Starhawk Quotes

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.

When we cast a circle, we create an energy form, a boundary that limits and contains the movements of subtle forces.

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. In fact, we had a broad range of choices we as a society could have made in response to 9/11. The soldier at the checkpoint could have chosen — and eventually did choose — to let the group of men he was detaining go home to their village. No court in the world would have convicted the police officer on the horse for refusing an order to trample a young woman — and, in fact, the order never came and the police instead withdrew. It was clear to me, in each case above, that the authorities were saying “I have to” in order to absolve themselves of responsibility, to avoid choice. But as I thought about those incidents, I began to become uncomfortably aware of how often I said “I have to” to myself.

And meanwhile we decayed. When I was born, when I grew up in the fifties, we believed our country was the land of opportunity, where nobody was doomed to remain poor, where every person of goodwill had a chance to rise. By the time my child was born in the nineties, beggars were crowding the streets of every city, accosting shoppers in the malls. There were camps of homeless in the parks and empty lots, young people going to war with each other for drugs and booze and a few bucks. Our compassion eroded faster than the topsoil, and when we began to notice the earth changes, the droughts and the warming and the die-offs of the animals, the hole in the ozone layer and the epidemics of strange diseases that showed our own immune systems faltering, when we still had a chance to save so much and avert the worst of what followed, we continued to distract ourselves with war.

I use “Witch” to identify with the heritage outlined above, to place myself firmly in the line of outlaw healers and purveyors of unapproved wisdom. And I use the word “magic” for much the same reason. I could say “sophisticated non-mechanistic psychology,” but that term lacks the same ring. Magic is a discipline of the mind, and it begins with understanding how consciousness is shaped and how our view of reality is constructed. Since the time of the Witch persecutions, knowledge that derives from the worldview of an animate, interconnected, dynamic universe is considered suspect — either outright evil or simply woo-woo. But whenever an area of knowledge is considered suspect, our minds are constricted. The universe is too big, too complex, too ever-changing for us to know it completely, so we choose to view it through a certain frame — one that screens out pieces of information that conflict with the categories in our minds. The narrower that frame, the more we screen out, the less we are capable of understanding or doing.

When the intention is clear, the symbols, the acts, and objects that embody and personify it come clear.

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.

even a drop of happiness could color a whole well of misery.

Each of us embodies the divine. Our ultimate spiritual authority is within, and we need no other person to interpret the sacred to us. We foster the questioning attitude, and we honor intellectual, spiritual, and creative freedom.

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 …

Panic is not an effective, long-term organizing strategy.

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.

I think of the Spiral Dance as a metaphor for community. We are all linked, and each person’s motion affects everyone down the line.

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.

The Judeo-Christian heritage has left us with the view of a universe composed of warring opposites, which are valued as either good or evil. They cannot coexist. A valuable insight of Witchcraft, shared by many earth-based religions, is that polarities are in balance, not at war.