“What the Living have in common today is that they rarely think about the Dead. But the Dead think only about the Living, just as a loving, devoted parent thinks only about their child.” —Our Lady of Woodstock, October 29, 2017
We all have more mothers than we know. All of our mothers, from all of our past lives, are waiting to guide us and hold us. All of our mothers from all of our past lives are waiting for us to remember who they are—and who we are.
Human history, the story of civilization, is a violent story of slavery, misogyny, and war, war against each other, war against the earth, and most of all, war against the mother. Our species has utterly traumatized itself by turning away from the bodies that birthed us, the land that feeds us, and the maternal darkness to which we all return. No wonder so many of us feel lost, bereft, anxious, and alone.
But human history is not the only story and in the long journey of our people through deep time we once knew how to turn to the mothers, honor the mothers, and find the mothers wherever they were. Not just the human mothers, but the bird mothers, the mountain mothers, the ocean mothers, all the mothers of magic and mystery.
What if we could descend into the land of the dead and find our mothers again, all of our forgotten mothers, who have loved us and love us still? These ancient mothers and grandmothers are waiting to hold us, guide us, heal us, and welcome us home. They are ready to show us, too, male and female, young and old, those with biological children and those without, what it means to be mothers in the world.
Join me to meet your mothers from all your lives, the mothers even now watching over you, helping you, standing ready to answer your calls.
Join me to heal the disappointments, the frustrations, and the furies you have felt in your relationship with your own mother.
Journey with me back into the land of the dead, into the darkness and the dirt, to meet the Great Mothers from the bottom of time.
Join me to find out what it means to rebirth the wild revelry of embodied animism back into the world and become together, whatever our gender or biological experience, mothers of magic and mystery.
Session One: Our Lady of the Beasts: The Mother Before Patriarchy
Session Two: Our Lady of Sorrows: The Mother Within Patriarchy
Session Three: The Black Madonna: The Mother after Patriarchy
Session Four: The Return of the Grandmothers
Wednesdays 7-8:3- pm est Every session is recorded and sent to all participants. Find out more and register here.
Perdita Finn is the co-founder, with her husband Clark Strand, of the feral fellowship The Way of the Rose, which inspired their book The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary.
In addition to extensive study with Zen masters, priests, spirit workers, and healers, she apprenticed with the psychic Susan Saxman, with whom she wrote The Reluctant Psychic. Perdita Finn now teaches popular workshops on Getting to Know the Dead. Participants are empowered to activate the miracles in their own lives with the help of their ancestors and recover their own intuitive magic. Her book Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World is an intimate journey through her recovery of these lost ways. She speaks widely on how to collaborate with those on the other side, on the urgent necessity of a new romantic animism, and on the sobriety that emerges when we claim the long story of our souls. Her next book is The Body of My Mother.
She lives with her family in the moss-filled shadows of the Catskill Mountains.