Lecture 1: Motherhouse

In this opening lecture we will discuss the concept of a pre-patriarchal, matrifocal “Old Europe,” both through the work of Marija Gimbutas and the lineage of scholars who came before her, especially women, like classicist Jane Ellen Harrison. We will talk about what I mean by the term “motherhouse”— connected to the Neolithic sites across the Balkans as well as Çatalhöyük in present-day Turkey, where the bones of generations of ancestral women were very often buried in the walls, beneath the threshold or under the oven. The house was very literally the body of collective ancestral mothers, a place where all you needed to do was touch the wall or the floor or the warmth of the hearth to feel them near. What would it feel like to remember the motherhouse in each of us? We will explore the Greek myth of Europa, namesake of Europe, and her journey from Anatolia to Crete as a map of early migrations and the meeting of Neolithic and Mesolithic cultures. We will look at matrilineal house-structures in early Bronze Age Crete, and examine the myth of Demeter and Persephone as a memory-holder of matrilineal consciousness before the dominance of Myceneaen war-gods like Zeus. And we will ground ourselves in our own motherhouses through creative practice and connection to the earth where we each are.

Lecture 2: Hestia

At the heart of the cave, there is a fire that never goes out. This is the fire in your motherhouse. In ancient Greek, the word εστία literally means the home and the hearth. The home as hearth. It is also the name of a goddess, but in the ancient Greek conception it means home and hearth first. Then the goddess. The goddess is these. She is inseparable. The home is the place where the wildest force of all — fire— is kept and tended. In this lecture, I will tell you the Russian story of Vasilisa who went to get fire from the Baba Yaga’s hut, and how this journey and the features of this fairytale might have Old European roots. We will explore the Vestal Virgins of ancient Rome and the ritual relighting of fires across the city by the mothers, as well as the offerings traditionally given to the fire both in ancient Rome and all the way across Europe, in Lithuania— and what all of this might have to do with early traces of temples and hearth-worship in the Neolithic and before.

Lecture 3: Bear Woman

The oldest of temples was the cave, where women once married bears, and gave birth to both human babies and bear cubs. In this second module we look at Paleolithic cave paintings from France; at ancient rituals surrounding the bear hunt; at variants of “The Woman Who Married a Bear” myth and its traces in the Norwegian fairytale “East of the Sun, West of the Moon,” and the story of the birth of Otso the bear in the Finnish Kalevala, as well as concepts of female guardians of the forest and its animals. We discuss the bear as original herbalist and teacher of plant medicine to human beings, and the womanhood initiation traditions surrounding Artemis Brauronia in classical Greece.

Lecture 4: Holy Water

In pre-Hellenic Greece, there is a goddess named Tethys. She is the mother of ten-thousand sea and river nymphs, wife of the god Okeanos, and the keeper of the primordial font of spring water that emerges from under the ground to nourish the earth. Her name is connected to ancient Greek words for both grandmother and nurse. Wherever there are water nymphs, maidens who guard wells and freshwater springs, or sacred caves now dedicated to the Virgin Mary where unending spring water still flows, we are in the presence of Old European memories of the water of life, the grandmother of us all. We will discuss Calypso on her island in the Odyssey, the sacred Otherworld waters and wells and sacred rivers in the Celtic tradition and their connection to goddesses of sovereignty, including a look at Grail legends and the Wasteland. We will connect with the local waters where we each live, and to the imaginal waters of our foremothers.

Lecture 5: Swanskin

Figurines with women’s bodies and the masks of birds abound across Neolithic Europe, especially amongst the Vinča culture, where figures depict bird-masked dancers, priestesses or shamans. Are they enacting rituals of seasonal return, or visionary, oracular flight? On Minoan sealstones from a thousand years later, pregnant women with bird wings squat in birthing postures, or leap into flight. Homeric epics, with their descriptions of the cosmic songs of the Sirens, gesture toward a language of the wild earth and of the bird-sung sky that long precedes the bard. And across Europe, especially in the north and east, migratory swans transform in folktales and myths into women and back into swans, marking the cycles of the seasons and often bringing both vision, and love, to human men. In this module, we will look at a Lithuanian fairytale about a swan mother, as well as the traces of swanskin and stork-mother myths across eastern and central Europe, concluding with a conversation about bird-language as a font of ecological knowledge.

Lecture 6: Trees of Life

The concept of a sacred tree that reaches from the depths of the earth to the celestial realms, or bears the fruit of eternal life or blessing, can be found all over the world. Before the garden of Eden there was Asherah, Canaanite mother goddess who was worshipped in the form of a tree. Before the garden of Eden, countless tiny sealstones from Minoan Crete depict worshippers communing with fruit-bearing trees. Greek myths tell of women transforming into trees, sacred orchards, and oracles, while Norse mythology has the world-tree Yggdrasil, with the Norns weaving fate beneath its roots. Further back, in the Neolithic of Old Europe, we see a root system of thinking that connects the ancestral dead to the yet-to-be-born future generations, through the medium of the sacred tree, and a special connection between motherhood and an arboreal goddess. In this lecture, we will take a close look at the Grimms’ version of Cinderella, to study the mother-tree at the center of the story. We will look at traditions surrounding the burial of the placenta after childbirth, and how communication with trees is a communication with both the past and the future.

Lecture 7: Spindlewhorl

One of the most common ritual offerings found across Neolithic Europe are spindlewhorls— the round weights at the bottom of spindles, which were used to handspin raw fibers into thread. In this module, we will bring together all the threads of the past six weeks through the lens of the powerful connection between textile work and women’s storytelling traditions. We will look at examples of women weaving and tale-telling across Europe, from Penelope at her loom in the Odyssey to the old “wives” and “gossips” said to be at the heart of the fairytale tradition in the 1600’s, and beyond. We will reclaim the ball of thread that Cretan Ariadne gave to Theseus to find his way in and out of the labyrinth in order to kill the Minotaur, and also discuss how this story has echoes all throughout the folktales of Europe, where old wise grandmothers give young heroines and heroes balls of wool to follow “across thrice-nine mountains” in order to find their heart’s desire. We will spin together the threads of hearths, holy waters, bear-women, swanskins, and trees of life from our time together, and see what new tapestries our motherlines are asking us to weave now. Where and how will we offer what we have made?

Unearthing the Myths & Histories of Old Europe

7 pre-recorded lectures by Sylvia V. Linsteadt

available via ADVAYA