What if the strength that got Medusa labeled monstrous really made her majestic?

What if the strength that got Medusa labeled monstrous really made her majestic?

Myths are powerful archetype creators, and no myth has contributed more to the strong-woman-as-monster archetype than Medusa.

Today Medusa—like strong women everywhere—would be called nasty, persistent, bossy, bitchy or worse. This is the legacy of misinterpreting her power, and it has led us to misunderstanding our own.

That is why we have called in the torchbearers—the most learned Medusa scholars on the planet—to re-story this myth with us, restoring her—and us—to our original majesty.

During a series of conversations, Girl God Books founder Trista Hendren will dive deep into the creation of this myth and its tragic distortions with Glenys Livingstone, Laura Shannon, Miriam Robbins Dexter and Joan Marler.

This four-part series will bring Medusa's voice into your living room. Watch the recordings at your leisure.

For just $49, you will have access to the recordings to rewatch as many times as you like—because deprogramming our patriarchal inheritance is not a one and done!

Glenys Livingstone

Glenys opens our dialogue with essential questions and insightful explorations of how we all would be profoundly altered by welcoming Medusa back into our souls and our psyches in all her glory.

Glenys Livingstone Ph.D. (Social Ecology) is the author of PaGaian Cosmology and My Name is Medusa. She is a featured contributor to Return to Mago blog. Current projects include a book on Celebrating PaGaian Sacred Ceremony and a series of PaGaian Cosmology Meditations.

Laura Shannon

Miriam Robbins Dexter

Our deep dive into Medusa continues as Miriam and Trista embark on a historical and cross-cultural exploration of Medusa in a much-needed a feminist effort to honor and articulate the complexity of the divine female.

Miriam Robbins Dexter holds a Ph.D. in ancient Indo-European languages, archaeology, and comparative mythology, from UCLA. She is the author of Whence the Goddesses: A Source Book, and she completed and supplemented Marija Gimbutas' final book, The Living Goddesses. She coauthored Sacred Display: Divine and Magical Female Figures of Eurasia with Victor Mair and with Vicki Noble, edited the anthology, Foremothers of the Women's Spirituality Movement: Elders and Visionaries. 

Joan Marler

In this final conversation, Joan reminds us that the Gorgon Medusa presents herself to us here and now, requiring us to be fully present, to listen deeply—past the noise of accumulated judgments—to the Ancient Wisdom that is our true inheritance.

Joan Marler is the Founder and Executive Director of the Institute of Archaeomythology. She is the editor of several books on the life and work of Marija Gimbutas and is completing her doctorate in Philosophy and Religion with an emphasis in Women's Spirituality at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco where she has been an adjunct professor. She is the author of "An Archaeomythological Investigation of the Gorgon" in ReVision 25, no. 1 (Summer 2002): 15-23; and "The Gorgon Medusa" in Women in World Religions.

Trista Hendren