The 2024 Glastonbury Goddess Conference is being held July 30 through August 4 in the historic town of Glastonbury in England. The posted description says:
The Glastonbury Goddess Conference was initiated and created by Kathy Jones in 1996, with the help of Tina Redpath as co-organiser. Over the years it has developed and changed, but from the very start, the Goddess Conference carried the strongly held intention of making Goddess visible, and bringing Her presence as a lived experience out into the world.
To do so, it has gone through several rounds of four and nine year cycles of working with different aspects of Goddess. For the first years the Maiden-, Mother-, Crone Goddess were each celebrated in turn, in the Assembly Rooms. With the energetic centre held by Kathy Jones, Tina Redpath and Aine Carey, the early years offered the power of ceremony in which to feel and open to Goddess, as well as an opportunity to experience inspirational talks and wonderful women’s Goddess art, and to celebrate together in Her name. Informative and ground-breaking, the Glastonbury Goddess Conference has always been completely unique and life changing.
To attend the Goddess Conference every year is a pilgrimage and can have profound effects on your life. Over the years the Goddess Conference has grown from 3 to 6 days, as a full emergence experience, with Fringe event days extending the entire journey you could have, to 9 full days. As participant with friends, with your children, alone or with a partner, women and men have found their way here and are welcomed into the Goddess loving community we create. Friendships are formed and networks of connection and support created. Many have found they want to become more involved, and step up to become part of the Melisa team, or into priestess roles, musicians, artists, speakers or ceremonialists.
It has certainly shaped my spiritual journey and self-development, as I know it has done for many others. Whether you attend only once for a few days, or take the whole Conference pilgrimage every year, the magic of the Conference and the Goddess we celebrate and work with each year, will bless your life and ripple through your year in way both expected and surprising.
1999 was the year the first priestess of Avalon training started and initiated new Priestesses to help hold the Goddess Conference. Then a course of eight Saturdays throughout the solar year, it has since grown into a 3 year spiral and has initiated specific Goddess based priestess training courses in the Avalonian lineage, like that of Brighde, Rhiannon and Cerridwen.
The following years had ‘priestesses in training’ opening each Conference day in small ceremonial ways, as well as ceremonial priestesses weaving the energetic container of the Conference and it’s ceremonies. Witnessing these priestesses has always been a deeply moving experience, as well as the reclaiming of a spiritual path in action: a remembering on a cellular level of a soul-path returning.
The year 2000, appropriately honouring the Maiden Goddess and New Beginnings as the first part of a new four-year cycle, saw the Goddess Conference move to the Town Hall. Here a yearly Goddess Temple festively themed has been created every year since. This in itself is an energetic and physical experience to enter into, best described as mind blowing. The combined efforts, skill, art, beauty, devotion and vision of many people co-create a wonderful expression of the Goddesses we have celebrated throughout the years, which has seeded and inspired Goddess Conferences around the world since.
2001, the Virgin/Lover Goddess year, had for the first time in living memory, priestesses embodying Goddess in a ceremonial event that will remain in the hearts and minds of all who attended it. An unforgettable night in which Kathy Jones, Sally Pullinger and Tegwyn Hyndman powerfully embodied the Great Maiden-, Mother-, and Crone Goddess, in the venue that was to become the permanent Goddess Temple in Glastonbury.
ach year, we have woven into awareness a different form of our Beloved Lady, She who is so multi-faceted, that to think we could ever fully know or express Her, is folly.
Two cycles of four years, in which we went into deeper connection with Goddess as Maiden Lover, Mother and Crone, and one full turnaround the wheel of the nine directions, meeting the Archetypes as well as forms of Elemental Goddesses of the Avalonian Wheel.
We have celebrated Bridie with ceremony on Wearyall Hill, and Swan feathered maidens dancing in the Town Hall Temple, created the Conference sacred flame of the Goddess. Young and whole unto Herself, She shone out of the loving eyes of Her girdled healing priestess, encircling the participants: Radiant Her blessings amongst us.
We’ve build bowers on the land for the Wild Maiden Goddess. To retrieve our soul skins we go into the Earth dens to find Her embodied as the land and connect to our wild self.
The year we celebrated the Great Mother Goddess Ker and Her abundant blessings, we enacted, as an entire Goddess Conference, in sacred drama, the creation myth of Avalon.
We have called into being a MotherWorld concept and witnessed people stepping out of the illusion of patriarchies’ entrapments, taking down the great fear cage of our own making, around priestess ceremonialists holding the sacred source of She.
For more information:
https://goddessconference.com/.
