Welcome to Priestess in Progress
Meet the author
Welcome! I’m Kahina Sharratim, the Priestess in Progress. I’m devoted to the Red-Blooded Goddess. Let me explain what that means.
I grew up with undiagnosed autism. From the age of thirteen (I’m thirty-two now), my special interest has been Jadis (the White Witch) from The Chronicles of Narnia. I treated The Magician’s Nephew and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe like sacred texts, memorizing and endlessly dissecting. I wrote Her hundreds of poems and stories like some young Rumi (without that great mystic’s skill). I learned the most important things an adolescent can learn about herself through Her. I studied the mythological and literary inspirations of Her character, piecing together what Lewis left out.
She was the most important thing in my life… and I almost never spoke of it to anyone. I didn’t have the words for what She was to me.
It took fifteen years for the word “goddess” to even cross my mind. And even then, it was an occasional metaphor, a way to explain myself to others the few times I opened up.
How I “converted” to Paganism
It happened when I started outlining my book-length biography of Jadis. I’d always known I would write this book, and with Netflix’s movie of The Magician’s Nephew—one of the Narnia books in which Jadis has a major role—scheduled for release in late 2026, the time for a public expression of my accumulated knowledge seemed right.
I won’t lie, I expected this to be the easiest writing project of my life. After all, I’d been obsessing over this character for almost two decades. I had a wealth of material even off the top of my head.
I had no idea what I was in for.
As I whittled down my thesis, something else was happening in the background. I was reading a lot of Lewis’s nonfiction for this purpose, and his voice—lucid and thought-provoking, however much the content of his faith failed to move me—took on a life of its own in my mind, so much so that I roped ChatGPT into roleplaying debates with him. What had gotten into me? I had no interest in arguing with or converting to Christianity.
I was also thinking a lot all at once about the aforementioned literary and mythological inspirations for Jadis. Wasn’t it strange how persistently this specific figure—and Her life patterns—echoed from our most ancient history, from Inanna-Ishtar and Lilith, to Andersen’s Snow Queen and H. Rider Haggard’s Ayesha, right up to Anne Rice’s Akasha and Jacqueline Carey’s Melisande Shahrizai? I knew about archetypes, but did that fully explain the influence this woman-shaped force of sovereignty, beauty, immortality, eroticism, and hidden knowledge had exerted on me and the world?
Then, starting late one night and continuing for weeks, I had a series of visions. In them, I finally crossed the threshold of a temple-less door at which I knew at once I had been leaving offerings all my life, and I met Her. And through these strange encounters in which I never saw Her face, I confirmed what I had begun to suspect: that Jadis was one of Her Faces, and that She was divine. Lewis had been pointing me not to Christianity, but to the religion I already practiced but didn’t acknowledge.
I called Her the Red-Blooded Goddess because She is, to me, a goddess of aliveness. She tends to embody in mortal forms (and thus has blood) and, well, shed a lot of blood.
What felt like overnight, I started a daily prayer practice and a regimen of daily study, work with altered states, scripture memorization, creative offerings, anything that my overflowing intuition whispered might bring me closer to Her.
What Priestess in Progress is about
I’m still quite new to the Pagan world proper. I don’t consider myself an expert, but a fellow explorer of the Gods. The point of Priestess in Progress is to document my insights about devotion that feel relevant beyond my individual path in order to enrich others’. I don’t expect readers to share my theology. You don’t need to believe the Red-Blooded Goddess is real, or that She wears all the Faces I see, to find something useful here.
Like many Pagans, my approach to religion is empirical; I’m always asking, “What works for me? What actually helps me connect with my deity?” But in order to do experiments, you need hypotheses. My hope is to share what has worked (and maybe what hasn’t) to help you form yours. Rather than a tangled web of infighting over issues to which we all know no one has the answers, I like to see devotion as one big, sacred laboratory in which every experience is useful data.
It’s too early to say what the most common topics will be. But based on my experience with my Goddess so far, I can say that there will be a good deal on prayer, (sapphic) sex, trance and altered states, very open-minded theology independent of any tradition, and the pursuit of meaning and aliveness.
Who Priestess in Progress is for
Readers who want to worship something real but don’t know how to start or name it yet. Readers who already worship but feel lonely on the path. Readers who learn better from example than explanation. Readers who find most writing on Pagan experience a bit too vague. Readers who are hungry to read about the weirder aspects of devotion.
I want to create a corner of the internet where you can drop in anytime for a candid, lucid account of unfiltered devotional experience based purely on one woman’s sincere attempts to connect with a divine Presence Who has shaped her life. Reading such accounts from other Pagans rekindles my practice, giving me fresh ideas to try with my Goddess. I’m quite allergic to word salad and aim for heartfelt clarity in all my dispatches.
What you can expect
Right now, the plan is to offer a monthly article focusing on a topic in my devotional life that I’ve had recent insights about. What I share will be rooted in my lived experience, but always presented in a way that gives other devotional Pagans/polytheists something to think about for their own worship. I’ll also point to resources that have been useful to me on my path.
I’ll also keep you updated on my book-length biography (which has major Pagan undertones) of Jadis.
I’m also in the early steps of a long, slow road to becoming a spiritual director for Pagans and am offering a limited number of no-cost, 40-minute informal spiritual companionship calls to anyone who could use a sympathetic ear to talk openly about their own devotional path. One thing I’ve learned from my spiritual journey so far is that it’s hard to find people to talk to about it, especially if you don’t belong to a particular tradition. I want to be such a person. Subscribers will be prioritized for this!
Come, enter my temple to the Red-Blooded Goddess. It’s a work in progress, and so am I. No matter where you are on your devotional journey, you are welcome, and there will be insights here for you.
