Institute for Thealogy & Deasophy

Max Dashú
http://www.suppressedhistories.net
http://www.maxdashu.net
http://www.sourcememory.net

Max Dashú is an independent scholar who teaches global women's history and goddess traditions in the oral tradition, using images. In 1970 she founded the Suppressed Histories Archives to research female spheres of power, goddess veneration, shamanic arts, mother-right, patriarchy and the history of domination. She began presenting slideshows in feminist bookstores and women's centers in 1973. Since then she has built up a collection of over 15,000 slides, with thousands more in a fast-growing digital collection. From these she has created over one hundred visual presentations on topics such as Goddess Cosmologies, Woman Shaman, Witches and Pagans, Kemetic Deasophy, Mother-Right and Gender Justice, and Sacra Vulva.

Dashú has been a featured speaker at many universities, including Northwestern, Stanford, and Princeton, as well as countless community centers, conferences, festivals, prisons, libraries, and schools. She has lectured at the Museo de San Miguel de Allende in Mexico and the Casa Internazionale delle Donne in Rome, and presented at international conferences including: Spiritual Politics (Hambacher Schloss, Germany, 2010); International Congress of Matriarchal Studies (San Marcos, Texas, 2005); Female Mysteries of the Substratum (Rila, Bulgaria, 2004), and the Goddess Conference at Glastonbury (Britain, 2007).

In 2008 Dashú published her acclaimed dvd Women's Power in Global Perspective, and she is now working on a second movie, Woman Shaman. Her posters Sacra Vulva and Female Icons, Ancestral Mothers draw together little-known archaeological and historic images showing the global continuities in sacred female iconography. Her forthcoming sourcebook The Secret History of the Witches looks at priestesses, oracles, healers, and goddesses in Europe. She has published book excerpts and numerous articles on the Suppressed Histories Archives website, as well as on numerous journals in print and online. These writings bridge the gap between scholarship and spirituality, addressing controversies over the sacrality of ancient female figurines, the implications of recent and living mother-right societies for interpreting neolithic history, and the sexual politics of the witch hunts.

A founding mother of the Goddess resurgence, Max has participated in Pagan women's circles and sacramental dance rituals since 1971. Her legendary slideshows and paintings have helped to shape today's reclamation of female cultural heritages. Her art adorns many altars and walls, and has appeared in countless publications of the feminist spirituality movement, including the first, Womanspirit, and Goddessing Regenerated, Daughters of the Moon Tarot, and the WeMoon calendar. Her own Witch Dream Comix was published in 1975 by the Women's Press Collective. For Max, spiritual connection and wisdom is found in the Earth and the waters, so roaming the wilderness is one of her passions. She loves to dance on the land and chant goddess litanies. She practices and teaches shamanic arts of incantation and movement, and is a certified teacher of Wild Goose Qigong. She is currently teaching an online course, Woman Shaman, surveying medicine women, prophets, dreamers and drummers around the world.

partial list of publications

• "Respect and Responsibility: A Pagan Critique of Cultural Appropriation," in La Gazette (Santa Cruz, circa 1993).
• "Another View of the Witch Hunts: the Sexual Politics of Witchcraft Studies" in The Pomegranate, Issue 9, Lammas 1999.
• Streams of Wisdom. Oakland: Suppressed Histories Archives, 2000. Portions serialized in Goddessing Regenerated, 2001.
• "Knocking Down Straw Dolls: A Critique of Eller's The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory," (2002); republished in Feminist Theology, 13.2 (2005), Sage Publications, UK, pp 185-216.
• "The Meanings of Goddess," serialized article in British e-journal The Goddess Pages. 2007, condensed version in She Is Everywhere II (forthcoming).
• "Xi Wang Mu: the Great Goddess of China" and "Mother and Origin: Female Divinity in South America," in Goddesses in World Culture, ed. Patricia Monaghan, Praeger (forthcoming)