It’s been said that “no man is a prophet in his own country,” and, for women, that has at times extended to the entire planet. It’s time now for women to reclaim the prophetic tradition, for us to be taken seriously as instruments of otherworldly wisdom, and for the silencing of our voices to end.
I’m just back from 3 weeks in the UK where I was confronted personally & historically with where women stand as channels of oracular knowing. I found a reminder of the clampdown on women’s knowing in the “witch’s stone” of Cluny Hill in Scotland, marking the place where one of many shamanic women accused of witchcraft stopped rolling down a hill after being nailed up in a barrel through which spikes had been driven, thereafter to be burned on the spot, barrel & all.
Witch’s stone near Cluny Hill, Scotland
I found more silencing in Meigle, Scotland, where we are told that Guinevere, queen of King Arthur, locally known as “Vanora,” was deliberately killed by being torn apart by animals & buried with curses for not GOING WITH THE PROGRAM to control her as a high priestess.
Burial mound of Guinevere, aka “Vanora,” in Meigle, Scotland
I found further ripples of the respression in the ducking stool of Canterbury, England, in which wise women were submerged under water for 2-3 mins. If they survived, they were “witches,” if they drowned, they were not, and their families were issued a cursory apology. At Findhorn, I gleaned that while the place was founded in the 1960s on oracular wisdom channelled by Eileen Cady and Dorothy Maclean reminding us that humans could actively cooperate and collaborate with the higher intelligence of nature, male perspectives & styles of leadership have tended to dominate & eclipse the feminine wisdom tradition there.
Winged doors at Universal Hall, Findhorn
For myself, I was confronted at times by individuals who were extremely uncomfortable with my own weave of the scholarly & the oracular in my work. While I was well-received overall in the circles in which I participated, in the more conservative quarters there was a keen suspicion of my ontologicial, epistemological & methodological points of view — meaning, at core, a dismissal of what I know & how I know it. This extended to a suspicion & derision of all women’s oracularly informed & channeled material today.
So, despite all the progress women are making in the realm of evolutionary spirituality, there still lingers an ongoing problem in our world: the denial of other realms of existence & the repression of the fact that women can have access to it & speak about it with authority.
No, not every utterance is truth. But I come back home to California with this: In order to adequately evaluate the validity of women’s channelled information, we must accept 1) that there is information accessible through means other than the 5 senses, 2) that people can connect with it through various techniques & 3) that women are particularly adept at this, given the general “pourous” nature of their biological reality.
We need to take the long view here, as the ancient yew tree of Fortingall, Scotland, reminds us.
More than 5000 years old, it may well be the oldest living thing in Europe, and possibly in the world. Renewing itself every 500 years, it has seen women’s visionary power wax & wane. May it witness & help usher in a new period of enlightenment for women, men & all beings!
Yew & me in Scotland