Witch’s truth. Wild spirituality is a fluid embrace of divine selfhood, and it is nothing if not entirely personal. There is no book so holy that you should be made to feel choiceless in its mandates, and this is certainly no exception.
BEYOND THE PALATABLE GODDESS: NAMING THE DARK HOLY
We have heard their names, but we have not heard their stories. No story is true unless it is told by the one who lived it, and their sullied names have been used and abused in the service of a false morality for so long that we can scarcely remember the sound of their voices. Priestess, if you are so called, breathe life into their names to give them justice: our Lilith, our Salome, our Mother of Babylon, our Mary Magdalene, our Jezebel, and countless other women who have been denigrated and forced to pin bright-red letters on their bare chests. In this holy book, I reframe these women as archetypes of the sacred, forgotten feminine and liken them to other Goddesses from many cultures, importantly not to encourage their appropriation but to honor the wildest faces of the feminine as they have existed, and indeed persisted, throughout time.* The love of a deity is a deeply personal experience, and I am in no position to direct your devotion. This book is grounded in nature and affirms your kinship not with individual deities but with the elements themselves and the myths and her-stories that reflect your own experience back to you.
The elemental archetypes I offer here, like you, deserve liberation from the stories that have confined them for so long. They are archetypal benedictions to your own wild worth. Sing their names, infuse their memories with breath and body, and know I am singing with you. Too often, women who are coming home to the feminine divine will search for Her most palatable faces, Goddesses of compassion and love who undoubtedly deserve our devotion and respect, Goddesses who seem exotic and easily appropriated by those of other cultures, and Goddesses who seem to be accessible tools to be wielded during ritual more than hearty incarnations of all that is. The Goddess is not an inanimate object to be used, and to do so merely perpetuates the same wounds that have been affecting the divine feminine for more than two millennia. We do not search for the Goddess in order to own Her. We search for the Goddess to name holy those parts of ourselves we know are real, those parts of ourselves that the more accessible religious paths may not accept. I discuss Goddess archetypes here as holy, energetic, heavily guarded gateways to true, embodied divinity, and their stories matter.
A woman cannot know herself as holy while still seeing the Goddess as superficial or optional, and it takes work to dismantle layers upon layers of belief about who She is and who She is not. If we look to the Goddess as a sacred collective of energy nourished and enlivened by human belief, prayer, and ritual, we can see how She is fundamentally born of the elements, how we have never really lost Her.
Ask yourself, over and over again, where Her energy meets yours, how Her story is your story, and constantly work to blur the lines, those rigid boundaries drawn by someone else’s hand, between Goddess and Self. In many ways, the quest for Goddess is simply the quest for a deeper kinship with nature, the constant long-armed reach for the unconditional love of Her, the Holy Wild. We need not seek to own what we cannot possess, what is not ours to claim, and we need not all necessarily have deified names in our practice other than simply earth, water, fire, air, and ether.
LOOK TO THE SHADOWS, AND RECLAIM THE HEATHEN CROWN
Know that every human being embodies the sacred masculine and feminine, and gender is a social construction that has nothing to do with true divinity. Someone who identifies as male may live very close to the feminine, while a woman may have significant masculine energy. More importantly, it does not matter whether you label the disempowered aspects of our society as feminine or with another name, for it is ultimately the liberation of our holy sensuality, environmental reverence, emotional integrity, generative creativity, magickal agency, holistic relationship, authentic voice, intuition and psychic power, understanding of the spiral nature of time, and inborn spiritual autonomy that we are after. Call them what you will, but I will call these suppressed characteristics the wild, heathen feminine.
We all need Her, for we all are She. We are all change agents at this pivotal time in human history. This is the time of the Wild Rising, and we are setting the table for Her homecoming banquet. Everyone is invited. Exclude no one who truly wants to come, for the decisions we make now are our proclamation of the principles on which we want our children’s world to be based. She, despite the pronoun I have chosen to use to designate the feminine, is positively and irrefutably pan-gender. Eventually, yes, we will all sit at this table together. For now, the untamed woman is tasked with digging up her psychic dirt, igniting her shame on a funeral pyre, facing her most gruesome shadows, and enacting within the microcosm of her own spiritual journey all that she hopes to see accepted and empowered in greater society.
Consider this holy book an ode to your coronation. You may have called yourself Witch, Priestess, or wild woman for some time now — but, in these pages, I ask you to claim your heathen crown, to know yourself as an embodiment of not only the feminine divine light but also the feminine divine dark. I am placing it on your head now, Priestess. Can you feel the weight of it? You are She who is returned, and this is your sacred text because much of it will be written by you. These verses call you to burn your fear at the stake and build your own temple of the Holy Wild out of mud and stones, tended by your ancestors and named sacred by you. Keep a fire burning for Her there, as She has always kept one softly crackling for you. Arch your back and listen closely for Her drumbeat, for it grows louder with every Priestess who joins you, who spits on the instruments of spiritual oppression, continually examines whether her beliefs are truly her own, and reclaims her hard-earned, holy heathen crown. This temple is ours, built by the hands of the heathen and attended by the countless Priestesses of the Holy Wild.
* Please see the Additional Resources section for books written by women of color about the Goddesses Kali, Lalita, Oshun, and Oya.
The earth element is our ground, the place from which we rise. Here, our greatest lessons are those sourced straight from our souls’ hard-won liberation. Earth calls us to dig deep, to uncover the blood-soaked treasure embedded in our wounds, to harvest our most ancient underworld wisdom, and to remember the way back to our wild home. Here, we stand firm in our sovereignty and our selfhood, howling incantations our hearts have always remembered. Here, all that is uniquely ours serves to nourish our roots and remind us of the immutable truths tattooed on our bones.
Wild Feminine Archetype: The Priestess of the Wild Earth
Themes in Her-story: Rightful rebellion, tasting the forbidden, spiritual initiation, sacred solitude in nature, coming home to the wilds
Come home to the wilds, heathen. Let’s speak of stone circles and forbidden fruit. Share your ancient medicine with me, and I will show you the overgrown, untamed places where you belong.
Long before the holy feminine’s voice arises from the depths of a woman’s soft belly and demands to be heard — before she claims the name Witch, wild woman, fire-keeper, or any other designation that speaks to her spiritual autonomy — she side-eyes the parts of her world that no longer suit the truth-telling Priestess she is becoming. She outgrows her
