It happened about 15 years ago when Ava Park stood in a cramped, dark cave in Egypt, adjusting her eyes to the warrior goddess Sekhmet.

The only light in the very small chamber comes from a square hole in the ceiling. Outside is the vast temple complex of Karnak in Luxor on the east side of the Nile River, home to the second largest ancient religious site in the world.

Park remembers that the tourists were unrelenting, jostling and talking loudly, ignoring the solemnity. She just wanted a moment.

“Suddenly, I was alone in the room,” she said, amazed at the turn of events.

She then tried to explain what happened next as she gazed at the nearly 3,500-year-old, life-sized statue.

“It’s hard to describe with words a spiritual experience,” she said.

But she did feel something that to her was undeniable and has helped guide her life ever since.

“I saw the solar disk on her head change into a crown and something pushed me to my knees,” she said. “The message was, ‘You have a lot of work to do, so get to it.’”

As quickly as it came, the experience left. The tourists ambled back and she got to her feet and walked out, feeling both startled and exhilarated.

When she returned to the United States, Park researched women’s spirituality, trying to find a group of kindred souls. But she was left lacking, so she started her own, the Goddess Temple of Orange County in Irvine, goddesstempleoc.org.

Park, 61, is now a presiding priestess and a virtual compendium of goddess spirituality. In person, she is both forthright but receptive, acutely aware but not self-absorbed, confident but not arrogant. With warm hands and penetrating eyes, you can understand why the women — and some men — in her temple treat her as a respected spiritual adviser and confidant.

While she has extensive training in many kinds of religions, none spoke to her in the same way as what she felt in Egypt.

“I realized that all of the organized churches were very male dominated,” she said. “They were very ‘God the father.’ There was not much mention of females. Everything seemed very one-sided to me.”

The modern goddess movement started growing in popularity in the 1970s. But it has a long, complicated history that is traced back to the start of civilization.

“I think of there being a source of life, a principle in the universe that creates life and is alive and is conscious and is one being, and we are all that being,” Park said. “All is one. And because that principle is creative and constantly giving birth to new things, it makes sense to think of that — in human terms — as a great mother rather than a great father.”

In these times, despite more than 40 years of feminism, there still is a polarized view of what constitutes male and female. Whether it’s transgender rights or presidential character debates, the current climate is not particularly enlightened.

In some ways, Park considers this as an opportunity because it fosters discussion and honesty.

“The paradigm we have is that it’s men against women, and women against men, and that we have different interests. And if you take away power from one, it takes away power from the other,” she said. “That is a completely polarizing paradigm of duality that is very much of the patriarchal mindset.

“If I uplift and empower myself, it takes nothing away from you. In fact, it makes all of us stronger and more happy and more whole.”

It’s not common, however, to talk this way, let alone becoming a “priestess.” Park knows this. If she’s at a dinner party, for example, and someone asks her what she does, she doesn’t normally lead with “I’m a goddess woman.”

“People don’t know about it,” she said. “They don’t know what it is. They don’t even know what questions to ask. So you have to explain things very simply.”

She tells them it’s a church for the empowerment of women. That it’s not some crazy notion. That, in fact, it’s one of the first belief structures ever practiced.

“Most people don’t know but for 250,000 years on this planet, everyone venerated a god that they thought of as a female, a great mother,” she said.

Unfortunately, many years ago, men changed all that and history has never been the same. Despite this “hidden history of humanity,” Park said, she hopes people start to become more open to spiritual alternatives because for many women, they will never feel completely happy under a patriarchal system.

“What I see all the time are women who feel vaguely dissatisfied — or sometimes strongly dissatisfied — with their current religion. They know they are deeply spiritual people and want spirituality in their lives, but they feel that their church is dried out – that’s there’s no juice in it.”

Still, if a woman changes her life, there is often a consequence if she is in a relationship with a man, and it can be difficult to navigate, Park said.

“In our culture, we only want women to be the playful, sexy maiden that we can have sex with, or the giving mother who cooks and cleans and takes care of people,” she said. “This is the situation with women today. They have the responsibility of making the home happy and running the home, but they don’t have the authority in the public sphere of changing the laws so that life actually works for all of us.”

There is another way to live, she said, but it takes inherent trust and equality.

“The matriarchal mindset is shared power. We’re all in this for the good of the tribe together. We have forgotten that there’s another way to live on this planet.”

Park is convinced the approach is correct, just and healthy.

“I see how broken things are. I see how it doesn’t have to be that way. And I’m just committed to spending the rest of my life to helping uncover some deep and ancient truths for humanity that will help us all live more happily together,” Park said.

DAVID HANSEN is a writer and Laguna Beach resident. He can be reached at hansen.dave@gmail.com.