I practice the art of creative and responsible scholarship. With a PhD in Mythological Studies, an arts background, a philosophical mindset, and an evergreen urge to distill meaning from myths, I can be found researching, writing, and speaking about mythology, or otherwise creating noetic events.
In the Classical world, a profound relationship between death and love was recognized and mythologized through stories featuring Persephone and Aphrodite. This talk delves into the nature of Persephone's beauty, exploring it as a metaphor for the beauty conferred by death.
A goddess evoked at Irish Midsummer is Danu, patroness of rivers, wisdom and mother of the Tuatha de Danaan, the supernaturally gifted people of legend who escaped into the Irish hills to avoid conquest. They became known as the Fairy people who remain invisible behind a veil which parts at certain times of the year— including now, the days surrounding the Summer Solstice.
Join Maryam Sayyad as she unpacks the myth of the apocalypse, and the agony and ecstasy of transformative revelations.
Twilight of the Empress is a multimedia musical convergence of 3 artists and a mythologist – Banafsheh Sayyad, Fared Shafinury, Shila Ommi and Maryam Sayyad.
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A two-part course on The Golden Ass by Apuleius (translated by E.J. Kenney).
March 14th and April 11th, 2023
A conference at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz, California.
May 21, 2023
In narrative history, the djinn doesn’t always live in a small container; nor does he always fulfill people’s wishes. But when he does, we can be sure that the storyteller is telling us about desire—and about magic.
