Starhawk Quotes

Witchcraft is fun. It offers us a chance to play, to act silly, to let the inner child come out. Out of foolishness and play, creativity is born.

You don’t have to be a black-flag-waving anarchist to be outraged by this shortsightedness. Anyone who loves capitalism should be especially maddened — -because solutions and alternative sources of energy do exist that could enable us to transition swiftly from our fossil-fuel-based economy to one that runs on clean, renewable energy sources that don’t contribute to global warming.

In a culture where profit has become the true God, self-sacrifice can seem incomprehensible rather than noble.

What shames us, what we most fear to tell, does not set us apart from others; it binds us together if only we can take the risk to speak it.

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.

...They would probably only get a little while, if that, but even a drop of happiness could color a whole well of misery.

The Goddess religion asserts that the earth is alive, and that everything on the earth is part of a living being. We believe that you can celebrate life in many different images and forms, that life moves in cycles of birth and growth and death and rebirth, and that the same spirit moves through nature, through the cycles of the seasons, through the birth and growth and death of plants and animals, and through our lives as human beings. There is a multiplicity of images that you can draw upon for understanding and power, but the reason we focus on the goddess is partly to counterbalance the 5,000 years worth of focus on male holy images, and partly to affirm that bringing life into the world is sacred. Our goal is not to get out of the world or to get out of life, but to integrate it, to celebrate it, to embrace it fully, and to embrace all the different cycles within it

The love of the Goddess is unconditional. She does not ask for sacrifice — whether human or animal — nor does She want us to sacrifice our normal human needs and desires. Witchcraft is a religion of self-celebration, not self-abnegation.

May the wind carry her spirit gently May the Fire release her soul, May the Water cleanse her, may the Earth receive her, May the Goddess take her in her arms and guide her to rebirth.

When power relations of domination are no longer the norm in society, and when men assume truly equal shares of all aspects of childrearing, perhaps we will be able to fully reclaim the nurturing aspects of the God. Until then, let us hope some men will begin this process by the way they lead their lives.

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.

But a windbreak is also a great teacher, for me, about nonviolence. How do we respond to strong forces — anger, rage, even physical attack — without becoming violent in return? How do we respond to what might be well-meant but harsh criticism (whether well intentioned or intentionally hurtful)? If we become a wall, shutting out the energies coming at us, we may actually strengthen the anger of the opposition. On the other hand, if we simply brush off or bat away criticism, the opposition may expand its criticism to include our reactions. But there’s a third alternative: if we can learn from the trees, we can take in and transform the energy coming at us. We do this by staying calm and grounded and centered, by listening rather than responding, by swaying with the wind and letting it blow itself out.

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 …