Tag: 2025 Conference

Friday, March 27, 2025 at Westward Look Inn, Tucson AZ

Unilateral Giving and Receiving from the Template of the Web of Life

Our panel brings together several strands of women’s thinking and experience regarding the maternal gift economy of humans and the maternal gifting and giftedness of nature. In order to heal the huge environmental and ethical rifts that are endangering life on Earth, a shift is necessary towards the understanding of the human as a maternal species, homo donans, the gifting being as opposed to homo sapiens, a knower in denial of the maternal paradigm or homo economicus, a creature of patriarchal capitalism.
Nané Jordan affirms placental ecologies of the mother, Margarita Rosa Tirado
describes living in communication with her ecological preserve in Colombia and,Areeya Marie Sharpe will offer desert stories with sound and postures to open us to new thinking, Genevieve Vaughan discusses the economic and
psychological reasons for the plunder and objectification of Nature.

Dr. Nané Jordan is a community-based scholar, birth-keeper, artist and mother of first-generation Irish-Canadian descent on Turtle Island. Nané is devoted to decolonizing, eco-matrifeminist, birth-gifting streams of community care. Holding a doctorate in Education, an MA in Women’s Spirituality, and SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship with the University of Paris 8, she publishes widely while working as an Aboriginal Infant Development consultant on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish Peoples.

Rev. Areeya Marie Sharpe is a Priestess, Interfaith Minister, US military veteran, Artist and Chef who has worked on Visual and Sacred Sound Art projects, Large Themed Prop Construction and in Private Chef venues for over 20yrs, serving Las Vegas NV and several other locales around the world. She creates recipes of visual/sound art, prayerFull cuisine and sacred scent
honoring the earth, sacred sites and ceremonies. Areeya is the current Resident Priestess at the Temple of Goddess Spirituality Dedicated to
Sekhmet outside of Las Vegas.

Margarita Rosa Tirado Mejia is an environmentalist and founder of La Rosa de los Vientos (Rose of the Winds) nature reserve in Boquia, Salento, Colombia. La Rosa de los Vientos is in an environmentally devastated area and her work focuses on social regeneration of the land. Her special focus is the endangered wax palm, the national tree of Colombia.

Genevieve Vaughan is an independent researcher who has been working on the idea of the maternal gift economy as an alternative to Patriarchal Capitalism for more than half a century. She created the multicultural all-woman activist Foundation for a Compassionate Society (1987-2005) and the network: International Feminists for a Gift Economy (2001 –ongoing). She founded the Temple of Goddess Spirituality dedicated to Sekhmet in Cactus Springs, Nevada (1992 – ongoing). Her books are For-Giving, a Feminist Criticism of Exchange (1997), Homo Donans (2006) and The Gift in the Heart of Language: the Maternal Source of Meaning (2015). She has edited three anthologies and has written three children’s books. She is the mother of three daughters and lives part time in Italy, part time in Austin,Texas.

Read all about the ASWM Conference and register  here.

 

Saturday March 29, 2025, Westward Look Inn, Tucson AZ

Close to the Ground: Reclaiming Our Relationships with Reptiles & Amphibians

There are innumerable examples of stories in which humans and reptiles or amphibians have complex and ambivalent relationships. But are these primarily modern interpretations obscuring the real and beneficial attributes of these remarkable animals?

• Regenerating stories and women’s connection with the earth through a survey of art featuring the snake and its symbolism, Kristen Calvert
• The Serpent-Guardian of Watery Paradox: The Sonoran Desert Legend of La Corúa, Cheryl De Ciantis
• The White Snake 白蛇傅, Jaclyn Kalkhurst
• Ancient Liminality in Egyptian Frog Symbolism, Kira Kull

Kristen Calvert has a M.A. in Art History and a M.A. in Women’s Spirituality. She is a certified practitioner in Rosen Method Bodywork, a somatic method that engages emotions and body tension simultaneously. She is also a certified Sound Healing Practitioner. She offers these holistic healing modalities under her business name BlueGreen Harmony. She also likes to do nature and spirituality-based art with her photography, music and flower feather jewelry.

Cheryl De Ciantis. Artist, mythologist, educator, organizational learning specialist and values-based dialogue mentor, Cheryl seeks to discern and illuminate the connecting threads between images, stories and lived experience to gain insights from the archetypal energies that continually re-manifest through our individual and collective lives. By training she is an art historian and historiographer and holds a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies with Emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She resides in Tucson.

Born in Hong Kong to an American father and Chinese mother, Jaclyn Ke Yin Kalkhurst grew up immersed in Chinese myths, sparking her passion for storytelling and symbolism. She recently earned a Master’s in Mythology and Depth Psychology, presenting on the Chinese Underworld at Mythologium 2024. Now a PhD candidate at Pacifica Graduate Institute, she focuses her dissertation on creation myths from the Middle East and Asia.

Kira Kull (they/them) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Mythological Studies program at Pacifica Graduate Institute with specialization in Intersex Studies and Decolonial Theory. They serve as a Senior Editor of the Mythological Studies Journal (2023, 2024) and currently live in Los Angeles where they work as a Myth Specialist, Queer Consultant, and line dance instructor. More info at www.kirakull.com & @kkmiracle on Instagram.

Read all about the ASWM Conference and register  here.

 

Saturday March 29, 2025, Westward Look Inn, Tucson AZ

“The Archaeomythology of Ancestral Knowledge”

This panel recognizes the essential links with the deep indigenous roots of inherited knowledge and cultural meaning among traditional women and their children of the Costa Rican mountains and the bountiful sea.

• New Dimensions in Archeomythological Discoveries, Joan Marler
• Feminist Epistemology and the Revitalization of our Ancestral Roots, Costanza Ragel Núñez 
• Multicultural Dialogue and Inherited Knowledge Honoring Our Cultural Roots, Maria Saurez Toro
• At the Heart: Honoring Palaeolithic Human-Animal Interdependence, Susan Moulton

Joan Marler earned a BA in Dance and the Liberal Arts, Mills College, Oakland; MA in Archaeomythology, Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park; PhD in Philosophy and Religion, California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco. She edited The Civilization of the Goddess by Marija Gimbutas and has lectured internationally on Gimbutas’s life and work. Joan taught dance and archaeomythology for more than 30 years and is the Director of the Institute of Archaeomythology and edits its online journal.

Dr. Constanza Ragel Nunez, a Mexican feminist living in Costa Rica, is a licensed clinical psychologist and university professor with a PhD in education. She is a family psychotherapist, a professor of research methodology and bioethical research in family and judicial processes and is a bioethical consultant. She is also a performance artist who has worked in the field with women prisoners in Costa Rican jails.

Maria Suarez Toro is a feminist journalist, an activist in defense of human rights, and an educator. She is founder in 2014 of Centro Comunitario de Buceo Embajadoras Del Mar in Costa Rica’s Southern Caribbean. She is founder and director of ESCRIBANA, a feminist digital media venue since 2011. She was a co-director of the Feminist International Radio Endeavor (FIRE) from 1991 to 2011, and since 2011 she has been a correspondent for the News Service for the Women of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Susan Moulton, B.A. , U.C. Davis; certificate of studies at the Accademia, Venice and the University of Padua, Italy; M.A., Ph.D., Stanford University. Awards: Carnegie Foundation Research Grant, NEH Grant, Professor and Chair of the Sonoma State University Art Department and University Faculty, Distinguished University Teaching Award; Co-founder with Joan Marler of the International Institute of Archaeomythology. She has published numerous articles and given presentations globally.

Read all about the ASWM Conference and register  here.

 

Saturday, March 29, 2025, 9:00 AM Pacific Time

• Judy Grahn: Inanna, Protectress of Nature’s and Women’s Cycles
• Annalisa Derr: Reclaiming Inanna: A Myth Model for Embodying Erotic Aliveness
• Pinar Durgun:  Goddess of Ambiguities: Inanna/Ishtar and her (many) images

Our plenary panel examines the many dimensions of one of the world’s oldest known mythic figures, the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna.  Her attributes include celestial powers of stars and planets,  yet she is best known for her voluntary journey into the underworld of loss and pain. This outstanding panel includes the work of three pre-eminent scholars of Inanna’s myths and images:

Annalisa Derr, PhD, offers an affirming alternative by re-visioning the Sumerian myth, “The Descent of Inanna,” as a sacred menstrual narrative and ritual rite-of-passage. Her forthcoming book, under contract with Inner Traditions, aims to help liberate women from internalized sexism and menstrual shame and (re)awaken them to their Sacred Feminine Power.  Annalisa earned her doctorate in Mythological Studies with Emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and holds a BA in Theater with specialized training in masked and physical performance.  Out of a desire to enrich the lives of everyday women, Annalisa hosts “Journey to the Goddess TV,” facilitating interviews and keynote presentations by experts in goddess scholarship and spirituality. Last, but not least, she is an aspiring flamenco dancer, Italophile, and a recent resident of Athens, Greece.

Dr. Pınar Durgun is the Jeannette and Jonathan Rosen Associate Curator of Ancient Western Asian Seals and Tablets and Department Head of Ancient Western Asian Seals and Tablets Department at the Morgan Library in New York, which contains one of the most distinguished collections of Mesopotamian cylinder seals in the United States. She studied in Turkey and has a Ph.D. in Archaeology and the Ancient World from Brown University. She is an art-historically trained archaeologist with a strong background in anthropology. Her research focuses on ancient materials and crafts, seals and sealings, death and burial, image and identity making, and copies and copying in ancient western Asia. With over ten years of experience teaching and working in museums, Dr. Durgun is interested in how museums help us engage with the past and how they can better serve our communities today.

Judy Grahn, Ph.D., has been writing about women’s spirituality and women’s contributions to human culture for over fifty years. She taught her own work in Women’s Spirituality Master’s Programs at New College of California and the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology for over thirteen years total. Her work on Inanna includes Eruptions of Inanna: Justice, Gender, and Erotic Power, for which she won the ASWM Sarasvati Award,  and three book-length poems on the goddess of love, power, and beauty.  She is also the winner of ASWM’s Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality.

Read all about our 2025 Conference and register here.

 

 

 

Sunday, March 30, 2025, Westward Look Inn, Tucson AZ

Weaving a Matrix of Community Across Time: the deep history and lived expressions of the Great Goddess Tanit and her Sister Goddesses

This panel discusses the Carthaginian Tanit, Ugaritic Anat, Greek Athena (Mycenaean Greek A-ta-na), Egyptian Neith, and Sumerian Inanna as Goddesses related not only in function but also linguistically, shown in translations of texts and iconographically. Athena, a sister Goddess to Tanit, and her function of weaving, are viewed from a depth psychological view as well. Finally, Tanit is discussed as a Goddess whose images support a clothesline in a lived ritual of renewal, linking the Motherline through time.

Miriam Robbins Dexter holds a Ph.D. in ancient Indo-European Studies from UCLA. Her books include Whence the Goddesses: A Source Book (1990); Sacred Display: Divine and Magical Female Figures of Eurasia (2010, with Victor Mair) (2012 ASWM Sarasvati award); and Foremothers of the Women’s Spirituality Movement: Elders and Visionaries (2015, with Vicki Noble) (Susan Koppelman award, 2016). Miriam is the author of over thirty scholarly articles and nine encyclopedia articles on ancient female figures, and she has edited and co-edited sixteen scholarly volumes. For thirteen years, she taught courses in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit languages in the department of Classics at USC. For the following sixteen years, she taught courses in comparative myth at UCLA.

Safron Rossi, Ph.D., is a Professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute in the Jungian and Archetypal Studies MA/PhD program. Her areas of study include Greek mythology, archetypal psychology, astrology, and goddess traditions. For years she was Curator of the Marija Gimbutas manuscript collections at Opus Archives. Safron is author of The Kore Goddess: A Mythology & Psychology (2021), co-editor of Jung on Astrology (2017) and editor of Joseph Campbell’s Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine (2013).

Mary Beth Moser, Ph.D., has traveled widely in Italy to study women’s spirituality, with a focus on women and folk wisdom in Trentino. This presentation draws from study pilgrimages to Sicily and Sardegna with Dr. Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, professor emerita at CIIS, and from “The Motherline: Laundry, Lunedi, and Women’s Lineage” in She Is Everywhere, Volume 3, which Mary Beth co-edited, and whose anthology series Lucia founded.

Read all about the ASWM Conference and register  here.