THE GODDESS TEMPLE THAT SNUCK PAST THE PLANNING COMMITTEE AND ACCIDENTALLY STARTED A REVOLUTION

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In a Somerset town famous for its ley lines and its ability to make grown men weep into crystals, two priestesses are quietly dismantling five thousand years of spiritual patriarchy — and they’d really like you to stop hovering in the doorway

Based on a podcast conversation between guests Anna Saqqara and Katie Player and host Philipp Kobald.

Where the Deer Women Dream and the Men Linger on the Threshold

There is a particular kind of courage required to register a pagan temple as an official place of worship in the United Kingdom, a country whose relationship with organised religion ranges from polite indifference to active suspicion of anyone who seems to be enjoying it too much. And yet, in the early 2000s, a group of women in Glastonbury — that strange, magnificent hilltop town where the veil between worlds is supposedly thinner than the margin on a self-published poetry collection — managed to do precisely that. The Goddess Temple of Avalon opened its doors, received its legal registration, and has remained open 365 days a year since, staffed by volunteers called Melissas, offering blessings, sacred smoke, and the radical proposition that the divine might have a feminine face. “Somehow we managed to sneak in before they realized who they were giving permission to,” Anna Saqqara and Katie Player explain with the kind of cheerful mischief that suggests the Lady of Avalon has a sense of humour about bureaucracy.

What makes this particular corner of the spiritual landscape so compelling is not the ley lines, nor the Arthurian mythology, nor even the fact that young women keep walking into the temple reporting dreams of an antlered woman they cannot explain. It is the sheer, stubborn ordinariness of the need it serves. People arrive — from Romania, from Australia, from Spain, from the next town over — and they sit on cushions, and they breathe, and sometimes they fall asleep in the presence of strangers, which is perhaps the most radical act of trust available to a species that has spent the last two decades doom-scrolling itself into a cortisol coma. Katie describes men hovering at the threshold, asking if they are allowed inside, and the answer — a resounding yes — carries more theological weight than most sermons manage in an hour.

The Wheel, the Well, and the Absolute Refusal to Colonise Anything

The structural genius of the Glastonbury model is that it is designed to export itself and then immediately let go. Priestesses and priests train over three years, absorb the seasonal wheel of the year that Cathy Jones developed from this specific landscape, and then return to their own countries to discover their own goddesses, their own wheels, their own sacred rivers and hills. Temples have sprouted in Rome, Madrid, Mexico, across America — not as franchises of a British spiritual brand, but as locally rooted expressions of something the founders are very clear about not owning. “We’re not into repeating any mistakes that the British people have made in the past,” Katie says, with the kind of dry understatement that suggests she is aware of approximately four centuries of imperial history and would rather not add goddess worship to the list.

This is where the conversation between Philipp Kobald and his guests becomes genuinely interesting, because it refuses the trap that so many spiritual movements fall into: the creeping hierarchical calcification that turns liberation into franchise. There are no high priestesses here. There is no dogma, no conversion strategy, no ascending ladder of enlightenment with a gift shop at the top. The seasonal wheel turns, the temple is redressed every six weeks in a new colour — red for Beltane, blue for the summer solstice — and the whole enterprise operates on the understanding that balance is not a destination but a continuous, slightly wobbly negotiation with reality. Philipp, who spent years in marketing, offers a beautifully acid observation: “When you work in marketing, you look at the one thing that is completely missing, and then make a headline out of it and sell it as the core quality.” Social media sells connection. The Goddess Temple actually provides it, which is presumably why it does not need a marketing department.

Compost, Shadow Work, and the Glorious Death of Perfectionism

The conversation’s most potent territory is its treatment of darkness — not as something to be vanquished or transcended, but as the composting season without which nothing new can grow. Anna Saqqara speaks about her own journey of learning to own her anger, working with horses to find a more embodied, less performatively pleasant way of being in the world. Katie invokes Miles Davis: “Do not fear mistakes, there are none.” Both women articulate a vision of spiritual practice that is fundamentally incompatible with the Instagram-ready version of enlightenment, where every shadow must be alchemised into a caption and every wound monetised into a workshop title.

What emerges is a theology — if one can call it that without triggering allergic reactions — built on the understanding that the patriarchy has wounded everyone, including men, and that reclaiming the feminine is not about exclusion but about returning to all of us the parts that were amputated by centuries of rigid role assignment. The temple is not a women-only space. It is a space where children make noise, where men weep for their mothers, where everyone is invited to be, as Anna puts it, “perfectly imperfect.” When Philipp tries his final gambit — imagine you ruled Britain, imagine thirty percent of the population followed your movement — both women refuse the premise entirely. They do not want power over anything. They want a goddess temple in every town and the freedom for every person to find divinity in whatever form it speaks to them. It is, in its quiet way, the most subversive political position available: the absolute refusal to dominate.

Guest Bio

Anna Saqqara and Katie Player are Priestesses of Avalon and healers based at the Goddess House in Glastonbury, where they serve the Goddess Temple through ceremony, healing work, teaching, and holding sacred space.

Web: goddesstemple.co.uk

Closer

There is something almost unbearably tender about a movement whose founding act of rebellion was to open a door and keep it open — every single day, for over two decades — and simply wait for people to stop hovering on the threshold and walk in. Perhaps the most ancient magic available to us is not a spell or a frequency or a quantum vibration, but the scandalous, countercultural act of making a space warm enough that strangers fall asleep in it, trusting that they will wake up closer to themselves.

Copyright

Copyright © HolisticCircle. All rights reserved.
The full episode can be watched on the @HolisticCircle YouTube channel.

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