Glossary — A Sacred Vocabulary

Cisgender: Of a person whose gender aligns with the one they were assigned at birth.
Transgender: Of a person whose gender does not align with the one they were assigned at birth. An umbrella term that may include trans women, trans men, non-binary, agender, genderfluid, and others.
Non-binary: Of a person whose gender is neither exclusively woman nor exclusively man.
Two-Spirit: A pan-Indigenous umbrella term for various gender and ceremonial roles within North American Indigenous nations. Properly belongs to Indigenous people; non-Indigenous people do not use it for themselves.
Divine Feminine: A spiritual current associated with receptivity, fierceness, the earth, and cyclical change — not a body type.
The Goddess: A name for divinity understood as feminine in expression. May refer to a specific deity or to the larger field of feminine sacred presence.
Paganism: A broad family of contemporary spiritual traditions reviving, reconstructing, or innovating pre-Christian religious practice.
Coven: A small working group of practitioners, often in Wiccan and adjacent traditions.
Galli: Priests of Cybele in the ancient Mediterranean world who underwent ritual transformation and lived in feminine dress in Her service.
Gala: A Sumerian priestly role in the cult of Inanna, often associated with gender variance and the singing of laments.
Inanna / Ishtar: Sumerian and Akkadian goddess of love, war, and transformation — including the power to change a person's gender.
Cybele: Anatolian Great Mother goddess whose Roman cult included the gender-variant Galli priesthood.
Sabbat: A seasonal holy day in many modern pagan traditions.
Esbat: A lunar observance, typically at the full moon.
Altar: A dedicated surface or place for ritual and devotion.
Intersectionality: An analytical frame for how overlapping identities — race, class, gender, disability, and others — shape a person's experience of power and harm.
Wounded healer: An archetype, common across traditions, in which a person's own suffering becomes the source of their capacity to help others.