JOIN US FOR COMMUNITY LUMINARY:
MARK YOUR CALENDARS
FRIDAY, APRIL 23RD, 2025 AT 12PM PST
Dear Beloved Community,
What Max would like to share with us in our time together is in part from her book, Women in Greek Mythography: Pythias, Melissae, and Titanides. She will also be looking at what lies beneath the standardized narratives of classical Greece, the foundation of modern Euro-patriarchy. We’ll talk about the titanides (pre-Olympian Nature goddesses): Nyx, Gaia, Thetis, the Moirae—the mighty Fates—and Hekate. We’ll look at what Linear B inscriptions tell us about the oldest known goddesses, and the transformations that goddesses went through over the centuries. Part of this story is in Mythic Conquests, that subjugated goddesses and women, in the earliest form of rape culture. But earlier art of the Archaic and Geometric periods powerfully depicts women in ceremony—with indications of both Libyan and Phoenician influence on the Greeks.
We will also look at the oracular women, most famously the Pythia at the ancient womb sanctuary of Delphi, and the dream-chamber of the Korykian Cave. The snake-women and bee-women go back to the Cretan seals and figurines, but they keep turning up in the Women’s Mysteries all the way to Roman times. We might touch on the legend of Melanippe (“Black Horse”), a prophetess and Nature philosopher who confronts patriarchal law head-on. And we’ll probably talk about the multitude of Cretan and Mycenaean seals that show women shapeshifting in their ecstatic dance, in the tradition of Ariadne, their lifted arms turning into wings.
Max Dashu founded the Suppressed Histories Archives in 1970 to research and document women’s history and heritages from the most ancient times to the present, globally. She is internationally known for her expertise on iconography, matricultures and female spheres of power; medicine women, witches, and the witch hunts; and the interconnections between patriarchy, conquest, and systems of domination. www.suppressedhistories.net
She is the author of Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Culture, 700-1100 (2016) and Women in Greek Mythography: Pythias, Melissae and Titanides (2023). Her videos include Woman Shaman: the Ancients (2013) and Women’s Power in Global Perspective (2008), along with an extensive videography at https://www.youtube.com/@
She is the author of Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Culture, 700-1100 (2016) and Women in Greek Mythography: Pythias, Melissae and Titanides (2023). Her videos include Woman Shaman: the Ancients (2013) and Women’s Power in Global Perspective (2008), along with an extensive videography at https://www.youtube.com/@
PLEASE COME JOIN US FOR THIS EXPLORATION ON WEDNESDAY, APRIL 23RD AT 12PM PST
In delight,
Ariel
