Starhawk Quotes

If you see God as something outside the world, the world becomes subtly and not-so-subtly devalued. But if you see God — or Goddess, or whatever you want to call It — as embodied in human beings, in trees, in plants, in rocks, in animals — in the living world itself — then all those things, and particularly the interconnections between them, have that kind of deep intensive value.

That changes the way we see ourselves. The sense of personal authority we have to direct our own lives, to make choices about our own bodies, our own selves, who we are, changes very much if we see ourselves as embodiments of the sacred …

The Spiral Dance is a seed planted twenty years ago. Over the last two decades, the goddess movement has grown from many seeds like a garden of long-life flowers and healing herbs. It's a big garden — I've tended only one corner of it.

And you who seek to know Me, know that the seeking and yearning will avail you not, unless you know the Mystery: for if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without. For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, and I am That which is attained at the end of desire.

It’s hard to remember now just how mind-altering the very concept of a Goddess was in an era when there were no women priests, no women rabbis, few women ministers, and scarcely any models of women’s spiritual power and leadership

This is how it works: Someone has a vision that arises from a fierce and passionate love. To make it real, we must love every moment of what we do. Impermanent spirals embed themselves in asphalt, concrete, dust. Slowly, slowly, they eat into the foundations of the structures of power. Deep transformations take time. Regeneration arises from decay. Si, se puede! It can be done. (p26)

We need to fully feel and express our emotions without worrying that they are likely to cause harm to another. But intensely and obsessively brooding on one's anger or resentment is not a good thing to do.

Inspiration-when something is flowing through you, the music is playing you.

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.

Both trance and fiction can bring insights and spark personal growth and change. But they are always colored by subjectivity.

The essence of nonviolence is choice: acknowledging that we always do have a choice about whether or not to use violence, and posing an expanded range of choices to those in power. (p64)

When we practice magic we are always making connections, moving energy, identifying with other forms of being. Magic could be called the applied science that is based on an understanding of how energy makes patterns and patterns direct energy. To put it another way, at its heart is a paradox:

A real relationship with nature is vital for our magical and spiritual development, and our psychic and spiritual health. It is also a vital base for any work we do to heal the earth and transform the social and political systems that are assaulting her daily.

The mythology and cosmology of Witchcraft are rooted in that “Paleolithic shaman’s insight”: that all things are swirls of energy, vortexes of moving forces, currents in an ever-changing sea. Underlying the appearance of separateness, of fixed objects within a linear stream of time, reality is a field of energies that congeal, temporarily, into forms. In time, all “fixed” things dissolve, only to coalesce again into new forms, new vehicles.

This is how it works: Someone has a vision that arises from a fierce and passionate love. To make it real, we must love every moment of what we do. Impermanent spirals embed themselves in asphalt, concrete, dust. Slowly, slowly, they eat into the foundations of the structures of power. Deep transformations take time. Regeneration arises from decay. Si, se puede! It can be done.

Aspects of Witchcraft rituals may sometimes seem silly to very serious-minded people, who fail to realize that ritual is aimed at Younger Self. The sense of humor, of play, is often the key to opening the deepest states of consciousness. Part of the “price of freedom,” then, is the willingness to play, to let go of our adult dignity, to look foolish, to laugh at nothing. A child makes believe that she is a queen; her chair becomes a throne. A Witch makes believe that her wand has magic power, and it becomes a channel for energy.