By Ankh - ḥm.t-nṯr n Ḥwt-Ḥr m Šá¸«mt
It is important to understand that a journey like this does not unfold in a straight line. The language of the soul rarely follows human ideas of time. Often, a symbol appears long before we understand it. A moment that feels ordinary in the present can later reveal itself as a quiet conversation with the divine.
For anyone who senses that spirit, the higher self, or the divine is attempting to communicate, but the message feels fragmented or strange, I strongly recommend keeping a record. Write down the dreams. Record the symbols. Note the moments that feel important even when you cannot explain why. Over time, the fragments begin to gather themselves. Eventually, the story reveals itself.
This was my own path to becoming a priestess of Hathor in her form as Sekhmet. A path that would lead me to sit in the presence of her Ba at Dendera, and later to stand before her terrifying and magnificent power in Luxor.
When the universe first began communicating with me, I was genuinely prepared to accept that I was losing my mind.
I was trained as a scientist. If someone wished to make an extraordinary claim, I expected extraordinary evidence. I was the person who rolled her eyes at ghost stories and joked about making tin foil hats for anyone who claimed to speak with spirits.
So when these experiences began, I documented them carefully. At first, I believed I was recording the early stages of a psychological break. I spoke with doctors. At one point I even found myself lying inside an MRI machine, convinced that a brain tumour must be the explanation.
Yet there was one problem with this theory.
I kept asking myself the question.
Was I manic?
Was I having a breakdown?
At the same time I continued living my life exactly as before. Work. School runs. Grocery shopping. Conversations with friends. The normal rhythm of daily life never stopped.
Anyone who has witnessed true psychosis understands something about it. The person experiencing it rarely pauses calmly to question whether they are in a psychotic episode. Nor do they continue functioning through ordinary responsibilities while calmly documenting their symptoms.
Eventually, I had to admit that the explanation I had been clinging to did not fit.
So the journal changed. Instead of recording experiences, I began recording symbols. Once I did that, patterns began to appear.
At first the images were abstract.
I was told simply to follow the snakes. The snake would lead me to the answers. But there was no explanation of which snake, or where.
Then there was the sun.
The sun became an eye.
Then the eye became obscured, hidden as if behind an eclipse.
With it came a deep, aching feeling of being called to return somewhere.
In dreams and meditation, I swam through colours. Bright pink and violet tones that gradually shifted into a deep cyan green.
A zodiac that spiralled rather than forming a circle.
A mountain where the sun both rose and set behind the same peak.
A red flower that resembled wheat.
There were sound frequencies as well. A tone held steadily at 432 hertz before splitting into three equal parts that resonated at 144 each. I remember being told clearly: it is not two. It is one, but it is three.
And always there were twins.
One in light.
One in shadow.
One descending while the other ascended.
A cosmic dance that appeared again and again.
At the time it all felt like nonsense. Beautiful perhaps, but still nonsense.
Then someone I cared for deeply appeared in a dream and told me something simple.
Just trust the process.
So that is what I tried to do.
Around that time my best friend gave me a small magnet from the British Museum. It was an image of an Egyptian goddess.
I asked her why she chose it.
She shrugged and said she didn’t know. She simply felt it was meant for me.
I placed it on my fridge and thought very little more about it. Ancient mythology had never been a particular interest of mine. Egypt, its gods and temples, felt distant from my life.
Yet something else had begun happening.
I had started painting.
The paintings always began with those same colours from my dreams. Pink. Violet. Cyan. Green. Slowly shapes would emerge from the colour. Androgynous figures, often with the face of a lion. Around them appeared a strange circular symbol that I did not consciously understand.
One painting affected me more deeply than the others.
The figure had the gentle features of a lion and from the crown of its head a lotus flower bloomed open. When I finished the painting I began crying uncontrollably. I remember saying aloud that this was my son, though I had no logical explanation for why that felt true.
Soon, the dreams became more vivid.
I found myself wandering through Sudan. Yet it was not the Sudan of modern conflict. It was a Sudan of abundance and wealth. A landscape of lush greens and flourishing life that made modern cities seem pale in comparison.
In these dreams I was searching for someone. There was a constant sense that a part of me was missing but that I would eventually find it again.
Then came the more violent visions.
I dreamt that my right eye burned hotter than the sun. It swelled and bled red fire. The dream felt disturbingly real.
A few days later, I woke with a painful infection in that exact eye. By the end of the day, just as strangely as it appeared, it vanished.
Eventually, during a deep meditation while listening to a tone at 432 hertz, I found myself crying out with an overwhelming longing to go home.
The word that answered me was clear.
Dendera.
When I searched the name I discovered the Temple of Hathor in Egypt. I also discovered the famous Dendera zodiac, a spiral depiction of the heavens carved into the ceiling of the temple.
Something inside me shifted when I saw it.
The spiral zodiac from my dreams.
I knew I had found the place I was being led toward, yet something still felt incomplete.
My attention returned to the magnet on my fridge.
When I searched the figure on the magnet I discovered that it was not Hathor at all.
It was Sekhmet.
This was the moment when another piece of the puzzle fell into place.
In Egyptian cosmology Hathor and Sekhmet are not separate in the way modern minds often imagine gods. They are two expressions of the same divine feminine force.
Hathor is the nurturer. The bringer of beauty, fertility, music, love, and joy. She is the cow goddess who nurses the sun each morning and welcomes the dead into the afterlife with tenderness.
Sekhmet is her mirror. The lioness. The solar fire. The force that destroys what has become corrupt so that balance can return.
Creation and correction.
Life and the power that restores it when it falls out of harmony.
These dual aspects appear in one of Egypt’s oldest myths. The story of the Wandering Eye of Ra.
In the story, Ra sends his Eye to earth to punish humanity when it turns away from divine order. The Eye becomes the lioness Sekhmet and unleashes a terrible fury upon the world. Yet the rage grows so great that she forgets who she is.
To calm her, the gods pour red beer across the fields, dyed to resemble blood. Sekhmet drinks deeply, becomes intoxicated, and when she awakens she has transformed back into Hathor.
The destroyer remembers she is also the mother.
Another version tells of the lioness Tefnut, daughter of Ra, who leaves Egypt entirely and wanders into Nubia (modern-day Sudan). The land grows barren in her absence. The gods must travel to find her and coax her return.
These myths echo the same theme. When the balance between masculine and feminine order collapses, the feminine withdraws or transforms. The world must change in order for her to return.
Over time, the symbols from my dreams began appearing in the physical world.
The colours from my visions appeared one night in the sky as the aurora borealis. That same night the presence of Sekhmet and Horus stepped forward with the image of the red flower.
The red flower would appear again later in Luxor, painted on the wall of a building belonging to a devotee of Sekhmet. It marked the place where I would receive an energetic initiation.
My grandmother passed from this life beneath a lunar eclipse, a moment that shifted my path again and brought me under the guardianship of Minerva. My oracular work deepened after that.
Eventually I travelled to Egypt.
One morning I watched the sun rise behind Mount Sinai. That same evening I watched it set behind the same mountain.
The mountain from my visions.
Later that day I walked into the Temple of Hathor at Dendera.
Many modern priestesses speak of being marked by Hathor within the inner sanctum of the temple. My own marking came differently.
I had already visited the inner sanctuary earlier that day and was looking for somewhere quiet to meditate before leaving.
As I walked through the temple a man suddenly stopped me.
“Priestess,” he said, “you wish to meditate.”
I had no idea why he called me this. I must have looked like any other tourist wandering through the temple.
Yet he led me to a ladder that ascended into a small crypt.
I climbed up.
Inside the chamber was an image of Hathor in her form as the Ba. In Egyptian understanding the Ba is the soul that moves between worlds, the part of consciousness that travels between life and death and carries messages between realms.
I sat in silence within that chamber.
The prayer crypts of Dendera are rarely open to visitors. Yet somehow I had been led there.
After years of working with her energy, the moment cannot be reduced to mere coincidence.
While I sat there, the message that came was simple.
It is time to see me in reverse pole.
When I climbed back out of the crypt my guide approached me with unexpected news. He had managed to gain access to the Temple of Ptah at Karnak, a place that houses one of the most powerful statues of Sekhmet and is often closed to the public.
I could remain at Dendera or travel to Luxor.
In that moment I understood what reverse pole meant.
Hathor had shown me her nurturing face.
Now I was being asked to stand before the lioness.
That afternoon I travelled to Luxor.
Standing before the statue of Sekhmet is an experience that is difficult to describe. Those who have stood there will understand. The air itself seems to change. The energy surges like lightning.
When I stood before her I felt something inside me align with a force far older than anything I could rationally explain.
The message that came was clear.
The final illusions will fall away now.
You must hold what is true.
It is time to restore balance.
Not only within yourself, but wherever life force has been misdirected.
And perhaps that is the part of the story I am still learning how to finish.
Because becoming a priestess is not a title one claims.
It is a responsibility that continues unfolding. Each step reveals the next piece of the path.
What I know now is this.
Hathor teaches us how to love life.
Sekhmet teaches us how to protect it.
And sometimes the work of a priestess is simply to stand between those two forces and help the world remember the balance between them.
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