“Shepenwepet II Kushite God’s Wife of Amun”
with Dr. Solange Ashby
Thursday,  February 8, 2024 at 3 PM Eastern Time  

Early European visitors and researchers viewed their findings in Egypt through a narrow lens of cultural assumptions. Dr. Solange Ashby provides us with a corrective to persistent but outmoded theories, making clear that Nubian women held roles of ritual, political, and economic power in the Twenty-fifth Dynasty.

Shepenwepet II was a royal woman of the Kushite dynasty from ancient Nubia (now northern Sudan) who arrived in Egypt during the time of her family’s reign as Egypt’s Twenty-Fifth Dynasty (747-656 BCE). She was the daughter of king Piankhy and sister of the pharaoh Taharqa. Shepenwepet herself held the powerful religious and economic role of the God’s Wife of Amun (GWA), the highest-ranking religious leader of the preeminent temple of Amun at Karnak (Thebes/Egyptian: Waset).

This paper will explore the religious rites performed by the GWA as related to the Beautiful Feast of Valley and the Decade Festival. Both of these celebrations consisted of processions from the temples of the east bank of the Nile (primarily Karnak) across the river to visit various temples on the west bank of the river (Small Temple of Amun, funerary complex of Hatshepsut at Deir el Bahari, and the temple-tombs in the Asasif and South Asasif areas). The Kushite revival of the office of God’s Wife of Amun, created for the earlier queens of the Eighteenth Dynasty (ca. 1520 BCE), incorporated new elements of the central role played by royal women in Kush. Shepenwepet II represents the trifecta of power – ritual, political, and economic.

Solange Ashby received her Ph.D. in Egyptology from the University of Chicago. Dr. Ashby’s expertise in sacred ancient languages, including Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Meroitic, underpins her research into the history of religious transformation in Northeast Africa. Her book, Calling Out to Isis: The Enduring Nubian Presence at Philae, explores the temple of Philae as a Nubian sacred site. Her second book explores the lives of five Nubian women from history including queens, priestesses, and mothers. Dr. Ashby is an Assistant Professor in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA where she teaches Egyptology and Nubian Studies.

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“Why Brigit was Born at Faughart, Co. Louth”
with Dr. Mary Condren
Thursday,  February 22, 2024 at 12 NOON Eastern Time  

Following many calls, the Irish government recently instituted a Public Holiday in honour of Brigit: saint, outlaw, goddess, peace weaver, whistleblower, poet, healer and smith worker. As though a long- suppressed substrate had just been unleashed, unlikely combinations of feminist, post-feminist, pagan, goddess devotees, christian, post-christian, atheists, and agnostics collectively gathered offering unprecedented artistic, poetic, musical and ritual forms to celebrate the day. Apart from explicitly Christian events, the question Who is Brigit? was largely ignored. 

Focussing on the question, “Where was Brigit born?” this presentation will explore her relationship to Faughart, County Louth, one of the oldest ritual sites in Ireland, where shadowy figures, such as Flídais, Bláthnait, Monenna, and the Cailleach persist to this day. Many battles, mythic and real, took place at Faughart. In Saint Brigit’s birth stories, could another battle have been fought, that between indigenous ritual traditions, and the emerging Christian church? Did Saint Brigit’s birth at Faughart signify both its matristic importance, alongside the parallel importance of subjugating Irish indigenous traditions, in the interests of an emerging patristic world order?

Mary Condren Th.D., has degrees in theology, sociology, and social anthropology from the University of Hull; religion and society from Boston College, and a doctorate in religion, gender and culture from Harvard University. She is a Research Associate in Women’s Studies at the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, Trinity College Dublin; a former Research Associate in Women’s Studies at Harvard University, and has published widely on issues of feminism and religion, and on the interrelationship between religion, violence and gender.

Mary is the author of The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion, and Power in Celtic Ireland. She is currently completing books on the roles of women and men in the sacrificial social contract.  Mary is also the National Director of Woman Spirit Ireland – The Institute for Feminism and Religion aims to explore a prophetic approach to feminism and religion, inclusive of many traditions and the emerging consciousness in Ireland. The Institute provides opportunities for women to reclaim religion by engaging theoretically and experientially with the issues of feminist theology, ethics, spirituality, and ritual.

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Save the date for this upcoming ASWM Salon:

Matriarchy in Bronze Age Crete: Perspective from Archaeomythology and Modern Matriarchal Studies

with Dr. Joan Cichon

March 7, 2024 at 3pm Eastern Standard Time

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