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Events

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Travel
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Ireland 2007
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Yucatan 2005
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Oaxaca 2004
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Malta 2003
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Guatemala 2002

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(608) 226-9998
Mon - Fri, 10 am - 2 pm (CST)
email: rcgi@rcgi.org

Travel with RCG-I

Malta,
Where the Ancients
Call You Home to Dream

March 12-23, 2003

A PROGRAM FOR GODDESS WOMEN

Sponsored by RCG & led by Linda Eneix, director and founder of the OTS Foundation

Join a small group of women for 10 magical days on the sunny Mediterranean island of Malta, home to the world’s oldest standing Goddess temples & monuments. Predating Stonehenge, the palaces of Crete and the pyramids at Giza, they are an incredible one thousand years older than the pyramids, thought until recently to be the oldest architectural monuments in existence.

The Re-formed Congregation of the Goddess with our 19 year history of working to empower women via Goddess spirituality and feminism now comes together with the OTS Foundation to bring you this memorable spiritual journey. The OTS Foundation was specifically set up to foster international awareness and understanding of the importance of Malta’s prehistoric heritage and to provide all possible assistance toward the preservation of these sacred sites. They have been leading travel programs to Malta since 1994.

ELEMENTS OF THE PROGRAM MAY INCLUDE:

  • Both film and live introduction to the temples of Malta.
  • Meetings with local individuals from the university, government or the private sector involved in the work of protecting and preserving the ancient sites.
  • The Tarxien Temple, the largest temple complex on Malta and the most elaborately embellished with spiral reliefs and carved animals.
  • The Temples of Hagar Qim and Mnajdra.
  • The lesser known Borg n’Nadur Temple site
  • The cave at Ghar Hassan, a vast cave with a large window in the cliff-face rising perpendicularly out of the water.
  • The Hal-Saflieni hypogeum, a haunting underground temple.
  • The Ggantija Temples on Malta’s sister island of Gozo, known also as the island of Calypso.
  • Craft demonstrations & a stop at a workshop producing fine artifact reproductions.
  • Valletta, baroque capital city of Malta, and its important National Museum of Archaeology which houses many of the temple findings.
  • The charming fishing village of Marsaxlokk with its open-air market.
  • A drive to the northern end of the island and the beach of Golden Sands.
  • The Blue Grotto where the waters mirror the brilliant phosphorescent colors of the underwater flora. Here we’ll take small boats along the coast to see the magnificent caverns from the sea.
  • Rabat with its roman ruins and fine mosaics.
  • The walled medieval city of Mdina, the old capital of Malta, situated in the center of Malta and commanding a magnificent view of the entire island.
  • The Three Cities—3 historic fortified towns, with a cruise of the Grand Harbour by small “dghaijsa” boats.
  • An evening in dialogue with a local woman poet.
  • A visit to a stone workshop and the opportunity to create our own very personal momento out of Maltese limestone.
  • Multiple opportunities for reflection, discussion, meditation, and ritual.

THE NEOLITHIC TEMPLES OF MALTA

Many an island has at some point in the past cradled remarkable cultures and civilizations. Crete, also in the Mediterranean, is one of the more notable. No less important, though ranking among the lesser known surprises of the world, is Malta and it’s fabulous prehistoric remains. For those visitors who set their eyes on Malta’s megalithic achievement for the first time, the experience of seeing some of the oldest free-standing stone architecture still surviving in the world is as intense as viewing the great Pyramids of Egypt. Like the pyramids, the Greek temples or the Cretan palaces, Malta’s megalithic structures were recipients of some of the finest art ever produced in the Mediterranean. Yet the origins of the Maltese prehistoric art and architecture predate other equally important cultural achievements in neighboring lands. Within the temples stone benches are decorated with carved parades of sheep and goats. Fish and birds, a sow suckling her piglets, a bull in bas relief, a four-sided tree of life, and the rolling waves of the sea adorn haunting interior spaces. Their magnificent goddesses in stone are of such abundant and luxuriant fullness that they have come to be known as “the Fat Ladies.” The people who built the temples left behind a physical legacy of a time of peace and spiritual communion with the mother earth which has been called the purest and most impressive in the world (approximately 4000-2500 BCE.) Compared with other Neolithic cultures, the masculine is almost absent in Malta. For more than a thousand years, the Neolithic “temple people” lived in harmony with their surroundings, weaving fine fabric, grinding grain, harvesting crops, tending domesticated animals, and communing with Goddess. They had buttons and they had furniture. They did not have metal tools, wheels, nor weapons. They decorated pottery and sanctuary alike with the red ochre color of life and the cyclical spirals of unending turning: daylight and darkness, summer and winter, birth and death and regeneration. There is no doubt that between 6000 and 4500 years ago, in what has come to be known as the Temple Period, the Maltese islands were inhabited by an extraordinary people, both technologically and artistically endowed. These were the “temple builders” of Malta, vital for centuries and then gone without a trace by 2500 BCE. Conjecture abounds on the mystery of who these apparently healthy, happy, and peaceful people were and what their “fat-lady” Goddesses were all about. The Fat Ladies of Malta now issue their call. Welcome to the lap of the Goddess.