wisdom up through your roots. Let the brew run through your veins and reach the soul-wound, healing it over with minuscule bursts of love, with grace, and with the bravehearted, ever-enduring ways of the elders.
Stay with this vision for as long as you have. Let yourself be repowered and repurposed. Your soft body seethes with the blood mysteries, the herbal wisdom, and the ancient ceremonies. If “Witch” is a name you claim for yourself, shout aloud: I am Witch, wise woman, and wayfinder! You are the living antidote to the poison that keeps the wound from healing, and you are the rebel Priestess who has come home to the wilds. And so it is.
THE ROAD TO MANIFESTATION: A RITUAL OF MOVEMENT ALCHEMY
Materials: Just you and an earthy oil such as vetiver, cedar, or pine
Priestess, take to the road. This red journey can take place out of doors in a yard, in a forest, on a lonely sidewalk, on a long driveway, or even within an empty hallway. Find a place where you can walk in sacred solitude, relatively undisturbed, and let this small piece of movement alchemy signify your right to manifest your desires. Bless your body before the journey begins by anointing your feet with a bit of earthy oil or water blessed by you with a few select words. Whisper-pray before you begin: I call in abundance and grace. I call in ancestral wisdom, and I call in the next chapter.
As you walk now, my love, imagine that every mindful step you are taking is bringing you that much closer to fulfilling your soul’s contract. Every corner you turn is a decided step away from the too-small life and toward more authentic embodiment of your divinity. Step in rhythm with your heartbeat and imagine those beauteous scenes from your next chapter. Believe with every cell of your body that you are moving toward that vision. Look through your third eye and see all you deserve perfectly placed within your wildest home.
Don’t turn back, Priestess. Not yet. Feel your foot bones fall on the Earth as if you were blessing the ground with every step you take, and call in your soul’s greatest gifts. This is a moving spell, with every step raising energy and infusing it into the vision of your wild home.
If we are stripping our Craft down to the bare bones of the elements, down to nature herself, we begin here, with a mindful walk. We begin here, connecting to ground with every step, and we begin here, in the warm bodies we find ourselves in now, with our imperfect mental-emotional states and stretch-marked bellies, accepting the place where we stand in the total absence of shoulds and supposed-tos. This is where you are, on the Earth. Start here. And so it is.
PRIESTESS RISING FROM GROUND: A RITUAL OF SELF-INITIATION
Materials: Skin-safe mud or clay
Our ground is precisely where we find ourselves each morning when we wake; it is a place of genesis, of sparking to life over and over again, despite its apparent flaws, the cracks in the pristine glaze of our grandest plans and greatest obsessions. Here, with our bare feet firm on the ground, we embody our inner altar regardless of where our story has taken us. We understand that whatever wounds have scarred our skin, whatever agonies have brought us here to this fateful incarnation, we are eternally whole. We are unruined. We are precisely who we need to be, precisely who we have always been.
For the awakening Priestess, the Earth serves as a foundation for her rising. She no longer clings to outmoded identities or is confined by garden rules. She values herself and affirms her right to exist here on the primal ground as she is. Her descent could have broken her, but it did not. The upward journey could have overwhelmed her to the point of eternal exhaustion, could have forced her into waist-deep psychic quicksand, but it did not. Now, the Priestess has a true topside place to start building her home, and it is a sanctuary that can never be invaded because, though its foundation was laid with fierce rebellion, it reaches skyward with the unbreachable walls of feminine authenticity.
Lilith, Inanna, and Persephone carry their wild homes on their bare backs. They have been to hell, have returned, and know how to stand against the fiery tide that would curse them. They have lived in the underworld for a time, been burned there for days on end, and now they have the verses of the wild feminine whisper-hissing from deep within their pelvic bowls. The descent is invaluable because the wild woman must be pulled into her depths in order to understand her darkness, lest it direct all she does with a heavy, shadowy hand, undermining her sense of self-worth, invalidating her most authentic identity, and keeping her contained in the too-small life. The descent is necessary, for only from our depths can we begin to rise.
If you can be safely out in nature for this ritual, my love, go. Find yourself a secluded space you can call your own. Carry with you some wet dirt or clay, and, when ready, call to the four directions and build yourself an energetic temple here. Hold whatever vessel you chose for your symbolic “Earth” in both hands, and bless it with the words I offer here or others you have written yourself: This is my initiation. These wounds are mine. I am whole unto myself, and I am of this Earth. So it is. When ready, anoint your third eye, that space between and slightly above the brows, with earth, creating an imperfect spiral with the mud or clay. Say aloud: This is my initiation. I am returned from the underworld, and I reclaim my right to see in the dark. Anoint your throat center, then say: This is my initiation. My voice is loud, and I reclaim my right to be heard. Finally, anoint your heart center and say: This is my initiation. My heart is unruined, and I reclaim my right to be loved deeply. Seal the ritual by offering gratitude to the four directions and placing hands firmly on the Earth, affirming: This is my initiation. All blessings be. And so it is.
TO WED SACRED SOLITUDE: A SOUL-MARRIAGE RITUAL FOR THE TOO-MUCH WOMAN
Materials: Just you, adorned as the Priestess you are
The mutation of Lilith’s story has much to teach us about the mass rejection targeting a woman as she re-wilds herself against all odds. Much of what the feminine learns about itself during childhood, in babes of all genders raised within the confines of patriarchy, is inextricably bound to a fear of being too loudmouthed and demanding. Lilith is a too-much woman, and, in several versions of her-story, she was condemned for naught more than demanding equality in her relationship. The feminine surrenders during the years of youth to a life of low worth and lack, with this lack well positioned, in our very roots, to undermine our very sense of self.
We tell ourselves we cannot have what we truly desire, for that very desire will get us kicked out of the life we know. We tell ourselves we cannot have what we want, particularly when that longing does not conform to the individualistic goals of our inner Fathers, those masculine commanders who rule over our psyches as if they were armies, fighting against anyone or anything we deem foreign or unfamiliar. We tame ourselves, housing multiple mechanisms in our psyches that carry their own whips, poised to strike if we speak out of turn or lose control, and we do all of this to keep from being abandoned by those whom we both love yet also see ourselves as subservient to; these may be our caregivers, our early mentors, our closest teenage friendships, our first lovers, and, most prominently, our heavy-handed egos. We wear many masks during our garden years, and, when the masks all finally fall to the ground heralding our pending escape, our real faces are raw and sensitive to light.
What healing salve can we put on our aching skin after our liberation, when we have few friends, few trusted souls who have seen us to hell and back? How can we sit on the topside world on the fringes of all we know, as the autonomous outcast in sacred solitude rather than the anguished loner? What grace can we find here in our bitter isolation?
Here, we have no choice but to become a bride to soul. When all others have forsaken us, when we have leaped so far beyond our most secure
