I grew up mostly in the North West during the 1950s and 60s and worked in IT Support until retiring in 2013, but continued to work creating and maintaining websites for the Glastonbury Goddess Temple.

I was very happy to discover  Feminism around 1970 – a friend gave me a book and said I absolutely had to read it. This was The Female Eunuch, by Germaine Greer, fast becoming a bestseller. Although raised as a Roman Catholic and sent to a convent school, I had already walked away from all that, but wasn’t sure what came next. People say a book changed their lives and this certainly changed mine. I’d been arguing about why women were paid less, treated worse and generally economically abused, so this helped me to understand where our freedom had gone. Much more reading followed so that within a few years I began to regard myself as a radical feminist, calling for the elimination of male supremacy and the patriarchy. That hasn’t changed.

I can’t remember a time when mythology, folklore and language didn’t all fascinate me. Obligatory Sunday drives with the parents gave me an interest in place names – where they come from, their history. Rivers, for example, often have names that go back to Roman times and before, so there’s a great deal to learn there.  Even on those Sunday drives I’d wondered about goddess and picked up a name somewhere – Astarte. I didn’t know who she was, but I absolutely knew this was important. From then on, I read everything I could find about goddess, which wasn’t a great deal – probably would have fainted with joy in a modern bookstore.

Many years and a failed marriage later, I saw a poster advertising training as a Priestess of Avalon. Having read Marion Zimmer Bradley’s novel of the same name, I first suspected that someone was cashing in, and then worried about being asked to believe in fairies and the like. It took a year for me to stop pre-judging and to find out more. I wasn’t 100% sure why I wanted this but went for it. I don’t see myself as the sort of priestess who wafts about but as a worker who will do what is needed to bring about the return of Goddess to these isles and to the world that needs her so very much.

Geraldine Charles
October 2026