Pagan Portals: The Temple Priestesses of Antiquity

Medium Haight-Ashton (Pagan Portals: The First Sisters) studies ancient female pagan spiritual leaders’ contributions to religious life in this cursory chronicle. The author details the stories and practices of female healers, oracles, psychics, seers, and sibyls from antiquity who were believed to possess abilities that ranged from seeing into the future to communing with the dead. Priestesses were often young girls from royalty, nobility, or the political elite who were proffered by their families to follow a divine calling. Haight-Ashton begins with the first priestesses in Sumer around 4500 BCE, noting that their role was to communicate the gods’ will to mortals. She offers brisk sketches of notable priestesses from the next several millennia, describing how Eumachia of Pompeii used her spiritual status to forward women’s involvement in politics, the Delphic oracle took hallucinogenics to receive divine messages, and the priestesses of Isis in Egypt performed rituals to “ensure fertility and the well-being of the land.” While Haight-Ashton’s account acts as an adequate compendium of ancient female spiritual leaders, the treatments sometimes feel too brief, and the scant citations call into question the quality of the research (the eight endnotes for the first chapter consist of URLs for Merriam-Webster, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Wikipedia entries). The spotty scholarship puts a big damper on this primer. (Aug.)