How I heard the call of the goddess, the call of Avalon
I can still remember the first time I visited the Goddess Temple in Glastonbury. I was traveling with a spiritual tourist group and for the first time I heard about a “goddess”. Well, I thought to myself, it’s just another word for God, in the end we all mean the same thing, no matter what we call it. I must say, I was very wrong. I didn’t realize it until the call of the Goddess hit me. “Hit” pretty much sums it up, because my first reaction to her call was something like, “What?! No!!! No way! There must be some mistake!!!” One of my most challenging wounds in this life has come from my mother’s side. And at that point, my reaction to anything soft, feminine was pretty much a strong form of rejection. And now I felt the call of the Goddess, the archetype of all femininity, pointing at me with a vehemence I could not ignore.
So now I was in Glastonbury for the first time in my life, a town I had never heard of before, let alone its association with Avalon or a goddess. On our second day, our tour guide told us we should ask “Why are we here?”. I found this question relatively odd, it was obvious why I was here! I am part of a tourist group, we spend a week here and then travel back home to Germany. That’s it, what more could there be?
Okay, so that was the task. We should open our eyes and our senses to perceive the signs. At the end we should put the signs together, like a puzzle, which will give us the answer to the question “Why we are really here”.
During our stay in Glastonbury, we stayed in one of the beautiful houses of the Chalice Well Garden. This was just great, I love these old, typically English furnished houses with its heavy sofas, the curtains and the open fireplace! And of course we had 24 hour access to the Chalice Well Garden.
As we gathered in the seminar room early the next day, while one of the tour guides was talking about something, I suddenly heard this voice in my head “Look into your hand!”. It was such a clear voice, like someone was standing right next to me talking to me. I intuitively then turned my palm over to look at the inside and at that moment all my palm lines were as if erased! Only in one place a pentagram showed up clearly! Wow a pentagram in my hand, was my first thought, although the sign meant nothing to me at this time. The pentagram then came to me several times during my entire stay in England. As a pattern on a floor, on a wall in a picture, as an embroidery on a bag of a woman passing by…. it almost haunted me.
I have to say that I found it a bit creepy. What is the spiritual world trying to tell me? That I am an evil person? After all, I only knew the pentagram in the context of what the media has made of one of the oldest symbols of the Goddess, a symbol for dark, evil witches who secretly perform blood sacrifices in their living rooms, while worshipping Satan! Buhhhhh! Are you guys scared now? I was it a bit, at least it was spooky!
On our last day in Glastonbury we visited the Apple Orchard of Avalon. A beautiful orchard below the Glastonbury Tor, one of the sacred hills of Avalon. The two shamans who were our guides invited us to make ourselves comfortable under one of the many apple trees. I immediately had the impulse to go to a certain tree and sit there in the high lush grass. There were no specific instructions what we should do now, whether we should connect with the tree or just relax a bit. So I thought that I could meditate a little bit. I have to say meditation was not really one of my king disciplines at the time, so it didn’t take five minutes until my superficial concentration was gone again and I opened my eyes.
Looking up into the crown of the tree, I saw this beautiful white woman. Her hair was flowing in the wind, even though it was windless, and she was looking down through the branches at me. She smiled gently at me and her whole being was imbued with infinite love and compassion.
At that moment I noticed a stirring within me, which seemed to be hidden deep inside me. It felt like a second self that was slowly emerging in me to look out into the world.
Except for the cool facial expression, this image has a great resemblance to the being I saw.
She was so gentle and loving and when she saw the beauty of this apple orchard, a thought went through her mind “Oh how beautiful it is here in this world!”.
I had the feeling that she had been hiding for many centuries, behind the wounds and injuries of many past lives, forming a hard crust, like a protective armor.
At that time I did not know who this delicate being was. It became clear to me much later, when I followed the call of the Goddess, that at that moment she showed me my true self, my priestess self. And since I have been following the path of becoming a priestess of the old ways again, I have been working to bring this beautiful being back into this world.
When I was back in Germany, of course, I immediately wanted to know what the meaning of the pentagram was. So I searched half the internet for its symbolism.
But I found nothing that really resonated with me. That can’t be, I thought to myself, the internet is huge and yet I find nothing that really spoke to me? So I put this quest aside at first. Then, a few days later, when I started reading a book I had brought with me from Glastonbury, one sentence suddenly “clicked”. It was Kathy Jones’ book “Priestess of Avalon, Priestess of the Goddess.” In the chapter about Samhain she wrote that the pentagram is the symbol of the Goddess and especially of the Dark Goddess who is worshipped during this time. At that moment I knew that the Goddess had called me! And I took her hand and followed her.
