About the last thing I expected that Saturday morning, July 10, was to be initiated as a Priest of Isis, foremost among goddesses of ancient Egypt, in an open-air ritual at Bayville Farms Park in Virginia Beach.

Across the universe, to our hands.

I don’t think Jala, my wife and partner these past 46 years, expected to come home with the new title of Priestess, either. But that’s what happened.

Now, in the aftermath, I wonder: What does it mean? Will it make any difference in my life?

“I’d heard of Isis, of course. She was the sister and grieving lover of Osiris.”

So begins a passage I wrote in the second act of The Lunar Project, a stagetale which I first performed in 1997 at Second Story Theater in Norfolk and which won a Port Folio Weekly award as the Best New Play by a Local Playwright in the 1997-98 theatrical season in Hampton Roads.

“But,” the passage continues, “I’d never realized before that she was the same as Ishtar, Hathor, Maia, Demeter, Venus, and the divine Sophia of the poets and philosophers. She was also the same as the Virgin Mary. She was the Great Veiled Goddess of the Ancient Mideast.”

Isis, in short, is a prototype of the Divine Feminine who appears in all the ancient mythologies of western civilization as mother, lover, sister, bride, friend, and spiritual guide to all in a pain-wracked world who open their hearts and minds to her reality of unconditional love for all beings, including oneself.

Jala performs "Incantation to Luna"

So when Jeanne O’Cain Foster learned of my involvement in goddess lore, she was quick to reveal to me that she is an official Adept—High Priestess Hierophant, in fact—of the Temple Beautiful Isis in Virginia Beach. In that capacity, she told me, as a poet, actress, and dancer she has performed many rituals in the Hampton Roads area and beyond, including at the world center of the Fellowship of Isis at Clonegal Castle in Enniscothy, Ireland.

Initially, to be honest, most of this seemed a little off the wall to me, as my interest in Isis did not extend to organized societies. So what Jeanne told me didn’t sink in until she had repeated it on a couple of different occasions when we met at one public function or another. In short, she recognized the kindred soul in me before I recognized the same in her. Jala caught on before I did, though, and when Jeanne told her about the summer solstice ritual planned for July 10 at Bayville Park, she said she’d like to go and asked if I’d come, too. I shrugged. Okay. Why not?

Then Jeanne said she hoped we’d perform at the ritual. She liked a dance poem Jala wrote called “Incantation to Luna,” which she generally performs as an introduction to The Lunar Project. For my part, I decided on my poem “Window Facing East” about the mystical marriage of male and female in a world otherwise dark with the violence of war. It seemed to suit the occasion, and besides that I knew it well enough that I wouldn’t have to spend much time rehearsing.

Saturday morning at about ten to ten we pulled into the southern-most parking lot at Bayville Park, where we found Jeanne unloading the last of her accouterments from her car. She’d already prepared the setting and only needed, she said, to get dressed herself.

She led us along a walkway through a spacious grove of exceptionally tall, straight-trunked trees—pines, mostly, it seemed—which formed a cool retreat from the humidity beginning to cook beyond their high canopy of shade. Soon we arrived at a stone wall gracefully curving like a serpent along a stretch of perhaps twenty-five yards. On the other side of this wall was an improvised altar—an ironing board draped nearly to its feet in green fabric (color of Venus)—and on the altar were several ritual items, including a loaf of bread, a tray of communion cups brimming with a reddish liquid, a small bottle of an essential oil, and a vase of water with a sponge inside. Several feet removed from the altar a leopard-patterned fleece blanket lay spread on the ground for us to sit on once the ritual began.

Aside from Jeanne, we were the first to arrive. I wondered if we’d be the only ones, but that thought form proved inferior when a man appeared walking down the path toward us. “My Priest,” Jeanne said, introducing us to Lloyd Kremer, who would assist her in the ritual. He’d been with her at Clonegal Castle, an Isis devotee of long standing.

Eventually, four more people arrived—two men and two women—making a party of eight to invoke the blessings of Isis upon the summer solstice season of 2010.

Jeanne and Lloyd leading the ritual

It’s not generally recognized that our July 4th celebration, like our Christmas and New Year’s  holidays, are overlays, so to speak, on the ancient festivals of the solstices, winter and summer. As it happened, the July 10th Isis ritual Jeanne assembled occurred at the cusp of the July 11th new Moon/total Solar eclipse, making it an exceptionally powerful time from the perspective of cosmic energies. For astrologers, a new Moon represents a time for the sowing of seeds—new ideas, fresh projects or initiatives—while a Solar eclipse dims the rational left-brain, traditionally  masculine functions while highlighting the intuitive, traditionally feminine, right-brain functions. And while a new Moon may set the pattern of events for up to a month, the effects of an eclipse are said to extend for six months or more.

In those terms, then, whatever was to happen at this Isis solstice celebration was practically preordained to carry a cosmic charge.

And I have to say, for me, it did.

The ritual was a combination of pagan, Native American, and Christian elements, since its ruling principle is to enhance one’s practicing faith, not to replace it. Jeanne—Priestess Amara—assisted by Lloyd—Priest Elkar—led the proceedings, which began with a dance-like processional weaving among the trees with ringing of bells and tapping of a tambourine. From there it proceeded to an invocation of the four directions and the four archangels, the Lord’s Prayer recited in Aramaic, baptism of the assembled with water and anointment of each one’s brow with oil, communion with bread and wine—honoring Ceres (goddess of grain) and Dionysus (god of spiritual ecstasy)—and, finally, initiation.

That was the surprise of the morning. Whether Jeanne planned it this way all along or decided it on the spur of the moment—which seemed the most likely—she announced that, by the power invested in her and unless anyone objected, we would all be initiated as Priests and Priestesses into the Fellowship of Isis.

Isis.

Now, by this time I had to admit to a feeling of authenticity about all of this. Jeanne and Lloyd in their white ceremonial robes, the setting among those tall trees standing like silent witnesses in a scene out of J.R.R. Tolkien, the circle of participants dressed in white, the altar with its ceremonial implements, and, of course, the atmosphere created in the multiple acts of invoking spirits and drawing down energies particularly friendly to the time and place—all this combined to create a feeling of sacred peace and a dedication to reproducing that feeling in the world through whatever talents and abilities we each might lend to the purpose.

To put it in mystical terms, Isis was present in our little gathering. The ritual was a success. When it was over we exchanged warm hugs and email addresses and promised to keep in touch.

Since then—whether because of it or not I can’t say—I find my thoughts and emotions elevated, somehow. I tend to believe less in my negative evaluations of people and events. I see less threat in human activities which seem to reflect ignorance or outright evil. I have more conviction that no earthly power can really overthrow Nature’s fundamental purpose, which is to support and nurture us, particularly when we commit ourselves to helping.

And in that conviction I’ve taken sides. I believe in the Goddess of love and compassion, whatever name you call her. I believe she really will prevail in the long run over the shadows of doubt and despair which plague the mind with misery, turning unspoiled children into hateful, self-gratifying adults. I believe that in the unseen world of spirit everything we need is available to us to dispel those shadows in a divine light of peace. All we have to do is be willing to invite it in.

It’s not just “a chick thing.” It’s a willingness to harmonize, even if you feel like grumbling about it at first.