The Warrior Priestess

The Role of the Warrior Priestess

This post spews out of my repugnance at the vile creatures of the totally misguided women’s protest movement, but what could I say that hasn’t already been said? Instead, I’m going to push that spectre of poisoned femininity out of my mind and try to define the role of the warrior priestess, or witch, if you prefer.

This archetypal role is available to any woman who claims it and can handle it. The lineage of the warrior priestess is represented in ancient art from all over the world, from Aztec warrior goddesses to the female warrior shaman of Siberia and China and the war goddesses of Greece and Turkey, Egypt and India. In northern Afghanistan, an excavation of 1978-9 unearthed a tomb containing the remains of three warrior priestesses and two priestesses, thought to be from around the second millennium BCE. A male of around 30 years old wearing the attire of the warrior priestess was also buried in the same tomb and, leading to speculation that he was a eunuch. Was this early evidence of the same infection that is driving emasculation and the corruption of the gender binary today?

I am not advocating a return to a matriarchal society, if ever there was one. I am saying that self-initiating witches need to reclaim the spirit of the Mistress of the Animals and work with their men in the invisible world to hunt down and kill the predatory virus that hides among us, before we can begin to build a new society, like nothing that has ever been before on this planet. To claim back their ‘power’, women need to engage with the source of all power – the earth. I saw the vestigial remains of the elaborate headdresses of the female shamanic warriors of the ancient world, as if distorted through a carnival mirror, in the ‘pink pussy’ hats of the pavlovian feminists on parade, and I also saw the turning point.

Feminine power is not found in politics, although it can affect politics and it’s certainly not found in feminism or any women’s study group. You find it in the woods and mountains, by rivers and lakes, and by following the lunar shifts to get to know the moods of the earth. Women were the healers, not only because of the maternal instinct to take care of their families and clans, but because the close study of the interaction between animals and the healing plants and minerals is how we learn to handle the power of the earth. Every woman who takes herself out of the mainstream starts to look at natural healing and plant medicine, without even knowing that this is the call of her shamanic ancestors vibrating through her DNA. From plant medicine, to knowledge of the psychoactive plants, to poison plants and from the psychoactive plants to deeper knowledge of the natural world, to the anointment of kings and then genocide. The history is easily accessible to anyone who wants to look.

The role of the warrior priestess is just a character you can choose to play in the dreaming of the Aeonic Mother. It does not mean you are a reincarnation of any witches of the past, although you may have access to their memories. It does not make you a goddess or anything other than human. If you choose this role, you get immediate access to all the power of the earth, there are no intermediary steps, but if you cannot handle that power you will get badly burned. It seems to bring out the latent and malignant insanity in some people.

The mirroring attention

The earth has already given us all Her power, it is just a matter of learning how to use it.  This involves, but is not limited to, the mysterious functioning of the mirroring attention. Mysterious does not mean without factual basis. For example the mirror-neuron system, which enables the sensory motor system to learn through imitation – it’s why you instinctively make sucking or chewing noises if you want a baby to eat. The mirror neurons in the baby’s brain respond to the visual stimuli by stimulating the part of the motor cortex in his brain that causes the mouth to move, exactly as if he had initiated the eating process himself. (See: The Mirror-Neuron System, Rizzolatti and Craighero, 2004)

The mirror neuron system doesn’t die off when we become adults. It’s there all the time, silently maintaining the relationship with other life forms and the external environment, while you focus your attention elsewhere. Information is not just received visually or aurally, but via your skin, the chakra system and your gut. I would expect mirror-type neurons to be discovered in other ‘intelligent’ organs, like the heart and gut at some point. All the ‘intelligent’ organs are connected via the vagus nerve (the carnal instrument of the mirroring attention) which modulates the ‘volume’ across the entire system to regulate the biochemical activity in all the organs and systems involved. There is also a similar system in plants.

The mirror neuron system is part of the mirroring attention, that acts an extensive support system enabling you to take action, sometimes complex series of actions without having to make a conscious decision about every stage of that process. For example, have you ever driven somewhere and arrived without having any memory of the journey? That was the mirroring attention, operating through your visual and motor cortices, without you being aware of it. In partnership with the ability to generate spontaneous action, the mirroring attention forms the biological basis for surviving predation in all creatures. However, in human animals, with the capacity to override natural instincts, it is being used to train you to work against your best interests.

The shaman’s mirror

What has this got to do with the role of the warrior priestess, you might ask? Well, there is the curious fact of the shaman’s mirror to consider. Once again, all over the world (but especially in Siberia, Mongolia, China and central Asia) shamans, male and female, were buried with mirrors, of bronze, silver, mixed metals and stone in Mesoamerica. Sometimes, they were sewn into their clothes. The current consensus among the ‘experts’, is that these mirrors were used in healing, to ward off evil spirits and for divination. However, when I consider the status that must have been accorded to some of these warrior priestesses, judging by the riches in their tombs, I have to question what service they provided that was so highly valued? For example, Lady Fu Hau of the Shang dynasty (c. 1250 – 1192 B.C.) was a military general and a high priestess, who led military campaigns against other tribes and was also consulted for ritual and ceremonial matters. She had a lavish tomb, with weapons, bells, mirrors, ritual vessels and cowrie shells. She also had a statue erected in her honour. She was a powerful woman, and one of many, before the Abrahamic religions forced us into hiding and all but destroyed the memory of when we were valued for the power we wielded.

About two weeks after I began engaging the warrior priestess archetype, I had a dream in which I was trapped in a hostile environment and didn’t know how to get out and it was dark. I was afraid, but lucid and I knew it was one of those interesting situations, so I summoned Black Jaguar to help me. This was the first time I’d ever called Black Jaguar in a dream. With him at my side I could see in infrared and I kicked off my shoes and we started walking. We communicated telepathically and he asked me where I wanted to go and I didn’t know. So we walked a few steps further and he asked me what I wanted and I thought: fuck, I don’t know that either! He stopped and looked at me and said: there are rules here you know. If you don’t know where you are going or what you want I can’t help you So I went through a list of possibilities in my head to see which one felt right – key, artifact, treasure, book and eventually I came to weapon and that felt right. I told him that I wanted my magical weapon and he asked me what it was and I told him that it was a mirror.

So, I’m drawing a few threads together here and focusing on the mirroring attention because, from the little we know of the functioning of mirroring in humans, it appears to be stronger in women. Women are biologically wired to be more empathetic, in order to bond with their offspring and teach them basic skills, just as men are wired to be less empathetic and to take greater pleasure in revenge. Women’s intuition is biological, due to reduced testosterone in the womb, the trade-off for men is that they get more morbido – the pleasure of killing. But what if the warrior priestesses had learned how to initiate directly into the mirroring attention and orchestrate events to benefit their armies?

In times of peace, the female shaman would most likely focus on healing, nurturing and teaching, with rituals around the crops, water, the seasons etc., but these are not those times. If I had young children now, I’d be teaching them martial arts, how to grow and cook real food, how to take care of themselves in the real world, as opposed to doing things online. Digital natives still need to eat. They also need to know factual history and how to think for themselves. I don’t want to live under communist rule any more than I want to live under Sharia law and the current odds do not favour the white European, most of whom will most likely end up begging their governments (the Jewish communists) to save them from the hoards of ‘peace-loving refugees’ in their communities.

In times of war, and we are at war, the role of the female shaman transitions into the warrior priestess. (The terms priestess, shaman or witch are interchangeable in this context.) This is why the ‘job descriptions’ of the goddesses who give their power to the shaman tend to cover the trilogy of love, war and magic. The roles of male and female warrior shaman are bound to compliment each other, but I still don’t know how this works in practice. The ideal Euro-aboriginal clan would have both.  Personally, I feel driven to hone my instincts and work closely with the men I encounter, who are not yet totally pussified, to help toughen and sharpen them up – in so many ways! It’s impossible to predict how this is all going to pan out, the attacks are coming from so many directions, but it only takes one warrior priestess to recover the skills of our ancestors to change the game.