory, and the origins and impact of patriarchy. Your knowledge of these subjects is rooted in your studies of the classics, art, art history, archaeology, literature, and languages acquired at Vassar, the University of Utah, Harvard, and NYU. For over five decades, you have been conducting ongoing, in-depth research that has broadened and deepened your passion and abiding interest in the Goddess and antiquity.

For many of us, our first introduction to the Goddess and to the great Goddess monuments of ancient Malta and the islands of Scotland, came through your 1994 work Habitations of the Great Goddess. Your 2000 book In the Footsteps of the Goddess, which is a collection of personal stories inspired by the Female Divine, is a first in the field of spirituality. In The Rule of Mars (2006), you bring together an outstanding group of scholars to tackle the questions of when and where the change from a matriarchal to a patriarchal societal structure occurred and what the results of that change were. This pivotal collection not only heightened our understanding of pre-patriarchal societies, but left us with hope and thoughtful suggestions for real change.

In addition to publishing these works, you have spoken about the Goddess, prehistory and the origins of patriarchy throughout the world, bringing these neglected topics to such prestigious venues as the Smithsonian Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, the World Archaeology Conference, the Brooklyn Museum, and the New York Times.

Those of us who know you as a scholar of the Goddess and antiquity can sometimes forget that you are an internationally renowned artist as well. All of your art is entwined with activism in celebration of the Great Goddess. In addition to your figurative sculpture in bronze and wood, you have created political and abstract collages and paintings, constructed large outdoor sculptures from materials found in the natural world. You have created the Goddess Mound, which will be both a sacred place in itself, and a long overdue link to the sacred earthworks that were on this continent long before Europeans arrived.

You have also provided a strong role model as a dedicated athlete: a mountain climber–hiking to some of the most awe-inspiring peaks in the world, including Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Shasta, Mount Rainier, and the active Gorely volcano in Siberia; a world-class swimmer, crossing the Bosphorus, and a 5th degree Blackbelt in Taekwondo sharing that skill as a teacher of Taekwondo with women and girls.

We are happy to honor you as a foremother of the Women’s Spirituality movement, a pre-eminent artist, author, scholar, and tireless feminist activist. You have been and continue to be an inspiration to ASWM members and to women throughout the world.

Past winners of the Saga Award include Dr. Heide Goettner-Abendroth, Genevieve Vaughan, Dr. Peggy Sanday, Z Budapest, Arisika Razak, Donna Read, and Dr. Mara Keller.