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The Priestess is the three-headed Goddess as a young woman, the Virgin. She stands in the pose of the Cretan snake Goddess, snakes twining around her arms, and dances the way women always have done, with swaying hips, behind a veil, symbolizing everything that separates us from our true center. The dance creates an extatic trance in which she and the Goddess becomes one, bringing about an integration between the physical body and that realm which is often considered to be removed from and ”higher” than the body. In Goddess cultures sexuality was the vehicle of bringing life into the world and was a sacred act. It was also sacred because of the ecstacy that accompanied it was the nearest experience to the state of bliss associated with the divine existence of the goddesses and gods.
Her power does not come from being asexual or sexually ignorant, but in having control over her own sexuality. The virginity of the Goddess has nothing to do with sexual ”purity” in the sense it has been given in our culture. The Goddess is virgin because she carries within herself her own fertilizing power. Ishtar, Inanna, Astarte, Isis, Afrodite and Diana were all called virgins, and were sexually independent, belonging to no man, in control of their lives. Such a woman is whole in herself. She is strong, and can be dangerous, much more so than a man. She can be moody and unreliable (the dark side of the Goddess), but she can also be capable of great changes. Such a woman is capable of anything.
In her function as a priestess she guards the entrance to the labyrinth that leads to the womb of Mother Earth. We have to pass through the labyrinth - winding like the convolutions of our brain - to reach the deepest power, inaccessible to the conscious mind. There, in the nameless darkness of the cave, in the center of ourselves, we can find our ancient heritage: silent knowledge, knowing without words and without knowing how. It is the last remnants of our animal instincts, that comes through in dreams and vague hunches.
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Created by Maria Näslund ©1997-2002.