The Knowledge We Lose and Rediscover and Loose Again….
And on it goes…
A research team at the University of Cambridge, working in collaboration with Iranian archaeologists, recently translated a shard of clay written over three thousand years ago.
It speaks of the beauty of Babylon — its rivers and fields — and of priestesses who tended the sacred fires. A hymn of devotion and praise, once taught in schools and sung in ancient Babylon, thus finds its way back into the world.
Reading about this, for some reason, I was deeply moved by the short mention of the priestesses, as if an ancient current was moving through me, like I had lost something but couldn’t quite remember what it was. Nostalgic and exciting at the same time. Like remembering an old friend you haven’t thought of in years.
Another way to describe it would be: reading about the hymn was as if it had unlocked a genetic memory within me. Maybe even more like a remembrance of a possible future than of a historical past. I don’t know how people lived or felt thousands of years ago, but my intuition is that a better way of living than now is very possible and it’s right on the tip of my tongue, but I cant quite grasp it.
I do know that for as long as we’ve had written records, humans have lived with shocking violence, hate, betrayals, brutality, genocides, oppression, racism, sexism and war… and yet, through all of that darkness, there have always been these protected bubbles, pockets where humanity showed up at its best. Places of creativity, beauty, spirituality, of learning, connection, trust and love beyond the family bounds.
That feeling of nostalgia and inspiration activates in me when I hear of the Greek Mysteries, or the Dakinis and wild yogis of India and Tibet, or the Lady of the Lake, Merlin or the druids in Britain, or when I hear the name Maria Magdalena — a tingling sensation of recognition, as if a truth within me were stirring, asking to be remembered, asking to be spoken, to be lived — trying to surface and enter this world once again, through me.
I think that throughout the ages we discover and then forget and rediscover how to live in balance and connection. We find the union between the worldly/linear/dualistic and the divine/spiritual/magical/other-dimentional, the power of the sacred female and male. We discover those hidden doors leading to other dimensions of consciousness. It feels as if this time round it has been lost for ages.
One obvious sign of this loss is the deep civilzasional wound of feminine suppression This wound is not a woman’s wound alone — this loss of the divine, the sacred feminine, the wisdom transmissions, the wild women, of eroticism and feminine power.
The loss of her voice, her connection to the cycles of the universe.
Burned on pyres, drowned in rivers, stripped of safety, stripped of sovereignty, taught to fear being seen. Taught to feel shame for sensuality and intuition.
This wound rips through society — affecting men also, they are told not to be emotional or sensitive — “are you a girl or what?”, “don’t be such a pussy.” As if being in connection with or even expressing emotions is something to be ashamed of. And the more we suppress this side the more it becomes something to be feared and subdued. Our emotional, intuitive inner world becomes something we learn to bury deep and whenever it surfaces we push it back down, living with a fear in the back of our heads that one day, if we let go, it might just all come rushing up to overwhelm us.
Carl Jung: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
From the floodplains of Mesopotamia to the olive groves of Greece, from the misted forests of northern Europe to the high plateaus of the Himalayas, women held roles of genuine authority — spiritual, economic, and social.
Over three thousand years ago, in Babylon, nadītu and qadištu women owned land, ran businesses, and performed temple rites dedicated to the gods.
They were not concubines or servants — though later historians, uneasy with their autonomy, would recast them as “temple prostitutes.”
These women were the highly respected, living bridge between divine and earthly order.
Further west, in Greece, women walked at the center of the Eleusinian Mysteries, one of the longest-running spiritual traditions in human history.
For nearly two millennia, from the Bronze Age through classical Athens, female Hierophants and torchbearers guided initiates through the sacred drama of Demeter and Persephone: descent, loss, rebirth. They shared the great secret, that death and life are not enemies, but partners in the same eternal dance.
And in the lands beyond, the forests and isles of the north, the trail continues.
Archaeology reveals Bronze Age graves of women buried with staffs, mirrors, and solar emblems, priestess-queens of a northern sun cult. Later, oral memory called them Völur, seeresses who sang the threads of fate, or wise women, healers who worked with herbs, dream, and weather.
Meanwhile, far to the east, another lineage of sacred women moved through India and Tibet: the Dakinis, the “sky dancers.”
They embodied a wild, liberated wisdom, fierce, playful, untamed. To meet a Dakini was to encounter the living current of the divine feminine: the energy that dissolves illusion, opens the heart and the mind
Their teachings taught that sexuality and spirituality are not exclusive and that when man and woman meet in conscious union, they mirror the cosmic dance of emptiness and form, compassion and clarity.
Across all these cultures, Babylonian, Greek, Celtic, Tibetan, the pattern is unmistakable:
for thousands of years, in pockets of society, women were recognized as channels of wisdom and spirit, not in opposition to men, but as two parts of a sacred whole.
And yes, it is also clear that throughout the ages society repeatedly tried to suppress this.
It’s almost too simple. Some men believe they need to control and rule over weaker men and women. And to gain and hold Status they create hierarchies of power. These systems of subjugation then become more powerful than their creators and the people they are ment to control. Eventually after centuries we start to believe that this is just how the world works. And this is not to say if women where to take power and suppress men that it would be any better. The simple secret antidote is union, cooperation, respect…
The Great Recasting and the centralization of power
With the rise of patriarchal monotheistic religions, something shifted, those pockets of freedom that I was talking about came under ever stronger fire.
As empires rose and faiths consolidated, power centralized — not just politically, but spiritually. The many faces of the divine were replaced by a single face; the balance of earth and sky tilted toward abstraction.
Those who once served the mysteries of life became suspect to the machinery of hierarchy.
The priestesses of Babylon were reduced in later retellings to “sacred prostitutes.”
The Hierophants of Eleusis — extinguished and branded “pagan.”
It seems historically evident that an entire female lineage of psychoactive drink and transcendent experience was wiped out when the Eleusinian Mystery school was finally shut down. For nearly two thousand years, women from the ancient priestly families tended the sacred barley fields of Demeter, guarded the vessels, and prepared the secret kykeon — the ritual drink that likely held an ergot-based psychoactive compound, a precursor to what we know today as LSD. These priestesses preserved a matrilineal technology of consciousness: agricultural knowledge, fungal cycles, fermentation, timing, and purification. When the Mysteries were outlawed in 392 CE and the sanctuary destroyed, this lineage — these women who held the keys to visionary experience, rebirth, and the dissolving of death’s fear — vanished. A gateway they had protected for centuries was sealed, and with it, an entire female tradition of awakening disappeared from the visible world.
The wise women all across Europe — proclaimed “witches,” their bodies burned, their land absorbed into the coffers of Church and crown.
And while I am on the subject of the church, I cant forgot a woman that belongs in this long line of rewritten history: Maria Magdalena. She almost certainly held a role that was later redacted, rewritten, removed from Christianity and from history. It seems very likely that she held a more mystical, direct-experience lineage, and that this was at odds with the more hierarchical system being put in place.
These were not mere accidents of history; they were acts of redefinition.
And though they bore the name of the “masculine,” or “patriarchal,” they wounded men just as deeply as they silenced women. Those men of power where broken things and the systems they created are broken systems.
Because what was lost was not only just equality — it was relationship and wholeness, inside and out.
That’s the end of this essay… but its not the end of the story.
It is worth thinking and writing about what it could look like to recindle those sacred spaces of equality, creativity, union, devotion, experimentation and freedom… and also search for where it is already happening, it is never truly lost or dead because we are born with these qualities, it is who we really are…. creators, learners, lovers, poets, warriors and protectors, Mothers and fathers. At times we are vulnerable and week and at times we are strong and powerful. We are capable of creating spaces full of connection, love, magic, union….. things are syclical, nothing is forever: night turns into day, winter into summer, dark times into light…
