Starhawk Quotes

The Trickster represents the quality of randomness and chance in the universe, without which there could be no freedom. 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. Understanding this keeps us humble, able to admit that we cannot know or control or define everything.

It’s worth ten times the price to get you out of those things. Besides, I’ve got credits to burn.” He did. They all did. The more they worked, the more credits they got. The more they got, the more they needed to spend them before they expired, which they did after a year. You didn’t need to save them. All the things that Maya’s generation had saved for — a home of one’s own, retirement, the kids’ college education, medical emergencies — all those were now each person’s birthright. When the surplus was totaled each year — for the City inevitably ended up with a net surplus — it was simply a measure that they had produced more than they consumed, given more than they took back.

Beware of organizations that proclaim their devotion to the light without embracing, bowing to the dark; for when they idealize half the world they must devalue the rest.

The Sabbats are the eight points at which we connect the inner and the outer cycles: the interstices where the seasonal, the celestial, the communal, the creative, and the personal all meet.

Witchcraft has always been a religion of poetry, not theology. The myths, legends, and teachings are recognized as metaphors for “That-Which-Cannot-Be-Told,” the absolute reality our limited minds can never completely know.

Energy moves in cycles, circles, spirals, vortexes, whirls, pulsations, waves, and rhythms — rarely if ever in simple straight lines.

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.

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.

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.

We worked hard, we were just making it — then they raised the interest rates, or closed the schools, or changed the laws....

The earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water, and earth. Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them. To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standards by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. No one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy. All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure balance: only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity. To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible. To this we dedicate our curiosity, our will, our courage, our silences, and our voices. To this we dedicate our lives.

Experimenting with trance possession is one of the few truly dangerous things you can do in ritual and I don’t recommend it.

The Crone, the Reaper... She is the Dark Moon, what you don't see coming at you, what you don't get away with, the wind that whips the spark across the fire line. Chance, you could say, or, what's scarier still: the intersection of chance with choices and actions made before. The brush that is tinder dry from decades of drought, the warming of the earth's climate that sends the storms away north, the hole in the ozone layer. Not punishment, not even justice, but consequence.

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.

Systems change in response to forces that disturb their equilibrium. External forces, changes in conditions, new energies, and new challenges can shake up self-regulating cycles. So one way to change a system is to stir it up. That’s the role of protest and direct action, and it’s the reason why stronger forms of action are often necessary to bring change. Sweet reason, gentle persuasion, and dialogue that doesn’t challenge the functioning of the system often end up becoming incorporated in the system’s own efforts to maintain equilibrium. (p37)