CHICAGO – In autumn last year, the Chicago chapter of the Fellowship of Isis celebrated their 30th annual Autumnal Goddess Festival with dances, oracle readings, lectures, and a sharing of cultural history on September 29th, 2023. They recently sat down with The Wild Hunt to talk about their mission and their accomplishments in their three decades of work.
The Fellowship of Isis is a global organization that describes its mission as “honoring the Divine Feminine in all Her forms and the good in all faiths.” Its history at the intersection of Paganism and monotheism is a fascinating one, dating back to its 1976 founding by Goddess devotee Olivia Robertson, her brother Anglican priest Lawrence Alexander Durdin-Robertson, and his Quaker-raised wife Pamela Mary Durdin-Robertson.
While Olivia felt that she had a calling from the goddess Isis as the embodiment of the supreme Divine Feminine in the Egyptian pantheon, Lawrence and Pamela came from progressive Christian traditions which had already begun to reject patriarchal Christianity and embraced the Divine Feminine and the potential legitimacy of diverse religious experiences.
Today, many Anglican churches refer to the Holy Spirit as the “Sister” and “She,” describing Her as the feminine manifestation of a God that encompasses and transcends all genders. Similarly, many Quaker congregations admit Pagan members as the Quaker methodology of centering God’s ability to speak through each member of the community does not actually require that community members espouse Christian theologies.
Despite its interfaith origins, the Fellowship of Isis has clearly set down its strongest roots in the Pagan community across the decades. Its rituals, liturgies, educational programming, and ordination program all make heavy use of polytheistic imagery and mythology as well as traditions drawn from polytheistic faiths. Many FOI clergy are multi-ordained, serving as clergy within the Fellowship and also within other Indigenous, Pagan, and African Traditional Religions traditions and organizations.
Geb and Nut [The Gods of the Egyptians Vol. II, public domain
The Fellowship of Isis Chicago branch has been holding its Autumnal Goddess Festival annually since 1993, the same year Olivia Robertson played her sistrum, a musical instrument commonly used in ancient Egypt, and invoked a blessing of the Goddess on the first reconvening of the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago in 1993.
This year’s Festival drew upon diverse programming to honor and embody the goddess Inanna, who is the traditional focus of the Autumnal Festival, in many ways.
Rt. Rev. Demetria Nanos opened this year’s festival with a recounting of the lineage of the Divine Feminine from the earliest known urban civilization, where Sumerian records name Ninhursag as “The Lady of the Sacred Mountain,” “the Mother of Mountains,” and the “True and Great Lady of Heaven.”
Ninhursag may be part of a group of ancient goddesses in Mesopotamia and Anatolia. In this region, the concept of a ‘Mountain Mother,’ often represented by a woman seated on a throne with large cats by her side, seems to have existed before the advent of writing. When Inanna dethroned Ninhursag as the Queen of Heaven, lions became one of Inanna’s prominent symbols.
Inanna captivates modern Pagans and goddess scholars with her compelling blend of unabashed femininity, sexuality, and supreme power. Revered as the most formidable entity in the Sumerian pantheon for centuries, hymns dedicated to Inanna praise not only her feminine allure, beauty, and sexuality but also highlight her unparalleled strength in war, astute intellect, and her pivotal role as the progenitor of human civilization.
In Sumerian legends, it was Inanna who stole knowledge including knowledge of shepherding, kingship, priesthood, life, sex, and death from the other gods and gave this knowledge to humans to enable them to create civilization and exercise godlike power over nature using knowledge.
“Goddess Inanna-Ishtar and the Sumerian pantheon are older than the Bible,” Rev. Demetria Nanos said in her talk. “Her cult continued around the Mediterranean until the Islamic era. She is the Divine Feminine emanation of the strong, intelligent, wily, passionate, independent woman who leads and doesn’t follow. The state of the world today needs her energy, drive, and feminism to impel the necessary changes in politics so that women’s rights are graven in stone – or on a clay tablet.”
This image is an accurate, photographic representation of an ancient Akkadian cylindrical seal depicting the goddess Inanna/Ishtar and her sukkal Ninshubur. The seal originates from the Akkad Period and was created sometime circa 2334-2154 B.C. This seal is currently housed in the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. [Public Domain
Presentations segued from the deepest human history to local cultural history as Rev. Joan Forest Mage, the proprietor of Chicago’s Life Force Arts Center where the Festival was hosted, took over. She was among those who knew Olivia Robertson and Chicago FOI founder Deena Butta when they were alive.
Rev. Joan shared stories of Deena’s famous hospitality and support for Chicagoans’ spiritual growth, and Olivia’s work to stretch the limits of global religious and interfaith communities to include Goddess worship. Attendees who have been involved in the Fellowship in Chicago for a decade or more shared their own memories of Deena’s home, the mystical rites she oversaw, and Robertson’s powerful presence when she visited the Windy City.
The next talk came from Lady Melanie Silver, a newly minted Master of the Fine Arts with a specialty in Art and Art History from Columbia College’s Chicago campus, who shared her presentation on Women and the Hidden Labors of Ritual. She focused on traditional arts with sacred meaning and tremendous economic value, such as beadwork and quilting, whose tremendous skill and time investments are often overlooked by Western and male economists and historians.
She highlighted the extensive effort involved in crafting ceremonial beadworks and indigenous quilts, emphasizing the collaborative labor of women that spans thousands of hours. These creations intricately weave together patterns, colors, and symbols, each laden with profound meaning and a transmission of knowledge. Despite their rich cultural significance, these works have, at times, been unjustly disregarded by Western male scholars as mere frivolous ornaments.
One example Silver shared was that of Dr. Danielle Lussier, JD. In 2021 Lussier, a Red River Métis woman and citizen of the Manitoba Métis Federation, successfully defended her doctoral thesis in Canadian law. Her final work product was a powerful discussion of the challenges faced when integrating indigenous tribal and Canadian legal systems. According to Dr. Lussier, indigenous ways of thinking and feeling may be harmed by Western demands that analyses must deconstruct living beings and conceptualize them as objects while treating relationships as abstract concepts. Meanwhile, Western law has a history of refusing to recognize indigenous ways of knowing as legitimate sources of information and truth.
Part of Lussier’s thesis was a series of beadwork pieces depicting plants and animals native to Canada, along with a mosaic of hearts of different shapes, sizes, and colors forming a larger heart that exhibited internal diversity. The beadwork integrated her central point: that traditional crafts hold power in their ability to represent beings, processes, and emotions but these methods are often not recognized as scholarly or valuable by Western legal and scholarly bodies.
In Lussier’s case, though they were: she received her Doctorate of Law from the University of Ottawa for this thesis, and has since worked teaching Indigenous Legal Traditions at the University. As part of her work, she established a community beading circle where members came to know each other in a relational way while creating personalized regalia for indigenous graduating students to wear.
As part of the presentation, Silver also shared her own MFA thesis: an unconventional collection of beadwork that invoke the elements of nature using shapes, colors, and even the sounds of the glass beads rustling and tinkling together as they hung in leaf-shaped ornaments from the hood of the dark cloak she designed.
“My mom taught me beadwork as a child,” Silver told me in an interview after the event. “My favorite part is that I can take small pieces of glass and some thread and create all kinds of decorations, jewelry, and garments. The versatility of the medium can be used to make anything from two-dimensional images to three-dimensional items.”
Next came a performance that felt very ancient: Alice Liddell’s dance, “Rainbows of Glory for Inanna”. Alice, an author, artist, and performer, skillfully blended the aspects of power, dignity, and sexuality that were so frequently found together in ancient depictions of Inanna.
Liddell arrived in a white robe, wearing a queenly iridescent crown. But in the course of her dance channeling Inanna, layers fell away to reveal an iridescent chainmail bodysuit, flamboyant gold wings, and a tantalizingly split crimson skirt beneath the robes. The sparkling leaves of mail made the dance a clear celebration of the female form and of the power and beauty of sexuality. This mirrored the content of some of Inanna’s best-known myths and hymns, which have her explicitly celebrating the beauty of her feminine body and ritually disrobing as part of her journey to the underworld and her triumphant return.
I spoke with Liddell to learn about her thought process in crafting a stage presence that marries queenly dignity with sensual dance so seamlessly. Here’s what she had to say:
“I named the dance ‘Rainbows of Glory for Inanna’ because Inanna was a deity that was friendly with the LGBTQIA+ community. The rainbows also captured the exuberance and complexity of her story.
“I wanted to capture that she is a goddess that rides on a ship through the sky and works with the elements of air, water, and earth. This was the inspiration for my costume with the rainbow fans, the cloud and star-like crown, and the dress that could be read as a sunrise or sunset by the ombre colors. The sparkling body jewelry, the final part of the costume to be revealed, is to showcase that Inanna is very proud of her body and embraces her femininity. I wanted to draw attention to my body and show that it is a beautiful thing to be proud of.”
Liddell asked the venue hosts to clear a large area of furniture or anything breakable for the dance, which involved embodying as well as honoring the goddess. Inanna is many things, but “tame” and “inhibited” are not among them.
“For the performance itself,” Liddell told me, “I always have touchpoints in the performance that are planned, and there is a lot of room around them for improvisation. All my performances are loose this way so that I can let the excitement and connection with the deity take over and guide my movements, while still hitting the touchpoints to tell the story of the dance.”
After three decades of existence, the Fellowship of Isis in Chicago continues to be a vibrant hub, dedicated to the celebration and embodiment of ancient goddesses who predate patriarchal influences. Their festivals are a dynamic blend of multidisciplinary scholarship, rich oral histories, captivating visual arts, lively embodied dance, and mystical divination. Together, these elements create an extraordinary personal journey and foster a unique, culture-building space for all who participate.
Guest Correspondent Catherine Carr earned her B.S. in Neuroscience from the University of Michigan in 2011 and worked in clinical research for five years before leaving the field to become a full-time writer. Her book World Soul: Healing Ourselves and the Earth Through Pagan Theology was published in 2023.
She became a student of Cherry Hill Seminary and the Village Mystery Temple and Dream School in 2020. She now offers life coaching from a spiritually oriented perspective, ritual facilitation, and quarterly classes for those seeking to deepen their spiritual community work and their personal practices.
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