PART VIII Priestesshood

Had some traveling philosopher seeking to discover and describe the ways of foreign and unfamiliar peoples found his way to Llwddawanden, and had he persuaded Herrwn to explain the education and training for boys selected to enter the priesthood, he would most likely have found himself quite exhausted after hearing about the rigors of those studies. Assuming he was astute enough to notice that the shrine had priestesses as well as priests—and was not too overwhelmed to ask for more information—and had then inquired about the education and training by which girls were prepared to become priestesses, he might have suppressed a groan to learn that the studies for becoming a priestess of the shrine of the Great Mother Goddess were, if anything, more exacting than those for becoming a priest.

Like boys, girls began learning simple recitations while still in the nursery. Unlike boys, who were abruptly taken from the nursery on the women’s side of the shrine on the morning of their sixth birthday to enter the classroom on the men’s side, girls remained in the women’s quarters, where they advanced as quickly as possible through the basics of ordinary invocations and minor rites to increasingly intensive lessons in the songs and dances reserved for women, along with introductory instruction in midwifery, herbal lore, and keeping the sacred calendar.

The most important difference between a priestess-to-be and her male counterpart—the power to give life—was inherent and innate and its onset was marked by her first trip to the Sacred Pools. By longstanding tradition it was at this, the most important of a woman’s rites of passage, that a priestess-in-training learned the last of the most secret and sacred of the women’s songs and dances, and that she made her declaration of the great fields of women’s endeavors she would enter.

“Then,” Herrwn, who would have the advantage over his beleaguered listener of having spent most his life reciting lengthy and complex sagas and so would hardly need to pause for breath before going on, “having determined her life’s path as a midwife, an herbalist, or a keeper of the sacred calendar, she returns to the shrine to take her place at the high table and begin intensive studies with the chief priestess in her chosen field.”

“But,” the visiting philosopher, who would almost certainly have had his own training in oratory and argumentation, and possessed an ear for discrepancies in informant accounts, might well object, “you have said that a boy’s discipleship—whether as an oracle, a bard, or a healer—is decided for him in a council of the three elder priests, and then not until he is sixteen at the earliest, and yet you say that a girl makes the same decision for herself at an age possibly as young as twelve or thirteen?”

“Well, of course! Is that not how it is among your people?” Herrwn would no doubt answer and, frankly, would be wondering why he’d agreed to waste his time answering foolish questions from someone either simple-minded or inexcusably ignorant.

It would have been unfair of Herrwn to dismiss the visiting philosopher’s question out of hand and without considering the possibility that there could be a society in which it was not assumed that girls born to their highest class were gifted with an inner wisdom that emerged along with the capacity to become pregnant—unlike boys, who needed to be trained and molded to assume the responsibilities of priesthood and who could hardly be expected to know what was best for themselves and the shrine until well into their adult years.

As with most societal norms, the question of whether this supposition was true was distinct from the question of whether it worked—and for most of a millennium, the assumption that “what girls know, boys must be taught” had worked well, so well that the possibility that the generally appropriate choices made by young girls might be explained by the benefits of having deep, ongoing relationships with their mothers (or, for those orphaned at birth, by a close female relative) was never considered. With the inherent wisdom of girls taken for granted, no one realized that a test of that notion was underway in the aftermath of Rhedwyn’s fatal charge.

That so much of life in the shrine had gone on apparently unchanged in spite of losing so many of the valley’s young men was in large part because the elder priestesses—Rhonnon, Aolfe, and Lunedd—had quietly taken up the tasks left behind by the servants who’d gone to work in the fields and pastures. It was out of simple necessity that caring for the five girls on whom the future of the shrine depended was turned over to a nurse who, though doting and devoted, was not equipped to replace the individual nurturance and learning the little priestesses-to-be would have received from their mothers. The girls were by no means neglected and each one, in fact, thrived in her own way, but their lack of maternal guidance and the stronger than usual alliance they formed with each other would eventually have unintended consequences for everyone in Llwddawanden.