2026 Symposium Presenter: Apostolia Papadamaki
“Anamnesis: Embodying Ancient Greek Mysticism Through Ceremonial Performances”
Panel: Revitalizing Sacred Ceremony
2026 Online Symposium, May 3 2026
Reimagining Goddess Scholarship: At the Edges of Sacred Knowledge
Apostolia Papadamaki is a performance artist, ceremonial facilitator, and wisdom keeper working at the intersection of embodied myth, sacred performance, and living Hellenic traditions. She is the founder and artistic director of Anamnesis, a long-term artistic project devoted to ceremonial performance in archaeological sites. For over three decades, she has created site-specific, participatory ritual performances in archaeological sites across Greece, collaborating with professional artists, local communities, women and children to reactivate ancient sacred spaces as fields of embodied remembrance.
Her work is grounded in the ancient Greek concept of Anamnesis, the act of remembering through direct experience rather than intellectual transmission as articulated by Plato. Central to her practice is Orchesis, the ceremonial synthesis of sacred word (logos), music (melos), and embodied movement (kinesis), described by ancient sources as indispensable to ritual life in the ancient Greek world. Through orchesis, myth is approached not as narrative alone, but as a living presence encountered through the body. Apostolia’s performances have taken place in temples, sanctuaries, and museums sacred to Hellenic goddesses and gods. Her creative process weaves together scholarly research, archaeological dialogue, intuitive vision, and dream incubation, often revealing correspondences later confirmed by material evidence and historical sources. These participatory performances unfold as living ceremonies, inviting participants into direct relationship with myth, land, and memory.
Apostolia’s work has been presented internationally in festivals and cultural contexts across Europe,and beyond, supported by major public and cultural institutions. She is also the founder of The Mysteries of Light, a contemporary women’s mystery school rooted exclusively in Hellenic wisdom traditions. Apostolia continues to mentor women worldwide in embodied spiritual practice, mythic remembrance, and ritual art as pathways for re-engaging sacred knowledge in the present.
See Apostolia’s work: Discover Anamnesis, Site Specific Performances
Abstract: It is impossible to determine when human beings first began to observe the movements of the sun and moon, the wandering of the planets, or the mysterious phenomena of the natural world. Across ancient civilizations, the rhythms of light and darkness, growth and decay, stirred awe and fear before the vastness of the cosmos. Among those who gave profound expression to this cosmic awareness were the Ancient Greeks. By observing the rising and setting of the sun, the waxing and waning of the moon, and the cycles of season they developed ceremonies and rituals so they can understand and to unite with nature, with the cosmos, and with the Divine.
Long before classical Greek civilization, the ancestors of the Greeks inhabited the same land and their lineage remains rooted in this same landscape to this day. Within this living continuum emerged the Orphic tradition, centered on Orpheus, regarded as the first theologian of ancient Greece. The Orphics articulated profound visions of cosmos, nature, and the Divine, not as abstract theory, but as initiatory knowledge to be lived. From these teachings arose the rituals and mysteries of ancient Greece: sacred practices offering human beings the inner means to unite with the All, to transcend the fear of death, and to pursue a life of virtue.
Today, the question becomes: how might this initiatory knowledge be embodied in our time?
This presentation explores Anamnesis as an embodied methodology through which Ancient Greek mysticism may be lived in the present. Drawing on the Platonic understanding of ἀνάμνησις as recollection through direct experience, as articulated by Plato, I approach sacred knowledge not as historical content to be reconstructed, but as presence to be embodied. For over three decades, I have created site-specific, participatory ceremonial performances in archaeological spaces across Greece. These works do not attempt to replicate ancient rites. Rather, they cultivate conditions in which embodied remembrance may arise.
Announcing Scholar Salon 97: Register for March 19
“Rewriting Human Strength: What Female Biology Reveals About Survival, Performance, and Power”
with Starre Vartan
Thursday, March 19, 2026 at 3:00 PM Eastern Time
REGISTER HERE
For centuries, we’ve been told a simple story: men are strong, women are weak. It’s a myth so deeply embedded in modern culture that it often feels like biological fact. But when we look closely at the science, that story begins to unravel. Yes, male bodies tend to excel at generating short bursts of upper-body power. But strength is far more complex than how much weight someone can bench press. When we expand our definition beyond visible muscle mass, a very different picture emerges—one grounded in physiology, evolution, and endurance.
The female body has remained remarkably consistent in its core design for tens of thousands of years. Across that time, it evolved not merely to reproduce, but to survive environmental stress, food scarcity, infection, migration, and physical strain. The result is a body built for durability.
Women mount faster and more robust immune responses to many pathogens. Female metabolism is metabolically flexible, allowing for more efficient fat utilization during sustained effort and greater protection during caloric stress. Women often demonstrate superior fatigue resistance and recovery in endurance contexts. Even heightened perceptual sensitivity—long dismissed as weakness—reflects neurological responsiveness that enhances environmental awareness and social cohesion.
This talk reframes strength as a multidimensional biological reality rather than a single performance metric. Drawing from evolutionary biology, physiology, and contemporary research, it reveals the adaptive advantages embedded in female bodies. When we redefine strength, we don’t just update the science—we challenge a cultural narrative that has shaped medicine, sport, and social norms for generations—and how we understand history.
Starre Vartan writes about health & science, the natural world, and the female body—especially the parts that are strong, misunderstood, or totally ignored. Her science journalism and investigative reporting has been published in National Geographic, Scientific American, Slate, The Washington Post, Undark, New Scientist, and other outlets where curiosity—and research rigor—are job requirements. She’s also published essays in Aeon’s Psyche, Candidly, and in her newsletter, Palimpsest of Flesh, as well as short fiction.
Her second book, The Stronger Sex: What Science Tells Us About the Power of the Female Body (Seal Press/Hachette, July 2025), has been published in the US & Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and is forthcoming in China and Korea. It is a science-backed, myth-busting love letter to the female body—an exploration of the female body’s sensitivity, endurance, immunity, longevity, and more. In addition to her science writing, Starre is a 5Rhythms and ecstatic dancer, trailrunner and weightlifter, and a ceramicist of surrealist female goddesses. She splits her time between the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. and the Illawarra Coast south of Sydney, Australia, and grew up in New York. A dual citizen of the US and Australia, Starre has a Bachelors of Science in Geology from Syracuse University and a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Columbia University.
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2026 Symposium Presenter: Kay Turner
“Dining with Hekate: Embodied Knowledge as a Source of Nourishment”
Panel: “Revitalizing Sacred Ceremony”
2026 Online Symposium, May 3 2026
Reimagining Goddess Scholarship: At the Edges of Sacred Knowledge
Dr. Kay Turner is an artist and scholar working across disciplines including performance, writing, music, and folklore. Since 2012 Turner’s performance works and writing have revolved around an exploration of the witch figure in folklore and history. She has worked with artist Elizabeth Insogna on several projects exploring the Greek goddess Hekate, including “Healing Persephone Wounds” (National Art Gallery, NYC, 2021) and “A Hekate Supper”, Parts 1 and 2 (Five Myles Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, 2022). She is the founding editor and publisher of Lady-Unique-Inclination-of-the-Night, a journal of art and the goddess (1976-1983). Her books include What a Witch: Before and After, with Zini Lardieri (2021); Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms, with Pauline Greenhill (2012) and Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars (1999). She holds a PhD in Folklore and Anthropology (UT Austin) and taught for 20 years in the Performance Studies Department at NYU. Turner is a past president of the American Folklore Society. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Presentation Description: Hekate has often been called the Goddess of Witches. She was and is that, but also so much more. In ancient Greece her worship took place in temples and also at house-post altars and crossroad shrines. At these shrines devotees gathered to feast—their meal was called “a Hekate supper—and make petitions for Hekate’s intercession.
My presentation proposes a feast with Hekate getting to know her many facets including her lineage, her epithets, her invocations, her rites, her symbols, her realms, and her alliances. I have done a number of ritual performances that attempt to deconstruct aspects of Hekate through ritual means. This lecture is largely based on a performance called “A Hekate Supper, Parts 1 and 2” that I did in 2022 at Five Myles Gallery in Brooklyn. This, as well as other performances I have done in my “What A Witch” series begun in 2012, is framed by my practice of embodied knowledge: sealing the history and folklore of various witch figures in ritual experience. Each “What A Witch” begins with a performative lecture followed by a ritual that invites participation from the audience.
This symposium presentation must of course forego full-on ritual but I will discuss Hekate in light of embodied knowledge and queer pedagogy. I highlight Hekate’s recognition and repair of brokenness as seen in her role in the myth of Demeter’s separation from Persephone. Hekate heard the cries of Persephone and lighted the way to her recovery.To repair brokenness is her moral charge. She urges commingling, links worlds together, threads connections. A goddess sought after to repair brokenness, her work was made most potent through her union of the living and the dead.
I also share some research and thinking that came out of a recent ritual performance at the School of Visual Arts *NYC) called “Aphrodite’s Mirror/Hekate’s Reflection.” The performance explores beauty and hag-ery in an exchange of gifts between Aphrodite and Hekate. A critique of ageism but also a solution, Aphrodite and Hekate, both known as transgressors of boundaries, are viewed as equals and allies in dismantling false hierarchies.
Announcing Scholar Salon 96: Register for March 5
“She Who Endures: Power, Politics, and the Iconography of Artemis of Ephesus”
with Dr. Carla Ionescu
Thursday, March 5, 2026 at 3:00 PM Eastern Time
REGISTER HERE
In her latest book, She Who Endures: The Cult and Iconography of Artemis of Ephesus, Dr. Carla Ionescu reexamines one of the most misunderstood divine figures of the ancient Mediterranean. Far from being a regional curiosity or an anomaly within Greek religion, Artemis of Ephesus was a powerful, adaptive, and politically embedded goddess whose cult shaped civic identity, imperial diplomacy, and religious imagination for centuries.
This lecture explores how the Ephesian Artemis functioned simultaneously as city protectress, cosmic sovereign, and sacred embodiment of continuity. Drawing on archaeological evidence, temple dedications, imperial coinage, inscriptions, and sculptural programs, the talk traces how her distinctive iconography emerged and evolved across Archaic, Hellenistic, and Roman contexts. Particular attention will be given to the famous cult statue type and the symbolic language embedded in its form, including animal imagery, cosmic references, and ritual ornamentation.
Rather than treating Artemis of Ephesus as a deviation from the “Greek” Artemis, this presentation argues for theological continuity across her manifestations. The Ephesian goddess reveals how local tradition, Anatolian religious heritage, and Greek cult practice intertwined to produce a form of sacred authority that endured political change, imperial control, and shifting religious landscapes.
By examining the material record alongside literary testimony and civic history, this lecture invites us to reconsider how ancient communities constructed divine power, and how modern scholarship has often constrained it. Artemis of Ephesus did not simply survive history. She shaped it.
Dr. Carla Ionescu is an ancient historian and author specializing in Greek religion and Mediterranean cult traditions. She has taught at several Canadian universities and colleges, bringing over a decade of experience in both in-person and online instruction. Her research focuses on the material culture, sanctuaries, and evolving iconography of Artemis across the Mediterranean world. She is the author of She Who Hunts: Artemis, the Goddess Who Changed the World (2022) and She Who Endures: The Cult and Iconography of Artemis of Ephesus (2025). Her work combines archaeological evidence, inscriptions, literary sources, and site-based research to reconstruct how Artemis functioned within civic, political, and ritual life from the Archaic period through Late Antiquity.
Dr. Ionescu is also the founder of the Artemis Mapping Project, an ongoing digital initiative documenting sanctuaries and dedications to Artemis across the Mediterranean, Balkans, and Near East. Through public lectures, workshops, and field research, she works to make ancient material culture accessible to both academic and public audiences. Her current projects explore Artemis in relation to mountain traditions, animal sovereignty, and the broader religious networks of the ancient world.
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