Conferences Details


Goddess conference


Speakers


Speakers Details

Opening Our Hearts to the Goddess

In this conference, we begin to sense and experience the extraordinary possibilities that the Goddess so generously provides for us.

October 25-27, 2002, at the Marion Foundation

3 Barnabas Road, Marion, MA 02738

Guest speakers:

Margot Adler and Barbara Walker

We live in a time of significant discoveries in science that are dissolving our assumptions. But has anything changed? In spite of far-reaching, core-wrenching findings, our culture remains confident in old ways of knowing that are destroying nature and one another.

Fortunately, a rapidly growing number of people all over the world recognize that our current path leads to environmental disaster. We need to change our attitude or face catastrophe. We need to find older, truer stories that shape the way we live with one another and nature in healthier, sustainable ways.

Background

For the past ten years members of the Marion Foundation have been nipping away at the assumptions of our time, investigating matters of medicine, the environment, gender, death and dying, philanthropy, and spiritual inquiry. We have been asking a lot of questions. Always asking. This allows us to pursue a deeply held hunch: the myths and stories that animate us are not what they seem. There are real, older stories behind the ones we have been generating.

Last fall, the Marion Foundation embarked on a new series of conferences centered on an investigation of stories from recorded and pre-recorded history. Our investigations take into account the staggering amount of new research which is beginning to change the way we view our world. At our Searching for Now conference, Elaine Pagels, Christopher Knight and John Lash helped us see how our patriarchal theology has systematically obscured Christianity’s vital origins in Gnosticism.

This fall in October, we will explore the Goddess who was central to Gnostic thinkers and to thousands of years of pre-Christian spiritual practice. We want to discover the Goddess — to know her, to experience her, to embrace her.

Who Is the Goddess?

Who is the Goddess? In which of her various and changing forms do we know her? Gaia, Sophia, Aphrodite, maid, mother, crone? How can we experience her? What might be the real story? These are some of the driving questions that motivate this year’s Metahistory conference.

The Marion Foundation is a community of friends and explorers who experience the universe as far richer, more varied, more sensuous, and more beautiful than our traditional culture has led us to believe. We are fortunate to come together to explore our deepest and forgotten past and see how it informs our present and our future.

Driven from obscurity through thousands of years of Patriarchal hegemony, the Goddess is making an increasingly rapid and marked re-entry into Western consciousness. How was she ever written out of our story? How is it that she is finally coming back? And what does this mean for women, for men, and for our universe?

Mother, mater, matter — body, earth, nature. We have become disconnected from our source. “The earth is our mother” — we are despoiling our mother. Embodying spirit, as in nature, is at the heart of many spiritual, ecological, and feminist movements today. Without seeking to impose any particular path, we will explore the different manifestations of the return to the Divine Feminine. The renewal of our connection to the Goddess is appearing in such circles as Wicca, the pagan revival, ecofeminism, and other forms of spirituality.

Opening Our Hearts to the Goddess

Experiencing the embodied connection to the Goddess, in whatever form, elicits a deep yearning in men as well as in women. “Knowing” the Goddess so directly clearly implies a new departure in spiritual life for most of us. In this conference, we may begin to sense and experience the extraordinary possibilities that the Goddess so generously provides for us.

Please join us in Marion Friday evening October 25 through Sunday October 27 to experience her beauty and bounty.

Our conference speakers

Margot Adler is the author of Drawing Down the Moon, the classic study of goddess spirituality and contemporary paganism, and Heretic's Heart: A Journey Through Spirit and Revolution. She is a correspondent for National Public Radio, and her reports air on NPR’s award-winning shows “All Things Considered,” “Morning Edition,” and “Weekend Edition.” She hosts “Justice Talking,” a new radio show on the subject of the U.S. Constitution, which is produced by the Annenberg Center for Public Policy of the University of Pennsylvania. She also lectures widely on paganism and earth traditions. She has been a priestess of Wicca for more than 25 years.

Margot received a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Master's degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York in 1970. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1982.

Barbara G. Walker, a highly successful feminist writer of both fiction and nonfiction works, is the author of The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, The Crone, The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, The Skeptical Feminist, The Essential Handbook of Women’s Spirituality and Ritual, Feminist Fairy Tales, Amazon, The Secrets of the Tarot, The I Ching of the Goddess, The Book of Sacred Stones . . .plus ten books on knitting.

She critiques male-dominated religion and establishes a liberating alternative to the Judeo-Christian myth. Tracing human history from the widespread worship of a Mother Goddess at the dawn of civilization through the early church’s excising of feminine references in scripture and beyond to the resulting modern sexist societies, Barbara seeks to restore this primal religious sensibility which celebrated the Earth’s fertility and women’s unique power to replenish the species. She illustrates that women are already rediscovering these ancient forms and redefining the modern outlook in response to their new appreciation of women's rights and the long history of male dominance.

In 1993, Barbara was named “Humanist Heroine of the Year” by the American Humanist Association, and in 1995 she received the “Women Making Herstory Award” from New Jersey NOW.

Reconnecting - Remembering - Knowing

Sponsored by:

One of the great lessons of the Earth traditions is that the world is something to embrace, not to escape from. This land, this earth, this place of joys and sadness where we live out our days is where the sacred lives.

— Margot Adler

The Goddess now envisioned is emphatically not God-with-a-feminine-suffix. In Her many manifestations, ancient or modern, She is not transcendent but
immanent in the living earth, in the human body, mind, and spirit, in the life force, in love, sexuality, birth, death, nature, and the very elements themselves — that is, in reality and also in the poetry that the human perception creates of reality. Women are creating the Goddess consciously and deliberately, without pretentious phony epiphanies. Unlike nearly all religionists before them, modern women know they are tapping into the only true wellspring of any deity, the archetypal human mind. 

— Barabara Walker