It's been a hard spring for many of us, including this Priestess. We've been doing a lot of emotional housecleaning, facing fears, putting to rest old selves, and navigating a world that seems to be determined to show us its cruelest face. It can be hard to find even a moment of peace, of gentleness, of compassion. That's why I'm delighted that Kuan Yin, She Who Hears the Cries of the World, has decided to visit us this week.
Kuan Yin reminds us that if our compassion does not include ourselves, it is incomplete. She also reminds us to release judgement. This does not mean that we cannot be discerning, or that we cannot decide to remove ourselves from situations that are toxic or harmful. Rather, she reminds us that we can use our discernment and compassion to transform ourselves and others.
I've been on a bit of a feminist thealogy/feminist spirituality history tour of late. It feels like the moment is ripe for a whole new wave of Goddess Spirituality to be born, with the resurgence in interest in Witchcraft born of the #Resistance, plus the newly visible nature of the feminist movement due to the Women's March. The work of W.I.T.C.H. in Portland and Chicago has also been a reminder of the rich intertwining of feminist politics and witchcraft that gave rise to the Goddess Spirituality I practice . Even though I part ways with many of the movement's founders on issues of trans inclusion, biological essentialism, cultural appropriation, and more, at my core Goddess Spirituality and Witchcraft are what shapes my life and work and gives them meaning.
It's been almost a year since I chose the word "Priestess" as my power word for the year -- or rather, since it chose me. And over the last turn of the Wheel the work -- because above all, being a priestess is work -- has found me in the most unexpected places. For a long time I resisted applying the word priestess to myself, at least when I wasn't actively in a circle and leading a ritual, because it seemed too loaded, too pretentious. As a Goddess woman who is completely self-taught -- or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, whose training has been completely self-directed, as I have had wonderful mentors -- rather than having been trained up through a formal coven system, I have balked at using the term for myself in any but the most basic of senses.
When I was a young woman in my early 20s, newly on a Pagan path, someone -- I no longer remember who -- put in my hands a copy of WomanSpirit Rising, edited by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow. I had discovered Goddess-centered Craft a year or so before, when I attended a Spring Equinox celebration and was slightly confused (and then elated) when no male Godhead was invoked. The idea of an explicitly feminist, overtly political, Goddess-centered spirituality excited me -- a young activist who was really coming into her own political consciousness and who had begun to heal the deep wounds left by a childhood spent in the Church of Christ, with its punishing Father God.
Each essay in WomanSpirit Rising stirred me, but thenI got to Carol P. Christ's "Why Women Need the Goddess," and I read the words
That's the running joke whenever anyone in my circle pulls Kali Ma from one of my Goddess Oracle decks. Kali evokes a sense of simultaneous awe and revulsion, devotion and recoiling, from many people. The Hindu Dark Mother embodies so much that seems paradoxical -- endings and beginnings, creation and destruction, nurturing and punishment, love and hate, and -- yes -- Sex and Death. Her fearsome visage, her girdle of severed arms, her necklace of skulls all draw on our darkest fears. And yet the ultimate lesson of Kali Ma, it so often seems, is for us to be willing to find beauty in the horrific, to find the love in the dark nights of the soul, to find the new beginning in the fiery ending.
One of the things I love most about the Goddess Inspiration Oracle by Kris Waldherr is that it includes many lesser-known and even obscure Goddess alongside those that are familiar to me. I appreciate the chance to learn about Goddesses who may have been overlooked in my mythological education, and to find connections with Goddesses from pantheons or cultures I may know little about.
This week brings the Baltic Goddess Haltia, Goddess of the Hearth and Home. She has much in common with the Estonia Goddess Holdja, and with Hearth Goddesses more generally. Honored among the Baltic Finns as the guardian of the hearth and hearthfire, Haltia lives on today as a general name for the house faeries or spirits who guard homes, water, graveyards and other places where humans dwell and carry out our daily activities.
Thesseli
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David Dashifen Kees
I feel it necessary to state, unequivocally, that anti-trans points of view are not an essential part of Paganism. As a trans Pagan myself who helps ...
