What Is a Blue Lotus Initiation, and Why the Egyptian Priests and Priestesses Used Blue Lotus in Ritual and Ceremony

Three years with a sentence I could not use

She spoke to me in one of my very first ceremonies.

I was not asking for a message that night. I was not braced for one either, and that is exactly how she works, she gives you what you need at the moment you are least prepared to receive it.

"Look upon the walls of red and gold and you will find the keys."

That was the whole of it.

No map. No temple named. Nothing, not her, not the room, not the long silence afterward, told me what the keys actually were.

I sat with that sentence the way you sit with a key someone presses into your hand in the dark. Useless until you find the door. And I did not know whether there was a door, or a country, or a single wall anywhere in the world that matched it.

Three years.

Say that slowly, because it is longer than it sounds when you are the one carrying it. I built a life around her in those years. I held ceremonies, I learned what she could do and, just as importantly, what she had never once claimed to do. And underneath all of it, quietly, a sentence about red and gold walls sat in me like a stone in a pocket I kept forgetting to empty.

Not painful. Not urgent.

Just there.

That waiting is the part nobody tells you about. Most stories like this one skip straight to the moment it comes true, someone receives a message, someone travels, someone stands somewhere and it all clicks. I want to tell you about the years in between, because that is the part I actually lived in the longest, and I have come to think it is the part that made everything after it possible.

What the temples gave me when I finally went

The invitations came long before I went.

Group tours. Guided pilgrimages. Someone who had studied these temples for twenty years, offering to walk me through them.

I said no every time.

Not because group travel is wrong. I have sat in enough circles to know how much can move through a room held by someone who knows what they are doing. That was never the issue.

The issue was smaller and more stubborn than that. I did not want another person deciding, in advance, what a room was going to mean to me before I had stood inside it. Because the moment someone tells you what a wall means, you stop finding out for yourself. You start checking your own reaction against theirs.

So I waited. And when I finally went, I went alone.

Three weeks, roughly. No group, no guide walking ahead of me pointing at things, no plan telling me which day I was supposed to feel what. I let intuition choose where I stayed and where I went next.

Giza first. The pyramids, the Sphinx. I had seen the photographs the way everyone has, and a photograph lets you believe you already understand the thing it shows you. Standing beside the actual stone is a different education entirely, one built out of scale and heat and distance rather than information.

Then Luxor, and Karnak, and across the river into the tombs of the West Bank. I did not stand in front of those walls trying to decode them. I could not have. What I could do was stand in front of the sheer density of it, thousands of symbols arranged together across thousands of years, and let that density do whatever it was going to do to me.

Some rooms wanted silence and closed eyes. That surprised me every time it happened. A chamber would ask for stillness rather than looking, and I would sit down and shut my eyes, and something would move that had nothing to do with what was painted on the walls around me.

Other rooms did the opposite. They worked on me purely through sight. No closing the eyes, no going inward, just scale and colour doing their work directly.

Nobody could have told me in advance which room would ask for which. That was the whole reason I went without someone whose job was to tell me.

Dendera held her own weight, the temple of Hathor, colour still living on stone after thousands of years, reds and golds that have no business surviving this long and did anyway. Abydos carried something heavier, quieter and older feeling in a way I still do not have better language for. Aswan opened it all up again, the light changing, the Nile narrower and closer.

And then Philae.

You do not walk up to her. You cross to her, by boat, over the water, and there is a stretch of minutes where the ordinary shore is behind you and the island is not close enough to be real yet. The river does that on purpose, or it feels like it does. It separates you from the world you walked out of before it lets you into the one you are going toward.

I felt something standing in that forecourt I had not expected to feel.

And it was not new.

Years before I ever crossed that water, long before Egypt was anything to me but a country I loved from a distance, I sat alone in my room on the spring equinox with an elixir I had made with my own hands, and something met me there I had no framework for at all. I called it the lotus spirit. She, because that is how I have always spoken about the flower and whatever moves through her. I did not write the name of a goddess anywhere that night.

The name came later. Much later, and slowly, out of research and museums and following her backward through every temple wall and papyrus fragment that had anything to say about her. Isis kept turning up. Not once, and not decided on the spot, but again and again from different directions, until the feeling I had alone in that room started to rhyme with a name instead of staying a shape with no word attached to it.

Standing at Philae years later did not prove any of that. No temple, however old, can reach back through the years and confirm a private experience for you. What she gave me was somewhere to stand while I thought about her.

And what I found on those walls was not one hidden sentence waiting to be the answer, the way a password waits to open a locked door. Some part of me had hoped for exactly that, because a single hidden line would have been so much easier to hand you than what I actually walked away with.

What I found were patterns.

She was never alone on any wall I stood in front of. She sat beside a god, a vessel, a sound, an offering, and her meaning shifted depending on what stood next to her. I noticed how often a dark, narrow chamber came directly before an open, painted one, as though the builders knew that concealment has to come before revealing for revealing to mean anything at all. I noticed colour and scent and sound and touch all working together inside the same ritual instead of any one of them carrying the whole weight alone. And I noticed the same shapes repeating, across walls, across temples, across centuries, the way you repeat something to a child not because they missed it the first time but because repetition is itself a kind of teaching.

These are my own working interpretations, built slowly out of standing in those rooms with my own eyes open. Not a doctrine handed to me by anyone. I am still finding more of them, and I expect to keep finding them for years yet.

You can have all the keys in the world, but should you not know which door to open, you will only wander the halls searching for what to open.

I think that is far closer to what she actually meant than any single hidden secret could have been.

What the record actually shows, and where it stops

I want to slow down here, because this is exactly the place where a story like mine goes soft if I let it.

That she was offered, worn, and placed with the dead is documented, and it is not in dispute. When Howard Carter's team opened Tutankhamun's tomb, floral garlands remained across the nested coffins and shrouds, and among that preserved material were her petals, placed deliberately rather than scattered. Her petals appear again in the embalming cache recovered nearby, material used in preparing the body itself.

Beyond the tomb she recurs constantly. Carved into temple columns, painted on tomb walls, held in the hands of gods and kings, set on offering tables in scenes of ceremony and feasting. She is not a decorative motif at the edges of that imagery. She sits at the centre of it.

Then there is the part most accounts blur straight past.

That she was specifically consumed as part of ritual, steeped in wine or in oil, the way you read almost everywhere online, rests on a different kind of evidence. She appears again and again alongside wine vessels and unguents in banqueting and temple scenes, which is a strong pattern and one I find genuinely convincing. It is not a surviving recipe with her name on it and a ritual spelled out step by step. I have not found a single text that closes that gap.

I would rather tell you that plainly than dress an inference up as a settled fact. I have written through the whole of that evidence, and exactly where it runs out, in its own piece.

The human side of it moves me more than the god side, if I am honest with you. The women who actually held her in temple ritual were not the goddesses. They were priestesses. People, with a role you can see in the reliefs and in Hathor's own attendants, and I have written about what is documented of them and what is only legend rather than compress it into a paragraph here. I find that human role more moving the longer I sit with it, precisely because it was human.

Why three months, and not one night

Here is something I have watched happen in ceremony after ceremony, and it took me a long time to say it out loud.

Participants think it is what they are drinking that makes them feel this way. They think the Blue Lotus makes them feel like this.

But this could not be further from the truth.

She opens a door. That is what she does, and she does it beautifully. What moves through that door is the space you are held in while it stands open, the intention, the attention, the person sitting with you who is not going anywhere.

And a door that opens for one evening can close again.

Not always. Not for everyone. But often enough that I stopped pretending a single night was the whole of the work. People would leave a ceremony genuinely opened, and a week later the ordinary world would have quietly closed over the top of it, and what they touched would be a memory of something rather than something they were still living inside.

That is the reason an Initiation runs three months and not one evening.

And notice that the temples did the same thing. The dark narrow chamber placed before the open painted one. The sequence built into your legs, room by room, on purpose, by people who could have built it any other way. Nobody designed those places to be understood in an hour.

What a Blue Lotus Initiation actually is

For those ready to go further than a single ceremony, the Blue Lotus Initiation is a private, guided journey with me and the plant, over three months.

It is not a course. It is not coaching.

It is a period of real, held work. Private one to one sessions using Blue Lotus, Ankh breathwork, meditation, sound and energy work, alongside deep dive ceremonies and daily support between our meetings.

It begins with a conversation, where I come to understand your practice, your body, your intentions and your history, so that what follows is built around you rather than delivered to you from a template.

What she opens over that time is different for everyone, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Over the weeks people describe seeing themselves more clearly, beginning to trust themselves again, meeting parts of their own story they had stopped looking at. She tends to open the core patterns and beliefs that have been running underneath everything.

For more than half a year I've been telling myself maybe I'm broken, that I'm not enough. But in the ceremony I received one sentence that stayed with me: you are as you are. I felt it deeply, on my whole body. Now I feel, it's okay. That's me.

I take only a small number of people into this work at a time, so that each journey receives the attention it actually asks for. Nothing is decided before we speak.

I gave three years to a sentence I could not use.

I am not telling you that to make it sound noble. For most of that time I had no idea whether I was carrying something real or simply refusing to let go of a beautiful line. What I know now is that the waiting was not wasted. It was the part that made me ready to understand what I eventually stood in front of.

If you are holding something like that right now, a pull toward her you cannot yet explain or act on, I do not think that is a failure of the message. I think it might be the message working exactly the way it is supposed to.

You do not have to find the door today.

But if something in you has been quietly answering while you read this, that is usually enough of a sign to begin the conversation.

Let me know if any of this sparked something within you. I read every reply, and you can also find me on Instagram, @bluelotuspriest.

For the flower behind all of this, her botany, her chemistry, and the spagyric process that carries her into the elixirs, read the complete guide to Blue Lotus, Nymphaea caerulea. If a single ceremony rather than the full Initiation is where you are right now, I have written about what actually happens in that held space, and Love of Hathor, the ceremonial spagyric elixir, is the one built for circle work.

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