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.

For more info visit:

https://danceofoneness.org/empress/.

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

A musical—philosophical journey featuring piano, cello, and spoken word.

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.

We are too inclined to think of Aphrodite as a trinket as if she were a decorative accessory. She appears seductive, vain, unserious; and yet, we know that the ancient Greeks took beauty very seriously.

Iranian revolutionaries are—fist in the air, boots on the ground, hope in the heart—screaming out for the end of one dark chapter and the start of a new bright one.

Iran is undergoing a fundamental and multi-layered transformation. One layer is political, and the other is mythological. One is a physical event, and the other is an event in the Iranian soul.