Temenos

Nov 18, 2024

A sanctuary space for conversations around women’s faith and spirituality

From January 2025, members of The Hearth (i.e. ‘founding members’ of The Art of Enchantment) will be invited to participate in conversations around women’s faith and spirituality, in a section I’m calling ‘Temenos’ – an old word for a sanctuary, or an enclosure in a temple or other sacred place.

Some of the questions we will engage with include:

How do we find meaning in an increasingly secular – and challenging – age?
Why are women still not accepted as equals within traditional faith hierarchies?
How do we find our own authentic ways of honouring the divine and the sacred feminine, outside of those institutions and hierarchies as well as within them?

Although our scope will be wide-ranging, our focus will not be on neopagan traditions (Wicca, Druidism, Heathenry etc) as there are many other forums for such discussions if that’s your main interest. What I’m mostly interested in is the path of the mystic. It’s a journey that springs from longing, for the holy fools, the free spirits, the iconoclasts who simply don’t fit into the hierarchy of tired, male-dominated religious institutions. It’s a path which has imagination at its heart. It’s both a gentler path and a more radical one. Above all, and across religious and spiritual traditions, it is – and always has been – a path for women.

I’ll be producing monthly written or video posts, and introducing discussion threads in between, to offer up topics for conversation around contemporary faith and spirituality. My Substack chat is exclusively available to all members of The Hearth, and there will be four additional online sharing circles during the year to talk about these issues.

More generally, The Hearth is focused on the ways in which mythic imagination practices, contemplative practices and a practice of paying close attention to the land we live in can help us to ground ourselves in the seasons and cycles of the year – and so in the seasons and cycles of our lives. We will have four seasonal 90-minute online retreats during which we consider the ways in which we can be present in the world with intention and awareness.