Starhawk Quotes

Love is not only an energizing force, but an individualizing force. It dissolves separation and yet creates individuality. It is, again, the primal paradox.

The drum lets us hear the heartbeat of the earth.

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 was reflecting on the ways in which even movements of liberation can be shaped by the very thought forms they seek to challenge.

Witchcraft offers the model of a religion of poetry, not theology. It presents metaphors, not doctrines, and leaves open the possibility of reconciliation of science and religion, of many ways of knowing.

One of the great disservices a culture of domination has done to all of us is to confuse the erotic with domination and violence. The God is wild, but his is the wildness of connection, not of domination. Wildness is not the same as violence. Gentleness and tenderness do not translate into wimpiness. When men — or women, for that matter — begin to unleash what is untamed in us, we need to remember that the first images and impulses we encounter will often be the stereotyped paths of power we have learned in a culture of domination. To become truly wild, we must not be sidetracked by the dramas of power-over, the seduction of addictions, or the thrill of control. We must go deeper.

In a culture where profit has become the true God, self-sacrifice can seem incomprehensible rather than noble. (p215)

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.

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.

His image is poemagogic: It both symbolizes and sparks the creative process, which is itself a Quest.

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

Because everything is interdependent, there are no simple, single causes and effects. Every action creates not just an equal and opposite reaction, but a web of reverberating consequences.

A group that is raising power together should always be made aware of each person’s intention and imagery. To use the power of a group for a private, unacknowledged end-even a positive one-is manipulative.

In covens as in families, we tend to play different roles and manifest each other’s fears.

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.