writer
and activist
. She is well known as a theorist of Paganism
, and is one of the foremost popular voices of ecofeminism
. She is a columnist for Beliefnet.com and On Faith, the Newsweek
/Washington Post online forum on religion. Starhawk's book The Spiral Dance
(1979) was one of the main inspirations behind the Neopagan movement.
Starhawk lives in San Francisco, where she works with Reclaiming
, a tradition of Witchcraft that she co-founded in the late 1970s.
She was influential in the decision by the Unitarian Universalist
Association of Congregations to include earth-centered traditions in the UUA sources of faith.
The witches, the wise women, and the healers were also always the counselors. It's a whole other tradition of knowledge and learning that has been suppressed because it had political implications.
Each being is sacred — meaning that each has inherent value that cannot be ranked in a hierarchy or compared to the value of another being.
Any ritual is an opportunity for transformation. To do a ritual, you must be willing to be transformed in some way. The inner willingness is what makes the ritual come alive and have power. If you aren't willing to be changed by the ritual, don't do it.
In the Craft the Goddess is not omnipotent. The cosmos is interesting rather than perfect, and everything is not part of some greater plan, nor is all necessarily under control.
Spirituality leaps where science cannot yet follow, because science must always test and measure, and much of reality and human experience is immeasurable.
In the Craft, we do not believe in the Goddess — we connect with her; through the moon, the stars, the ocean, the earth, through trees, animals, through other human beings, through ourselves. She is here. She is within us all.
The test of a true myth is that each time you return to it, new insights and interpretations arise.
This is the stillness behind motion, when time itself stops; the center is also the circumference of all. We are awake in the night. We turn the Wheel to bring the light. We call the sun from the womb of night. Blessed Be!