News

Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum

Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Professor Emerita, Women’s Spirituality, CIIS, joins ASWM’s 2016 conference to deliver Saturday’s keynote address, “Women as Visionaries and Healers.”

Known to her students as LuLu Nanna (grandma) and Strega Nonna (witch grandmother), Lucia’s groundbreaking research in Black Madonnas: Feminism, Religion, and Politics in Italy was followed by She is Everywhere: Anthology of Writings in Womanist/Feminist Spirituality, edited with Annette Williams, Karen Villanueva, and The Future has an Ancient Heart: Caring, Sharing, Healing from the African Mediterranean to Occupy Everywhere.

“In a time of unprecedented peril (global heating, perpetual war, nuclear danger, moral disarray) I am a great grandmother who can not afford to be hopeless.”

“ My research, books, and life suggest that even when there is no evidence for hope, there may be possibilities we can not see. These possibilities are related to every human’s origin in Africa—we are all ultimately sisters and brothers, a legacy of human migrations after 60,000 BCE to all continents out of Africa—caring, sharing, healing—otherwise we would not have survived to now. A kaleidoscopic dance of our genes in loving encounters creating a highly multicultural world in an open-ended universe.”

Lucia is dedicating her offerings this year to ASWM sister scholar, artist, and dear friend, Lydia Ruyle, who is, today, critically ill.

Citing Lydia’s inspiration, Lucia explains, “Lydia has been significant in my life, personally and professionally. She helped me through the searing time when I was unable to present to the ASWM 2012 conference because my husband Wally was dying. In my conflict with my publisher over the cover of The Future Has an Ancient Heart, Lydia saved the book with her banner of Cybele, African and West Asian dark mother for the front cover. Recently she honored me by dedicating her banner, La Befana, to me, depicting me as witch grandmother (strega nonna) who brings gifts to all children, whether they’re naughty or nice. She called her banners, “my girls,” suggesting the reflexive nurturing she conveyed in the banners she painted and sewed. And showed all over the world, touching thousands, if not millions of women while conveying her early aphorism, “Better Homes and Goddesses”. . . in all the wonderful diversity of the world’s women and their homes.”

All of us in ASWM share in Lucia’s love and concern for Lydia, who is a dear mentor and friend to many of us on the board.

The Friday networking luncheon features an opportunity for conversation with Lucia at her table: “Strega Nonna – Witch Grandmother.”

Additionally, Lucia will present at our sister gathering, the Matriarchal Studies Day, on Thursday night, March 31: Modern Matriarchies, where she is the keynote and closing speaker, discussing her newest manuscript, “Black Bird and a Pear Tree.”

The Story of Niibish with Ann Megisikwe Filemyr and Tahnahga Yako Myers

 

The Story of Niibish will be told, an ancestral tale of the long-ago handed down through the Oral Tradition of the Anishinaabeg peoples. Ann Megisikwe and Tahnahga both carry this story as part of their role as lineage carriers of the late Keewydinoquay, an Anishinaabe mashkikikwe (Ojibwe herbal medicine woman).

This traditional story carries medicine to help wound the ruptures that can befall families, communities, and nations when division is based on difference and a lack of understanding ensues. It is a sacred story that reminds us of our fundamental interconnection and interdependence on each other and on water and all that lives, grows and flourishes in the waters, fresh or saltwater.

This story helps us recall our fundamental kinship with the other-than-human realms and reminds us that we are all related despite the appearance of surface differences. It helps us reach back into our own ancestral memories to recall the stories in most coastal cultures regarding the finned people. Perhaps they are half human and half fish, but weren’t we all underwater beings conceived in the watery womb of our mother’s bodies? Are Mer stories also tales of our earliest form of becoming? Are they persistent memories that continue to fascinate and intrigue us?

In this time of large scale environmental and social destruction, how do we reclaim the knowledge contained in these ancient tales in order to re-imagine our relationships and re-structure our lives to include the magical?

Join us for this exploration.

We have a wonderful program of presentations this year.  

Below you will find the schedule and here 2016 ASWM Schedule PDF if you want to print it off. 

 PLEASE BE AWARE that the schedule, like life itself,  is subject to change!  

And–here are the Abstracts for those great presentations.

ASWM 2016 CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

FRIDAY, APRIL 1, 2016

 7:30 am: Registration

8:30 am Room 1

Welcome and Opening

SESSION A: 9:00 am-10:15 am

Room 1

KEYNOTE: Dr. Elinor Gadon, History or Mystery: Fact of Fiction?

BREAK

SESSION B: 10:30 am -12:00 pm

 Room 1

Panel Title: Defiant Mothers, Rebellious Daughters: Patriarchal Family Myths and Matriarchal Mothering

1. Tamara Agha-Jaffar, Demeter, Persephone and Iambe: Three Rebels with Cause
2. Mariam Tazi-Preve, The Mother Trap
3. Molly Claire Benjamin, Magic and Fertility: The Goddess Freya as the Female Orphan Archetype

Room 2

Panel Title: Re-visioning and Hospitality in the Sacred Home of the Feminine

1. Marcella De Veaux, In Search of Home: Summoning the Goddess Ala
2. Gina Belton, The Indigenous Feminine: Fierce Receptivity in Cultivating an Ethic of Radical Hospitality
3. Toni Truesdale, Feminine Centered Dwellings as Areas of Sacred Protection

 Room 3

Panel Title: Matriarchal Studies: Past Debates and Present Practices

Moderator: Joan Cichon

1. Heide Goettner-Abendroth via Skype, Matriarchal Studies: Past Debates and Present New Foundation
2. Lydia Ruyle, Matriarchal Studies: A Visual, Global History
3. Cristina Biaggi, Matriarchy as Inspiration for Art
4. Kim Duckett, Being Audacious: Conceptualizing a Contemporary Goddess Women’s Community as a Matriarchal Culture

Room 4

Workshops (45 minutes each)

1. Mama Donna Henes, Mythology, the Matriarchy, and Me “The Story of Us”
2. Alisa Starkweather, The Builder’s Daughter: Out of the land, out of the myths, comes our living work.

LUNCH & KEYNOTE– 12:15 – 1:45

Room 1

KEYNOTE: Dr. Margaret Bruchac, Pudjinskewss: Transgressive Animalities in Algonkian Indian Stories (working title)

SESSION C: 1:45 pm – 3:15 pm

 Room 1

Panel Title: Artists, Activists, and Scientists and the Lineage of the Goddess

1. Genevieve Vaughan, The Temple of Sekhmet as Harbour and Hearth
2. Simone Clunie, The Representation of Goddess Imagery in Feminist Art
3. Nancy Vedder-Shults, Science and Divination: The Blurring Lines between the Secular and the Sacred
4. Christine Keating, Dickinson, mythopoeia, and the Akasha Paradigm

Room 2

Title: Goddesses of the Americas

(45 minutes each)

1. Anne Key and Veronica Iglesias, Fierce, and Com/Passionate and Protective: Goddesses from Central Mexico
2. Lydia Ruyle, Images and Herstories/ Goddesses of the Americas

 Room 3

Panel Title: Light in the Darkness: Locating The Goddess in Ritual Space

1. Robin Hanson, Acllacunas: Sacred Women or Virgins of the Sun
2. Jessica Bowman, The Dark Goddess
3. Mary Louise Stone, Ancient Andean Mother and Third Millenium BCE Hearths

Room 4

Workshops (45 minutes each)

1. Kate Brunner, Becoming Branwen the Peaceweaver: A Meditative Writing Workshop for Personal Healing and Cultural Activism
2. Marie Summerwood, Chanting to Heal the Spiral Everywhere

BREAK

 SESSION D: 3:30 pm: 5:00 pm

Room 1

Panel Title: Ritual, Tradition and Feminine Intuition among the Wabanaki of Maine and the Canadian Maritimes.

Room 2

Workshops (45 minutes each)

1. Betsy Crane, Implications of the Goddess for Gendered Sexuality: Then and Now
2. Holly Bellebuono, Women Healers of the World

 Room 3

Panel Title: Social Justice as Spiritual Choice: The Transpersonal and Transformative Goddess

1. Shirindokht Nourmanesh, The Transpersonal in Women without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur
2. Keisha Kogan, A Queering of the Waters in the Orisha in Santeria: Yemaya and Oshun through the Lens of Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderland
3. Yuria Celidwen, Tonantzin Coatlicue Guadalupe: Christian Symbolism, Colonization and Social Justice

Room 4

Film, to be announced

 BREAK

SESSION E: 5:15 pm – 6:45 pm

Room 1

Panel Title: Embracing Transgression: Women’s Spirituality and Atypical Goddess Myths

1. Malgorzata Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, Liminality, Transgression, and Feminine Empowerment: The case of Kali and Pombagira
2. Marie Lucie Tarpent, The Animal Origins of Medusa and some other Atypical Female Deities
3. Rekha Vijayashankar, Kali’s Roar: The Rise of the Sacred Feminine as Light unto Darkness ( A Story from Indian History and Mythology)

 Room 2

Panel Title: Hearing the Call of the Ancestors through Myth, Lineage, and the Spirit of Place

1. Mary Beth Moser, Sacred Landscape: Folk Stories, Ancestral Values and the Importance of Place
2. Maryka Ives Paquette, Tracing Roots in Ancestral Lands: Remembering Through Relationship to Place
3. Marion Gail Dumont, Gateways to Submerged Histories: Biographies, Folklore and Place

Room 3

Panel Title: Male-Female Relationships in Hebrew Texts: Three Feminist Analyses

1. Judith Laura, via Skype, Gender Equity in Kabbalah?
2. Rabbi Jill Hammer, The King and the Priestess: Mythic Motifs and Motives in the Tale of Judah and Tamar
3. Judith Maeryam Wouk, Teraphim and the Role of Women

Room 4

Workshops (45 minutes each)

1. Laura Thomae, Drumming in the Dark: Integrating Music Therapy and Traditional Healing Practices in Hospice
2. Laney Goodman, Mother Drum Ceremonial Circle

BREAK – DINNER ON YOUR OWN

SESSION F: 7:30pm – Room 1

Authors read their spiritual stories, from award winning anthology, Foremothers of Women’s Spirituality: Elders and Visionaries

Moderated by Miriam Robbins Dexter and Vicki Noble and featuring: Max Dashu, Starr Goode, Mama Donna Henes, Donna Read, Genevieve Vaughan, Cristina Biaggi, Lydia Ruyle, Miranda Shaw, Elinor Gadon, and Susun Weed

——————————————————————————————————–

 SATURDAY, APRIL 2, 2016

 8:30 am – Room 1

Opening and Announcements

SESSION G: 9:00 am – 10:15 am

Room 1

Panel Title: Wheels of the Goddess

1. Alexandra Cichon, Reflections on Reclaiming the Wheel of Ariadne of Bronze Age Crete
2. Joan Cichon, The Forgotten Goddesses of Ariadne’s Wheel
3. Kim Duckett, The Wheel of the Year as an Earth-Based Spiritual Psychology for Women
4. Barb Lutz, Synthesizing Goddess, Nature, Priestess, and Archeomythology: Creating Sacred Space for the Wheel of the Year

 Room 2

Panel Title: Matriarchal Matrix and Patriarchal Overlay: Three Historical Patterns

1. Constance Tippett, Archaeological Evidence of Ancient Women’s Gatherings
2. Elizabeth Kingswood, Gantowisas: The Role of Women within the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy and her Influence on the Early Suffrage Movement
3. Laura Truxler, Through the Seer Stone: Cultural Landscape of Ancestral Memory and Four Generations of Early Mormon Progenitors on the Eastern Seaboard

Room 3

Panel Title: Rage, Ravages, and Rapture: Applying Goddess Wisdom to the Grieving Mother

1. Stephanie Zajchowski, Persephone’s Perception: The Paradox of Motherhood
2. Kayden Baker-McInnis, The Rich Dark of Grief: The Myths of Niobe and Demeter
3. Jaffa Frank, Objective Relatedness, Radical Empathy, and Letting Go
4. Angelina Avedano, Raging Grief and Dual Descent

Room 4

Roundtable: Native American Issues and Scholarship

BREAK

 SESSION H: 10:30 am-12:00 pm

 Room 1

Panel Title: Women’s Wisdom and Sacred Rites of Water

1. Mary Beth Moser, Flowing Across Time: Women, Water and the Sacred in the Italian Alps
2. Gayatri Devi and Savithri Shanker de Tourreil, Immersion: Sea and Sexuality in Goddess Myths
3. Jelka Vince Pallua, The Slavic Baba as an Aquatic Goddess

Room 2

Panel Title: Native Artists with Laura Fragua Cota

Presenters: Laura Fragua-Cota and others to be announced

Room 3

Panel Title: Goddess Myths, Nature, Wilderness and the Animal World

1. Kathryn Henderson, Deer, Women, Myth, and Spirit
2. Ingrid Kincaid, Playing by your Own Rules When the Gods Cheat: The Saga of Skadi
3. Kayden Baker-McInnis, Wilderness, Women and Soul-Making
4. Heather Kohser, Heroic Hummingbirds

Room 4

Film to be announced

 SESSION 1: 12:15 pm- 1:30 pm

Room 1

ASWM AWARDS AND NETWORKING LUNCHEON

SESSION J: 1:45 pm – 3:15 pm

Room 1

Panel title: By the Light and the Dark of the Moon – Lunar Knowing: The Cyclic, Dark and Regenerative Moon Nurturing Wisdom, Culture, and Research

1. Vicki Noble, Lunar Cycle Mandala and Its Cross-Cultural Evolutionary Significance
2. Demetra George, via Skype, Dark Moon Life Transitions
3. Marna Hauk, Lunar Inquiry

Room 2

Title: The Story of Niibish: Mer People of the St. Lawrence Seaway & the Great Lakes

Ann Filemyr and Tahnahga Yako Myers

Room 3

Panel Title: Women’s Spirituality, Transformative Scholarship and Personal Quest

1. Diane Jennett, Reweaving the Web: Ancestral Relationships in Research and Life
2. Kate Brunner, Rhiannon, Great Queen of the Mabinogi: Ancient Mythology in Modern Context as a Tool for Personal Healing and Social Justice Activism
3. Natasha Redina, Finding Light in Darkness: The Process of Descent from Ancient Goddesses to Present Day Women

Room 4

Workshop: April Heaslip, Reclaiming ISIS: From Traumatic Othering to Tending and Befriending

BREAK

 SESSION K: 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm

Room 1

Title: The Distaff: Fates, Witches, and Women’s Power

Max Dashu

Room 2

Title: The Role of the Traditional Ecological Knowledge in an Era of Global Change

Cristina Eisenberg

Room 3

 Panel Title: Sacred Lineages and the Spirit of Place

1. Barbara Daughter, Women are the Revolution: Examining the Lessons of my Motherline while Honoring the Legacy of Deborah Sampson
2. Margaret Lynn Mitchell, Seeking Sanctuary with Saint Brigid of Ireland: A Harbor of Sacred Feminine Divinity
3. Jennifer Smith, Finding the Feminine at MIT: The Great Mother Goddess under the Great Dome
4. Rain Hastings, Vinotok: Cultural Transformation through Community Ritual.

Room 4

Film and Filmmakers Roundtable

 BREAK

SESSION L: 5:15 pm – 6:45 pm

Room 1

KEYNOTE: Women as Visionaries and Healers

Dr. Lucia Ciavola Birnbaum

BREAK—DINNER ON YOUR OWN

SESSION M: 7:30 pm

 Room 1

Special showing: Yemanjá: Wisdom from the African Heart of Brazil

A film produced/directed by Donna Carole Roberts, directed/edited by Donna Read, and narrated by Alice Walker

 The Candomblé spiritual tradition in Bahia, Brazil, a vibrant African-derived culture that evolved from slavery’s brutal past. Elder women leaders tell stories of Candomblé’s history, social challenges and triumphs, grounded in strong community, and Earth-based wisdom and practice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mama Donna Henes (“Mythology, the Matriarchy, and Me” & workshop: “The Story of Us”)

 

 

Mama Donna is a ritualist and award-winning writer whose work focuses on healing self, society, and planet. She designs and leads multi-cultural, non-denominational celebrations, using ancient, traditional rituals and contemporary ceremonies.

She maintains a ceremonial center, ritual practice and consultancy in Exotic Brooklyn, New York, Mama Donna’s Tea Garden and Healing Haven, where she works with individuals and groups to create personalized rituals for all of life’s transitions. Her story is included in the new book, Foremothers of Women’s Spirituality, whose authors will be featured at the conference.

“2015 was an especially, devastatingly, brutal year for so many people everywhere. The patriarchal powers-that-be have created a complete mess. Clearly, it is up to us women to roll up our sleeves and get busy putting life back together again.  It might be too late, already, but I fervently believe that if there is any hope at all for healing this planet and all who live upon it, that hope is us. What in the world are we waiting for?

“I hereby call on women everywhere to take a stand and use our vast stores of wisdom, experience, creativity, and chutzpah do something positive, each in our own unique and inimitable way, toward creating a better world for us all.  If not us, who? If not now, when?”

Mama Donna will give a workshop and present on the Friday night author panel for the book release for Foremothers of the Women’s Spirituality Movement:  Elders and Visionaries.

 

Demetra George (“Dark Moon Life Traditions”)

“Since ancient times the Moon has been worshipped as the Queen of the Night. Dating to at least 35,000 years ago, artifacts from the upper Paleolithic era (sequences of notches carved into bone, stone, and ivory) are thought to be the earliest lunar phase calendars. By gazing at the Moon and tracking her phases, early peoples regulated their lives according to lunar rhythms. They watched the Moon change place, color, shape, and disappear and reappear each month.”

Demetra George, M.A., looks to classical antiquity for inspiration in her pioneering work in mythic archetypal astrology, ancient Hellenistic techniques and history, and translations from Greek of primary source astrological texts. She is the author of Astrology For Yourself, Asteroid Goddesses, Mysteries of the Dark Moon, Finding Our Way Through the Dark, and Astrology and the Authentic Self. She lives in Oregon, lectures internationally, and leads pilgrimages to the sacred sites in Greece, Italy, Egypt, and India.  She offers personal astrological consultations and mentors individual students in all levels of astrological education.

Demetra will be joining her panel (Lunar Knowing: The Cyclic, Dark, and Regenerative Moon Nurturing Wisdom, Culture, and Research) by Skype from Oregon.

Judith Laura (“Gender Equity in Kabbalah?” )

Judith, author of three Goddess books, has been active in feminist spirituality since the 1970s.  She is Jewish by birth, and Unitarian Universalist and Goddessian by choice.

Her first Goddess writings, “Women’s Celebrations,” first published in 1978 in the journal Womanspirit, became part of her first Goddess book, She Lives! The Return of Our Great Mother: Myths, Rituals, Music & Meditations (1989). The second enlarged edition of her second book, Goddess Spirituality for the 21^stCentury: from Kabbalah to Quantum Physics, won the comparative religion category of USA Best Book Awards 2009.

In her Conference presentation she’ll discuss this book’s analyses of Jewish Kabbalah and Hermetic Qabalah and her more gender-equitable revisioning of their Tree of Life.

Her most recent book, Goddess Matters: the Mystical, Practical, & Controversial, received finalist awards in two categories from the International Book Awards 2012.

She blogs as Medusa on Medusa Coils and is founder of the Asherah yahoogroup.

Of her work she says: “When I first started writing Goddess Spirituality for the 21^st Century, I thought that Kabbalah would be only a small part of the book. Both Tarot, which often uses qabalistic correspondences, and my introduction to Jewish Kabbalah in a DC-area feminist spirituality group played parts in developing my interest in exploring the Tree of Life which is central to kabbalistic forms. But I feel the most important role was played by a divine emanation on the Tree called, in Hebrew, Hokmah. In English, this is Wisdom, and in Greek, Sophia. I believe this spiritual form, which I consider a Goddess, led me to discover that the Tree was not as gender-equitable as many assume and to the re-visioning I did.”

Judith will join her panel, Male-Female Relationships in Hebrew Texts: Three Feminist Analyses, via Skype.