What Does a Priestess Do?

*Picture is of Priestess Yeshe Matthews

A priestess serves her community in various spiritual and ritual roles, which may include:

• Leading Public Ceremonies: Priestesses often guide communal rituals, sacred dances, and ceremonies in temples, sanctuaries, and shrines.
• Healing and Protection: They play a vital role in healing and protecting the living, sometimes using prayers, laments, and ritual technologies.
• Guiding Souls: Some priestesses, such as midwives in Jewish Eastern Europe, were valued for their spiritual skill in guiding unborn souls into the living world and maintaining connections with those souls throughout their lives.
• Maintaining Boundaries Between Worlds: Priestesses help tend the relationship between the physical and spiritual realms, communicating across boundaries and helping to keep those boundaries in place.
• Modeling and Facilitating Emotional Expression: They help their communities express sadness, fear, and other emotions, often through ritual and communal support.
• Serving as Healers and Incantation-Sayers: In some traditions, priestesses overlap with roles such as healers skilled in incantations against harm or the evil eye.

Overall, a priestess is a spiritual leader who nurtures, protects, and guides her community through ritual, healing, and connection with the sacred.

This post was written with the help of Hinneh BEHOLD! the divine feminine library and Priestesses of the Shtetl? The Jewish Women Spiritual Leaders of Eastern Europe by Annabel Gottfried Cohen

You can find many Priestesses through the divine feminine app, such as:

Mount Shasta Goddess Temple Tsogyal Lhamo Drayang Ling, is a living mandala honoring Goddesses of the world with online and in-person ceremonies, classes, divinations, and retreats. We create experiences and services to help women connect with the primal female powers of life, death, healing, and rebirth, and we make pilgrimage to ancient and modern sacred sites of the world.

Triple Spiral of Dun na Sidhe Triple Spiral of Dún na Sidhe is a Pagan spiritual community that gathers together to remember the Old Ways and hold sacred space to honor all of creation. We work, primarily, from a Celtic tradition with reference to the Native American and cross-cultural pagan wisdoms. The Women of Triple Spiral meet at the Full Moon to work in the Grove and invoke various aspects of the Goddess. At the Fire Feasts (Beltain, Lughnasa, and Samhain) we join with the Men of our community to participate in rituals that honor the connection and balance of female and male, Earth and Sky, Goddesses and Gods.

Glastonbury Goddess Temple “THE GODDESS is alive in Glastonbury, visible for all to see in the shapes of the sacred landscape. She is soft as the rounded hills of Her body and sweet as the apple blossom that grows in Her orchards. Here Her love enfolds us every day and Her voice is always near, carried on the wind, whispering through the mists of Avalon. Her Mysteries are as deep as the Cauldron She stirs, taking us down into Her depths and lifting us up to Her heights. She is our Source, our Inspiration and our Love.”– Kathy Jones

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