Past Life IV: The Trainee Priestess

Door 33

Part 1

The L-shaped Temple, Byblos, Lebanon

This piece is part of a series about past life regressions. This regression was not conducted by someone else, but instead is the result of solo meditations whilst listening to theta wave meditation recordings. The piece starts with the regression itself and then concludes with some of my thoughts afterwards.

The Regression

I am outside the L-shaped temple in Byblos, Lebanon. What strikes me is the light and the deep blue of the sea. I am a girl, a teenager. I do not know my name but I am a priestess at the temple. I was chosen to be, perhaps because of some special qualities or perhaps because my mother is. I am probably a sort-of apprentice priestess.

The temple belongs to the goddess. I am not 100% sure of this, but it is probably Asherah. She is a beautiful goddess, and her statue stands inside the temple. The temple is dark, like a womb. We light incense before her. That is part of my job. I light the incense and hold it aloft before her. I watch the smoke rise and swirl and in that smoke, I see things. Not visions exactly, more like meditations. It is how the goddess speaks to us. The contrast between the dark, smoky interior and the light, sunny exterior is palpable.

I have a friend whom I am very close with. She is a girl my age and she is also a trainee priestess in the temple. She has dark brown hair and wonderful eyes. We are very close. I think I may be in love with her. Perhaps I see in her what I love so much about the goddess. We go around everywhere together.

I live nearby in a simple house made of stones. The whole town is dominated by the sea which it stands next to. Ships come and go from far-off lands like Cyprus and Egypt. I long to board one of those boats and see those lands beyond the horizon. But I can’t because my job is here at the temple. If I leave, I cannot return and take up my old position. I am standing on the promontory looking out and yearning to board one of those ships. My friend is with me. She is not so adventurous as I am. Perhaps she would like to do the same, but the yearning is not strong with her. She is happier in the role that she has been given. She will always stay in Byblos. I know that I have to make a choice: between her and the temple and my dreams of lands beyond the horizon. I ask the goddess what to do.

I have a vision. It is the middle of the night and either in real-life or in a dream, I walk out of the temple. By the pool in the heart of the city there is a woman weeping. I go up to her. She is very beautiful. She says that her love has been murdered, his body dismembered and scattered around the globe, and she is travelling the world to find the different parts and bring them together again. Only then can he be brought back to life. As she tells me the tale, I realise that she reminds me of the goddess. I realise that this is a message to me: I need to travel to find all the pieces of me. Only when I have discovered them all, will I be complete.

I leave Byblos and my love. We are both distraught. I’m not sure if I ever return but I don’t think so. As to where I go, I think it is Cyprus. I probably die there.

Reflections

This regression was prompted by my friend RD who told me that I had once been a priestess in the L-shaped temple in Byblos. When I visited the site in 2019, I felt an extremely powerful connection to it that I have never fully understood. It prompted me to become interested in the Phoenicians, Near Eastern religion and the Neolithic Era.

The images I have described were powerful and, as with the Victoria and Jocelyn regressions, they felt like me rather than a story. A lot of the initial thoughts stemmed out of how I have found lighting incense in a burner and holding it aloft to a deity in a dark space to be inexplicably powerful, and believe this could be a sort-of memory from this life. However, it could be auto-suggestion.

I feel that the girlfriend in the life is S from this life. However, I am aware that this could be wistful thinking.

The story of the woman by the pool is that of Isis which is associated with that pool in Byblos. Again, this could be autosuggestion or it could be because that story’s association with that location stems from a vision that someone once had there.

I have had a long-standing connection with Asherah as a deity.

The destination of Cyprus could be because I travelled there in 2022. Indeed, when I visited the Neolithic city of Enkomi and also the altar at Pi Gades Tapınağı and in both places I felt a strong connection. Both would have been active at the time of this life.

Conversely, I spoke to Alex Jacoby, my companion on both the Cyprus and Lebanon trips as to why I might have felt such a connection in all three places and his reply was because I am someone who likes a mystery and all three are shrouded in mystery. Therefore, all of this could be my imagination filling in the gaps of the wonderful places that I have visited on my travels.

The journey continues.

Written 01/12/2023, Smallthorne, UK

Copyright © 2023, Matthew E. Pointon

Part 2

Enkomi, Cyprus

This piece is part of a series in which I write down what I saw when I underwent a past life regression guided by Michelle at Heavenly Treasures, Cannock, UK. The piece starts with the regression itself and then concludes with some of my thoughts afterwards.

The Regression

Light. As my eyes adjust, I begin to see that I am in a busy city street. Or, to be more honest, an alleyway, for it is narrow and crowded with traders and people that you can hardly walk down it. I know it to be the city of Enkomi in Cyprus, and I am walking down the street on a mission to buy some herbs and other items for the wise woman whom I live with. I do not know my name, but I do know that I am named after the goddess whom I was born to serve. I understand immediately that I am back in the life that I explored partially during the self-regression done whilst meditating to theta waves. I am a teenage girl, perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old, although possibly younger as people matured earlier back then. I am living around four thousand years ago, around 2000BC. I am wearing simple clothes of rough woven cloth, a full-length skirt tied with a cord around the waist.

Michelle asks me about my life now, but I start telling her how I got there. That I was born into a priestly family in Byblos, but that the lineage goes through the woman. Our job is to serve the goddess and my destiny from birth was to serve in the goddess temple in the city. From around the age of eight, I have served with another girl of a similar age who is my cousin. She was happy in the role but I never was. I used to look out over the sea and wonder about what lay beyond. My cousin used to chastise me for this because she didn’t understand. Then, one evening, whilst I was serving the goddess, she spoke to me. Not actually, but into my mind. I was standing or kneeling before her altar and incense smoke was calling up and she told me to leave. I argued that I could not as it was my job to serve her there, but she insisted. So, I disguised myself as a boy, stowed away in a ship and sailed away.

I arrived on the shore of Cyprus, near to modern-day Famagusta or ancient Salamis, and walked to the nearest city which was Enkomi. Enkomi blew me away with its great walls and busy streets. I walked through it in awe, but then, sitting in a shop or stall, I saw a woman. Her eyes met mine and although we did not speak, we both knew that we were ordained to meet. I went to her and she made me a drink, a herbal tea. I became her helper/apprentice. I live with her in her room and I am learning her trade. She is a wise woman or a witch. She makes enough money to live by creating healing potions, doing prophecies and other such tasks. People come to her because they trust her.

Michelle asks about my home, but I correct her. The simple room in which we live is not my home even though I am comfortable; instead it is like an inn where I am staying on life’s journey even though I have bee there for years. She makes me aware that my destiny in life is not to stay in Enkomi but to follow my path to the goddess. I sense that I will stay with the wise woman until either she dies or we both understand that I must go away, but this will only happen once I have learnt what I need to.

I talk about the temple. Most people go to the temple for the services that the wise woman provides and, indeed, we too often go there. The goddess resides in the temple, of this I have no doubt. I know this because I was brought up in a temple and in was in that temple that the goddess spoke to me, so I know that she resides there. However, because of my upbringing, I also know that other things matter there too: the temple is worldly, pride and money and hierarchies reside there. The temple is real but tainted. Sometimes the wise woman and I go out of the city in the evening before they lock the gates to spend the night in the wilderness. People say that we are mad because wild animals or brigands could attack or kill us, but we both trust in the goddess and are always safe. We lie on our backs and look at the billions of stars and in them I see the goddess outlined.

Michelle asks whether I miss my family at all. I reply that I do miss them but I do not regret leaving them as I knew that this was my pathway. However, sometimes, I do go down to the harbour and send messages via the sailors to give to the temple in Byblos to tell them that I am safe, but whether they have received them, I know not, for I have never received a reply.

I also talk about my female cousin who was my closest friend. I understand that, intime, she is now in-line to become the high priestess of the temple in Byblos. I miss her sometimes, but understand that we have different destinies.

Michelle now moves me on to the time of my death. I am no longer in Enkomi but, instead, I am back in Byblos in the goddess temple where I lived as a child. My cousin — who is now the high priestess — is there, as too are the younger generations of our family who are in-line to carry on the tradition. They crowd round me and love and protect me as I die, and they recognise me as a holy woman. However, I know that I never lived there. Indeed, the goddess told me that death was approaching and so I returned there specifically to die. Nor too did I live in Enkomi. In the interim, I travelled and lived in other lands. I suspect in and around modern-day Israel but I this was unclear. Whatever the details, I die happily, in the place where I should be, having done what I should have done and followed my own path.

I have a feeling of completion and being ready to leave this life.

Now Michelle asks me to leave the room and return to the corridor.

Reflections

This was my second regression of my second visit to Heavenly Treasures. It was a regression that I both anticipated and fought against. Beforehand, I wondered if I would return to the Byblos/Enkomi life that I had glimpsed in the self-regression discussed at the top of this piece, and I almost fought against this happening because I felt that would just prove regressions are all one’s imagination. However, after fighting it for the first regression, I gave in and accepted it for the second and it flowed freely. Interestingly, the door was ajar when I reached it. Michelle said that means that I had accessed this life before. The sceptical me argues that I’d worked out what the open or closed door signifies, and so I’d made sure the door was ajar in my mind since it had to be.

What is interesting is that this regression focusses on a different period of the life of the trainee priestess and that, none of the details in both regressions contradict one another. However, since I had started to explore this life in fiction — there is a part-written story about her — and so I may have incorporated some of this into my “memories”. Similarly, I had recently read a travel book on Cyprus in which the author visits Enkomi and I wonder if that affected the regression. Ultimately, as with all the regressions, it is chicken and egg. Do I read these things and compose those stories because of some latent memories of a past life, or does my imagination compose a past life because of the influences in my life? The truth is, one can never say which is the truth for certain, although Michelle was adamant that she believed my regressions were genuine because of the amount of detail I could recall. One fact does remain which argues in favour of the regression being genuine, is that when I was in both Enkomi and Byblos, I felt incredible strong feelings in both places which I have not felt in other ancient sites such as Jerash, Salamis, Djemila, etc. Indeed, my entire trip around Cyprus was extremely spiritually charged, and only a couple of days before going to Enkomi, I had had a mysterious encounter with someone I believe to be Al-Khidr and, possibly, also Aphrodite. Also, on the day we visited Enkomi, I was adamant that I wanted to visit that site more than any of the others, and the taxi driver didn’t even know it existed and no guide books rated it, yet I insisted and when I arrived there it blew me away despite the ruins being meagre.

Whatever the truth of the regression, what I believe without any doubt is that this regression, like all of them, is emotionally true, and that it is interesting that, as with all the other ones, the theme of frustration with one’s lot and either choosing or not choosing to follow the path in life presented to you by society predominates (and that following one’s own path brings peace and contentment).

I intend to complete the story I am writing about this past life.

I wrote these notes the day following my regression (which was on 12/05/2025).

The journey continues.

Written 13/05/2025, Smallthorne, UK

Copyright © 2025, Matthew E. Pointon

Part 3

This piece is part of a series about past life regressions. This regression was not conducted by someone else, but instead is the result of solo meditations whilst listening to theta wave meditation recordings. The piece starts with the regression itself and then concludes with some of my thoughts afterwards.

The Regression

I try to focus my mind on what I saw in the regression the previous day and then move on from there. I get into this very easily and find my mind wanting to concentrate on the life of my former self in Enkomi more than when she goes travelling afterwards. I begin to discover that the nights spent looking at the stars are significant. I learn more about the journey from Byblos. I learn that I did dress as a boy and stow away but I was found soon after leaving the port and the sailors only laugh and say, “We’ve got another one!” They all assume I am a boy and put me to work, but one of them pays a special interest in me. He works out that I am a girl but promises to look after me and not tell the others. At night, when we are both on the deck, I ask him how they don’t get lost in this vast emptiness with no map to guide them, but he replies, “How can we get lost when the map is unfolded above us.” He starts to show me how to read the stars and use them for navigation.

I return to Enkomi and the wise woman says that it is time for me to go and face my fears and that the nights spent outside of the city walls were merely a preparation for this. She explains that Enkomi is on an island and I am to find myself by walking across it. She says that we know it is an island because everyone tells us that it is, that ships have sailed around it, but until we witness this for ourselves, we do not truly know and to truly know something we have to live it personally. She sends me off outside the city.

I walk across the plain where there are well-established roads and trackways and people are settled. To my right are high mountains but I steer clear of these. I head for the famous shrine in the west of the island and witness animals being sacrificed to the male bull god there on the altar. The goddess does not require blood sacrifice and seeing and smelling the death of the animals disgusts me.

I walk onwards to the promontory at Vouni and drink in the view there. Behind me are mountains and I begin to realise that I fear these. I continue walking around them, along the coast, but then I realise that rather than avoiding, I need to actually face my fear and so I walk into them. I have no map but use the stars for guidance as the sailor taught me.

In the high pastures I come across a man. He has dusky skin and black curly hair. He appears as a shepherd but I see in him a god. We connect and lie together. I lose my virginity and feel an intense pleasure there on the mountainside. Later we part and I never see him again.

I walk on, out of the mountains, down towards Paphos where there is a shrine to the goddess. I begin to realise that she is portrayed slightly differently in different places and that her name changes too but she is the same goddess. I walk on, confident, but feeling that my purpose has been fulfilled. Like Isis in the story I heard in the temple in Byblos as a child, I travel around picking up different pieces of myself in different places.

I return to Enkomi and meet with the wise woman again. She knows that I am now a woman and tells me that I must choose. The intense pleasure and joy of sex and relationships is a path I can follow. I can find a man and be with him, but it will come at a cost. Or, I can choose the other path which means following the goddess fully. I worry that I might be pregnant from my encounter with the shepherd, but she merely laughs and tells me not to worry, and that getting pregnant first-time is rare. She reminds me of all the couples who come to here for potions who are “fucking like rabbits every night and still not making any babies”. However, she warns me that if I do have sex regularly, the chances are that I will fall pregnant.

I realise that the sexual path is not mine for this time and she tells me that she has taught me what I need to know and that I must leave. I protest that I cannot because I have no money and she presents me with a large sum in gold that she has saved. I am overwhelmed by her kindness as I know she has saved it for many years from all the work she has done. She kisses me like a mother and I leave, knowing that we shall never meet again.

I go to the harbour and decide to head for Egypt. In truth, I don’t know where to go, but I choose there because that was where Isis and Osiris from my childhood story were from and so I want to see their temples and homeland. I board a ship and head to Egypt.

I sail up the Nile. I am staggered by how dry and arid Egypt is. I have never seen anywhere like that. I visit the temples and pray to Isis. I realise that she too is the goddess but I feel like this country is not mine. I do not belong there like I did in Cyprus and Byblos, I am merely an observer. It is all too alien, but I marvel at the cities and temples and pyramids.

Then the meditation ends and I return to this life.

On 15/05/2025 I again return to this life during theta wave meditations. It was less clear this time, but I picked up the life again in Egypt. The initial impression is, again, how dry and arid this land is. I become fascinated by this and so leave the Nile to head into the desert. I walk into the desert using the stars as my pilot and stay there. I’m unsure how long, but probably for a few nights. There I feel the intense aloneness, only me and the Divine, nothing else. I return to the city, probably Thebes.

I walk down the crowded streets and feel divorced from the people, like they are a separate race, simpler and less developed than me. I am superior because I have seen and done things that they have not. I have taken risks and been to places that they would never dare. Pride fills me but I think it is spirituality. In their temples, I am unimpressed. It is all show, this obsession with death is just about controlling the sheep out there. I am beyond them.

I fall ill. Desperately ill. A local woman, a widow, takes me in. despite not knowing me and us not really sharing a common tongue, she nurses me and does not demand any money. I lie there drifting in and out of conscience. I have chaotic, irrational dreams, images of my family, of Byblos, of Enkomi and the wise woman flash through my mind, none of it making sense. However, out of the chaos I realise something: I am homesick, I miss my family. The woman nurses me as my mother once did when I was a child. I need to return home.

I start to recover and she keeps on nursing me. She is a widow and her one child, a son, now sails on ships going up and down the Nile trading. She is lonely. After I recover, I stay with her. We become friends despite the language barrier. She loves to teach me how to cook and to share her life.

However, when I feel that it is time to leave, she changes. She begs me to stay. Tells me how she needs me. I stay for a while but begin to grow increasingly uneasy and feel trapped. I try to leave again and she changes her tone. Calls me ungrateful for all the care I received, how I stayed when I needed something but now I was deserting her when she gave her all for me. I realise that she is using me to try and plug the gap in her own soul. One night, when she is sleeping, I leave. I sneak out and go down to the river to take a ship headed north. I feel awful, like a complete shit who has abandoned her friend, but at the same time I know that I have to. My duty in life is to serve the goddess by following my own path and this is an alien country and not my destiny. On the boat I pray to the goddess for her, that she may find healing and grow comfortable in her own skin and not rely on someone else to fill the hole in her life.

Then the meditation ends and I return to this life.

On 28/05/2025 I again return to this life during theta wave meditations. This time I was unsure of what the focus of my meditations would be as I wanted to further explore this past life but also connect with the eternal essence of my friend S as I was writing an essay about this at the time and had been discussing the issue with several friends. I decided to let the goddess decide and so concentrated on the small incense burner statuette that I was using which I had purchased from Heavenly Treasures several months earlier. Picking out the curve of her thighs, I found myself transported to a bedroom overlooking the sea. I was in ancient Sidon and the beautiful girl that I was looking at was my lover. I think she was also S from this life in another incarnation. I was the Trainee Priestess again and I saw that, after my experiences in Egypt, I had decided that I needed to return home, so I had taken a ship from the mouth of the Nile to Sidon. Quite why I hadn’t gone straight to Byblos, I am unsure; perhaps there were none, or perhaps I felt compelled to alight at Sidon. Anyway, once in Sidon I had seen this girl and the moment our eyes met, I felt an instant connection, akin to the one that I had felt when I’d first encountered the Wise Woman in Enkomi. We were fated to meet. She was part of my destiny. I tried to explore where we met, and I first thought it might have been in the narrow streets of the city, but then I got the feeling that this was not the case and, instead, I had met her bathing a stream where the women of the city went in the foothills a kilometre or so east of the city. I fell in love with her and vice versa.

She was similar to me in age but in a very different situation. She had money and was living alone in a house in the city. The bedroom where I first glimpsed her naked body in my regression was in that house. I think her parents had died somehow, perhaps in an epidemic, which is why she was alone and had money. Whether she had siblings, I cannot say for sure but I think not. She did, however, have uncles (or an uncle, I am unsure as to whether there was one or more) who had some sort of control and responsibility for her.

We became friends and lovers. Previously, I had never thought of being with a woman in that way since I was attracted to men, but I now realised I was attracted to both sexes. One reason why I felt safer lying with her is because of what the Wise Woman had said to me about choosing my path and the path of marriage and family being quite distinct from my spiritual journey. I felt comfortable with her because I knew there was no chance of pregnancy as having a child scared me greatly. We spent some idyllic weeks or months together as friends and lovers. I lived with her and started to make a little money of my own by providing some of the services that the Wise Woman provided in Enkomi to the citizens of Sidon.

However, the dark clouds slowly started to gather. Her uncles were pressuring her to get married saying that a girl of her age should be a mother and not alone with no one to care for her. They were not overly impressed with me since I was an outsider and my trade was suspicious but they allowed us to be friends since they had no inkling we were also lovers.

She did not want to marry but felt duty-bound to do so. I pleaded with her not to, but she gave in to the pressure and married a man of her uncles’ choosing and I was present at the wedding.

I continued to live with them afterwards, but her husband did not like me. He was a rich, selfish, self-important and cruel man. He distrusted me and, I think, feared me, because of my trade and my closeness to the goddess. He tried to poison his wife against me and then, to pressure me to leave. He was also abusive and started to berate and hit her. I left the house when it became intolerable, but stayed in Sidon practising my craft so as to be close to my love. She diminished before my eyes and, in the end, I sense she died. I am unclear as to how this happened as the meditation ended around this point; it may have been suicide, the result of his violence, or just an accident or illness. All I know is that I felt the unfairness of it acutely, I was angry with him for destroying her, with her for her weakness, and with the goddess for allowing it all. I was also confused because in her I clearly saw the goddess, so why would She allow such indignities to be heaped upon herself?

Then the meditation ends and I return to this life.

The goddess incense burner

On 30/05/2025 I again return to this life during theta wave meditations. I find myself in the goddess temple in Sidon asking why. Why had my love died, before her time and miserably tied to an abusive husband. I tried to focus my mind on what she had died of and the answer I received was that she’d died in childbirth, giving birth to their first child which, I think, also died. The husband blames me for his wife and child’s death, calling me a witch and the citizens are getting suspicious. I leave, both out of fear for my safety but because there is no reason for me to stay in that place anymore now that my love is gone. I decide to travel into the wilderness like I did when I was in Egypt, so I wander south and inland, passing the Sea of Galilee before entering the Wilderness of Judea. There I stay, starving myself, almost dying of thirst, a female mystic and hermit. I recall looking at my hands as I sit on the rocky ground and marvelling at how dirty and skeletal they are. The local nomads give me food and water and this keeps me alive.

And then, one day, she comes to me. The goddess sits before me on the sand, as real as you or I, taking the form of my dead love. She asks why I am in this place and tells me to leave saying that I am pledged to her and she, being a goddess, dwells in fertile places, not barren wastelands. I ask her why and she tells me that there was a purpose to it all. I cannot fathom any purpose and I tell her so. She says that the purposes are many and different for different people. Perhaps there is a purpose for her husband or her uncles, but these I shall never know. However, for me, the purpose was clear. She came to me in the form of my love in order that I may know her better. Before the goddess was always abstract, the feminine in general, a terracotta or stone statue in a temple. But now I can see her for real, she will always take the form of my love for me and I will be able to call on her more easily. The purpose for me is that my love has brought me closer to the goddess who is no longer abstract to me. She orders me to leave the desert and return to the fertile places.

Then the meditation ends and I return to this life.

On 02/06/2025 I again return to this life during theta wave meditations. I find myself in a village or small town which, I suspect, is somewhere near to Jericho. I have walked back to civilisation from the wilderness and this is the first settlement that I encounter. The people there see how emaciated I am and one family welcomes me into their home. They feed me and nurse me back to health and, in time, I settle in the village and get my own dwelling. I partake in the village life, helping in the fields and with the crafts that the women practise. I also practise some of my own craft as a wise woman, but there is not enough work in this small place to make an income of it.

The family that took me in are devotees of the goddess and they have a small image of her in their house. Here she is called Asherah and she is the spouse of the main god. I start to wonder at how she takes on a slightly different form and name wherever I travel, whilst her essence remains the same. When I wish to worship her, I go to a small pool on the edge of the village. After my time in the desert, water is now a precious wonder for me and I sense its sacredness.

I immerse myself in village life and, perhaps for the first time in my existence, I live as a “normal” person. I start to notice the children and love spending time with them. I wonder about what I would be like to have a child of my own. One of them looks like — or is — Saja, a young girl I met whilst travelling in Algeria. She is very cute and playful.

With Saja in Tunisia

The locals here see the goddess as a mother. The lady in the family who took me in explain that when she is in need, she doesn’t feel that she can approach the male god, but the goddess loves her and cares for her like a mother. This makes me think about my relationship with my own mother who was never there for me because she was always obsessed with the duties of her role in the temple. I realise that, unlike the children here, I never had a proper childhood since, from the day I was born, I was destined for temple service and so treated differently from the other children. This realisation angers me a little and makes me glad that I left Byblos. I am happy in the village although, perhaps, not quite fulfilled. I stay there for several years.

On 03/06/2025 I again return to this life during theta wave meditations. I am still in the village and I find regressing harder than usual. I feel like I need to decide something and I don’t know what to do. Should I stay in the village forever or leave? At one point in the regression I decide to leave and walk towards the coastal cities but then it doesn’t feel right. I think this is an option but I don’t actually take it. I go to the pool to seek guidance from the goddess. I struggle to find it but at one point she comes to me as my late love. “Are you human or divine today?” I ask her, and she smiles and replies, “Both.” I ask her why she let herself be married to such an awful man and die in that way and she replies it had to be. I am angry that she is so passive and I am angry at myself for not knowing what to do next.

The following day I return to the life whilst in the steam room at Fenton Manor. I try to resolve the problem of what to do. I see the village women with families and want one of my own. I have not made love since coming to the village. It is too small a community to risk going with a woman, and although the men ask for my hand, I do not consent. But I am getting old, perhaps around twenty-five which is old here.

There is a man. He is old and wise. He is either extremely holy or evil and deceptive, I cannot work out which. Although not a priest, he is held in high esteem in the village. He comes to talk with me. His tone is friendly but his words are harsh and loaded. He says that even though I profess myself to be a devotee of the goddess, I am the most unfemale woman there is. I am solitary and I travel alone, going on quests and caring only for myself. Women, he argues, exist to nurture and support. I should be a wife and a mother, bearing a child and serving a husband. I argue that all women are different, but he cuts me down. “Even the goddess has a husband whom she serves,” he explains. “Do you think yourself better than her?” I find both truth and lies in his words and I am confused. Maybe I should settle down and be a woman as he says, but then I feel that maybe I shouldn’t. I don’t know and go to pray by the pool for guidance.

During theta wave meditations later that evening, I return. I realise that I am repressing something: my childhood. I ran away from Byblos and I am scared to return. But, if I need feminine guidance then who better than my real mother. And if I am to marry and start a family, then why not there? I can return and they will all forgive me, I will retake my old position in the temple and the men will queue up to marry me such will my status be.

Or I will be rejected forever…

Ultimately, I realise I need to return to Byblos to know my future. After all, in that temple is where the goddess first spoke to me. So, I leave the village and walk there. I pass through Sidon and look up at the window of the room where once I made love.

Approaching Byblos, I don a cloak with a hood and carry a staff. Disguised as a man, I enter the city. I make my way to the goddess temple and there is a crowd there as if it is a festival. I ask what is happening and they say it is a memorial service for the former temple priestess who died forty days earlier. I realise this is my mother. I enter the temple and view my cousin, the new high priestess, fulfilling the sacrifices and rituals. People talk about the old priestess and her daughter who ran away to Cyprus. They say that she died broken-hearted because she had had a vision that her daughter would return to the temple one day, but she never did. I weep but do not show this to anyone.

I stay all day, weeping and mourning. At the end of the day the temple empties and I remain. The high priestess comes over to me and asks me to leave. I take out some coin and ask if I may stay awhile with the goddess alone. She looks at me curiously and asks, “Do I know you?”

I shake my head. “No, you do not know me,” I reply, honestly, for the child she knew bears no resemblance to the woman that I now am. She takes the money and leaves me. I kneel before the goddess and beseech her to guide me. I am angry that I missed my mother’s death. If only I had left the village earlier! Then the goddess speaks to me. She tells me that I shall be a mother and I shall have a child, but not in the usual way. Instead, like I came to the wise woman in Enkomi, a successor will come to me. I have been trained and I have a mission to fulfil. I understand. My fate is not in Byblos where they will know me as the should-have-been priestess, but instead a city where I can practise my trade like the wise woman did in Enkomi. I write out a note for the high priestess explaining who I was and that the prophecy had been fulfilled and then I leave, going down to the harbour and climbing aboard the first ship to set sail

Then the meditation ends and I return to this life.

On 05–06/06/2025 I again return to this life during theta wave meditations and also whilst sitting in the steam room at Fenton Manor. I find it much more difficult to gain clarity and my thoughts bounce about. On 05/06/2025, I find myself in a cave. I am somewhere near to the city where I now live and I come to the cave for religious purposes as it is a good place to commune with the goddess. I am told that my apprentice will come and I am to wait for her and continue my work as a healer and witch.

The following day, in the steam room, I see my apprentice. She is not what I expected, fair-skinned and with short, boyish, brown hair. She is a tom boy and I am reminded of the comments of the old man in the village about what is a girl and what is not. She has arrived by ship from afar but I know nothing more of her.

That evening (technically 06/06/2025), during the theta wave meditation, it becomes clear. I took the first ship out of Byblos trusting in the goddess to guide me. The ship was bound for Sidon, the one city I wanted to avoid because I was scared I would be remembered and victimised by my love’s abusive husband or her uncle. But when I arrive there, someone recognises me. She is one of my old customers and she gives thanks that I am back because I was much missed. She tells me that the husband and the uncle have both died in a plague and that the husband was known in the city as an evil man and many felt for her when she married him. I use the last of the wise woman’s savings to buy the small house by the sea that I once shared with my love, and then I begin my trade once again, making potions, healing, listening and loving.

I stay there a long time, but when I need a break I go to the cave in the mountains. Eventually, after many years, my apprentice, the tom boy glimpsed previously, turns up. Our eyes meet in the square just as mine had with the wise woman in Enkomi, and I know that she is the one. It transpires that she is from the north, perhaps Illyria, and that she ran away from home to escape a forced marriage to a man she did not like. I welcome her and start to train her in the ways of the goddess.

The journey continues.

Reflections

This regression was prompted by writing up the regression of the day before and wanting to explore this life further. There is little to add to past reflections on this topic except for one thing: when I was in the mountains and saw the shepherd, I felt lust and arousal for him. This was curious as I have never before felt this when looking at a man. Literally, men do nothing for me in that way and yet then, seeing through the priestess’s eyes, I desired him. Can that be put down to the imagination? I am far from sure.

As for other aspects, I had just read Colin Thubron’s ‘Journey into Cyprus’ which could have influenced things, and on my own travels I visited the Bronze Age shrine at Pigadhes, the ruined Persian palace at Vouni, and explored the Trodos Mountains. I did feel drawn to Bronze Age sites on the island but again, chicken and egg.

Regression undertaken 13/05/2025 and written up immediately afterwards.

Regarding the regression of 15/05/2025, there is little to reflect upon save that I have long held an interest in the Desert Fathers and early Christian monasticism which could have fed into this. The regression was written up immediately afterwards.

Regarding the regression of 28/05/2025, I find it interesting how my two desires prior to the meditation almost converged into one and I discovered why I felt that S was connected to this life. Also intriguing was how the curves of the goddess statuette gave me the image which launched the regression. I was drawn to that statuette the moment that I saw it, having been looking for a focus for my goddess meditations for some time but not having found anything suitable before. Also interesting is that it is erotic and the initial scene was erotic and yet it, somehow, did not feel erotic, just beautiful and divine.

Interestingly, regarding me meeting her bathing in the stream in the foothills, this scene actually came to me several years earlier when writing a story about Jezebel. In the story I imagined the Israelite king meeting his bride-to-be as she bathed in a stream in the foothills beyond Tyre. The scene was identical which, again, either means that the scene was a dim memory or that my imagination conjured up the scene when exploring this life. The regression of 28/05/2025 was written up the following day.

Regarding the regression of 30/05/2025, there is little to add except that the goddess statue from Heavenly Treasures helped form the image of me praying in despair in the Sidon goddess temple which kickstarted the regression. The theology of the goddess becoming real and no longer abstract by incarnating as my love, reflects my theological musings on Christ. The regression of 30/05/2025 was written up the following day.

Regarding the regression of 02/06/2025, there is little to add except that I had been reading about Jericho being an ancient city populous at that time and about the cult of Asherah. The justification given by the village woman for following the goddess is exactly what Thao, my ex-wife gave for her devotion to Quan Am. The link with the little girl in Algeria is obvious. The regression of 02/06/2025 was written up the following day.

Regarding the regressions of 03–04/06/2025, there is little to add except that these did not come easily, the sense of having to make a decision for her was palpable. Considering the book ‘Same Soul, Many Bodies: Discover the Healing Power of Future Lives through Progression Therapy’ by Brian L. Weiss that I’d read a year earlier, I wondered if I, in this future life, could impact her in that past life. RD had stated that she believes that all lives occur simultaneously, and that time is a worldly construct. If this is the case then maybe I can influence her decision-making. Maybe one’s guardian angel is a dude doing a past life regression somewhere.

No reflections to add from the regressions on 05–06/06/2025. Written up in the day of 06/06/2025.

The journey continues.

Written 13/05 to 06/06/2025, Smallthorne, UK

Copyright © 2025, Matthew E. Pointon