Gaia: Then and Now is a series of ARAS webinars that will be offered between January and June, 2022. The presentations will focus on our relationship to the Earth, as revealed through the study of ancient and contemporary symbolic imagery as it appears in myth, the visual arts, dance, and dramatic story telling. With widely varying but complementary perspectives, the speakers will present commentary, visual images, original videos, and engage with the online audience in interactive dialogue.
The ARAS Gaia Project seeks to explore the mythopoetic ways of knowing about the nature of the Earth and the current crisis of climate change—not by putting itself in opposition to the scientific way of knowing, but rather as offering itself as a complementary way of understanding our dire situation and how we got there. This inquiry centers around the basic question: Can we find our way to a renewed sacralized reverence for the Earth in all her forms—animate and inanimate?