The Prostitutionof Avalon
The Prostitution of Avalon and Her People in the Global Sisterhood.
Like many, my initiation onto the Path of the Rose as a child was through Mother Mary, when my mother had breast cancer and, fearing her death, I turned to the Divine Mother for comfort.
Mary then led me to the Black Madonna in Southern Italy where I read the Mists of Avalon in 1993, and my spiritual paths of the Rose and Avalon began to weave together.
After 4 years of struggling with suicidal depression and addiction in response to childhood abuse, I was then initiated by Sophia, Black Goddess of Wisdom, through the traumatic birth of my daughter Sophia Mary requiring life-saving surgery.
On Sophia’s 1st birthday in 2000, I made my first conscious pilgrimage to Glastonbury-Avalon, although I had visited as a teenager.
For the next 9 years, I travelled to the Isle of Avalon every six weeks or so, as I trained and walked the path of a Priestess of Avalon with the Glastonbury Goddess Temple and Goddess Conference.
I will never forget our first Priestess Training circle at Samhain 2001, my first Samhain on the Isle of the Dead, and the tears I cried feeling that deep sense of home-coming and Soul remembrance.
During those years of nursing my daughter through 11 more operations, the Isle of Avalon became my sanctuary, a hallowed retreat away from the intense stress of mothering, a refuge in which to sit in circle with beloved sisters and brothers, a land to walk in solitude, a sacred Well to offer my tears to, a Cave of Ancestors who held me as I released all control and allowed myself to be healed, restored and returned to the Land of the Living.
When I eventually moved here in 2009 with my family, I naively thought that our suffering had come to an end. But Avalon isn’t for the faint-hearted. If She wants you to serve Her from a place of truth, integrity and humility, She will annihilate you again and again, until you are but ashes scattered in your own grave and have to resurrect yourSelf back home.
The following few years of nursing my son on the bridge between life and death on the Isle of the Dead took me to depths I could not have previously imagined existed.
Many live in poverty and struggle to support themselves and their families. My son’s school in Glastonbury serves one of the most deprived communities in the whole of the UK.
It is from this daily lived experience and witnessing that I feel sick to my stomach when I see these international teachers with their huge followings and glamorous marketing, who have only been to Glastonbury a couple of times, cashing in on Avalon, lying about their relationship to Her, spewing forth about what She is and is not, with the sole intention of lining their own insatiably greedy pockets.
So, I would like to ask that you please boycott any Avalon Samhain Mysteries you see advertised by these patriarchal, colonial parasites, and I’d like to invite every genuine Sister and Brother of Avalon to please market your upcoming events in the comments below. You don’t have to actually live here, just to have a genuine connection in service to Glastonbury-Avalon and Her energies, in whatever way She communes with you.
Let’s redistribute the abundance to the women, men and children who actually deserve and need it on the Isle of the Dead this Samhain.
Blessed be to Avalon and Her People ???
Annabel Du Boulay
