Starhawk
(1951 - )
(1951 - )
Starhawk (born Miriam Simos in St. Paul, Minnesota on June 17, 1951) is an
American writer, activist and Witch. She is well known as a theorist of Paganism and
is one of the foremost voices of ecofeminism. Starhawk lives in San Francisco,
where she works with the Reclaiming tradition of Witchcraft she helped found,
through classes, workshops, camps, and public rituals in earth-based spirituality,
with the goal to "unify spirit and politics".
She is internationally known as a trainer in nonviolence and direct action, and as an
activist within the peace movement, women's movement, environmental movement,
and anti-globalization movement. She travels and teaches widely in North America,
Europe and the Middle East giving lectures and workshops.
She is currently working with United for Peace and Justice, the RANT trainers'
collective, Earth Activist Training, and other groups.
Starhawk is the author of numerous non-fiction best-selling works: The Earth Path
(2004), The Spiral Dance (1979, 1989, 1999), Dreaming the Dark (1982, 1988,
1997), Truth or Dare (1988), Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising
(2003). She is the author of a widely read essay, How We Shut Down the WTO as
well as her web writings.
With Hilary Valentine she wrote The Twelve Wild Swans: A Journey Into Magic,
Healing and Action (2000) a resource book for Pagans. With M. Macha NightMare
and Reclaiming Collective, she wrote The Pagan Book of Living and Dying (1997).
Circle Round: Raising Children in the Goddess Tradition (1998) was co-written with
Anne Hill and Diane Baker. Starhawk's fiction includes The Fifth Sacred Thing
(1993), and Walking to Mercury (1997) ISBN 0553102338.
Starhawk has been consulted or contributed to the films Signs Out of Time: The
Story of Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, Goddess Remembered, The Burning
Times, and Full Circle. She participated in the Reclaiming CDs Chants: Ritual Music,
and recorded the guided meditation Way to the Well.
Early life
Starhawk's father, Jack Simos, died when she was 5. Her mother, Bertha Goldfarb
Simos, was a professor of social work at UCLA. Both her parents were the children
of Jewish immigrants from Russia. While a film student at UCLA in 1973, Starhawk
won the Samuel Goldwyn Award for her novel, A Weight of Gold, a story about
Venice, California, where she then lived. Starhawk married Edwin Rahsman in 1977.
She is currently married to David Miller.
American writer, activist and Witch. She is well known as a theorist of Paganism and
is one of the foremost voices of ecofeminism. Starhawk lives in San Francisco,
where she works with the Reclaiming tradition of Witchcraft she helped found,
through classes, workshops, camps, and public rituals in earth-based spirituality,
with the goal to "unify spirit and politics".
She is internationally known as a trainer in nonviolence and direct action, and as an
activist within the peace movement, women's movement, environmental movement,
and anti-globalization movement. She travels and teaches widely in North America,
Europe and the Middle East giving lectures and workshops.
She is currently working with United for Peace and Justice, the RANT trainers'
collective, Earth Activist Training, and other groups.
Starhawk is the author of numerous non-fiction best-selling works: The Earth Path
(2004), The Spiral Dance (1979, 1989, 1999), Dreaming the Dark (1982, 1988,
1997), Truth or Dare (1988), Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising
(2003). She is the author of a widely read essay, How We Shut Down the WTO as
well as her web writings.
With Hilary Valentine she wrote The Twelve Wild Swans: A Journey Into Magic,
Healing and Action (2000) a resource book for Pagans. With M. Macha NightMare
and Reclaiming Collective, she wrote The Pagan Book of Living and Dying (1997).
Circle Round: Raising Children in the Goddess Tradition (1998) was co-written with
Anne Hill and Diane Baker. Starhawk's fiction includes The Fifth Sacred Thing
(1993), and Walking to Mercury (1997) ISBN 0553102338.
Starhawk has been consulted or contributed to the films Signs Out of Time: The
Story of Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, Goddess Remembered, The Burning
Times, and Full Circle. She participated in the Reclaiming CDs Chants: Ritual Music,
and recorded the guided meditation Way to the Well.
Early life
Starhawk's father, Jack Simos, died when she was 5. Her mother, Bertha Goldfarb
Simos, was a professor of social work at UCLA. Both her parents were the children
of Jewish immigrants from Russia. While a film student at UCLA in 1973, Starhawk
won the Samuel Goldwyn Award for her novel, A Weight of Gold, a story about
Venice, California, where she then lived. Starhawk married Edwin Rahsman in 1977.
She is currently married to David Miller.
Sourced
I am a witch, by which I mean that I am somebody who believes that the earth is sacred, and that women and
women's bodies are one expression of that sacred being. My spirituality has always been linked to my feminism.
Feminism is about challenging unequal power structures. So, it also means challenging inequalities in race,
class, sexual preference. What we need to be doing is not just changing who holds power, but changing the way
we conceive of power. There is the power we're all familiar — with power over. But there is another kind of power
— power from within. For a woman, it is the power to be fertile either in terms of having babies or writing books or
dancing or baking bread or being a great organizer. It is the kind of power that doesn't depend on depriving
someone else.
As quoted in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (1979) by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow.
Much of what is written on the craft is biased in one way or another, so weed out what is useful to you and ignore
the rest. I see the next few years as being crucial in the transformation of our culture away from the patriarchal
death cults and toward the love of life, of nature, of the female principle. The craft is only one path among the
many opening up for women, and many of us will blaze new trails as we explore the uncharted country of our own
interiors. The heritage, the culture, the knowledge of the ancient priestesses, healers, poets, singers, and seers
were nearly lost, but a seed survived the flames that will blossom in a new age into thousands of flowers. The
long sleep of Mother Goddess is ended. May She awaken in each of our hearts — Merry meet, merry part, and
blessed be.
As quoted in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (1979) by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow.
The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess (1979)
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.
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!
The tide has turned!
The light will come again!
In a new dawn, in a new day,
The sun is rising!
Io! Evohe! Blessed Be!
Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics (1982)
To live with integrity in an unjust society we must work for justice. To walk with integrity through a landscape
strewn with beer cans, we must stop and pick them up.
Toward an Activist Sprituality (October 2003)
Online text, from Reclaiming Quarterly (Fall 2003)
No sane person with a life really wants to be a political activist. When activism is exciting, it tends to involve the
risk of bodily harm or incarceration, and when it's safe, it is often tedious, dry, and boring. Activism tends to put
one into contact with extremely unpleasant people, whether they are media interviewers, riot cops, or at times,
your fellow activists. Not only that, it generates enormous feelings of frustration and rage, makes your throat sore
from shouting, and hurts your feet.
Nonetheless, at this moment in history, we are called to act as if we truly believe that the Earth is a living,
conscious being that we're part of, that human beings are interconnected and precious, and that liberty and
justice for all is a desirable thing.
When we founded Reclaiming two decades ago, our intention was to bring together the spiritual and the political.
Or more accurately, some of us for whom the spiritual and the political were inseparable wanted to create a
practice and community that reflected this integration.
Now, with the Bush forces pushing into an aggressive war, with horrific environmental and social problems left un-
addressed, the need for activism is stronger than ever. The stakes have never been higher, and the sense of
urgency is palpable.
Spirituality and ritual are not something removed from the world, but are deeply embedded in it.
Reclaiming is founded on Earth-based spirituality, which rejects the split between spirit and matter, and claims
nature and the physical, material world as equally sacred with the spirit.
We don't ideologically believe in the separation of spirit and matter, but in practice, we still tend to think that
things that are too material, too real-life, are somehow not as spiritual. So a trance to Faery is perceived as
"spiritual," whereas a trance to a Brazilian favela slum is not. We can argue about the reality of Faery, but the
favela is undeniably real. If we truly believe that our spirituality is about deep interconnectedness, maybe it's
more important for us to grapple internally with the reality of the favela than to dance with the faeries.
Much of our magic and our community work is about creating spaces of refuge from a harsh and often hostile
world, safe places where people can heal and regenerate, renew our energies and learn new skills. In that work,
we try to release guilt, rage, and frustration, and generally turn them into positive emotions.
Safety and refuge and healing are important aspects of spiritual community. But they are not the whole of
spirituality. Feeling good is not the measure by which we should judge our spiritual work. Ritual is more than self-
soothing activity.
Spirituality is also about challenge and disturbance, about pushing our edges and giving us the support we need
to take great risks. The Goddess is not just a light, happy maiden or a nurturing mother. She is death as well as
birth, dark as well as light, rage as well as compassion — and if we shy away from her fiercer embrace we
undercut both her own power and our own growth.
There are times when it is inappropriate to feel wholly good. Now is one of them. As the saying goes, "If you
aren't angry, you aren't paying attention."This doesn't mean that we need to be in a constant state of rage or
irritability or guilt. It means we need to use our magical tools to face the stark and overwhelming realities that
confront us, acknowledge our feelings, and transmute them into the energy we need for change.
Everyone has the right to their own opinion about a ritual, and to their own aesthetics. There's generally at least
one invocation in every ritual that I could personally do without.
The water we hold sacred is not some abstract image or fantasy of Water, but the real stuff that we need to drink
and bathe and grow our gardens, that provides the crucial habitat for fish and plants and thousands of other
creatures, that is the Earth's literal life blood.
Another common, unspoken assumption is that spirituality is about calm and peace, and conflict is unspiritual.
Which of course makes it hard to integrate the spiritual with the political, which is all about conflict.
In New Age circles, a common slogan is that "What you resist, persists." Truly spiritual people are never
supposed to be confrontational or adversarial — that would be perpetuating an un-evolved, "us-them" dualism.
I don't know from what spiritual tradition the "what you resist, persists" slogan originated, but I often want to ask
those who blithely repeat it, "What's your evidence?" When it is so patently obvious that what you don't resist
persists like hell and spreads all over the place. In fact, good, strong, solid resistance may be the only thing that
stands between us and hell. Hitler didn't persist because of the Resistance — he succeeded in taking over
Germany and murdering millions because not enough people resisted.
On some deep cosmic level, we are all one, and within us we each contain the potential for good and for
destruction, for compassion and hate, for generosity and greed. But even if I acknowledge the full range of
impulses within myself, that doesn't erase the differences between a person acting from compassion and love,
and another choosing to act from hate and greed. Moreover, it doesn't erase my responsibility to challenge a
system which furthers hate and greed. If I don't resist such a system, I am complicit in what it does. I join the
perpetrators in oppressing the victims.
I am often astonished at well-meaning, spiritual people who advocate beaming light toward world leaders, who
scold activists for expressing anger toward authorities or police, who define compassion as loving the enemy —
but somehow lose sight of the need to love our friends, our allies, and those who suffer at the hands of the
perpetrators. I really don't feel much call to beam love and light at Bush or Cheney or the directors of the
International Monetary Fund. Whether or not they suffer from lack of love is beyond me. From my perspective,
they suffer from an excess of power, and I feel called to take it away from them. Because I do love the child in
Iraq, the woman in the favela, the eighteen-year-old recruit to the Marines who never dreamed he was signing up
to bomb civilians. I can't love them, or myself and my community, effectively if I can't articulate the real
differences in interests and agendas between "us" and "them" — between those who have too little social power
and those who have too much.
Systems don't change easily. Systems try to maintain themselves, and seek equilibrium. To change a system,
you need to shake it up, disrupt the equilibrium. That often requires conflict.
To me, conflict is a deeply spiritual place. It's the high-energy place where power meets power, where change
and transformation can occur.
Our magical tools and insights, our awareness of energies and allies on many planes, can deepen and inform
our activism. And our activism can deepen our magic, by encouraging us to create ritual that speaks to the real
challenges we face in the world, offers the healing and renewal we need to continue working, and a community
that understands that spirit and action are one.
Attributed
Any ritual is an opportunity for transformation.
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.
Spirituality leaps where science cannot yet follow, because science must always test and measure, and much of
reality and human experience is immeasurable.
The cosmos is interesting rather than perfect, and everything is not part of some greater plan, nor is all
necessarily under control.
The test of a true myth is that each time you return to it, new insights and interpretations arise.
We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been — a place half-remembered and half-
envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time. Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom
we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open
to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power.
Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when
we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
More info on Starhawk at:
http://www.starhawk.org
I am a witch, by which I mean that I am somebody who believes that the earth is sacred, and that women and
women's bodies are one expression of that sacred being. My spirituality has always been linked to my feminism.
Feminism is about challenging unequal power structures. So, it also means challenging inequalities in race,
class, sexual preference. What we need to be doing is not just changing who holds power, but changing the way
we conceive of power. There is the power we're all familiar — with power over. But there is another kind of power
— power from within. For a woman, it is the power to be fertile either in terms of having babies or writing books or
dancing or baking bread or being a great organizer. It is the kind of power that doesn't depend on depriving
someone else.
As quoted in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (1979) by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow.
Much of what is written on the craft is biased in one way or another, so weed out what is useful to you and ignore
the rest. I see the next few years as being crucial in the transformation of our culture away from the patriarchal
death cults and toward the love of life, of nature, of the female principle. The craft is only one path among the
many opening up for women, and many of us will blaze new trails as we explore the uncharted country of our own
interiors. The heritage, the culture, the knowledge of the ancient priestesses, healers, poets, singers, and seers
were nearly lost, but a seed survived the flames that will blossom in a new age into thousands of flowers. The
long sleep of Mother Goddess is ended. May She awaken in each of our hearts — Merry meet, merry part, and
blessed be.
As quoted in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (1979) by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow.
The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess (1979)
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.
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!
The tide has turned!
The light will come again!
In a new dawn, in a new day,
The sun is rising!
Io! Evohe! Blessed Be!
Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics (1982)
To live with integrity in an unjust society we must work for justice. To walk with integrity through a landscape
strewn with beer cans, we must stop and pick them up.
Toward an Activist Sprituality (October 2003)
Online text, from Reclaiming Quarterly (Fall 2003)
No sane person with a life really wants to be a political activist. When activism is exciting, it tends to involve the
risk of bodily harm or incarceration, and when it's safe, it is often tedious, dry, and boring. Activism tends to put
one into contact with extremely unpleasant people, whether they are media interviewers, riot cops, or at times,
your fellow activists. Not only that, it generates enormous feelings of frustration and rage, makes your throat sore
from shouting, and hurts your feet.
Nonetheless, at this moment in history, we are called to act as if we truly believe that the Earth is a living,
conscious being that we're part of, that human beings are interconnected and precious, and that liberty and
justice for all is a desirable thing.
When we founded Reclaiming two decades ago, our intention was to bring together the spiritual and the political.
Or more accurately, some of us for whom the spiritual and the political were inseparable wanted to create a
practice and community that reflected this integration.
Now, with the Bush forces pushing into an aggressive war, with horrific environmental and social problems left un-
addressed, the need for activism is stronger than ever. The stakes have never been higher, and the sense of
urgency is palpable.
Spirituality and ritual are not something removed from the world, but are deeply embedded in it.
Reclaiming is founded on Earth-based spirituality, which rejects the split between spirit and matter, and claims
nature and the physical, material world as equally sacred with the spirit.
We don't ideologically believe in the separation of spirit and matter, but in practice, we still tend to think that
things that are too material, too real-life, are somehow not as spiritual. So a trance to Faery is perceived as
"spiritual," whereas a trance to a Brazilian favela slum is not. We can argue about the reality of Faery, but the
favela is undeniably real. If we truly believe that our spirituality is about deep interconnectedness, maybe it's
more important for us to grapple internally with the reality of the favela than to dance with the faeries.
Much of our magic and our community work is about creating spaces of refuge from a harsh and often hostile
world, safe places where people can heal and regenerate, renew our energies and learn new skills. In that work,
we try to release guilt, rage, and frustration, and generally turn them into positive emotions.
Safety and refuge and healing are important aspects of spiritual community. But they are not the whole of
spirituality. Feeling good is not the measure by which we should judge our spiritual work. Ritual is more than self-
soothing activity.
Spirituality is also about challenge and disturbance, about pushing our edges and giving us the support we need
to take great risks. The Goddess is not just a light, happy maiden or a nurturing mother. She is death as well as
birth, dark as well as light, rage as well as compassion — and if we shy away from her fiercer embrace we
undercut both her own power and our own growth.
There are times when it is inappropriate to feel wholly good. Now is one of them. As the saying goes, "If you
aren't angry, you aren't paying attention."This doesn't mean that we need to be in a constant state of rage or
irritability or guilt. It means we need to use our magical tools to face the stark and overwhelming realities that
confront us, acknowledge our feelings, and transmute them into the energy we need for change.
Everyone has the right to their own opinion about a ritual, and to their own aesthetics. There's generally at least
one invocation in every ritual that I could personally do without.
The water we hold sacred is not some abstract image or fantasy of Water, but the real stuff that we need to drink
and bathe and grow our gardens, that provides the crucial habitat for fish and plants and thousands of other
creatures, that is the Earth's literal life blood.
Another common, unspoken assumption is that spirituality is about calm and peace, and conflict is unspiritual.
Which of course makes it hard to integrate the spiritual with the political, which is all about conflict.
In New Age circles, a common slogan is that "What you resist, persists." Truly spiritual people are never
supposed to be confrontational or adversarial — that would be perpetuating an un-evolved, "us-them" dualism.
I don't know from what spiritual tradition the "what you resist, persists" slogan originated, but I often want to ask
those who blithely repeat it, "What's your evidence?" When it is so patently obvious that what you don't resist
persists like hell and spreads all over the place. In fact, good, strong, solid resistance may be the only thing that
stands between us and hell. Hitler didn't persist because of the Resistance — he succeeded in taking over
Germany and murdering millions because not enough people resisted.
On some deep cosmic level, we are all one, and within us we each contain the potential for good and for
destruction, for compassion and hate, for generosity and greed. But even if I acknowledge the full range of
impulses within myself, that doesn't erase the differences between a person acting from compassion and love,
and another choosing to act from hate and greed. Moreover, it doesn't erase my responsibility to challenge a
system which furthers hate and greed. If I don't resist such a system, I am complicit in what it does. I join the
perpetrators in oppressing the victims.
I am often astonished at well-meaning, spiritual people who advocate beaming light toward world leaders, who
scold activists for expressing anger toward authorities or police, who define compassion as loving the enemy —
but somehow lose sight of the need to love our friends, our allies, and those who suffer at the hands of the
perpetrators. I really don't feel much call to beam love and light at Bush or Cheney or the directors of the
International Monetary Fund. Whether or not they suffer from lack of love is beyond me. From my perspective,
they suffer from an excess of power, and I feel called to take it away from them. Because I do love the child in
Iraq, the woman in the favela, the eighteen-year-old recruit to the Marines who never dreamed he was signing up
to bomb civilians. I can't love them, or myself and my community, effectively if I can't articulate the real
differences in interests and agendas between "us" and "them" — between those who have too little social power
and those who have too much.
Systems don't change easily. Systems try to maintain themselves, and seek equilibrium. To change a system,
you need to shake it up, disrupt the equilibrium. That often requires conflict.
To me, conflict is a deeply spiritual place. It's the high-energy place where power meets power, where change
and transformation can occur.
Our magical tools and insights, our awareness of energies and allies on many planes, can deepen and inform
our activism. And our activism can deepen our magic, by encouraging us to create ritual that speaks to the real
challenges we face in the world, offers the healing and renewal we need to continue working, and a community
that understands that spirit and action are one.
Attributed
Any ritual is an opportunity for transformation.
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.
Spirituality leaps where science cannot yet follow, because science must always test and measure, and much of
reality and human experience is immeasurable.
The cosmos is interesting rather than perfect, and everything is not part of some greater plan, nor is all
necessarily under control.
The test of a true myth is that each time you return to it, new insights and interpretations arise.
We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been — a place half-remembered and half-
envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time. Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom
we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open
to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power.
Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when
we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
More info on Starhawk at:
http://www.starhawk.org
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