“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
