A new book by Kathy Jones
An Ariadne Publication
A Journey of Transformation within
the sacred Landscape of Glastonbury Avalon
544 pages with illustrations and colour
ISBN10: 1 872983 28 6; ISBN13: 978 1872983 28 8
£14.95 plus P&P
The Lady of Avalon is the Goddess who dwells on the Isle of Avalon, the Mysterious Otherworldly Paradise which lies across the waters, beyond the mists. A Priestess or Priest of Avalon is one who devotes her/himself to the service of the Lady of Avalon, to Her sacred land and to Her people. This is an ancient yet ever new spiritual calling which speaks to many women and men in the present day. For She is the Great Goddess, the missing piece of the picture, the Divine Feminine and Lady of our hearts.
This book provides an inspiring and exhilarating journey into the Heart of the Goddess, learning of the Mysteries of Avalon and the renewed Priestess of Avalon tradition. Share Kathy’s experiences of living in Glastonbury Avalon for 30 years, learning of the ways of the Goddess in the sacred land, and the experiences of other Priestesses who have also chosen this spiritual path.
Introduction
Our love for the Lady often begins when we first hear Her name – Lady of Avalon, Lady of the Holy Isle of Avalon, Lady of the Lake and Lady of the Lake of Mysts. These Goddess titles echo like a distant trumpet blowing through our lives, awakening us to long-forgotten memories. Her name strikes a chord within our souls that resounds in every part of our being. Deep inside we already know Her.
In our hearts we feel connected to the Lady of Avalon by a thread, which may be tenuous and gossamer thin, but it is alive and vibrating. We want to strengthen that thread and follow it. We want to devote ourselves to the Lady as we believe the ancient priestesses of this land once did. Some remember being those priestesses in previous lives.
In imagination and visions we see robed womanly figures walking the sacred landscape, climbing the slopes of a steep hill in ceremony, worshipping the Goddess beside the holy wells. We see them serving Her people as ceremonialists, healers, poets and scryers, as midwives of birth, life and death, living a life of praise and dedication to Her.
We wish to live such a life now, although we have little idea of what this might mean. We long to become present day Priestesses and Priests of Avalon, dedicated to the Goddess. We hear Her voice calling to us and we respond,
“Yes, Lady, I am yours! May I be your priestess?”
without truly knowing anything about Her or the transforming nature of Her service.
Who is this Lady of Avalon, Her name redolent with meaning and mystery, the Lady we know and love instinctively? There are no facts to be found about Her, no history, no certainty, only a paragraph or two of dubious legend and a priestess title in a modern day novel. Yet we find we have such a longing in the heart to know who She is as Goddess, in all Her majesty and glory.
Returning out of the mists of our forgetting the Lady of Avalon is the One Goddess who rules the magical Isle of Avalon. Her name has emerged in the great mirror of Avalon as Nolava, the Goddess who reflects to us all that is. Her body contours form the Sacred Land and Her loving energies radiate outwards from Avalon through all the worlds. She is an awesome Goddess of love, beauty, compassion and wisdom, a Queen of Light and of Darkness, who reigns in the Space between the worlds. She is the One Goddess who expresses Herself through the seasons of Her nature as Maiden, Lover, Mother and Crone, as Lady of Earth, Water, Fire, Air and Space. She is the Spiral Goddess of Birth, Healing, Death and Rebirth. She is Mother of Transformation.
To become Her priestess is to love, honour and serve the Lady of Avalon with one’s whole heart, mind, emotions, body and spirit. It is to serve Her people, Her nature and Her earth to the best of one’s abilities and energy. To become Her priestess is to take a public role in Her name, to stand up and be counted as Her ceremonialist, healer, visionary, communicator, practitioner and embodiment of Her, as required by Her. It is not an easy path to take. It is not the path for everyone.
The journey to Her priestesshood is one of continual surrender to Her, letting go of our desire to be in control, to always know what is happening, giving way to the Lady’s wisdom for us. We learn to give sovereignty to Her voice which we hear within, which bids us always to be more loving, generous, creative and kind than we are. It is a journey of constant challenge to our Shadow selves, those parts that do not serve us or Her, and which continually betray our Soul’s true purpose. She calls to us to heal the wounds of our conditioning and karma, to become bigger than we have been, to expand our consciousness to its true capacities. She asks us to follow our destiny and become Her priestesses and priests once again. But be aware that Her path is one of love, of challenge and change.
Avalon means the place of apples and the Isle of Avalon is the mythic Paradise Isle that lies beyond the western shore, where the Goddess’s golden apples of immortality are to be found. Avalon is ruled by the Lady of Avalon, who is also Avallonia, Lady of Apples, the fruit of transformation. In legend Avalon has always been a place of women, where women’s values, beliefs and experience are honoured and shared. It is the place where the Nine Morgens dwell, the Nine Sisters who are the essence of the feminine in nature, in womankind and in the weather. Today Avalon is open to women and men to journey here to experience these deeply feminine energies. The Isle of Avalon is also known as the Western Isle of the Dead, to which souls are transported both in and out of incarnation for the healing of their disease, to experience many deaths – mental, emotional and sometimes physical – and to await and later experience rebirth.
For many hundreds of years the small country town of Glastonbury in Somerset , England has been recognised as a physical location for the mysterious Isle of Avalon. Once surrounded by water, the landscape of Glastonbury is an Outerworld counterpart to the Innerworld of Avalon. Walking in the lanes and fields, on the hillsides that make up Glastonbury’s sacred landscape, Avalon is always just a breath away, a shift in consciousness, an opening glimpsed through a Veil into another dimension of reality. The beings who inhabit Avalon are revealed in the movements caught in the corner of one’s eye or seen dimly through the mist that can shroud the sacred land. Glastonbury Avalon is that unique combination of the underlying physical and energetic landscape of Glastonbury, which is intimately connected to the Otherworld of Avalon, so that they cannot be separated. While Glastonbury provides one of the most accessible gateways into Avalon, where its secrets are held in the land itself, Avalon can also be found anywhere in Brigit’s Isles and beyond, where our hearts open to Her.