The Holy Wild. Danielle Dulsky

countless Earth-based religions and nonsystematic spiritual traditions. Your inner Witch remembers how to get home to those liminal places between honored guest and social outcast, between queen and freak.

      This path is wild because we cannot possibly predict where it will lead us. We cannot know, amid the chaos, precisely where the global collective’s evolution is leading. We can assure ourselves that we are doing our part, living our purpose, and honoring our human birthright as complex, sensual, creative, loving, and spiritual beings. We can repeatedly examine the extent to which we are truly working to achieve the vision of equality we say we seek. Here and now, with the body, skills, and other resources we have been given, we are charged to embody Her, in all Her light-and-shadow majesty, as fully as possible in the time we have been given. In these pages, I will call this wild path the Red Road, the always-spiraling, unmapped route toward a woman’s spiritual home.

      READ WILDLY: OURS IS NOT A ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL PATH

      This heathens’ bible offers you verses, rituals, and magick framed within five books and rooted within a wild and untamed spirituality. The Book of Earth will call you toward the underground world of soul, revisioning the story of Lilith and honoring the merit of necessary rebellion. The Book of Water begs you to swim in the wild waters of erotic sensuality, emotional ebbs and flows, and joyous creativity, revisioning the story of Salome and highlighting our right to feel deeply. In the Book of Fire, we explore righteous rage, radical hope, and feminine ire as change agents, working with the Mother of Babylon’s transformational energies and honoring women’s collective strength as a powerful fuel for social justice and communal activism. Revisioning the story of Mary Magdalene and working with the Mother-Healer archetype, the Book of Air focuses on our most meaningful relationships, our partnerships, and our generative work as alchemical teachers housing the greatest lessons of this life of ours. Finally, the Book of Ether honors our inner Crones, revisioning Queen Jezebel’s story and exploring the many-layered teachings of the Dark Goddess archetypes, the long-lost wisdom of our grandmothers.

      All five elements are integral to the Holy Wild, and I will hold space for you not only to discover, explore, and integrate them all in a personally relevant, soul-true spiritual craft but to own how they are already embodied by the heathen Priestess that is you. The verses chapters highlight the her-stories of historically shunned women; personal mythwork for you, the reader, to write your own sacred tales of feminine wisdom; and prayers and incantations for working with that particular aspect of the Holy Wild. The rituals chapters offer ceremonies and practices for invoking the elemental power and honoring our most pivotal past experiences, and the magick chapters contain spellwork and pathworking meditations for moving forward, enacting change, and divining our feminine futures.

      Set aside all you know about scholarly study, my love, and read wildly. Wander through this book as you would explore the shadows of a haunted fairy-tale forest — curiously, cautiously, and sensually. Walk with bare feet, and be open to new ways of knowing yourself and your world. Scribble your own poetic verses on these pages as you would scrawl your name in the mud to keep from getting lost in the midst of the ’twixt and ’tween. Move in spirals if you are called, and feel no need to read linearly. Be a curious scout in this majestic wilderness you have discovered; then be the stealthy, aged guide who knows the secrets of the land and knows them well. This spiritual terrain is yours, and you alone know the route your soul has taken or where it might be headed.

      Wild spirituality is a wily shape-shifter, just like nature and the divine feminine Herself. I ask you to consider each element to be a paint color on your sacred palette; you may be drawn to the red and ruddy earth much more than the blazing yellows of fire, and the aesthetic of the painting you might birth tomorrow may diverge significantly from the one you create today. Ours is not a one-size-fits-all path.

       Ours is not a one-size-fits-all path.

      This book asks you to handcraft your own spirituality not just from the inspiration offered here but from your own Witch’s truth. Wild spirituality is a fluid embrace of divine selfhood, and it is nothing if not entirely personal. There is no book so holy that you should be made to feel choiceless in its mandates, and this is certainly no exception.

      BEYOND THE PALATABLE GODDESS: NAMING THE DARK HOLY

We have heard their names, but we have not heard their stories. No story is true unless it is told by the one who lived it, and their sullied names have been used and abused in the service of a false morality for so long that we can scarcely remember the sound of their voices. Priestess, if you are so called, breathe life into their names to give them justice: our Lilith, our Salome, our Mother of Babylon, our Mary Magdalene, our Jezebel, and countless other women who have been denigrated and forced to pin bright-red letters on their bare chests. In this holy book, I reframe these women as archetypes of the sacred, forgotten feminine and liken them to other Goddesses from many cultures, importantly not to encourage their appropriation but to honor the wildest faces of the feminine as they have existed, and indeed persisted, throughout time.* The love of a deity is a deeply personal experience, and I am in no position to direct your devotion. This book is grounded in nature and affirms your kinship not with individual deities but with the elements themselves and the myths and her-stories that reflect your own experience back to you.

      The elemental archetypes I offer here, like you, deserve liberation from the stories that have confined them for so long. They are archetypal benedictions to your own wild worth. Sing their names, infuse their memories with breath and body, and know I am singing with you. Too often, women who are coming home to the feminine divine will search for Her most palatable faces, Goddesses of compassion and love who undoubtedly deserve our devotion and respect, Goddesses who seem exotic and easily appropriated by those of other cultures, and Goddesses who seem to be accessible tools to be wielded during ritual more than hearty incarnations of all that is. The Goddess is not an inanimate object to be used, and to do so merely perpetuates the same wounds that have been affecting the divine feminine for more than two millennia. We do not search for the Goddess in order to own Her. We search for the Goddess to name holy those parts of ourselves we know are real, those parts of ourselves that the more accessible religious paths may not accept. I discuss Goddess archetypes here as holy, energetic, heavily guarded gateways to true, embodied divinity, and their stories matter.

      A woman cannot know herself as holy while still seeing the Goddess as superficial or optional, and it takes work to dismantle layers upon layers of belief about who She is and who She is not. If we look to the Goddess as a sacred collective of energy nourished and enlivened by human belief, prayer, and ritual, we can see how She is fundamentally born of the elements, how we have never really lost Her.

      Ask yourself, over and over again, where Her energy meets yours, how Her story is your story, and constantly work to blur the lines, those rigid boundaries drawn by someone else’s hand, between Goddess and Self. In many ways, the quest for Goddess is simply the quest for a deeper kinship with nature, the constant long-armed reach for the unconditional love of Her, the Holy Wild. We need not seek to own what we cannot possess, what is not ours to claim, and we need not all necessarily have deified names in our practice other than simply earth, water, fire, air, and ether.

      LOOK TO THE SHADOWS, AND RECLAIM THE HEATHEN CROWN

      Know that every human being embodies the sacred masculine and feminine, and gender is a social construction that has nothing to do with true divinity. Someone who identifies as male may live very close to the feminine, while a woman may have significant masculine energy. More importantly, it does not matter whether you label the disempowered aspects of our society as feminine or with another name, for it is ultimately the liberation of our holy sensuality, environmental reverence, emotional integrity, generative creativity, magickal agency, holistic relationship, authentic voice, intuition and psychic power, understanding of the spiral nature of time, and inborn spiritual autonomy that we are after. Call them what you will, but I will call these suppressed characteristics the wild, heathen feminine.

      We all need Her, for we all are She. We are all change agents at this pivotal time in human history. This is the time of the Wild Rising, and we are setting the table for Her homecoming banquet. Everyone