[Editor’s Note: Return to Mago E-Magazine (RTME) introduces Sister Organizations under the banner of the Nine Sister Networks as a way of consolidating Matriversal Feminism previously known as Goddess Feminist Activist Spirituality. If you are interested in interviewing or being interviewed for this project, please see here. This interview was conducted through a Zoom meeting and its video recording and script are available below.]
Carolyn: Welcome! I’m Carolyn Boyd, a contributor to the e-magazine Return to Mago and I will be interviewing Max Dashu, founder of the Suppressed Histories Archives. The interview is a part of an effort by Return to Mago E-magazine to introduce Sister Organizations under the banner of the Nine Sister Networks as a way of consolidating Matriversal Feminism, and making all our works more visible.
First, let me introduce Max.
Max Dashu founded the Suppressed Histories Archives in 1970 to research and document global women’s history. She teaches with images from her collection of more than 80,000 pictures, on female cultural heritages across time and space. She is internationally known for her expertise on iconography, matricultures, patriarchy and systems of domination; medicine women, shamans, witches, and the witch hunts. She is the author of Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Culture, 700-1100 which was published by Veleda Press in 2016 and Women in Greek Mythography: Pythias, Melissae and Titanides, which was published in 2023.
So let’s start and get to some questions. Probably the most basic question is what is the overall mission of the Suppressed Histories Archives?
Max: To scan the cultural record and to document women’s history on a fully global level. To research in an interdisciplinary way, looking from many angles, at many streams of information: from archaeology, history, Indigenous orature—all kinds of cultural testimony. To synthesize that information, to get some idea of who women have been in different times and places. The cultural record is, of course, incomplete, since much of it has been destroyed by patriarchalization and conquest. This undertaking is an ongoing process, that I won’t ever finish, of gathering, sifting and sorting, correcting and adding, comparing, and synthesizing. It’s not more complete, but it’s more than what we have been given—which is not much. What we want to know has been withheld, distorted, contested—or destroyed. All of us have a birthright to this ancestral knowledge, which has been hidden, sequestered in specialist corners of academia. We’re trying to trace our real history and heritages.
Carolyn: I know that the Suppressed Histories Archives offers this information in many different ways. Could you tell us some of the things that you offer?
Max: The visual evidence, for one thing, in photo essays, web pages and, increasingly, in videos. I do a lot of commentary on things that are coming through in present day research. So, for example, genome studies have thrown up a lot of information, revealing matrilocal societies and patterns of conquest. Historical linguistics is another important source of deep history. In my social media and annual courses I share commentary and links to articles and other resources.
Carolyn: You actually have a pretty astounding reach. I think that you now have 267,000 followers on Facebook.
Max: On the Suppressed Histories page on Facebook, that’s right. About 15,000 more on youtube, academia.edu and other platforms, with some overlap.
Carolyn: That’s just amazing. What would you say some of the themes are that run though all this work that you are doing that you think are most important for people to know about now.
Max: There are a lot of themes, such as female spheres of power, and where they persist even under patriarchy. My starting point was asking “Are there any places in the world where women are free,” and looking for matriarchal societies. They show a constellation of patterns, not only matrilineage and matrilocality, but social motherhood, communitarian kin groups, female authority commensurate with contribution, the work women do to sustain the life support matrix. The much-buried spiritual leadership of women, from medicine women to oracles and priestesses, and cultural wars to do away with them.
Another theme is culturally significant symbols, recurring patterns. For example, the ancient female figurines were a starting point in my search for women in history; that’s what turned up in the paleolithic and neolithic archaeology, and even in later cultures. And from there it widened out into Goddess cosmologies and philosophies: the Creatrix, Great Mother, or Mother of the Gods (the netjeru, orisha, kachina). Old Woman, Cosmic Weaver; the female Divine as the Waters, Fire, Earth or the Heavens, as Snake Woman, Bee, Tiger or Jaguar Woman, Bear Mother, Spider Grandmother. Moon, Sun, planets, especially Venus (Inanna, Ishtar, Aphrodite, Oshun), or constellations, such as the Pleiades. Also principles of divine Law: Maāt, Dao, Wyrd, Aluna—and the ancestral mothers. I go into this spectrum in my article “The Meanings of Goddess,” and in my visual talks, especially Deasophy (“Goddess Wisdom,” my alternative to the feminist neologism “thealogy,” after christian “theology”). As Judy Grahn wrote, “Grand Grand Mother is returning…”
I’m very interested in understanding patriarchy as a historical process, instead of a universal from the beginning of time. How did it come about? this colonization of women’s bodies and minds, in all its variations and common patterns around the world. Divide and Conquer is a main strategy of domination. They divided women in order to institute the patrilineage and the sexual double standard to ensure paternity, its basis. They pitted sisters of the patriline versus married-in wives (and often versus enslaved women) as several African feminists have pointed out. Early slavery was female slavery, as anthropologists caught on to long ago.We have to look at how conquest affects women, rape as basic to warfare. Men taking female captives turns into systemic trafficking of women, which degraded women’s status across the board, defining them as potential chattel. In The Iliad, even the royal women of Troy are taken captive and enslaved. The Trojan princess Kassandra is raped and becomes an enslaved concubine. So, the violence of war affects everyone, but it affected women in structural ways, that over many centuries degraded our status across the board.
Looking at the broad visual record you won’t find much representation of these patriarchal transformations, though much can be gleaned from the written record, laws, and linguistic patterns. For example rape is almost never depicted; Greek vase painters liked to show men carrying women off, but they never show the actual rapes. It’s distanced, off-staged. They can’t show what the warriors did to them, which looks bad, and their job, like the poets, is to glorify the “heroes.” Mesopotamian reliefs show captives being led off into slavery, glorifying conquest, but not the violence they suffered upon capture and ever after. And we have to investigate how patriarchy is entangled with other systems of domination, class hierarchies or racialized castes, conquest, colonization. Because there is a relationship between those dominations.
We’ve been looking at the spiritual realm, what we could call philosophies of Nature, the way humans interact relationally with not only each other but with Earth, water, fire, animals, and forests and all of those things. The recurring symbols: the spiral, for example, or the quadrant of the Directions. The spiral recurs over and over, in paintings on rock or pottery in various parts of the world. You see it in petroglyphs. They were engraving symbols on rock. Which not only reflects belief or religious concepts, but also are evidence of ceremonial practice. There are the vulva signs that people engraved into the stone, and the cupmarks, as the archeologists call them: hollowing out the stone, grinding out rock dust.
In the deep, deep Libyan neolithic, at Wadi Tillizahen in the Messak Setaffet, is a petroglyph of a woman with animal horns (or perhaps the beaks of two birds) sitting cross-legged, with milk streaming from her breasts. People have scraped out rock dust from her vulva, that her hands are pointing to like a sheela na gig. They’ve have come there over long periods of time and ground out rock dust from that potent spot, deepening the groove. That’s evidence of a ceremonial practice, people somehow activating that rock dust from the ancestor / spirit woman in that petroglyph, and the numinous power in the rock itself, the bones of Earth. How were they were using it? for conception magic or healing, ingested or rubbed on the body, or worn? —this gets very speculative. But we see is that the vulva signs are a global pattern, going back to the paleolithic, in Australia, in Europe, in Africa. It’s in California, the Pomo Baby rocks and the Hupa rainmaking rocks, and in the south, shrines for womanhood initiations. You could call these petroglyphs universal testimony from the ancients themselves.
The vulva stones are some of the very oldest human symbols, on all continents. Freudians kept telling us about phallic symbols and how important they were. (I’m not saying there were no phallus artifacts, but pointing to how the emblems of female potency got disappeared, dismissed as “pornographic,” and therefore unpublishable.) In some places the vulva signs cover entire rockfaces, in Baja California, Odissa, the Philippines, at Carnarvon Gorge in NE Australia. Some are illustrated on my “Vulva Stones” poster, including that horned Libyan spirit-woman.
These patterns become so recognizable, repeated in so many places, that you realize that these are essential elements of human culture and they are not related to systems of domination. But how do we evaluate these patterns as we look at them? Female potency, for sure, procreative and sexual power, possibly emblems of Source, origination, even kinship. Insight from Indigenous orature where there’s a living continuity of the meanings, connections, in some cases, ceremonies. Information also comes in from the written record, ethnographers who talked to Scots or Bretons or Sardinians, missionaries in the Americas who were trying to stamp out things that were sacred, in Africa and the Pacific Islands. But people don’t give them up easily; they kept on scraping out rock dust even in medieval times, at the Nuremberg cathedral, or on temple walls at Karnak.
In another layer, there are societies that are more — I really hate the expression “complex” societies so often used in academia, because it is a way to avoid saying “class systems,” or “social hierarchy,” built on a foundation of patriarchy. (Patricians, “those of the father,” versus plebeians, “those of the people, “who know not their fathers.”) Anyway you start to see more stone statues and temples in some places. Goddesses remain prominent, up to a point, but get expurgated over the millennia, or overwritten with male-dominant scripts. This is the layered nature of patriarchalization, that early patriarchies, like in Sumeria, still had goddesses, they still had priestesses, but the mythology, which we can access because they had cuneiform writing, also shows that elements of rape culture were already present, in stories about Enki and Enlil raping goddesses. Or the way the hero-king Gilgamesh disrespects the goddess Inanna.
We’re tracking how systems of domination evolve, or devolve, across many layers of history. In the early 70s we were thinking a lot in terms of male takeover (from myths describing that) and invasion, which happened: warfare and conquest are ways of enacting domination, slavery, oppression. But that’s not all. There’s also: how do systems of domination develop internally, inside a society? There’s all kinds of clues about that, but we have to be wary of all-encompassing explanations, that it was caused by one single factor. That it was agriculture, and therefore accumulation, and therefore class stratification and patriarchy. But then what about the fact that the matricultures, the matrilineal societies, are predominantly farming cultures? We’re not only talking about ancient history: some Indigenous matricultures have persisted despite everything. Why did they not adopt male dominance? And what about non-state, non-class societies that subordinate women, in marriage, or male monopoly of ceremony?
So we are looking at a lot of complexity, multiple factors. Over history, in widely separated countries, women were bound down by marriage, rules of female chastity and obedience, under the sexual double standard that constrained and punished females, but allowed freedom to males. Polygyny, boy preference, female infanticide. For some societies, like in North America, patriarchalization did come primarily through invasion, the European invasions. Some cultures had patriarchal elements before that, but there were many matrilineal societies that we weren’t told about growing up in the US educational system.
I say that what I do is provisional, because history is complex, and because of gaps in our knowledge. But also because of bias in the written record—often referred to as “the primary sources.” Colonial literature is by definition an outsider perspective; the real, original source is Indigenous orature, or some of what in Europe is called “folklore.”
With archaeology, things are often pitched to you in a certain way. There’s been a pattern, to emphasize the “big men,” the chiefs, and de-emphasize the women. To ignore what Marija Gimbutas discovered for the Balkan neolithic: villagers who were living peacefully for 1500 years and creating all this amazing ceramic art centered on female ancestors, on goddesses. No military weapons, no fortifications, no representations of “big chiefs.” Egalitarian, no disparity of wealth, either. So interpretation is very much at issue, and whether a woman has any authority to do it, or to dissent from the men.
A lot of the resources we have to draw on are patriarchal and colonial, both. That’s not to say that those sources can be of no use to us but that we have to be aware of the bias, and weigh it against Indigenous cultural testimony. For example, take the Jesuit Relations. French missionaries were coming into the Haudenosaunee country, with their prejudices. One of them, Lafitau writes that “Nothing is more real than the superiority of women.” He is speaking to women’s power, and noting a contrast with his own society. But we have to read past his paradigm of domination. Talking about “superiority” is his projection, not Iroquoian ways of relating. The women are not oppressing men as men oppressed women in the European patriarchies. But Lafitau’s declaration still has value as testimony to the consequential authority of Haudenosaunee women. There’s a wonderful book, Chain Her By One Foot: The Subjugation of Native Women in Seventeenth-Century New France, about the missionary campaign in eastern Canada. Priests were telling Native men, You have to subjugate the women, the Bible says so, and men should have absolute authority over them. Introducing a viral toxin into the culture.
So we have to read through and under, and be aware of the racializing patterns and the male dominance lens being projected. But we can find important accounts. Missionaries in Paraguay talking about processions led by medicine women and female elders carrying staffs. An old woman doing ritual healing with rhea feather fans. So there’s a lot to be learned, keeping in mind the ways that these accounts are suspect. The bias in calling people “heathen,” their medicine people “sorcerers,” “jugglers” or “ventriloquists.” Projecting standard Euro-tropes in the process of colonization, one of the worst being “devil worship.”
Carolyn: I know you started (the Suppressed Histories Archives) back in 1970. Is there a story of how you decided to dedicate your life to this?
Max: Yeah. In the winter of ’69-’70 I left my college scholarship, since women’s history was literally a joke to the professors. They said it did not exist, that it would make a very short book. So I began researching as an independent scholar, in a passion to understand how women came to be oppressed everywhere I looked. I didn’t think of starting an archive—I was penniless, and homeless for some months—but just knew I needed to find evidence. It was clear that the powers-that-be were invested in their doctrine. You’d have to prove anything that contradicted the masculine default narrative every step of the way. Like the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes 80 years ago, when she was looking at matriversal culture in ancient Crete.
I knew I had to document what I found. I was starting with card catalogs and index cards, then filling up notebooks. I looked through archaeological reports for more pictures of the small female icons and to get an overview of ancient societies in different parts of the world. I spent countless hours scouring libraries, reading, recording info, copying quotes. Back then photocopying books cost more than I had. I regret the books that I didn’t manage to photocopy from the early 70s, because you forget things, and I wish I had those texts now. Finally, when I got to Berkeley, I began making select photocopies, and at times entire books.
But in 1973, though Judy Grahn, I met Donna Deitch, who was at UCLA Film School. She was making a documentary on women, called Woman to Woman. She wanted a section on women’s history in there, so I became her ad hoc consultant. Along with Cynth Fitzpatrick, we went around to the university libraries in southern California to look for historical images of women around the world. We used a camera and copystand to take slides, to be filmed from later. Female figurines from Tlatilco, ancient Egypt, the Jomon culture, wooden statues from Congo, gold statuettes from Colombia. It was this amazing process of discovery, finding these pictures. I had already been doing this, looking through archaeology and history books, writing things down, or typing them up. But Donna gave me duplicates of the slides, and that’s how I ended up teaching with images. This was in 1973, 74, and it was a pivotal turn in my work, to be able to share these potent photos with roomfuls of women. And I started doing slide shows at women’s bookstores and cafes, followed by spirited discussions. There was always someone who would say, Why don’t we know any of this.
So, now that I knew how to do copy photography, I got a camera and copystand. I’d go to UC Berkeley and public libraries, look through the stacks, and bring home as many books as I could carry. I’d mark the pages to be photographed, get the slides made, taking in the film, back and forth on my bike. Over and over. It was just about 300 slides to begin with, and when I had to stop, there were over 15,000: 150 slide carousels and many overflow boxes. But slide photography completely sunsetted with digital technology. Kodak stopped making slide film.
A constant from 1970 til now, is how fast the technologies keep changing. I had to learn to edit in Photoshop, Powerpoint, then how to make videos. DVDs, another technology that died off. So now it’s zoom webcasts and youtube and a course platform with stream-on-demand videos. It’s been a tech learning curve but what you can do with the technologies that have unfolded is amazing. To be able to publish books, to format them the way I want, without a publisher standing over me and saying “You can’t cover the Peasant Revolts because this is about the witches,” or you can only have 10 photos. So the tech has been a powerful expansion.
Also there is so much more available to us now; we are no longer limited to what the gatekeepers in publishing put out in the form of books. Articles in pdf have ballooned, web resources, bloggers who specialize in petroglyphs or certain regions, with photos I couldn’t find before. When I did speaking tours I would visit university libraries. I often stayed with my hosts, and get to look at their libraries. One woman had amazing German books on Anatolian archeology. And it was not just Hacilar and Çatalhöyük, there was Köşk Höyük with these incredible ceramic sculptures of fat and happy women, dancing arm in arm, on the sides of pots. There’s still so much out there to find, this process of uncovering that feminists have been engaged in.
When women see the images, it goes beyond analyzing or talking about them. Often it’s a gut level recognition, connection, healing. It’s like medicine to witness iconography outside the patriarchal perception and representation of women. They’re not in coy poses, not shrinking; they’re full strength. And with the oldest clay figurines, it’s women representing themselves, or their ancestral mothers: self-possessed, confident, inhabiting their bodies. This is why I object to the naming “Venus figurines.” It began with a French aristocrat who called a paleolithic statuette an “immodest Venus.” That term appealed to male scholars who took it up, made it definitive. Yes, Venus was a goddess, but in a deeply patriarchal society. These icons are not “sex goddesses”—that’s too narrow a framing. Too many male archaeologists have said, “This is ancient porn.” That’s a continuation of the patriarchal gaze, the devaluation of women, of the matriversal, as Helen Hwang has aptly named it. People don’t bury their dead with porn. Many figurines are found in funerary contexts because they are about regeneration, the life giver, cycles of renewal. The term “fertility idols” is still widely used, which also functions to conceptually narrow down the female Divine.
Carolyn: You’ve talked a little bit about my next question, which is what are your future visions for the Suppressed Histories Archives?
Max: I’m trying as much as possible to make things open access. I‘ve written sixteen volumes of The Secret History of the Witches. So far only two of them have been published as books. I have a third that is at the preprint design phase. But I’m starting to publish more open access because I don’t have storage space nor can I afford to print all those volumes myself, so I’m just throwing it online. I feel a lot of urgency, not like there’s a lot of time to get this out, in the current patriarchal / imperial state of emergency.
So I’ve started publishing Vol V—Magna Mater, Paulianity, and the Imperial Church—open access.It’s basically the pre-history of church-state authoritarianism, which is on the rise again. Christian Nationalism, White Nationalism, violent religious extremisms are proliferating. We need to understand the danger of those cultural toxins. They may sink into abeyance for awhile and then roar back up. The persecution lessens for awhile, it seems to be solved but the underlying cultural scripts were never fully exposed or discredited. That’s what we need to do with the patriarchal scripts, the racialized and colonizing scripts, especially diabolism, this idea that other peoples’ religions are “devil worship.” Authoritarian imperial religions that demonize Indigenous and ethnic spiritual cultures—and feminists ones, treating Goddess reverence and heresy, blasphemy. That’s a priority for me— to get that information out, to counter those persecutory scripts. I’ll keep publishing books open access as much as possible, piece by piece. I’m starting to get some volunteers coming along to make that happen, because it’s a lot, and I’m dealing with vision challenges. A woman with the right skills just volunteered to execute the book design of my newest print book Women’s Power in Greek Patriarchy: Priestesses, Amazons and Witches.
It’s been a long march working out the tech to reconfigure the Suppressed Histories website, CSS coding and developing a taxonomy for tagging all the content in the database. We’ve migrated over some 12,000 photo essays from the Suppressed Histories Facebook page. They’re on the website, but they aren’t visible yet, just db entry numbers. I’ve designed navigation pages and banners. Now we have to fill them up with links to content, so people can browse and look things up. If they want priestesses, they can find all the articles on priestesses; on goddess reverence, clan mothers, builders, farmers, women drummers, free-thinkers, doctors, witches, everything. Servile marriage, child marriage, slavery, racialized caste, rebellions. All those are part of women’s history. So that’s what’s happening this year, and we are seeking funding to tag all that content and pour it into the navigation pages.
We are going to create a new YouTube page for the Suppressed Histories Archives where the most important videos will be open access: Matricultures, Female Icons, Diabolism: Ideologies of Domination. Some on much-obscured regions, like the video on women’s history in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi, which includes some powerful traditions of oracular women. People always think of the Oracle of Delphi, but have never heard of the Makewana at the Pool of Malawi. There is all this knowledge out of Africa. These spheres of female power are widespread, and persist even in some societies that have undergone patriarchalization.
Another one is Rebel Shamans: Women Confront Empire. It came out of my slideshow on Women’s Power in Global Perspective (published in 2008 as a dvd). It has a section on women who led insurrections, particularly Indigenous resistance movements. I noticed this pattern: a lot of these women were diviners, or medicine women, or priestesses, spiritual leaders who stepped into political roles in times of crisis. So I started a new presentation, which only had 35 slides to begin with. Now it’s almost too long for a single sitting, because this is such a pronounced pattern. And an important one, because it’s spiritual and political, which is why it needs to be open access, so anyone with a mobile device or internet connection can access it.
Carolyn: You mentioned that you need some financial support. How can people participate in and contribute to the mission of the Suppressed Histories Archives?
Max: The SHA website has a donation page (https://suppressedhistories.net/donations.html). Other easy ways to donate are by paid monthly subscription to my Substack (https://oldwitch.substack.com/). Or to my Matreon, as I prefer to call it (https://www.patreon.com/maxdashu). Those go directly to my work, and to keeping the roof over my head, and house the Archives.
Carolyn: Are there ways that the Nine Sisters Network project can help you? This is one way, just kind of getting word out.
Max: Sure. Getting the word out is really important, especially by sharing links. Like, for example, the chapters that I’m publishing out of The Secret History of the Witches. I’m putting them on the Suppressed Histories website, and on my Substack. I’ve made Names of the Witch (chapter 3 of Witches and Pagans) open access. Same goes for the videos on my YouTube channel. One of them that I consider too important to be behind a paywall is on women in ancient Saharan rock art, a much overlooked trove, with a vast heritage of rock art galleries in Algeria, Libya, Chad, Niger. Some are magnificent rock paintings of women leading ceremony, women’s dances, birth scenes. So I made that full length video free on my youtube channel. Also: buy my books and posters, the Female Icons, and dvds, like Woman Shaman: the Ancients.
Carolyn: We’ve come to the end of our questions. Any final thoughts you’d like to leave us with?
Max: Oh gosh (laughter). This is a collective project, talking about the Mago Nine Sister Network. Many of us have been engaged in this excavation, reinterpretation, recovery. We’re building a new web, not only of relationship, but re-weaving the ripped webs of culture, or at least recovering strands that can guide us. Culture is a web, and so is kinship. Language is a web, and the concepts that are embedded in language are integral to how culture works. So this reconstitution is taking place and Indigenous voices are coming forward, speaking and being published. That is significant because it gives angles of view that are very different from what has governed the intellectual sphere and the academic sphere for centuries, things that are crucial to be aware of. We are also reweaving our ceremonial cultures. It won’t look just like what came before; we are in a different time, with a lot of cultural syncretism. But we need to move forward in recreating egalitarian, balanced and spiritually aware cultures. Matriversal webs of relations. Kin-dom, not kingdoms.
Carolyn: Thank you so much, Max. As you know, I’ve been following your work for more than two decades and I’m a huge admirer of yours and I really appreciate your coming and being interviewed.
Max: I thank you for interviewing me. I appreciate that also.
Carolyn: Okay. Thanks so much!
You can find Max’s main website at https://www.suppressedhistories.net/ chock full of information and resources, including book excerpts and articles. Her youtube channel, at https://www.youtube.com/c/maxdashu/videos, has many open access videos. Her Facebook page with daily posts can be found at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064415032446. You may access her annual course and individual courses at https://maxdashu.freshlearn.com/products/Home-Page. You can find her Substack at https://oldwitch.substack.com/ and her “Matreon” (Patreon) page at https://www.patreon.com/maxdashu
Links to open access resources discussed in the interview:
Ancient Sahara: women in a great rock art tradition
Intro to Matricultures International:
Rebel Shamans: Women Confront Empire (open access coming soon)
https://maxdashu.freshlearn.com/rebel-shamans
They Are Not Venus Figurines
https://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/notvenusfigurines.html
The Meanings of Goddess
https://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/meaningsofgoddess.html
Names of the Witch, chapter 3 in the book Witches and Pagans (free download):
https://www.suppressedhistories.net/secrethistory/namesofthewitch.html
Magna Mater, Paulianity, and the Imperial Church (unfolding digital volume):
https://www.suppressedhistories.net/secrethistory/vol5.html
The easiest way to access the chapters on The Imperial Church and The Gnostic Goddess is via https://oldwitch.substack.com/ (scroll down)
More videos: https://www.youtube.com/@maxdashu/videos
Very grateful to Max for this supremely important archival work and what she’s gifting to the world. Her sacra vulva poster hangs in my office! Thank you to Carolyn for conducting this interview, it was enjoyable to hear about the beginnings of Max’s work.