Women of the Islands

Access to a recorded event in The Bone Cave

Dear friends

Normal service here at The Art of Enchantment will resume next week; I seem finally after surgery to have regained the use of all my faculties (though not entirely of my wrist, which will need physiotherapy). I’m delighted to say I’ll be back in our monthly Fairy Tale Salon next Saturday, July 20 at 16.00 UK time; as always, you’ll receive an email next Thursday with an audio recording of the story we’ll be working with, to listen to beforehand.

In the meantime, I wanted to offer you something this weekend, as usual, but haven’t this week had a chance to write anything for reasons you all know about. So I thought you might like to have access to a recording of one of the online workshops I carried out between 2021 and February of this year: ‘Women of the Islands’, in which we explore the mythical women of Britain. Here’s the event info:

Throughout the oldest British mythology, stories of islands where women live alone together, rule, or tend sacred places, are abundant. And the ‘real’ islands of, and around, Britain were once seen as a bastion of female power by writers and travellers in Classical Europe. In this gathering, we’ll explore those stories, from Tir na mBan, the magical Land of Women, to Morgan le Fay and the wondrous Isle of Avalon. On the way, we’ll encounter legends of the female founder of Albion, and the giants and ‘Amazonian women’ of the Scottish islands. We’ll delve into the reasons why these ancient stories of women as priestesses, the keepers of women’s mysteries, contained within an island – a place where women can be free, safe, apart from the patriarchy – resonates so strongly with women today.

I look a little strange in this video because my hair was just beginning to grow back after I’d lost it during chemotherapy and, much to my perplexity, it was growing back curly.