Underworld Journeys: Christian, Jewish & Zoroastrian Legends with Mary Dowd

Thursdays, October 3 and 10 from 7 - 9 pm

(This program will be recorded and sent to registrants)

Mary has always been fascinated by the many different versions of the underworld in various myths, religions and cultures. What draws her to such texts most is how imaginative they are, how elaborately our human imagination works to avoid the ultimate unknown. Whatever our culture or moment in time, we create highly detailed worlds and beings, to fill in the yawning void of what happens to us after death. We do this to comfort ourselves, in a way, that death is not the end. It can also create a final arena where morality and justice prevail, which may be comforting, or not, depending on your beliefs and your version of yourself.

In the first session, Mary will be discussing Zoroastrian beliefs, and looking at early Christian and Jewish visions and apocalypses as important influences on medieval versions of the afterlife.  In the second talk, she will discuss various other medieval otherworld journeys and Dante's Inferno.

Mary Dowd is a physician who works in detox and at various addiction clinics and sometimes, the county jail. She is married and has four grown children. In graduate school, she did a Master’s degree in Medieval art and literature. Her poems have appeared in various minor and sometimes defunct journals and in the Hippocrates Prize Anthology 2017. In 2018 “The Heroin Diaries” was published by Permanente Press. She has led poetry workshops for the Transformational Language Arts Network at Goddard College and The Examined Life Conference in Iowa. For many years she led a workshop reading and writing poetry with men in long-term treatment for addiction at Milestone Foundation. She arranges poetry events for Poetry at the Library at Merrill Library in Yarmouth. She is a member of the Cloud Appreciation Society.