About Evenstar Mystery School

Woman Shaman Priestess Healer Initiatory Training – these are  disciplined, guided initiatory tracks leading to initiation as an Evenstar Woman Shaman Priestess and ordination as Clergy as a Dianic DruidCraft and Feminist Dianic Wiccan Priestess of the Evenstar Earth Path Seminary.

 Is this Mystery Path calling to you?

Women’s rising awareness will shatter the present social molds as women turn within to find the energies uniquely theirs. In coming into touch with them, they will become empowered. This will be such an irresistible force which will alter society as it exists now. Conversations with the Goddess, Dorothy Atalla

 Woman Shaman Priestess Healer Ancestry

Historically, the female shaman was viewed as using her body as a vessel to allow powerful energies to flow through her for healing and magic. In ancient times, women performed this function in collective rituals and communal ceremonies. Just as a pregnant woman gives over her body for the duration of her incubation, a woman shaman was thought to give over her body for the use of an incarnating spirit or ancestor.

Ancient Female Shamanism, was embodied by the Tibetan Dakini (sky-going woman) – a female being who moves through emptiness or flies through space. Tibetan historical and tantric texts refer to the famous “Land of the Dakinis,” a matriarchal place west of Tibet, where the spiritual leaders were women. The place was called Odiyana or Uddiyana, which translates as “vehicle of flying.” It was considered a country of shamanic women and magical priestess who fly. Dakinis are believed to take human form as women, so although not all women are Dakinis, any woman could potentially be acting as a Dakini at any time.

Although historically dated to 8th-century Tibet, Dakinis are believed to have descended from more ancient female supernatural beings.

Since earliest times, supernatural, woman Shaman Priestesses have been depicted to move through space like birds. Flight is an integral part of traditional shamanic practices around the world.

Winged women and “bird goddess” figures abound in many places around the world and through eons of time, going all the way back to the Paleolithic period (around 30,000 BCE) where they are part of the earliest human art.

Egyptian vulture goddesses with raised arms pre-date three thousand years of dynastic empire in northern Africa. Intricate and colorful bird-women in flight are finely embroidered on remarkable textiles found in Peru and Bolivia, wrapped around mummies from extinct Andean cultures known to have practiced shamanism.

Hybrid bird-women, hugely pregnant, dance with the animals on a ceiling in the Paleolithic cavern at Pech Merle in the south of France. From the later Neolithic period, more than a hundred thousand female figurines have been unearthed from Old Europe alone, a large percentage of them depicted with wings or as pregnant birds; significantly, many are also covered with an extinct script.

These early Female Shaman provide an unbroken lineage of Shamanic Priestesses that emerged in Crete and the Mediterranean area in the late Bronze Age but arose from the confluence of earlier streams of Woman Shamans from Africa, Europe, and Asia. Descendants of these special – but ordinary women. The Woman Shaman of today still possess this ancient ability and power to use their bodies for healing and magic.

An Unbroken Line of Woman Shaman Priestesses

These developments all point to the “ body of the divine female, as a vessel of nourishment or renewal”. 

The ancient recognition and reverence for woman as the “Givers of Life”, the creators of life both in birth and through the cultivation and cooking of food, naturally positioned women as the Shaman Priestess in their communities.

Shamanism throughout various cultures is viewed as an act of intercession for healing, divination, dispensing of wisdom, and performing of rituals and communal ceremonies which benefit the community. It is the giving of one’s powers as a service to the community.

Although it is common these days to feature men as shamans, the ancient relationship of women with hearth and home and their evolutionary act of developing the land for the production of food, and harnessing fire for cooking, warmth and sustaining of life, draws attention to the fact that Shamanism was originally female.

Women’s ancient, shamanistic and priestess work to facilitate the profound rites of birth and death, and nurturing and sustenance are naturally related to shamanic experiences of soul flight and spirit communication through the dissolution of boundaries between self and other.

Portable offering tables or altars have been found in female burials since the beginnings of civilization, documenting the ongoing function of the sacred priestess woman.

Among several tribes, traditions exist that show the shaman’s gift was first bestowed on women. In Mongolian myths goddesses were both shamans themselves—like the Daughter of the Moon—and the bestowers of the shamanistic gift on mankind.

Linguistics tell us that the earliest shamans were women. The ancient root word for shaman from the most ancient times has etymological links to the words “bear,” “earth-goddess,” “housewife,” and “wife” – Earth Goddess, Mother Earth and the two Bear constellations. All the various words for “male shaman” came into being much later, after the tribes had migrated from their place of origin.

Birthing, ritual ceremonies, and the baking of bread happened more or less side-by-side in the early Neolithic temples of northern Greece. Ovens were created in the shape of a womb with an umbilicus, and pregnant female figurines were found nearby.

Evidence of bread offerings are found in most sacred sites in Europe, from as early as 12,000 BCE in the Ice Age caves of France, down through the Neolithic, and into the classical period when Dianic priestesses baked crescent-shaped cakes for the Moon Goddess. Today it is the Catholic nuns who still bake wafers for communion.

Female Buddhas and high-ranking shaman priestesses are pervasive in the artifacts and images from female-centered civilizations of Old Europe (6000 BCE).

By the first millennium BCE, portable altars were buried with every priestess in central Siberia, and these altars or offering tables, along with certain other predictable items such as mirrors, are among the defining features of shaman priestess burials across Central Asia.

This altruistic and communal Shamanic Priestess nature of women functioned for the good of the whole and society was able to sustain itself for several thousand years in peace.

Today we have the blessed opportunity to retrieve, reclaim and to re-imagine our ancient heritage as Woman Shaman Priestess Healers.

Open the Door to Your Unfolding

Woman Shaman Priestess Healer Initiatory Path and Divine Feminine Priestess Mentoring – Enter Here to Discover More

The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow 
sharper. 
– Eden Phillpotts