be read as a history of aversion to mater. Dulsky writes that “the extent to which feminine power, in its myriad forms, has been condemned as evil is nothing less than ancient and global. . . . The Goddess has been demonized in our culture, increasingly cast not into a hellish underworld but into a pink and glittery fairyland where she is harmless but also useless.” Now the Goddess is incarcerated no more, and a fierce reckoning is happening. This coming to the Holy Wilds is our deepest hope if we are to linger as an earth community.
In my work researching neomaterialist reconfigurations of racial identity, and specifically how ancestral DNA testing queers the idea of indigeneity, I met Danielle Dulsky. She introduced herself as a Witch. She smiled and told me her story, of her teenage longings for belonging, of being drawn to Ireland since before she knew what was calling her, even when she believed she was Polish. She spoke of her grandmother, her irresistible attraction to the figure of the feminine, and her call to become a Witch.
In this book, Dulsky’s libratory words, quivering sensuously with a search that has never terminated, open us up to the fathomless beauty of the wilds beyond our fences, ritualizing our approach to the Goddess our forebears once banished. This book is holy. This book is a prayer, a cartographical introduction to earth, to water, to fire, to air, and to ether. It is a spell to undo the trance that holds us in the grip of modern separability, devaluing the woman, distorting the masculine, and quelling the queer.
I invite you to read it. Read it knowing you will not arrive. Knowing you will be met quite suddenly by something greater than yourself, something hiding under the veil of the ordinary. Knowing that She breathes again, and desperately seeks you.
— Bayo Akomolafe, PhD, author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home
In the beginning, there was She.
She was nature’s primordial pulse, the pan-elemental alchemy of birth; the fertile void of death; and the mysterious, enduring, and numinous cosmic infinite. All was She, and She was all. Her power pervaded the totality of existence and veiled all potential worlds in the name of holy manifestation. Her steady, purposeful rhythm pounded on, in, and through the stellar fusions, the planet building, and the great galactic swell. The universal dawn was a quantum prayer to Her, and She was dancing for us long before humanity’s blessed inception, long before the glow of the primal feminine was eclipsed by modernity.
While the rhythm of Her hallowed drum has slowed and quieted to a barely audible, near-whisper beat, while humanity’s spiritual landscape has been overbuilt and hums with man-made hymns, She can never be silenced. She is our elemental nature, the stuff of our souls, and we are She embodied. Every one of us could hear Her if we only listened, for She has sought safe harbor in our very marrow. She lives in us, and with Her genesis came our mandate to wholly and emphatically embody Her in the wake of the feminine’s historical denigration. If we only put our ears to the ground, we would hear the promised pulse of Her return not as She descends from a gold-and-diamond heaven but as She claws Her way up so ceremoniously through rock and stone, destined to erupt from beneath the very structures built to keep Her contained.
Our language is insufficient when describing the shape-shifting majesty that is She, but I will call this force that both enlivens and enraptures us all — this beastly feminine dark that calls us to look not up toward the ethereal clouds but down to the muddy loam from which we were born, down to the Holy Wild — the ever-dying, ever-birthing dance of all that is. She is what many have willed us to forget, and She is the homegrown medicine for the spiritually starved soul. The depth of human experience precludes any universally relevant spiritual path, but She is the one, single universal truth: All of us were born here on Earth, and all of us will meet our ends on the same blessed planet.
This book is a five-part ode to Her, to you, and to the yet-to-be-rebuilt bridge between our spirituality and our lived, embodied experience. What you will find here is hearty home-cooked nourishment for the nature-hungry spirit, seasoned with a good deal of feminine ire and served hot. What you will find here is an invitation to descend into the dark with me, to gather up pieces of ourselves we have forgotten, and to rise. The wilds of nature will always be our ancestral home, no matter how long we wander or how far we stray from our roots, and what I offer you in these pages is a fervent call to come home to the truth of who you are, to take your rightful place in the circle of wise ones who came before you.
RISE UP, HEATHEN PRIESTESS: SHE LIVES IN THE WILDS
Our human divinity is bone-deep, lit by the red light of our souls’ truth and sourced straight from the cosmic womb. I have an insatiable hunger for Her fierce mother-love, as I believe all members of our global collective do, and I am calling out and calling on all wild Priestesses of our world to join me in Her resurrection. I am howling from the dark depths of every forest, and I am crooning a siren’s song from every body of water I can find. I am seeking you out, the wild woman who is through making apologies for her own divinity, the Witch who is handcrafting her own religion stitched from her own truth, and the blessed incarnation of every human being who can still feel Her. I will speak to you directly, for you are a Wolf-Woman of my bloodline and we share the same language, the heathen Mother Tongue of the wild word.
I hereby vow to validate your experience, your spiritual autonomy, and your magickal agency as we walk this misty and uncertain path together, and I will not ask you to sacrifice anything you know to be sacred. I do not assume that your life matches mine, and it is the uniqueness of our lived experiences of Her that will truly nourish the divine feminine in us all, rather than the bland and bleached homogenization of the Goddess experience.
I will speak to you directly, for you are a Wolf-Woman of my bloodline and we share the same language, the heathen Mother Tongue of the wild word.
As women of the wild, we deserve our own holy books, our own teaching tales, and our own venerable verses of validation. The spiritual wisdom of the feminine has always been born of lived experience, and the hooded Crone in all of us knows that her truth, her cyclical ways, are unique to her and her alone. The her-stories I offer here have merit only in their meeting with your own life; they do not stand alone as immutable truths or a step-by-step path toward any lofty and permanent healing goal, nor do they assert any secret mysteries that I alone am privileged to know. Without their soul-specific relationship with your memories, passions, woundings, and core values, Priestess, these verses are only words. Without your willful exploration of how the feminine archetypes I discuss in this heathens’ bible live and breathe within your own psyche, their names remain merely the default teaching tools used by outmoded traditions that have long required feminine shame to survive.
The women who have been locked inside the books they called good deserve liberation from their externally imposed immorality. We must unlock the cages in which they have been contained for so long, trapped behind the iron bars of judgment and dismissal. We women of this evolving world are tasked with their redemption, for they are we. We share the scars of every woman who has been condemned to ever be spiritually imprisoned, and, in these pages, I offer all the primal feminine technology this Witch has in her toolbox to dismantle the indoctrinated beliefs that continue to limit our spiritual autonomy; divorce our bodies from our spirits; and fence in what is, by nature, untamed, heathen, and wild.
The roots of the word heathen run far deeper than its derogatory, godless connotation; it is believed to come from the Germanic word meaning “dweller on the heath, one inhabiting uncultivated land.” To be heathen means to belong to the wild, to take our lessons from the natural world, and
