Womb Priestesses in Margate’s Mysterious Shell Grotto

Behind the Scenes of the first Psychedelic Feminine Oracle Deck Photoshoot

The womb priestesses, Poppy, Lara and Delmar dancing in the passageways of the grotto

The Shell Grotto in Margate (Kent, England) is one of those places that lives between the worlds. It’s hidden beneath an ordinary street, yet stepping inside feels like entering a threshold space, ancient and otherworldly. The walls are completely covered in intricate patterns made from millions of sea shells, spirals, stars, serpents, all arranged with a kind of sacred precision that defies explanation. No one knows exactly who built it or why, and maybe that’s part of its power. It resists being pinned down. It simply exists, humming with memory, mystery, and the quiet insistence that something holy once happened here. Maybe still does.

The Shell Grotto doesn’t give away its secrets easily. There are no signs explaining its origin, no confirmed date or architect, no known ritual lineage to lay claim to its meaning. And yet, the moment you step inside, you feel it. Something in your body recognises the language being spoken. The coolness of the air. The way sound travels. The spirals. The shells. The darkness. It’s less like entering a man-made building, and more like entering a body. The walls curve like hips. The patterns repeat like pulse. It feels womb-like, protective, humming with a memory older than language.

The entire structure is lined with over four million shells, mussels, cockles, scallops, oysters, each one placed with deliberate care. Some of the patterns are unmistakably yoni-shaped, their outlines echoing the sacred vulva, the portal through which all life arrives. Others are upright, phallic, unmistakably lingham. The balance between the feminine and masculine is there if you know how to see it, a dance between polarities, perfectly mirrored in the rippling geometry of the walls. A temple of fertility, creation, and perhaps even conception.

And when you begin to view the grotto through that lens, not just as a historical curiosity, but as a living ceremonial site, everything begins to align. The symbolism of the shell has long been associated with the feminine, the womb, the sea, and the mystery of inner worlds. From Venus rising out of her scallop shell to ancient burial rites that placed shells in the hands or on the pelvis of the dead, this is not a new language. It’s an ancestral one. A language of water. A language of mothers.

There are whispers, of course, stories that connect the grotto to Magdalene priestesses, to mermaid lore, to the women of the sea who once lived on these lands and carried the mysteries of the womb in their bones. Margate, a town whose name itself may hold the syllables of “Magdalene” and “gate,” offers fertile ground for such speculation. Was it once a gateway for sea priestesses? Did this subterranean chamber serve as a ceremonial space for women who worshipped the cycles of the moon and the sea, who anointed one another with oils and sang songs to the Mother? No one can say for sure. But when we stood in that space, dressed in shells and silk and salt-stained fabrics, we felt the presence of something ancient. Something familiar.

Mary Magdalene has become a powerful figure in my work, not the vilified or domesticated version offered by the church, but the original teacher of love and embodiment. The priestess. The one who anointed with oils, who wept, who remembered the body as sacred and the feminine as divine. Her energy moves like tidewater through the Oracle Deck, and it felt right that this particular card, The Chalice, would be born in a place so deeply connected to the womb.

There’s something about the sea, the shell, and the priestess that has always been intertwined. Mermaids, too, are not the Disney version in these old tales, they are seductresses, truth-tellers, liminal beings who guide souls between worlds. They dwell in the depths, they sing, they remember. They are feared and adored in equal measure. And when Lara stepped into her mermaid-priestess dress, corseted in shells, standing beneath the shell-covered archway of the grotto, it was as if all these threads wove themselves together.

Womb. Sea. Shell. Magdalene. Priestess. Portal. It didn’t feel symbolic. It felt cellular.

Lara holding the chalice

I chose it as a location for the Oracle Deck because the moment I saw it, I recognised its energy. It felt like a womb. A place of prayer. A coded temple to the divine feminine, and to the parts of us that still remember how to kneel before beauty without needing to explain it. It didn’t feel like a backdrop for a photoshoot. It felt like a collaborator. A guardian. A place to enter with reverence. And this wasn’t just any photoshoot. It was the first shoot of the Oracle Deck, our beginning. Our opening ceremony. The moment where everything began to breathe. And this shoot, this day, was where it all began.

We chose to begin at Beltane/ Calan Mai week, the cross-quarter festival that honours fertility, eroticism, and the fire of becoming. A threshold in the wheel of the year, when the veil thins not to the otherworlds of death and decay, but to the luminous, pulsing forces of life. It’s a time of union, of fire meeting flesh, of seed meeting womb. We wanted to conceive the deck in that frequency. To infuse it with the spark of creation, the wild sensuality of spring turning to summer, the sacred tension between desire and gestation. So we approached the shoot not as an aesthetic exercise, but as a ceremonial act of conception. The Oracle Deck is a living being, and this was her quickening.

I’ve always known this project would be more than a collection of images. It’s a living body of work, built on land and lineage, shaped by devotion. Each card will be created at a sacred site or a place of natural power across the British Isles, stone circles, sea caves, forests, holy wells, places that hold memory in the earth and carry medicine in their bones. And because of that, we couldn’t just begin anywhere. We needed to start in a womb. A chamber. A place beneath the surface where light meets salt and silence. The Shell Grotto gave us that.

We approached the day as ceremony, because there was no other way to hold it. We gathered slowly, in softness. We arrived at the site early, moving quietly, instinctively, holding the weight of what we were about to do. We brought a playlist woven with Magdalene Mermaid energy, devotional, feminine, elemental, music that echoed off the stone and turned the tunnel into a temple. The songs that dripped with water, honey, incense, longing. The space echoed with sound, but it felt like silence too. A kind of inner stillness. That presence you only feel in temples or forests or birth rooms. We were inside a stone-lined passage, beneath the streets of Margate, but it felt like we were far away. Or maybe very deep within. We anointed one another with blue lotus oil, the scent of it blooming on our skin, softening the edges of our everyday selves, inviting us into the mythic.

We prayed before we began. Whispered our intentions for the photos we create to be a deep and profound transmission, to touch and change all who receive their medicine in the way they will most be of service, that we could embody the frequencies of the magdalene priestess and through our embodiment anchor that into our art. We prayed gratitude for the land, for the sacred site, for all who created her and worshiped there. Praying for our art to honour our connections to our wombs, to each other and to our earth, to be in right relationship with all through the alchemy of art.  It was felt. Held in the gaze we offered each other. In the breath we took before the first image. In the way our feet met the stone floor. In the way we said yes to being vessels, not just artists. 

The grotto received us, and we received each other.

This shoot wasn’t simply about capturing a look or building a brand. It was a transmission, a prayer to the Magdalene, to the ancient priestesses of these isles, to the women who once gathered in circle and remembered the body as sacred, the land as holy, the act of creation as ceremony. We offered this work to them. And to the ones yet to come. And to the parts of ourselves we are still remembering.

This was the invocation, the threshold crossing. The moment where the Oracle Deck began to gather its voice. Every shoot that follows, on windswept moors, on the coastlines where selkies once walked, in the stone chambers carved by hand and time, will carry this first prayer within it. The grotto was the opening. The womb. The call. And we answered.

We had one hour to be inside. Sixty minutes underground, inside this living texture of shell and stone. The constraints made us more intentional. Every decision was considered in advance, every scene mapped out, every item chosen with care. We came in knowing exactly what we wanted to capture, but also open to what might emerge.

What we created in that hour was more than I could have planned. It felt like something came through us, like the grotto itself had been waiting.

This image of Lara is unedited, the effects occur in camera from painting with light

Adorning the Oracle

The Fashion & Styling

Clothing, in this context, wasn’t just visual. It was vibrational. A form of invocation.

For this first ceremonial shoot, every textile, texture, and adornment was chosen not for trend or aesthetic, but for memory, the kind that lives in the skin. We weren’t just styling models, we were dressing archetypes, summoning lineage through cloth and ornament, allowing the body to become a vessel for myth.

Lara, art director, model, and creatrix, stepped fully into her role as the central oracle. Her gown was not bought or borrowed, but built: layer by layer, like a devotional offering.She crafted a full length blue and silver gown that felt as though it had emerged from the walls themselves, an offering born of sea and ceremony. The bodice was sculpted, corseted, and hand-adorned with delicate shells, pearls, starfish and shimmering beadwork, creating a mirrored echo of the Shell Grotto’s encrusted walls. Her body became part of the architecture, an altar of soft strength, wrapped in layers of sea-foam tulle and sky-toned mesh, her silhouette shifting between Magdalene priestess and mermaid oracle.

Her accessories were as intentional as her dress. The sheer blue sleeves billowed like sea mist, and her neck was encircled with a blue silk choker, recalling both sacred adornment and the breathlessness of deep water. It symbolised both the voice and the sacred breath, that liminal space between expression and silence. Around her neck, a handmade necklace of white shells, irregular, raw, beautiful, like bones or teeth or prayer beads. It gave weight to her softness, an edge of sea-witch wildness beneath the elegance. 

In her hands, she held the chalice, a thrifted glass bowl shaped like a flower, refracting every shard of light into rainbow fragments. Lifted overhead in offering, it turned her into vessel. She didn’t perform the role. She became the archetype. Oracle. Grail bearer. Magdalene.

In the next scene, sher stood Poppy and Delmar, the other two muses in this trinity. We styled them all in soft, off-white silks and cottons, barefoot, bare-limbed, radiant. Their garments were simple but fluid, wrapped and tied like priestess robes, echoing ancient ritual dress. There was ease in their elegance, a timelessness that belonged more to myth than modernity.

There was something deeply erotic in the styling too, not sexualised, but alive. The kind of eroticism Audre Lorde wrote about: power, presence, aliveness in the body. These weren’t women to be looked at. They were women holding the gaze of the sacred. And that’s the frequency I want the Oracle Deck to carry, one where fashion becomes remembrance, where styling is spellwork, and where the feminine is honoured not just in beauty, but in presence, in power, in archetypal depth.

Together, the three of them became a living tableau. One image, blurred by slow shutter, taken through the pointed arch of the grotto, captured them like a vision in water. Three women in communion, holding the chalice, whispering something forgotten and holy. Their bodies soft, curved, woven into one another like a hymn. Nothing was accidental. The shellwork. The translucent veils. The crystal chalice. Even the way the fabric caught the light was part of the prayer. This wasn’t about costume. This was about codes, ancestral, erotic, elemental.

Motion blur creates and otherworldly effect

The Space as Collaborator

When I first envisioned the Oracle Deck, I knew it wouldn’t be created in a studio. It had to be shaped by the land. By the ancient places that have held prayer, story, and silence long before we arrived with our cameras and costumes. This is not a deck about symbols alone, it’s a deck made of energy. Each image is a transmission, and each transmission is shaped by the place it was received.

The Shell Grotto was never just a location, it was the first collaborator. A temple of spiral and shell, of unknown origin, of unmistakable power. It set the tone for everything that will follow.

The decision to create this Oracle Deck on sacred sites and places of wild beauty throughout the British Isles is not rooted in aesthetics. It’s an act of reclamation. A restoration of right relationship with the land, and with the sacred. It’s my lifelong feminine lineage project to reconnect to womb worship and worship of my lands.

These islands have suffered deep and layered wounds. The witch burnings. The dissolution of the monasteries. The Protestant–Catholic wars. The severing of earth-based traditions beneath the force of empire, industry, and institutional religion. We walk on land that has held both prayer and persecution, sanctuary and silencing. So many of our once-holy places were bulldozed or buried, renamed or repurposed, overwritten with narratives that turned the sacred into shame and the feminine into heresy. But the land remembers.

Even where the stories have been stripped away, the stone still holds the imprint. The yew trees still whisper. The wells still rise. The paths are still there if you know how to walk them, not with entitlement, but with reverence.

This project is a pilgrimage of sorts. Not just across the map, but back through the bone-memory of these lands. It’s a response to the forgetting. A way of restoring sacred connection, not through doctrine or dogma, but through presence. Through ceremony. Through art made with devotion. The camera becomes a tool in the act of worship and reconnection.

When we enter a place with intention, when we arrive not to extract beauty but to be in relationship with the spirit of the place, something shifts. The space becomes part of the unfolding. It offers its frequency. It collaborates. It teaches. And the transmission that emerges is not just visual, it’s energetic. It lives in the image, it speaks through the card, it becomes part of the fabric of the deck.

This is why we began in the Shell Grotto. Because the project needed to be conceived in a place that still pulses with mystery, in a chamber that holds both the feminine and the forgotten. Because this isn’t just about remembering the priestess. It’s about remembering the land as holy. Remembering that these islands have always known how to pray.

Inside the grotto, we felt this tangibly. The acoustics turned our music into incantation. The curves of the walls shaped the way bodies moved. Light reflected off shell mosaics with the shimmer of water, creating patterns we could never have designed. Even the silence had a texture to it. The grotto held us in a way a regular room never could. It directed the shoot as much as we did.

Some places hold memory. Others are memory. The Shell Grotto felt like both.

From the moment we stepped inside, we felt the reverence. The atmosphere didn’t demand silence, exactly, it just made anything unnecessary feel heavy. The space held its own language, a kind of pulsing quiet that met you at the skin. It wasn’t grand in scale, but it was grand in frequency. Every wall, every curve and crevice, was textured with shells that seemed to breathe. They shimmered like fish-scale mosaics, like constellations embedded in stone, like the inner lining of the womb.

We had hired the space privately, which allowed us to be fully present, unobserved. There were no tourists shuffling through with commentary. No noise but the music we brought in and the occasional breath caught in awe. The absence of distraction let the space come alive, not as a background, but as a collaborator. This wasn’t a neutral location. It shaped us. It shaped the images. It held the ceremony with us.

The music echoed in a way that felt devotional. Low notes carried through the tunnel like prayers. High tones shimmered off the shellwork and returned as if blessed. Every sound was amplified and softened, like being inside an instrument. The shells didn’t just reflect light, they reflected feeling, amplifying whatever we brought with us. And we brought reverence. We brought the Magdalene. We brought the fire of Beltane and the stillness of the underworld. We brought our own bodies as altars, and the grotto received us as such.

As the shoot unfolded, it became clear that the space was responding. Light would move differently in certain pockets. The chalice caught more than we expected. Some shadows felt alive, and some scenes, like the one through the arched doorway, the one with the three muses almost blurred out of existence, seemed to compose themselves. It was less like directing, more like witnessing. Less like shooting, more like being let in.

The space allowed us to blur the boundary between the physical and the mythic. We weren’t pretending to be priestesses. We were simply remembering how. And the grotto, with its yoni-shaped alcoves, its spiral formations, its shell-lined paths that lead nowhere and everywhere, became the mirror.

There’s something deeply ancestral about working in a space that has no clear origin. It unhooks the rational mind. It invites the subconscious to lead. You don’t ask why. You ask how it makes you feel. And we felt held, witnessed, changed. 

And what happens in these spaces doesn’t stay in the space. That’s the magic. It lives on in the images. The frequency of the place imprints itself into the photograph, not just in colour and form, but in energy. That’s why this matters. That’s why we chose the grotto to begin. Because the oracle isn’t just what you see, it’s what you feel when you hold it. It’s the vibration it carries. The invitation it offers. 

Each site we shoot at becomes part of the story, part of the spell. The stone circles, the sea caves, the holy wells, the windswept ridges, they’re not just settings. They’re teachers. They’re remembering places. And we go to them not to take, but to co-create.

The Shell Grotto reminded us what’s possible when we do that, when we bring the archetype to the land, and let the land shape how she appears. When we listen more than we direct. When we treat the image-making as a sacred act.

When we finally stepped back out into the daylight, it felt abrupt. The sun was too bright, the world too fast. I remember blinking, holding the scent of blue lotus in my hair, the weight of the chalice still in my hands. We had gone somewhere. We had come back. And something had shifted.

The grotto had done its work.

This is shot through an on lens filter with a prism that fragments the image

Art as Alchemy

My Personal Transformation

Art, when made with intention, becomes alchemy. It doesn’t just illustrate something, it transforms it. It holds frequency. It shapes the one who creates it, and it continues to shape the one who receives it.

Since beginning this project, I’ve felt myself shifting in ways I can’t yet fully explain. This deck is more than imagery. It’s a vessel for something deeper, something of the psychedelic feminine, something that bypasses logic and speaks directly to the inner oracle. These images are made to feel, not just to be seen. They carry the codes of remembrance, of water, womb, myth, earth, and they’re designed to awaken something ancient in the subconscious. A knowing that doesn’t need explanation. A pulse that’s always been there.

As I walked through the process of creating this first card, from the ceremonial act of photography in the Shell Grotto to the days that followed, I began to realise that this isn’t a linear project. It’s a spiral. A spell. A rite of passage that is working on me as much as I’m working on it.

I didn’t leave the grotto the same.

Something inside me had been stirred. Unbound. Not loudly, but powerfully. A soft unraveling began to take place, one that reached into my body, into the spaces that still held stories from birth, pregnancy, and the quiet griefs I hadn’t yet given voice to.

In the days after the shoot, on Beltane itself, I received a womb healing ceremony from Lara. I hadn’t planned it to align, but of course, it did. My body was ready. My womb was ready. Ready to shed, to transmute, to soften and open. I cried through the massage, feeling wave after wave of old pain, not just physical, but cellular, releasing. Layers of trauma, fear, tension, control, all beginning to move. And in their place, something braver started to emerge. A deeper courage. A quiet, rooted power.

This project is transforming me. Not through grand declarations, but through layers. Through ceremony. Through the way my body is being asked to show up in new ways, present, porous, powerful. Through the invitation to stand in my feminine wisdom as the work itself. To honour the arts of image, embodiment, ritual, storytelling, and womb-connection not as aesthetic choices, but as portals to the psychedelic. As pathways into the Mystery.

I am still integrating. I will be integrating for some time. But what I know is this: when we approach art as prayer, when we create in partnership with spirit, with land, with body, something else begins to speak through us. Something wise. Something oracular. Something that doesn’t need to be explained, only felt.

This is what the deck is. A transmission. A spell. A mirror for the parts of us that are ready to return. And this is what the work is doing to me. It is returning me to myself, through beauty, through bravery, through the body. Through the wisdom path.

Delmar, Lara and Poppy in the Shell Grotto

Your Invitation

The Oracle Deck has now begun to gather, card by card, site by site, frequency by frequency. She is being born not in a rush of content creation, but through reverence, ritual, and real connection with the land and its memory. With the real priestesses who walk beside me. With the mystery that lives at the centre of the feminine arts.

This is not a solo project. It is a co-creation: with the earth, with the archetypes, with the muses, and with those of you who feel the call in your bones.

So if you are reading this and you recognise the frequency, if you feel connected to the feminine arts, the dark feminine, the psychedelic feminine, the wild woman within… if you walk the path of the priestess, the medicine woman, the shapeshifter, the edge-dweller… if you are a vessel for stories that don’t have words yet, and you are based in the UK or feel the call to come to these lands and be part of this project, I invite you to join me.

I am calling in muses for future shoots. Women who are willing to show up in their truth, their texture, their archetypal power. Women who want to co-create art that heals, remembers, and transforms. This is embodiment. This is spellwork. This is sacred image-making as transmission.

It is completely free to participate and there are also options to add paid mini-shoots using the props, styling and location we provide for your own business and brand for a lower price than my usual photoshoots are as a thank you for investing your time and energy into the project.

The oracle deck is entirely self-funded and any money the project generates will go back into it: costume, props, hair, makeup, location hire, travel to locations, the printing of the physical cards and accompanying book.

You can apply to be a muse here:

Oracle Deck Muse Application

And if you know of a sacred site in the UK, a stone circle, a cave, a well, an enchanted forest, a hidden grove, that you feel holds the frequency of this work, I would love to hear from you. Please feel free to share your recommendations in the comments. This project is a pilgrimage, and you are part of the map.

The Psychedelic Feminine Oracle is not just being created, she is being remembered. And we remember her together.

A prototype for The Chalice card