Home to Her
The Portal of the Divine Feminine with Sophie Strand
Episode Summary
On the latest episode, I embark upon a wild and roaming conversational romp with writer Sophie Strand. Sophie’s writing focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But, as she says, it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Sophie’s first book of essays, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine is newly released from Inner Traditions. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions in 2023. On today’s episode, we discuss: • Sophie’s “spiritual compost heap” background, and how it’s contributed to her worldview today • Her understanding of the Sacred Feminine, including the limitations she sees with this language and why she sees it not as a destination, but as a portal away from more predominant male, monotheist traditions and towards what she writes about as the “Animate Everything” • The problem with seeking one linear narrative to explain how we’ve arrived where we are • What it means to both re-examine and re-imagine the myths we’ve been handed about the Sacred Masculine • Getting to know Jesus not as a white, docile savior but as the radical, storytelling iterant teacher that he was – and Mary Magdalene as his teaching counterpart • The wisdom that ancient Gods like Dionysus have to offer us now • What it means to have evidence-based spiritual practices
Episode Notes
- If you’d like to know whose ancestral tribal lands you currently reside on, you can look up your address here: https://native-land.ca/
- My new book, “Home to Her: Walking the Transformative Path of the Sacred Feminine,” is now available Womancraft Publishing! To learn more, read endorsements and purchase, please visit www.womancraftpublishing.com. It is also available for sale via Amazon, Bookshop.org, and you can order it from your favorite local bookstore, too.
- Please – if you love this podcast and/or have read my book, please consider leaving me a review! For the podcast, reviews on iTunes are extremely helpful, and for the book, reviews on Amazon and Goodreads are equally helpful. Thank you for supporting my work!
- You can watch this and other podcast episodes at the Home to Her YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK6xtUV6K7ayV30iz1ECigw
- Sophie’s latest book is The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-flowering-wand-rewilding-the-sacred-masculine-sophie-strand/
- You can follow her on Instagram @cosmogyny, and subscribe to her writings on Substack at https://sophiestrand.substack.com/
- We covered lots of ground in this episode! Here are links to some of the resources we discussed:
- This conversation with the late Barbara Ehrenreich, explores the fact that ancient cave art is primarily nature-based, which Sophie refers to: https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2020/jan/10/humans-were-not-centre-stage-how-ancient-cave-art-puts-us-in-our-place.
- “The Dawn of Everything”, by David Graeber and David Wengrow is an excellent, updated exploration of ancient history
- Sophie referenced the social change platform Advaya , with whom she offers coursework – you can learn more here: https://advaya.co/
- Sophie also mentioned many books and authors who explore the historical evidence of Jesus. These include: “Rabbi Jesus” by Bruce Chilton; “Gospel Q” and the “Gnostic Bible”; “The Gnostic Gospels” by Elaine Pagels; the work of Neil Douglas-Klotz; and “The Historical Jesus”, by John Dominc Crossan
- Sophie made the comment that mother myths become monster myths. One example of this is Tiamat, the ancient Sea Serpent Mother Goddess whose murder is described in the ancient Babylonia text the Enuma Elish. You can read this text in its full here: https://www.worldhistory.org/article/225/enuma-elish---the-babylonian-epic-of-creation---fu/
Past podcasts that are relevant to this conversation include: