ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on those American priestesses who serve groups primarily of women, who take the culture's powerful symbols of male Divinity and of the priest – the embodied link between the Divine and the human – and transforms them into female myth and metaphor. It begins by exploring the material processes through which women become priestesses recognized by a community. These processes inspire significant debate and illustrate specific tensions that exist between the secular worldview and the magical one. The chapter then moves to interviews with priestesses about how they perceive their role as facilitators of enchantment. As practitioners of enchantment, priestesses facilitate this kind of experience. As clergy, they also help shape the discourse on the Goddess, and thus the spiritual practice itself. The chapter concludes with an account of the ordination of a High Priestess where ritual magic, as O'Keefe describes it, flows.
