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The Priestess in History: Our Role Models By Kala Trobe The lifting of the veil was at hand under the female monarch As modern priestesses, we will be (or already are) carrying the torch of various spiritual and sociological principles. What we do may be innovative, but it is never self-generated, for we’re treading a path much-traveled, and if not for this fact, we would become stuck in brambles very swiftly. An empirical understanding of the route is a preliminary any sensible traveler will undertake. So, let us take a swift aerial overview of the path of the modern priestess so that we may assess the lie of the land and give due thanks at the various shrines scattered along the way. It is said that behind every great man there has to be a great woman. I would extend this observation to the fact that behind every great movement—spiritual, political and cultural—there is at least one powerful priestess, and often several. The Craft of the Priestess in the West Historically speaking, a priestess is a girl or woman whose life is dedicated to the service of a particular deity. This involves performing the tasks relevant to that God or Goddess, such as tending their temple and altar, performing rites of cleanliness and sometimes undertaking specific roles such as divination and devotional ritual. She is also an intermediary between the divine and the mortal, a living gateway or bridge between the worlds. So, traditionally, the priestess is a focal point for concentrated spiritual and magical energy. This is a function mostly, though not exclusively, performed by the female. However, some men also carry Goddess energy and are capable of performing some priestess functions. Mythology and archaeology reveal to us many of the old functions of the priestess. Ancient literature, such as The Odyssey and The Iliad, does the same. However, the craft of the priestess dropped out of recorded history in the West, or was abandoned altogether, thanks to the infiltration of new and highly patriarchal religions. It was revived centuries later, mainly through the influence of Theosophy and then the Golden Dawn, during the Victorian era, when there was a massive upsurge of interest in myth, folklore and Magic, as there always is when a woman is on the throne. Let us look at Great Britain, which after all is widely recognized in modern spirituality as the home of the Grail of mystical truth. Elizabeth I was a patron of the arts magical, and we find traces of the priestess’s craft in Elizabethan literature as well as many references to the magical and fairy realms. Even the date of Elizabeth’s coronation was determined by her court astrologer and alchemist, John Dee, with the help of his visionary, Edward Kelley, who in this context was performing the role once performed by women dedicated to the sacred. Of course, in those days the occult arts were perceived as a respectable science, part of every Renaissance gentleman’s repertoire of skills, and logical in nature. It has only been since the industrial revolution and the publishing of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species that logos, appropriated by the atheist and Christian alike, has become the self-declared enemy of the intuitive faculties in certain scenarios. Rather ironic, as these faculties were in ancient times ascribed to Goddesses such as the Egyptian Maat and the Greek Athena, the cerebral child of Zeus. However, until recently they have been appropriated by men, at least in the Western Hemisphere. Unfortunately, history casts a theological blank over the next few centuries, as most of the records were made by scholars and the only educated and accepted creeds came, again, from men trained in this blinkered way of thinking. So our aerial view becomes a little obfuscated as we fly over the priestess’s chronological path and arrive in the eighteenth century. We can, however, rest assured that many of the traditions continued, perpetuated by strong women of all creeds and social statuses, either through the power of archetype working within them (there is no getting away from the blueprint of the Goddess!) or through conscious recognition of the Divine in nature. The occult arts suddenly flourished again under Queen Victoria. We have a rich fund of writing, painting and music to affirm this. Even the Poet Laureate, Lord Alfred Tennyson, was deeply preoccupied by myth and legend, and many of his poems revolve around Goddess-related characters such as Guinevere, Aurora, the Greek Goddess of dawn, and other mystical personae. This trend is also apparent in the works of other popular and enduring writers of the time: Keats, the Shelleys, Christina Rossetti (in whose poem “Goblin Market” two Goddess-like sisters are severely compromised by an unpleasant and invasive masculine principle) and of course Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Paintings of the time redoubled the emphasis on feminine-based spirituality, mainly through the works of the Pre-Raphaelites. Admittedly, many of the female characters in these paintings appear as victims, but they are also sublime and impassive, and often deified, such as Circe, who “raises her cup to Ulysses” in Hunt’s wonderful painting. The lifting of the veil was at hand under the female monarch, even though Victoria’s participation in the revival may be safely categorized as inadvertent. As we will explore in a moment, this cultural out flux of hidden Goddess spirituality was largely a symptom of what was going on in the populace at large, for good art always reflects a particular cultural and spiritual process. Interest in the afterlife was at an all-time high. People of the middle and upper classes had just enough effective medication to stop them dying before they had explored at least a little of the Mysteries. Tables were tapped, séances held, and in England and America Spiritualism re-emerged. This has continued to hold the imagination and aspirations of society ever since and the Goddess has been reborn into modern consciousness. With her, of course, come her priestesses. These ancient arts have resurfaced most noticeably under the current queen, Elizabeth II. This is partly due to social evolution, of course, but it is interesting to look at the symbolism behind her role. The Queen is the tangible Shakti of the people, as the Grail mythos attests, in that a true monarch in the Gnostic Grail tradition is given service of the Chalice through the fact that they, the people and the land are one, and so they are “possessed” by the divine spirit that serves the Grail. That they are aware of this is not required, thankfully. In ancient times the regent was well aware of their divine role and was subsequently revered as a deity, or a manifestation of Spirit. Because of corruption caused by megalomania in various figureheads, this role is no longer spiritually tenable, though the monarch may well act as an unconscious spectrum through which divine energies are passed and magnified in different rays or wavelengths. In the contemporary era, we can each become one of these foci through knowledge, intent, meditation and practice of the ancient magical arts. So the priestess serves the same function as the monarch, in a cosmic sense. Let us continue our flight over the terrain of progressive spirituality. Since the 1960s, the upsurge of theology and the shift away from orthodox religions into a freer form of spiritual expression, plus the recent popularity of paganism and Witchcraft, have brought a new breed of priestess to light. Wicca, which has infiltrated the “alternative religion” scene since the 1970s, has played an important role in precipitating the return of the role of the priestess. The modern religion of Wicca is the thought-child of ancient paganism combined with comparatively recent feminism. The most obvious active forms of expression of the Goddess are the well-versed rituals of “Drawing Down the Moon” and “Assuming the Goddess Form,” both of which we will be looking at later in this book. The assumption of the form of the Goddess involves channeling and “becoming” a particular deity, and is a key technique to Wiccan practice. This is not quite the same as the rites of possession in Voodoo ritual, as the effects of working in this way are less visceral and much more subtle nowadays. In Ancient Egypt, the rituals were heavily influenced by the African diasporic cults, from which Voodoo originates, and were consequently more physical, that being the energy required at the time. However, Wicca and Witchcraft have helped to bring this method of working directly with divinity once more to the fore, and its effects are psychically palpable. The energies being delivered into the realms of matter have changed. More lunar current is reaching us—a wavelength that facilitates the psychic and intuitive arts, access to the subconscious and Magic itself. The rise of interest in Goddess studies and the research of authors such as Joseph Campbell into archetypes have also “upped the voltage,” so to speak. The modern world, particularly the Western world, has become a potent network of psycho-spiritual energies. The priestess is their channel and their mouthpiece. Channeling, which became popular in the Victorian era following the groundbreaking work of Helena Blavatsky and the spread of Theosophy and Spiritualism, has also played a significant role in the return of priest- and priestess-related craft. Channeling began mainly through the delivering of books to “psychic secretaries” on the Earth plane, as Alice Bailey put it. She was the channel for “the Tibetan Master”. The Theosophical belief in Hidden Masters—that is, guardians and guides of human evolution who exist on the inner planes—hugely affected this trend. It became the task of the sensitive to record their messages as accurately as possible. Some works of astonishing complexity, sometimes containing languages and skills unknown to the “secretary,” have been delivered in this manner. The latter-day developments of this channeling are clearly visible everywhere in the “alternative spirituality” scene. The role of psychic secretary, greatly akin to that of the ancient priestess, has been keenly adopted by a large sector of individuals, and their contacts are no less various. A brief glance at any New Age magazine will now reveal those claiming to be in touch with everything from inter-stellar intelligences to the dolphin spirits of Sirius to Angels. Obviously it is necessary to use personal intuition and discrimination to deduce which are real and which deluded. However, the revival of this practice, which is somewhat akin to the role of the Delphic and other ancient oracles, has done much to revive the pertinence of the one acting as priestess.
Excerpted from How to Find Your Inner Priestess, by Kala Trobe. Published by Hay House, it is available in August, 2006, at retail and online bookstores. |
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