Holy Women, Holy Land.

Drawing on a wealth of texts, Professor at St Andrews university, R. Anthony Lodge, has demonstrated that all evidence suggests that what was designated St Fillan’s cave in Pittenweem, was in fact, ‘fontem Marie Magdalene’ (the well of St Mary Magdalene).

If we accept that Pittenweem Cave was known in pre- Reformation times as the ‘Well of St Mary Magdalene’, we have to explain when and how the name got changed to St Fillan’s

Lodge tells us that the person who first made a connection between St Fillan and Pittenweem was David Chambers, who was writing seventy years after the Reformation. During the intervening years, Protestant reformers had outlawed the veneration of saints, blurring the memory of a spring dedicated to Magdalene. St Fillan’s connection with the cave is mentioned for the first time in the 19^th century.

Though Lodge and other writers have acknowledged the outlawing of the veneration of saints after the Reformation, the associations of place with the male saints remained eponymous. Connections to holy places and the female saints (and the priestesses) who inhabited them were especially erased.

Why is this important to acknowledge?

Because these places were chosen as sacred sites of devotion for a reason. The spirit of place, the genius loci, emanated a particular essence or vibration that interacted and affected the people who dwelt there and visited. Often the shrines and saints were associated with healing properties, and people would make pilgrimages in the hope of being cured. Visiting the sites transformed the pilgrim who was changed in some way from that point forth. The earth energies contained within, and moving through the land, concentrating at certain places, are the serpent energies. These serpent energies have been explored, documented, and testified by geomancers, diviners, and those who work with the spirit of the land. I have personally felt and interacted with these energies both in the physical world and psychically.

In his collected works, Jung remarks:

The comparison of Christ with the serpent is more authentic than that with the fish, but, for all that, it was not so popular in primitive Christianity. The Gnostics favoured it because it was an old-established symbol for the “good” genius loci, the Agathodaimon, and also for their beloved Nous. Both symbols are of inestimable value when it comes to the natural, instinctive interpretation of the Christ-figure. Theriomorphic symbols are very common in dreams and other manifestations of the unconscious. They express the psychic level of the content in question; that is to say, such contents are at a stage of unconsciousness that is as far from human consciousness as the psyche of an animal. Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 287-289

Connection to primordial and telluric currents in the land, particularly in places such as wells, springs, groves, hills, and caves, allows for the consciousness to be illuminated beyond ordinary, ego bound human experience.

I believe that the healing, or in other words, the ‘power’ that people receive from visiting these sites activates gnosis- a direct instinctual wisdom.

While sites dedicated to the female saints, nuns, priestesses and ultimately the goddess are thin off the ground in Scotland due to mass appropriation by the Christian church, the Greco-Roman world preserved its goddess sites more readily. But even here, sites that were sacred to the Earth Mother were usurped by the sky gods.

In Greek mythology the Pythia priestesses, Oracles of the temple, emerged around 7^th century BC. By 9th- 11th century, the temple had been taken over by Apollo to whom the Pythia priestesses were subsequently in service.

Delphi is a very ancient site with its earliest roots in the late bronze age, 1600 BC. and had been a sacred shrine dedicated to Gaia and the sea god Poseidon. In usurping the ancient snake priestesses, the roots of patriarchy established a new cult where the ancient wisdom of the Great Mother and her priestesses was repressed and assimilated. The new agenda was less about Gaia and direct relationship with the natural world as a divine being, and more about the sovereignty of the priesthood and worship of the male gods.

Delphi is etymologically linked to the Greek word “delphys,” which means womb, and was a portal of consciousness, a bridge between heaven and earth, and a place where spirit entered the material world (through the Pythia). The word (πίθος pithos) is thought to mean large jar- the large jar could have been the body of the priestess who channelled and transmitted the divine. Although some believe that the Pythia Priestesses were in a half mad state of intoxication caused by putrid fumes from the earth, others claim that far from gibberish their prophecies were intelligible and clear. Divine wisdom uttered by the Pythia was sought by the Kings and Philosophers who were influenced by their prophecies (including Socrates) up until the 4^th century AD.

This speaks to me of both an acknowledgment and a fear of the oracular abilities of the priestesses and their special feminine connection with the telluric power of the earth.

It is not by coincidence that the sites where holy women congregated to worship and connect with the divine were dissolved and over-laid, it was by design. But these sites are still there and there are other ‘Temples of Nature’, waiting to be interacted with.

The inherent power of these sites is still available to us if we open to them. It is my belief -though it may not be a popular one- that women have an inherent ability to connect with these subtle divine earth energies in a particular way. I have long felt that physical bodies are not only a matter of biology, but they are bio- spiritual tuning forks and resonance chambers. It was through the portal of the womb that the oracular priestesses of Delphi received the feminine aspect of god, Sophia. The womb of modern women, though much medicalised and pathologised, is still the portal through women can mediate divine energies of the earth. The bodies of women, the womb, is the grail that can hold, transmute, and transmit, the divine.

In Scotland many, if not all, of the sites dedicated to the female saints, priestess, and worshippers of a feminine divine spirit in the land have been forgotten or stripped of their power. But the power is still there beneath the rubble, bubbling in the waters of sacred springs that have been covered up, and in caves where once women gathered to honour the goddess.