Awakening the New Millennium Priestess: An interview with Anyaa McAndrew by Tim Miejan July 2005

It’s widely acknowledged by those attuned to the energies of the Earth that much more balance is needed. The Divine Feminine, once a powerful force on the planet, has been overshadowed by a patriarchy that diminishes the presence of the feminine. The result: few women in the role of spiritual leader and a culture lacking in compassion and nurturance of all. Cries can be heard, if one listens carefully, for the sacred feminine to be restored as an equal player in the consciousness of this planet.

McAndrew’s work is grounded in Transpersonal and Shamanic psychology, as she walks the spiritual path of the Goddess. Anyaa is an ordained Madonna Ministry Bishop, a Magdalen High Priestess, a Certified Shamanic Astrologer and Shamanic Breathwork facilitator, and teacher of Tantra and a Certified Imago Therapist. Her Priestess Circles empower women to reclaim the lost soul essence of the priestess within, while learning to walk in the underworld of their own fears to gain power, playful passion and magnetism.


She spoke with Edge Life about the role of the Priestess and why the awakening process is vital in the lives of those who experience it.

For those who have never heard of the Priestess Process, describe its intention and for whom it’s intended.
McAndrew: The Priestess Process is intended for women only and women who are interested in expanding their spiritual life and also stepping more into their own personal and spiritual authority. It is to assist women in stepping fully into their spiritual authority, their personal authority, and also something that we call “individuating from the patriarchy.” A lot of us feel like we’ve done that, but there are little places in our psyche where we’re still attached to the patriarchal culture, so the process really gives us an opportunity to be centered around our own Divine inner feminine.

Regarding the patriarchy, do you mean that within women there is still something within them it’s okay to go along with it?
McAndrew: We do an interesting process on the second weekend. It’s a process of getting in touch with what we call our inner patriarch. We’ve found that the inner patriarch is an aspect of the super-ego, like the inner critic or the inner judge, and it gets passed down to us from our mothers. It’s a set of unconscious beliefs and judgments and rules about women and about how to get along in a patriarchal world.

In our process, we interview each other and get to hear our own inner patriarch; it’s a sub-personality, so it comes through in this exercise. We get to see those limiting beliefs. Each woman has a ceiling, and that ceiling is a place that each of us have to push through to be able to be a woman of power. These internal beliefs would have us believe that, somehow, women are inferior, or we should keep our mouths shut.

All of this was created in the Collective for good reasons. If you think about it, 200, 500, 1,000 years ago, for a woman to be in her power meant certain persecution or even death. So these rules, or this inner patriarch, that’s been passed down from generation to generation…

Protected them in the past.
McAndrew: Yes! It was a way for our mothers to actually keep us alive, to keep us safe. So, that’s an example of what I’m talking about in terms of the individuation process.

Continue reading “Awakening the New Millennium Priestess: An interview with Anyaa McAndrew by Tim Miejan July 2005”

If Men Could Menstruate: A Political Fantasy by Gloria Steinem

A white minority of the world has spent centuries conning us into thinking that a white skin makes people superior – even though the only thing it really does is make the more subject to ultraviolet rays and to wrinkles. Male human beings have built whole cultures around the idea that penis-envy is “natural” to women – though having such an unprotected organ might be said to make men vulnerable, and the power to give birth makes womb-envy at least as logical.

In short, the characteristics of the powerful, whatever they may be, are thought to be better than the characteristics of the powerless – and logic has nothing to do with it.

What would happen, for instance, if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not? Continue reading “If Men Could Menstruate: A Political Fantasy by Gloria Steinem”

Conjure Women: The Importance of the African-American Woman’s Fight Against Racism…..By Priestess Mona Reeves

Below is an excerpt from my master’s thesis Conjure Women: The Importance of the African-American Woman’s Fight Against Racism. It refers to Cassandra Wilson and her Blue Light ‘til Dawn CD. I ran across part of it unexpectedly and was quite inspired, so inspired that I did not want to keep it to myself, and so I am sharing it with you. The portion in italics touched my heart today and I am grateful that God saw fit to channel such words through me.

She has embodied the spirit of Sankofa– going back to learn from the past in order to move forward in the future-and even has an acapella chant on Blue Light that she created herself entitled “Sankofa.” This song is a call to the ancestors for guidance and strength, an acknowledgement of their power.

Oh Sankofa, high in the heavens you’ve soared,

My Soul wants to follow you,

Back to yesterday’s moon,

Will it remember me?

Back to yesterday’s sun,

It will rekindle me.

Rekindle the spirit into tomorrow and high on the wind,

Sankofa flies again and again.

Wilson performs all the vocal parts, creating intricate harmonies with a hauntingly spiritual quality. It has the hum of Negro spirituals, the drumbeat of Africa. It is a call for connection—connection to the past, present, and future. It is a powerful reminder of the power and the strength of the African spirit which lies inside African Americans. It is a call to awaken that spirit in those who are unaware of its presence and a boost of support to those already connected. It is about touching the heart, opening up to the light, and living in the world from a place of power. It is a call to shed the victim role, release occupation of the place of the downtrodden, and claim our rightful place in the scheme of the human landscape. It is about being a Conjure Woman; taking energy, stirring it up, and creating positive change with it.

Mother’s Day Proclamation – 1870 by Julia Ward Howe

Arise then…women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace…
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God –
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

Women’s Blood Mysteries:by Adelheid Ohlig

In matrifocal cultures, women are honored and seen as the Goddess. The power of their fertility, both to give birth and to green the Earth, as evidenced in their ability to menstruate, is respected and held sacred. Menstrual blood has been used through the ages as an Earth fertilizer par excellence. During planting season, women would plant the seeds and then fertilize the ground with their menstrual blood. The menstrual cycle is seen as creatively powerful, giving birth not only to children but all nourishment.
During the time of bleeding women’s ability to dream, have visions and attain altered states of consciousness is strong. When moontime visions are sought, answers come, whether of pottery patterns, or the location of herds of food animals, or solutions to social problems.
For thousands of years the blood mysteries of women were an important part of the life of most human societies. The rituals that women create for their own well-being, to protect and nurture their extreme psychic sensitivity and power during menstruation and menopause, childbirth and puberty, serve all of society, not only the individual woman. About 5000 years ago, this changed in many places, most notably Europe. There, matrifocal wisdom has been repressed, and the special menstrual/menopausal/fertility rituals that once nourished all have been calcified into rules and taboos and used to create shame that separates women from their own power and the power of the blood mysteries.

Continue reading “Women’s Blood Mysteries:by Adelheid Ohlig”