“How I Found the Lost Goddesses of Early Greece in the Emergence of the Women’s Spirituality Movement”

with Charlene Spretnak

Thursday,  October 22, 2026 at 3:00 PM Eastern Time  

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During the mid-1970s, interest in women’s spirituality bubbled up in feminist communities across the country. One of the major nodes (the other was Boston) was the San Francisco Bay Area. Charlene Spretnak reflects on the energizing sense of discovery; the collective thrill of exposing the patriarchal grip on our cultural, social, and spiritual history (and pre-history!); and the synergistic flow of creativity and mutual support that yielded diverse works and paths into women’s authentic spiritual experience.

Among the many early books, gatherings, and personal practices that emerged was her book Lost Goddesses of Early Greece (1978), which she feels owes much to that heady time and place. Charlene Spretnak will read a few of the pre-Olympian, pre-patriarchal myths from the book, reconstructed for the first time in more than 2500 years. The first ebook edition of the book was recently published by Women’s Spirituality Studies Press. She will also discuss her article “Goddess Time,” commissioned for The Brooklyn Rail in 2025, which continues the story that began fifty years ago, particularly regarding a prominent scholar and a pioneering Women’s Spirituality artist.

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Charlene Spretnak is the author of nine books on cultural history, religion and spirituality, feminism, Green politics, and ecological thought. Her first book, Lost Goddesses of Early Greece, was among the initial books that sparked the emergence of the Women’s Spirituality movement in the mid-1970s. Goddess spirituality was one of the four orientations presented in her book on modernity and religion, States of Grace (1991). In 2011 her article “Anatomy of a Backlash: Concerning the Work of Marija Gimbutas” was published in the Journal of Archaeomythology. She has brought a focus on dynamic interrelatedness to her engagement with the pre-Olympian mythology of Greece; the emergent Women’s Spirituality movement; the ecofeminist movement; the emergent Green Party movement in Europe and the United States; the spiritual dimension of Green politics; the rising tide of eco-social solutions to the crises of modernity; the cancellation of the symbolic, cosmological, and mystical dimensions of the Virgin Mary when the Catholic Church modernized itself; new discoveries that have led to the Relational Shift in many fields; and the vast spiritual dimensions of modern and contemporary art, which are largely unacknowledged by the professional art world and art history. Her book The Resurgence of the Real was named by the Los Angeles Times as one of the Best Books of 1997. In 2012 she received the Demeter Award for lifetime achievement as “one of the premier visionary feminist thinkers of our time” from the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology. She is a professor emerita in religion and philosophy. She lives in Ojai, California. Website: www.charlenespretnak.com .

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Upcoming Salon

Scholar Salon 105:

Thursday, November 5 at 3 PM Eastern Time

Marija Gimbutas: A Model of Grace and Courage in the Face of Adversity

with Joan Marler and Susan Moulton

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

“The Land is Our Mother: The Indigenous Euro-Slavic Beliefs”

with Patricia Robin Woodruff

Thursday,  October 8, 2026 at 3:00 PM Eastern Time  

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In the Carpathian mountains the spiritual molfar (magician/healer), Mikailovitch Nechay, stated “Earth is our mother, she holds us all.” This is not a figurative expression.  In the native belief preserved in Slavic lands the earth is literally viewed as one’s mother, grandmother, or Primal Ancestor and indeed the same belief runs throughout other indigenous cultures of Old Europe and beyond.  Archaeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas wrote on this concept of Mother Earth/ the Great Goddess in the 1970’s and 80’s.  

Patricia Robin Woodruff was unaware of Gimbutas’ work when she began her research. By tracing the beliefs preserved in the Slavic religions, she found these beliefs extended in a continuous line back tens of thousands of years into the Paleolithic.  Her research provides an independent confirmation of Gimbutas’ work and branches off into unexplored territory with insights into Paleolithic and Neolithic spiritual beliefs.   This presentation explores the multiplicity of Goddesses that have been shaped by dividing cultures tracing back tens of thousands of years, combined with the ancient belief in the power of the word.  These factors brought about the various “names”/ titles used for the Feminine Divine.  As the material is presented the facts reveal that the Earth was viewed as our Mother to whom we are connected by an umbilical cord (or omphalos).  

“This presentation points out that the primarily monotheistic, patriarchal culture of today has a male-centric (and Christian-centric) preconception that creates a blind spot when it comes to the word origins of lands. By using comparative plausibility and the variation of land, country, or town names from cross-cultural comparisons, i will lay out the facts that most of our countries today (and many cities) stem from the local titles of the Earth Mother.”  

Patricia Robin Woodruff is an independent scholar of ancient spiritual beliefs.  Classes in Wicca started her exploring the pre-Christian beliefs of her maternal culture, a little-known ethnicity of Lemko from the Carpathian Mountains.  This resulted in her spirit-led initiation as a Lemko bosorka (a shamanic witch) that derives from the Euro-Slavic indigenous beliefs.  Woodruff has read over 7,000 academic papers related to the topic and is an author of several books including Slavic Deities & their Worship: Book 1.

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Upcoming Salon

Scholar Salon 104:

Thursday, October 22 at 3 PM Eastern Time

How I Found the Lost Goddesses of Early Greece in the Emergence of the Women’s Spirituality Movement

with Charlene Spretnak

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

“Collective Goddesses in Northern Europe, Part 1: The Matronen”

with Dawn Work-MaKinne

Thursday,  September 24, 2026 at 3:00 PM Eastern Time  

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Abstract: There is a recurring theme in the religious expression of Germanic Europe. It appears again and again over the last two thousand years. This theme is the veneration of the collective sacred female. What is this? It is the idea that deity is a sisterhood, honored as a collective. They may or may not have separate names, but their action is taken as a group, and their worship is as a group. The earliest example of this religious expression is the Deae Matronae, the matron-goddesses, from the 2nd to 4th centuries CE. They are often described as Celtic goddesses, but they also have a particularly strong veneration in Germany.

There we find temples, names and inscriptions on stone altars. The religion is truly syncretic; the goddesses’ names are Germanic or Celtic, but the religion is carried out in a Roman context. Without the Roman presence along the Rhine River, the German Matronae might never be known. My work on the collective sacred female in Germanic Europe also includes the Old Norse Norns and Disir and the Drei Heiligen Jungfrauen (three holy maidens), a collective of Roman Catholic Saints well known over Germanic Europe. We learned of them in a recent Scholar Salon on the Bethen in Salzkammergut, given by Krista Rodin.

Dawn Work-MaKinne is an independent scholar focusing on the sacred female in Germanic Europe and on animism and ancestor veneration in the U.S. Midwest. She holds a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies in Religion from the Union Institute, and her work on the collective sacred female in Germanic Europe formed the basis of her dissertation. The dissertation won the Kore Award 2010 from the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology, and the Marvin B. Sussman Award from the Union Institute for excellence in dissertation scholarship. Dawn plans two additional ASWM Scholar Salons, to delve into the Norns and Disir, of old Norse religion, and the Drei Heiligen Jungfrauen, scattered over Germany, Austria and Italy. Dawn’s current research focuses on the practice of animism and ancestor religion on U.S. land gained by genocide and treaty violation. She is especially interested right now in early Germanic calendar systems. 

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Upcoming Salon

Scholar Salon 103:

Thursday, September 24 at 3 PM Eastern Time

The Land is Our Mother: The Indigenous Euro-Slavic Beliefs

with Patricia Robin Woodruff

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