Your Pastor Gets Paid, But Your Priestess Can’t?

The priest lives in a mansion. The priestess is called a fraud.
One collects tithes in silk robes. The other buries her power under her tongue and prays no one asks for proof.
He’s honored. She’s feared.
His labor is holy. Hers is demonic.
And yet—they come to her in secret.

They always have.

In the Caribbean, she was called Obeah woman. In Africa, the midwife, the diviner, the mouth of the village. In the Americas, she became a whisper, a warning, a superstition.
But when the pastor couldn’t fix it—when the prayer circle didn’t hit—they came anyway. Quiet. Desperate. Empty-handed.

And expected her to heal them for free.

Because we’ve been taught to pay men to speak for God, but guilt women for speaking with God.
Especially if that woman is Black.
Especially if her gift can’t be gentrified.

The first time I named a price, I felt my ancestors behind me. Not proud—protective.
Because they understood the cost.
They understood how quickly a priestess becomes a problem the moment she asks to be paid.

I descend from women whose medicine was outlawed. Whose rituals were criminalized. Whose power was feared precisely because it worked.
And when people flinch at the cost of my work, I don’t feel shame—I feel the weight of every woman who was burned for less.

Every woman who held the village together without a single offering.
Every woman who was called devil while the bishop built empires with tax exemptions.

Imposter syndrome didn’t grow in me because I doubted my calling.
It grew in me because I watched the world reward fraud and fear the real thing.

My altar is not a charity. It is a site of exchange.
This is ancestral labor. Generational calculus. Energetic debt collection.
And I’ve stopped offering myself at a discount.

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They didn't just steal our gods—they monetized their replacements and sent us the bill.

Before they criminalized our rituals, they commodified them. The violence wasn't just in the burning—it was in the branding. What was once temple became tabernacle. What was once shrine became steeple. What was once oracle became ownership.

As Christina Sharpe writes in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being,

“What is lived in the wake of slavery is not only the catastrophe, but the afterlife of property.”

The Black body as resource. The Black gift as extractable. The Black woman as infrastructure—expected to birth, to hold, to heal, but never to invoice.

Religion didn’t just rewire our sense of the divine. It rewrote the divine economy. In pre-colonial West African societies, priestesses, oracles, and spiritual intermediaries were compensated for their roles in maintaining communal harmony, resolving conflict, and guiding public decision-making—and paid well. Payments included offerings of food, livestock, textiles, and other forms of wealth, reflecting a system of reciprocity that honored their contributions.

As Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí explains in The Invention of Women, many pre-colonial African societies—such as the Yoruba—organized spiritual and political power around relational seniority rather than fixed gender roles. Sacred work was respected because it served the community, not because it fit a colonial framework of authority.

But colonization didn’t just steal our land. It stole our ledgers.
It told us to pray to a god that doesn’t look like us for freedom while kneeling on our grandmother’s grave.

Suddenly, anything not sanctioned by church or state was labeled witchcraft. And anyone asking for compensation outside of those systems was accused of exploiting faith.
The priest could build a mansion.
The priestess became a warning.

We now live in a world where a televangelist can own a private jet and call it “divine favor,” but if I charge for my spiritual work, I am “taking advantage of vulnerable people.”
Where is that energy when megachurches take in over $6 billion annually and don’t pay a cent in taxes?

There is no shame in charging for sacred work.
There is shame in expecting sacred labor to be free when nothing else in this world is.

bell hooks once said,

“When we work without compensation, we signal that our labor has no value.”

But what she didn’t say—what I will—is this:
When Black women work without compensation, we reinforce the economic systems that were built to exploit us.

We inherit the fatigue of those who were forced to give everything and still be grateful.
We inherit the distrust of those who watched their holy be rewritten as heresy.
We inherit the silence of those who were too powerful to be allowed to speak.

Consider Tituba—the enslaved Afro-Indigenous woman at the center of the Salem Witch Trials.
History remembers the hysteria. It remembers the hangings. But it often forgets that the spellwork, the rituals, the “witchcraft” that terrified Puritan society were learned from her.

The women of Salem weren’t burned simply for practicing magic—they were burned because the magic traced back to a Black woman.

The fear was never just about the supernatural.
It was about who the power came from.

This is why I charge.
Not for the gift—but for the cost of surviving it.

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Hatshepsut was Pharaoh. Full stop.

She reigned over a flourishing empire for over two decades. Ruled Egypt at the height of its wealth, built monuments that still stand, launched successful trade expeditions that expanded the empire, and governed with both spiritual and political authority. She was the highest seat. The head. The god-body in a crown.

And yet, after her death, they tried to erase her.
Chiseled her image from stone.
Smashed her statues.
Buried her legacy in dust and denial.

Because power in the hands of a Black woman has always been seen as a threat.

This happens time and time again. Each time a Black woman steps into sacred leadership, they either rewrite her—or ridicule her.

Ask Ms. Cleo.

Turned into a meme. A late-night joke. A parody of the very thing wellness culture now monetizes on TikTok. She read for a generation, but they never gave her the respect they gave the cards. She was mocked into caricature, then forgotten—while the industry she opened the door for now prints money in incense and irony.

This is how spiritual labor gets dismissed—when it challenges authority, when it defies institutions, when it comes from someone we’ve been taught not to trust.

I've felt the heat of that gaze. The suspicion. The smirk.
The "oh, you charge for this?"
The "how much?" that comes with a raised eyebrow.
The silence that follows when I say my rate like I mean it.

And so I’ve lowered it. More than once.
Not because the work is worth less, but because I was made to believe I was.

I’ve called it “energy exchange” just to ease the blow.
As if currency becomes sacred when we dilute the word.
As if money becomes less capitalist when it comes wrapped in spiritual guilt.
But let's be honest—"energy exchange" is how we undercharge with language that still hopes to be liked.

There’s a specific kind of grief that comes from being excellent and still underpaid.
A specific kind of rage that simmers when someone tells you “you should be doing this for the community,” while handing thousands to someone who just turned their first deck of oracle cards into a 12-week mentorship program.

I’ve stayed up late reworking pricing tiers, dissecting my offerings, searching for the flaw that makes my worth negotiable.
Wondering if one more bonus or deliverable might make my value easier to swallow.

What I do can build structure where confusion once lived.
It can clear out the noise, can anchor people in their truth, and reintroduces them to their own authority.
This is the kind of clarity that resonates through the body—subtle at first, then undeniable.
It changes decisions, direction, and destiny.

And still—still—I find myself questioning whether it’s “too much.”

Not because I don’t believe in it.
But because I’ve seen what happens when women like me speak too boldly, charge too confidently, own their power too completely.
Yes, some of us are getting paid. Yes, some are building empires. But it’s still the exception—not the norm.

We speak of sovereignty, but many of us are still negotiating with ghosts.
Scarcity stitched into our nervous systems.
Beliefs passed down like Grandma’s prayers: be generous, be invisible, be grateful for scraps.
The truth is, every priestess must meet her own edges before she can fully hold someone else’s transformation.

If the priest can profit off prophecy, then so can the ones he learned it from.

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This is the part where I stop negotiating.

What I offer is the result of years spent refining my craft, trusting what arrives, and holding space in ways most systems won’t.
I no longer bend the terms of my agreement to match someone else’s readiness.
What I offer is consistent. What I hold is real. And I intend to keep it that way.
I price it accordingly—not for approval, but to sustain the integrity of the work.
I’m here to endure. On purpose. On rate. On record.

“If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
— Audre Lorde

Period.

One love, ESS xo

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REFERENCES

• Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Duke University Press, 2016.

• bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, South End Press, 1981.

• Audre Lorde, Poetry Foundation Biography

• Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

• Tituba – Wikipedia

• Hatshepsut – Wikipedia

The Holy Ghost is Trans

If God is everything, why are we still insisting God is either/or?

What we call Spirit has always existed beyond the architecture of gender. But the human impulse to categorize, to control, to contain what makes us uncomfortable, did what conquest always does—it narrowed the infinite. It carved binaries into being and dared to call them Divine.

The Holy Ghost is not bound by biology.
It has no fixed form, no singular voice, no allegiance to the constraints of flesh.
It moves as wind. As fire. As presence.
And if I’m being honest, it moves like queerness.

But still, institutions try to make holiness legible—palatable.
They put the sacred in a suit and tie. They give it a father’s tone, a pastor’s cadence, a theology of walls.
And they call anything outside that boundary unnatural.

Yet before any of us could spell transgender, two-spirit, or non-binary, there were cultures who not only understood these identities—they revered them.

Among the Fon of West Africa, Mawu-Lisa was both moon and sun, male and female—creator and container. They understood the divine as dual, unified, indivisible. Holiness didn’t divide itself to be understood—it expanded itself to be felt.

Among the Navajo, there is nádleehi—one who walks in-between.
Among the Lakota, winkte, whose visions were trusted, whose roles were sacred.
In the Dagara tribe of Burkina Faso, dual-spirited people are seen as mediators between realms.
The Yoruba didn’t weaponize fluidity—they encoded it into the divine. Ọ̀ṣun does not explain herself. She simply is. And she is never just one thing.

Before queerness was politicized, it was praised.
Before it was punished, it was priesthood.

This is sacred memory—passed through story, through ceremony, through blood.
It’s a remembering older than the language trying to erase it.

The Holy Ghost is trans because Spirit has never needed to choose.
And maybe the reason that makes some people so uncomfortable…
…is because they’ve built their entire sense of holiness on the assumption that God looks just like them.

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Before gender was boxed and labeled, it flowed—between bodies, across borders, through breath and ritual. It lived in those whose presence reminded the community that the sacred was never singular.

In Diné (Navajo) culture, the nádleehi—"one who is transformed"—embodied both masculine and feminine traits. They served as healers, spiritual guides, mediators. Their existence enriched the community, woven into the spiritual and ceremonial life of the people. (source)

The Lakota recognize winkte—those who move between gender roles, who hold spiritual functions no one else can. Winkte have long been respected as ceremonial leaders, dreamers, mediators—carriers of wisdom that lives between the lines. (source)

In Burkina Faso, the Dagara call them gatekeepers—individuals who live on the threshold of gender and spirit. Their presence sustains cosmic balance. They are tasked with bridging the seen and unseen, anchoring the spiritual health of the village. (source)

Within the spiritual traditions of the Fon people of Benin, Mawu-Lisa embodies a divine duality—Mawu, the moon goddess associated with night, fertility, and compassion, and Lisa, the sun god linked to day, strength, and power. Together, they represent a harmonious balance of feminine and masculine energies, illustrating that the sacred transcends binary definitions. (source)

In Yoruba cosmology, the orisha Ọ̀ṣun dances through contradiction—seductive and sovereign, nurturing and destructive. In her, gender is not a limit but a language. The divine doesn’t collapse into male or female—it expands. (source)

When colonial powers arrived, they did more than conquer bodies—they redrew cosmologies. Imposed hierarchies. Rewrote the sacred in their own image. What was once holy became forbidden. And the ones who once stood at the center were cast out.

But power doesn’t vanish. It adapts. It remembers.

Today, the flourishing of Black transgender and gender-expansive life is a revelation. A recognition. A sacred architecture being rebuilt in public view. And what people fear isn’t the visibility—it’s the vibrancy. The truth that wholeness doesn’t need approval to shine.

Naming and honoring these truths is an act of recognition. Of resurgence. Of returning what was never lost—only buried.

I write this not as someone speaking for trans and gender-expansive people—but as someone who honors them, learns from them, and knows that Spirit rises wherever truth is welcome.

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Spirit has always adapted. It traveled in drumbeats and dreamscapes. It etched itself into scar patterns and language. And now—it hums through fiber-optic veins. It slides between screens. It speaks in 1s and 0s because it knows we still need it to speak.

For those the church exiled and the temple ignored, the internet became sanctuary.
Not a perfect one. But one where Black, trans, and gender-expansive bodies could begin again.
Where the altar wasn’t built of marble, but interface.
Where a livestream could hold as much power as a laying on of hands.
Where divinity didn’t ask me to apologize for being complicated.

These digital sanctuaries weren’t born from convenience.
They were carved from necessity.

When physical churches turned us away, we coded new temples.
When sacred texts erased our names, we wrote new ones—in blogs, on social media accounts, in voice notes between chosen kin.
When the systems refused to see us, we built mirrors that could.

Because Spirit has never required a building.
It requires truth.
It requires presence.
It requires a body willing to hold what cannot be defined.

Spiritual technology is more than apps and affirmations.
It’s memory coding.
It’s knowing how to make meaning in exile.
It’s making a ritual out of reclamation.
It’s turning digital space into devotional space—because when your existence is politicized, worship becomes reclamation.

And who better to engineer the future of the sacred than those of us who have always lived in the in-between?

This is the reemergence of the original code.
The sacred rising to meet us in every form we’ve ever taken.

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There is nothing more threatening to a system built on control than the sight of someone it tried to erase—thriving.

To dance in a body they said should be hidden.
To love in a way they said was broken.
To call Spirit into a room and have it show up looking like you.

That is consecration.

Because joy, in its rawest form, is design. It remembers what the world forgot. It restores what doctrine tried to unwrite. It doesn’t just outlive shame—it rewires the frequency altogether.

Black trans and gender-expansive joy is not a side effect of healing. It is the healing.
Not a prize for survival, but a method of it.

This kind of joy doesn’t wait for permission.
It doesn’t ask if its softness will be palatable.
It doesn’t lower its volume to make others comfortable.

It anoints.
It takes up space.
It weaves laughter through the grief and says, “We’re still here. We’re still sacred. We’re still becoming.”

And in witnessing it, I learn too.

As a queer Black woman, I’ve watched how the binary limits not just others, but me.
How the rules about how to be “feminine” or “spiritual” or “good” don’t actually fit the mess and majesty of who we are.
And how the more I deconstruct what I was told holiness should look like, the more Spirit begins to resemble people I was taught to fear.

What if joy is the ceremony?
What if queerness is the prayer?
What if we are the ones building the altar—each time we choose truth over safety, aliveness over assimilation, soul over spectacle?

They don’t ask for answers.
They summon presence.
They open the door to the sacred already breathing beneath our names.

We were never meant to fit inside temples we didn’t build.
We were meant to be the temple.

To remember joy not as indulgence—but as data.
As design.
As divine.

One love, ESS xo

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References

• Wikipedia. Nádleehi – Navajo Cultural Gender Roles.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A1dleehi

• South Dakota Public Broadcasting. The Winkte and the Hundred in Hand.
  https://www.sdpb.org/arts-and-culture/2016-06-06/the-winkte-and-the-hundred-in-hand/

• Rainbow Messenger. Gatekeepers: Gays in the Dagara Tribe.
  https://rainbowmessenger.blog/2018/06/23/gatekeepers-gays-in-the-dagara-tribe/

• Mythopedia. Mawu-Lisa.
  https://mythopedia.com/topics/mawu-lisa

• Taylor & Francis Online / Third World Quarterly. Decolonising Gender: Reimagining the Sacred.
  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01436597.2023.2213171

White Sage, White Spaces

They burned my ancestors’ herbs and spoke our tongues with borrowed breath—then asked for my trust. My Blackness was welcome on the altar, but not in the room.

I was one of the few.
One of the only Black bodies in a room thick with the smoke of stolen plants.
A room lined with crystal grids, white gauze curtains, and dreamcatchers imported from Etsy.
A room where the ritual had been gutted and resold in pastel packaging, and the sacred had been stripped of its memory.
Where spiritual language was fluent, but cultural fluency was nonexistent.
Where “love and light” meant “don’t make it uncomfortable.”
I wasn’t there to be initiated—I was already encoded. My blood carried the blueprint long before the room called it ritual.

When I questioned the absence—of elders, of history, of representation—
I was met with a well-rehearsed dismissal delivered like gospel:
“Maybe this just isn’t the right space for you.”
“Maybe I’m not the teacher you’re looking for.”

No effort to widen the circle. No reflection.
Just an elegant form of exile.

Let’s be clear: representation is not a request—it’s a requirement.
Especially when the ideologies you’re profiting from were once punished.
Especially when the words on your altar come from tongues your ancestors never spoke.
Especially when the wisdom you teach was kept alive by people you never credit.

Because when whiteness repackages ancient practices as intuitive downloads, the Source gets lost—and so does the integrity.

They were right about one thing: they weren’t the teacher for me.
Not because I couldn’t meet their frequency—because they refused to raise theirs.

Because what they offered had no roots—only reach.

They didn’t crave connection—they craved access.
To the power, not the people. To the form, not the function.
They wanted ancestral entry without reverence or relationship.
Practice with no pulse.
Meaning without memory.

And when you center your comfort over someone else’s history,
you’re not holding space—you’re hoarding it.

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Spiritual spaces don’t become exclusionary by accident.
They’re curated—consciously or not—by who is centered, who is credited, and who is kept at the margins.

Even in the most “inclusive” circles, whiteness often remains the default setting.
Wellness brands celebrate cacao but forget the genocide that tried to erase the Maya.
They host sound baths using singing bowls while never once mentioning Tibet.
They perform African drumming they can’t trace—with no ancestral connection, no acknowledgment, just a beat they borrowed and now sell as their own.
And they call it healing, when it’s extraction.

Author and spiritual activist Rachel Ricketts writes in Do Better: Spiritual Activism for Fighting and Healing from White Supremacy that

“Spiritual bypassing is when white folks weaponize spiritual tools to avoid accountability, perpetuate harm, and center their comfort while claiming it’s collective liberation.”

The aesthetics are sacred. The politics remain the same.

And when Black and Indigenous voices do enter the room, we’re often positioned as accessories.
Our wisdom is acknowledged only when it’s been curated, distilled, and made palatable—
Not too angry. Not too mystical. Not too loud.
We’re expected to inspire, not to lead.
Our medicine is welcomed, but our mastery is policed.

A 2023 plenary talk by Dr. Yolanda Covington-Ward at the African and Diasporic Religious Studies Association highlighted how Black and Indigenous spiritual voices are often erased or sidelined in spaces built on their cultural legacies—especially when those voices push beyond aesthetic to reclaim authority.

This is spiritual plagiarism—sacred knowledge rewritten without the authors.
Because in these rooms, proximity to the sacred isn’t the same as permission to teach it—
and yet the mic is often handed to those with the most distance from the Source.

This is how spiritual appropriation works: soft voice, hard silence.
It smiles. It smudges. And it erases.

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For a long time, I thought the problem was me.

Before I ever entered the room, my body had already said no.
But I mistook my refusal as avoidance—because I’d been conditioned to believe that any friction I felt was proof I wasn’t evolved enough to receive the teaching.
I labeled it resistance.
I called it shadow work.

Because when you’re taught to spiritualize your discomfort, you forget how to trust it.

I sat in silence and called it maturity.
I ignored my instincts and called it growth.

These spiritual spaces have the ability to exploit your willingness to override your instincts.
They recode boundaries as blocks and call coercion a rite of passage.
What should be discernment is framed as resistance—
and when you flinch, they tell you it’s your initiation—this is the medicine.

But healing isn’t comfort.
And discomfort isn’t always a lesson.

Sometimes what you’re being told is a lesson is actually a mechanism—engineered to make you doubt your perception so the system stays intact.

“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
— Zora Neale Hurston

That wasn’t growth I was being asked to lean into.
It was spiritual gaslighting.

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I stayed in those spaces longer than I cared to admit.

Not because I didn’t feel the disconnect—
but because for too long, these were the only spaces that even spoke the language of ceremony—even if it was borrowed.

Because spaces where Black and Indigenous people teach our own traditions—fully, unapologetically, without dilution—are still too rare.
Because most altars are built on stolen soil, but few are led by the descendants it was stolen from.

I stayed because I was hungry.
Hungry for memory.
Hungry for meaning.
Hungry for language that sounded like where I came from—even if it came from someone who didn’t.

They invited me to bring my energy, my medicine, my resonance—
but not my questions.
Not my framing.
Not my critique.
They welcomed the symbols, not the system that made them sacred.

And when I spoke—when I asked where the elders were, where the origin was, where the integrity lived—
the answer was silence dressed in white.

Erasure has evolved. It doesn’t wear hoods; it wears hemp.
It sips from copper cups.
It burns sage and says “community” while avoiding everything that would make one real.

I don’t sit quietly anymore—not because I seek disruption, but because I finally trust the sound of my own discernment.

When I teach, I don’t translate.
I remember.
I invoke.
I protect.

Because I am not here to distill wisdom for mass appeal.
I am not here to soften the sacred for palates that refuse to do the work.
And I am not here to ask permission to reclaim what has always been inherited, rightful, and mine.

If a space demands your silence to remain spiritual—
it was never sacred to begin with.

One love, ESS xo

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References

• Ricketts, R. (2021). Do Better: Spiritual Activism for Fighting and Healing from White Supremacy. Atria Books.

• Covington-Ward, Y. (2023). Plenary Talk - African and Diasporic Religious Studies Association.

• Hurston, Z. N. Zora Neale Hurston Official Site.