2017 Nine-Day Solstice Celebration
Hosted by Mago Academy
December 13/14 to 21/22, 2016.
Theme: Personal Transformation in tune with Mago Time/Space
Planning Committee: Dr. Lila Moore, Daphne Moon, Amina Rodriguez, Helen Hye-Sook Hwang
Featured presenters
Jhilmil Breckenridge
Jhilmil Breckenridge is a poet, writer and activist. She is the Founder of Bhor Foundation, a mental health charity. Her areas of work are mental health, domestic violence and trauma. Jhilmil is currently working on a PhD in the UK and her poetry and other writings have been widely published and anthologised. She tweets at jhilmilspirit.
Louisa Calio
Louisa Calio won first prize for her poem “Bhari” from the City of Messina, Sicily, an International Poetry Competition 2013, was 2013 Finalist for Poet Laureate of Nassau County, NY and in Oct. 2014, Legas Press published her epic, Journey to the Heart Waters. Director of the Poets and Writer’s Piazza for Hofstra’s Italian Experience for 12 years, she is on the Advisory Board of Arba Sicula, was honored at Columbia/Barnard with Alice Walker, Ruth Beta Ginsberg & others, as a Feminist who Changed America 2nd wave. won the 1978 Connecticut Commission of the Arts Award to individual Writers, the 1987 Women in Leadership Award for her contribution to Arts development in Connecticut, the Barbara Jones and Taliesin prizes for Poetry (Trinidad and Tobago), an Educational Center for the Arts Grant for the Production of In the Eye of Balance her collection of poetry published in 1978 by Paradiso Press.
Her writings have been translated into Korean, Italian and Sicilian. Her work appears in numerous anthologies & journals ie: Birthed From Scorched Hearts: Women on War, Sister’s Singing, I Name Myself Daughter, She is Everywhere, darkmother, Italian Heart/ American Soul, Remembrances, Sweet Lemons 2, Arts and Culture, Humorous Stories. Journals: Long Island Sounds, GRADIVA, Journal of Italian Translation, Korean Expatriate Literature, Voices in Italian Americana, STUDIA MYSTICA, SALOME, POET’S ON, Feile-Festa, New Verse News, Descant, a Canadian Literary Journal and others.
Max Dashu
Max Dashu founded the Suppressed Histories Archives in 1970 to research global women’s history across the full spectrum of the world’s peoples. She has built a collection of 40,000 slides and digital images and created 130 slideshows on female cultural heritages, especially Indigenous traditions. Her legendary slideshows bring to light female realities usually hidden from view, from ancient female figurines to women leaders, priestesses, clan mothers, and philosophers, to warriors and rebels, all with attention to patterns of conquest and domination. Dashu has been presenting her visual talks for 44 years, first at grassroots women’s and community centers, then universities and conferences, and now internationally. She also teaches via webcasts and online courses. Her daily posts on the Suppressed Histories Facebook page are followed by 163,000 people.
Dashu’s book Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion, 700-1000 was published by Veleda Press in 2016. It is Vol. VII of the 15-volume series Secret History of the Witches. Pythias, Melissae and Pharmakides, on women’s spiritual cultures in Greece and the Aegean, is Vol II (forthcoming in 2018). Deasophy: Coloring Book of Goddesses .:. Spirits .:. Ancestors (Veleda, 2017) features 50 icons from around the world, with Max’s drawings and commentary.
Louise Hewett
Louise M Hewett was born in Camden, New South Wales on April 8, 1966. Her childhood was spent moving from place to place: from Canberra and the suburbs of Sydney in her home state, to Victoria, Papua New Guinea where she spent two years living near Port Moresby, and in South Australia where she is now settled. In 1991 she took an eight month working holiday in the UK and Ireland to get back to her roots, searching for a sense of who she was and where she, and her ancestors, had come from. The initiations of motherhood arrived in 1993 and began a transformative spiritual crisis, enriching her long held interests in mysticism, shamanism, Paganism, and Goddess Feminism. Today, Louise is a single mother, a carer for her autistic son, a writer and an artist. She is currently working on and self-publishing the Pictish Spirit series of novels, including a companion book ‘Nine Drums’ which explores her personal journey of creating the Pictish Spirit path. She also facilitates sacred space for women in her desire to support others in a mutual process of learning and healing.
Louise can be contacted through her website www.eggserpentstudio.com.au or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/pictishspiritmist/
Glenys Livingstone Ph.D. (Social Ecology) has been on a Goddess path since 1979. She is the author of PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion, which fuses the indigenous traditions of Old Europe with scientific theory, feminism and a poetic relationship with place. She has facilitated Seasonal ceremony for almost three decades. Glenys recently co-edited the anthology Re-Visioning Medusa: from Monster to DivineWisdom. In 2014, Glenys co-facilitated the Mago Pilgrimage to Korea with Dr. Helen Hye-Sook Hwang. Glenys is a contributor to Foremothers of Women’s Spirituality: Elders and Visionaries edited by Miriam Robbins Dexter and Vicki Noble (2015), and also to Goddesses in World Cultures edited by Patricia Monaghan (2010). She has produced PaGaian Cosmology Meditations CDs, and teaches a year-long on-line course “Celebrating Cosmogenesis in the Wheel of the Year”. Her website is http://pagaian.org
Daphne Moon
Lila Moore
Dr Lila Moore is an artist film-maker, screen choreographer, networked performance and ritual practitioner, lecturer and theorist. She holds a practice-based Ph.D. degree in Dance on Screen (2001) from Middlesex University and an M.A in Independent Film from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London. She has been teaching courses in
Cinema, Religion and Contemporary Spiritualities, Film and Ritual as well as Spiritual Art as part of BA and MA programmes in Mysticism and Spirituality at Zefat Academic College, UNESCO programmes, and other pioneering , multicultural educational settings. Dr Moore is the founder of the Cybernetic Futures Institute, an online academy for the study and creative exploration of technoetic arts, and the spiritual in screen dance and film. It is based on her postdoctoral project at the Planetary Collegium of Plymouth University. The courses and workshops take place online and in London, UK.
Shireen Qudosi
Janie Rezner
Indu Ramesh
Shekhina Weaver
Genevieve Vaughan
Program Outline
Jhilmil Breckenridge
Louisa Calio
Max Dashu
Louise Hewett
Priestess
You’re a priestess of the mountain
a wave in a volcanic sea;
Your feathered shoulders, far-sighted eagle,
your belly filled with wattle seed.
You wear a crown of eucalypt,
your skin is brown like a sheoak tree;
Your voice calls to me in flaming spirals,
seer blind in the smoke.
You’re a priestess of the mountains,
growing up from the ground.
You’re a priestess of the mountains,
help me to understand –
Why don’t you take my hand?
You’re a priestess of the valley,
your robes of needles, moss and leaves;
Your ancient fingers are long and twisted,
the forest floor you nightly weave.
You bleed your sorrow from the divide,
the wind carries your silent roar
And I will seek you though I know
the way is tangled to your door.
You’re a priestess of the valley,
carving your way through the land.
You’re a priestess of the valley,
help me to understand –
why don’t you take my hand?
You’re a priestess of the rivers,
you cut me deep and staunch my wounds;
Your serpent body by ochre moonlight,
this ancient treasure I have found.
You dance before me in many guises,
a priestess of the sombre night.
Come whisper wisdom so I’ll remember
the secrets of your healing rite…
https://kcguy.bandcamp.com/track/priestess
Glenys Livingstone Ph.D.
Daphne Moon
Lila Moore
Shireen Qudosi
Janie Rezner
Indu Ramesh
http://wings.org/ftp/WINGS%
http://wings.org/ftp/WINGS%
Shekhina Weaver
Genevieve Vaughan