THE OCHRE PAPERS is a space for readers to go deeper into the themes I explore here. As you read, questions may rise—curiosities, challenges, or echoes of your own experience. This column is where you can bring them. Think of it as a gathering place for deeper inquiry and dialogue. You can ask me anything, and I’ll choose some of your questions to explore publicly in these pages. Your questions—sent through messages and emails—have already been funny, moving, unexpected, and profound.

In my responses, I’ll draw on what I know and love: ancient knowledge, myth and story, symbolism, archetypal patterns, spirituality, and the teachings that have been gifted me and I can gift on.

SUBMIT A QUESTION

Hi friends,

It’s been a while since I last answered a question here, so I thought I’d return to the archive and write the next issue.

Here is the third issue of the Ochre Papers, my Q&A column.

If you would like to send in a question for future issues, you can do so here.

The Ochre Papers is a space for readers to go deeper into the themes I explore in my essays. As you read, questions may arise, and this column is where you can bring them. Think of it as a gathering place for inquiry and dialogue. You can ask me anything, and I’ll select a number of questions to respond to publicly in these pages.

Here are some past issues.

THE OCHRE PAPERS ISSUE #3

Listen via audio:

Dear Riordan,

It’s exciting to receive a question related to my current research.

I wrote my master’s dissertation on the Melissae back in 2021, and have been turning it into a book for the past four years, to be published by Shambhala Publications. What you’re pointing to here is one of the most subtle and revealing threads in their mythology.

To begin, I’d like to briefly situate the figures involved, for readers who may not be familiar with them.

The Melissae, a Greek word meaning “honeybees,” occupied a unique and fluid position in ancient Greek thought. The term did not refer to a single, fixed category, but moved across registers. It was used to describe bees, nymphs, and priestesses at once. In mythic contexts, the Melissae appear as nymphs associated with caves, honey, prophecy, and the nourishment of divine children. In ritual contexts, the same name is given to mortal women serving as priestesses of the ancient Mother Goddess, later primarily in her form as Demeter. Across both registers, they are consistently linked to prophecy, sacred mediation, and to psycho-magical substances such as honey that was believed to enable movement between worlds.

Alongside recovering the mythic dimensions of the Melissae, my work also explores the role of priestesses more broadly. One of their primary functions within their societies was as mediators in times of transition: birth, menstruation, the passage from boyhood to manhood, marriage, death, and initiation into the Mysteries of the Mother Goddess at sacred sites such as Eleusis.

These are threshold moments, points at which the ordinary structures of life loosen and something unknown or transformative emerges. In such times, guidance is sought. Even today, we recognise this impulse: people turn towards mediums, astrologers, tarot readers, or other forms of divination when navigating uncertainty, loss, or change.

The priestesses of the ancient world fulfilled a comparable role, but within a fully integrated cosmology. They didn’t stand outside life as interpreters of it, but moved within its transitions, mediating between the visible and invisible realms.

When referring to mortal women, then, the Melissae were historical priestesses, embedded within specific cultic traditions and ritual practices. By contrast, the figures we turn to next—the Moirai, or Fates—belong to the realm of myth.

The Moirai were three women who presided over the unfolding of every life. Their name comes from the ancient Greek word moira, meaning a portion or a share; that which is allotted. It refers to the part of life that falls to someone, what is given rather than chosen; it is a principle that orders existence, the measured apportioning of life.

When this idea takes shape in myth, it often appears as three female figures. In Norse tradition, they appear as the Norns, who tend the roots of the world tree and mark out the fate of gods and humans. In the Baltics, they are the Laima, figures who determine the course of a person’s life at birth.

Across cultures, the pattern holds: a life is given, it is bounded, and it comes to an end.

In Greek tradition, their names are Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, who spin, measure, and cut the thread of life.

At first glance, the Melissae and the Moirai appear to belong to different orders. Yet they converge within the same symbolic field. The Moirai belong to the deeper mythic structure that underlies and informs the practices of the Melissae—figures who, as priestesses and oracles, gave voice to what was already woven into existence.

The clearest point of connection between them is the domain of prophecy. Both the Melissae and the Moirai are associated with revelation. This reflects a worldview in which the cosmos itself is animate, capable of determining, articulating, and disclosing destiny.

The association of prophecy is not merely conceptual, but attested within the tradition itself. At Delphi, the Pythia—the priestess of Apollo—was sometimes referred to as a Delphic “Bee”, a title that situates her within the same symbolic lineage as the Melissae, the bee-priestess. Likewise, the Hymn to Hermes describes three prophetic bee-maidens, dwelling in a cave on Mount Parnassus above Delphi, who offer divination when inspired by imbibing honey:

“maidens… rejoicing in their swift wings…
who feed on honeycomb and bring all things to pass…”

Hermes’ bee-maidens speak truth when they have tasted honey, but fall into confusion when deprived of it—a detail that ties their prophetic capacity directly to the sacred substance of the hive.

The Moirai, too, are consistently figured as three. Their triadic form is not incidental: it expresses a structure of unfolding—beginning, measure, and end; emergence, duration, and cessation. The same pattern appears in the Melissae of the Hymn to Hermes: three figures who mediate access to knowledge that lies beyond ordinary perception.

This recurrence of three also resonates with a much wider pattern found across cultures, in which the feminine is understood through three principal stages of life and initiation: maiden, mother, and crone. These are not merely biological phases, but thresholds of transformation—each marked by shifts in knowledge, power, and relation to the unseen.

Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos can be read not only as figures of fate, but as figures of beginning, middle, and end. Clotho, who spins the thread, stands at the point of emergence, where a life first takes form. Lachesis, who measures it, belongs to its duration, to the span in which a life is lived out and shaped. Atropos, who cuts it, marks its limit, the moment at which that portion is brought to completion.

Both the Melissae and the Moirai carry a prophetic dimension. The connection between them becomes clearer when we turn to a particular imaginal setting in the Odyssey: the Cave of Bees.

This is a place that gathers bees and nymphs within the same space, and the name melissae was once used for both. It is also the name given to priestesses, women associated with ritual and with prophecy. In this way, the cave holds together the symbolic, the mythic, and the historical at once.

Caves, in the ancient world, were among the earliest sacred sites. Before constructed temples, they functioned as threshold spaces; places of descent, concealment, and encounter with the unseen. Across cultures, they are associated with initiation, burial, renewal, prophecy, and with the presence of chthonic and generative powers. To enter a cave was to cross a boundary between worlds.

The appearance of the bee-maidens within such spaces—most explicitly in the Hymn to Hermes, where they dwell in a cave on Mount Parnassus above Delphi—suggests not only their prophetic function, but the antiquity of their lineage, rooted in a form of sacred life prior to built sanctuaries.

In late antiquity, the 3rd-century Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry offers one of the most evocative readings of this passage, interpreting it not as a physical place, but as a symbolic threshold between worlds. His commentary on Homer’s Cave of Bees reframes it as a metaphysical diagram of the cosmos and the soul’s movement within it.

An olive tree grows above the cave, its branches casting shade over the rock. Below it is a hollowed space, cool and dim, where the nymphs dwell. Stone vessels and ledges line the interior. There the nymphs weave their purple cloth, while bees gather and store their honey in the amphorae. Water moves steadily through the cave. It has two entrances. The northern one is open to human beings. The southern is reserved for the immortals.1

Porphyry insists that Homer’s description is not merely poetic, but allegorical—that Homer speaks “under the veil of allegory,” concealing a deeper structure. He understands the cave as a symbol of the cosmos itself: a space both beautiful and obscure, composed of matter, movement, and form; and overlooked by female mediators, nymphs, or bees. Considering the interchangeable use of the “melissae” term, perhaps they are one and the same.

The details of the cave’s interior belong to a coherent symbolic language. The nymphs are described as weaving purple garments upon stone looms, while bees deposit their honey within hollowed urns. These are not decorative elements, but expressions of a shared grammar. Weaving, storing, shaping, and containing all belong to processes through which form emerges from formlessness, and life is brought into sacred order.

The cave, as a liminal space between worlds, gathers these processes together. Within it, the figures of the nymphs and the bees begin to converge: both are associated with hidden labour, transformation, and the production of something refined from what is raw. In this way, they participate in the same symbolic field as the Melissae and the Moirai—figures linked to threads, to vessels, and to substances that are formed, measured, and revealed, and through which, at certain thresholds, destiny may be disclosed.

The two gates (one for mortals, one for gods) are read as the pathways of descent and ascent: the movement of the soul into embodiment, and its return. The flowing waters, the woven threads of the nymphs, and the presence of bees storing honey all belong to this symbolic system, describing processes of formation, sustenance, and transformation.

What both groups of women reveal is an ancient imagination that understood existence as ordered and animate, structured not only by visible forces, but by intelligences beyond the human. This was not yet a world in which access to the sacred was restricted to institutions, or mediated exclusively through formal priesthoods.

Rather, it belonged to an earlier, more animistic horizon of experience in which the boundary between the human and the more-than-human was porous, and the presence of sacred intelligence was encountered throughout the living world.

Within such a cosmos, guidance could be received from gods, from nature, from the unseen landscapes that were not distant or abstract, but imbued with sensuousness and intelligence. Their methods were not doctrinal and passive, but active and relational; processes that directly participated with the mysteries of existence. The movements of animals, the patterns of the seasons, the behaviour of bees, the voice of the oracle… all could disclose meaning.

Knowledge was not produced solely through human reasoning, but revealed through encounter.

And yet, this didn’t mean that all could perceive or interpret such signs equally. Even within this more open and participatory world, ritual specialists existed who were prepared through discipline and rites of passage to receive, interpret, and transmit what was disclosed.

It is here that we find the Melissae, and behind them, uttering over their shoulders, the guides who informed their seership, amongst whom were the Moirai and the imaginal tapestries that they wove.

SUBMIT A QUESTION FOR THE NEXT ISSUE!

THE OCHRE PAPERS is a space for readers to go deeper into the themes I explore in this publication. As you read, questions may rise—curiosities, challenges, echoes of your own experience. This column is where you can bring them. Think of it as a gathering place for inquiry and dialogue. You can ask me anything, and I’ll choose some of your questions to explore publicly in these pages. Your questions have already been funny, moving, unexpected, and profound. They remind me that creating is a communal act.

SUBMIT A QUESTION