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2010 Conference Summary

The Green Goddess, Our first biennial multi-day conference, was held April 23 to 25, 2010, at Kirkridge Retreat Center, Bangor, PA.

The Labyrinth at Kirkridge Retreat Center
Labyrinth at Kirkridge

Keynote speakers included Max Dashu of Suppressed Histories with a tour de force presentation on female icons, Cristina Eisenberg (a wolf biologist who is actively engaged in ecological restoration that supports sustainability of wildlife communities and of the human spirit), Dr. Ann Filemyr on healing from the nature/culture divide, and Cristina Biaggi on the Great Goddess as a green goddess, through the lens of art and history.

Margot Adler was honored with our first Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality, and the Kore Award for Best Dissertation in Goddess Studies went to Dawn Work-Makinne, Ph.D.

Lydia Ruyle’s inspiring goddess banners graced the meeting space, and she will offered an art workshop. Our film series premiered “Pink Smoke Over the Vatican,” about the ordination of Catholic women priests, and featured ethnologist Sabine Jell-Bahlson’s film on Mammywata.

Topics included lady of the beasts, publishing goddess scholarship, spiritual geometry and the goddess, archaeomythology, the divine feminine as vortex, finding your sacred language, the wheel of the year as spiritual psychology, frog mysteries, and much more.

Poet Annie Finch gave a masked reading; novelist Elizabeth Cunningham read from her Maeve novels; storyteller Diane Wolkstein presented The Monkey King; and singer Ruth Barrett gave a “concert for Gaia.”

The 2010 conference took place at the beautiful Kirkridge Retreat Center, atop the Pocono mountain ridges near the Delaware Water Gap.  Kirkridge is located about 90 minutes from both New York City and Philadelphia.

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A Note about Bees

by ASWM President Sid Reger

ASWM’s mission is to promote the study of mythology.  Myths about animals are essential to our ability to explain our humanity to ourselves.  And they are based on observation of the wonders and magic of living species.  We can’t isolate ourselves from our animal “relations” whose wisdom we celebrate.  We have an obligation to promote their welfare along with our own.

Bee Goddess of Rhodes

We chose the image of the Bee Goddess as our logo and central metaphor for ASWM for very good reasons.  It is not only that bees are great collaborators and communicators. The honey they produce is a magical substance unlike any other, sweet beyond compare, more often given through cooperation than taken by competition.  Honey is also associated with shamanic travel and physical healing.  Myths of bees are intimately related to the myths of goddesses in many traditions, and more often associated with women than men. Continue reading “A Note about Bees”

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Margot Adler Receives 2010 Demeter Award

On April 2010, ASWM conferred the first Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality to journalist and cultural commentator Margot Adler.

Margot Adler is a long-time correspondent for National Public Radio, based in NPR’s New York Bureau. Her reports can be heard regularly on All Things Considered, Morning Edition and Weekend Edition. From 1999-2008, Adler was also the host of NPR’s Justice Talking, a weekly show exploring constitutional controversies in the nation’s courts.

Adler is the author of the ground-breaking study of alternative spirituality in America, Drawing Down the Moon, which introduced nature religions to hundreds of thousands of readers.  She is an active lecturer on pagan studies and women’s spirituality.  The presentation of the first Demeter Award to Adler recognized her influence in changing public perceptions of women’s religions, past and present.

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Review: A Modern Mythmaker in Wyoming

A Woman to Match A Mountain: Neal Forsling and Crimson Dawn.

Film review by Sid Reger, Ed. D.

Neal Forsling

Are myths and legends only available from ancient sources?  This charming biographical film proves that it’s possible for a modern woman to single-handedly build a myth tradition that continues to thrive in Wyoming 80 years after its creation.  Neal Forsling was herself the stuff of legend, a young woman who divorced in the 1920s and moved with her two girls to homestead on a mountaintop in the rugged land near Casper.  There she not only defied convention as a writer and artist, but in 1930, at her Summer Solstice party, she started a living myth tradition: the Witches of Crimson Dawn.

Witches and lanterns, N. Forsling

Through telling and enacting stories for the children of the mountain, Neal and her friends created an ongoing celebration of fairies, witches, and other mythic characters.  She maintained that the Crimson Witch approached her when she moved to the land, and told her to protect the beautiful mountain and pass its stories on to willing visitors. As the Bohemian group of artists in Casper grew, so did the energy for creating the stories of the witches, (benevolent spirits) elves, and woodcutters. Continue reading “Review: A Modern Mythmaker in Wyoming”

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Green Goddess Conference–A “Life-weaving Web”

Annie Finch at Kirkridge, photo by Ora Wry

Award-winning poet Annie Finch, featured speaker at our ASWM Conference, reflects on the activities of the weekend:

The ASWM conference was truly a life-weaving web–and a life-changing one for me. I have rarely (never?!!) read for an audience that “got” my goddess poems so profoundly–it was humbling. Overall, the quality of so many presentations was so high–and the content so amazing, so rich, so nourishing. I especially remember performances by Elizabeth Cunningham in her bawdy bodice, reciting a Magdalen prologue from memory prefaced and concluded by songs (what novelist ever does that??!); Cristina Eisenberg’s superb keynote presentation on women and wolves; the remarkable world premiere of the film Pink Smoke Over the Vatican; untangling patriarchy over lunch with Oloye Aina Olomo; dancing a raucous Sicilian dance and participating in Betz King’s superb womb-healing ceremony; being inundated, filled, by fantastic presentations exploring images of the Goddess in the form of bee, butterfly, deer, snake, wolf. . . and meeting so many new and established (Margot Adler! Diane Wolkstein!) brave scholars, writers, and artists, who give so much, care so much, do so much to further this much-needed herstory. I wish ASWM a long and flourishing life, since I know that will mean many more astounding conferences!