Mythopoeic Matrignosis©
Coined by Dr. Jessica Spring Weappa, Mythopoeic Matrignosis© is a maternal way of knowing that brings myth-making (mythopoeia) together with direct insight (gnosis) to restore the presence, wisdom, and cultural significance of mothers in both ancient and modern narratives. It is a practice of re-mothering mythology—of returning the maternal to the center of the stories that shape our understanding of human life.
Rather than analyzing myth through detached critique, mythopoeic matrignosis invites us to descend into the symbolic, relational, somatic, and intuitive depths of story. It listens for what has been lost: the missing mothers, the unnamed figures, the maternal contributions once central to rites of healing and becoming. Drawing from intellectual and intuitive ways of knowing, it reweaves the motherlines—those ancestral threads that have carried the enduring knowledge of caregiving, ecological connection, and relational ethics.
This approach recognizes that many mythic traditions and institutional systems have erased, bypassed, or overwritten maternal origins. In response, mythopoeic matrignosis becomes both a cultural remedy and a personal process—reclaiming maternal presence, restoring sacred meaning, and regenerating life-affirming myths from the ground of lived mothering.
It is not simply about recovering the past. It is about remaking the future through stories that honor mothers not as secondary figures, but as origin points of care, consciousness, and culture.
Read the posts:
Re-Mothering Mythology: Healing the Lineage of Medicine
About Jessica Weappa, PhD
Dr. Jessica Spring Weappa is an organic intellectual theorizing from life—as a mother, artist, therapist, and scholar-practitioner. She draws from integral transdisciplinarity—spanning psychology, somatics, mythology, ecology, and narrative therapy—to explore what it means to be fully human. Founder of Mothering Futures®, she writes and teaches on matrisophy, matrescence, and maternal wealth. Her scholarly and therapeutic work is shaped by a background in holistic education, depth psychology, and the interdisciplinary arts, as well as formative years in a cooperative farming community rooted in care ethics.
Jessica speaks regularly at academic conferences, community education events, and wellness retreats. Her writing appears in several peer-reviewed collections from Demeter Press and the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative, including Care-Based Creative Futures: Regenerative Maternal Ethics; Luminous Butterfly Weed and Red Thread; Gone Spielreinian: Maternal Ferality and the Suprahumanities; and The Motherlines of Asclepius: Ancestral Female Healers in the Origins of Medicine.
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