How the Office Was Actually Entered, from Rome to Modern Wicca

The clearest surviving procedural detail for any ancient priestess office belongs to Rome's Vestal Virgins: a girl was chosen by lot between the ages of six and ten from a shortlist of eligible patrician candidates, served a fixed term of thirty years divided between learning, performing and then teaching the duties of tending Rome's sacred hearth fire, and took a vow of chastity for that entire period, breach of which was punished by live burial, one of the most severe penalties in Roman law and applied to no other office. In return a Vestal held legal capacities no other Roman woman held at all, including the right to own property, make a will and give testimony in court without a male guardian, and enjoyed a public precedence that put her ahead of most magistrates.

Contemporary Wicca and much of modern Paganism built an initiatory priestess office of their own in the twentieth century, organised in most traditional lineages around a system of three initiatory degrees, with a High Priestess, typically paired with a High Priest, leading an individual coven and empowered to train and initiate new priestesses in turn, a structure modelled loosely on older fraternal and magical orders rather than continuing any unbroken line from the ancient offices the same word now evokes. Because no body sits above an individual coven, recognition as a priestess in this modern sense rests entirely on initiation within a specific lineage, and, as with the guru and the spiritual teacher, on the acceptance of a community with no external authority to appeal to.