When Women Were the LandUnearthing European Myths & Histories
Discover the powerful, ancient historical bond between women and the earth, and explore the matrilineal wisdom held in land, archeology, mythology and history.
taught by Sylvia V. Linsteadt
Module 1Mother House
We 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.
Chapter 1
Chapter 1: Introduction to the Ground and Field
Chapter 2
Chapter 2: The Red Thread
Chapter 3
Chapter 3: Tracing Roots
Chapter 4
Chapter 4: A Meditation for Your Motherhouse
Module 2Hestia's Fire
In this module we look at the concept of houses and hearths as temples and shrines in Old Europe, and why ancestral bones might have been buried right beneath the oven.
Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The Eternal Flame of Vasilisa and the Baba Yaga
Chapter 2
Chapter 2: Fire's Origin
Chapter 3
Chapter 3: Sacred Flames and Power
Chapter 4
Chapter 4: Resilience of the Hearth
Chapter 5
Chapter 5: The Living Flame
Module 3Bear Woman
Look at Paleolithic cave paintings from France; 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, and many more.
Chapter 1
Chapter 1: Meeting the Mother Bear
Chapter 2
Chapter 2: Bera and the Woman Who Married the Bear
Chapter 3
Chapter 3: The Bear as the Mother of the People
Chapter 4
Chapter 4: Bear Lore and the Kalevala
Chapter 5
Chapter 5: Motherhood and the Bear
Chapter 6
Chapter 6: Bear Guardianship and the Sovereign Wild
Module 4Holy Water
We will discuss Calypso's spring on her island in the Odyssey, amniotic waters and the renewal of virginity by pre-Hellenic goddesses, the sacred Otherworld waters and wells and sacred rivers in the Celtic tradition and their connection to goddesses of sovereignty, and more.
Chapter 1
Chapter 1: Guarding What is Sacred
Chapter 2
Chapter 2: Wells of Memory and Female Guardianship
Chapter 3
Chapter 3: Other-World Guardians of the Wells
Chapter 4
Chapter 4: Memory of Wells
Chapter 5
Chapter 5: Ancestral Imagining & Dreaming
Module 5Swanskin
In this module, we will look at figures of the "bird goddess" in Neolithic Old Europe, stories of swan maidens and their swanskins from Lithuania to Ireland, and explore bird-language as a font of ecological knowledge.
Chapter 1
Chapter 1: Wings of Light
Chapter 2
Chapter 2: The Swan Queen
Chapter 3
Chapter 3: Of Swans and Storks
Chapter 4
Chapter 4: Dancing Labyrinths
Chapter 5
Chapter 5: The Siren's Song
Chapter 6
Chapter 6: The Language of Birds
Module 6Trees of Life
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. In this module, we will explore trees as goddesses of both life, dea...
Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The Sacred Hazel Tree in Cinderella
Chapter 2
Chapter 2: Warden Trees and Guardian Spirits
Chapter 3
Chapter 3: Sacred Knowledge and the Tree Goddess
Chapter 4
Chapter 4: Weaving the Tree of Life
Chapter 5
Chapter 5: Breathing Through the Roots
Module 7Spindlewhorl
In this module, 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, connecting these threads all the way back to Neolithic offerings connected to...
Chapter 1
Chapter 1: Threads of Resistance and Memory
Chapter 2
Chapter 2: Women's Voices and the Spinning of Tales
Chapter 3
Chapter 3: Following a Ball of Thread
Chapter 4
Chapter 4: Returning to the Motherhouse
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.
- 7 classes with Sylvia
- Mythic writing prompts
- Transcriptions
- Community area
- Additional readings & resources
- A new understanding of the patterns and possibilities of Old European cultures
- Learn about European myths and folktales from a matrifocal, earth-connected perspective
- Learn creative practices that access the power of your imagination and intuition
- Get tools for connecting more deeply to the plants, animals and earth where you live
- Explore motherlines, both cultural and personal, and the opportunity to write your own mythic story of motherline blessing, mending, and healing.