Starhawk Quotes

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.

If thoughts and emotions alone could cause things to happen, thousands of my contemporaries would have married the Beatles in 1964.

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.

The Conqueror, whose core issue is safety splits us into Conqueror and Enemy/Victim, tells us, "Don't trust!" and generates fear, paranoia, distortions of reality, and the need to annihilate enemies. The Conqueror seduces us by making us feel special, sometimes grandiose and self-righteous, sometimes especially weak and victimized.

An initiation is a symbolic death and rebirth, a rite of passage that transforms each person who experiences it.

Finally we learn the Mystery — that unless we find the Goddess within ourselves we will never find Her without. She is both internal and external; as solid as a rock, as changeable as our own internal image of Her.

The Mysteries are teachings that cannot be grasped by the intellect alone, but only by the deep mind made accessible in trance. They may be conveyed by an object — a shaft of wheat, as in the Eleusinian Mysteries — by a key phrase, or symbol. The secret itself may be meaningless when out of context: only within the framework of the ritual does it take on its illuminating power.

The term grounding means to create an energy connection with the earth.

The image of the Goddess inspires women to see ourselves as divine, our bodies as sacred, the changing phases of our lives as holy, our aggression as healthy, our anger as purifying, and our power to nurture and create, but also to limit and destroy when necessary, as the very force that sustains all life. Through the Goddess, we can discover our strength, enlighten our minds, own our bodies, and celebrate our emotions. We can move beyond narrow, constricting roles and become whole.

Life demands honesty, the ability to face, admit, and express oneself.

Learn to listen to the rhythm of the chant and the energy of the circle. Follow the energy; don’t try to control it or lead it.

The primary principle of magic is connection. The universe is a fluid, everchanging energy pattern, not a collection of fixed and separate things. What affects one thing affects, in some way, all things: All is interwoven into the continuous fabric of being.

Was there some deeper, level some plane upon which the consciousness of mountains responded to death and waste and pain? Was there a compassion embedded in the very rocks, so that they offered their beauty in compensation for human loss?

Clarity of intention is the key to creating a powerful skill or ritual.

A spell is a symbolic act done in an altered state of consciousness, in order to cause a desired change.