"Goddess,
I would be your priestess.
Open my eyes to see your Light in those around me.
Gift me with the courage to overflow with your Love.
Lend my voice the power of your Creative Word
Grant, Beloved One, that I may touch You in All you bring to me."
These are words that I wrote three years ago, as I was preparing
myself for the ritual of consecration in which I dedicated my life to the
service of the Goddess, as Her priestess. It was an act of affirmation,
performed in the company of friends. On that Midsummer morning,
shortly after dawn, I chose to stand up in the open air and assert an essential
truth about who I am.
In some corner of my soul, I fully expected to be struck down by lightening for being so unashamedly bold. And yet, at the same time, it was an act of deep humility, of choosing to offer up my own life in the service of another. It was an act of love. It was a public and a private commitment to a lifelong relationship with the Divine, as She continues to make Herself known to me.
In preparing for the ritual, I found myself reflecting long and hard
on my own motivation. I found that as much as I was doing it for
love, I was also doing it for my own further growth. I was consciously
choosing to confront my fear of allowing what I hold precious about myself
to be visible in the world. At the time I wrote of my desire "to
be challenged and confronted and encouraged and supported by the world
- in a way that cannot happen unless I am willing to be visible,
present, actively manifest in the world."
The night before my ritual, I had still not found my words, the words I wanted to say by way of dedication. All else was clear, planned well in advance, arranged with my friends and supporters: one was to create an altar, another to cast the circle, another to lead us in a dance; from this one I had asked for a song, from that one the telling of a story; others I had asked to help robe me in the garments of a priestess; still others, to simply witness.
That night I had chosen to keep a vigil by the river. Two friends had come to keep me company, and after a while we decided that we would lie down and sleep for a while. In the middle of the night, I woke up, crawled out of my sleeping bag, leaving my companions asleep, and followed the moon down to the water. There I sang to the moonlit waters, searching my soul for the right words to say in answer to the questions I knew were coming.. and I found them.
The next morning shortly after dawn, freshly bathed and dressed in a beautiful white gown, I spoke clearly and from an overflowing heart as I offered myself in the service of the Goddess. I named as my offerings: the love of my heart, the warmth of my hands, and the light of my creative imagination. I offered myself to the Great Mother for the sake of the work, and for as long as the work shall last. I named myself: Catherine, daughter of the universe, priestess of the Goddess. And I asked that my life might become a chalice in Her service.
Now, here I am rising to stand and speak my truth aloud once more.
Preparing to do so has been a further rite of initiation. I have
found myself brought face to face once again with my longstanding fears
about allowing my true self to be be seen and heard. I have
been drawn to reflect on the pathway that has brought me to this point;
to see and understand it as a journey of reclaiming my birthright - to
openly be who I am: a courageous, passionate, embodied human being.
Turning that "something to say" into a speech (or as my partner Gerald helpfully put it, a "public sharing", turned out to be a further journey of intiation in its own right. I have chosen to break what I have to say into two parts: the first, focusing on my personal journey as a priestess, and the second, sketching for you my vision for the future, a vision of birthing Goddess community in Perth.
I have begun by sharing with you the high point of my journey to pagan priestesshood, the moment when I dedicated my life to the service of the Goddess and ritually claimed the title of priestess for myself. I am aware that this was a somewhat unusual decision, for a twentieth century Australian, and you are probably wondering what led me to take this step. After all, the role of priestess as all but disappeared from our culture, and it's not as if I was raised as a pagan by my parents. So next I would like to outline for you some of the journey which brought me to this point. It is a personal story about growing up, because who I am as a priestess is not, and cannot be seperate from who I am as a woman and a human being.
I plan to conclude the first half of what I have to say by sharing with you some of my experience of what being a priestess has been like so far, the good parts and the bad parts. Then I'd like to take a short break from me doing all the work, and have you do a partner exercise around seeing the Goddess.
Shared contexts for worship were also an important feature of my childhood, and while we enjoyed Christmas stockings and Easter eggs, we did not lose sight of the spiritual significance of these festivals.
Nominally Anglican, my parents were involved in various house-churchs and other somewhat unorthodox communities during my childhood. So I grew up with the understanding that ordinary people could be full participants in worship and ritual without necessarily requiring an ordained priest to administer the sacrements. During the early housechurch years I was generally still too young to be included in the adult activities. However I have fond memories of celebrating the eucharistic in a high ritual manner, with plenty of incense, candles and song, in a small open community which met under the ministry of a Jesuit brother.
As an older child, my main memory of Church, or indeed of any truly
prayerful context, was of inexplicably finding myself weeping: something
strong and nameless moving inside me, seeking to find somekind of expression.
For a certain time I went around in a state of yearning, half-pleading, half-affirming: "Knock, and the door shall be opened".
Then my opportunity came. I was visiting an adult friend and neighbour, who reported that she was suffering from some neuralgia. Greatly astounded at my own courage, I offered to "try and see if I could do something". She asked if I could, and I said "I don't know, but I can try.." I laid my hands on her jaw, and when I took them away again slowly, she reported a sensation as if I had been pulling chewing-gum off her, and the pain went. I was buzzing wildly, unable to discern what might be healing energy and what was pure adreline shock at my own daring in having made the attempt.
For sometime after that, I found that the combination of my own uncertainty,
yearning and fear of rejection tended to get in the way of my healing gifts.
Such was my difficulty in finding the words to make the offer, that others
tended to shy away from my intensity.
Moving on to the relatively adult freedom of first year university, I began to buy and read books from the "Women's studies" shelf in the bookshops. I read Adrienne Rich Of Woman Born, Nor Hall The Moon and The Virgin, Goddesses in Everywoman. I watched my friends from school as they started to go out with boyfriends. I struggled to understand what it meant to be a woman.
My mother's gift to me was to intimate a connection between my physical
cycles and my creative inner life as a woman. My puzzle was to work
out what this meant for the rest of my life.
When it did come, my personal vision of divinity called to me from another, more unexpected direction:
A numinous glow shining through and around a series of close women friends, which was at once personal and yet clearly more than personal.
The image of the Lascaux shaman, imprinted strongly on my inward eye from the cover of a BBC educational booklet I had on my bookshelf as a child.
A earlier dream: that I was visiting a witch-woman, who was teaching me to produce sparks from a crystal, when all at once a blazing vision of a sparkling treasure-trove, 'The Crystal Regalia', appeared as unlooked for omen, portending that I would be 'The next queen of the witches'. And this well, before I had any concept of what witches were.
Words, coming to light in my personal journal: "So now I have a nameless Goddess and a God - what am I supposed to do with them?"
Reading The Mists of Avalon, reading Starhawk's Dreaming the Dark, and
experiencing the ring of recognition on every page. Knowing that
one day, my teacher would find me, and then I too would become a priestess.
Coming to, coming back to myself, on the other side of the marriage, I returned again to this idea of myself as a priestess. I began tentatively to introduce my aspiration to others "I think I'm supposed to be a priestess, but I'm not really sure what that means". I had a couple of confirming experiences, several months apart, in which others recognised and affirmed my priestess-self.
Finally, driving in my car on my way to a friend's birthday, I suddenly became conscious of being prompted: "Wake up Catherine. What do you think you are doing, sitting around waiting for someone outside yourself to confer some kind of authority upon you? Surely you know by now that it doesn't work that way. If you want it, it's up to you to make it happen". The message couldn't possibly have been any clearer. So I decided I needed to do something about it, and chose a date, three months later, at the summer solstice, for the consecration ritual which I talked of at the start of my sharing.
In the three years since that day, I have begun the life-long process of striving to find appropriate forms of expression for my vocation as a priestess of the Great Goddess. I have deepened my commitment to sacred dance, in particular the Dances of Universal Peace, as an integral part of my path and practice. I have prepared and led a series of eleven shared rituals, entitled Earth Communions, designed to strengthen our sense of oneness with the living Earth. I have helped several women design appropriate rituals for their own rites of passage - into motherhood, and out the other side. I have come together with my partner Gerald, and begun our shared work of teaching transformational ritual. I have been initiated into motherhood by my son Robin, who is now 14 months old.
As my twenties draw to a close, I feel that a period of apprenticeship has come to an end, and that this public sharing in some way marks the start of a new era in my life as a priestess.
Looking back over the journey of my life to this point, I have come
to realise that I am no longer one of the very young. Perhaps
my varied life-experience has confered on me a certain authority from which
to speak. Or perhaps it has been an extended process of reclaiming
my birthright: the courage to stand up and be heard, to speak with my true
voice. In any case, I am proud to stand here and share my story with
you today, as a woman, a pagan and a freelance priestess.
So now let me share some of my thoughts and feelings about what
it is like to be a priestess: the good bits, the bad bits; the things I
never want to hear again, the things I most want you to hear.
Preparing to name myself priestess, I wrote: "I want to work with energy - healing through listening, touching, dancing, telling stories. And most especially I want to work with rituals, which I see as a powerful way of combining all of these elements, and healing and strengthening ourselves and the Earth and the Goddess, through consciously drawing meaning and pattern into our lives..."
It is a great honour and a privilege to be the channel through which healing touches another's life. The experience of that overflowing Love in my own body and being is beyond words.
I particularly rejoice in the fact that my chosen path calls upon me
to embrace the fullness of my human experience: my physical being, my sensuality
and sexuality; my creative mind; the whole gamut of human emotions; my
shadow-self as well as my brightness; my child-self as well as the mature
woman; the earthy and the mystical; nothing is left out, nothing is unacceptable
in the sight of the Goddess, all of who I am is brought to that offering
of self which is my priestesshood.
Not only this, but of course other people haven't a clear concept of
what a priestess is, so when I feel the inner call to act from my priestess-self,
I have to somehow create openings in the world around me for that to happen.
The truth, for me and many other contemporary pagans, is that love of the Goddess has nothing whatever to do with the hatred of Christianity. As spiritual path, neo-paganism is about affirming and celebrating life, our own aliveness, our connection with the living Earth, the sacredness of all that lives.
At the same time, it is up to all of us, as a community of women, to begin to acknowledge and affirm the priestess in each other. To make a space in our thinking, and in our actions, for women to once again reclaim the role. If you take nothing else away from my sharing today, I hope you will take this thought: reclaiming the role of the priestess is an essential part of reclaiming our ancient birthrights as women.
I find great inspiration in these words:
"..she who walks with the Angel of Work
has within her a field always fertile,
where corn and grapes
and all manner of sweet-scented herbs and flowers grow in abundance.
As I sow, so shall I reap.
The child of light who has found her task,
shall not ask for any other blessing."
In this first half of my sharing, I have recounted some of my own
spiritual journey as a priestess: that peak moment on Midsummer's
Day 1992, of choosing to claim for myself the name of priestess; some of
the history of my growing up from an invisible ecstatic child lost in the
sound of the wind and the waves, to rather the more grounded and embodied
mother of a 14 month old. I have shared my personal appreciation
of some of the ups and downs of being a priestess. Doing so has been
a further rite of initiation for me personally. It has been another
step in the process of reclaiming my own true voice.
I know that I am not alone in finding in myself the will to stand and
break through the silence. The personal silence of feeling discouraged
and unacceptable. And the greater culturally imposed silence which
surrounds Witchcraft and the Goddess. It was this sense of a broader
wave of movement afoot in the world which prompted me to share my story
with you today. I see myself as working in the service of a new Goddess
focused tradition, one which has its roots in our tribal memory, and yet
seeks to find a new expression appropriate to our contemporary life.
None the less, I do have a strong sense of working in the service of a global current or movement. A current which is seeing a great many western people return to a memory of our own indigenous roots. A movement which is striving to create anew forms which will allow us to express our underlying oneness with all life, with the living planet earth, with all of creation. So perhaps it is appropriate after all, to speak of a birthing, a birthing which is afoot in our collective psyche. The contractions are sending their shock waves out to stir up many of us, to bring us back into our bodies, to challenge us to grow into a new kind of relationship with Earth/Goddess/All That Is.
In the next 15 minutes or so, I'd like to share with you my own vision of some of the possibilities that lie ahead. It is my hope that something somewhere along the way may resonate with you, whether it be to plant the seeds of an idea, or to name, express and affirm the vision that is already at work within you.
I want to talk briefly about three main aspects of my vision for Birthing
Goddess community. First of all, I want to talk about claiming our
special role as women in supporting this birth: as a network of healers,
midwives, priestesses. Secondly, I want to talk about the potential
role of the pagan vision in healing the polarised divisions with which
our culture is afflicted: the divisions between men and women, and between
humanity and the Earth. Finally, I want to outline my vision
of becoming indigenous once more, of dancing hand in hand with the seasons
of the land.
My vision calls for a network of spiritual midwives to assist at
the birthing of a new kind of Goddess-centred community. I
see it as a network of healers, midwives and priestesses. Indeed,
I feel that this network is already there in embryonic form. It is
now a question of naming, honouring and nourishing ourselves as we continue
to develop and strengthen our own identity as spiritual midwives of a new
culture and community.
I want to acknowledge you for the important work you are doing.
You are reclaiming one of our sacred roles as women. You are remembering ancient ways of re-establishing wholeness and harmony in our bodies, hearts and minds. You are breaking new ground. If you have not already done so, I invite you to acknowledge yourselves for what you are: healers and wise-women.
One of the greatest gifts that the healers have to offer is a trust in their own intuitive wisdom. It springs from a willingness to honour the deep wisdom which is innate in the human body and psyche, and is constantly working to restore each one of us to greater wholeness and harmony. It manifests as a willingness to follow the promptings of their own intuition, as they support and witness this process. We learn from their example to honour this same intuitive wisdom in ourselves.
The seond gift the healers bring is to teach us, in a variety of loving,
supportive ways, is how to stay grounded, embodied, and "in touch"
with ourselves, with each other and with the earth.
In my vision, I see the midwives multiplying. I see us, as a community,
finding ways to circumnavigate the current medical model which requires
midwives to first train as nurses, and inculcates a whole view of the birthing
mother as a patient. I see us finding ways to acknowledge and foster
the spiritual dimension of midwifery, so that babies are finally able to
be born into sacred space, most often at home in the nurturing, protected
environment which we as pregnant mothers are instinctively drawn to create.
I see a role for women, whose vocation is in supporting birthing mothers,
whether or not they feel drawn to train as midwives. I see birthing
and lactation restored as women's mysteries, and a wider acknowledgement
that the midwife's role is as much about birthing new mothers as it is
about catching babies.
However, I will point out that there is now a resurgence of interest
in ritual. Many people are coming to recognise the lack of meaningful
ritual in our culture, and the associated sense of rootlessness.
It is up to all of us to be creative, and to find new forms of spiritual
and ritual expression which are appropriate to our contemporary world.
At the same time, to those of us who have a special vocation in this
area falls the task of facilitating the process, as we individually and
collectively continue the process of dreaming new ways forward. Let
us step forward proudly and name ourselves priestesses. Let us put
our hearts, hands and creative intelligence at the service of this task.
Let us join hands with each other, and with our sister healers and midwives,
and let our inspiration and our strength be magnified in the joining.
Healing the polarised divisions between Men and Women, Humanity and The Earth, with an expanded vision of Goddess and God
For me, one of the greatest blessings of the Neo-pagan vision is its
potential for healing two of the major splits in our late twentieth century
western psyche and culture. I refer to the the polarised divisions
between male and female, and between humanity and the earth. This
healing is made possible when we widen our consciousness to embrace an
expanded vision of Goddess and God.
A co-worker, with whom I had been working for a couple of years, privately shared with me that he, or I might more appropriately say, she, was a transexual: a man to the outward physical eye, but inwardly, emotionally and spiritually a woman. She told me, that after many years of working to try to resolve her feelings in other ways, she had decided to take the huge step to publicly "living as a woman", as a prelude to undergoing the operation which would change her physical sex to match her inner understanding of her gender.
I prided myself on being an open-minded kind of person, so I was shocked at the depth of my own initial reaction: how could anyone contemplate mutilating themselves in that way; surely there must be some way she could reconcile herself to being a man! It took me several weeks to integrate the new information.
Meanwhile, as I had had advanced warning, I was well positioned to watch others in my workplace struggle to come to terms with her choice. Not surprisingly, it was some of the more conservative among the men who had the greatest difficulty. Some of them got themselves completely tied in knots, refering to her by her woman's name, and still calling her "he", all in the same sentence.
It wasn't until after I had shared with her a guided meditation in which she visited her "inner wise woman", and got some kind of answer for herself, that I began to understand. For me, at least, it seemed that she, and other courageous souls like her, had undertaken a particularly difficult path to bridging the uncrossable gap between men and women in our culture.
At the same time, I still feel that there must be other, softer ways of liberating ourselves from the constricting sex roles and gender identities inculcated by our contemporary society. I believe that the pagan vision offers one such way.
First of all, let me talk about the pagan God. He is not,
as yet, enjoying the same renaissance accorded to the Goddess. And
yet, He too holds many possibilities for a restoration of wholenss and
balance in our culture. How would our conception of fatherhood change,
were we to offer worship to Father Earth. In my personal vision, he is
earthy, green and nurturing: the Green Man of so many English pubs.
Perhaps, were he more present in our collective consciousness, the precious
fragile forests of the world might be in less danger of disappearing.
Similarly, as the Horned God, He breaks out of our dualistic thinking.
He is lunar, receptive, shaman.
I'd like to share with you some words from Starhawk's Dreaming the Dark which made a great impact on me when I first read them:
'The images of God that may prove liberating are those that point firmly back to the feeling-body, to sex, to the power of mortality. It is not any individual person or group that needs those images; it is the culture as a whole that needs to reconnect maleness with earth, with flesh...'
'Father Earth is the Green Man of the Craft, the God who is pictured crowned with leaves and twined with vines, the spirit of vegetation, growing things, the forest. The image says, "Experience this: you are rooted in the earth, know the force that twines upward - how it is to flower, to swell into fruit, to ripen in the sun, to drop leaves, to ferment, to be intoxicating. Know the cycle, over and over; you are not apart from it. It is the source of your life." '
'The God is an animal: stag, goat, bull, boar. He is the Horned Shaman in the prehistoric cave, He carries the bird wand, He smiles through owl eyes. His image says, "Remember - that mastery is not all; remember the deeper part of yourself, still untamed, whose strength is that of instinct; remember you bleed, smell, feel - that you can be in your body with animal grace, that there is an elegance, a control not imposed by the mind on nature, one that rises from the body, that arises from being in the world, in the moment, as if we belonged, just as an animal belongs where it is' (pp87-88)
Man, woman; sun, moon; God, Goddess: how familiar these apparent
sets of opposites are. Yet once again, my personal vision of the
divine threw these up on their heads. For me, the Goddess is as much
sun as moon. She is radiant, active, courageous. She
is a passionate lover. She is too bright to look at directly.
She is creatrix. She has her dark face too, her shadow side
inseperable from her light. Her fires bring destruction as well as
creation.
The beauty of the pagan vision of the Goddess is that it is able to encompass so many diverse aspects, without losing sight of the underlying unity which is Her truth. That said, you will not find a lot of material on the solar aspect of the Goddess, so I was enchanted to discover a book by Patricia Monaghan, entitled O Mother Sun! A New View of the Cosmic Feminine. It is a scholarly work, in which she looks at world mythology in which the sun is represented as Goddess. In her introduction, she debunks what she calls "the Apollonian conspiracy" which has taught us to identify the sun as essentially masculine, a force for disembodied intellect. At the same time, she warns against a simple reversal of roles:
" The message of the sun goddess is even more profound: we must not
seperate or dichotomise the world any more. Night and day,
death and life, black and white - these are not opposites, any more than
are the sun and the moon, or men and women. Her myths and rituals
help us to restore wholeness to our lives."
I come to the final, and possibly the most important aspect of my
vision for the future. It is about how we might make the choice to
once again, become indigenous, to belong where we are.
Reflecting on the message of these three runes, I realised that the
most important thing I needed to say to you was this: we who have
come as migrants to this land; we who have come, bringing with us our own
inheritance of western traditions and spirituality; we are now faced with
the greatest challenge of our time, the challenge of resuming an active
role of conscious stewardship in relation to this land in which we now
reside.
We must find our way to becoming indigenous once more.
I reflected on my own experience as a third generation Australian with an Australian father and an English mother. I was born here in Perth. As a child, we made regular pilgrimages to the South-West, camping in the karri forests or by the southern ocean. My mother first toured the region when she was pregnant with me - camping under a tarpaulin suspended from the roof of the car. So I have a strong sense of connection with this landscape - this land is my country.
And yet, as I have already shared, my psyche resonates to images and mythos which originate in a nothern hemisphere landscape. My tribal memories are Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Pictish. They are neolithic images etched on cave walls in the Dordogne in France and across Europe.
The challenge I face, and others along with me, is to find ways to honour
both of these realities, and build bridges between them. And I have
a vision of how this may be accomplished...
It begins with a willingness to reclaim our roots. If we dive deep into our cultural and tribal memory, we may recover a sense of what it was like, in another time and another place, a long way from here, to be at one with the seasons of the land. We may get glimpses of a time when our beings were so interwoven with our physical and spiritual landscape that our rituals did not merely celebrate the passing seasons, they co-created them.
Here in Australia, there is a large market for Native American spirituality. I am told that in America, Australian Aboriginal spirituality is the hot item. I wonder if this is because it is sometimes too difficult or painful for us to remember for ourselves what it was to be indigenous?
It is not enough to simply foster a kind of nostalgia for a lost golden age. In that way, we will simply continue to be migrants forever, forever alienated from our present surroundings, our present circumstances. And how many of us would willingly trade our twentieth century lifestyle and consciousness to return to bronze-age living conditions?
No, what I am envisioning is to reclaim our origins, and then to move forward from there. I believe we need to become active participants in our own Dreaming. I believe that our present challenge is to dream new ways of honouring our connection with Deep Self (however you understand that reality).
My vision is of a growing number of people returning to a Goddess-centred spirituality which is firmly grounded in our present circumstances. I get very excited as I envision whole communities of people meeting together in public open spaces to celebrate and make sacred the local seasons of the land. I see priestesses working alone, or with small groups, reattuning to the voices of the land. I see this finding practical expression in new and multiplying landcare projects. I see a new creative, adult relationship with the local landscape, in which the diversity and sacredness of all life-forms is acknowledged and honoured. I see our circles rippling and extending to connect across the whole of this beautiful blue-green planet.
I'd like to conclude by asking you to share in my vision. I'm asking you to close your eyes for a couple of minutes, now, while I paint for you a vision of how it could be. Take this time, just to imagine, if you will, how it would feel...
To wake up a couple of weeks after the autumn equinox, on the morning of the festival of Dewfall, the return of moisture to the dry earth. To wash and dress yourself in your best festival clothes. To prepare special food, from ingredients specific to the season. To meet with friends, greet them with wishes appropriate to this high holy day. To travel together to Kings Park, or perhaps the Swan River foreshore, for the big ritual. The one which you and others have been helping to plan and prepare for several weeks. To mingle with others, also dressed in colourful array, to find old friends and new. To join hands in one great circle, and to feel the energy rise, as the priestesses begin to call upon the many names of the Goddess, to call on the God as Green Man, as Magical Shaman. To see those called to the Sacred Dance, each bearing the mask of the ally they are called to speak for: crow, goat, maidenhair fern, the wheatbelt, the spirit of beauty. To feel the surge of renewed life and hope at the first return of moisture to the dry earth. To be caught up in the swirl of a vast spiral dance. To beome enchanted, entranced. To receive a vision of a new communal landcare project, or a message about your own personal journey at this time. To ground that energy deeply in the earth. To share the food you have made with others. To sit on the ground and talk and sing and tell stories until well into the night. To share your vision with a council of others from your community. To return home to sleep deeply, and dream of the Goddess.