Forgotten Mothers, Timeless Tales with Sylvia Lindsteadt | When Women Were the Lands

Join us as we trace pathways of myth, archaeology, nature connection back into pre-patriarchal cultures indigenous to these lands, cultures that centered the earth and the female divine. Register for our upcoming course, When Women Were the Lands with Sylvia Lindsteadt: advaya.life/co...
ABOUT THE COURSE: 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, older than the Odyssey, older than the Garden of Eden.
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. We will explore how European fairytales still encode motherlines of Old European memory, and how attentive ecological study and nature-connection practices can help us orient to the regenerative stories held in the lands we live within-animal, vegetable, celestial, and more. We will look at creation myths, and at our own creativity.
Each module will be organised around a centering, elemental theme (FIRE, MINERAL, SPRING-WATER, MOTHER BEAR, BIRD-SONG, MOON). Connected to each, Sylvia will offer history lectures, mythic writing prompts to activate the wellsprings of your imagination and creativity, and nature-connection practices from her background in wildlife tracking to keep you rooted in your “place in space” (to quote Gary Snyder).
The purpose of this work is not only to help us reimagine the foundation myths of Europe itself, but at the same time 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.
ABOUT SYLVIA: Sylvia V. Linsteadt is a novelist, poet, scholar of ancient history, animal tracker, and artist. Her work-both fiction and non-fiction-is rooted in myth, ecology, feminism and bioregionalism, and is devoted to broadening our human stories to include the voices of the living land. She is the author of the short story collection Our Lady of the Dark Country (Wild Talewort Press 2018), two novels for young readers, The Wild Folk and The Wild Folk Rising (Usborne, 2018 and 2019), and the post-apocalyptic folktale cycle Tatterdemalion (Unbound 2017) with painter Rima Staines. Her works of nonfiction include The Wonderments of the East Bay (Heyday 2014), and Lost Worlds of the San Francisco Bay Area (Heyday, Spring 2017).
Reserve your spot today: advaya.life/co...