"Priestess" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Romulus, was a vestal virgin, who lived in the kingdom of Latium about four hundred years after the death of AEneas. A vestal virgin was a sort of priestess, who was required, like the nuns of modern times, to live in seclusion from the rest of the world, and devote their time wholly and without reserve to the services of religion. They were, like nuns, especially prohibited from all association and ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... gods, of the Beneficent gods, of the Father-loving gods, of the Illustrious gods, of the Paternal god, and of the Mother-loving gods, being (as by law appointed): and the prize-bearer of Berenice the Beneficent, and the basket-bearer of Arsinoe the Brother-loving, and the priestess of Arsinoe the Father-loving, being as appointed in the metropolis (of Alexandria); and in (Ptolemais) the royal city of the Thebaid? the guardian priest for the year? of Ptolemy Soter, and the priest of king Ptolemy the Father-loving, and the priest ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... this Town a certain High Priestess of the Socially Elect and a Queen Bee of the Cotillion Tribe. Whatever she said, Went. No one could lay claim to any Class in this Town until he had seated himself at one of her Dinners, with the $28,000 Gold Service in front of him, ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... not divided into acts; it has merely four and twenty scenes—upon the battle-field of Troy. The characters are Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons; her chief leaders, Prothoe, Meroe and Asteria, and the high priestess of Diana. Of the Greeks there are Achilles, Odysseus, Diomede and Antilochus. Much of the fighting and other action is not seen, but is reported either by messengers or by present ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... woman, is the heart of all. But she, as priestess of the visible earth, Holding the key, herself most beautiful, Had come to him, and flung the portals wide. He entered: every beauty was a glass That gleamed the woman back upon his view. Shall I not rather say: each beauty gave Its own soul up to him who worshipped ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... of the chase was identified with Artemis in Galatia, where she had a priestess Camma, and also in the west. At the feast of the Galatian goddess dogs were crowned with flowers, her worshippers feasted and a sacrifice was made to her, feast and sacrifice being provided out of money laid aside for every animal taken in the chase.[126] Other goddesses ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... postscript of the letter, words which astonished the young girl, but at the same time reassured her. The hours passed away very slowly, but the time fixed, however, arrived at last. As punctual as the priestess Hero, Louise lifted up the trap-door at the last stroke of the hour of two, and found the king upon the top steps, waiting for her with the greatest respect, in order to give her his hand to descend. The delicacy and deference shown in this attention affected her very ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... Delphi, through the oracular utterance of his priestess, pronounced Socrates the wisest of men. Of him it is related that he said with sagacity and great learning that the human breast should have been furnished with open windows, so that men might not keep their feelings concealed, but ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... ice-caps retreated . . . reembodied on the Baltic coast or the shores of the North Sea . . . sleeping for ages in one of the Megaliths, to rise again a daughter of the Brythons, or of a Norse Viking . . . west into Anglia to appear once more as a Priestess of the Druids chaunting in a sacred grove . . . or as Boadicea—who knows! But no prose can regenerate that shadowy time. I see it—prehistory—as a swaying mass of ghostly multitudes, but always pressing ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... vii. 82.]—whom the Marischal has carefully brought up, and who refuses to marry away from him,—rather stupid, not very pretty by the Portraits; must now be two-and-thirty gone] is perfectly calculated to be the Priestess of it! Yet he dawdles away his day in a manner not unpleasant to him; and I really am persuaded he has a conscience that would gild the inside of a dungeon. The feats of our bare-legged warriors in the late War [BERG-SCHOTTEN, among whom I was a Colonel], accompanied by ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... which she is experimenting: holding, meantime, a grim intuition of their foolishness, or so it seems to me. 'The science' made it easier for her to seek her ancestors in a foreign country with only a hundred dollars in her purse; for the Salem priestess proclaims the glad tidings that all the wealth of the world is ours, if we will but assert our heirship. Benella believed this more or less until a week's sea-sickness undermined all her new convictions of every sort. When she woke in the little bedroom at O'Carolan's, she says, her heart ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... rage split the darkness. From the side of the fire where the women sat darted Esle, the High Priestess, a bloody bit of liver in her hand. Following her, and snarling like an enraged cat, came one of the maidens of the tribe. The aged hag, Esle, whose duty it was to declare to the tribe the will of Degar Astok, ...
— B. C. 30,000 • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... protection of Jutta, and there is no place in the country where birds congregate to such an extent, and birds of passage remain so long. Jutta is perhaps the same as Lindu (vol. ii. p. 147). Near Heidelberg is a spring called the "Wolfsbrunnen," where a beautiful enchantress named Jutta, the priestess of Hertha, is said to have had an assignation with her lover; but he found she had been killed by a wolf, the messenger of the offended goddess. Whether there is any connection between the German and Esthonian Jutta I ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... child, 'the priestess of pity and vengeance,' Mr. Stead calls her. You are too young to know about her, but I remember reading of her in 1872, during the Commune troubles in France. She is an anarchist, and she used to wear a uniform, and shoulder ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... balls, the shouldering, the striving, the worship of money, the gambling, the self-advertisement—all the abject vulgarity of it? And my set, the artistic, soulful literary set, you said was the worst of all: you actually described the high-priestess as looking like a 'decomposing cod-fish,' and added by way of a final insult that you thought the ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... that, naturally. But somehow it was a little difficult to get it through his own doubtless too-thick skull. He'd often dreamed of power. Being a priest or a priestess, for instance—now that meant something. At least people paid attention to you if you were a member of the hierarchy, favored of the Gods. But, Forrester knew, there was no chance of that any more. Either you were picked before you ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... offerings had been disinterred from the sand in front of the building. The soil at that place is profusely strewn with fragments of images wrought in clay, representing portions of the human body. I was myself so fortunate as to fall in with the head of a priestess, a beautiful piece of workmanship, moulded according to the most exact proportions of Grecian art. It had formed part of a brazier that had served to burn perfumes on the altar near which I found it. I happened to use part of that vase to hold some live coals, and notwithstanding ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... refreshment-room to stand in the doorway at the sound of the piano, had gone away quietly in couples after a few minutes. The only persons who seemed to follow the music were Mary Jane herself, her hands racing along the key-board or lifted from it at the pauses like those of a priestess in momentary imprecation, and Aunt Kate standing at her ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... Spangenberg were the bane of the Lutheran Church. According to Dorner, the evangelical theologian, the Brethren helped to save the Protestant faith from ruin. "When other Churches," says Dorner, "were sunk in sleep, when darkness was almost everywhere, it was she, the humble priestess of the sanctuary, who fed the sacred flame." Between two such doctors of divinity who shall judge? But perhaps the philosopher, Kant, will be able to help us. He was in the thick of the rationalist movement; and he lived in the town of Knigsberg, where ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... of ancient Greece in Phocis, at the foot of Parnassus, where Apollo had a temple, and whence he was wont to issue his oracles by the mouth of his priestess the Pythia, who when receiving the oracle used to sit on a tripod over an opening in the ground through which an intoxicating vapour exhaled, deemed the breath of the god, and that proved the vehicle of her inspiration; the Pythian games were ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Brown's; so she appears with her arms and hands full, to the infinite detriment of her dress and general effect. Some arrangement might be devised whereby such trophies could be dragged in the train of the high-priestess ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... in such majesty, finding its own aptest words by its unconscious instinct, that the aged minister was presently aware of a preternatural power at his side. Was this woman a witch, genius, demon, or the very priestess of God, he asked. ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... abyss pressed in upon the charmed circle of Hellas. For Apollo, who in one of his aspects is a figure so typically Hellenic, the ever-young and beautiful god of music and the arts, was also the Power of prophetic inspiration, of ecstasy or passing out of oneself. The priestess who delivered his oracle at Delphi was possessed and mastered by the god. Maddened by mephitic vapours streaming from a cleft in the rock, convulsed in every feature and every limb, she delivered in semi- articulate cries the burden of the divine message. Her ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... Later on we all fell in love with her; but for the present we were simply amiably fraternal. We were united to her by a common enthusiasm; we were fellow-celebrants at her ancestral altar—or, rather, she was the high priestess there, we were her acolytes. For, with her, filial piety did in very truth partake of the nature of religion; she really, literally, idolised her father. One only needed to watch her for three minutes, as she sat beside him, to understand the depth and ardour of her emotion: ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... this heifer as having "a very intelligent face" and "a reflective cast of character." He certainly paid Margaret Fuller herself no such tribute, but thus early in his Brook Farm experience let appear his thinly veiled contempt for the high priestess of transcendentalism. Even earlier his antagonism toward this eminent woman was strong, if it was not frank, for he wrote: "I was invited to dine at Mr. Bancroft's yesterday with Miss Margaret Fuller, but Providence had given me some business to ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... Maerchen, as invaluable fossils for those who will stoop to pick them up and study them. Back in the far past we can build up the life of our ancestry—the little kingdom, the queen or her daughter as king maker, the simple life of the royal household, and the humble candidate for the kingship, the priestess with her control of the weather and her power over youth and maid. In the dimmest distance we can see traces of the earlier kindred group marriage, and in the near foreground the beginnings of that fight ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... of old, joined to a brain which rebels against the divine inspiration; broken lyre, mute instrument, whose tones the world of to-day, if it heard them, could not understand, but yet in whose depth the eternal harmony murmurs imprisoned; priestess of death, I, I who feel and know that before now I have been Pythia, have wept before now, before now have spoken, but who cannot recollect, alas, cannot utter the word of healing! Yes, yes! I remember the cavern of truth and the access of revelation; ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... great City where the walls Shake, and the streets with ghastly faces throng'd Do utter forth a subterranean voice, Among the inner columns far retir'd At midnight, in the lone Acropolis. Before the awful Genius of the place Kneels the pale Priestess in deep faith, the while Above her head the weak lamp dips and winks Unto the fearful summoning without: Nathless she ever clasps the marble knees, Bathes the cold hand with tears, and gazeth on Those eyes which wear no light but that ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... South, and in particular the grand old Commonwealth which they inhabited, he stated, had not long sat among the ruins of her temples, like a sorrowing priestess with veiled eyes and a depressed soul, mourning for that which had been. Like the fabled Phoenix, she had risen from the ashes of her past. To-day she was once more to be seen in her hereditary position, the brightest ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... son of that resplendent Muse, Who gleams, high priestess of sweet scholarship, Still slumber on, and every bard refuse To touch a harp or move a ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... however, took kindly to him, invited him to join the Society for Psychical Research, and two years after its formation were instrumental in sending him to India to investigate the methods of Madam Blavatsky, the high priestess of the theosophic movement which was then winning adherents throughout ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... placing of their goddesses rather than their gods—of the priestess rather than priest—in the forefront of their worship signifies! Very plainly it reflects honour on the sex to which the supreme deities belong. We need no clearer proof of the high status of women ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... direct orders of the black despots in the land, young Ralestone got de Roche and his daughter away on his ship. Her maid chose to remain among her people. Ralestone hints that she was a sort of priestess of Voodoo and that it had been her dark powers which had protected the lives of ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... that of Jupiter at Dodona and that of Apollo at Delphi, the latter holding chief place. At Delphi there was a temple to Apollo built over a chasm in the mountain side from which came sulphurous fumes. A priestess took her seat on a tripod over this chasm, and the answers she gave to inquiries were supposed to be dictated by the god. These answers were almost always unintelligible, and even when interpreted by the priests were ambiguous and of little use. Nevertheless, the Greeks ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... didst thou, fair mount, when Greece was young, See round thy giant base a brighter choir; Nor e'er did Delphi, when her priestess sung The Pythian hymn with more than mortal fire, Behold a train more fitting to inspire The song of love than Andalusia's maids, Nurst in the glowing lap of soft desire: Ah! that to these were given such peaceful shades As Greece can still bestow, though Glory ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... her go at last and she took her place at the piano. Her hands fell softly on a group of dreamy ascending chords. Her face, then, in a long pause, took on a rapt expectancy and power. She was the priestess waiting before her altar for the descent of the god, glorious and dreadful. And it was as if with the chill and shudder of a possession that, breathing deeply, drawing her shoulders a little together, she lifted her hands and played. She became the possessed and articulate priestess, ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... whose smell is so powerful that he is never cooked within doors. Blood-raw he proved to be on this occasion, so that Oldbuck half threatened to throw the greasy sea-fowl at the head of the negligent housekeeper, who acted as priestess in presenting this odoriferous offering. But, by good-hap, she had been most fortunate in the hotch-potch, which was unanimously pronounced to be inimitable. "I knew we should succeed here," said ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... if the Eagle still waved its wings over their city. Even the very old women still have a degree of beauty, because when the colors are all faded, and the skin wrinkled, the face retains this dignity of outline. The men do not share in these characteristics; some priestess, well beloved of the powers of old religion, must have called down an especial blessing on her ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... stands display'd, Each silver Vase in mystic order laid. First, rob'd in white, the Nymph intent adores, With head uncover'd, the Cosmetic pow'rs. A heav'nly image in the glass appears, 125 To that she bends, to that her eyes she rears; Th' inferior Priestess, at her altar's side, Trembling begins the sacred rites of Pride. Unnumber'd treasures ope at once, and here The various off'rings of the world appear; 130 From each she nicely culls with curious toil, And decks the Goddess with the glitt'ring ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... Thou art a being that I am doomed never to meet with in the world below." "Peace:" whispered an unknown voice; "injure not thy species by such a remark: the object before thee is called by a name that is familiar to thee—it is 'CANDOUR.' She is the handmaid of Truth, the sister of Virtue, and the priestess of Religion." ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... wreath of myrtle. It befits me to adorn myself with the symbol of youthful innocence, since I now wander in Nature's Paradise. Hitherto all that held us together was love and passion. Now Nature has united us more firmly with an indissoluble bond. Nature is the only true priestess of joy; she alone knows how to tie the nuptial knot, not with empty words that bring no blessing, but with fresh blossoms and living fruits from the fullness of her power. In the endless succession of new forms creating Time plaits the wreath of Eternity, and blessed is he ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... The friezes decorating the huge circular flower receptacles set around the base of the rotunda and at intervals in the colonnade are by Ellerhusen. Eight times repeated on the lofty columns within the rotunda is "The Priestess of Culture," a conventional but pleasing ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... radiance on the broad side of a flitch of bacon or were reflected back from well-scoured utensils that gleamed from the midst of obscurity. A strapping Flemish lass, with long golden pendants in her ears and a necklace with a golden heart suspended to it, was the presiding priestess of the temple. ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... uttered incoherent words, which the old women proclaimed to be prophecies. Much later I discovered that they had put me in this terrible condition by means of opiates. That is how they wanted to make me a Khouan priestess. ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... it is that has so twined itself around the hearts of mankind that it has lived in classic story for ages and gotten into the folk-tales of more than one European people! Hero is a priestess of Aphrodite, who lives at Sestos, on the Thracian coast; Leander, a youth, whose home is at Abydos, on the Asiatic shore, beyond the Hellespont. The pair meet at a festival of Venus and Adonis and fall in love with ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... many a forest glen, With frantic gestures rude, The red Dahcotah men. But onward sped the bark Until it reached the height, Where mounts the angry spray And raves the water's might And whirling eddies swept Into the gulf below The smiles of infancy And youth's maturer glow; The priestess of the rock And white-robed surges bore The wronged and broken heart To ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford
... understood of the proceedings or of the scope of the society nobody could fathom. She sat, during the meetings, bolt upright, with folded arms, as if she were in school, her bright, beady eyes fixed unblinkingly upon Mrs. Arnold, whom she seemed to regard as a species of priestess in charge of ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... ceremony much in the manner of their ancestors. Clearly, the custom we have of breaking a bottle of wine is derived from the libations of the ancients. In most instances, at the present day, the ship is named at the moment she is launched by a young lady, who acts the part of the priest or priestess ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... priestess, died soon after a vain attempt to save her father, condemned to death as a traitor by Aulus Coecina. Her epitaph was discovered many years ago; ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... And I laughed—"You expected what is called a 'singular' woman—one who makes herself 'singular,' adopts a 'singular' pose, and is altogether removed from ordinary humanity. And of course you are disappointed. I am not at all a type of the veiled priestess." ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... Amulius, left his kingdom, according to the custom, to Numitor, the elder. But Amulius drave out his brother, and reigned in his stead. Nor was he content with this wickedness, but slew all the male children of his brother. And the daughter of his brother, that was named Rhea Silvia, he chose to be a priestess of Vesta, making as though he would do the maiden honour; but his thought was that the name of his brother should perish, for they that serve Vesta are ...
— Stories From Livy • Alfred Church
... your wife refuses to give the receipt for a ham or a gooseberry dumpling. She values her receipts, not because they secure to her a certain flavour, but because they remind her that her neighbours want it—a feeling laughable in a priestess, shameful in a priest; venial when it withholds the blessings of a ham, tyrannical and execrable when it narrows ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... the priestess lifted her hand above her head and when she withdrew it, the sun and planets remained to form a diadem just above the intricate braiding of her dull red hair. As she moved into the secret way, the five orbs swung with her, and in the darkness there the sun glowed richly, ...
— The Gifts of Asti • Andre Alice Norton
... source, nor in a Spanish text of the play, to explain this. Perhaps (as may be guessed from the line "From their tender years go thither" in the previous scene) the character is an acolyte or novice priestess played by a child. She ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... Forrester and Lilias Fay set out upon a ramble over the wide estate which they were to possess together, seeking a proper site for their Temple of Happiness. They were themselves a fair and happy spectacle, fit priest and priestess for such a shrine; although, making poetry of the pretty name of Lilias, Adam Forrester was wont to call her LILY, because her form was as fragile, and her cheek almost ...
— The Lily's Quest (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hue, his wasting flesh and his sunken eyes confirm the statement;—is he a madman, or is he not? he should be raising a family and enjoying matrimony; but he lets this fair-faced lovely girl wither away; he might as well be bringing up a perpetual priestess of Demeter. And now you understand my feelings when one set of people kick me about or waste me by the bucketful, and the others clap irons on me like ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... the prose of everyday life! When Poetry is hounded from every other nook of the earth which the Maker of it meant should be one vast, sublime epic, she will find an inviolable retreat under the Lares and Penates guarding the ingleside, and crown as priestess forever the wife and mother who makes and ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... glad," said the cook-lady, with the rapt expression of a high-priestess. "Allenby told me how you arranged for a hot spoon. It was beautiful of ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... (or, as the negroes call them, camps) on the island, consisting of from ten to twenty houses, and to each settlement is annexed a cook's shop with capacious cauldrons, and the oldest wife of the settlement for officiating priestess. Pursuing my walk along the river's bank, upon an artificial dyke, sufficiently high and broad to protect the fields from inundation by the ordinary rising of the tide—for the whole island is below high water ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... great-grandchild, the son or daughter—as might turn out—of her granddaughter, Maisie Costrell, the only daughter of Widow Thrale. For this young woman had ordained that "Granny" should officiate as high-priestess on this occasion, and we know it is just as well to give way ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... attentive. Evoe! my mind trembles with recent dread, and my soul, replete with Bacchus, has a tumultuous joy, Evoe! spare me, Bacchus; spare me, thou who art formidable for thy dreadful thyrsus. It is granted me to sing the wanton Bacchanalian priestess, and the fountain of wine, and rivulets flowing with milk, and to tell again of the honeys distilling from the hollow trunks. It is granted me likewise to celebrate the honor added to the constellations by your happy spouse, and the palace of Pentheus demolished with no light ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... also with love; she was born to be a priestess of love's religion. She had waited for this hour—that she might take his hand, and lead him into the temple, and teach him the ritual. It was a ministry that she entered upon with the joy of all her being. "Ah, let me teach you how ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... indeed, which is, perhaps, one of the typical misunderstandings between men and women. The man, impatient of painful thoughts and recollections, eager to be quit of them as weakening and unprofitable, determined to silence them by the pleasant clamor of his own ambitions and desires; the woman, priestess of the past, clinging to all the pieties of memory, in terror lest she forget the dead, feeling it a disloyalty even to draw the dagger from the wound—between these two figures and dispositions there is ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... virgin priestess, who fell to the lot of Achilles among the spoil of a victory, but whom Agamemnon carried off from him, whereupon he retired to his tent and sullenly refused to take any further part in the war, to its prolongation, in consequence, as Homer relates, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... was almost solemn in its dignity; for the moment that fair young girl looked and spoke like a priestess. ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... the woman before her. Mrs. Comerford had grown much softer. She was still a remarkable-looking woman, the wreck of stately beauty. In her black garments, which fell about her in flowing lines, she had the air of a priestess. Her age showed in her thinness, which was almost emaciation, and her face was wrinkled and heavily lined. Yet her smile was more ready than Lady O'Gara remembered and her eyes quieter. They had been very blue eyes once upon a time—her ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... way, are universally considered the best stories of Indian life ever written. You will perhaps remember also reading of the astonishing performances of Mme. Blavatsky, who visited the United States some years ago as the high priestess of Theosophy. Her supernatural manifestations attracted a great deal of attention at one time, but she was finally exposed and ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... have needed a greater than the Pythian Priestess to have given me hopes of either in Florence. And yet, as we pursued our way, by the Borg' Ognissanti towards the river, I could not but be struck by the subdued aspect of the citizens, who, far from being the lively impertinents they had been reputed, went gravely and silently about their business, ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... neglect of Woman was a reaction on the manners of Etruria, where the priestess Queen, warrior Queen, would seem to have been so usual ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... our priestess took herself and her Prayer-book out of the kitchen. I joined Naomi, entering the room by the garden door. She met me eagerly. "I am not quite easy about something," she said. "Did you tell me that you left ...
— The Dead Alive • Wilkie Collins
... a moral and even a religious ceremony." He turned to an illustration of a woman's rights convention; "observe with what rapt attention the audience of that heathen temple watch the inspired ravings of that elderly priestess on the dais. It is even this kind of sacrilegious performance that I am told thy nephew Don Jose expounds ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... And so, step by step, she was being led to sue in forma pauperis to the very man whom she had spurned when he sued in like form to her. That temptation of having some mysterious private treasure, of being the priestess of some hidden sanctuary, and being able to thank Heaven that she was not as other women are, was becoming fast too much for Rose, as it is too much for most. For none knew better than the Spaniard how much more ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... emitted stupefying vapors, that were thought to be the inspiring breath of Apollo. Over the spot was erected a splendid temple, in honor of the oracle. The revelation was generally received by the Pythia, or priestess, seated upon a tripod placed over the orifice. As she became overpowered by the influence of the prophetic exhalations, she uttered the message of the god. These mutterings of the Pythia were taken down by attendant priests, interpreted, ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... "Priestess of Set, great seeress and magician of the old world in whom once my spirit dwelt, send forth your Ka, your everlasting Emanation, to help me. Crush this black hound. ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... round eyes, shy and fierce at the same time, came to rest with an adoring awe. The smell of him being extremely offensive to all this cleanly tribe, and especially to A-ya and Grom, who were more fastidious than their fellows, A-ya had taken advantage of her office as priestess of the Shining One to establish a little fire within the precincts of her own dwelling, and by the judicious use of aromatic barks upon the blaze she was able to scent the place to her taste. And the Bow-leg, seeing her ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... us one of the plaintive ballads of the old country, till we forgot to listen to the sobbing and the trampling of the engines, and till all sights and sounds resolved themselves into a temple of sentiment round a charming priestess chanting low anthems. She would leave us early to go to her babies. She would leave us throbbing with mock heroics, undecided whether we should cry, or consecrate our lives to some high and noble enterprise, ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... state relations. And, apart from the sort of galvanism notoriously applied by Hadrian, surely the fathers could not have seen Plutarch's account of its condition, already a century later than our Saviour's nativity. The Pythian priestess, as we gather from him, had by that time become a less select and dignified personage; she was no longer a princess in the land—a change which was proximately due to the impoverished income of the temple; but she was still in existence; still held in ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... celibacy of the clergy and the withholding of the cup from the laity. Shall the clergy marry or not?—that was the moot point; and the "Bottle of Tent Wine," or the clergy, who kept the bottle to themselves, alone could solve it. The oracle and priestess of the bottle were both called Bacbuc (Hebrew for "bottle").—Rabelais, Pantag'ruel, iv., ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... sabbaths have I attended within it; or upon Rumbles Moor, or on the summit of Pendle Hill, or within the ruins of Whalley Abbey. Many proselytes have I made; many unbaptised babes offered up in sacrifice. I am high-priestess to the Demon, and thy ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... if truth had for the first time found a perfectly translucent medium. It was not so much that she said rare things, but her very silence was eloquent, and there was a great deal of it. Her girlhood had in it a certain dignity as of a virgin priestess or sibyl. Yet her hearty sympathies and her healthy energy made her at home in daily life, and in a democratic society. To Kate, for instance, she was a necessity of existence, like light or air. Kate's nature was limited; part of her graceful ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... she withdrew a little within the curtained archway, and, placing the crimson-covered book of destiny upon an inlaid table, brought forward a piano stool, and seated herself thereon, as a priestess ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... oath. Lady Jane Grey put down her breviary and took up Plato. Marguerite of Valois laughed outright. Hypatia put a green leaf over Charlotte, with the air of a high-priestess, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... the maiden than in that of Ivan. Nathalie carried back with her into the gray Petersburg Institute such a host of flagrant dreams as kept a dozen chums about her through the long twilights of as many afternoons. For the damsel was an erratic priestess of Eros; and, at this dream-age, she and her comrades gave to the technique of forthcoming flirtation a patient analysis that promised adequate devastation among the courtier ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... to chance or fate to amuse the beings whom she has herself assembled within her halls. Nonchalance is the metier of your modern hostess; and so long as the house be not on fire, or the furniture not kicked, you may be even ignorant who is the priestess of the hospitable fane in ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... Lola," murmured Kilfane. "Of course, you know who it is? This, my daughter," turning the sleepy glance towards Rita, "is our officiating priestess, Mrs. Sin." ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... sternest way, that I was always to return to myself, to be my own priest, pupil, parent, child, husband, and wife. All this I did not understand as I do now; but this destiny of the thinker, and (shall I dare to say it?) of the poetic priestess, sibylline, dwelling in the cave, or amid the Lybian sands, lay yet enfolded in my mind. Accordingly, I did not look on any of the persons, brought into relation with me, with common ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... afterward threw a decanter at the head of a confederate for mentioning her name in a barroom. The over-dressed mother of a pupil whose paternity was doubtful had often lingered near this astute Vestal's temple, never daring to enter its sacred precincts, but content to worship the priestess from afar. ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... sisters, the Gorgons, who dwelt in the Far West, beyond the stream of ocean, in that cold region of Atlas where the sun never shines and the light is always dim. Medusa was one of them, the only mortal of the trio. She was a monster with a past, for in her girlhood she had been the beautiful priestess of Athene, golden-haired and very lovely, whose life had been devoted to virgin service of the goddess. Her golden locks, which set her above all other women in the desire of Neptune, had been her undoing: and when ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... de Bromsart had been waited upon like a divinity by many a priestess in the form of a maid. It had been dressed and shampooed and treated by artists and adepts, the hours of brushing alone if put together would have made a terrific total. The result was perfection, and even now, after all she had gone through, it shewed scarcely disarrangement, ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... genius, ran a dazzling career of a dozen years or so in Cambridge and Boston, and then her light seems to have gone out. She came to the surface, with other newness, in the Transcendental era; she was the priestess of its mysteries; when that movement ebbed away, her day was over. This is the impression one would gather, if he had only current oral traditions of ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... off by Phenecian merchants. She that was sold into Greece, settled in the forest of Dodona, where great numbers of the ancient inhabitants of Greece went to gather acorns. She there erected a little chapel at the foot of an oak, in honour of the same Jupiter, whose priestess she had been; and here it was this ancient oracle was established, which in after times became so famous. The manner of delivering the oracles of Dodona was very singular. There were a great number of kettles suspended ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... the fires of Thessalian incantations, their ideal for some image of the goddess of all-conquering desire. The Sophists of the antique world would have read her story charactered in every lithe line, in every appealing motion, and saluted in her the priestess of sheer appetite, for whom the gods were dead, indeed, yet living in their material form—Dionysus as wine, Aphrodite as the act of love, ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... falls within the superintendence of my cousin Lucretia is a pattern of industry. In fact, I consider her the very priestess of the American system, for, with her, the protection of manufactures is even more a passion than a principle. Every here and there, over the estate, may be seen, rising in humble guise above the shrubbery, the rude chimney of a log cabin, where all the livelong day, the plaintive ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... passage into the outer chamber; and the illusion was of walking behind a golden-haired Madonna to some shrine of Innocence. Her perfume was like incense; her manner perfect reverence. She passed into the cave where the two dead bodies lay like a high priestess performing a rite. ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... real and living belief in that fixed order of nature which sends social disorganization upon the track of immorality, as surely as it sends physical disease after physical trespasses. And of that firm and lively faith it is her high mission to be the priestess. ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... effeminate—"If he was offended with nature for making him a man, and not a woman;" and the affirmation of the Pedasians, from your friend Herodotus, that, whenever any calamity befell them, a prodigious beard grew on the chin of the priestess of Minerva. You ever thought a man in woman's disguise a profanation—a woman in man's a horror. The fair sex were never, in your eyes, the weaker and the worse; how oft have you delighted in their outward grace and moral purity, contrasting ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... Tiber, far from the city's tumult, My cradle stood; it was a quiet home! A sister much beloved lived with me there, A chosen vestal from her childhood days.— Then came a coward to our distant valley;— He saw the fair, young priestess of the future— ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... about the gods, had been seized upon, and put to death, if he had not fled away immediately. Nor need we at all wonder that they thus treated such considerable men, when they did not spare even women also; for they very lately slew a certain priestess, because she was accused by somebody that she initiated people into the worship of strange gods, it having been forbidden so to do by one of their laws; and a capital punishment had been decreed to such as introduced ...
— Against Apion • Flavius Josephus
... with Arkesilas at his triumph thou mayst swell the favourable gale of song, the due of Leto's children, and of Pytho. For at Pytho of old she who sitteth beside the eagles of Zeus—nor was Apollo absent then—the priestess, spake this oracle, that Battos should found a power in fruitful Libya, that straightway departing from the holy isle he might lay the foundations of a city of goodly chariots upon a white breast of the swelling earth, and might fulfil in the seventeenth generation ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar
... Being the priestess, she, naturally demands acolytes; but she'll let you know that she holds the prior place. The tent is so fixed that she sees nothing beyond your hands; so there's absolutely no delusion." He laughed once more. Then suddenly he lowered his voice and slackened his steps. ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... had on her, as on most sleep-wakers, a distinguished magnetic effect. We thus see why the priestess at Delphi, previous to uttering her oracles, shook a laurel tree, and then seated herself on a tripod covered with laurel boughs. In the temple of Aesculapius, and others, the laurel was used to excite sleep ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... cloak and hood of the period—which she had put on during the cloudy morning. Her tall strong figure did not bend in the wind, and the schoolbooks she carried in her hand broke the straight line of her figure only to heighten the priestess effect that ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... the danger, the bane, the alarming rivalry, involved in this priestess of nature whom he makes a show of despising. From the gods of yore she has conceived other gods. Close to the Satan of the Past we see dawning within her a Satan of ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... goes to the chest of drawers, and adores the portrait there with feelings that are beyond all expression. She does not kiss it or press it to her breast, or shew it any mark of bodily affection; but she takes it in her hands and elevates it like a priestess.) ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... the great, born to restore The crown that once his injured grandsire wore. This prince a priestess of our blood shall bear; And like his sire in arms ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... "The Priestess of Culture," by Herbert Adams, one of the best-known of American sculptors, eight times repeated, we felt, had its rightful place up there and blended into the general architectural scheme. But some of the other pieces of statuary might have ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... wide doors into the broad hall, up the grand staircase, through the luxurious rooms goes the high Priestess of the Temple of Love. It is a lonely house. For it is still in a state of social siege. So far as Harvey is concerned, no one has entered it. So ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... voice return through the desert waste,—to enter the temple and find nothing but ruins and desolation,—to lay a sacrifice on the altar, and see no fire from heaven descend in token of acceptance,—to stand the priestess of a lonely shrine, uttering oracles to the unheeding wind,—is not such too often the doom of those who have looked to fame as their heritage, ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... that there are saints of different orders; are there not, Mary? and nobody supposes that the Franciscans and the Dominicans agree very well together. Dr. Thorne does not belong to the school of St. Proudie, of Barchester; he would prefer the priestess whom I see coming round the corner of the staircase, with a very famous ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... of each ward or quarter, is ancient, and can be traced to prehistoric times. When Servius Tullius enclosed the city with his walls, there were twenty-four such altars, called sacraria Argeorum. Two facts speak in favor of their remote antiquity. The priestess of Jupiter was not allowed to sacrifice on them, unless in a savage attire, with hair unkempt and untrimmed. On the 17th of May, the Vestals used to throw into the Tiber, from the Sublician bridge, manikins of wickerwork, in commemoration ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... the other, while statues stood between. The long rows of columns were lost in the dim distance. In the middle of the temple was placed a high altar, and all the scene was wrapped in the haze of incense which arose from golden bowls. The High Priestess sang a song of mystic beauty in which the High Priest and others joined, and then the Priestesses danced to ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... use their own jargon—and that, not in the name of revolutionary and incendiary politics, but in the name of a religion of charity, love, and peace—to speak as they speak. There, too, would be Adrienne de Cardoville, the type of elegance, grace, and beauty, the priestess of the senses, which she deifies by refining and cultivating them. I need not tell you of her wit and audacity; you know them but too well. No one could be more dangerous to us than this creature, a patrician in blood, a plebeian in heart, a poet in imagination. Then, too, there would be Prince ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... sign except a blush over a sly allusion to some one who had been "attentive." If you had stolen a look into the workbasket or the secret bureau-drawer, you might have found a treasured note, a bit of ribbon, a rosebud, some token of tenderness or of friendship that was growing old with the priestess who cherished it. Did they not love flowers, and pets, and had they not a passion for children? Were there not moonlight evenings when they sat silent and musing on the stone steps, watching the shadows and the dancing gleams on the swift river, when the air was fragrant with the pink and the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the bored world bowing to her feet because she brought it, along with name and wealth, so fresh a spirit, so pure a beauty. There was a certain autocratic old Aunt of her mother's, a sort of awful high priestess in the inmost shrine of the sacred elect; this Begum, delighted with her young kinswoman, ordered the rest of her world to be likewise delighted, and the world agreeing with her verdict, Mary Virginia fared very well. She was feted, photographed, and paragraphed. ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... known all, I should have given grandmother some trouble in getting me started. As it was, I was helpless, and she—dear woman!—led me along by the hand, resisting, with the reserve and solemnity of a priestess, all my inquiring ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... and the male officiants are only their deputies (p. 121); in one important state, Khyrim, the High Priestess and actual head of the State is a woman, who combines in her person sacerdotal ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... religion of Dea. Sometimes, lost in her sense of love towards him, she knelt, like a beautiful priestess before a gnome in a pagoda, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... is laid among the Druids, in Gaul, after its occupation by the Roman legions. In the first scene the Druids enter with Oroveso, their priest, to the impressive strains of a religious march which is almost as familiar as a household word. The priest announces that Norma, the high priestess, will come and cut the sacred branch and give the signal for the expulsion of the Romans. The next scene introduces Pollione, the Roman proconsul, to whom Norma, in defiance of her faith and traditions, has bound herself in secret marriage, and by whom she has had two children. ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... 'proconsuls' is a rhetorical plural, just as e.g. in Euripides (Iph. Taur. 1359) Orestes and Pylades are upbraided for 'stealing from the land its images and priestesses' ([Greek: kleptontes ek ges xoana kai thuepolous]), though there was only one image and one priestess. ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... of vinegar and pickles. On the stove the big dishpan, in which the jelly glasses and fruit jars, with their tops and rubbers, bobbed about in hot water. In the great granite kettle simmered the cooking fruit Molly Brandeis, enveloped in the familiar blue-and-white apron, stood over it, like a priestess, stirring, stirring, slowly, rhythmically. Her face would be hot and moist with the steam, and very tired too, for she often came home from the store utterly weary, to stand over the kettle until ten or eleven o'clock. But the pride in it as she counted the golden ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... mother and son reaped the reward of their mutual forbearance. There was a night and a day when Paul became a boy again in his mother's hands, and she took the place that was hers in Nature. She was the priestess acquainted with mysteries. He followed her, and hung upon her words. The expression of her face meant life and death to him. The dreadful consciousness passed out of his eyes; tears washed it out as he rose from his knees by Moya's bed, and his mother kissed ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... that it-seems highly probable that the worship of female deities was in the main confined to the women of the community, while the men worshipped the gods. This distinction extended even to the priesthoods where the wife of the priest of a god was the priestess of the corresponding goddess. Such a state of affairs is doubly interesting in view of the pre-eminence of female deities in the early Greek world, which has been so strikingly shown by Miss Jane Harrison in her recent book, Prolegomena to the ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... hundred picked warriors of the Six Nations under Thayendanegea, besides the little band of Wyandots led by the resolute Timmendiquas. "Indian" Butler was in general command of the whole, and Queen Esther was the high priestess of the Indians, continually making fiery speeches and chanting songs that made the warriors see red. Upon the rear of this extraordinary army hung a band of fierce old squaws, from whom every remnant of mercy ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... her habit to walk in the cool of the day. Or, rather, there were two terraced temples, one dedicated to Fate like that in the underground city of Nyo, and the other to Love. Of the temple to Fate she told me her father had been the High Priest, and of the temple to Love she was the High Priestess. ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... ignoring this ominous suggestion, "thou thinkest, when she is gone, to be queen in her place, or to rule as high priestess through this White One." ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... That she shall play in,—and 'tis not begun: Therefore from rising sun to setting sun There flit before her half-formed images Of what I am, and in all things she sees Something of mine: so single is her heart Filled with the worship of one set apart To be my priestess through all joy and sorrow; So sad and sweet she waits the certain morrow. —And yet sometimes, although her heart be strong, You may well think I tarry over-long: The lonely sweetness of desire grows pain, The reverent life of longing void and vain: Then are my dream-smiths mindful of my lore: ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... legitimate only the "positive" knowledge which science affords. For the emotional and ethical needs of man, he offered "the religion of humanity," with the service of mankind as its worship and woman as its priestess. Spencer, equally discarding the supernatural as matter of knowledge, relegates the distinctively religious emotion to awe before a supreme power wholly inscrutable to man. He sets himself to formulate so far as possible ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... In this way they would be brought up in the fear of God. I am no idle prattler: I ask you not to cast my words to the winds. I would not think you so rude if I did not daily hear it. Every housefather is a priest in his own house, every housemother is a priestess; therefore see that you help us to perform the office of the ministry in your homes as we do in church. If you do, we shall have a propitious God, who will defend us from all evil. In the Psalm [78, 5] it is written: 'He appointed a ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... set the table," said Anne, in the tone of a priestess about to perform some sacred rite in honor of a divinity. "We'll have a big vaseful of wild roses in the center and one single rose in front of everybody's plate—and a special bouquet of rosebuds only by Mrs. Morgan's—an allusion to 'The Rosebud ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery |
