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