I passed my dissertation defense on March 3, 2017 and I walked graduation ceremony on May 20, 2017. I never thought the end of my graduate school journey would ever come. But remarkably it did! Both were good days.  My graduate work, like all  transformative processes, was both elating and arduous, and really made me step up my mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical games as a soul in the world. I am now reborn and am in the process of reinventing myself and emerging from the chrysalis of an academic initiatory pathway and the birthing process that is the dissertation. These final ceremonies, in which I was able to share the research and understanding that I had worked so hard to achieve, and to be ritually confirmed by degree were both kick-ass days for me (yes, I am in the splits onstage at commencement, and yes, that is a skull bag I am sporting). I am now Dr. Elisabeth P. Sikie, or how I like to refer to myself now – Witch Dr! Bless!

The picture above is of the Minoan artifact that guided my research as I embarked on the academic journey to retrieve my shamanic European ancestors. The middle artifact is my girl whose representation of female trance states kept me going. Gonna get her tatted upon me in the near future. The two other versions of her are added bonuses to this Neolithic shamanic female pattern of trance and movement evident in the artifact. I love that they are positioned in threes in this display. Mother, Maiden, Krone. [1] 

[1] The rising young Earth Mother with poppy headdress. Minoan. Post-Palatial Crete 1350 B.C. Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess:Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization  (New York: HarperCollins, 1989), 150.