A Journey Through the Divine Feminine Archetypes of Goddesses and Mythic Figures In Witch, Healer, Priestess, Outcast, explore original retellings of mythic figures and goddesses from around the world, discovering how to embrace both the dark and light aspects of life. Learn how embodying the power of witches, healers, priestesses, and outcasts can help you navigate your deepest emotions , reclaim your place in a fast-paced world, and bring new meaning to your experiences. Drawing inspiration from the ancient tradition of oral storytelling , uncover forgotten figures whose tales may have been lost to time, yet have much to teach us about what it means to live as a woman fully empowered . Witch, Healer, Priestess, Outcast shines a new light on these lost figures, while offering fresh perspectives on those we know well. Each story is a chance to be inspired, and through guided meditations, you'll learn how to integrate that inspiration into your life. Embrace the Divine Energy of Healing : Connect with an ancient lineage that honours the feminine power to nurture and heal. - Discover the Magick of Feminine Power : Explore the stories of Hekate and Morgan Le Fay to gain fresh insights into the enduring power of women—and how it has often been misunderstood. - Practical Exercises for Daily Growth : Integrate the power of the goddesses into your life with guided meditations that deepen your connection to each story's message and help you embody their transformative energy. Step into your own divine power, awaken the wisdom of the goddesses, and begin your transformative journey today. Julie Peters is a counselor, tarot reader, and yoga and meditation teacher with over two decades of practice. She is a staff writer for Spirituality and Health Magazine and has dozens of guided meditations available on the Insight Timer app. She is the author of Secrets of the Eternal Moon Phase Goddesses: Meditations on Desire, Relationships, and the Art of Being Broken (SkyLight Paths 2016), which is focused on a set of Tantric moon phase goddesses that helped her heal from trauma and find beauty again after heartbreak. Her second book, the Canada Book Award-winning WANT: 8 Steps to Recovering Desire, Passion, and Pleasure After Sexual Assault (Mango, April 2019) goes deeper into that recovery process with an encouraging outlook towards healing and possibility after trauma. Her latest book, The Full Moon Yearbook (David&Charles 2023) is all about understanding the cycles of a year through perspectives on the moon from all over the world. “Myths are like mushrooms”, the writer Sophie Strand has said: from the surface, they looks like individuals, with a little stem and curved top poking out from the dirt, all alone. But if you dig a little deeper, you will see a network of root-like threads called mycelium connecting each single mushroom to all kinds of other mushrooms and non-mushroom beings, extending across a wide swath of land. Each of the divine feminine figures we meet in this book have roots like that, oral and written roots that traversed people, lands, and cultures for centuries, even millennia. Some of these roots have been forgotten, but still they reach up through the dirt to the light, demanding to be remembered. Once, there were deities of storms, the wild wood, healing herbs, wolves, the ocean, fertility, wisdom, and everything else. The divine world was filled with color and flavor, and it taught us precious secrets about how to survive and thrive on the land. Modern life is busy and technologized, thoroughly separated from ancient lessons about which berries are safe to eat and the rhythms of the wolves in the wintertime. If we can “re-root” these mythologies, as Sophie Strand suggests, we can reorient them to the lands they came from, remembering how they once helped us to live with the plants and animals with whom we shared our space. I live in a place known in Cree as amiskwaciy-wâskahikan, Beaver Hills House, a place where many indigenous bands would gather to rest, trade, connect, and enjoy the many resources of this land. In English, this is Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, a city designed so you never really have to get out of your car and face the extreme cold or blistering heat of the seasons here. I grew up as a (lazy) Christian with English and Irish roots, and while I loved the rituals of church, the spicy smell of incense smoke, the cool hard pews and the thin powdery pages of the Bibles held behind each one, something was missing. I turned to witchcraft as a teen, casting love spells and burying my hair clippings in the garden. I studied literature and world religions at school, fascinated by stories of gods and goddesses that were so different from what I’d learned at church. I became a yoga teacher, and sat rapt at the feet of anyone who would tell me a story about the Goddess in her fierce and powerful forms. Now, as a therapist, I listen deeply to the intimate narratives of my