*Writer’s Note: This piece is based on my poetic recollections of archetypal consciousness, as recalled during my recent remembering of self as priestess, which—although always present in some form—began unfolding with an almost dangerous intensity in June 2014. I share this offering here as a reflection and space held for countless others who are currently in their own incredible throes of rising and remembering this ancient gnosis, even as we embody and enact the power of the feminine in the now.

If this article describes you or someone you love, please remember to take excellent care of your exotic species. Loving attention, and if possible hand-feeding and copious third-eye kisses—will help her grow healthy and strong. And rest assured that what she receives will be exponentially given. With Love and deep bows, Sara Sophia*

The priestess is a creature of potency and devotion, weaving and wending between Heaven and Earth, confounding and joyously disturbing all attempts at categorization.

She continuously receives and transmits a living elixir of transcendent love, a consciousness of the most welcoming and inclusive non-duality, in service of the Goddess. Each breath she takes, each gaze, each footfall is an act of divine lovemaking.

None of this is a thought for her; it is not mental or intellectualized. Rather, gnosis glows like sparks within her very cells, her smile, the gleam in her eye, her turn of phrase, and her strength as she stands powerfully in the eye of her own storm. Her life is holy ceremony, and her body a fearsome and eloquent alchemy. Wherever she goes, she carries a benevolent hurricane of power within her—an entire system of meaning and ancient beauty—multifarious in its manifestations and ever presiding in mystery.

She is always, by definition, more than herself. She is spirit essence, archetypal memory, the undulation of nature—solid and sure as bedrock, yet changing like quicksilver before one’s eyes. She suddenly becomes waves of heat visible in the desert air, as one hallucinates and thirsts for the oasis that her eyes promise. Even as we long and tremble for Her presence, we tell ourselves to snap out of this strange mirage. We want to sweep her under the rug, to declare her just a dream. But in the colors swirling and coalescing behind our slumbering eyes, a face emerges. She is still there, shimmering and beckoning, refusing to subside. She is difficult to shake and impossible to forget. She is the uncanny laughter and flare of space making love to time, bending to the darkness of our dreamscape.

Many times she experiences the deep pain of these sharp shape-shiftings, a sort turmoil of form and formlessness that bashes her soul up against the limitations of her human flesh and bone, like an ocean wave relentlessly shattering so many shells and memories along a rocky shore. As she shatters, she merges; as she particlizes, she becomes quantum and ineffable.

Yet she chooses expansion and diversity of experience even when it hurts, for it is her soul’s contract; she agrees to be as numerous as the stars in the sky.

Above all she is still human. She is the mother who brushes the hair gently from her child’s brow; other times she is the small child at war with her own starlight, who cries herself to sleep. Her tears navigate familiar rivulets across her pillow as she whispers over and over, to no one in particular:

“I am made of love.”

She is the pain of remembering, a delicious sort of pain that heals.

She is simultaneously dead and alive, and dancing; paradox her native state. She fears no creature of the Underworld for they know her; to Death she nods her head in nonchalant recognition. The crows and snakes greet her readily and call her friend. Lizards scale the wall to to her bedroom, and the wolves and bears recognize her easily. Trees and rivers speak to her all the day. The moon and wind assist her in ceremony. Her sisters are many, and materialize at will. None of this is “supernatural” to her; it is Nature itself, as is she.
The look in her eyes is both absolutely soft and unyieldingly fierce, holding at once a dare and the kindest invitation. She is sovereign and free; she can never be made captive.

And yes, she is dangerous: the kind of danger that blows man off the course of his own seas, pulls his ship into the choppy waters where his own overgrown claims to control and outcome can moor him no longer, and he at last must surrender in love to the elemental truth of his own being. Deep in the uncharted territory of the vulnerable inchoate, he finds nothing other than pleasure and pain, light and darkness, Heaven and Earth, all in his own body and soul. The beauty haunts and calls him with the glorious and exquisite song of the siren. This call he cannot refuse any longer. She holds him as, at last, the sacred tears form in his eyes. And falling to her arms without control, naked as a man can be, he shudders.

This is the power the priestess carries squarely upon her shoulders and deep within her center, a power of tender magic and light beating in her heart and coursing in her blood, an inextinguishable flame, now returned in full to this age. And so it is.

Relephant Read:

A Shaman’s Journey to Goddess.

~

Author: Sara Sophia Eisenman

Editor: Travis May

Photo: Author’s Own