Every December in Mystery School we enter High Priestess Season.
It’s so funny that this time of year is so packed with expectation, stress and obligation when nature is telling us to rest and release.
It’s like we are so bad at resting, we have to make a performance out of it and get loads of “restful activities” done instead!
A Priestess is someone who is committed to pulling themselves into presence, into being the sacred witness, into accepting what is and seeing the celebration and ecstasy in life.
High Priestess is one of the eight aspects of Morgan le Fay we work with in Mystery School.
Morgana is the Priestess of Priestesses, almost like our guardian spirit or the saint of the priestess path, and she guides us on our path into our spiritual presence and power.
I tend to only use the honorific of High Priestess for goddesses and deities, because I don’t believe that human priestesses need that kind of hierarchy in Goddess Spirituality.
No matter the experience or expertise, and even outside of High Priestess season, we are all priestesses, taking a stand for equality and leaving behind the patriarchal idea of power over or better than. I feel like if there are no high priestesses, it’s like we are all on a team together.
So if Morgana is the High Priestess, what does that mean?
It means that she holds the teachings and energy of the archetypal priestess energy, the mystery of devotion, presence, seeing things from an expanded heart perspective, and the secrets of intuition.
Morgana is the mistress of the Isle of Avalon and the head of the sisterhood of priestesses who live there. She is their mentor, showing them the ways of spirit, the movement of the stars, how to live in harmony with the rhythms of the earth and hear the whispered guidance of the soul.
She leads us back into a state of being where we can access peace, no matter what is happening in our every day lives. She pulls us into that divine expanded luminous state, out of time and in time, where we are awake to the serene beauty of the Goddess as she moves through and becomes all things.
Of course, archetypal priestess energy is very different from what it’s like to be an actual human priestess.
This is often forgotten as we step forward on the priestess path: women in particular like to believe they (or others; spiritual communities are notorious for unowned projections, where someone is furious and betrayed when a teacher or priestess doesn’t live up to the perfected projection they were expected to be) need to be absolutely perfect, above reproach and better-than-human to attain the saintly title of priestess.
Real priestesses are messy, chaotic and make mistakes all the time, just like everyone else.
You don’t have to stop being everything you already are to live intentionally, or to be spiritual.
And as the Midwife of Priestesses, Morgan le Fay is more than just the archetypal priestess.
Think of the archetypal priestess as what everyone thinks of when you think “priestess”: peace, luminous energy, intuitive as hell, reading the signs, deeply connected to the goddess, almost a lil’ bit otherworldly.
The rest of Morgana is what you don’t tend think of when you think ‘Priestess.”
She’s pushy, makes you confront the things about you that you would really rather not see, gets you to own your dreams and desires (even if they aren’t ‘priestessy’ at all) and demands that you take the reigns of your power, both spiritual and material. It’s not just all about gazing at the moon and meditating: she wants you to be fully here, fully embodied in the physical world so you can actually make a difference with your priestess powers. It’s about ebodying this energy throughout and beyond High Priestess season.
But all the shadow, truth and power is what makes a potent priestess.
It takes the archetypal stuff from being something that is a little disconnected from our everyday world and deeply integrates it so it is useful to others. It balances out the shadow edges of the archetypal priestess which can lead us to dissociate from life, lack empathy for the humanness of things and retreat into a spiritual world, which serves no-one.
