the wild feminine, and it does not grow in a garden where all that flourishes was planted and named by someone else.
Rebellion against what is not ours precedes the reclaiming of what is truly for us. The subjugation of the feminine correlates directly with the suppression of soul, as the shape-shifting nature of the feminine wild has been dismissed for its volatility. We have been robbed of social permissions to descend into our depths, leave outmoded relationships, pursue passions that are not financially lucrative, or do anything remotely unpredictable; thus, even when the soul is screaming at us from below to honor our unique nature, we will pretend not to hear our truest voice for fear of being abandoned by those we love, losing our jobs, or disrupting the even-keeled rhythm of our world. When we deny our cyclical nature, we deny our connection to the Earth, and we deny our connection to the Holy Wild.
There are religions and other spiritual systems that sourced much of their power from humanity’s fundamental disconnection from nature and the feminine. Our right to spread our spiritual roots down and deep was denied in an effort to fix our eyes on a promised heaven, and we forgot that we are essentially fluid and mutable creatures who do not wake the same beings as those who closed their eyes the night before. On an individual level, we commit the sin of inauthenticity in order to maintain our relationship with ourselves and with others without facing the exhaustion of constant conflict, of constant defending and rationalization of our extraordinary actions and beliefs. On a collective level, the sin of inauthenticity becomes socially validated, as it is difficult to economically, politically, and socially profit from what is wild and, by nature, inherently dynamic. Ultimately, the traits of the unburnt feminine that the Witch is tasked with embodying and enacting are those that do not suit capitalism or patriarchal control; these are the same traits that she suppresses during childhood, rendering her light-of-day personality a small reflection of the wealth of her soulful treasures, the truest parts of herself that lie buried in the fertile dark.
When we deny our cyclical nature, we deny our connection to the Earth, and we deny our connection to the Holy Wild.
No one can write your story for you, my love, and it is not the task of any one of us to judge the gardens in which we do not live. We cannot discount the number of human beings who remain trapped despite their desire to escape, nor can we dismiss the sheer bravery of those staying in their gardens in order to protect loved ones or their own precious bodies from harm. These are the caged angels, and those who have been free to enact their own liberation are tasked with using every resource they have to reach those who need more hands to unbind their tethers. I say this not to dilute or universalize the experiences of those who are affected by compounded oppressions, and it is certainly not our task to decide who needs saving and how. I only urge those who have made it out of their gardens to keep their ears open, for they speak the forbidden serpentine language now and can hear it spoken by others from below who, like Lilith, are ready to find a way out and are asking, of their own volition, for a scale-skinned wilderness guide.
Handwritten Verses: Your Lilith Story
The garden is a deeply personal experience, and no one lives it the same way. Stay awake, Priestess, and remember that your wounds, your garden, are yours for a reason. Come to know your story as you would tell it today. In exploring the ways you have embodied the Priestess of the Wild Earth archetype, you can identify your personal Eden by reviewing your cycles of descending and ascending, drawing meaning from these patterns of hurts and healings.
Begin with the following prompts, and freewrite for as long as you wish. Your Lilith story is your wild woman’s myth of risking it all in the name of personal liberation. It is a living testament to your feminine power, soulful worth, and so-holy infallibility. Use whatever pronouns feel most authentic. Return to your story as often as you are called. Write as if it were a rite. Let it be part fantasy, part spell, part personal fairy tale.
As a young Priestess in the garden, I was dazzled by the beauty of...
The perfection of the garden was so beauteous that I...
In the garden, I knew myself to be...
The garden began to smell of...
I sprouted black wings and became Lilith then, and I decided...
I risked it all, and I had to embody...
True liberation tasted like...
End your Lilith story, for now, with the yet-to-come. Let the final scene in your liberation tale be one that has not occurred in your till-now, lived experience but nonetheless feels real and true. Gift this tale to the Holy Wild when it feels finished, reading your words aloud while sitting among the elements in sacred solitude. Let your story be a poetic blessing to the earth element, with the grasses, the trees, and the soil your most honored and beloved audience.
INITIATION IN SACRED SOLITUDE: WALKING THE RED ROAD
The integration of your knowledge of the garden into your more soulful identity depends on claiming your right to cyclical rootlessness. Lilith severs ties with her old life when she consumes the forbidden fruit. She rejects the rules of the garden and, by extension, refuses to remain in that too-small place. She is defiant in her selfhood, and she risks it all, running blindly into the dark without direction. All wild women have torn up their roots from time to time, leaving relationships, roles, and places that came to misalign with their emergent identity.
You, Priestess of the Wild Earth, have a right to sacred solitude. You have a right to wander, and you have a right to be wholly in your body. Integrate your knowledge of the garden by affirming the role these increasingly unjust places have played in your life. In many ways, the garden is a mirror of who you used to be. How you remember the garden is a mere reflection of where you are in your life right now; at another point on the Red Road, that spiral path of a woman’s spiritual journey, you may remember the garden completely differently. Know that the act of guiltless reflection, of a nonjudgmental sifting-through of experiences from time to time, is radical in its own right. It is a bravehearted woman who leaves whatever security the garden has to offer in the name of her own liberation, but there is bravery in the looking back also. It takes courage to kiss the snake and a soulful audacity to sink one’s teeth deep into the forbidden fruit, but to look back and honor those moments as moving benedictions to the wild within you is another particular and glorious victory.
It is never a short journey home to the wilds. In order to find her soulful home, the Priestess of the Wild Earth must first come to an unsettling realization: She knows she is looking for something, but she is not sure exactly what it is or precisely where it can be found. She becomes the hooded wanderer, a mere ghost of who she used to be, and she commits to knowing only a few scarce but in-the-bones truths. Somehow she understands that the agony she feels as the outcast is well worth the new world that is waiting for her, a post-garden lifescape she cannot even begin to imagine. In the teaching tale, Lilith is homesick for a wild place she had never seen. She holds an infinite trust in herself now, even as she loses it all, and that trust is sufficient to sustain her for a time, in the absence of all other social nourishment.
The Priestess of the Wild Earth also harbors a deep knowing that, regardless of the precise nature of her confinement in the garden and without necessitating any forgiveness of wrongs done to her there, time spent in her too-small world was absolutely necessary. She was midwifing her own birth in that place, and, as she finds herself in the wilderness now, she is charged to relinquish any and all guilt over staying too long in the garden. It was what it was. It had to be done, and she may never have a concrete rationale for why she remained there for so long. The Mystery does not gift us with maps, and the grand design is built from near-infinite sacred geometric angles and softly spiraling edges that our most advanced research technologies, the very language of our
