“It should come as no surprise to anyone that a new baby greatly changes your sacred relationship. If the pregnancy and birth is understood as a mystical initiation, as part of the magical progression of your relationship, the changes can be delightful and profoundly spiritual. When two people are not fully prepared for parenthood, however, the baby may bring chaos…As the child gets older, Pagan parents have to make a decision about involving her/him in their magical practices. Some parents prefer not to have their child in Circle until the child is old enough to choose the Pagan path.” – Lira Silbury
This book is, quite frankly, the best resource I have come across (outside of D.J. Conway’s Falcon Feather & Valkyrie Sword, 1995) for explaining the nature and role of a Wiccan priestess in a way that is actually helpful and life-affirming for most Wiccan women. Most books written by Wiccan priestesses have historically focused on the origins and legitimacy of that individual woman’s spiritual quest, usually in the form of personal narrative and memoir (and are thereby inspirational in their own right by way of example), or on the technical aspects and materia magica of operative witchcraft itself, (i.e. subjects of special “occult” interest particularly associated with historical witchcraft and “alternative” healing methods, such as medicinal herbalism or counseling sessions formed around runes, tarot, ect.) This book, by contrast, explores what it means to be a Wiccan priestess in a more formal religious sense by focusing on the foundational relationship by which most Wiccan covens are formed (i.e. that of a priestess and her priest). Taking inspiration in the wisdom gleaned from the best aspects of the North American Goddess Spirituality movement of the 1970’s and 1980’s, Lira Silbury (whom I suspect is a nom de plume—the American author remaining enviously anonymous in the age of Google) refreshingly makes no appeals to any Wiccan authority other than the common appeal to an intellectual basis for the religion as put forth by other contemporary Wiccan writers such as Raymond Buckland, Ashleen O’Gaea, Janet & Stewart Farrar, and Pauline & Dan Campanelli—and augments her understanding with personal experience and the work of other Goddess Spirituality priestesses such as Shekhinah Mountainwater, whose “Moonwheel” in Ariadne’s Thread (1991) I personally discovered in my early twenties. Eminently practical, the author deals directly with her own reservations about working skyclad in a coven situation (outside of established lovers), and with the reality that skyclad ritual has to wait until after a child’s bedtime anyway, and is therefore not realistically feasible in a household still raising school-age children. Silbury also addresses the necessity of a conscious decision on the part of parents on how to raise children in a way that hopefully minimizes the feeling of being “different” from their friends, but without allowing the experience of parenthood itself to become detrimental to the sacred marriage at the heart of a Pagan/Wiccan home. Children, after all, will hopefully feel free to forge their own paths in life. While the youthful femininity of the book’s cover design likely limited the book’s shelf appeal at the time of its initial publication (even among the Wiccan women who were its target audience), Helen Nelson-Reed’s interior illustrations full of traditional Wiccan symbolism are an enjoyable companion to Lira Silbury’s text. Emphasizing that mature religion fosters not only healthy relationships between women and men, but a stable and happy home for children, this is a unique book that I would recommend to all self-dedicated Wiccans who love people who are worthy of love.
Lincoln Green 