The Goddesses Revisited: 50,000 Years Later

Saturday, April 5, Lambert Campus

Morning Presentations

• Hallie Iglehart Austen: The Birth of Woman Spirit
• Charlene Spretnak: States of Grace: The Politics of Woman’s Spirituality
• Maureen Murdock: Contemporary Faces of the Goddess and The Heroine’s Journey.

Afternoon Presentations

• Monica Mody: “The Borderlands Epistemology of the Goddess in South Asia: Encounters by Contemporary Writers and Artists”
• Evans Lansing Smith: Necro-Gynetypes: An Iconography of the Archetypal Feminine
• Safron Rossi: The Kore and the Archive

Sunday, April 6, OPUS at Ladera Campus

Morning Presentations

• Devon Deimler: Goddesses in the Archives: A Tour of OPUS Featuring the Collections of Marija Gimbutas and Christine Downing
• Jean Palmer Daly: Marion Woodman and the OPUS Archives
• Mary Heebner: “Goddess as Muse and Inspiration: Selections from Four Decades of Work in Collage and Artists’ Books”

Presenters:

Hallie Iglehart

Hallie Iglehart Austen grew up on a farm and has lived close to the earth for most of her life. Her lifelong interest in goddesses began at the age of twelve when she started studying ancient Greek language and mythology at Bryn Mawr School. After graduating from Brown University, she drove from England to Nepal and back again over the course of a year. This journey, described in her book, Womanspirit, led to her synthesis of spirituality and feminism, which she first started teaching in 1974. She has led workshops, rituals and conferences at the University of California, United Nations International Women’s Conference, and Graduate Theological Union among others. She created Womanspirit Meditations and collected worldwide Goddess art, myth and meditations in her book, The Heart of the Goddess.
https://heartgoddess.net/about-hallie/

Charlene Spretnak

Charlene Spretnak is the author of nine books on cultural history, social criticism (including feminism and Green politics), and religion and spirituality, several of which proposed a “map of the terrain” of emergent movements and expanded new ways of thinking. In recent decades she has explored societal implications of the discoveries in human biology of dynamic interrelatedness as the key to understanding how the physical world, including us, is actually structured and functions. In a sense, all her books have been concerned with dynamic interrelatedness. Her book Green Politics was a major catalyst for the formation of the U.S. Green Party movement, which she and others cofounded in 1984. She is also a cofounder of two branches of the feminist movement: the women’s spirituality movement and ecofeminism. Her book The Resurgence of the Real was named by the Los Angeles Times as one of the Best Books of 1997. In 2006 Charlene Spretnak was named by the British government’s Environment Department as one of the “100 Eco-Heroes of All Time.” 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 philosophy and religion. https://www.charlenespretnak.com

Maureen Murdock

Maureen Murdock, Ph.D. is a family therapist and the author of the best-selling book, The Heroine’s Journey, which explores the rich territory of the feminine psyche. This groundbreaking book, her response to Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, has been translated into 23 languages, including Farsi. She created a photo essay called “Changing Woman: Contemporary Faces of the Goddess” to highlight the various ways women honored the goddess in their work and lives. Murdock was Chair and Core Faculty of the MA Counseling Psychology Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute and teaches memoir with Jennifer Selig in Pacifica’s program “Writing Down the Soul”. She is the author of Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory; Fathers’ Daughters: Breaking the Ties that Bind; Spinning Inward: Using Guided Imagery with Children; and The Heroine’s Journey Workbook. Her new book, Mythmaking: Self-Discovery and the Timeless Art of Memoir was published by Shambhala in 2024. She has written pieces for the Huffington Post on criminal justice and mental illness and volunteers for the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP). www.maureenmurdock.com.

Monica Mody

Dr. Monica Mody is a Core Professor in the Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Mythological Studies MA/PhD Program. Her areas of specialization include decolonial, indigenous, and women of color paradigms and epistemologies; Anzaldúan frameworks; earth-sourced and feminist spirituality and ritual; poetry, divination, oracular speech, and arts-based research; and nondual embodiment, in conversation with ancestral lineages from South Asia. She is the author of the full-length poetry collections Wild Fin(Weavers Press, 2024),  Bright Parallel(Copper Coin, 2023), the cross-genre Kala Pani(1913 Press, 2013), and three chapbooks including Ordinary Annals(above/ground press, 2021). Monica’s academic publications include peer-reviewed articles in the Transformative Power of Art Journal and Integral Review: A Transdisciplinary and Transcultural Journal For New Thought, Research, and Praxis, as well as essays in Tarka Journal and The Land Remembers Us: Women, Myth, and Nature. She has presented widely, including at the El Mundo Zurdo Conference, the Parliament of World Religions, Symposia of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology, the Center for Black and Indigenous Praxis at CIIS, Oakland Summer School, American Academy of Religion Western Region, and Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference. https://www.drmonicamody.com

Safron Rossi

Evans Lansing Smith

Evans Lansing Smith is Chair and Core Faculty of the Mythological Studies Program at the Pacifica Graduate Institute, in Santa Barbara, CA. In the 1970s he traveled with the late Joseph Campbell on tours of Northern France, Egypt, and Kenya. He is the author of thirteen books (including two recent volumes of poems) and numerous articles on comparative literature and mythology. He has his Ph.D. from The Claremont Graduate School, an M.A. in Creative Writing from Antioch International (London and Dublin), and a B.A. from Williams College. He has taught at colleges and universities in Switzerland, Maryland, Texas, and California, and is the recipient of awards for distinguished teaching and publication from Midwestern State University, and the Pacifica Graduate Institute. In addition, he has lectured at the C.G. Jung Institutes in Küsnacht and New York, The Seattle Friends of Jung, the Modern Language Association, the American Popular Culture Association, the Ojai Writer’s Conference, the Pacifica Graduate Institute, and the Casa dei Pesci in Circeo San Felice, Italy. His edited volume of Joseph Campbell’s writings and lectures on the Grail Romances was published in the Collected Works Series by New World Publishing in November, 2015, and his edition of the Correspondences of Joseph Campbell is forthcoming. https://coniunctioblog.com/

Mary Heebner

Mary Heebner earned her BFA in Art and Literature from the College of Creative Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara, where she studied with Paul Wonner, Charles Garabedian, and Gerald Haggerty, followed by a Master of Fine Arts where she worked with mentor, artist William Dole. In addition to her fine art practice in collage, painting, and drawing, Heebner founded Simplemente Maria Press in 1995. The press unites place-based inspirations and images with studio practice, print, and papermaking to create hand-crafted books that couple her visual art and writing in a variety of formats. Her checklist also includes several collaborative projects with the work of William Shakespeare, Pablo Neruda, Alastair Reid, Sienna Craig, Clayton Eshleman, Michael Hannon, and Stephen Kessler. In 2020, Heebner celebrated 25 years with the catalog Bridging: Image & Word: 25 Years of Simplemente Maria Press. In 2024, she completed her twentieth edition artists book, Arctic Trilogy. Heebner’s work is held in numerous private and public collections, including the John Paul Getty Research Institute, The US Library of Congress, The New York Public Library, The Fisher Collection, The National Gallery of Art, The British Museum, Fundación Neruda, San Francisco and Santa Barbara Museums of Art, The Universities of California, University of Michigan, Lily Library, Indiana, Wesleyan University, Bowdoin College, Maine, Columbia University, NYC. https://maryheebner.com

Devon Deimler

Devon Deimler, PhD is a writer, artist, and researcher. She is Associate Core Faculty in Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Mythological Studies program. She is also Curator of exhibits and events at OPUS Archives and Research Center and a has served as Contributing Artist, Scholar-in-Residence, and Special Editions Editor at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, as well as a lecturer for Morbid Anatomy. Devon earned her PhD in Mythological Studies with an emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica with an award-winning doctoral dissertation, Ultraviolet Concrete: Dionysos and the Ecstatic Play of Aesthetic Experience. She holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her experience in the arts includes founding an independent record label, Wildfire Wildfire Productions, and working as Assistant to the Director at the Dennis Hopper Art Trust. More at devondeimler.com