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More "Priestess" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... or twice, in a delightfully mischievous spirit, amused herself by flouting those very social ordinances of which she is an acknowledged high priestess. When wars, strikes, and Governments are forgotten, it will still be remembered how, some years ago when she was a few months younger than she is now, she appeared in her box at the opera on a MELBA (and therefore a tiara) night wearing a necklace ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... noontide of her womanhood, and immolated in this house of perennial mourning, making vain oblation of her youth, her beauty, the rich wine of life that coursed so lustily through her being, upon the altar of a memory whose high priestess was only ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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 the ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford
... that theological creed, but in a 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
... mocking smile, though, as he stood an instant silently weighing one thing against another. The colonel was patiently waiting his motion; Mrs. Ellison sat watching him from the sofa; Kitty moved about the room with averted face,—a pretty domestic presence, a household priestess ordering the temporary Penates. Mr. Arbuton opened his lips to say farewell, but a god spoke through them,—inconsequently, as the gods for the most part do, saying, "Besides, I suppose you've ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... 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 Athene knew of the frailty of her priestess, her vengeance was indeed ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... numerous black and red statues inscribed with the name of Ramses II., but many of which were probably not really erected by this monarch. Here there was also found a standing statue of the Governor of Ethiopia, a priest and priestess of the twenty-sixth dynasty, and many other monuments of the greatest historical interest. The hall itself was ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... stretch of charity, may be described as the model of a boat, the others bearing calves, which, curiously enough, are represented, like the great bulls of the frescoes, as in full gallop. At the other end of the panel a priestess pours a libation into an urn standing between two Double Axes, with birds perched upon them. Behind the priestess is a woman carrying over her shoulders a yoke, from which hang two vessels, while behind her, again, comes a ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... and their eyes met in the gloom. Barbara thought she had never seen anything more marked than the tragic intensity of the other woman's face. Julia might have been a young priestess, the problems of the world ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... Tories, were present, and eight 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 and ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... should attempt the Indian ocean? Whether he should enter Babylon, when the augurs denounced impending danger? Whether Cicero, to appease the wrath of Marc Antony, should burn all his works? The subjects in the second class are more complex. A priestess was taken prisoner by a band of pirates, and sold to slavery. The purchaser abandoned her to prostitution. Her person being rendered venal, a soldier made his offers of gallantry. She desired the price of her prostituted charms; but the ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... 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 the ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... were not the very highest craft and mystery of social life," said I. "I admit that our sex speak too unadvisedly on such topics, and, being well instructed by my household priestess, will humbly suggest the following ideas ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... with which nature hath bedecked all females, or hath at least instructed them how to put it on; lest, through the indelicacy of males, the Samean mysteries should be pryed into by unhallowed eyes: for, at the celebration of these rites, the female priestess cries out with her in Virgil (who was then, probably, hard at work on ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... me in indulgent words as these, who knows but that, like burning Sappho, I might have sang as well as loved? Who knows but that the golden gates of the Eden of immortality might have opened to admit the wandering Peri to her long-lost home? I might have been the priestess of a shrine of Delphic celebrity, and the world have offered burning incense at my altar. I might have won the laurel crown, and found, perchance, thorns hidden under its triumphant leaves. I might,—but it matters not. The divine spark is undying, and though circumstances may smother ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... had thus been spent, when there was a commotion in the village, and it was announced that a person of importance was approaching, no less than the high-priestess of Pele, if not Pele herself, as ...
— The Voyage of the "Steadfast" - The Young Missionaries in the Pacific • W.H.G. Kingston
... woman. Julian glanced at a girl who watched him from the corner of the street. He knew that Cuckoo looked each night at men as that girl looked at him. He knew it, yet he felt that he did not believe it. For to him she was dressed already in the fillet of some priestess, in the robes of one tending some strange and unnamed altar. She woke in him a little of the uneasy fear and uneasy attraction that a creature whom a man feels to be greater than himself often wakes in him. That evening, while Julian ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... inspiration of pure thoughts, and her protection of their chastity. Those of them, who distinguished themselves above the rest, by superior graces of performance, received rewards not only from the priestess of Diana, but from their own parents. Nor were the young men but curiously inquisitive, as to who particularly excelled on these occasions. Distinction in these dances was a great incentive to love, and ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... of drums and bamboo flutes; and turning to look, I see the musicians, three men, seated upon the matting, and a young girl with them. At another sign from the Guji the girl rises. She is barefooted and robed in snowy white, a virgin priestess. But below the hem of the white robe I see the gleam of hakama of crimson silk. She advances to a little table in the middle of the apartment, upon which a queer instrument is lying, shaped somewhat like a branch with twigs bent downward, from each of which hangs a ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... 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
... we first put in the share. Many things have happened since," he said, "but once more the harvest means a great deal to both of us. Miss Lorimer—and we are now more fortunate, Ralph, than we were then—you will imagine yourself an ancient priestess, and bless the soil for us. That always struck me ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... alone make us happy, and procure for us honor, power, love, and constancy? Ah! Joseph, have you not made me the miserable, heartless creature that I am? Can you reproach me that your teaching has borne such good fruit? I am happy to be the priestess of wealth, and grateful for what you ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... 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
... sensation she created, 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. Her portrait, painted by ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... 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 the boon of ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... came round, and brought its roses, and the apple-trees blossomed for the third time since the commencement of our story; and the robins had rebuilt their nest, and began to lay their blue eggs in it; and Mary still walked her calm course, as a sanctified priestess of the great worship of sorrow. Many were the hearts now dependent on her, the spiritual histories, the threads of which were held in her loving hand,—many the souls burdened with sins, or oppressed with sorrow, who found in her bosom at once confessional and sanctuary. So many sought ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... desire with spilth of nard. The bistred rims above the fard Of cheeks as red as bergamot Attest that no shamefaced delays Will clog fulfilment, nor retard Full payment of the Cyprian's praise Down to the last remorseful jot. Hail priestess of we know not what Strange ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... 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 witnesses of a ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... 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 ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... central superstition of the islanders. The young Princess Kapiolani was converted to Christianity through the teaching of the missionaries. Grieving for the ignorance and misery of her people, she resolved to visit the burning mountain of Kilauea, and dare the dreaded Pele to do her worst. There a priestess met her, threatened her with the displeasure of the goddess if she persisted, and prophesied that she and her followers would miserably perish. In defiance of this threat, she and her Christian followers went down to the edge of the burning lake, ...
— Harper's Young People, March 2, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... 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 ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... as it were, bursting with indignation, she looked like a youthful priestess denouncing ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... thousands of Hawaiians. "I have been deceived," he said, "I have deceived others, I have lived in darkness, and did not know the true God. I worshipped what was no God. I renounce it all. The true God has come. He speaks. I bow down to Him. I wish to be His son." The priestess, his sister, came soon afterwards, and they remained here several months for instruction. They were then about seventy years old, but they imbibed the New Testament spirit so thoroughly that they became as gentle, loving, and quiet as little children. After a long probationary ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... daughters"—we might wish to regard them as mere hateful chimeras, impossible as they are detestable; but fortunately there was once a Tullia. I know not where to look for the prototype of Cordelia: there was a Julia Alpinula, the young priestess of Aventicum,[65] who, unable to save her father's life by the sacrifice of her own, died with him—"infelix patris, infelix proles"—but this is all we know of her. There was the Roman daughter, too. I remember seeing at Genoa, Guido's "Pieta ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... wild man, with a tail and horns, who lives with the beasts. Jastrow thinks that this means that he consorted with female beasts, having as yet no female of his own species. No one could capture him, so the god Shamash assailed him by lust, sending to him a priestess of Ishtar who won him to herself (woman) away from beasts. She said to him: "Thou shalt be like a god. Why dost thou lie with beasts?" "She revealed his soul to Eabani." She was, therefore, a culture heroine, and the myth means that, with the knowledge of ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Walter, but this is a matter for our father's children only," she had said, and Walter had, as usual, bowed to her ruling. Ever since their mother's death May had been the high priestess of the family fetish, the position ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... thought of the toil, the noise, the sweat, the money involved made the work a sort of temple-building, and the thought of Nicky Easton's ability to annul all that devout accomplishment in an instant nauseated her like a blasphemy. She felt herself a priestess in a holy office and renewed her flagging spirits with prayers for ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... 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 ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... removed, the image of Alfieri appears to have been obliterated little by little from the soft wax of her character. She continued, nay instituted, a sort of cultus of Alfieri; became, as his beloved, the priestess presiding over what had once been his house, and was now his temple. The house on the Lung Arno remained the Casa Alfieri; the rooms which he had inhabited were kept carefully untouched; his books and papers ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... nor can she be so unkind as to carry Mr. Smith's flowers and ignore Mr. 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 of fashion. ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... pinched her when she passed by him, and said a thousand coarse, shameless things to her which she knew how to take in the opposite sense. And the dwarfish maid, who was neither kind nor pretty, and whose cruel nature had choked every germ of pleasantness and transformed her into a priestess of misery, a fatal, pitiless Eumenide, was pleasant and obliging to that brute. She admired his bearish manners, his roughness, his greediness, and his insolent, careless way of treating everybody, including the ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... and talked, and cud yo' 'av hearn her, it would ha' made yo' think she war the prettiest and sweetest, and most compassionate woman as ever a-come ter bless ther world. She seemed ter me like a fur off priestess ministerin' to ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... not afraid of him at all. In some other way she used him as a mere magic implement, used him with the most amazing priestess-craft. Himself, the individual man which he was, this she treated with an indifference ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... the tropic seas is a ceremony performed with reverence, as if the rising moon were a priestess come among her silver vessels. Shadows like phantom sails dip through the dark and lie idle where unseen crafts with unexplained cargoes weigh anchor in mid-air. One almost hears the water cunningly lap upon ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... Gay priestess of a Dryad cult With leaf-like locks she'll haunt the trees, Securing this superb result ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various
... So Oswald said, 'Fair priestess, we do greatly desire to find gold beneath our land, therefore we pray thee practise with the divining-rod, and tell us ...
— The Story of the Treasure Seekers • E. Nesbit
... learning them, and the ears of the goat-footed satyrs all 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 ruin, and ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... ready to follow the party which should prove itself the strongest, but that the real voice of decision would speak from behind that fire. It was the case of the Delphic Oracle over again with a priest instead of a priestess, ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... Dunstable. "But you must always remember 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 young novice ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... quite the same town it used to be, and disappointment must necessarily attend efforts to identify the once familiar landmarks of the mountain division. Improvement, implacable priestess of American industry, has well-nigh obliterated the picturesque features of pioneer days. The very right of way of the earliest overland line, abandoned for miles and miles, is seen now from the car windows bleaching on the ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... 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, ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... of a sacrificed victim. In the temple of Apollo Diradiotes at Argos, a lamb was sacrificed by night once a month; a woman, who had to observe a rule of chastity, tasted the blood of the lamb, and thus being inspired by the god she prophesied or divined. At Aegira in Achaia the priestess of Earth drank the fresh blood of a bull before she descended into the cave to prophesy. Similarly among the Kuruvikkarans, a class of bird-catchers and beggars in Southern India, the goddess Kali is believed to descend upon the priest, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... imagining, Thy sister nations would not own their foe, And turned to jest thy warnings, though the low, Deep, awful mutterings, that precede the throe Of earthquakes, burdened all the ominous air; While yet they paused in scorn, Of fatal madness born,— Thou, oh, my Mother! like a priestess bless'd With wondrous vision of the things to come, Thou couldst not calmly rest Secure and dumb— But from thy borders, with the sounds of drum And trumpet, came the thrilling note, "PREPARE!" "Prepare for what?" thy careless sisters said; "We see no threatening tempest overhead, Only a few pale ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... the Oracle of Delphi: the Central Doors being the Gate of the 'Adytum,' or Innermost shrine. From the left Inferior Door enter the Priestess of the Oracle, who stands in front of the Central Gate, to offer the ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... little better at last. The mood of the town was reproducing itself in him. In proportion as his ordinary external self became muffled, that inner secret life, that was far more real and vital, asserted itself. And this girl was surely the high-priestess of it all, the chief instrument of its accomplishment. New thoughts, with new interpretations, flooded his mind as she walked beside him through the winding streets, while the picturesque old gabled town, softly coloured in the sunset, had never appeared to him so wholly ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... and gave up her tray of blue corn. So each in turn the Maidens gave up their trays of precious seed. The Maiden of the South, the red seed; the Maiden of the East, the white seed; then the Maiden with the black seed, and lastly, the tray of all-color seed which the Priestess of Seed-and-All ...
— Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest • Katharine Berry Judson
... 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
... ceremonial rites we find the rose, violet, anemone, thyme, melilot, hyacinth, crocus, yellow lily, and yellow flowers generally. Thucydides relates how, in the ninth year of the Peloponnesian War, the temple of Juno at Argos was burnt down owing to the priestess Chrysis having set a lighted torch too near the garlands and then fallen asleep. The garlands caught fire, and the damage was irremediable before she was conscious of the mischief. The gigantic scale on which these floral ceremonies were conducted ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... sea, and rises again in Sicily, near the fountain of Arethusa. Even among the more learned, this fable gained credit; for we find the oracle of Delphi ordering Archias to conduct a colony of Corinthians to Syracuse, and the priestess giving the following directions:—'Go into that island where the river Alpheus mixes his waters with the ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... its immodesty. From beginning to end there is but one thought in Leanders mind, as there is in Hero's, whose words and actions are even more indelicate than those of Leander; they are the words and actions of a priestess of Venus true to her function—a girl to whom the higher feminine virtues, which alone can inspire romantic love, are unknown. On the impulse of the moment, in response to coarse flattery, she makes an assignation in a lonely tower with a perfect stranger, regardless of her ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... that Socrates does not claim to be giving his own thoughts when speaking of love. He says he is only relating what a woman once imparted to him as a revelation. It was through mantic art that he came to his conception of love. Diotima, the priestess, awakened in Socrates the daimonic force which was to lead him to the divine. ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... a matter of very great difficulty and seriousness, not to be achieved without special aid and the intervention of the gods. We may even go so far as to say that the new materfamilias was in some sort a priestess of the household, and that she must undergo a solemn initiation before assuming that position. And we may still further illustrate the mystical religious nature of the whole rite, if we remember that throughout Roman history no one could hold the priesthood of Jupiter (flaminium ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... devoted tribe—to be delivered over to her will. Her right to this remnant of her murdered husband's family is acknowledged. A knife is placed in her hand, while a deafening yell of triumph bursts from the excited squaws, as this their great high priestess, as they deem her, advances to the criminal. But it is not to shed the heart's blood of the Mohawk girl, but to sever the thong that bind her to the deadly stake, for which that glittering blade is drawn, and to bid her depart in peace whithersoever ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... rest-room in the garden. We looked on the beauty that generations of gardeners of a single vision had created. Our minds rested in the quiet as in the quaint phrase, we "tasted the sound of the kettle and listened to the incense." At length at a signal we rose. Led by the priestess of the ceremony, our host's aunt, a slight figure in grey with snow-white tabi and new straw sandals, we passed by the dripping rocky fountain, with its lilies, and the azure hydrangea of the hills which, some say, suggests distance. ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... 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, for ten long years; the theme of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... 'Violet Banks' It is the Holy Hill. This house is the temple; that nursery is the sanctuary; that cradle is the altar; and that babe is the idol of the community. Now go along with Violet. Oh! she is high priestess to the idol. Go along. I'm going to wash my face and hands, and ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... native state, in order to become a citizen and son of a larger fatherland. I cease to be a Prussian, in order to become a German; and Prussia having no desire to avail herself of my abiliies, I am going to see whether or not Germany has any use for them. My beautiful Marianne, you shall be the priestess who receives the oath which I make on the altar of the fatherland: 'I swear to devote all my powers and talents to Germany; I swear to be a faithful and untiring son ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... 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 ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... device but a quality of mind. They have the power of standing aloof from matters in which they are personally interested, and surveying them from outside like impartial spectators, with the keenest interest, but without bias. As the Delphic priestess in the act of prophecy lost her individuality and became the mouthpiece of the god, so the Greek allowed facts to speak for themselves, became their mouthpiece and banished the intrusive ego. If therefore we call the Greeks objective, all this must ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... 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
... that they will attain that divine instinct, not by renouncing their sex, but by fulfilling it; by becoming true women, and not bad imitations of men; by educating their heads for the sake of their hearts, not their hearts for the sake of their heads; by claiming woman's divine vocation as the priestess of purity, of ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... would have fared ill in her esteem. Her lectures upon the beauties and advantages of a modest, yet alluring reserve, were cut up into familiar and much-prized quotations among her disciples, and were acted upon the more willingly for the prestige that surrounded her exploits as high priestess of Hymen. But Rosa had been too coy to Alfred's evident devotion—almost repellent at seasons. Had these rebuffs not alternated with attacks of remorse, during which the exceeding gentleness of her demeanor gradually pried the crushed hopes of her adorer out of the slough, and cleansed their drooping ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... funeral feast, had I been slain, But, fearing Zeus, they halted for a space, And lo, Apollo's priestess with a train Of holy maidens came into that place, And far did she outshine the rest in grace, But in her eyes such dread was frozen then As glares eternal from the Gorgon's face Wherewith Athene ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... shape, are received by Philemon and Baucis, after having been refused admittance by their neighbours. The Gods, in acknowledgment of their hospitality, transform their cottage into a temple, of which, at their own request, they are made the priest and priestess; and, after a long life, the worthy couple are changed into trees. The village where they live is laid under water, on account of the impiety of the inhabitants, and is turned into a lake. Acheloues here relates the surprising changes ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... oracle to go to Tauris, and to steal and transport to Athens an image of Artemis that had fallen from heaven. His friend Pylades accompanied him on this expedition. They were seized by Thoas the king, and Orestes, as the principal offender, was to be sacrificed to Artemis. His sister, Iphigeneia, priestess of Artemis, contrived their escape, and the three arrived safe at Athens with the sacred image.] The whole assembly rose in applause at this mere fictitious representation. What may we suppose that they would have done, had the same thing occurred ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... man to whom Mortimer had sold his daughter—such was the man whom Hesper, entirely aware that none could compel her to marry against her will, had, partly from fear of her father, partly from moral laziness, partly from reverence for the Moloch of society, whose priestess was her mother, vowed to love, honor, and obey! In justice to her, it must be remembered, however, that she did not and could not know of him ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... face, which was convulsed with love and pain, and found her stern as a priestess who defends her mystery from violation. Meekly he let his arms fall from her body and turned away, resting his head on his hand and staring ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... her goddess from Mr. Carlyon's arms, and walking with the dignity of a priestess of the Temple, she preceded her master ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... not informed that any of them contained a sacred image, with the apparent exception of the temple of Athena at Troy. There we are told that the Trojan matrons, in a time of stress, brought a robe to offer to the goddess, and that the priestess Theano placed it "upon the knees of beauteous-haired Athene." Unless, as is possible, this is a purely metaphorical expression, it would seem to imply a seated statue; but it is to be noted that the Palladium ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... shepherds, and laborers of all sorts, were coming towards the chapel. The Senora, with her best black silk handkerchief bound tight around her forehead, the ends hanging down each side of her face, making her look like an Assyrian priestess, was descending the veranda steps, Felipe at her side; and Father Salvierderra had already entered the chapel before Ramona appeared, or Alessandro stirred from his vantage-post of observation at ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... of Enamoa is not a legend," she said, "for it is more. It was a happening known to our grandfathers. There were two warriors who coveted a woman, and she was tapu to them. She was a taua vehine, a priestess of the old gods. But they coveted her, and they were friends, who shared their wives as they ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... god Hermes. Some of these articles were doubtless worn by the deities themselves on festive occasions, when their statues were decked out. The toilet, kosmos, of goddesses was superintended by a priestess specially chosen for that purpose. She was called kosmeteira, or ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... stood before him like an outraged priestess. This time he did not shrink, but glared back at her balefully. "This is the end! We have come to the parting of the ways. I will never call you husband again. If you even speak to me, Thomas Braddock, I shall ask any one of a dozen men here to beat you as you deserve. ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... his hat and turned to leave as Gerald disappeared. "Pray don't let me detain you from the interesting ceremony, Miss Lane," he said, with his most cynical and mocking voice; "Miss Vernor as high-priestess will be worth a ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... 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 ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... cosmetic and make-up. Unabashed by the admiration she compels, she calmly pursues her exciting calling. The new-comer is well worthy the rank, by general acclaim, of "Queen of the El Dorado." In no way does she notice the eager crowd. She is an impartial priestess of fortune. Maxime waits only to hear her speak. She is silent, save the monosyllabic French words of the game. Is she Cuban, Creole, French, Andalusian, Italian, or a wandering gypsy star? A jewelled dagger-sheath in her corsage ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... moonlight a little boat came floating, Came to the sea-cave beneath the breezy headland, Where amid myrtles a pathway stole in mazes Up to the groves of the high embosom'd temple. 10 There in a thicket of dedicated roses, Oft did a priestess, as lovely as a vision, Pouring her soul to the son of Cytherea, Pray him to hover around the slight canoe-boat, And with invisible pilotage to guide it 15 Over the dusk wave, until the nightly sailor Shivering with ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... heaven! man, I wish thee to taste of the joys of paradise. There," said he, tapping the door of the room in which was Madame d'Hocquetonville, "in there is a lady of the court and a friend of the queen, but the greatest priestess of Venus that ever was, and her equal is not to be found in any courtesan, harlot, dancer, doxy, or hussy. She was engendered at a moment when paradise was radiant with joy, when nature was procreating, when ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... sacrifice his daughter in order to appease the wrath of Diana. Agamemnon consented; but it is said that the goddess was so sorry for the maiden that she bore her away to Tauris, and made her a priestess, and left a hart to be sacrificed instead of Iphigenia. In our cut you see Calchas on the right; two men are bearing the maiden to her doom, while her father stands on the left with his head veiled ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... who had obtained a knowledge of laws of nature, then considered occult, now recognized among the guiding principles from which scientific deductions are drawn. She believed in the power of magic, which she was universally understood to possess; but she was no vulgar witch: rather was she a worthy priestess of her not ignoble deities. The effect upon Hilda's mind of the teachings of such a woman is easy to conceive. She had been allowed to know little of the wild orgies of the barbaric feasts offered to the Gods by her countrymen, of their brutal excesses, of their human sacrifices: ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... huge as she afterwards became, and was rather attractive. She was humorous, entertaining, affable; she had the air of a woman who had tried every experience,—the last person I should have suspected of interest in spiritual or other philosophy. We next heard of her as the high priestess of a new cult in India. Rumors reached London, where I was residing, that this new religion was spreading among the Hindus, giving much trouble to the missionaries, and that Madame Blavatsky was suspected of being in the pay of the Russian government. That way of meeting the new movement ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... escape that so easily. Why, this is the temple of superstition, and you are the high-Priestess. How shall I ever get on at dinner, without you? I know I shall do something to shock Mr. Raby. Perhaps spill the very salt. I ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... a grand triumph for the young composer from the outset, especially as the lofty character of the Druid priestess was sung by that unapproachable lyric tragedienne, the Siddons of the opera, Madame Pasta. Bellini is said to have had this queen of dramatic song in his mind in writing the opera, and right nobly did she vindicate his judgment, for no European audience afterward but ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... took his mother to the temple of Athene, and there the priestess made her one of the temple sweepers. And there they knew that she would be safe, for not even Polydectes would dare to drag her out of the temple. And there Perseus and the good Dictys and his wife came to visit her ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... with her elegant coiffure powdered to excess, I could see that her face was painted like that of a priestess of antiquity. That gauze, that atmosphere, redolent with feminine perfumes, and ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... life like that of man, not only in Egypt but in most ancient lands. Offerings of food and drink were constantly supplied to them, in Egypt laid upon the altars, in other lands burnt for a sweet savour. At Thebes the divine wife of the god, or high priestess, was the head of the harem of concubines of the god; and similarly in Babylonia the chamber of the god with the golden couch could only be visited by the priestess who slept there for oracular responses. The Egyptian gods could not be cognisant of what passed on earth {3} without being informed, ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... that was not owned for truth by the Athenians 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 a strange ...
— Against Apion • Flavius Josephus
... was received from the East—the more talkative gods of the Greeks imparted actual utterances of prophecy. The Romans made efforts, even at an early period, to treasure up such counsels, and copies of the leaves of the soothsaying priestess of Apollo, the Cumaean Sibyl, were accordingly a highly valued gift on the part of their Greek guest-friends from Campania. For the reading and interpretation of the fortune-telling book a special college, inferior in rank only to the augurs and Pontifices, was instituted in ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... your hand, kiss in secret the glove you had let fall, the shoe you had flung off, know that you knew of my love, that I was yours to do with as you would, to live or die according to your wish. Or that you were priestess in some temple of forgotten gods, where I might steal at daybreak and at dusk to gaze upon your beauty; kneel with clasped hands, watching your sandalled feet coming and going about the altar steps; lie with pressed lips upon the stones ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... ugly eccentric dances, the costly pageant 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 woman had a ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... gained in repairing the defective parts of the fortifications of their city; and they then set the Athenians at defiance. So far, says Herodotus, the accounts of all the Greeks agree. But the Parians, in after years, told also a wild legend, how a captive priestess of a Parian temple of the Deities of the Earth promised Miltiades to give him the means of capturing Paros: how, at her bidding, the Athenian general went alone at night and forced his way into a holy shrine, near the city gate, but with what purpose it was not known: how a supernatural ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... dread hour, entirely, wildly given To him and—she believed, lost maid!—to heaven; Her brain, her heart, her passions all inflamed, How proud she stood, when in full Haram named The Priestess of the Faith!—how flasht her eyes With light, alas, that was not of the skies, When round in trances only less than hers She saw the Haram kneel, her prostrate worshippers. Well might MOKANNA think that form alone Had spells enough to make the world ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... looked, he doubted if she were dead, and took immediate steps to restore her. Then a great wonder happened, for she, who had been thrown into the sea as dead, came back to life. But feeling sure that she would never see her husband again, Thaisa retired from the world, and became a priestess of ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... frightened the tenor who sang the part of Pollio by the fury of her acting. But measured by the standards of to-day, say that set by Calve's Carmen, it must have been a simple age that could be impressed by the tragic power of anyone acting the part of Bellini's Druidical priestess. The surmise is strengthened by the circumstance that Madame Grisi created a sensation in "Il Trovatore" by showing signs of agitation in the tower scene, walking about the stage during Manrico's "Ah! ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Furies seem to echo along this wild and desert shore? As soon as Madame de Hell could distinguish the line of rocks that traced the vague horizon, she began to look for Cape Parthenike, the traditional site of the altar of the goddess, to whom the young priestess Iphigenia was on the point of sacrificing her brother. Assisted by the captain, she at length descried on a rocky headland a solitary chapel, dedicated, she was told, to the Virgin Mother. "What a contrast," she naturally remarks, "between the gentle worship of Mary and ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... that were hot in that hunt, women that followed, Babes that were promised our bones, trembled and wallowed: Over the necks of the tribe crouching and fawning— Prophet and priestess we came back from ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... twins, declared Mars to be the father of her illegitimate offspring, either because she really imagined it to be the case, or because it was less discreditable to have committed such an offence with a god.[3] But neither gods nor men protected either her or her offspring from the king's cruelty. The priestess was bound and cast into prison; the king ordered the children to be thrown into the flowing river. By some chance which Providence seemed to direct, the Tiber, having over flown its banks, thereby forming stagnant pools, could not be approached at the regular course of its ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... conveniences to wash them. In fine, the Chalcidicum was the smaller Exchange, and the niches still seen there must have been the stands of the auctioneers. But what was there in common between this market, this fullers' counter, and the melancholy priestess? ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... The kilted Hester, on her knees, her brow bound with a glistening towel, threw her body forward with the regularity of a rower, her strong, muscled arms shot out in a measured curve; on her little island of dry boards she sang amid her clean, damp sea, high-priestess of a lustral service as old as the oldest temple of man, and the odour of her incense, the keen, sweet freshness of her cleansing soap, rose to the heaven ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... slowly pulled the gold-embroidered band that hung by the mantel, clinging to it for a moment, then releasing it suddenly. Like a priestess she looked, unconscious, sunk ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... Pope, without being as good as either. When he began that original and splendid portrait of himself, and transcript of his travels, Childe Harold, he imitated Spenser in form and in archaism. But he was possessed by the muse: the man wrote as the spirit within dictated, as the Pythian priestess is fabled to have uttered her oracles. Childe Harold is a stream of intuitive, irrepressible poetry; not art, but overflowing nature: the sentiments good and bad came welling forth from his heart. His descriptive powers are great but peculiar. Travellers find in Childe Harold ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... to shine," cried Burtis. "Hitherto, Amy, the oracle has usually been dumb, but you may become a priestess who will evoke untold stores ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... see what I have been obliged to do!" she exclaimed, extending both her arms down toward the opening with a look of blended horror and inspiration, such as might have sat upon the countenance of some sacrificial priestess of the olden time. ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... simple tale 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 each other at sight. ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... have kept her waiting too long, perhaps," said Leslie, "and who knows but the fates may be the more unkind to us for the neglect of their priestess." He was really not very well at his ease, but somewhat anxious to appear so, as all very bashful people can fully understand, when they remember the efforts they have sometimes made to appear the most impudent men in creation. Tom Leslie was not in the slightest degree bashful, ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... do it with a gun, because they tell me the president isn't afraid of anything except a voodoo priestess. What is your secret?" coaxed the consul. "If you'll only sell it, I know several Powers that ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... establish a secret understanding, in order to ask her visitor if she would venture on an apple-fritter. She wore a flowing mantle, which resembled her husband's waterproof—a garment which, when she turned to her daughter or talked about her, might have passed for the robe of a sort of priestess of maternity. She endeavoured to keep the conversation in a channel which would enable her to ask sudden incoherent questions of Olive, mainly as to whether she knew the principal ladies (the expression was Mrs. Tarrant's), not only in Boston, but in the other cities ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... exalted idea of his daughter's attractions, either personal or mental. However this might be, it is certain that when the demoiselle had ill-treated the poodle, and insulted the priest, and quarrelled with the cook—that high-priestess of the kitchen who alone, in all Normandy, could concoct those messes which the Baron loved—the master of Cotenoir decided on marrying his heiress out ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... in Jewish affairs was at its height when she planned a visit abroad, which had been a long-cherished dream, and May 15, 1883, she sailed for England, accompanied by a younger sister. We have difficulty in recognizing the tragic priestess we have been portraying in the enthusiastic child of travel who seems new-born into a new world. From the very outset she is in a maze of wonder and delight. At sea ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... than human, and struck fear and dread into the enemy, who believed it to be a divine apparition; so that they lost all courage to defend themselves. But the Pellenians tell us that the image of Diana stands usually untouched, and when the priestess happens at any time to remove it to some other place, nobody dares look upon it, but all turn their faces from it; for not only is the sight of it terrible and hurtful to mankind, but it makes even the trees, by which it happens to be carried, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the names, the record of gifts inscribed in the book, already a long list for Needley had required no other incentive to give than the example that had been set—but that was all. Quietly, with demure simplicity, Helena, prompted by Madison, like a priestess who guards some holy, inner shrine, told them that sensational notoriety had no place there—and the notoriety for that very cause became the greater! Not that they were denied a sight of the Patriarch's venerable and saintly ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... women come to such places of amusement to hear love songs, see love scenes, and share in the fictitious joys and sorrows of love, which they long to enact in reality. Nothing is above love; nothing equals it. He reigns as a master in a temple, with woman as the high-priestess, and man the ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... is, among the rest, Because with flowers her temple was not dressed; The next, because her altars did not shine With daily fires; the last, neglect of wine; For which her wrath is gone forth to consume Us all, unless preserved by thy perfume. Take then thy censer, put in fire, and thus, O pious priestess! make a peace for us. For our neglect Love did our death decree; That we escape. Redemption comes ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... over it. Thereby he gave it the power that it spoke to him, and discovered to him many secrets.[115] Odin placed Njord and Frey as priests of the sacrifices, and they became deities of the Asaland people. Njord's daughter, Freyja, was priestess of the sacrifices, and first taught the Asaland people the magic art, as it was in use and fashion among the Vanaland people. While Njord was with the Vanaland people he had taken his own sister in marriage, for that was allowed by their law; and their children ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... return, as indeed it ought: for it is thus that God intended woman to look instinctively at the world. Would to God that she would teach us men to look at it thus likewise! Would to God that she would in these days claim and fulfil to the uttermost her vocation as the priestess of charity!—that woman's heart would help to deliver man from bondage to his own tyrannous and all-too-exclusive brain— from our idolatry of mere dead laws and printed books—from our daily sin of looking at men, not as our struggling and suffering brothers, but as mere symbols of certain ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... abuilding, in which she will be the grand exemplar. As change is the order of the day, and what one age damns its successor ofttimes deifies, who knows but an up-to-date religion may yet be evolved with Bacchic revels for sacred rites and a favorite prostitute for high priestess? ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... 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 sex in ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... families did not show themselves inclined to give their daughters for the service of Vesta, a law was passed that the daughters of freedmen might likewise be consecrated. Many contended for the honor, and so they drew lots in the senate in the presence of their fathers; no priestess, however, was appointed ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... myself, sire—to save myself, and because I could not learn to forget. Your majesty has just said that you have the religion of memory. Sire, I am the anguish-stricken, tortured, fanatical priestess of the same faith. I have lain daily before her altar, I have scourged my heart with remembrances, and blinded my eyes with weeping. At last a day came in which I roused myself. I resolved to abandon my altar, to flee from the past, ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... outrage upon gentility in Mrs. Ramrod's very presence possessed that red republican Sissy. She giggled within herself, Madigan's attitude, his streaked and gilded face, his confident voice, showed such delightful indifference to the effect his unconventional attire must have upon this Priestess of Form. ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... trance of hero-worship, a cloud of high ideal images,—the lighting up, in short, of all that God has laid, ready to be enkindled, in a woman's nature, when the time comes to sanctify her as the pure priestess of a domestic temple. But, alas! it was kindled by one who did it only for an experiment, because he felt an artistic pleasure in the beautiful light and heat, and cared not, though it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... available occasion. How much she 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 ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... health; she returned to London, and spent several years in a darkened room. Here she "read almost every book worth reading in almost every language, and gave herself heart and soul to that poetry of which she seemed born to be the priestess." This way of life lasted for many years: and, in the course of it, she published several volumes of noble verse. In 1846 she married Robert Browning, also a great poet. In 1856 she brought out Aurora Leigh, her longest, and probably also her greatest, poem. ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... the boys were being cruelly scourged, the priestess of Artemis Orthia held an ancient barbaric wooden image of the goddess in her hands. If the boys were spared, the image grew heavy; the more they were tortured, the lighter grew the image. In Samoa the image (shark's teeth) of the god Taema is consulted before battle. 'If it felt ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... and that heaven-directed bimbo straightway turns his head toward the dust-hole, and, again illustrating the first clause of the Sphynx's not very complicated riddle, keeps the strictly noiseless tenor of his way, till Ahriman's priestess looks round to see the metaphors fulfilled, of the pup turning again to his ashheap, and the papoose that was washed wallowing in the dust-hole. And so the pull-devil-pull-baker strife goes on to the last ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... Analysis, vol. i.; Deane's Worship of the Serpent, p. 80. From a notion of the mysterious inflation produced by the presence of the divine spirit, those who had the spirit of Ob, or Python, received the names of Ob, or Pythia; according to the not unusual custom for the priest or priestess of any god to take the name of the deity they served. See Selden, De Dis Syris, Synt. 1. c. 2. It is a curious coincidence, that as the Witch of Endor is called "Oub," and the African sorceress "Obi," from the serpent-deity Oub, so the old English name of a witch, "hag," ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 77, April 19, 1851 • Various
... Caesar, a tragedy, and epigrams. But their writing was the entertainment of their pleasure; yours is only a diversion of your pain. The muses have seldom employed your thoughts, but when some violent fit of the gout has snatched you from affairs of state; and, like the priestess of Apollo, you never come to deliver his oracles, but unwillingly, and in torment. So that we are obliged to your lordship's misery for our delight: You treat us with the cruel pleasure of a Turkish ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... heroe (hero) La heroina (heroine) El poeta (poet) La poetisa (poetess) El principe (prince) La princesa (princess) El profeta (prophet) La profetisa (prophetess) El rey (king) La reina (queen) El sacerdote (priest) La sacerdotisa (priestess) El vizconde (viscount) La vizcondesa (viscountess) El Zar (czar) La ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... erected structure of human society may produce remote fissures in that clumsy fabric. She saw that, having hazarded the loosening of the stone, she should have held herself apart from ordinary human ties, like some priestess set apart for the service of the temple. And instead, she had seized happiness with both hands, taken it as the gift of the very fate she had herself precipitated! She remembered some old Greek saying to the effect that the gods never forgive ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... inaccessible; it can be seen only from across the lagoon. (p. 137.) 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 ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... religion! It would 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 ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... house of the king of Kyrene of goodly horses, that 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 word of Medea spoken ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar
... was not greater than the allowance made to many poorer girls. In those days in New York there were still a few altar-fires flickering in the temple of Republican simplicity, and Dr. Sloper would have been glad to see his daughter present herself, with a classic grace, as a priestess of this mild faith. It made him fairly grimace, in private, to think that a child of his should be both ugly and overdressed. For himself, he was fond of the good things of life, and he made a considerable use of them; but he had a dread of vulgarity, and even ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... among great fluted pillars and bowls of softly burning radiance swung (like censers) by long chains. Occasionally there is an airy flutter, a bell clangs, bronze doors slide apart, and an elevator appears, in charge of a chastely uniformed priestess. Lights flash up over this dark little cave which stands invitingly open: UP, they say, LOCAL 1-13. The door-sill of the cave shines with a row of golden beads (small lights, to guide the foot)—it is irresistible. There is an upward impulse about the whole place: the light ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... the chorus, and Jenny Lind has comprehended and shows to us this holy priestess in the aria, Casta diva. In Copenhagen she sang all her parts in Swedish, and the other singers sang theirs in Danish, and the two kindred languages mingled very beautifully together; there was no jarring; even in the Daughter of the Regiment where there is a deal of dialogue, ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... that the question what was to be done should be referred to an oracle in which the whole country had the greatest confidence, and to which recourse was always had in times of special perplexity. It was whispered that a near relation of the philosopher's was lady's-maid to the priestess who delivered the oracle, and the Puritan party declared that the strangely unequivocal answer of the oracle was obtained by backstairs influence; but whether this was so or no, the response as nearly as I can translate ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... 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 ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... added the 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 ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... Bruno gathered that the sudden death of one who had dared to lift an armed hand against the woman so mysteriously placed there in their very midst awed all opposition to the general belief in the divine origin of mother and child; and ere long Victo was installed as a sort of high priestess of the temple more especially devoted ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... Mercury, disguised in human shape, are received by Philemon and Baucis, after having been refused admittance by their neighbours. The Gods, in acknowledgment of their hospitality, transform their cottage into a temple, of which, at their own request, they are made the priest and priestess; and, after a long life, the worthy couple are changed into trees. The village where they live is laid under water, on account of the impiety of the inhabitants, and is turned into a lake. Acheloues here relates ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... to feel in his quiet way that the oracle must be a match for the priestess. "'Want' her, Jane? We wouldn't TAKE her." And as if knowing quite what he was about he looked at his wife only ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... "Don't you know that the afflatus always exhausts the priestess? You may tell Letty's fortune, or mine, if you will; but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... Tatshbapem: the figures here represented are the deceased praying to Osiris, the usual figure of the embalmer of the dead, Anubis, and a scarabaeus, or sacred beetle, made of beads. The next case contains the coffin and mummy of a priestess of Amoun, named Kotbti. The hair is attached to the mask of the face, as the visitor will observe, by two ivory studs: there are wooden models of the hands and arms decorated with bracelets and rings; each hand ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... in 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 ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... armies. This peculiarity in the habits of the North was so general, that it was no unusual thing to see females, from respect to their supposed views into futurity, and the degree of divine inspiration which was vouchsafed to them, arise to the degree of HAXA, or chief priestess, from which comes the word Hexe, now universally used for a witch; a circumstance which plainly shows that the mythological system of the ancient natives of the North had given to the modern language an appropriate ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... 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 mastery of the mysterious and dreadful scarlet ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... thereafter Sikassig[)e] received continued instruction from his father Bai[-e]dzh[)e]k, and although he never publicly received advancement beyond the second degree of the society, his wife became a fourth degree priestess, at whose initiation he was permitted ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... have been obliged to do!" she exclaimed, extending both her arms down toward the opening with a look of blended horror and inspiration, such as might have sat upon the countenance of some sacrificial priestess of the ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... 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
... this Stella, the young adopted daughter, explained the change in 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 son had had such blue eyes—now, they had faded almost to ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... evidence is very strong against you, but you shall not be unjustly treated. You are not a prisoner as yet. In Graustark a man who is accused of murder, and who was not seen by any one to commit the crime, cannot be legally arrested until an accuser shall go before the Princess, who is also High Priestess, and swear on his life that he knows the guilty man. The man who so accuses agrees to forfeit his own life in case the other is proved innocent. If you are to be charged with the murder of the Prince, some one must ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... grand triumph for the young composer from the outset, especially as the lofty character of the Druid priestess was sung by that unapproachable lyric tragedienne, the Siddons of the opera, Madame Pasta. Bellini is said to have had this queen of dramatic song in his mind in writing the opera, and right nobly did she vindicate ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... Diana at Ephesus; Thaisa standing near the altar, as high priestess; a number of Virgins on each side; Cerimon and other ...
— Pericles Prince of Tyre • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... and cups from the cupboard as she spoke, so that her sentences were more than usually broken apart. Mary could not help looking at the odd little priestess of humanity with something like admiration. While she had been thinking about herself, Mrs. Seal had thought of nothing ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... where Beauty, sylvan priestess, sped away, Lies the rich afterglow Of Indian Summer, bringing round the happy holiday That antedates the snow: The glad Thanksgiving time, the cheer, The festival commotion That stirs fraternal feeling from The ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... for thy green island? No! for there the fairy altars are deserted, the faith is gone from the land; thou art among the last of an unhonoured and expiring race. Thy mortal poets are dumb, and Fancy, which was thy priestess, sleeps hushed in her last repose. New and hard creeds have succeeded to the fairy lore. Who steals through the starlit boughs on the nights of June to watch the roundels of thy tribe? The wheels of commerce, the din of trade, have silenced to mortal ear the ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... phratries, and occasionally with the same gens. There is no doubt, however, that in the earlier villages each gens, and where practicable, the whole of the phratry, built their houses together. To a certain extent the house of the priestess of a gens is still regarded as the home of the gens. She has to be consulted concerning proposed marriages, and has much to say ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... of ushering into the world her first 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 to ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... BRISE'IS, a young 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, for ten long years; the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... entertainment of their pleasure; yours is only a diversion of your pain. The muses have seldom employed your thoughts, but when some violent fit of the gout has snatched you from affairs of state; and, like the priestess of Apollo, you never come to deliver his oracles, but unwillingly, and in torment. So that we are obliged to your lordship's misery for our delight: You treat us with the cruel pleasure of a Turkish triumph, where ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... glowing, which appeal to all observers by their mystical illumination of rapture—eyes which seem as though they had been dwelling on some glorious sight—which have, as Haydon said, "an inward look perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess ...
— A Day with Keats • May (Clarissa Gillington) Byron
... of man. He determined, therefore, to provide for them a home of their own, and to do so built the first temple in his realm. The sacred symbols were placed under the care of his daughter, who was appointed priestess of the shrine. From that day to this a virgin princess of imperial blood has been chosen as custodian of these emblems of ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... said: "instructed from above, My lover I shall gain, or lose my love; Nigh rising Atlas, next the falling sun Long tracts of Ethiopian climates run: There a Massylian priestess I have found, Honored for age, for magic arts renowned: The Hesperian temple was her trusted care; 'Twas she supplied the wakeful dragon's fare; She, poppy-seeds in honey taught to steep, Reclaimed his rage, and soothed him into sleep; ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... machinations—I will have repose. In the interior of my palace I will be empress; there will I establish a realm, a realm of peace and enjoyable happiness; there will I erect the temple of love, and consecrate myself as its priestess! No, speak no more of revolutions and conspiracies. I am not made to sit upon a throne as the feared and thundering goddess of cowardly slaves, causing millions to tremble at every word and glance! I will not be empress, ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... The Bructeri were a non-Suevian tribe, who dwelt below the duchies of Oldenburgh, and Lauenburgh, on the borders of the Lippe, and in the Hartz Mountains. It was among them that the priestess Velleda obtained ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... and splendid portrait of himself, and transcript of his travels, Childe Harold, he imitated Spenser in form and in archaism. But he was possessed by the muse: the man wrote as the spirit within dictated, as the Pythian priestess is fabled to have uttered her oracles. Childe Harold is a stream of intuitive, irrepressible poetry; not art, but overflowing nature: the sentiments good and bad came welling forth from his heart. His descriptive ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... city bought a Bull 'the finest that could be got,' and at the new moon of the month at the beginning of seed-time (? April) Bull was led in procession at the head of which went the chief priest and priestess of the city. With them went a herald and sacrificer, and two bands of youths and maidens. So holy was the Bull that nothing unlucky might come near him. The herald pronounced aloud a prayer for 'the safety of the city and the land, and the citizens, and the women and children, for ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... torments. The gods were also supposed to share in a life like that of man, not only in Egypt but in most ancient lands. Offerings of food and drink were constantly supplied to them, in Egypt laid upon the altars, in other lands burnt for a sweet savour. At Thebes the divine wife of the god, or high priestess, was the head of the harem of concubines of the god; and similarly in Babylonia the chamber of the god with the golden couch could only be visited by the priestess who slept there for oracular responses. The Egyptian gods ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... "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 been ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... power of self-devotion and self-sacrifice, a trance of hero-worship, a cloud of high ideal images,—the lighting up, in short, of all that God has laid, ready to be enkindled, in a woman's nature, when the time comes to sanctify her as the pure priestess of a domestic temple. But, alas! it was kindled by one who did it only for an experiment, because he felt an artistic pleasure in the beautiful light and heat, and cared not, though it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... him like an outraged priestess. This time he did not shrink, but glared back at her balefully. "This is the end! We have come to the parting of the ways. I will never call you husband again. If you even speak to me, Thomas Braddock, I shall ask any one of a dozen men here to beat you as you deserve. Oh, they ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... promptly she could point out the pole-star at the centre of the clock's vast dial, although at our right a big moon was leaving the tree tops and flooding the sky with its light. Toward this she turned, and lifting an arm with the reverence of a priestess said, in impassioned monotone: ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... emancipation, progress—to 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
... from so white a priestess, and in words that lent so musical and sweet a sanction, removed the last mote of conjecture from the air. Mrs. Wright, as usual, was the first to take action. Every set of women, probably, has its recognized clown, she who is just too cute and killing. And those who do ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... tea first." This is from Miss Sally, the tea-priestess. "Another cup?" But no; he ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... with a most graceful decency; invoking her continual inspiration of pure thoughts, and her protection of their chastity. Those of them, who distinguished themselves above the rest, by superior graces of performance, received rewards not only from the priestess of Diana, but from their own parents. Nor were the young men but curiously inquisitive, as to who particularly excelled on these occasions. Distinction in these dances was a great incentive to love, and produced many ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... Ellis, the children of a priest or of a priestess "are not ordinarily educated for the priestly profession, one generation being usually passed over [a curious primitive recognition of the idea in our common saying, "genius skips a generation"], and the grand-children selected" (438. 121). ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... Diana is not far distant from hence; there you may abide as a vestal. Moreover, if you please, a niece of mine shall there attend you." This proposal was accepted with thanks by Thaisa; and when she was perfectly recovered, Cerimon placed her in the temple of Diana, where she became a vestal or priestess of that goddess, and passed her days in sorrowing for her husband's supposed loss, and in the most devout exercises of ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... from the stern of a South Sea canoe; or, most of all, to that famous wooden image of Freya, which once leapt lumbering forth from her bullock-cart, creaking and rattling in every oaken joint, to belabour the too daring Viking who was flirting with her priestess. Even so, whispered Elsley, did those brains and tongues creak and rattle, lumbering before the blasts of Pythonic inspiration; and so, he verily believed, would the awkward arms and legs have done likewise, if one of the Pythonesses had ever so far ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... was succeeded in this mansion by a sour fanatic knight, a distant and collateral relation, who claimed the same merit for expelling the priestess of Baal, which his predecessor had founded on maintaining the votaresses of Heaven. Of the two unhappy nuns, driven from their ancient refuge, one went beyond sea; the other, unable from old age to undertake such a journey, died under the roof of a faithful Catholic ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 from trees near a copper statue, which was also ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... pretence," said Antonia, with a shudder. "Fancy a priestess of art stooping to pretence. Well, if you don't detest me, let us walk about for a little. Have you no wild, uncultured spot to show me, which the hand of man has not defaced? My whole soul recoils from a ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... were there. And completing the group was Nea holding a round object in each hand—round things with unkempt, trailing hair. He was not completely conscious—and for a second she looked like a high priestess of the Amazon, holding two mummified ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... said the priestess with a lofty gesture. "His hair is black. He don't eat so much, ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... affairs was at its height when she planned a visit abroad, which had been a long-cherished dream, and May 15, 1883, she sailed for England, accompanied by a younger sister. We have difficulty in recognizing the tragic priestess we have been portraying in the enthusiastic child of travel who seems new-born into a new world. From the very outset she is in a maze of wonder and delight. At sea ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... furnished working material for his nimble and inquiring mind. The Cambridge trio, 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
... herself—the love of luxury, her vanity, her fierce competition for worldly position—if only for the disastrous effect of such evils upon men. They force him to lower his dreams of her, who should be high-priestess." ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... which he lived. "'The greatest blessings which men receive come through the operation of phrensy ([Greek: mania]—inspired exaltation), when phrensy is the gift of God. The prophetess of Delphi, and the priestess of Dodona, many are the benefits which in their phrensies (moments of inspiration) they have bestowed upon Greece; but in their hours of self-possession, few or none. And too long were it to speak of the Sibyl, and others, who, inspired ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... from time to time rumours reach us concerning these Pongo—that it is an island where grows the Holy Flower, of which you know, for when last you were here you had one of its blooms. I heard, too, that this Holy Flower was tended by a priestess named Mother of the Flower, and her servants, ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... have the power of standing aloof from matters in which they are personally interested, and surveying them from outside like impartial spectators, with the keenest interest, but without bias. As the Delphic priestess in the act of prophecy lost her individuality and became the mouthpiece of the god, so the Greek allowed facts to speak for themselves, became their mouthpiece and banished the intrusive ego. If therefore we call the Greeks objective, all this must be included in ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... her oars, lifted her hands like a priestess, and her strong, sweet voice burst into song,—the song of the Jewish maiden when she went out before the chorus of, women and sang that grand solo, which we all remember in its ancient words, and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Apollo once occupied nearly half an acre of ground: a great many of its marble pillars are still to be seen, half buried by the plough, and corn growing over them. About a hundred yards from this temple is the cave in the rock from whence the priestess pronounced the oracle. Among the curiosities of this wonderful place, the tombs in the rocks are not the least remarkable. They are built of the most beautiful white marble; the entrance is by a large archway, ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... when the long procession reach'd the fane Of Pallas in the heights of Troy, to them The fair Theano ope'd the portals wide, Daughter of Cisseus, brave Antenor's spouse, 365 And by appointment public, at that time, Priestess of Pallas. All with lifted hands[22] In presence of Minerva wept aloud. Beauteous Theano on the Goddess' lap Then spread the robe, and to the daughter fair 370 Of Jove omnipotent her suit address'd. Goddess[23] of Goddesses, our ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... but in a 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
... gaze of the eye, they looked as 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
... passes under the bed of the sea, and rises again in Sicily, near the fountain of Arethusa. Even among the more learned, this fable gained credit; for we find the oracle of Delphi ordering Archias to conduct a colony of Corinthians to Syracuse, and the priestess giving the following directions:—'Go into that island where the river Alpheus mixes his waters with ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... her, and the same feeling of bewilderment. The suddenness and the nature of the disclosures were dream-like and unreal, and the image of Dorcas remained impressed upon her sight; not like Dorcas, though the same, but something ghastly, wan, glittering, and terrible, like a priestess at a ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... a comparing of notes among the ladies and much laughter, when it appeared that the priestess of the hidden spell, in her working, had mixed up the oracles. Jacob had manifestly got Esau's blessing. It was agreed that the bonnes fortunes should be exchanged, that the shillings might not be regarded ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... who had insulted the god. But because the dolphin found the hidden sea-goddess whom Poseidon loved, the dolphin, too, was raised by the grateful sea-god to the stars.(4) The vulture and the heron, according to Boeo (said to have been a priestess in Delphi and the author of a Greek treatise on the traditions about birds), were once a man named Aigupios (vulture) and his mother, Boulis. They sinned inadvertently, like Oedipus and Jocasta; wherefore Boulis, becoming aware of the guilt, was about to ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... Toilet 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 spoil. This casket India's glowing gems unlocks, ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... the 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
... warm precincts of the reigning Queen; There fires inviting blazed, and all around Was heard the tinkling bells' seducing sound; The nimble waiters to that sound from far Sprang to the call, then hasteri'd to the bar, Where a glad priestess of the temple sway'd, The most obedient, and the most obey'd; Rosy and round, adorn'd in crimson vest, And flaming ribands at her ample breast: She, skill'd like Circe, tried her guests to move, ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... over the cultured life of Riseholme, and the priestess and dispenser of its mysteries was Lucia. Never before had she ruled from so elate a pinnacle, nor wielded so secure a supremacy. None had access to the Guru but through her: all his classes were held in the smoking-parlour and he meditated only in Hamlet or in the sequestered arbour at the end ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... god himself comes to the temple and reposes on the bed, in like manner as at Thebes in Egypt, where also, in the temple of Jupiter, a woman passes the night. A similar custom is observed at Pataris, in Lycia, where there is at times an oracle, on which occasions the priestess is shut up by ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... she still hung over the window-sill, gazing enraptured at the heavens, she was brought sharply down to earth. Up near the willows at the gate she dimly descried a dark figure hastening along Champlain's Road. It paused at the gate. Instantly Elizabeth was transformed. From the rapt priestess of the dawn she descended sharply to the keen-eyed spy. That was Charles Stuart just as sure as sure! And John would be up and off in another five minutes. She jerked herself back into the room so suddenly that her head came in ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... wishing to be unjust, refers to 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 ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... through the camp, and, striking down those of the prisoners that they meet, drag them to a brazen kettle, holding about twenty amphorae. This has a kind of stage above it, ascending on which, the priestess cuts the throat of the victim, and, from the manner in which the blood flows into the vessel, judges of the future event. Others tear open the bodies of the captives thus butchered, and, from inspection of the entrails, presage victory to their ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... community, as elsewhere, what has always appeared to me, to be a distemper, misnamed by its crafty creator, "Christian Science." Unchristian scienceless would be a more appropriate name, as the so-called divine revelation was made to its Eddyfying high priestess about 1800 years after the sublime career of Christ was ended, and its preposterous claims antagonize ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... and let his pallid 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 a ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... nations would not own their foe, And turned to jest thy warnings, though the low, Deep, awful mutterings, that precede the throe Of earthquakes, burdened all the ominous air; While yet they paused in scorn, Of fatal madness born,— Thou, oh, my Mother! like a priestess bless'd With wondrous vision of the things to come, Thou couldst not calmly rest Secure and dumb— But from thy borders, with the sounds of drum And trumpet, came the thrilling note, "PREPARE!" "Prepare ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... over the steppes of Russia as the 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 on—on . . . as ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... 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], ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... from the days when our primitive ancestresses clothed themselves in skins and twisted their prehistoric locks with pins of mammoth ivory. In and out and in and out, with Ingred, like an attendant priestess, behind her, she performed the necessary itinerary, and laid her floral offering upon what may have been the remains of a neolithic altar. The pool below was dark and boggy and brown with peat. She took a good-sized pebble, and flung it into the middle with a ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... "O Nofri," she said, "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. Come ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... action and gave over the dead clay to kindly hands when, at midnight on the day of her father's death, she had received all the dispatches which told her of Randall Clayton's evasion. Kneeling by her father's body she vowed herself a priestess of Justice. "They may have killed him. I may be too late; but I will deal with my despoiled brother's memory as my only heritage. For he was innocent, and has been robbed of birthright, good ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... alive. But once the pressure of that strong personality removed, the image of Alfieri appears to have been obliterated little by little from the soft wax of her character. She continued, nay instituted, a sort of cultus of Alfieri; became, as his beloved, the priestess presiding over what had once been his house, and was now his temple. The house on the Lung Arno remained the Casa Alfieri; the rooms which he had inhabited were kept carefully untouched; his books and papers were elaborated and ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... there when very young by his parents, who formed a portion of a colony of Athenian citizens, sent to colonize Samos after its subjugation by Pericles. The father and mother of Epicurus were in very humble circumstances; his father was a schoolmaster, and his mother, Chaerestrata, acted as a kind of priestess, curing diseases, exorcising ghosts, and exercising other fabulous powers. Epicurus has been charged with sorcery, because he wrote several songs for his mother's solemn rites. Until eighteen, he remained at Samos and the neighboring isle of Teos; from whence ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... the shepherds, and laborers of all sorts, were coming towards the chapel. The Senora, with her best black silk handkerchief bound tight around her forehead, the ends hanging down each side of her face, making her look like an Assyrian priestess, was descending the veranda steps, Felipe at her side; and Father Salvierderra had already entered the chapel before Ramona appeared, or Alessandro stirred from his vantage-post ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... costly pageant 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 woman ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... scenes, and share in the fictitious joys and sorrows of love, which they long to enact in reality. Nothing is above love; nothing equals it. He reigns as a master in a temple, with woman as the high-priestess, and man the victim or ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... humorous, entertaining, affable; she had the air of a woman who had tried every experience,—the last person I should have suspected of interest in spiritual or other philosophy. We next heard of her as the high priestess of a new cult in India. Rumors reached London, where I was residing, that this new religion was spreading among the Hindus, giving much trouble to the missionaries, and that Madame Blavatsky was suspected of being in the pay of the Russian government. That way of meeting the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... better-born. Ah, if his wealth would but supply her poverty! 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 fond women are, by the ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... minutes, looking and taking all this in; and then the inner door opened, and he forgot it instantly. At one stroke, as it were, the mean little room was transformed into a sacred temple, and here was the priestess. The two young people stood a second or ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... the dwellers of thy home Blessed the path thy race had trod, Kneeling in the temple dome To a reptile god; Where the shrine of Isis shone Through the veil before its throne, And the priest with fixed eyes Watched his human sacrifice; And the priestess knelt in prayer, Like ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... the offender's children. Ulysses having, by a stratagem, withdrawn Iphigenia from her mother for that purpose, the unhappy Virgin was brought to the altar. But, as the story goes, the Goddess relenting at her hard fate, substituted a deer in her stead, and conveyed her away to serve her as a Priestess. It must be farther remarked that Menelaus was the Virgin's uncle, and Calchas the Priest who was to officiate at this horrid sacrifice.] could see that Chalcas should appear greatly concerned, Ulysses still more so, and Menelaus bathed in tears, but that the head of Agamemnon (the ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... might come to this fair end, He found Apollo, and besought him lend His throne of divination for a while, Whereby he did the priestess there beguile, To give the cruel answer ye have heard Unto those lords, who wrote it word by word, And back unto the King its threatenings bore, Whereof there came that grief and mourning sore, Of which ye wot; thereby is Psyche ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... hath sent me hither, bade me greet With hail, and fair salute, Diana's priestess. For new and wondrous conquest, this the day, When to her goddess Tauris renders thanks. I hasten on before the king and host, Himself to herald, and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... girls, factory girls—all had told her their troubles; and men of every condition had come to scoff and had remained to express, more or less offensively, their admiration. Some of the younger of these, after a first visit, returned the day following, and each begged the beautiful priestess of the occult to fly with him, to live with him, to marry him. When this happened Vera would touch a button, and "Mannie" Day, who admitted visitors, and later, in the hall, searched their hats and umbrellas for initials, came on the run and threw the infatuated one out ...
— Vera - The Medium • Richard Harding Davis
... under age.[10] Of these the elder was killed by Tarquin, who coveted their possessions; the younger escaped his brother's fate only by feigning idiotcy. On arriving at Delphi, Brutus propitiated the priestess with the gift of a golden stick inclosed in a hollow staff. After executing the king's commission, Titus and Aruns asked the priestess who was to reign at Rome after their father. The priestess replied, whichsoever should first kiss his mother. The princes agreed to keep ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... of the God. And they applied their innumerable hands to the pine, and tore it up from the ground; and sitting on high, Pentheus falls to the ground from on high, with numberless lamentations; for he knew that he was near to ill. And first his mother, as the priestess, began his slaughter, and falls upon him; but he threw the turban from his hair, that the wretched Agave, recognizing him, might not slay him; and touching her cheek, he says, I, indeed, O mother, am thy child,[60] Pentheus, whom ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... the Catholics upon the same principle that Sarah 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
... is almost done, my children. The first sign has come from the gods. I have brought you in human form the ancient priestess!" And he really believed he had. "O my children, my little ones, my kids! I have brought her who will now attend to the sacred fires; for these alone will restore the city as of old, the fat corn, the ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... No words but these,—and these to him are best:— That, henceforth, like a quenchless vestal flame, His words of truth shall burn on Truth's pure shrine; His memory be truth worshipped and confessed; Our gratitude and love, the priestess line, Who serve before Truth's ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... possessed that red republican Sissy. She giggled within herself, Madigan's attitude, his streaked and gilded face, his confident voice, showed such delightful indifference to the effect his unconventional attire must have upon this Priestess of Form. ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... ill-regulated passion for Christina Light a very regrettable affair, but he suspected that her manifest compassion had been all for Roderick, and not in the least for Mary Garland. She was fond of the young girl, but she had valued her primarily, during the last two years, as a kind of assistant priestess at Roderick's shrine. Roderick had honored her by asking her to become his wife, but that poor Mary had any rights in consequence Mrs. Hudson was quite incapable of perceiving. Her sentiment on the ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... DIOTI'MA, the priestess of Mantineia in Plato's Symposium, the teacher of Soc'rates. Her opinions on life, its nature, origin, end, and aim, form the nucleus of the dialogue. Socrates died ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... in your hair," he said, "why would you look like some witch or priestess, and never like ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... a huge tigress which glared with glassy eyes across the place at the snarling muzzle of a polar bear. Mycenaean vases and gold death masks stood upon the same shelf as Venetian goblets, and the mummy of an Egyptian priestess of the thirteenth dynasty occupied a sarcophagus upon the top of which rested a basrelief found in one of the shrines of the Syrian fish goddess ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... me in the ruddy light, and the dark cheeks of her glowing and her eyes flashing—"Hamish, I have that in the heart of me." And as she stood thus pointing to the fires, all lit up and wild and beautiful, I thought there must surely have been away back in her story a priestess who tended fires in some ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... bedecked all females, or hath at least instructed them how to put it on; lest, through the indelicacy of males, the Samean mysteries should be pryed into by unhallowed eyes: for, at the celebration of these rites, the female priestess cries out with her in Virgil (who was then, probably, hard ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... funeral, on a clear October day not unlike Miss Phoebe herself, bright, yet touched with wholesome frost. All Elmerton went about the rest of the day with hushed voice and sober brow, looking up at the closed shutters of the Temple of Vesta, and wondering how it fared with the gentle priestess, now left alone. The shutters were white and fluted, and being closed, heightened the effect of clean linen which the house always presented—linen starched to the point of perfection, with a dignified frill, but no frivolity of lace ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... 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 Athene knew of the frailty ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... and 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, ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... 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
... nearing the noontide of her womanhood, and immolated in this house of perennial mourning, making vain oblation of her youth, her beauty, the rich wine of life that coursed so lustily through her being, upon the altar of a memory whose high priestess was ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... through evil arts, to plague the race that had worked her husband to death in the mines, and now had killed her only son. She kept still more at home, brooding, planning, yielding farther and farther to the evil suggestions that her repute as a voodoo priestess offered to her, yet keeping one place in her heart even warmer than before,—the place filled by her ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... somewhat that was not owned for truth by the Athenians 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 a strange god; it being manifest, that they who make use of such a law do ...
— Against Apion • Flavius Josephus
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