The Holy Wild. Danielle Dulsky

that both enlivens and enraptures us all — this beastly feminine dark that calls us to look not up toward the ethereal clouds but down to the muddy loam from which we were born, down to the Holy Wild — the ever-dying, ever-birthing dance of all that is. She is what many have willed us to forget, and She is the homegrown medicine for the spiritually starved soul. The depth of human experience precludes any universally relevant spiritual path, but She is the one, single universal truth: All of us were born here on Earth, and all of us will meet our ends on the same blessed planet.

      This book is a five-part ode to Her, to you, and to the yet-to-be-rebuilt bridge between our spirituality and our lived, embodied experience. What you will find here is hearty home-cooked nourishment for the nature-hungry spirit, seasoned with a good deal of feminine ire and served hot. What you will find here is an invitation to descend into the dark with me, to gather up pieces of ourselves we have forgotten, and to rise. The wilds of nature will always be our ancestral home, no matter how long we wander or how far we stray from our roots, and what I offer you in these pages is a fervent call to come home to the truth of who you are, to take your rightful place in the circle of wise ones who came before you.

      RISE UP, HEATHEN PRIESTESS: SHE LIVES IN THE WILDS

      Our human divinity is bone-deep, lit by the red light of our souls’ truth and sourced straight from the cosmic womb. I have an insatiable hunger for Her fierce mother-love, as I believe all members of our global collective do, and I am calling out and calling on all wild Priestesses of our world to join me in Her resurrection. I am howling from the dark depths of every forest, and I am crooning a siren’s song from every body of water I can find. I am seeking you out, the wild woman who is through making apologies for her own divinity, the Witch who is handcrafting her own religion stitched from her own truth, and the blessed incarnation of every human being who can still feel Her. I will speak to you directly, for you are a Wolf-Woman of my bloodline and we share the same language, the heathen Mother Tongue of the wild word.

      I hereby vow to validate your experience, your spiritual autonomy, and your magickal agency as we walk this misty and uncertain path together, and I will not ask you to sacrifice anything you know to be sacred. I do not assume that your life matches mine, and it is the uniqueness of our lived experiences of Her that will truly nourish the divine feminine in us all, rather than the bland and bleached homogenization of the Goddess experience.

       I will speak to you directly, for you are a Wolf-Woman of my bloodline and we share the same language, the heathen Mother Tongue of the wild word.

      As women of the wild, we deserve our own holy books, our own teaching tales, and our own venerable verses of validation. The spiritual wisdom of the feminine has always been born of lived experience, and the hooded Crone in all of us knows that her truth, her cyclical ways, are unique to her and her alone. The her-stories I offer here have merit only in their meeting with your own life; they do not stand alone as immutable truths or a step-by-step path toward any lofty and permanent healing goal, nor do they assert any secret mysteries that I alone am privileged to know. Without their soul-specific relationship with your memories, passions, woundings, and core values, Priestess, these verses are only words. Without your willful exploration of how the feminine archetypes I discuss in this heathens’ bible live and breathe within your own psyche, their names remain merely the default teaching tools used by outmoded traditions that have long required feminine shame to survive.

      The women who have been locked inside the books they called good deserve liberation from their externally imposed immorality. We must unlock the cages in which they have been contained for so long, trapped behind the iron bars of judgment and dismissal. We women of this evolving world are tasked with their redemption, for they are we. We share the scars of every woman who has been condemned to ever be spiritually imprisoned, and, in these pages, I offer all the primal feminine technology this Witch has in her toolbox to dismantle the indoctrinated beliefs that continue to limit our spiritual autonomy; divorce our bodies from our spirits; and fence in what is, by nature, untamed, heathen, and wild.

      The roots of the word heathen run far deeper than its derogatory, godless connotation; it is believed to come from the Germanic word meaning “dweller on the heath, one inhabiting uncultivated land.” To be heathen means to belong to the wild, to take our lessons from the natural world, and to be nourished by what we fundamentally are rather than what we are told we must be. Let me distinguish here between Heathenry, a polytheistic neo-Pagan religion for which I have much reverence but to which I do not belong, and the eclectic pre-Christian landscape of our ancestors. To be heathen is to remember the rawest essence of our worth, what is most authentically human about this flesh-and-blood body we find ourselves in, and what is left when our most carefully constructed psychic temples, those long-held belief systems that once served us so well, crumble into dust. Every one of our bloodlines is rooted in an Earth-based tradition if we only follow our lineage back far enough, and every one of our souls longs to come home to the wilds.

      FIND HER IN THE DARK: THE FERTILE SHADOWS OF THE FEMININE PATH

      Heathen Priestess, your bejeweled crown is the same size as mine. I am neither above nor below you, and the round table of the Holy Wild has no structured hierarchy. I have no authority mandated by any great spiritual institution, and my truest church has long been the forest-covered mountains of my childhood, where no one has ever called me master or queen. Resistant am I, however, to the dilution of the diversity of the feminine spiritual experience. A lack of hierarchy does not demand sameness, and it is the living, breathing variety in our her-stories, in our ever-broadening relationship with Her, that must be nourished and protected.

      My story is no more significant than yours, and my hope is that you drink in the poetry, feel nourished by the ceremonies, and complete the myths I begin here while constantly affirming your own authority and your own spiritual agency. The Holy Wild is a feminist terrain that you autonomously walk, standing at innumerable crossroads along the way and wielding your discernment like a sharp-edged weapon against the would-be predatory mentors, elite abusers, apparent beacons of manipulation masked as wise ones, and salacious gurus who claim to know better than you. This is your wild home, and you decide who is worthy of being your guest, who has earned the privilege of hearing your heroine’s tale of the wild feminine lost and the wild feminine regained.

      You are flawed to perfection, and, regardless of the precise nature of your wounds or your identity, you know Her. Whatever you have been told of your body’s value or the merit of your art and work, your mud-caked soul is no less beauteous than your bright spirit light, and I will stand arm in arm with you while we reclaim our wild worth as divine beings who are of this Earth as much as we are of any ethereal heaven. She is still beating out Her rhythm for us, my love, and She will not be trapped in any pink, glittery, ineffectual shape, even one we may call Goddess. It is not the soft and passive feminine that has been socially suppressed, after all, for this form of the sacred is easily molded, controlled, and commodified. Sister, we do not always find Her in the light. Sometimes, we find Her in the dark.

       Sometimes, we find Her in the dark.

      We find Her in the places that terrify us, and we find Her in the places they told us not to look.

      WALKING A WILDER PATH: SEEKING OUT THE FRINGES

      You have many names, my love. In this book, I will call you a Priestess to validate your authority over your own spiritual journey. A Priestess looks within for direction and listens to the whispers, whimpers, and guttural groans of her inner wise woman. A Priestess is an elder. A Priestess is a woman who, regardless of linear age, has done the work and earned the right to say who she is and what she believes. She bows to no one except her own raw soul, and, while she is unquestionably an eternal student, she does not need external approval for her spiritual progress.

      I will call you a Witch to affirm your birthright as a holy healer, to vindicate those socially rejected women who were hunted — who still are hunted in many parts of the world — in the name of not only patriarchy but also institutionalized racism, classism, and persistent imperialism. I will call you Witch to give a fierce nod to our stolen feminine spirituality and to give your wisdom a real name. Witches live on the edges of what is permissible, continually seeking out the fringes and brewing up the secret recipes of