A Conversation with Christina Biaggi

The design of the Mound was influenced by many prehistoric precedents, and, like them, incorporates several kinds of astronomical alignments and metaphors. Archaeoastronomers have found that the most common horizon alignments in ancient structures and stone circles are toward sunrise and sunset on the solstices and equinoxes. These quarter points of the year established the planting and harvesting cycle and were especially important to Goddess-worshipping Neolithic farmers.

The most important alignment is from the Mound's entrance and passage to the Winter Solstice Sunrise, celebrating the moment of the sun?s annual rebirth from the darkest day of the year. (The Newgrange Passage Mound in Ireland was similarly oriented when it was built over 5,000 years ago. To this day, people enthusiastically witness the rising Solstice sun penetrating the dark of the mound's inner chamber.)

The [Goddess] Mound's astronomical metaphors involve proportional dimensions and numerical motifs. Through these, the Mound and its Sanctuary honor two heavenly bodies traditionally associated with the Goddess: the moon and Venus.

Hidden within the mound is a ring of 18 stones to be engraved with several names by which the Goddess has been known the world over. The hidden nature of these stones was inspired by beautifully engraved stones in an Irish mound that are turned inward against the body of the mound, away from human eyes. The tombstone shape recalls the importance of the Goddess as a deity of death as well as birth; thus the names were not "dead and buried," but rather are gestating like seeds in the womb of the Earth Mother, awaiting rebirth.

Symbolically, the top of the mound represents the full moon and the fullness of the pregnant Goddess whose belly is the mound itself. The dark of the moon is symbolized by the darkness at the floor of the inner Sanctuary where the Goddess is giving birth to the new moon, along with all of creation.

The door to the Goddess Sanctuary is 4'2" high. One must stoop, but the passage is considerably easier than in one?s first birth experience. A person entering the Sanctuary is, in effect, recapitulating Inanna/Ishtar's (and Quetzalcoatl?s) descent into the Nether World and entering the depths of her own psyche.

Surmounting a yoni above the entrance are the Horns of Consecration. In the Old World, this symbol figured prominently and was specially connected with female deities. They can signify the sacred bull or cow, the crescent of the waxing or waning moon, the vulva of the goddess, the gateway between the primal duality, and a valley between two mountain ranges. It usually frames something highly revered. In the Goddess Mound, it is hoped the Horns of Consecration will resonate with all of these meanings. They frame the goddess's vaginal passage through which one enters and leaves the Sanctuary.

The Goddess Mound is intended to be used by individuals and groups for viewing and private meditation, seasonal rituals and celebrations and observances. The opening year of the Goddess Mound is to be accompanied by a symposium or lecture series or both, and by an exhibit exploring the cultural and symbolic meaning of the Mound, its artistic and architectural antecedents, and the emergence of the Goddess imagery in contemporary art.

The above information is abridged from Christina Biaggi's website, www.goddessmound.com.

The Monthly Aspectarian: Christina, I usually like to start by having people briefly tell the story of their background. How did it all start and how did you get to where you are?

Christina Biaggi: Even when I was a child, I wondered why there was no Goddess. Why, in other words, God was a male. I was brought up Catholic, but the Virgin Mary just didn't cut it for me. In the early '70s when I was doing the research for my Master's degree, I was in the library and before I left, I picked out a book called Mothers and Amazons by Helen Diner. The very first paragraph of the book gave me chills because it spoke about an ancient matriarchal time when women were honored and respected and when the chief deity worshiped was female. I was crossing the street when I was reading this paragraph and was so engrossed in it that I almost got run over.

After reading this book, I looked for other books on the subject. At that point there were no goddess books. There were the old standards like the English archeologist Jane Harrison, and there was the French anthropologist Briffault and E.O. James, an English historian and others who had written in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth about the goddess . . . and also Joseph Campbell, who wrote quite a bit about the goddess. But while these people talked about the goddess peripherally, sort of on the outskirts. I then discovered the work of the Lithuanian archeologist Marija Gimbutas. She placed the goddess center stage with her book Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, and she wrote subsequent books. I was really very moved and turned on to the whole idea by these various books, and especially by the work of Marija Gimbutas.

I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on the great Goddess, historically and spiritually. One component of the Ph.D. in the School of Education at NYU was to create an actual work of art, a project illustrating my ideas. So I created a large sculpture in my backyard of a female figure that can be entered like a temple. I called it the G.G. Sculpture, the Great Goddess Sculpture. It was supposed to be temporary; it was made of papier-mâché, and from the outside it was like a large, irregular rock. On the inside, it was the negative form of a female figure lying down sleeping, very much like the Goddess who is sleeping and has to be wakened in the twentieth century. After that, I became very inspired by the whole idea of creating large sculptures that can be entered. In fact, I have a proposal for one and I'm looking for a site, preferably a college or university or a sculpture park where a lot of people go.

My dissertation turned out to be 600 pages long and had two parts. I talked about the Goddess in the first part and looked at Her through history from the Paleolithic all the way to the Bronze Age when belief in the Goddess began to wane, and she was assimilated with other gods and goddesses and so on. The second part of the dissertation was a comparison of the megalithic structures built to the goddess in Neolithic times in the islands of Malta and Gozo, an island right next to Malta, and also in the Scottish Orkneys and Shetland islands. I found there was a similarity between the architectural articulation of these various temples and tombs between those two places . . . which are quite far apart geographically.

TMA: All of this resulted in your first book, Habitations of the Great Goddess. The goddess was recognized not just in Europe.

CB: Not only in Europe but in Asia, in the Middle East, in parts of Africa and I would daresay even in the Americas. If you look at the museums, either there were no habitations or they were made of material that has since decomposed. You find that the majority of pre-Columbian figurines are female. Also in China, there is evidence of the Goddesses going back to before the dynasties, and Neolithic times, too.

TMA: Let's talk a little bit about your new book, In the Footsteps of the Goddess. You have a collection here of dozens of stories, some short, some long, in the first person. How did you come to collect them? I suppose it wouldn't be fair to ask you which are your favorites, but you might pick out a few and comment on them.

CB: I had been invited to a goddess conference in Mankato, Minnesota to talk. I looked at a map and found out Mankato was in the middle of Minnesota. I wondered why the conference was being held in Mankato, and then I discovered that this conference had been going on for the last twenty years. It started out very small with about twenty people and now it was up

to 800-900 people that came to it every year from all over the midwest and from the far west and east, and it had speakers like Mary Daly and others who are quite well known in the women's spirituality movement. I was quite amazed.

I was sitting at dinner there with five women that I met there at the conference and they all seemed like plain, ordinary, normal kinds of women. I asked them why they were there and discovered that each one of them had a very interesting history; their discovery of the Goddess had transformed their lives in some very fundamental ways. I was really amazed at this, and I thought, Well, if there are stories like this here in Mankato, what must there be in the rest of the United States and other parts of the world where the Goddess movement is just getting going! I decided this would make a great book and finally persuaded my publisher. I formulated a questionnaire and sent it to over 600 of all the people on the lists I had collected who had come to my lectures vis a vis my first book. I got over a hundred responses back, which is pretty good, and some very enthusiastic ones. This is a collection of the stories of many of these people.

I like all of the stories for one reason or another. Among my favorite ones are [chuckle] a story from an Austrialian named Dorothy Cameron. I think her story is phenomenal. She is an artist, about 84 years old. I had met her at a Goddess conference way back in 1985 and had forgotten about her even though she has written some very interesting things. I knew her as a scholar; I didn't know she was also an artist. Her story is that she knew nothing about the Goddess but she was going to look around Europe and went to this island and came across some archeologists working on this dig. They included her in their dinner and evening and conversations. Then one of them mentioned something about a Goddess stone. She was very moved by that, and they suggested that they take her to see it. It was at the very bottom of the dig. When she saw the stone, she was totally moved by it. She had a physical reaction to it. It was a plain, ordinary stone but it was carved with runnels in it. It was supposed to be from the Middle Neolithic. She had this very physical reaction to it, and decided that she needed to find out more about the Goddess. That's how her whole journey began. It's quite a remarkable story . . . the very simple and effective way in which she writes it.

And then there's Sandra Barnhouse's story. It was one of the first I heard . . . she was one of the women I had dinner with in Mankato. She told me her story and it just made my hair stand on end.

TMA: And all these stories are in the book for people to read. I was fascinated, looking at your website [www.goddessmound.com], about the project for the Goddess site, the Goddess Mount. You have done a great deal of detailed research into creating it properly.

CB: Well, thank you.

TMA: The way you're lining it up with the equinoxes, with the Venus cycle, with the lunar cycles . . .

CB: That was also the work of the architect Nineo Bell. That was clever, yes.

TMA: Will you talk a little bit about it?

CB: Most all of these early Neolithic sites that you find -- the Fourth, Fifth Millennium and so on that are found throughout Europe basically, the British Isles, north of Spain, France, Portugal, Germany, some in Italy and so on -- seem to have a very specific way of siting their monument. The Moon is very important. What's happening around is very, very important to the location of these sites. Especially Maes Howe in Ireland, the sun comes on the winter solstice and illuminates for just a brief time, fifteen or twenty minutes, these triple spirals at the end of a long passageway. It is remarkable. Obviously they sited this structure so that the sun would do that. You find this over and over again with structures.

TMA: Similar to what you find in pyramids, east and west. When this is built, and I believe you will see it through . . . what will a person experience coming up to it?

CB: Of course, I decided if I were to build such a site it would have to be done right. It will be like a large mound, like Silbury Hill in England, it will be very large, twenty feet tall by seventy feet across. Hills themselves are very moving, but you will have no idea what will happen inside. When you go inside and you get this feeling of a cavern, you feel as if you were entering into a sacred cave. I think it certainly should move whoever goes in. Also, going in, you don't just walk in; you'll have to stoop down, equating it with birth. It took a lot of doing to get born. I'm sure it takes a lot of doing to die, to go from one world to the other. So I'm not making it as easy as possible to enter into this state.

TMA: So the experience inside would be at least representative of being in the womb and emerging from it.

I'm interested in your concept of the Goddess herself. Is she the Earth?

CB: She's the Earth, she's the cosmos . . . she's everything that is: she's male, she's female, she's death, she's birth, she's illumination . . . she's everything. It's a way of saying what is, and what we're inspired by. Everything that is outside of yourself and whatever is inside.

TMA: Is Gaia the Goddess or is Gaia a separate entity?

CB: Gaia is part of the Goddess.

TMA: It occurs to me that if we can reestablish the proper connection of humanity, women and men, if we can reestablish a proper relationship with the planet or Gaia or the Goddess -- then she could heal herself in an afternoon and not spill a teacup, if she wants to.

CB: I think you're absolutely right.

TMA: Again, what is needed is a shift in consciousness. I've been very encouraged in recent years at the success of global meditations . . . for instance in terms of ending the cold war.

CB: I'm very interested in that concept of global meditation.

TMA: I think that what needs to happen now is to direct that same focus towards Gaia or the Goddess, in order to work cooperatively with her to effect that cleanup. I see your work, and the work of others who are doing work like that, as being very important . . . but what we need is to make the connection. Do you have any further thoughts along these lines?

CB: I think you've said it . . . that we need to establish that connection and with the earth as being a living, breathing entity. To respect her as we respect our bodies . . . or as we hope to respect our own bodies and those of others. That includes the animals and plants and everything that is upon this earth.

TMA: It's all part of the same thing. What's cutting edge for you at this point?

CB: I just finished this book, and now I'm working on a show for the gallery that I belong to which is going to take place next year. It's something totally different. I'm working on large-scale drawings of shadows and moonlight. Doing all of these drawings for my book has inspired me in a drawing way . . . the illusion of the two-dimensional space. That's what I'm going to explore next. The effect of moonlight on the earth, the trees and all that.

TMA: You are doing book signings, but you're also doing workshops?

CB: I'm doing book signings and talks about my book and related topics. I just finished doing a talk in Glastonbury at a conference about the maiden aspect of the Goddess. You know the maiden, mother, crone aspects of a woman.

I'm also doing a workshop and book signing in Chicago at Transitions, and talks about the book and the drawings in it that were inspired by what people said. As far as I'm concerned, the drawings are a big component of the book. They've led me in a whole new, interesting direction.

TMA: What would one tend to experience in your workshops?

CB: I'm going to have the participants draw, and do automatic writing to experience a deeper part of themselves . . . because we need to know the female divine.

TMA: Is there anything else you'd like to say to our readers?

CB: I just hope we can carry out this shift in consciousness and I certainly intend to be part of it.

Christina Biaggi, Ph.D., is a popular lecturer and the author of Habitations of the Great Goddess (1994) and In the Footsteps of the Goddess (2000), both published by Knowledge, Ideas & Trends. She lectured on the Great Goddess at the Beijing Women?s Conference, coordinated a sold-out Women?s History Month program entitled ?The Great Goddess: Her Enduring Presence, Power, and Personality? for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and participated in a similar program at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.

To her work as a writer, sculptor and lecturer on the Great Goddess, Dr. Biaggi brings a strong background in the classics, art and art history, archaeology, literature and languages. She has taught Art History, Sculpture, Mythology and Drawing and is world-renowned for her contribution to the field of Goddess-centered art and scholarly studies.


	A Conversation with Christina Biaggi Did it ever cross your mind to wonder why God is referred to as a male? You'll be interested in reading about Dr. Biaggi's far-reaching research of the Great Goddess. The Great Goddess is the Earth, she's the cosmos . . . she's everything that is. She's male, she's female; she's death, she's birth; she's illumination . . . she's everything that is outside of yourself and whatever is inside. It's a way of saying what is, and what we're inspired by.
THE GODDESS MOUND PROJECT The design of the Mound was influenced by many prehistoric precedents, and, like them, incorporates several kinds of astronomical alignments and metaphors. Archaeoastronomers have found that the most common horizon alignments in ancient structures and stone circles are toward sunrise and sunset on the solstices and equinoxes. These quarter points of the year established the planting and harvesting cycle and were especially important to Goddess-worshipping Neolithic farmers. The most important alignment is from the Mound's entrance and passage to the Winter Solstice Sunrise, celebrating the moment of the sun?s annual rebirth from the darkest day of the year. (The Newgrange Passage Mound in Ireland was similarly oriented when it was built over 5,000 years ago. To this day, people enthusiastically witness the rising Solstice sun penetrating the dark of the mound's inner chamber.) The [Goddess] Mound's astronomical metaphors involve proportional dimensions and numerical motifs. Through these, the Mound and its Sanctuary honor two heavenly bodies traditionally associated with the Goddess: the moon and Venus. Hidden within the mound is a ring of 18 stones to be engraved with several names by which the Goddess has been known the world over. The hidden nature of these stones was inspired by beautifully engraved stones in an Irish mound that are turned inward against the body of the mound, away from human eyes. The tombstone shape recalls the importance of the Goddess as a deity of death as well as birth; thus the names were not "dead and buried," but rather are gestating like seeds in the womb of the Earth Mother, awaiting rebirth. Symbolically, the top of the mound represents the full moon and the fullness of the pregnant Goddess whose belly is the mound itself. The dark of the moon is symbolized by the darkness at the floor of the inner Sanctuary where the Goddess is giving birth to the new moon, along with all of creation. The door to the Goddess Sanctuary is 4'2" high. One must stoop, but the passage is considerably easier than in one?s first birth experience. A person entering the Sanctuary is, in effect, recapitulating Inanna/Ishtar's (and Quetzalcoatl?s) descent into the Nether World and entering the depths of her own psyche. Surmounting a yoni above the entrance are the Horns of Consecration. In the Old World, this symbol figured prominently and was specially connected with female deities. They can signify the sacred bull or cow, the crescent of the waxing or waning moon, the vulva of the goddess, the gateway between the primal duality, and a valley between two mountain ranges. It usually frames something highly revered. In the Goddess Mound, it is hoped the Horns of Consecration will resonate with all of these meanings. They frame the goddess's vaginal passage through which one enters and leaves the Sanctuary. The Goddess Mound is intended to be used by individuals and groups for viewing and private meditation, seasonal rituals and celebrations and observances. The opening year of the Goddess Mound is to be accompanied by a symposium or lecture series or both, and by an exhibit exploring the cultural and symbolic meaning of the Mound, its artistic and architectural antecedents, and the emergence of the Goddess imagery in contemporary art. The above information is abridged from Christina Biaggi's website, www.goddessmound.com.
		The Monthly Aspectarian: Christina, I usually like to start by having people briefly tell the story of their background. How did it all start and how did you get to where you are? Christina Biaggi: Even when I was a child, I wondered why there was no Goddess. Why, in other words, God was a male. I was brought up Catholic, but the Virgin Mary just didn't cut it for me. In the early '70s when I was doing the research for my Master's degree, I was in the library and before I left, I picked out a book called Mothers and Amazons by Helen Diner. The very first paragraph of the book gave me chills because it spoke about an ancient matriarchal time when women were honored and respected and when the chief deity worshiped was female. I was crossing the street when I was reading this paragraph and was so engrossed in it that I almost got run over. After reading this book, I looked for other books on the subject. At that point there were no goddess books. There were the old standards like the English archeologist Jane Harrison, and there was the French anthropologist Briffault and E.O. James, an English historian and others who had written in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth about the goddess . . . and also Joseph Campbell, who wrote quite a bit about the goddess. But while these people talked about the goddess peripherally, sort of on the outskirts. I then discovered the work of the Lithuanian archeologist Marija Gimbutas. She placed the goddess center stage with her book Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, and she wrote subsequent books. I was really very moved and turned on to the whole idea by these various books, and especially by the work of Marija Gimbutas. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on the great Goddess, historically and spiritually. One component of the Ph.D. in the School of Education at NYU was to create an actual work of art, a project illustrating my ideas. So I created a large sculpture in my backyard of a female figure that can be entered like a temple. I called it the G.G. Sculpture, the Great Goddess Sculpture. It was supposed to be temporary; it was made of papier-mâché, and from the outside it was like a large, irregular rock. On the inside, it was the negative form of a female figure lying down sleeping, very much like the Goddess who is sleeping and has to be wakened in the twentieth century. After that, I became very inspired by the whole idea of creating large sculptures that can be entered. In fact, I have a proposal for one and I'm looking for a site, preferably a college or university or a sculpture park where a lot of people go. My dissertation turned out to be 600 pages long and had two parts. I talked about the Goddess in the first part and looked at Her through history from the Paleolithic all the way to the Bronze Age when belief in the Goddess began to wane, and she was assimilated with other gods and goddesses and so on. The second part of the dissertation was a comparison of the megalithic structures built to the goddess in Neolithic times in the islands of Malta and Gozo, an island right next to Malta, and also in the Scottish Orkneys and Shetland islands. I found there was a similarity between the architectural articulation of these various temples and tombs between those two places . . . which are quite far apart geographically. TMA: All of this resulted in your first book, Habitations of the Great Goddess. The goddess was recognized not just in Europe. CB: Not only in Europe but in Asia, in the Middle East, in parts of Africa and I would daresay even in the Americas. If you look at the museums, either there were no habitations or they were made of material that has since decomposed. You find that the majority of pre-Columbian figurines are female. Also in China, there is evidence of the Goddesses going back to before the dynasties, and Neolithic times, too. TMA: Let's talk a little bit about your new book, In the Footsteps of the Goddess. You have a collection here of dozens of stories, some short, some long, in the first person. How did you come to collect them? I suppose it wouldn't be fair to ask you which are your favorites, but you might pick out a few and comment on them. CB: I had been invited to a goddess conference in Mankato, Minnesota to talk. I looked at a map and found out Mankato was in the middle of Minnesota. I wondered why the conference was being held in Mankato, and then I discovered that this conference had been going on for the last twenty years. It started out very small with about twenty people and now it was up
to 800-900 people that came to it every year from all over the midwest and from the far west and east, and it had speakers like Mary Daly and others who are quite well known in the women's spirituality movement. I was quite amazed. I was sitting at dinner there with five women that I met there at the conference and they all seemed like plain, ordinary, normal kinds of women. I asked them why they were there and discovered that each one of them had a very interesting history; their discovery of the Goddess had transformed their lives in some very fundamental ways. I was really amazed at this, and I thought, Well, if there are stories like this here in Mankato, what must there be in the rest of the United States and other parts of the world where the Goddess movement is just getting going! I decided this would make a great book and finally persuaded my publisher. I formulated a questionnaire and sent it to over 600 of all the people on the lists I had collected who had come to my lectures vis a vis my first book. I got over a hundred responses back, which is pretty good, and some very enthusiastic ones. This is a collection of the stories of many of these people. I like all of the stories for one reason or another. Among my favorite ones are [chuckle] a story from an Austrialian named Dorothy Cameron. I think her story is phenomenal. She is an artist, about 84 years old. I had met her at a Goddess conference way back in 1985 and had forgotten about her even though she has written some very interesting things. I knew her as a scholar; I didn't know she was also an artist. Her story is that she knew nothing about the Goddess but she was going to look around Europe and went to this island and came across some archeologists working on this dig. They included her in their dinner and evening and conversations. Then one of them mentioned something about a Goddess stone. She was very moved by that, and they suggested that they take her to see it. It was at the very bottom of the dig. When she saw the stone, she was totally moved by it. She had a physical reaction to it. It was a plain, ordinary stone but it was carved with runnels in it. It was supposed to be from the Middle Neolithic. She had this very physical reaction to it, and decided that she needed to find out more about the Goddess. That's how her whole journey began. It's quite a remarkable story . . . the very simple and effective way in which she writes it. And then there's Sandra Barnhouse's story. It was one of the first I heard . . . she was one of the women I had dinner with in Mankato. She told me her story and it just made my hair stand on end. TMA: And all these stories are in the book for people to read. I was fascinated, looking at your website [www.goddessmound.com], about the project for the Goddess site, the Goddess Mount. You have done a great deal of detailed research into creating it properly. CB: Well, thank you. TMA: The way you're lining it up with the equinoxes, with the Venus cycle, with the lunar cycles . . . CB: That was also the work of the architect Nineo Bell. That was clever, yes. TMA: Will you talk a little bit about it? CB: Most all of these early Neolithic sites that you find -- the Fourth, Fifth Millennium and so on that are found throughout Europe basically, the British Isles, north of Spain, France, Portugal, Germany, some in Italy and so on -- seem to have a very specific way of siting their monument. The Moon is very important. What's happening around is very, very important to the location of these sites. Especially Maes Howe in Ireland, the sun comes on the winter solstice and illuminates for just a brief time, fifteen or twenty minutes, these triple spirals at the end of a long passageway. It is remarkable. Obviously they sited this structure so that the sun would do that. You find this over and over again with structures. TMA: Similar to what you find in pyramids, east and west. When this is built, and I believe you will see it through . . . what will a person experience coming up to it? CB: Of course, I decided if I were to build such a site it would have to be done right. It will be like a large mound, like Silbury Hill in England, it will be very large, twenty feet tall by seventy feet across. Hills themselves are very moving, but you will have no idea what will happen inside. When you go inside and you get this feeling of a cavern, you feel as if you were entering into a sacred cave. I think it certainly should move whoever goes in. Also, going in, you don't just walk in; you'll have to stoop down, equating it with birth. It took a lot of doing to get born. I'm sure it takes a lot of doing to die, to go from one world to the other. So I'm not making it as easy as possible to enter into this state. TMA: So the experience inside would be at least representative of being in the womb and emerging from it. I'm interested in your concept of the Goddess herself. Is she the Earth? CB: She's the Earth, she's the cosmos . . . she's everything that is: she's male, she's female, she's death, she's birth, she's illumination . . . she's everything. It's a way of saying what is, and what we're inspired by. Everything that is outside of yourself and whatever is inside. TMA: Is Gaia the Goddess or is Gaia a separate entity? CB: Gaia is part of the Goddess. TMA: It occurs to me that if we can reestablish the proper connection of humanity, women and men, if we can reestablish a proper relationship with the planet or Gaia or the Goddess -- then she could heal herself in an afternoon and not spill a teacup, if she wants to. CB: I think you're absolutely right. TMA: Again, what is needed is a shift in consciousness. I've been very encouraged in recent years at the success of global meditations . . . for instance in terms of ending the cold war. CB: I'm very interested in that concept of global meditation. TMA: I think that what needs to happen now is to direct that same focus towards Gaia or the Goddess, in order to work cooperatively with her to effect that cleanup. I see your work, and the work of others who are doing work like that, as being very important . . . but what we need is to make the connection. Do you have any further thoughts along these lines? CB: I think you've said it . . . that we need to establish that connection and with the earth as being a living, breathing entity. To respect her as we respect our bodies . . . or as we hope to respect our own bodies and those of others. That includes the animals and plants and everything that is upon this earth. TMA: It's all part of the same thing. What's cutting edge for you at this point? CB: I just finished this book, and now I'm working on a show for the gallery that I belong to which is going to take place next year. It's something totally different. I'm working on large-scale drawings of shadows and moonlight. Doing all of these drawings for my book has inspired me in a drawing way . . . the illusion of the two-dimensional space. That's what I'm going to explore next. The effect of moonlight on the earth, the trees and all that. TMA: You are doing book signings, but you're also doing workshops? CB: I'm doing book signings and talks about my book and related topics. I just finished doing a talk in Glastonbury at a conference about the maiden aspect of the Goddess. You know the maiden, mother, crone aspects of a woman. I'm also doing a workshop and book signing in Chicago at Transitions, and talks about the book and the drawings in it that were inspired by what people said. As far as I'm concerned, the drawings are a big component of the book. They've led me in a whole new, interesting direction. TMA: What would one tend to experience in your workshops? CB: I'm going to have the participants draw, and do automatic writing to experience a deeper part of themselves . . . because we need to know the female divine. TMA: Is there anything else you'd like to say to our readers? CB: I just hope we can carry out this shift in consciousness and I certainly intend to be part of it. Christina Biaggi, Ph.D., is a popular lecturer and the author of Habitations of the Great Goddess (1994) and In the Footsteps of the Goddess (2000), both published by Knowledge, Ideas & Trends. She lectured on the Great Goddess at the Beijing Women?s Conference, coordinated a sold-out Women?s History Month program entitled ?The Great Goddess: Her Enduring Presence, Power, and Personality? for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and participated in a similar program at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C. To her work as a writer, sculptor and lecturer on the Great Goddess, Dr. Biaggi brings a strong background in the classics, art and art history, archaeology, literature and languages. She has taught Art History, Sculpture, Mythology and Drawing and is world-renowned for her contribution to the field of Goddess-centered art and scholarly studies.