The return of women gathering together feels almost ancient in its remembering.
Across Australia and beyond, women are once again sitting in circles, gathering around fires, creating art, sharing stories, dancing beneath the moon, and seeking something many cannot fully name but deeply feel. While modern women’s festivals and gatherings may look very different from the ancient world, they echo something that has existed for thousands of years: the human longing for ritual, community, mystery, and feminine connection.
One of the most fascinating examples of this can be found in the ancient Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece.
Held for nearly two thousand years in the sacred city of Eleusis, the Mysteries were among the most revered spiritual rites of the ancient world. Initiates travelled from across the Mediterranean to take part in ceremonies honouring Demeter and Persephone, goddesses of the earth, fertility, death, and rebirth.
At the heart of the myth is Persephone’s descent into the underworld and her eventual return to the surface world, a sacred story reflecting the cycles of nature, grief, transformation, and renewal. Demeter’s mourning for her daughter caused the earth to become barren, until Persephone returned and life blossomed once again. Through this myth, the Greeks understood that life and death were not opposites, but part of the same eternal cycle.
Much of what occurred within the Mysteries remains unknown. Participants were sworn to secrecy, and remarkably, the rites were protected for centuries. Yet ancient writers spoke of profound transformation, describing the experience not as a religion, but as something deeply felt and embodied, a direct encounter with the sacred.
While men and women both attended the Eleusinian Mysteries, many historians believe women held important ceremonial roles connected to fertility, agriculture, initiation, and the mysteries of life itself.
Today, many modern women’s gatherings carry a surprisingly similar emotional thread.
Not because they are direct recreations of ancient rites, but because they emerge from similar longings:
the desire to gather outside of ordinary life,
to reconnect with the body,
to honour creativity,
to share wisdom,
to grieve,
to celebrate,
to be witnessed,
and to remember ourselves as part of something cyclical and alive.
In a world increasingly shaped by speed, isolation, and digital life, women’s gatherings offer something deeply nourishing: presence.
At festivals like Seven Sisters or smaller intimate gatherings across the country, women are creating temporary villages of creativity, ritual, storytelling, embodiment, music, healing, and connection. Time often feels different in these spaces. Many women leave feeling softer, clearer, more inspired, or more connected to themselves than they have in years.
Perhaps what is returning is not the ancient rituals themselves, but the understanding that transformation often happens in community.
That creativity can be sacred.
That gathering matters.
And that somewhere deep within the feminine psyche lives an ancient memory of women coming together beneath the stars to honour the great cycles of life, death, creation, and becoming.