A deep dive into the divine feminine, from goddess worship to modern motherhood, guided through the landmines by author, artist, activist, witch: Monica Sjöö.
We really wanted to dedicate an episode to one of the groundbreaking powerhouse 70s witches – those take back the night witches who were influencing our moms and step moms and weird aunts without us knowing – and we wanted to try to do justice to that young emergent Wicca rebirth scene.
But we also had this sense that there was a lot of bullshit in the new age stuff that emerged at that time, and we felt like we hadn’t quite found a perfect entry point… until we stumbled on the art, research writing and fierce activism of Monica Sjoo.
Artist, activist, feminist, witch, Monica Sjoo’s greatest work is her paintings: women channelled from ‘the unknown country’ goddesses, ancestors, cosmic mothers. She also co-authored an overwhelming goddess history called the Great Cosmic Mother; walked through live munitions testing from Silbury Mound to Stonehenge; had her iconic paintings threatened with gross indecency charges; and as the Guardian wrote in their loving obituary “she and others, from End Patriarchy Now, interrupted a Bristol Cathedral service to demonstrate against the non-recognition of female spirituality by the Church of England. The dean joined hands with them, to sing to the goddess in front of the altar.”


Monica Sjöö Resources
Great Cosmic Mother : Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth
by Barbara Mor and Monica Sjöö Harper Collins, 1987
New Age and Armageddon : The Goddess or the Gurus? Towards a Feminist Vision of the Future by Monica Sjöö Women’s Press, Limited, 1997
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/sep/23/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries1
http://www.artcornwall.org/features/Monica_Sjoo_God_Giving_Birth.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsNmJ7GKOUQ
http://www.artcornwall.org/features/Reluctant_shamanka_Monica_Sjoo.htm
https://monicasjoo.weebly.com/gallery-1.html
http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-51715850/view?partId=nla.obj-51715966#page/n1/mode/1up –