When Women Were the Land

There is an older origin story at the heart of the lands called Europe, older than the one we all learned in school. Older than the Iliad and the Odyssey, older than the Garden of Eden. We are here to tell it.

In this 7-module course with Sylvia Linsteadt, we will follow pathways of myth, archaeology, nature connection and creative practice back into the Neolithic (and earlier) matrilineal root systems of Europe. Into traces of pre-patriarchal cultures indigenous to these lands, cultures that centered the earth and the female divine. Cultures where the mother and her child were revered.

In you is a thread that reaches back tens of thousands of years. A motherhouse whose floors are full of your foremothers' bones, whose walls shelter the looms and spindles and mortar stones where your motherline still spirals, waiting to be woven all the way back to health. The fire in the hearth of your motherhouse has not gone out in all these tens of thousands of years. Even in the most difficult of seasons, there has always been an ember under the ashes, waiting for your breath. Even in the most devastating of times, the bones of your primordial grandmothers have not stopped chanting their love for you from the walls, and all the wisdoms their hands knew about life, and love, and death, and birth.

In this course, we will explore the earth-rooted, life-revering cultural heritage of Old Europe, a heritage that predates the origin stories and epics we all learned about in school. We will use archaeological and historical data, myths and fairytales, and our own imaginations and capacities to unearth and re-story the memory, in the lands of Europe, of cultures that centered mothers and children.

Together we will learn about the work of Marija Gimbutas, the brilliant Lithuanian archaeologist who first described a pre-patriarchal "Old Europe” in the mid-twentieth century, as well as the lineage of scholarship on this subject before here. We will explore how European fairytales still encode motherlines of Old European consciousness, and how attentive ecological study and nature-connection practices can help us orient to the regenerative stories held in the land—animal, vegetable, celestial, and more. We will look at myths of creation and of birth, and at our own creativity.

Each module will be organized around a mythic concept or archetype central to Sylvia’ sense of Old European cosmology— (Motherhouse, Bear Woman, Hestia’s Fire, Holy Water, Tree of Life, Swanskin, Spindlewhorl). Connected to each, Sylvia will offer lectures that combine archaeological evidence, history, and the study of myth; creative writing prompts to activate the wellsprings of your imagination; and nature-connection practices from her background in wildlife tracking to keep you rooted in your “place in space” (to quote the poet Gary Snyder).

The purpose of this work is not only to help reimagine the foundation myths of Europe itself, but also to encourage us to become more attentive to the lands where each of us live; to our animal bodies; and to our imaginations, gifting matrilineal memory and earth-reverence back into the root systems of the present moment.