The Season of the Priestess

“Will you be ready then,

When the angels call you?

 Will your heart be open,

the sky is falling?

Will you be ready then?”

                                                -“Ready”, October Project, The Book of Rounds

 Samhain has just passed and as the folk singer Donovan says, “Must be the season of the Witch”. Everywhere women (and men) are reclaiming the word Witch from its darker associations, created by years of negative press in fairy tales and blasphemous attempts to strip women of their power by patriarchal religious authorities.  Witch is a wonder-filled and powerful word and although I have used it off and on during my over twenty-five years on the Pagan Path, I find I am not using it nearly as much as I used to.  I’m not sure whether it is because the current definition of the Witch within the modern Pagan Community, someone who focuses their practice on spell work and spell crafting, is not in line with current path or because it has become associated with specific branches of practice, mostly Wiccan, to which I have not been initiated, but the word no longer calls to me. 

Over the last several weeks, I’ve found myself being asked to define my path in a number of different settings, many of them non-Pagan.  As I struggle to make my way understood by those who have not been exposed to it and are in some cases either dubious of it or hostile to it, I find myself repeatedly using the term Priestess to describe myself.  Until recently, I did not use the term Priestess in reference to my path.  I have had others call me priestess, both in ritual settings and in the secular world and I have long accepted the Wiccan idea that we are all our own priest/ess in the sight of the Divine.  But the title Priestess has always seem to belong to someone else, to some other path, some other time or place in history, when the Feminine Divine was not so marginalized and women’s power was not so sidelined.  Even when I began working directly with Brigid, Flame Keeping and running a group devoted to Her, I didn’t use the title of Priestess to describe my work.  Facilitator seemed more appropriate or coordinator perhaps.

 

Then I began to think about joining the clergy, becoming a UU minister and still I did not identify myself as a Priestess.  Becoming ordained seemed to be a different path from what I was already doing, more official, endorsed by a larger organization, made legal and powerful by community proclamation, instead of personal devotion.  I would know what to do, what to say and it would somehow be approved by society, instead of constantly flying by the seat of my pants and never being sure what I was doing was right.  I would be A MINISTER and I would finally be in the right place to be of service.  That dream died slowly but finally just about the time Mom got sick.  I realized that the UU movement was not something I wanted to devote my life to in service and no one else in that setting seemed to have confidence in me in that role anyway.  Was that my own fault, because I lacked confidence in myself and was looking for outside validation?  I’m not sure I’ll ever know, but at the end of Mom’s terminal illness, I was left stranded, flapping on the sand with no idea who or what I was.

So now, after 2 years of devotion to a dying woman and 8 months of struggling to define myself without that devotion, I find the word Priestess creeping in as a self-descriptor.  And I’m not really sure what to do with it.  I am not ordained.  I am not initiated.  I am dedicated certainly, in both senses of the word, but I cannot give myself over to the Goddess completely, as I have two children and a sister with Special Needs, whose care needs my focus.  So then why, oh subconscious, Priestess?  And what does that mean to me?  Heck, what does it mean to anyone?

In looking up official, dictionary definitions, I found a variety of descriptions of Priestess, everything from “A beautiful woman” in The Urban Dictionary to “a woman in a non-Christian religion who has particular duties and responsibilities in a place where people worship” from the Collins English Dictionary.  But I think my favorite is from Merriam – Webster.  They use a double definition of 1) a woman authorized to perform the sacred rites of a religion and 2) a woman regarded as a leader (of a movement).  Both are powerful statements of what a Priestess can and should be: A woman with authority and leadership.  It brings forth pictures of women standing on their own, standing up for themselves, seated in their own power, commanding respect and moving through the world under their own steam, unencumbered by the clinging hands of patriarchy. 

How true this image is to ancient duties of Priestesses is debatable.  Knowing that images can be deceiving, how much of our modern view of Priestesses is informed by the image of the fictional Woman of Avalon, so skillfully given us by the now disgraced Marion Zimmer Bradley, in her novel The Mist of Avalon or the equally fictional image of women led rites of the biblical desert from Antia Diamant’s The Red Tent? Two of the best known orders of ancient Priestesses, The Vestal Virgins and The Oracles of Delphi, were both firmly under the thumb of patriarchal convention, in the forms of the Roman State and the Cult of Apollo.  Even Enheduanna, the Mesopotamian Priestess known for her Hymns to Inanna, was actually a part of the cult of Nana, the Moon God and had attained her position because she was the daughter of Sargon the Great, the first ruler of the Akkadian Empire. As much as I’d like to believe that the Ancient World had the answers, it seems that I need to look elsewhere.

To help me in my search, I asked my friends and colleagues to help me define Priestess, to give me a snapshot of how individuals see the concept.  Many people used terms like “service” and “teacher”, highlighting spiritual connection to Deity and ritual leadership.  Several people used a sense of self or grounding as a descriptor.  Some were simple and rather textbook, others were very complicated.  Some were very general, others quite specific to certain traditions.  Two people talked about feeling uncomfortable with a strongly feminine word in a gender-fluid world.  But I think my favorite definition came from my friend Sam.  She defined Priestess as “A woman who tries to translate what the Universe sings into a language people can understand.”*  But even the beauty of that statement leads to more questions.  If we are all just trying to translate the Song of the Universe, why aren’t we all Priest/esses, all the time?  Does everyone go a Priest/ess Season, when their focus turns to that powerful duty of translation?  Are we all called to that duty, at different times in our lives?  How does that larger, more powerful duty fit into the everyday aspects that others have listed, the teaching and leading and serving that seems to be an accepted part of the whole concept of Priestess?  These are questions I guess I’ll be trying to answer as this year moves on. 

But is there a simpler answer for right now?  One that has give and take, service and leadership, teaching and ritual work, as well as Translation?  All of this contemplation came about because I asked a simple question: “Does anyone have Beloved Dead that they would like me to put on my ancestor altar?” I had expected a couple of answers from friends I knew had lost loved ones in the last year, but what I got was many more than I expected.  Folks I hadn’t known were grieving appeared out of nowhere, bringing their loved ones to me for memorialization.  What started as a simple courtesy, became a sacred duty, and that responsibility made me more focused in my own devotions and remembrances.  The holiday, always one of my favorites, took on a deeper dimension in my service to others and I felt more like a Priestess than I’ve felt in a long time.  Could it really be that simple?  Is being a Priestess as simple as responding to a need and asking the right questions?  Maybe all the prayers and candles and chants and meditations and the Visions of the Goddess and Universe Translation come down to following your heart and being present, offering of yourself to the right people at the right time, serving them to the best of your ability and in that service, waiting for the Universe to sing.

*Samantha Collins Halden Morin, Facebook, 10/25/17

New Beginnings

Now in this moment,

It’s time to start over,

Open your heart,

There’s nothing to forgive.

-          “Grace”, October Project from The Book of Rounds

Last week I had a long, complicated and rather pointed dream.  It involved a village having a festival, many of my good friends and acquaintances, music, food and my family.  It was also full of feelings of stress, distraction, jealousy and a sense of panicked inadequacy.  I woke from the dream with a splitting headache and the feeling that the world was passing me by. 

I started this blog almost 6 years ago, to commemorate my 20^th year of Pagan practice.  I posted 12 times and then was forced to stop, first by technical issues (my computer died and I didn’t have the money to replace it) and then by family issues.  In those 6 years, much has changed.  My son is older and in school full time.  My mother, with whom we shared a home, contracted lung cancer, was treated, went into remission, came out of remission and, this February, passed away.  I became my younger sister’s legal guardian and brought her into my nuclear family as a full member.  And I had another child, conceived, gestated and birthed while my mother was in remission.  Mom went into hospice the day after my daughter’s first birthday.  My husband no longer commutes an hour from home to work and I am no longer homeschooling a reluctant preschooler.  My faith is growing and changing in little ways but still remains firmly on the Pagan Path, although I have now drifted away from my UU congregation, and from the movement in general. 

For more than two years my own life was on hold.  I was my mother’s only caregiver and was slowly taking over care of my sister’s care.  I was gestating, birthing, nursing and focusing on my new daughter when I wasn’t caring for a dying woman or a grieving woman with Special Needs.  I was Mother, Daughter, Sister, Caregiver, (and Accountant, and Medical Representative and Estate Executor and more other titles than I can mention here), but I was not me.  Me had become a mythical creature that only existed in my dreams.  And now, 6 months after my mother’s death and one day after the 88^th anniversary of her birth, on my own 46^th birthday, I think that it is time to start figuring out how to be Me again.  The problem is that I don’t think I know how to be Me anymore.  The life I thought I was living, the path I thought I was creating isn’t where I am now and I’m not sure I can ever be there again.  Once again I am feeling rootless and in need of grounding and so writing here I hope will be a kind of rebirth.

I have no idea how often I will post or what the subjects will be.  All I know is that I’m being called to write again, after a long time away.  I still feel strongly called to serve my religious community but I no longer know how to make that happen.  I guess part of this attempt to find Me again will be finding out how to serve again, not just my community, wherever that is, but myself as well.  Maybe part of that service will be here.  Who knows? 

Carol*

The holly and the ivy,

When they are both full grown,

Of all the trees that are in the wood,

The holly wears the crown.
“The Holly and The Ivy”, traditional British Carol


From the end of October, until the first of January, you can’t walk into a store or a public place without being inundated with “Christmas Music”. Its quite often modern music (written in the 20th or 21st Century) and almost always badly played. It reverberates in our ears, the tinny dissonance of midi recordings or “Smooth Jazz” renditions and we are so overwhelmed by it that we are forced to tune it out just to survive.

I dearly love Christmas music. It has always been the ultimate expression of the season, songs that are put up as a shield against the darkness of the winter, a cry for the return of Light. I sang them as a child and listened to them on the radio and the record player until my parents thought that they would murder me. By the time I was 12 I had memorized all the verses of all the really popular ones (both modern and traditional) and begun to try and dig up more obscure ones. Then, in my early 20s, I did a spate of working in retail. It almost killed my love of Christmas Carols forever.

The traditional music of the season became background noise to be ignored. It lost its beauty and power. I no longer wanted to sing or even listen to anything connected to the holiday season, in large part because I had to listen to the awful renditions that were piped into the store, hour after hour.

Today, I have reclaimed my love of carols. I find I have little time for more modern songs of the season, but give me “Ther Is No Ros” or “Silent Night” or “The Gower Wassail” and I’m a happy person. And after many years in the Historical Dance community, I’ve found delight in dancing to a few carols as well**. I sang my baby son to sleep with the Coventry Carol and the Christ Child’s Lullaby. I own dozens of Christmas albums and take them out at the holidays to enjoy the music they provide.

How did I recapture that love? To start off, I stopped listening to holiday music at any other time but the holidays. I don’t take out my Christmas albums until the 1st of December and I retire them on the 1st of January. Second, I got picky about the arrangements I choose. I listen to things before I buy and I choose music that I know I’ll like. Since my interests lie in Early Music and Celtic Music, that’s the direction I look in. I tend to stay away from more modern Holiday tunes and performers unless I have a good reason (ie I bought Sting’s holiday album, but I knew about 30% of what was on it and I trusted for the rest, given his current interest in Early Music and my knowledge of the other performers listed). I don’t listen to the radio during the holidays. Its all pop Holiday music and it bores me to tears. I pick music I like to sing and I definitely sing along at every opportunity. That wasn’t something I was allowed to do when working retail. And I incorporate the music into our holiday traditions. We watch the Nutcracker on the evening of the 23rd, we listen to the Messiah on Christmas afternoon. When we trim the tree we listen to Revels CDs, when we drive to Cleveland to see friends over New Years, we most often have the Dr. Demento Holiday CD on, etc.

This year, getting into the holiday season has been particularly difficult. Our family has hit some tough financial times, making celebrating tougher than usual. We will make it through, but it means cutting back on things we love and making do with much, much less. But having holiday music is helping. And I’m hoping by the time the Solstice rolls around, I’ll be out of my blue funk and ready to do ritual, trim the tree and be festive.

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I’m going to put a plug in at this point. If you are interested in Winter Holiday music and traditions, I cannot recommend the recordings by the various Revels organizations enough. Their website has recordings and song books for sale as well as contacts for the various Revels groups across the country. I haven’t been to a show in a decade but I still remember the ones I attended with great love. These organizations have gone a long way towards bringing back my love of the season and reconnecting current Christmas traditions with their pre-Christian roots.





*A carol is defined as a festive song, generally religious but not necessarily connected with church worship.

**Carols were originally dances with words sung in complement. None of the dance done in the Medieval period survive, but several 18th and 19th century carol and hymn writers used dance tunes (extant dances) for their carols. The best examples of this are “Ding Dong Merrily on High” that uses the tune of “Le Branle de l’Offical” from the 1500s and “Masters in This Hall” that used a tune by French composer Marin Marais (1656-1728) to which the English Country Dance “Female Saylor” is also set.

Oak Moon*

Live thy Life,
Young and old,
Like yon oak,
Bright in spring,
Living gold;

Summer-rich
Then; and then
Autumn-changed
Soberer-hued
Gold again.

All his leaves
Fall'n at length,
Look, he stands,
Trunk and bough
Naked strength.
- The Oak by Alfred Lord Tennyson

We are now in the month of the Oak Moon. The oak tree that stands in our neighbor’s front yard has shed all its leaves (too late for the last of our county leaf pick-ups) and its bare branches reach to the sky. Our front lawn is still littered with acorns and the squirrels are busy stocking their winter stores. Oaks are endangered in our neighborhood, they are all suffering from a vascular disease that slowly strangles the tree, limb by limb. The oak next our garage is almost dead. It was scheduled to be taken down this year but the county ran out of funds before they got to it. We may lose it this winter to heavy snow or next summer to the tree surgeon. Either way, its days are numbered. I’m hoping I can recover a mostly healthy limb when it finally comes down to make a wand.

I have always loved oak trees. They are sacred to My Lady and to at least one of the Gods in my personal pantheon. And, I suppose, there is a mystery about them. I grew up with a yard full of locusts and silver maples, but I longed for just one oak. To have deep brown leaves fall in the autumn to mix with the golden yellow of the other trees. I was so happy when we moved to our current house and there were oaks all around. I’ve always felt the Oak was the King of Trees, to stand beside the Willow as the Queen. My own tree sign** is Coll, the Hazel, but we don’t have any in the area we live in and despite its legendary wisdom, it’s never really called to me.

To me the oak has always stood for power. It’s a warrior tree in my mind and a magic tree too. Its Celtic name, Duir, means door and there are legends that the oak was a doorway to the underworld or other world. Mistletoe, the Druid’s most sacred plant, grew on oaks and made them truly special. What is more appealing than the image a tiny faerie crowned with an acorn cap? There is such hidden power in the Oak, if we only remembered how to tap it.

I’ll be sad to see our oak go, even though I can never really remember it being a healthy tree. When we finally lose it, it will be the end of an era. Maybe our oak’s passing is a symbol of a part of my life passing and when it finally falls, it will be a doorway that opens on the next journey. The county will require us to replace the tree once it’s been removed. Perhaps we should put a hazel in instead...









*This moon name comes from the English Medieval naming tradition and I have chosen it because I connect this month with the rise of the Oak King. Other common names are Christmas Moon, Snow Moon and Long Night Moon.

**The Celts used a memory system related to trees which in modern times has become associated with a zodiac of tree months, thanks in large part to Robert Graves, who connected the “Tree Alphabet” to Ogham script.

Cailleach

I sing you of the Old Maid*
With gold upon her toe
Open up the west door
And let the old year go.

I sing you of the Fair Maid
With gold upon her chin
Open up the east door
And let the new year in.

-a personal adaptation of the second and third verses of the New Years Carol, a British Traditional Folk Carol

The solstice is mere weeks away and for Anglo-Celtic Pagans, we are firmly in the realm of our Germanic ancestors. With their boisterous lifestyles and strong male deities, its little wonder that the Winter Solstice and its successor holiday, Christmas, has become dominating by a strong sense of masculine power. After all, we are celebrating the rebirth of solar light, which in many ancient pantheons, fell under the auspices of a God.**

Christmas has always been my favorite Christian holiday and as I began to transfer so many of the traditions I love about Christmas to their older roots on the Solstice, I became aware of just how male dominated the holiday is***. The Goddess has only a small part, as the Divine Mother of the Sun (or Son). Perhaps her absence comes from the idea that, as a manifestation of the Earth, she sleeps through the winter and doesn’t actively participate in festivals at that time. I’m not sure, but for some time it bothered me. I also find it hard to honor her as a Mother when the Earth’s growth cycle is in its fallow time.

For me, the winter is the time of the Crone. Most specifically, it the time of the Cailleach, the White Hag of the Mountains. She is a Celtic deity, said to haunt the peaks of western Scotland in the winter, herding deer, and bringing strong winter storms. And she is intimately connected to Brighid, my matron deity. Many scholars think that they were considered, at least in Scotland, to be the same Goddess, representing winter and summer aspects. There is at least one legend that claims that the Cailleach locked Brighid away in a mountain cave on Samhain, keeping her hidden away until Beltaine.**** She is the face of the Crone that calls to me more strongly than any other, and in my mind, she is the very heart of winter.

So how do I marry the vague, life giving Goddess who births the Sun and the Storm Hag who carries nature’s fury behind Her like a cloak? It took me a long time, but I eventually had to come back to the cycles of the Earth. Just as the time between Samhain and Yule is a time that the Goddess walks the world alone, so does the God hold solitary sway over the days between Yule and Imbolc. This balances the year nicely and allows for rebirth for both Deities.

The Goddess, the Mother, carries the burden of the earth’s fertility throughout the growing season and the harvest. Weary from Her long burden, She fades to the Crone, worn, as all mothers are, by the task of parenting. Her weary steps over the world bring an end to the harvest time and beginning of the long dark time. Behind her come the cold winds of winter. At Solstice, She births the infant Sun, and as He rises in the sky, She retreats underground, to rest from Her tasks and to grow young again. When Spring comes again, She will come back to us, a Maiden, to join the youthful Sun in bringing new life back to the world.

So as I honor the newborn Sun on Solstice morning, I will also remember to thank the Goddess, for carrying Her burden for so long. I will wish Her a peaceful, healing sleep, just as I ask Her for the same each night. And I will wait with great anticipation for Her return in the Spring.



*I have changed the more traditional Fair Maid to Old Maid, since it fits my view of the Goddess at the time of the Solstice.

**But not, interestingly enough, the Nordic/Germanic pantheon. While their light deity was male, Baldur, their physical sun was female, Sunna.

*** I am not and have never been a Dianic or Goddess-only Pagan. I left Christianity because it lacked a female divine aspect and I have a strong desire for gender balance in my religious tradition. I do know many Dianics who happily celebrate Yule without the God, but that’s not my bag.

**** I’ve chosen to change this myth somewhat in my own practice, saying instead the Brighid is locked away on Lughnassa, when the Harvest season begins, and returns to the world on Imbolc.

Advent

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought for you are not ready for thought.
So the darkness shall be light, and the stillness the dancing.
T S Eliot, "East Coker," Four Quartets

Thanksgiving, with all its glorious gluttony, has passed and we have endured Black Friday and “Cyber Monday”, with their extreme deals and orgies of shopping. Most malls had the their decorations up in mid-October. They barely waited until the Halloween-themed goodies were on special before starting up the Christmas music and the red and green staff outfits. I am already caught between the disgust of overwhelming “holiday cheer” and the panic of knowing that I have 7 adults and 3 kids in the family to produce presents for on a limited budget and any number of friends who deserve holiday surprises as well. Most things have to be mailed and I’m already behind. This is not the way I remember the holidays from my childhood. This is not how I want my son to remember them either.

Christmas was always a favorite holiday in our house. And the lead up to the holiday was as important as the holiday itself. The season always started with a party at church on the first Sunday of Advent. We sang the first verse of “O Come Emanuel” and made our yearly Advent wreath (and hoped we would be able to keep the candles upright and not set it on fire). The wreath lived at the center of the dining room table until the Sunday after Christmas, getting drier and more flammable with every passing day. Each Sunday we would light a new candle and sing a new verse of the hymn in church, watching the weeks pass by.

There were visits to Santa, packages arriving by mail, rehearsals for the Christmas pageant , either at school or at church or both. While my grandmother was alive, there was a gingerbread house every year, that arrived a week before Christmas and sat, untouched and admired, until Christmas Day. And there were Advent calendars. Sometimes we had the kinds with pictures, sometimes we had ones with chocolates and one memorable year, we had one that had tiny ornaments inside. They sat on the mantle and we dutifully opened one door each evening before bed, to reveal what was inside. It was magical and important and hopeful.

Today, the holidays inundate us from Halloween until New Year’s. We can’t seem to escape them. There are TV commercials and TV specials and civic decorations. People put inflatable Santas and snowmen on their lawns. I even saw a light-up pig dressed in a Santa outfit at Sears over the weekend. Everything is covered with lights the day after Thanksgiving and stays that way until the day after New Year’s. And I can’t help wondering, with Christmas dominating our every waking moment (even if you don't celebrate it), what happened to Advent?

I’m not Christian anymore, but that doesn’t make Advent any less important. Whether you are Christian or Pagan or Jewish, we are all waiting for the Light to return. We are seeking the miracle of rebirth in the dead of winter, that hope of Peace on Earth. And a season of Advent is the gentle ramping up to joy. It is the slow climb of anticipation and it is missing from our on-demand world. The modern Christmas song that says “We need a little Christmas, right this very minute,” is the anthem of a world that has forgotten to appreciate the power of patience.

My family won’t be decorating any time soon. I was raised with the more British tradition of trimming the tree and decorating the house on Christmas Eve and leaving those decorations in place until Twelfth Night. And for now, that tradition will remain in place. Once we are no longer sharing living space with my mother, we will most likely switch our decoration day to the Solstice, to include both holidays in the celebration. We will wait and let the anticipation build. An advent wreath is out the question with a 3 year old in the house, but this year we will do some kind of advent calendar. Something he can open each night and see the tiny miracle inside. And hopefully it will help him understand that we are all waiting for the greater miracle, right around the corner.

Sitting Shift

Fall on your knees
Open your eyes
And admit Brighid.
Welcome, Welcome to the Holy Woman!

-Threshold Rite performed in Ireland on the feast of St. Brigit

Tonight I pray to my Lady and ask her special blessing on all those who heal: doctors, nurses, midwives, chiropractors, herbalist, therapists, researchers and clergy, among others. May the universe bless all who look after our minds, bodies and spirits.