Easter isn’t my holiday to priestess but Every four years or so an Easter pulls up to Priestess me. I come dressed with the fruits of Inanna in my eyes. A honey soaked mouth. A tongue swollen from deep earthly kisses. Mystery as a cloak or a silk dress that barely covers my thighs. 8 years ago, The golden gate of Musk through the red hawk’s eye in the Palo verde. The crown of humminbird songs clapping in my eardrums. Four years ago, The sea, the creek, the throat of the dragon and the swaying cedars. This year the currents are more subtle, cathartic, less infused with the great gasp. Slow pouring like the current of the sea outside of the window I look out when I sip on this hot chocolate and notice all the patterns moving towards the south. The south where everything is hotter, wetter, drier, where people unbutton + live in a swagger that is full rich a steady fire.
The Azure Adriatic sea, The shepherds church, the fig trees barely budding with soft fuzz, pomegranates darkened and hanging cracked open on the thorny branches. Turquoise pools of warm Inanna Pussy waters.
Could this be the work of Mary Magdalene? The myrrh bearer whose hands ceremoniously held up the white egg which turned a shade of deep red in the face of Tiberius informing him of what indeed had risen. Her golden sex energy still mingling post death in the air of the tomb she mounted, leaving with the seed of christ in her womb. Defiance was this red egg that celebrated the child she knew she was carrying. Red Sarah, a symbol of resistance to traditional gender roles and family values.
Although it is a tradition in Albania, there was no red egg on the Easter table, Our host does not like the color red but I can see the seed of Red Sarah within her. The ways she interacts with her own family. A family of shepherds who date back 400 years to the farm that fed us generously Raki + Mish Derri.
Our host, the red Sarai, introduced us to a tunnel in a mountain blown out by the intensely anti revisionist government of Enver Hoxha to create a storage space for weapons. It was emptied in 1983 or so and for the last thirty years the tunnel has been a dark womb space to birth baby goats into the world. I walked w/ our small pack of humans in the deep dark inhaling a very ripe acrid scent of ammonia from the years of compacted goat shit. A flood of baby goat eyes becoming visible when our host's phone swished the light through. I took my time feeling the moment of darkness + light. The place of birth and death. The emergence place. Shit on my boots. Inanna on my Mind. Her story in my bones. The word vestal virgin on my lips. Virgo. The mysticism of Virgo. There are dusty roads. There are thirsty roads. There are sun filled roads. The road from Easter was Azure. All the blues. Rituals being birthed after being cocooned in the crones hands for two years.
In Easter’s evening, I witnessed the Sun, tended by a swarm of slate plum cobalt cloud priestesses, transform into a thousand tangerine sky dragons that dripped down into the Adriatic sea. When the golden sky dragons began to weep at the oncoming of night I spread my hands underneath to catch their harmonious dreams. Grief being a vital aspect of our Erotic Wholeness.
New pulses of sex wept through my feet as I walked on the sands. The sands that hold the bones of those prietsesses who tended the cult of the Star, through names such as Venus, Aphrodite, Magdelene, Prende, Aradia, Love goddesses of sex + death + war even though the sacred warfare aspects of these goddess have been diminished by patriarchy, I feel them in the grit of my cracked teeth.
Sex is a major vein in the body of my spiritual praxis. Sex has been weaponized against me through my life. It is one of the biggest wound places within me. Our wounds are powerful healers. This wound has been a catalyst in creating new pathways my body can connect authentically to the energy of sex. The wound brought me into a deep inquiry of Erotic Reclamation, of sexual ethics, of sensual space and of channelling this energy through my physical body. The wound has brought me into many phases of repose. Many phases of how I hold this energy clearly and compassionately for myself and for others. This wound of mine has asked me to claim my sex in a distorted world of consumption, craving, dominance + power over. My experiences cannot be summed up in a few paragraphs but over the spread of poems and songs that continually fan out around me.
An orgasm can be a wash over, a release and flutter to the ground.
It can also be cultivated as a spell, a prayer blossom, a blessing, or a pivotal point of energy directed at certain place in the earth, sun, moon and stars, that connects your being to a larger being of consciousness and in that connection you open to the transformational cosmic energy of Sex. In the influence of that primal power. I often go into long cycles where I don’t share my orgasms with other humans.
A Virgo mysticism practice.
Once virgin was a word for Temple Prietesesses who carried the rites of sex in their bodies and would not marry or give away their power. Hor, a hebrew word, means, hole, cave, or pool of water in the heart of the temple. A cave is a place of dreaming deep in the womb of the Earth. The womb your mother’s consciousness was connected to when she brought your body through.
I follow these words back to their origin stories. Hor, Womb, Cave, Hearth, Earth, Hestia- Vesta, Navel stone of the Temple. Altar of the home, Houri, Harem, Hora, Sanctuary. I hold them with love on my tongue.
The Horae were Temple priestesses who held the ceremony of the Dance of Time. Tending to the hours of the night by dancing, as later monks would keep the hours of the night by prayer. The sensual magic of the Horae mellowed the thunder of war, healed the conflicted, tended to those in need of revelation and transformation The Horae, Who offered the The rites of sacred sexuality, a mixture of emotional, physical and spiritual well being. Who were prophetess, seers, and visionaries, Who were healers, and gate keepers of mysteries, initiation.
What does it mean in this time to be a prophetess, visionaire, healer, gate keeper of these mysteries in this timeline? What aspect of your involvement with the energy of Sex needs to be cleared? Claimed? Re imagined? Re visioned.? Held in sacred ways?
These are life long questions I cradle continually as trust and space are always changing.
I feel thankful for the few adventurous lovers that have met me in my inquiry and stretched their definition of "sex"; Both in the potent mundane forms and in a more disciplined, devotional ritualis. The rituals that have blossomed from my cauldron of trauma, healing, inquiry, curiosity are not “new” rituals. They feel very old, I feel their echoes in my bones and blood like swirling hands of priestesses whose eyes still gleam from the sands I walk on.
In the Irish language there are not many words and expressions for working in harmony with the sacred energy of sex. We can go further back though, to the bones of a 5,200 year old ancestor unearthed in a tomb in Ballynahatty. This ancestor’s genome analysis relates her to that of Stone Age farmers from Fertile Crescent. Dna linking Ireland to Sumeria. Sumeria holds the 5,000 year old story of Inanna preserved in clay tablets.
In those clay tablets; Gender is expansive, pleasure is celebrated, sex is sacred, Grief is Erotic aspect of nature, Death is a passage to greater wisdom, to deeper knowing + to sexual sovereignty. The word Hor is a sacred place.
I have an awareness of ancient sex practices that are still intact. They are not my lineage and I haven't studied them in any depth. I study the history of race and gender-based violence. How capitalism, christianity, patriarchy, white supremacy has altered our realtionship to the Earth, to sex and to our sexuality. I study words and stories of what was said to be shameful, polluted, filthy, spoiled, poisoned. All of those places hold power and truths to be felt all over again. those unbeautiful moments are keys unlocking the beautiful question:
How do I thread the sacred backup through my body?
The wound is our greatest teacher.
I feel the wound in the larger context of my body, through a flood of pain bodies, like a river through centuries of domination. I feel the long stretch of time, the severances of sacredness That led us to the most recent murders in Atlanta.
Grief + Rage flow from me into the divine over what has been taken from us.
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How can folks who arent sex workers aid in re threading the ways we culturally honor this work in our society?
How can folks who arent sex workers engage in this form of work?
Where are the points of this work that feel inaccessible?
What about this work feels like it isn’t for you?
How can queer desire expand the container of sex work, creating more access
For LGBTq2SNB clientele?