059: Womanizing the Runes with Falcon River

Falcon River is an ordained Dianic Priestess of the Guardian Path, dedicated to a magical partnership model that collaborates with other ritual facilitators to insure a safe and powerful ritual experience for participants. She has helped create and support women’s ritual circles since 1976 and is passionately committed to teaching practical energetic and magical skills for daily life. In 1999, Falcon co-founded Temple of Diana with Ruth Barrett, where she taught on the core faculty for The Spiral Door Women’s Mystery School of Magick and Ritual Arts for fifteen years. Falcon grew up in the Appalachian mountains of southern West Virginia, climbing the trees and crawling into every cave she could find. As a child, she was trained in traditional folk magic and medicine by her family elders. In her early 30s, Falcon studied and apprenticed intensively with Dr. Dawna Markova, author of The Open Mind, a body of work dealing with perceptual learning modalities. Falcon also studied for several years with Linda Tellington-Jones and Robin Hood, learning the Tellington Touch/TEAM Techniques for working with horses and other companion animals in their healing and training. For more than 30 years, she was a professional bodyworker, healer, and clairvoyant working with animals and people. Falcon is also a storyteller, a traditional archer and has brought “Amazon Archery” to women’s festivals and Pagan gatherings for decades as a tool for empowerment. She continues to teach online, do healing work, leather crafting and woodworking from her home with wife, Ruth Barrett in Michigan. Falcon has been teaching the Elder Futhark runes for about 40 years, bringing a female-centered perspective to her students online and at festivals nationally.Falcon River was a major interviewee for Baby, You’re My Religion: Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall, by Marie Cartier, Ph.D., (2013, Routledge) She was also an interviewee for Ruth Barrett’s Women’s Rites, Women’s Mysteries: Intuitive Ritual Creation (3rd Edition, Tidal Time Publishing, LLC, 2018). She contributed a chapter entitled “The Bathroom” to the anthology, Female Erasure: What You Need To Know About Gender Politics’ War On Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights (Tidal Time Publishing, 2016) She is also included in Feminists Who Changed America 1963-1975, editor Barbara J. Love (2006).SUPPORT: Shop Falcon’s Etsy store: etsy.com/shop/DancingTreeLeatherFOLLOW: You can find Falcon online at guardiansofthegrove.org and templeofdiana.org