Ashley Ryan’s journey into spirituality is a story of deep connection, resilience, and a lifelong search for truth. From her early encounters with the divine through the figure of the Virgin Mary to her initiation as a Hermetic Priestess under the Goddess Isis, Ashley has followed a path of discovery and empowerment. Now the founder of the Pythian Mystery School, she shares her wisdom with others, helping them unlock their spiritual potential. Her journey is a reminder that our spiritual paths can be both transformative and practical, grounded in self-love, gratitude, and dedication to growth.
1. What inspired you to pursue initiation as a hermetic Priestess under the goddess Isis?
The Goddess Isis has been present in my life from an early age, although not in her Egyptian form, I knew her energy in the Catholic form of the Virgin Mary. When I was quite young, I was babysat by my great aunts who were Benedictine nuns. At the age of four they asked me if I wanted to become a nun and get married to Jesus. I told them I would rather become a priest. And they told me I could not do that because I was a girl. I felt rejected from religion and this is when my spiritual journey started then. Isis first appeared as the Egyptian goddess at a jewelry convention in 2007. I saw a necklace with her wings expanded, and I knew I needed to buy it. It wasn’t until I was in high school where I had the freedom to explore. I didn’t know then what I was looking for. But now I would say it’s the Truth and the nature of reality. I searched in literature, art and even got my undergraduate degree in philosophy, but it still didn’t satisfy me, I was looking for more. In 2015 I moved to Los Angeles, California to pursue my masters degree. It was during that time that I was able to immerse myself in the occult community. At 28 years old, the owner of The Crooked Path Apothecary in Burbank, California, Salvatore Santoro. He mentioned a hermetic order dedicated to the Goddess Isis, and I was elated and asked for their contact information. I knew deep down this was what I had been looking for. I went through a very rigorous interview process and was accepted. It was during my initiation I was formerly given the title of Priestess, which solidified my childhood dream and deepened my understanding of my life path
2. Can you share more about your journey to starting the Pythian Mystery School?
Pythian Mystery School was founded in 2020. It was during this time that I became internet famous for being an occultist. During the pandemic, there was a noticeable interest in witchcraft and mysticism online. People were asking me to create more in-depth videos about my knowledge of candle magick, how to cast spells, astrology, and, of course, Tarot. Each class includes a 15 -30 minute pre-recorded video with captions and graphics and then a more personal recorded lecture.
Pythian Mystery School has grown significantly since 2020. I’ve even gotten the opportunity to collaborate with other practitioners, such as @afro_spiritual and @rootedinalchemy, who have different world views and different knowledge (such as Hoodoo and in-depth astrology) than I do. We are creating a well-rounded system for people to study and get a solid foundation in their magical craft and spiritual journey.
We currently offer courses to enhance your intuition, learn to read tarot cards without the book, connect with your spirits guides and how to remove malicious magick. You can see for yourself at study.pythianmysteryschool.com
3. How do you integrate your spiritual beliefs into your everyday life and teachings?
At a certain point when you’re practicing, you realize that everything has the potential to be spiritual. From washing the dishes, to morning prayer, to interactions with people. One of the most important things I practice in my life is gratitude. And it’s gratitude for the smallest things such as being able to park my car under a tree. I take a moment to give gratitude to the tree for sharing it shade with me, creating comfort in my daily life.
I believe that spirituality, if practiced correctly, leads to an expansion of consciousness. I live in Los Angeles, California and vanity is contagious. There’s always a fear of not being skinny enough, not being pretty enough, and it’s actually quite selfish.
After being initiated I was made aware of an eating dysfunction I had in my life. My obsession with thinness was creating a block in my spiritual life. I wasn’t eating enough to be able to do both my professional and spiritual work.
With the guidance of my hypnotherapist and spiritual mentors I was able to work through the old patterns of shame and create a form of self acceptance within myself. That self acceptance over the years has turned into self-love. And to achieve this was partly through giving gratitude towards my body. When I started viewing my body less something that needed to be fixed, but with compassion, I became less selfish and self absorbed. It was after I found this love for myself then I was able to truly step into my role as a healer and leader.
4. What challenges have you faced while establishing and running the Pythian Mystery School?
The biggest challenge for Pythian Mystery School is finding the best platform to enhance learning and community. I have learned that my younger audience does not check their emails and has many distractions. Think of all the notifications you get on your phone each day. How am I supposed to compete with that?
My biggest goal for Pythian Mystery School was to find a platform that would allow me to create my own social media and send push notifications like TikTok or Instagram.
The best platform I have found is called Circle. So I have previously used other programs like Patreon, Squarespace and passion.io, but none of them haven’t allow for automated workflows and curate the user experience so well. I would have to buy other systems like Zapier to make things work, but Circle offers all of those option in their program. And most importantly they offer the capability to cut through the noise of other apps with push notifications.
5. How do you maintain your mental health and well-being while managing a spiritually-focused business?
First of all, the balance between mind, body, and spirit is a difficult one. It has taken me years to find it.
In the realm of the mind, spirituality is not a replacement for therapy. Spirituality can be used in conjunction with therapy, but cannot replace it. In fact, I think a lot of people forget that studying the occult and magic can drive you mad. It can cause spiritual psychosis, and having a healthy mind is very important. I am a little bit of a therapy junkie, I have been in hypnotherapy for six years. And working the traumas of shame and rejection has allowed me to stop being codependent, which makes me a better leader.
In the realm of the body, it took me a while to honor my body. The body is a vehicle that allows you to move here on the physical plane. Sometimes it’s easy to dismiss the body when you are so much in your head and in the astral. This dismissal leads causes atrophy and even disease. I have a very specific health and fitness plan created by my doctor, personal trainer and acupuncturist that I follow to keep my healthy, as a lot of the work I do is sedentary.
An example of this is called 30-30-30 eating 30 g of protein within 30 minutes of asking up and then walking for 30 minutes minutes. I also take breaks during the day to stretch. I learned in 2021 am allergic to most dairy products. I eat vegan most days, learning how to cook tofu and create my own vegan cheese.
In the realm of spirit, it’s not about doing large rituals every day. I do have a regular morning, noon and night prayers/cleansings. But throughout the day I find the small ways to keep the Goddess Isis in the forefront of my mind. It’s also remembering that everything I do is for Her, it’s not about me anymore. I mat her mouthpiece, but the fame is a side effect of living authentically.
6. Can you describe a particularly transformative experience you’ve had in your spiritual practice?
The Goddess Isis gives me tests in my life to see if I have progressed in my Priestesscraft. Being a priestess means being of service to a God or Goddess fulfilling His/Her Will here on this plane of existence. Sometimes She lets me know when these are going to happen and sometimes she doesn’t.
But one particularly transformative experience was when I was working at The Crooked Path in Burbank as a Tarot reader. A young woman came into the store asking for a reading about her job. During the reading The Tower card came up and the Death card. I told her that it is likely she will be moving away from this job very soon. Immediately after the reading she received the phone call that she was fired. This woman began swaying and was about to pass out. I caught her and brought her to a chair and got her some water. I helped bring down her panic attack through breath work.
I am not a mother. In fact, I had a very negative experience with my mother growing up, but in that moment, I became a mother-like figure. This energy is not naturally in my personality, the majority of my natal chart is ruled by Saturn. But in that moment I allowed the Goddess Isis’s energy to flow through me and comfort this woman. That may not be “channeling” proper but I can say the Goddess Isis was truly acting through me at that moment. It’s a strange experience when I was acting out of character. I wasn’t even thinking the way I normally do, I was simply in the flow of this maternal nurturing energy. It was incredibly special. Two weeks later the woman came back and gave me a handwritten letter filled with gratitude and stating she believed she was brought to me directly to help her through a very challenging moment in her life.
7. What advice do you have for women seeking to reconnect with their spiritual selves?
The first thing I would say to women who want to reconnect to their spiritual selves is get away from the idea that everything needs to be “aesthetic” or pretty. You can buy thousands of crystals, the best candles, the most elaborate statues. And that’s great but it’s really not necessary. Don’t give into spiritual materialism. It is easy to go onto Pinterest or Instagram to see these elaborate, gorgeous altars and spells. It’s not necessary! Historically magick was done with what was available to the people. It does not need to be intensely elaborate of beautiful. One of the most successful spells I have done were on a paper plate using honey, salt and mustard from packets at fast food restaurant.
The other is that spirituality is often a solitary path.
A lot of women get into spirituality seeking a community. Remember that the Divine is perfect, humans are not. You can certainly make friends and find like-minded practitioners but specifically seeking a community that doesn’t have ego or drama is going to be difficult, almost near impossible. Remember even monks have their disagreements. Magick and spirituality is a way for you to connect to the Divine. It is not meant for you to connect to other people.
I recommend educating yourself cults and cult warning signs so you can have the awareness of what is acceptable or unacceptable behavior. Some examples of this are— Isolating members from their family. Financial or sexual exploitation. Absolute authoritarianism without meaningful accountability. No tolerance for questions or critical inquiry. These are just a few red flags to be aware of.
8. How do you balance the spiritual aspects of your work with the practical demands of running a business?
It is very hard to balance spirituality and day-to-day business work because they both require creative energy. I only have so much energy that I can put out in a day, and it is truly a one-woman show.
I have been so grateful to find the tools, particularly utilizing some AI to enhance workflow such as helping me onboarding students into the Pythian Mystery School community. I also use AI to crosspost my content and schedule posts. I use Manychat to help me nurture and facilitate leads on Instagram and Tiktok. Automating these tasks frees up my time for more spiritual work, reading, researching and mediation.
The spiritual part of my business comes very naturally, and sometimes easily. As I learn how to automate the more mundane parts of my business, I can focus and spend more energy on the spiritual part, such as spell casting.
9. What role does virtue, honesty, and integrity play in your teachings and personal life?
Virtues are at the forefront of my life. However, I think that I perceive virtues differently than other people. These days the word “virtue” has acquired a Christian conception of purity and chastity.
My focus on virtues comes from Ancient Greece. The ancient Greeks also believed that virtue was good for both the individual and the community, and that living virtuously was necessary for living well. The ancient Greece focused on four so-called cardinal virtues, understood as character traits that ought to be cultivated and used as a moral compass to navigate our lives. Virtues are about enhancing your life or reaching your full potential.
Honesty and integrity are why I have been able to scale my success, because people can see that I am genuinely passionate about magick.
I am oath-bound to secrecy regarding many of my personal practices. I do not share everything online. I have specifically gone out of my way to learn other magical systems that I can share. Authenticity and transparency are very important to me. Many of my followers and students know that I have taken an oath of secrecy. There are things that I cannot share, and they are respectful of that. If someone is not, that is a red flag for me.
Here are some of the other virtues I strive to uphold in my every day life.
Prudence (sometimes called practical wisdom), the ability to navigate complex situations in the best way possible. This means taking time to think before acting or speaking. Our world expects things to happen quickly and a immediately, that is a sure way to avoid practical wisdom. Never sacrifice wisdom for quickness.
Justice (a tarot card) understood as acting fairly toward others and respecting them as human beings. There are times in my business where I have had to deny people access to my work. I always divine with the Goddess Isis before doing any spells. Sometimes people are so bent on getting their way (usually it’s getting an ex to come back), they ignore the warning signs. Justice is not getting what you what, when you want it, and if I were to give people what they want all the time it would be against my role as priestess.
Fortitude (or courage), encompassing endurance and the ability to confront our fears. One a YouTuber named Colin, from @theparanormalfiles came to be for a collaboration. It was during our spirit board session with the Goddess Hekate made it known this man had made several blood oaths to lower level astral entities. In this moment I knew I was supposed to help him break the blood oaths, which is not easy and I had not prepared to do. I had to trust in my own ability to use what tools I had and allow Hekate to guide me through this process, which was successful!
Temperance (also a tarot card), the ability to practice self-restraint and to act in right measure. The virtue of temperance means creating a balanced life and one of the hardest things for me was to create a consist sleep schedule. In college and grad school I would be up till 2 or 3 AM working and sleeping til 11 AM. This would not work for me as a professional in business nor in my spiritual life (unless I have to do a ritual at 3 AM). So I tempered my life to going to bed no later than 11 PM ever night. I also stopped drinking all alcohol because it was affecting my mood and my quality of sleep.
10. How have you navigated any skepticism or misunderstanding about your spiritual practices?
My job is not to prove magic to anyone. The job of the Priestess is to fulfill the Isis’s Will here on earth and to be her handmaiden. I received thousands of comments every week from people condemning me to hell, or telling me to change my life, and that Jesus is the only way. And I feel bad for those people. Honestly! How closed your mind must be for you to feel the need to correct my life. I think most people do it out of fear and false moral superiority.
Most of the time I simply ignore these comments, I’ve had a handful of people personally asked me to prove magic to them and I simply say “if you need me to prove it, then it’s not for you.”
You do need a certain level of consciousness, you need to be at a certain place in your life, to want to aspire to the spiritual beyond the material plane. Skeptics will remain skeptics until they have a genuinely traumatizing experience that awakens them to the greater meaning of life. I believe that is part of their own alchemical journey in this life.
11. Can you share an example of how your work has positively impacted someone’s life?
There are two Youtubers that I have collaborated with named Sam and Colby, I went to go visit these young men in the beginning of 2013 to give them a tarot reading before their upcoming ghost adventure to the Whaley House. And it was probably one of the worst readings I have ever given in my entire life. The entire reading showed pain and suffering, I knew through my clairaudience that Sam was going to break up with his girlfriend, and I knew that Colby was going to suffer some kind of physical injury.
They were also skeptical about my reading and I scared these men so much. But I would find out a couple of months later that three days after that tarot reading Colby was diagnosed with testicular cancer. And they have told me that I changed their lives, and showed them, that magick is real. I’ve spoken to both of these boys privately and mentor them through their Saturn return and other personal matters.
This is an example of a moment where people who were skeptical, were then shown light through trauma. In my workings with both of these guys, we used my homemade spirit board, you may know it as a Ouija board. (I’ll be honest, it’s not my favorite form of divination, but it’s the most visual one so we use it a lot.)
And both of these guys were shocked at how well the spirit board worked and the communication they were receiving from the other side. And in that moment, I could see in their eyes, a change in consciousness.
I have been so lucky to influence peoples lives, I’ve received emails, saying how I helped people away from suicidal ideation and helped other people find true meaning in their life, but being able to see someone’s consciousness actually changed was the most impactful for me.
12. What are some common misconceptions about hermetic spirituality that you’d like to clarify
So, hermetic philosophy is an amalgamation of different cultures over time, spanning Islamic culture, Mesopotamian culture, ancient Egyptian culture, ancient Greek culture, and the Renaissance with Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and John Dee. Some people may call this appropriation, but I would call it syncretism, a combination of thoughts and ideas refining themselves throughout time and history.
One of the things that really freaks people out about hermetic philosophy is that there are crosses involved you will see crosses in these works, but that does not make it Christian. The cross symbol predates Christianity. There are many different versions of the cross, and it represents balance. It represents equality of elemental forces, I’m specifically talking about the equal armed cross. The Sun Cross is one of the oldest and most widespread of spiritual symbols, appearing in Asian, Indigenous American, European, and Indian religious art.
The other thing I would say is that a lot of people think about the occult as summoning demons or malefic workings. That is certainly not the case, although some people may practice and work with infernal energies. As a whole that is not with the occult is. That is a idea that was conceived by Hollywood and H.P. Lovecraft and packaged to horror movies.
The occult is about understanding and communicating the energies, planets, elements, and spirits that create our physical world. It helps us elevate our consciousness and live more complete and wholesome lives.
13. How do you stay inspired and motivated in your spiritual and professional life?
When it comes to magic and spiritual work, it’s about remembering the greater picture that the work that I am doing is divinely inspired and one of the reasons I was brought back to Earth. I may be focused on something like, “Oh no! My copywriting isn’t where I want it to be” or “This video did not perform nearly as well as I wanted to.” But ultimately everything that I put out professionally is thoughtful and well researched and those who look for it will find it
I think it’s also important to have a defined work schedule. Unless it is a special project, podcast or presentation, I work from the hours 10 AM – 6 PM. It is so easy to get sucked into working around the clock. That is the a good way to burn yourself out and get sick. I played that game for a while and I didn’t like it.
Another way I find to stay motivated is to create a specific location to divide work, home, and spirituality. I have specific locations in my house that are separated either by doors or by curtains. When I am not working in that space, I close it off so my mind recognizes it can rest from that part of my life.
So when I am not doing spiritual work, I close my temple. I close my office door when I’m not doing my professional work. When I am not sleeping, I close my bedroom door. This helps create a psychological barrier that is so important for my ability to stay motivated and not overwhelmed.
14. How can women incorporate spiritual practices into their daily routines?
When you’re trying to create a spiritual life, you want to learn how to incorporate your spiritual practice within your daily routine.
Ideally, you have two minutes while brushing your teeth. Brushing your teeth and saying your affirmations while looking in the mirror is a spiritual act. It’s also a psychological one because you’re doing something routine, so you have more access to your unconscious mind, and those affirmations will be better received.
Create a bedtime routine. It can be very helpful for improving sleep quality, as well as a more vivid dream life which is also a connection to the Divine and your unconscious mind. So instead of looking at Instagram last time before going to bed, I tell a lot of my clients to call upon a greater power to help them cleanse their aura, and then visualize what they want to manifest as are falling asleep. This is also a psychological hack because as you’re falling asleep, your brain is in the theater brain wave state, and this is an optimal time to be able to, do magic so a mantra or visualization is very helpful.
Turn n off all the social media notifications on your phone and set a time limit on each social media under 30 minutes. I do not receive any notifications from any social media, it is a distraction. To live a spiritual life in a mundane world, you need to get focused. Spirit is not going to send you a notification to remind you. You get to choose where you put your attention. Stop doom scrolling, and spend some time in meditation.
I also suggest another low-effect, high-reward option: making your phone background a picture of your goddess or a tarot card and the energy you want to bring into your life. These practices can suit individual lifestyles, intentions, and religious preferences.
15. What future goals or projects do you have for the Pythian Mystery School and your spiritual work?
I look forward to launching Pythian Mystery School on Circle in September 2024.
Pythian Mystery School will be it’s own enclosed social media that mimics the Facebook layout, with discussions, instant chat, organized groups. I have also installed AI moderators to maintain a safe place for people to connect and discuss spirituality.
The lessons at Pythian Mystery School will also include quizzes! You can test your knowledge to ensure you got the most out of each lesson.
I am very excited to grow and connect with more mystical people and give them a safe place to share and practice their spiritual path.
In my own spiritual work, I am looking forward to connecting to more YouTubers and other Content Creators, and hopefully directors and writers to give a more accurate perspective on the occult and how spirituality can improve our lives.
I would like for people to be able to see that spirituality is not “woo-woo.” But is a “science.” The occult sciences are a collection of esoteric disciplines and practices that seek to uncover hidden knowledge and understand the mysteries of the universe, which are often beyond the reach of conventional science. This includes conducting interactive rituals, using symbols and archetypes to unlock deeper levels of understanding, but. Most important get people away ro the ideas that magick is a form of entertainment but is sacred.
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