Songs in Honor of Goddesses and Amazons by Ruth Barrett
Our 2021 program is enhanced by the inclusion of performances by a variety of accomplished musicians and composers with connections to the work of Marija Gimbutas. These performances are included during interludes between sessions, and are also available to view at any time in our PUBLIC LIBRARY.
A foremother of feminist spirituality in the US, Ruth is the author of Women’s Rites, Women’s Mysteries, and has contributed to several other anthologies celebrating goddess spirituality. Ruth, who calls herself a “musician/priestess,” is also a songwriter and is internationally known as a mountain dulcimer recording artist and singer.
Ruth is best known for works that focus on magically themed traditional folk songs inspired by folklore, goddess mythology, celebration of women, and the spirituality innate in the natural world. Her most recent album, Once And Future Amazons(2020), incorporates African, Middle Eastern and Celtic folk rhythms in a “powerful celebration of women’s embodied mysteries, ancient sovereign goddesses, and the seasonal cycle of Mother Nature.” Learn more about Ruth at Dancing Tree.
Jazz and Vocal Improvisation with the Lithuanian kanklės
Our 2021 program is enhanced by the inclusion of performances by accomplished musicians and composers. These performances are included during interludes between sessions, and are also available to view at any time in our PUBLIC LIBRARY.
Simona Smirnova
Simona Smirnova is a Lithuanian born jazz vocalist, composer and kanklės player based in New York City. She’s a fixture in the New York live scene with her quartet when she’s not touring the world, including Australia, New Zealand and Europe.
Simona’s genre-bending style has a unique theatrical flavor and uncanny vocal improvisation techniques. She deftly implements chamber music, Lithuanian zither – kanklės – and folkloric chants into foundations of jazz and rock.
Simona’s latest album, Joan of Arc, for String Quartet, is an original composition written as a soundtrack for the classic Carl Dreyer silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). The album is a cinematic landscape of chamber pop, jazz and folklore.
Classically trained on the kanklės, Simona earned her BA in jazz vocals at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theater. Shortly after receiving the European Touring Scholarship, she moved to the United States to study at Berklee College of Music where she earned a degree in Contemporary Composition and Production.
Our thanks to Giedrė Elekšytė-Knieža, Chair of Lithuanian American Community Cultural Affairs, for her help in connecting us with Simona’s work.
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).
Carpathian Mountains photo by Iryna Palok
“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
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.
Deae Matronae (Aufaniæ), Nettersheim, Germany, 2nd c. CE
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.
Deae Matronen of the Ubii, Rhineland, 1st c BCE
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
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.
The Goddess of Burning Hair is the first complete collection of Mary Mackey’s goddess poems. Written from 1972 to 2025, the thirty-seven poems in this book emerge from a lifetime Mackey has spent studying, listing to, respecting, and giving voice to the spirit of Gaia the Great Mother in all her forms. Stunningly imaginative, beautifully written, intensely lyrical, mysterious, and sometimes powerfully prophetic, these poems take us into worlds both ancient and not-yet born.
Here you will find poems about goddesses from Europe like Medusa and Aphrodite; Afro-Brazilian goddesses like Iemanjá, and Yansã; goddesses Mackey has invented like The Goddess of Burning Hair; goddesses who have created themselves and goddesses who are a combination of the research of scholars like Marija Gimbutas and Mackey’s own imagination taken from her four novels about the Goddess-worshipping/Earth-centered cultures of Neolithic Europe. You will encounter prophets like Cassandra who speak warnings no one believes; and last, but by no means least, poems that celebrate those moments when the power of the Divine enters us, moments when we mortals become transformed into something greater and more powerful, and the Earth our Great Mother speaks through us.
Gaea, Erichthonius and Athena
“Reading Mary Mackey’s poems in this book is like listening to the Delphic Pythia utter her prophecies from her sacred chasm. With stark fluidity Mary exemplifies the poet as prophet. Her poems are rich and spare—like haikus.” Cristina Biaggi, Author of Habitations of the Great Goddess
Mary Mackey by Irene Young
Mary Mackey became a writer by running high fevers; visiting the ruins of the neolithic, goddess-worshiping cultures of Old Europe; tramping through tropical jungles; being swarmed by army ants, and reading. Her novels and poems have been praised by by Marija Gimbutas, Marge Piercy, Jane Hirshfield, Maxine Hong Kingston, Annie Finch, Judy Grahn, Cristina Biaggi, Vicki Noble, Starhawk, Wendel Berry, Thomas Moore, Rafael Jesús González, and Pat Conroy for their beauty, precision, gripping plots, originality, and extraordinary range. She is the author of 10 collections of poetry, including Sugar Zone, winner of a PEN Award; and The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, winner of the Eric Hoffer Award for Best Book Published by a Small Press; as well as 14 novels, including The New York Times bestseller A Grand Passion and the Earthsong Series, four novels about the Goddess-worshiping people of Old Europe. In December 2026 and January 2027 Open Road Media will reissue the Earthsong Series novels in new editions in both paper and electronic form. The Goddess of Burning Hair, the first complete collection of Mackey’s goddess poems, will be published by Women’s Spirituality Studies Press in September 2026.
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Upcoming Salon
Scholar Salon 102:
Thursday, September 24 at 3 PM Eastern Time
Collective Goddesses in Northern Europe, part 1, The Matronen
with Dawn Work-Makinne
This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event.
The Goddess of Burning Hair
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