The Holy Wild. Danielle Dulsky

you, to remind you of your journey along the Red Road and to affirm your personal Priestess power. Words carry power. What can you tell yourself, in a single sentence, that will remind you of your magick and your wild? What words can you cling to when the storm comes, when some snide remarks threaten to break you, when someone calls you “too” this or “too” that? What can you tell yourself to remind you that you are, after all, born of the elements, a star-child of the Holy Wild?

      Any mantra you write with your hand will be far better than one I could give you, my love, but you can begin harvesting the right words by freewriting on the following prompts, if you need a starting point:

       I am the Priestess of...

       I am calling in...

       I am building my temple for...

       This is my year, and I will...

       I am the wild Witch of the Earth, and I know...

      Find a short phrase you can hold housed in your heart. Imagine it blood-written in calligraphic script and placed on that inner altar built from your rib bones. Every time you speak it, you are enacting a ritual of coming home to yourself, owning the value of your voice, and engaging in practical alchemy. If you feel called, write these words on a sacred object, a small piece of wood or fabric, and leave your mantra in a wild place for all to see. May a little girl find it, tuck it into her sleeve, and keep it close. And so it is.

BLESSING THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT: A RITUAL OF REBELLIOUS NOURISHMENT

      Materials: Paper, writing utensil, large apple, knife

      Eating the forbidden fruit is an act of necessary rebellion. As her time in the garden comes to an end, the wild woman is ravenous for a life she has yet to live, and her hunger pangs rumble through her gut like the foreshocks of a devastating Gaia-sourced earthquake. The yearning for freedom consumes her body and psyche, and what used to seem magickal in the garden now seems mediocre, frightening, overly fragile, too good to be true, or, otherwise and more simply, just not for her. The bright colors take on a sepia tone, and the freely served garden food on which the Priestess once gorged herself now tastes bland and fails to satiate her. She becomes an outcast in her own land, and it is now that she begins to truly embark on the feminine quest for freedom. She sees the garden for the cage it is, and her choice is to stay and waste away or risk her life in a no-holds-barred fight for her own wildness. In the end, she has no choice but to eat the forbidden fruit, to rebel against this too-small life.

      The revisioned tale describes Lilith’s lament as she prays to the divine feminine at the foot of the Tree of Knowledge: I yearn so much for a freedom I know I deserve that my belly burns with the wanting. The Priestess of the Wild Earth archetype lives and breathes within our roots, and there is a necessary sense of entitlement that precedes the wild woman’s liberation. A woman will not leave her garden until she harbors a deep knowing, planted there at the base of her spine, that she deserves better. In the absence of this felt self-worth, the woman will stay in her garden-cage quite willingly until she embraces her right to have more, to be more, and to live in a bigger and brighter world where she can be fully and unapologetically herself. After she eats the forbidden fruit, after she gets a taste of a life that is more blissful, more true to self than the one the garden has offered her, there can be no going back.

      Ask yourself now, Priestess, when have you eaten the forbidden fruit? Was there a time when you risked rejection in the name of selfhood or sacrificed, perhaps unknowingly, social acceptance in a group where you no longer belonged, success in a career that drained you, or some promised reward from a spiritual community in order to be truer to your genuineness? The forbidden fruit can mean any number of things to women, and the act of consumption may not have necessarily been ecstatic or blissful. Ask yourself what memory of the forbidden fruit you have today. Whatever your sinful pleasure was, you made a choice to indulge, and you felt more true, more you, for having done so. Maybe you asked a question you knew would not be well received by an authority figure, but you were well satiated by having spoken your mind. Maybe you skipped church one day as a young girl to play in the woods, or maybe you stood up for someone who needed you. Tasting the forbidden fruit may not have been an easy choice, and it may not have tasted so sweet at the time — but, in retrospect, these were the moments that marked your awakening.

      List as many “forbidden fruits” as you can now. They need not be chronologically linear or brilliantly articulated. For each “fruit,” summarize the experience in just one word; it might be resistance, joy, hedonism, defiance, or any other name that feels right as a rite. With a knife, skewer, or other sharp utensil, carve as many of these words onto an apple’s skin as you can, then hold the sticky fruit in both your hands. Whisper-pray these words if they seem true: I am a Priestess of the Wild Earth, and I call in my most soulful joy. This forbidden fruit is mine, and I deserve all that is for me. When you feel ready, eat the apple, savoring the taste on your tongue. With every bite, go back to your list of “forbidden fruit” moments and relive one, apologizing for nothing and welcoming a fiercer version of yourself home. And so it is.

REPOWERING THE WITCH: A RITUAL FOR HEALING THE FEMININE SOUL-WOUND

      Materials: Just you, adorned as the Priestess you are

      While we must have joy in our Craft, we must also acknowledge our inherited wounds. The Witch lives at the edge of what is permissible, and, as a Priestess coming into her power, the wild woman sees with great clarity the systematic strangulation of feminine spirituality. Even women who are not raised within the confines of patriarchal religion are indoctrinated with beliefs that soften and dilute the power of the feminine. Regardless of gender, all human beings suffer greatly from the soul-wound of communal, feminine loss. Our society shapes us all to value the hard-edged, individualistic, toxic, and aggressive masculine over the sensually present, collectivist feminine. We are taught to devalue our planetary resources along with those of the holy feminine embodied in a single woman, the traits of the nature-loving Maiden, the nurturing, storyteller Mother, and the intuitive, ethereal Crone.

      Escaping the too-small life is often prompted by the acknowledgment of a great injustice, but, regardless of how this blight or corruption is shaped, undergirding the violation is the denigration of the feminine wild. Remember, however, that the stranglehold of patriarchy on human society has not choked the breath from the Goddess. The feminine in all human beings has housed her, kept her warm, and fed her with soft whispers that tell her we still feel her inside us and our wounded world. In the cold absence of feminine spiritual systems that permit her to speak, it is the Witches and wild women who often become her voice.

      You still embody bone-deep bruises from the Witch-hunters’ weapons, my love. Wild women’s bodies are homes to souls who remember the threat of the noose and the stake, a threat that remains in many parts of the world in various forms. In Witches, Sluts, and Feminists, Kristen Sollée writes, “in the face of oppression, the Witch reminds us what we can and have overcome, and illuminates the path to power beyond patriarchy. As we undress the legacy of the Witch to reveal her potent history, we may in the process uncover something marrow-deep within ourselves.” The fear of claiming spiritual autonomy is a sticky, dripping darkness that crouches and snarls in the shadows of even the most awakened woman’s psyche. There is no escape from this soul-wound; thus we have little choice but to look the monster straight in its red eyes and honor our right to speak and be heard. We are here, gruesome creature, and we are not leaving. Teach us what you know.

       In the cold absence of feminine spiritual systems that permit her to speak, it is the Witches and wild women who often become her voice.

      At the hand of patriarchal religion, the stories of wild women’s bravery became those of the scandalous, broken Maidens. Lilith’s story becomes one of the demon Mother who was cast out of the desert, devolving into a licentious succubus. Countless other incarnations of the divine feminine dark have had their stories bleached to remove the magick, the divination, and the fem-force of righteous rage. These are the