“Feasting on a Hekate Supper at the Crossroads”

with Dr. Kay Turner

Thursday,  September 26, 2024 at 3 pm Eastern Time  

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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.

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 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. 

“Decoding Delphi: Reconstructing the Technology of Divination“

with Dr. Vivien Monroe

Thursday,  September 12, 2024 at 3 pm Eastern Time  

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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.  

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.

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. 

“Of Golf Courses and World Heritage Sites“

with Dr. Barbara Mann

Thursday,  July 25, 2024 at 12 NOON Eastern Time  

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In 2023, UNESCO announced that the “Newark Earthworks,” a major collection of Tsalagi (“Cherokee”) sacred mounds dating back at least 2,000 years, sitting southeast of Columbus, Ohio, is now a World Heritage Site. This was a stunning development, given that the Moundbuilders Golf Club has sat atop these mounds since 1911.

The Native American Alliance of Ohio had fought for over forty years to protect the mounds, as golfers chunked up and sent pieces of them flying with every swing of their clubs. The mounds were built by women, bringing basket loads of soil from their home sites and mounding it up to solar and earth coordinates, so as to enable the Breathmen to read the equinoxes, solstices, and standstills of the moon.

The Mounds’ establishment as a World Heritage Site finally helped Ohio Indians kick the golfers off the mounds. The full significance of this new status becomes clear only once the Indigenous significance of the mounds, their shapes, locales in relations to one another and the landscape, and their mediation of Breath/sky and Blood/earth is understood.

“Of Golf Courses & World Heritage Sites” goes into the details of the mounds, their Indigenous meaning, their desecration, and finally (finally!) their recognition as a treasure from antiquity. 

Barbara Alice Mann, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita of Humanities, Jesup Scott Honors College, of the University of Toledo, in Toledo, Ohio, USA. Including encyclopedias and bibliographies, she  has produced seventeen books and over 500 articles. Her latest work is The Woman Who Married the Bear (Oxford University Press, August, 2023) co-authored with Finnish scholar Dr. Kaarina Kailo. Mann’s most recent monographs include President by Massacre: Indian-Killing for Political Gain; Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath: The Twinned Cosmos of Indigenous America; The Tainted Gift: The Disease Method of Settler Advance; Daughters of Mother Earth; and Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (Lang, 2000, 2004, 2006).

A Bear Clan, Ohio Seneca, community recognition, Barbara is the co-director of the Native American Alliance of Ohio. She lives in her Ohio homeland on the tail (western tip) of Lake Erie where she works for the rights of the people indigenous to Ohio, living in Ohio. (“Erie” is Seneca for “panther.” The Lake is a “water panther,” an important spiritual potency.)

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Watch our Newsletter for announcements about upcoming Salons in our Autumn Series.

This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event.