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