Mago Academy hosts the second S/HE Divine Studies Online Forum (the S/HE Forum), a spinoff project of the S/HE Divine Studies Conference. The S/HE Forum is a 2 hour-long event in the form of a panel.
This upcoming March Forum will feature three presentations by Dr. Nane Jordan, Dr. Judy Grahn, and Dr. Helen Hye-Sook Hwang. The titles and summaries of their papers as well as all biographies including the Moderator and the Discussant come under “Program Contents” toward the end of this page.
Theme: Menstruation in Motherhood, Culture, and Calendar: Restore the Female Mind-Body-Spirit
Date and Time: March 8, 2025 (Noon to 2PM PT)
Presenters: Dr. Nane Jordan, Dr. Judy Grahn, Dr. Helen Hye-Sook Hwang
Moderator: Dr. Glenys Livingstone
Discussant: Dr. Jessica Spring Weappa
Registration: Fee of $10 or Donation (enter your own amount) with the brief application information to be emailed Dr. Hwang (magoacademy@gmail.com) including (1) your name, (2) your work or website, and (3) I am interested in the forum because… (to be completed by you).
Program Contents
Moderator: Dr. Glenys Livingstone
Biography: Glenys Livingstone, Ph.D. (Social Ecology) is the author of PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion which is based on her doctoral research (University of Western Sydney, Social Ecology. 2002). She has been on a Goddess path since 1979, and has contributed to several anthologies, including Goddesses in World Culture (ed. Patricia Monaghan), and Goddesses in Myth, History and Culture (ed. Mary Ann Beavis and Helen Hye-Sook Hwang). She co-edited Re-visioning Medusa: from Monster to Divine Wisdom with Trista Hendren and Pat Daly. Glenys lives in Australia, where she has facilitated Seasonal ceremony for over two decades, and mentored students. She teaches a year long course on-line. Glenys’s website is http://pagaian.org/.
Discussant: Dr. Jessica Spring Weappa
Biography:
“Menstrual Rituals and Culture Creation” by Judy Grahn
Summary: Metaformic Theory is my reclamation of menstrual rituals as sources of human culture. In Western societies, due to patriarchy, Menses has gone from anathema, an unspeakable subject, to the medicalization and even suppression of its natural process. Indigenous cultures in contrast maintained the ancient ways even into recent or contemporary times. Metaformic Theory explores the cultural contributions of menstrual rituals, not to pull us backwards in time; rather to inspire us with the uncanny wisdom and relational creations of everyone’s, including our own, ancestral lines. All manner of human achievements, technologies, and arts can be traced to menstrual rites, including broad categories such as horticulture and goddess religion, jumping women into the center of culture creation.
Biography: Judy Grahn, Ph.D. is an internationally known poet, writer, and cultural theorist. An early (1965) LGBT activist, she is also a foremother of women’s spirituality, and a retired women’s spirituality professor. In her long career, she has published seventeen books and received many awards, including a Fred Cody Award for literature and social activism, a Pen Oakland award for excellence in literary criticism, two American Book awards, and two awards from the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology. Metaformic Theory is her embodied philosophy, result of research into menstrual ritual practices, resulting in her idea that menstrual rituals created the basics of uniquely human culture, outlined in her 1993 book Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World. Her Ph.D. dissertation was an application of the theory in a comparison of contemporary and recent menstrual rituals and goddess rituals in Kerala, south India.
“Placental Thinking for Re-conceiving Blood-Roots in Birth” by Nané Jordan, PhD
Summary: The notion of “placental thinking” draws from my birth-work and birth-thinking as nourished in practices of mother-centred birth alongside the gifting wisdom of placentas. I discuss placental thinking with attention to Judy Grahn’s metaformic theory to bring awareness to the maternal gift of life as embodied in placentas’ blood-roots—and for honouring the sacredness of birth itself and those who give it in human cultural creation. Through the life-giving roots of babies’ placentas in utero, which resemble the tree of life, mothers nourish babies’ growth through a continual, gestational dialogue of blood. By offering embodied understandings of this oft-ignored and discarded, yet primal-gifting blood-organ with a stage of labour all of its own, I seek to re-centre and liberate the power of birth itself towards more sacred, cooperative, harmonious, joyful and gift-based lives on Mother Earth.
Placental thinking traces the contrast of mother-centred birth with paternalistic, over-medicalized regimes that too often disempower and traumatize so many birthing mothers and those being born. In re-conceiving birth-blood and birth-giving as sacred, and embracing the fierce, overwhelming, ecstatic yet tender sensual qualities (as in: of the senses) of birth, mothers can experience more positive embodied potentials of self-empowerment, relief, joy, and even pleasure in giving birth through the love-centred, love-promoting resources of our own bodies. The birth process is thus restored to mothers and babies themselves, while held in protective, attuned, and caring communities of others. Re-conceiving by re-imagining our blood-roots in birth reclaims birth-giving as a powerful, experiential, sacred maternal wisdom tradition for new philosophies of birth and life in cultures of human thriving.
Biography: Nané Jordan is a Goddess Studies and Women’s Spirituality scholar with a working background in lay midwifery and community social work. As an active educator, birthkeeper, community worker, artist, and mother, her work theorizing mother-centred birth and the maternally gifting role of placentasinforms new ways of thinking about birth in care and experience as central to human thriving. Nané was a Social Science and Humanities Research of Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Paris 8, France. She holds a PhD in Education from the University of British Columbia, an MA in Women’s Spirituality from New College of California, and was recently a Scholar-in-Residence in the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University. Living in at the edge of the forest near the Salish Sea on the West Coast of Canada, Nané facilitates women’s circles and co-founded the artist collectives Gestare (to carry in the womb), and the Ma Whales. She publishes widely, including the anthologies: Placenta Wit: Mother Stories, Rituals, and Research, and Pagan, Goddess, Mother (Demeter Press). Nané was a planning and convening board member of the 2024 S/HE Divine Studies Conference, and is on the editorial board for S/HE: An International Journal of Goddess Studies. She is also affiliated with the Philosophy of Birth Network, and International Feminists for a Gift Economy.
“Menstruation marking the Magoist Calendar of the 13 Months and 28 Days” by Helen Hye-Sook Hwang, Ph.D.
Summary: Moderns have largely forgotten that the female biology culminating in menstruation is built in sync with the cycles of such cosmic entities as the moon and the sun. The Magoist Calendar demonstrates that menstruation is the human bio clock aligned with the moon, the sun, and beyond. Where the Magoist Calendar is lost, that the female biorhythm is in sync with ALL ELSE remains esoteric at best. Women, the procreator, embody the cosmogenic principle of the Matriverse. The Magoist Calendar of the 13 months 28 days is the nature-given civilizational foundation for ancient Magoists to have crafted culture in harmony with the creative force of the Matriverse, the Ninefold Cosmic Music. “Mago” is the Korean/East Asian word for the Cosmic Mother or the Creatrix. S/HE is the Divine Agent for the Ninefold Cosmic Music. The Magoist Calendar guides humanity to the Great Unity of ALL (not only humans but also inorganic entities) originated from the Creatrix in the Reality of WE/HERE/NOW. According to the Budoji (Epic of the Emblem Capital City), the principal text of Magoism transmitted from the late 4th or early 5th century of Silla Korea (57 BCE-935 CE), the 12-month solar-lunar calendar was purposefully forged to legitimize the man-made rule, patriarchy. It functioned to efface the maternal principle of the Ninefold Cosmic Music. The 12-month calendar was used as a philosophical underpinning of patriarchy, as patriarchy spread in the ancient world. The human world fell under an unprecedented scale of chaos and suffering disrupting ALL, as the Magoist Calendar was displaced in the course of history.
Biography: Dr. Helen Hye-Sook Hwang is a researcher, author, and advocate of Ceto-Magoism (the Whale-guided Way of the Creatrix) and has recently established the MA/PhD. program in Creatrix Studies. Having achieved an MA and Ph.D. in Religion with emphasis on Feminist Studies (Claremont Graduate University), Hwang studied an M.A. program at UCLA. Having founded The Mago Work, Hwang has recently launched the S/HE Conference and the S/HE Forum in 2024. She authored, co-edited, and published by Mago Books Reader: Toward Magoist Cetaceanism (2023), The Mago Way: Re-discovering Mago, the Great Goddess from East Asia (2015), Mago Almanac: 13 Month 28 Day Calendar annually since 2018, and the Budoji Workbook series since 2020, Goddesses in Myth, History and Culture (2018), Celebrating Intercosmic Kinship of the Goddess (2023), the She Rises trilogy series (2015, 2016, and 2019), and Celebrating Seasons of the Goddess (2017).