“The Woman who Married the Bear and Original Instructions”

with Kaarina Kailo

Thursday,  March 23, 2023 at NOON Eastern Time 

REGISTER HERE

The Spring festivals with, among others, bear goddess Brigit at the forefront celebrated gifting, food and collective merry-making as life returned. The Bear gave a woman the original instructions. Gifting ensured people did not overuse their resources of the commons. It is by comparing variants of the story of the Woman Who Married a Bear that we can see most clearly how the attitude towards mother and bear worship has changed in the shift from pre-christian to Christian and patriarchal cultures. The current threats to an ecosocially sustainable future require that we re-introduce ecomyths and rituals that reflect an understanding of humans’ interdependence with the community of sentient beings and Inter-relational ecosystems. I describe how the original instructions of matricultures in northern Finno-Ugric cultures have been appropriated and changed to serve patriarchal values.

Watch for the forthcoming (June 2023), The Woman Who Married the Bear. The Spirituality of the Ancient Foremothers by Barbara Alice Mann and Kaarina Kailo (Oxford UP; see Mann-Kailo book).  This book surveys Indigenous traditions across the global North, including North America and Eurasia, with matriarchal traditions of Women marrying the Bear in both, sporting caves as wombs, water as earth’s amniotic fluid, and birth-renewal as the point of thanksgiving. In North America, traditions stretch back to the Bölling−Allerød warming, 15,000 BP and come forward into historical times. In Eurasia, starting with the earliest “Venus” figurines of bear-headed women, 35,000 BP, traditions connect fire, water, earth, forest, and “Bear-Women” spirits to matriarchy. In both instances, women and bears originally collaborate through time-keeping star configurations and winter cave-dwelling, as symbolized by the spring awakening from hibernation followed by the birth of “cubs.” 

Dr. Kaarina Kailo has worked as prof. or senior scholar of Women’s Studies in Finland and Canada. Her expertise includes Northern indigenous studies, ecomythology and bear spirituality. Her hundreds of publications, books, articles, edited or co-edited volumes include Wo/men & Bears— Nature, Culture, Gender; Finnish Goddess Mythology and the Golden Woman; Mothering, Gift and Revolution and studies on sauna spirituality.

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Scholar Salons will resume later in the year following our International Conference “Waters of Life,” May 5-6 2023 in Syracuse NY.

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

“Philippine Shamans and Voice and Gender and Place”

with Grace Nono

Thursday,  March 9, 2023 at NOON Eastern Time 

REGISTER HERE

Babaylan Sing Back is Grace Nono’s most recent work, which depicts the embodied voices of Native Philippine ritual specialists popularly known as babaylan. These ritual specialists are widely believed to have perished during colonial times, or to survive on the margins in the present-day. They are either persecuted as witches and purveyors of superstition, or valorized as symbols of gender equality and anticolonial resistance. Drawing on fieldwork in the Philippines and in the Philippine diaspora, Grace’s deep engagement with the song and speech of a number of living ritual specialists demonstrates Native historical agency in the 500th year anniversary of the contact between the people of the Philippine Islands and the European colonizers.

Grace Nono, Ph.D., is an ethnomusicologist and scholar of Philippine shamanism. She is also a music-performing artist, and founding president of the Tao Foundation for Culture and Arts, a non-profit organization that contributes to cultural revitalization in the Philippines. Among Grace’s books are Babaylan Sing Back: Philippine Shamans and Voice, Gender and Place (Ateneo University Press, 2023, and Cornell University Press–Southeast Asia Program, 2021); Song of the Babaylan: Living Voices, Medicines, Spiritualities of Philippine Ritualist-Oralist-Healers (Institute of Spirituality in Asia, 2013); and The Shared Voice: Chanted and Spoken Narratives from the Philippines (ANVIL and Fundacion Santiago, 2008). For further information about Grace Nono, see  www.gracenono.com.

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Save this date for the next ASWM Salon:

March 23, 2023 “The Woman Who Married a Bear and Original Instructions” with Kaarina Kailo

NOTE: We will resume our Salon series later in the year, after our May 5-6 Conference!

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

“The Woman who Married the Bear and Original Instructions”

with Kaarina Kailo

Thursday,  February 23, 2023 at NOON Eastern Time 

RESCHEDULED FOR MARCH 23, 2023

REGISTER HERE

The Spring festivals with, among others, bear goddess Brigit at the forefront celebrated gifting, food and collective merry-making as life returned. The Bear gave a woman the original instructions. Gifting ensured people did not overuse their resources of the commons. It is by comparing variants of the story of the Woman Who Married a Bear that we can see most clearly how the attitude towards mother and bear worship has changed in the shift from pre-christian to Christian and patriarchal cultures. The current threats to an ecosocially sustainable future require that we re-introduce ecomyths and rituals that reflect an understanding of humans’ interdependence with the community of sentient beings and Inter-relational ecosystems. I describe how the original instructions of matricultures in northern Finno-Ugric cultures have been appropriated and changed to serve patriarchal values.

Watch for the forthcoming (June 2023), The Woman Who Married the Bear. The Spirituality of the Ancient Foremothers by Barbara Alice Mann and Kaarina Kailo (Oxford UP; see Mann-Kailo book).  This book surveys Indigenous traditions across the global North, including North America and Eurasia, with matriarchal traditions of Women marrying the Bear in both, sporting caves as wombs, water as earth’s amniotic fluid, and birth-renewal as the point of thanksgiving. In North America, traditions stretch back to the Bölling−Allerød warming, 15,000 BP and come forward into historical times. In Eurasia, starting with the earliest “Venus” figurines of bear-headed women, 35,000 BP, traditions connect fire, water, earth, forest, and “Bear-Women” spirits to matriarchy. In both instances, women and bears originally collaborate through time-keeping star configurations and winter cave-dwelling, as symbolized by the spring awakening from hibernation followed by the birth of “cubs.” 

Dr. Kaarina Kailo has worked as prof. or senior scholar of Women’s Studies in Finland and Canada. Her expertise includes Northern indigenous studies, ecomythology and bear spirituality. Her hundreds of publications, books, articles, edited or co-edited volumes include Wo/men & Bears— Nature, Culture, Gender; Finnish Goddess Mythology and the Golden Woman; Mothering, Gift and Revolution and studies on sauna spirituality.

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Save the date for the next ASWM Salon:

March 9, 2023 To Be Announced

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

“Searching for Palaeolithic and Neolithic Ancestors in Italy”

Luciana Percovich with Elvira Visciola

Thursday,  February 9, 2023 at NOON Eastern Time 

REGISTER HERE

My presentation is an introduction to a women’s research project about a neglected sector of archaeological and palethnological studies in Italy during the long Pleistocenic millennia of ice and immediately after, before the coming of the Indo-European peoples, known as the Italici.

Pioneer paleontologist Luigi Pigorini (1842-1925), who was the first in Italy to teach paletnology and to inaugurate a prehistoric and ethnographic museum, determined that a Paleolithic archaeological layer didn’t exist in Italy– even if the most remote traces of human presence go back 750.000 years (homo aesernensis Isernia, Molise).

For a long time, Pigorini’s prejudice reflected and affected the Academy, and excavations rarely reached the primary layers on which Etruscan, Greek, Latin and Christian monuments have been erected. But today, one of the most renowned of Italian goddess figurines, the Lady of Savignano (Upper Paleolithic), is displayed in the Roman museum named after him.

Honoring Marija Gimbutas’ centenary, we inaugurated www.preistoriainitalia.it, a free association of scholars of various disciplines, indipendent researchers and artists disseminated all over the Italian regions. Our goals are to collect and give a vision to myriad discoveries and manufacts preserved in small local museums and in variegated specialistic reviews and bulletins.

The presentation is based on the current state of this groundbreaking research, which is proving rich beyond expectations. The work is largely supported by images and divided into 5 topics: Caves, Ancestresses, Burials, Goddess figurines, and findings in Sardinia/Sicily.

Luciana Percovich  The Encyclopedia of Women describes her as “a traveller between worlds and a weaver of space-time connections for her ability of embracing distant wide horizons with a loving insight.” A member of the Italian Women’s Movement since the Seventies, she has lived and worked in Milano as a teacher, an editor, a translator, activist and an author. She has introduced, and made their books available to Italian readers, the works of important feminist authors including Mary Daly, Marija Gimbutas, Vicki Noble, Tsultrim Allione, Starhawk, Genevieve Vaughan, Phyllis Currott, Kathy Jones, Heide Goettner-Abendroth among others. As an essayist she has published widely on such topics as women’s health, science, anthropology and mythology. With the Laima Association, she helped to organize the International Indigenous Cultures of Peace conferences in Torino and Rome. She is a member of the Libera Università delle Donne di Milano.

Luciana’s main publications include La coscienza nel corpo. Donne, salute e medicina negli anni Settanta; Oscure Madri Splendenti. Le origini dl sacro e delle religion; Colei che dà la vita, Colei che dà la forma. Miti di creazione femminili; and Verso il Luogo delle Origini. Un percorso di ricerca del sé femminile.

Her E-book is available in English: She who gives Life, She who gives Form. Female creation myths.

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Save the date for the next ASWM Salon:

February 23, 2023, 12 NOON Eastern Standard Time  
The Woman who Married the Bear and Original Instructions
Kaarina Kailo

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