ASWM Scholar Salon with Dr. Vivien Monroe, "Decoding Delphi: Reconstructing the Technology of Divination," asks: What were the spiritual technologies used at the Delphic Oracle? How did the Greeks understand that the Oracle worked, and what role, if any, did gender play in the successful operation of the oracle?
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ASWM Scholar Salon with photographer Maria Haas, "Exploring Matriarchal Societies: Encounters and Insights from Around the World," which takes the audience on a captivating journey through the matriarchal cultures she has visited and documented.
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In her lecture, “Exploring Matriarchal Societies: Encounters and Insights from Around the World,” Maria Haas takes the audience on a captivating journey through the matriarchal cultures she has visited and documented. She shares her personal experiences and encounters with the Minangkabau in Indonesia, the Khasi in India, the Mosuo in China, and other matriarchal societies.
Maria Haas highlights the similarities and diffrences between these cultures, drawing out the unique characteristics of each society. She delves into the key parameters that define matriarchal cultures, from social organization and the role of women to cultural and spiritual aspects. The lecture offers a unique insight into the diversity and distinctive structures of these extraordinary communities.
Maria Haas
Maria Haas is a renowned photographer based in Klosterneuburg near Vienna, Austria. After graduating from the College of Photography at the Higher Graphic Teaching and Research Institute in Vienna in 1990, she founded her own photography studio, initially focusing on travel and reportage photography. In 1996, her work took her to New York, where she attended workshops at the International Center of Photography and exhibited her works in cities such as New York, Vienna, Florence, and Tampere. Over the years, Maria Haas’ interest shifted towards documenting societies that do not conform to Western norms, with a particular fascination for matriarchal cultures. She has studied and photographed these unique societies across the globe, producing acclaimed photo books like MATRIARCHS (2020) and MATRIARCHS 2 (2022), which explore the roles and significance of women in these communities. Her recent projects include documenting women affected by female genital mutilation (FGM) in Kenya and photographing shamans in Peru.
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Save the Dates for future Salons:
Thursday, October 24, 2024 at 3 PM Eastern Time (Rescheduled)
“Feasting on a Hekate Supper at the Crossroads” with Kay Turner
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Thursday, November 7, 2024 at 12 NOON Eastern Time
“Healing Goddesses of Greece” with Eftyhia Leontidou
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Thursday, November 21, 2024 at 3 PM Eastern Time
“Truth, Lies and Possibilities: Writing about Buddha’s Wife” with Barbara McHugh
This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event.
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 crossroads shrines dedicated to her where devotees gathered to feast and make petitions for her intercession. I propose a Hekate Supper! Join me to feast on knowing the many facets of Hekate through her lineage, her epithets, her invocations, her rites, her symbols, her realms, and her alliances. 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. My lecture works with materials from primary sources such as Hesiod’s Theogony and The Chaldean Oracles, and from the interpretive work of Hekate scholars such as Sarah Iles Johnston and Froma Zeitlin. Participants in the meeting will also join me in a bit of invocation.
Ninnion Tablet, Eleusis, GR
I wrote this evocation in 2022 to recite at the ruins of Hekate’s temple at Eleusis, outside Athens, the site of the Great and Lesser annual rites of Demeter and Persephone. I will touch on a number of the themes presented here:
Hekate: Invocation by Kay Turner
Eleusis: the place of Happy Arrival
Completion brings return
Pomegranates buried in the depths of death
unearthed:
If all we know is this cycle,
It is enough.
Hekate of earth, air, water, and fire,
Light our way with your double torches,
Open the gates with your keys,
Accept our offerings,
Brought to Trivium.
Lead us down the third road
To epiphany,
Greeted by “the grinning one.”
Mother Demeter, Daughter Persephone
Hekate Escort,
Take us with you.
Kay Turner photo by Ishwari Keller
Kay Turner is an artist and scholar working across disciplines including performance, writing, music, and folklore. Since 2012 her 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” and “A Hekate Supper,” Parts 1 and 2. Kay is the founding editor of Lady-Unique-Inclination-of-the-Night, a journal of art and the goddess published from 1976-1983. Her books include What a Witch: Before and After (with Zini Lardieri,), Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms (with Pauline Greenhill), and Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars. She taught for 20 years in the Performance Studies Department at NYU and is a past president of the American Folklore Society.
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Save the Dates for future Salons:
Thursday, October 10, 2024 at 12 NOON Eastern Time
“Exploring Matriarchal Societies: Encounters and Insights from Around the World,” with Maria Haas
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Thursday, October 24, 2024 at 3:00 PM Eastern Time
“Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers toward Truth, Healing, and Repair” with Hilary Giovale
This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event.
In ancient Greece there was an oracle so famous for her accurate, enigmatic, and poetic pronouncements that kings, generals, and pilgrims flocked from across empires to consult her. The oracle remained in operation for more than 1,000 years and counted among its supporters the philosopher Socrates and the mathematician Pythagoras. She was the Pythia of the Delphic Oracle.
My research questions are: What were the spiritual technologies used at the Delphic Oracle? How did the Greeks understand that the Oracle worked, and what role, if any, did gender play in the successful operation of the oracle? In order to answer these questions, I explore living divination traditions from West Africa. My decision to explore African systems of divination stems from my experience of witnessing numerous divinations in the tradition of the Dagara people of West Africa over a five-year period, including my own initiation as a diviner within this tradition.
The Athena Temple Complex, Delphi
Over the course of my exposure to Dagara divination technology, I noticed striking parallels between the Dagara tools and artifacts and chronicles of Delphic tools and artifacts. Because writers living contemporaneously with the Delphic Oracle did not discuss the details involved in the process of prophecy, we need to use living traditions to help reconstruct those that have been lost over the course of time. As I show in my dissertation, there is a scholarly tradition for utilizing comparative analysis.
I use archaeomythology and feminist theory to provide an original interpretation, deeper exploration, and advanced understanding of those archaeological artifacts that pertained to divination at Delphi. I offer one theory of the spiritual technologies in use at Delphi and hypothesize how these technologies may have facilitated one of the ancient world’s most accurate oracles. The significance of my findings is that by better understanding the spiritual science of divination at the Delphic Oracle, the modern West can better understand its ancient epistemological connection with divination and possibly reintegrate divinatory tools and practices into more of our modern life.
Dr. Vivien Monroe
Vivien Monroe, PhD is an accomplished scholar and educator with a Ph.D. in Women’s Spirituality. Her area of expertise is divination, specifically focusing her dissertation on reconstructing the spiritual technology of the Delphic Oracle. Vivien’s experience extends beyond academia, as she is also a practitioner of divination, having been initiated into three styles of divination within the Dagara tradition, and is also a gifted tarot reader. She remains committed to continuing to learn and share about various divinatory practices. Vivien lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her two doggie fur babies, Luke and Lilith.
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Save the Dates for future Salons:
Thursday, September 26, 3 PM Eastern Time
“Feasting on a Hekate Supper at the Crossroads,” with Kay Turner
Thursday, October 10, 2024 at 12 NOON
“Exploring Matriarchal Societies: Encounters and Insights from Around the World,” with Maria Haas
This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event.
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