My heart has been aching to share deeply, intimately with you about our global crises and what this has to do with snake medicine, snake priestessing.
I know that many of us are brokenhearted and distraught about the state of the world. We cry for the innocent lives being lost in Gaza and Israel. We see genocide happening before our very eyes. We see the very ancient tumult and pain of the patriarchy and all forms of us/them being perpetrated on the bodies of women and children.
I’ve been contemplating this from the lens of the Snake Priestess.
As Snake Priestesses, we’re conduits, rooted to our council of grandmothers who hold primordial, animist wisdom … Wisdom that coils us around the heart of the Earth, tethered to land, stewardship, and the union of All Life.
We remember that through touch, sound, movement, and scent we’re a living lineage of harmonious love songs.
What I mean by this is that we carry—in our yonis, hearts, spines, and throat—ancestral wisdom that’s ravenously awake, connecting us to the Original Ones…
What we awaken in ourselves and others is our wholeness. We awaken the remembrance of interconnection and interdependence.
We awaken ourselves to the time when grandmothers gave counsel after listening to land, ocean, sky, helper spirits, ancestors, animals, plants.
The web of life was the structure for storytelling, body honoring—for connection to life and one another. It called for reverence, respect, delicate stewardship, reciprocity, erotic honor, and dignity.
We didn’t have hierarchical structures and systems of dominance, oppression, displacement. We weren’t separate.
We entered an age of the suppression of women and with this came the devaluation of nature and all life.
It was a tyrannical plan to disconnect us from our body wisdom. After all, if you could disconnect us from our bodies, you could dominate our bodies … thus cutting us off from Her.
In our marrow, in our spine, we snake priestesses know that the root cause of all pain and suffering felt in the world comes from separation—of body, land, spirit, and one another.
Colonialism, racism, patriarchy, dominance, oppression, and alllll of the isms come from this collective spell or myth of separation. It was intentional so that power over body, mind, spirit, land could occur. Greed took over.
From this perspective and inner gnosis, my body aches with the rampant cognitive dissonance witnessed in mainstream media and social media. The reason for this cognitive dissonance is because of the unseen terrors and pain (including co-current genocides) occurring every day on our planet, whilst there is a focus on one horrendous atrocity … which truly is due to our geopolitical biases and our privilege. (Mine included.)
I feel such a profound activation in my body when our world—and we—turn away from the (indigenous & minority) mothers and children in Sudan, Ethiopia, Yemen, Myanmar, Iraq, Armenia, Syria, China (Uyghur people), Iran, Turtle Island, Guyana… the list goes on and on and on.
If you’ve seen me post on Instagram or Facebook recently, you’ve seen that no less than FIVE genocides are going on right now and most of them, no one is talking about … or may not even know about. The media doesn’t talk about it. Our governments aren’t. Why? Because we bought into a lie that some lives—or land!—are more valuable than others.
In my very cells, before we speak about the violence, apartheid, and displacement from colonial, oppressive rule, we must acknowledge the lands we live and work on … and the people who have stewarded them for thousands of years. We must see and acknowledge that most of us live on lands that were colonized, stolen, and still have people displaced—on reservations or smaller pockets of land without as many resources as the majority.
Without starting here in our hearts, in our guts, in our yonis, and seeing this as a GLOBAL truth (because almost every one of us lives on lands that were/are colonized) how can we, in the name of peace/unity/wholeness acknowledge any of the human right violations, let alone only one current atrocity—to the exclusion of all others?
To go one step further, what I observe in the communities I’m part of, is a shame cycle/calling out of those who aren’t speaking out against Israel or Hamas—not naming very specific terrors in a very specific way, within a very specific timeframe. I know this stems from a fire within and the feeling of powerlessness and fear for the horrors we’re seeing.
Yet, from that place of powerlessness/fear/anger, there’s a “demand” (which is, by nature, dominance) that organizations/people respond the required way, or they’re ostracized, classified (us/them), called out/fired/divested in, causing deeper polarization, etc. (Which, by the way, are the beginning 10 phases of genocide—the very thing that we all want to stop.)
Yet, there’s silence about Sudan, China, Iran, Iraq, Ethiopia, Myanmar…
As a Snake Priestess, I feel the inequity that’s deeply rooted in this. I feel the disparity. My heart breaks the wide world over.
Beyond this, when we look at the root of things…
All the violence throughout history—including the oppressive, racist systems and structures—stems from one thing:
wanting the land & its resources
If land/water isn’t given, it’s stolen. Usually violently. It still happens. In its wake, all manner of discrimination, dehumanization, rape, polarization, and extermination occur. Not just to people. But to the land and its family. Not just in the past, but now, too. EVERYWHERE.
We even see it in urban settings with gentrification and the erasure of culture that ensues. We continue to see it with land developments, with oil/gas, with pipelines, with deforestation, and with indigenous people not having the right to steward their ancestral lands.
The only reason this continues to be accepted across the globe is because of the profound disconnect we feel to land, our animal and plant kin, the water systems, eachother, and Source.
Everything—everything—comes back to the land…
And as Snake Priestesses, being sacred consorts of the land, we’re here to heal this. To return to union. To swallow ALL the myths of separation and terror in the name of our Original Mother.
We’re not afraid to name and acknowledge all of this. We’re not afraid to stand at the edge of the wild of life and name the taproot of all of what’s going on. By walking the edges of life, death, and rebirth…
We reclaim Her, Snake Mother, as holy and remember
our heritage as priestesses of the Goddess–
for this lifetime,
for our children,
for our world.
This is so deeply needed in our world to restore balance, union, and regeneration with all living things, including our planet.
There’s a profound reverence that comes from this reclamation.
To sum up Snake Medicine and Snake Priestesses in the most succinct way:
We’re here to awaken ourselves & others to being inherently interconnected to all living things.
We’re here to dissolve the old, painful myth that we’re in any way separate from nature, ourselves, one another, spirit, our ancestors, and Source.
It is possible to feel the regeneration of erotic life force energy as the healing balm for all of what has occurred and is occurring.
I send my beauty, my erotic, primordial call to all of you, to all of life in the living prayer that we will all come back to wholeness, together…
(If you want to learn more about the Snake Priestess, you can go here.)