Dates: Sundays, March 26 - July 15, 2023 (Skipping several dates to accommodate Dr. Heide Goettner-Abendroth's Matriarchal Societies Book Club; See below for details)
Time: 1 pm - 2:30 pm ET (Final class will run longer to accommodate all student projects)
Admission: $100 Patreon Members / General Admission: $150

PLEASE NOTE: All classes will also be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time.

In this 14 week reading group, we will take a deep dive into the book The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, which takes a Jungian, scholarly approach to the history of The Goddess from pre-history to the present.

Written by Jungian psychoanalysts Dr. Anne Baring, who also studied History at Oxford, and Jules Cashford, who was supervisor in literature at Cambridge, this book traces the the myth of the Goddess—our oldest known myth—and follows its evolution to understand how humankind’s understanding of itself has developed over the millennia of human history.

In this rich, accessible, and superbly researched study, Baring and Cashford draw on poetry and mythology, art and literature, archaeology and psychology to demonstrate how the myth of the goddess has been lost from our formal Judeo-Christian images of the divine. They explain what happened to the Goddess, when and how she was excluded, and the implications of this loss. They trace the image of the Great Mother Goddess of the Palaeolithic and Neolithic times through the Bronze and Iron Ages to the Virgin Mary, 'Queen of Heaven'. They show how the God separated from the originally androgynous Goddess and eventually came to stand alone as the creator of the world. And they discover the Goddess emerging again, today, in the realm of Science, which offers a vision of the universe as a living whole that can only be understood as a unity, with scientists expressing themselves in images that belong to the old Goddess myth.

This class will consist of an open-ended discussions based on each week’s reading. As a final projects, students will have the opportunity to share a response to what we have read and discussed in the form of a project of their choosing. This could take the form of an art work, a presentation of research on anther Goddess from history, the invention of their of Goddess, a written work, a performance, or anything else that helps them synthesize and digest the material in a meaningful way.

SCHEDULE

• Week One (March 26): Preface and In The Beginning: The Paleolithic Mother Goddess

• Week Two (April 2): The Neolithic Great Goddess of Sky, Earth and Waters

• Week Three (April 9): The Bronze Age: The Mother Goddess and Her Son-Lover

• Week Four (April 16): Inanna-Ishtar: Mesopotamian Goddess of the Great Above and Great Below

  SKIP APRIL 23

• Week Five Isis of Egypt (April 30): Queen of Heaven, Earth and the Underworld

• Week Six (May 7): Tiamat of Babylon: The Defeat of the Goddess

  SKIP MAY 14

• Week Seven (May 21): Goddesses of Greece: Aphrodite, Demeter and Persephone

• Week Eight (May 28): Cybele: great Goddess of Anatolia and Rome

• Week Nine (June 4): The Iron Age: The Great Father God Yahweh-Elohim

  SKIP JUNE 11

• Week Ten (June 18): The Hidden Goddess in the Old Testament

• Week Eleven (June 25): Eve: The Mother of All Living

• Week Twelve (July 2): Mary: The Return of the Goddess

  SKIP JULY 9

• Week Thirteen (July 16): Sophia: Mother, Daughter and Bride and The Sacred Marriage of Goddess and God: The Reunion of Nature and Spirit

• Week Fourteen (July 23): Final Project (Longer session to accommodate all presenters)

INSTRUCTOR BIO

Joanna Ebenstein is a Brooklyn-based writer, award winning curator, photographer and graphic designer. She is the creator of the Morbid Anatomy blog, library and event series, and was cofounder (with Tracy Hurley Martin) and creative director of the recently shuttered Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn. Her books include Death: A Graveside Companion, The Anatomical Venus and The Morbid Anatomy Anthology (with Colin Dickey). Her work has been covered by The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Wired, National Geographic, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek and more. You can see her Tedx talk—Death as You've Never Seen it Before—here.

AUTHOR BIOS

Anne Baring Born in 1931, Anne Baring was educated in England and America and read history at Oxford. In 1961, after traveling widely in the Far East, she wrote (under the name of Anne Gage) The One Work: A Journey Towards the Self, the story of her quest of the underlying unity of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity. For 12 years she was a dress designer with her own shop in London. She is a member of the international Association of the analytic psychologists and divides her time between writing and her practice and as an analyst. She is married to artist Robin Baring and they have one daughter.

Jules Cashford is a writer and lecturer on Mythology with a background in Philosophy and Literature. She was a Supervisor in Literature at Cambridge for some years, before training as a Jungian Analyst. Jules is the author of The Moon: Symbol of Transformation (2016), Gaia: Story of Origin to Universe Story (The Gaia Foundation, 2012), The Mysteries of Osiris (2010), co-author of The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (Penguin, 1993), and translator of The Homeric Hymns (Penguin Classics , 2003). She has written a number of booklets on the Imagination, made two films on the Early Northern Renaissance Painter, Jan van Eyck with Kingfisher Art Productions, and also an App and CD for young children called Songs of the Animals. She is a member of the International Association of Analytical Psychology (IAAP) and a Fellow of the Temenos Academy.