Who We Are
High Priestess is Australia’s largest witchcraft business, and we specifically care for Southern Hemisphere witches with authentic information, events, courses, and support.
Created by a witch who is a third generation psychic and light worker, High Priestess is here to bring back Goddess worship to the Southern Hemisphere, and eventually - to the world.
About the Founder: Leela Cosgrove
Leela Cosgrove is the founder of High Priestess, Australia's largest witchcraft education and events company. A third-generation psychic and lightworker, she's been a practicing witch since 1995 and has worked professionally as a psychic and healer for three decades, reading for Hollywood celebrities, billionaires and rock stars along the way.
She founded High Priestess to bring witchcraft education out of the shadows and into a serious, well-resourced home in the Southern Hemisphere, where women and witches can learn the craft from experienced practitioners rather than piecing it together from books and the internet.
Through High Priestess, Leela runs Witch School, the annual two-day live event in Melbourne, alongside an expanding catalogue of online courses, the High Priestess magazine, and a growing publishing arm bringing new witch voices into the world.
Leela has been named in the top 50 fast-growth companies in Australia by the Financial Times, listed as one of Australia's top 25 female entrepreneurs under 40, and recently joined the Leadership Council of Fortify Rights, the award-winning human rights organisation working across Southeast Asia, Ukraine, and the United States, alongside diplomats, lawyers, academics, and other leaders investigating and documenting atrocity crimes.
She has spoken on TEDx, written for Smart Company and other national publications, and been featured in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, 9News, and Kochie's Business Builders. She grew up in a housing commission suburb in Brisbane, in a household shaped by 70s counterculture, comparative religion, and beat literature, and remains, in her own description, fundamentally punk rock.
The Other Work
Leela is also the founder of Strategic Anarchy, a sales and marketing consultancy for expert founders, and the co-founder of Ritual Movement, a wellness business she runs in partnership with Ben Lewis. Across all three companies, the underlying conviction is the same: people do their best work when they stop performing the version of themselves they think the world wants, and start operating from who they actually are. Strategic Anarchy helps founders productise and sell their genuine expertise. High Priestess helps witches build practices grounded in the real tradition. Ritual Movement helps people design lives that don't break them.
Off the Clock
Leela lives in Geelong, in a 1962 brutalist art-deco round house known locally as the Round House, and to her as “The Tower”, which she shares with her partner Gulliver, two dogs, and two cats. She collects work by Rosaleen Norton, the Witch of Kings Cross.
Our Mission
In the tarot, the card of the High Priestess is the female counterpoint to the Magician. She is the illuminator – her crescent moon (long a symbol associated with women and witchcraft) showing the way. She is the keeper of arcane magic, mistress of the deep esoteric mysteries.
The very concept of a literal “High Priestess” seems so foreign from a mainstream societal point of view. Often veiled behind mysterious curtains, She exists only in the tarot, and for those few who work in non-mainstream traditions.
Our Mission at High Priestess is to fundamentally change the societal conversation around matriarchal traditions and women’s engagement with them.
And that all starts with YOU.
In 2020, we astrologically re-entered the Age of Aquarius, and the Lightworkers were called. So many women right now feel the call to something more – they know they’re searching for something, but they’re not always sure what.
We’re here to support you on your journey of illumination. We’re here to give you the history, the knowledge and the tools to rediscover the birthright that for so long has been hidden from you.
We’re non-denominational – we have women involved in our community who identify as Muslim, as Christian, and those who are decidedly more Pagan in their beliefs. We welcome women from all backgrounds to explore their cultural and ancestral histories through their own connection to the divine.
If you find yourself curious about your ancestral ways … about how the world was different before … if you’re a seeker of knowledge … if you feel the call, we’re here to help you discover and create your own practice and, hopefully, to eventually share that practice with others.