Thanks for the Third Edition

I want to thank my editor, Liz Perle, and all the folks at Harper San Francisco for their warm support for this new edition. I am also deeply grateful for the continuing friendship and inspiration and guidance of Marie Cantlon, who edited the first edition of this book. My agent, Ken Sherman, has also hung in with me for the long haul.

I am fortunate having the love and support of many people around me. My husband, David, keeps me smiling. My housemates and magical partners keep me going, and Madrone and Jodi Selene in different ways attempt to keep me organized. Mary Ellen Donald trained me in the magical skill of drumming. But most of all, I want to acknowledge the inspiration of working with the extended web of Reclaiming teachers, organizers, and community folks as we cocreate magic together.

And I acknowledge with sorrow the passing of my mother, Bertha Simos; of Raven Moonshadow; and of Mother Moth. All of them leave a legacy of contributions to this work.

STARHAWK CAZADERO, MARCH 1999

INTRODUCTION TO THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Movements are like plants. Some, like annuals, spring up in a season, take over the garden, flourish, and die when winter comes. Others, and the Goddess movement is one of them, grow like perennials. In the first few years, most progress is underground. Only when they have developed strong roots do the plants spring into wild and exuberant growth. Perennials develop slowly, but they have staying power. They spring up anew when winter ends. Their deep roots let them withstand drought. They live long, and reproduce from roots and runners as well as seeds.

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-lived flowers and healing herbs. It's a big garden: I've tended only one corner of it. But twenty years is long enough for perennials to come into full blossom and for fruit trees to mature. We can look back now and see the results of our planting, weeding, and tending.

In 1979, I ended the book with a chapter called "Creating Religion: Toward the Future." One of the disconcerting things about life is that the future has a way of catching up with you. I wrote the book on an electric typewriter when White-Out was the leading-edge word-processing technology. I wrote the ten-year notes on an early model home computer with a minuscule screen and no hard drive, and I'm writing these notes on a Mac laptop that, at five years old, is already outdated. My source of power is the solar panels on my roof, and when I take a break from working I'll be checking into an online meeting of Witchcraft teachers and organizers from across the United States, Canada, and Europe, or possibly updating my Web page. The future is already here.

Besides technological changes, political changes have reshaped the world in the last two decades. This book was conceived during the Carter era. Since then, we've seen Reagan and Bush come and go, the waxing and waning of the revolutionary movements in Central America, the fall of the Soviet Union, the end of apartheid, and the impeachment of a popular president in a drama so sleazy and bizarre that no one in 1979 could possibly have imagined it.

In approaching this new edition, I wondered if the book would still make sense on the edge of a new millennium, and in the light of both world changes and the tremendous growth of the Goddess movement in the last two decades. Ten years ago, we were still putting down roots, growing steadily but not as visibly. Today we are in that fine flush of perennial growth when the roots reach deep for underground waters and runners begin to multiply and spread.

In 1979, I was in my twenties, and most of my coven sisters and brothers were also young. I was still inventing my own life and figuring out some basic things, like what I wanted to be when I grew up and how to get the dishes done before the supply of clean plates was exhausted. I'm amazed at how that person, that mere snip of girl I remember being, knew some of the things in this book and why, if she knew them, she didn't apply them more clearly and consistently in her own life.

Now I'm middle-aged. I'm wiser, neater, and less judgmental although far more irritable. I don't see or hear as well, although I'm probably stronger and in better shape (if thicker around the middle) than I was in my twenties. I already am what I'm going to be when I grow up. Now I think about who is going to carry on this work when I'm gone, and what I want to be in my next life. In this one, it's too late for me to become a surfer, a professional flamenco dancer, a biological mother. These are choices I must now accept. Middle age is a time for coming to peace with decisions and life choices. The garden beds are built, and the perennials have had time to settle in. Either you continue to tend them or you toss it all out and start all over again at a time in life when double digging throws your back out. Time runs differently. This year we planted a grove of olive trees: I'll be in my midfifties by the time they bear fruit, and an old woman when they reach full maturity. Recently a friend I thought of as a contemporary informed me that she was "raised on the Spiral Dance." Not long after, a young woman inquiring about a class asked a friend of mine if she was familiar with the work of a woman named Starhawk. "Oh yes, I know her well," my friend replied. "I work with her closely." "Oh-is she still alive?" the caller asked.

I am still alive, and hope to remain so for a good long while yet. So is this book. I'm gratified that I still want to work in this garden. The soil is still rich, and the structure, the theology, the ethics, the politics, and the magical training and exercises are sound.

The insights in this book form the basic framework of understanding that has supported me throughout my adult life. The perennials that took root twenty years ago still nourish me. I know more about magic, ritual, energy, and groups than I did then. But the more I know, the simpler magic becomes. I still use and teach the exercises given here, and when I've changed them it is not because they're ineffective but because I felt a personal need to do something new.

There are aspects of this book I wish were irrelevant. A major thrust of this work is its challenge to the spiritual supremacy of patriarchal males and male images. I would have hoped those issues would be outdated by now, but they are not. I'd like to think the introduction to the fiftieth anniversary edition might read:

"This classic work of the past millennium brings us back to a time when religious teachers, leaders, and deities were nearly all men. How hard it is to conceive of that era now, when women abound in the highest decision-making bodies of every major religion, when rape, incest, and domestic violence have become as rare and unthinkable as cannibalism, when religious language is so universally gender-inclusive, when children learn Solstice chants along with Christmas carols, Hanukkah songs, and Kwanzaprayers, and new Goddess traditions spring up annually."

There are also plants that didn't grow and others that were probably a mistake to introduce into the garden. In the 1989 introduction, I wrote extensively about my shift away from a polarized view of the world as a dance of "female" and "male" qualities and energies, and toward a much more complex and inclusive view of gender and energy. That shift continues to deepen as I grow older, and it is still the major change I would make in this book. I have commented on others in the notes.

I also notice that throughout this book, I'm critical of Eastern traditions. In the seventies, they were the alternative people often turned to when mainstream religions left a void. There were new gurus every month, and I saw many women I knew fall into what seemed to me oppressive situations. Now, I have a lot more humility about judging something that's not my own. I've also grown to appreciate the deep wisdom and great diversity within those traditions.

Finally, were I writing today I would probably be more cautious about the history I present. In researching a film on the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, I've become aware of the controversy that rages in academic circles around the history of the Goddess. When I wrote this book, I was not attempting to do historical scholarship or archaeology. Writing as a Witch, I felt free to involve my imagination in a reconstruction of the past. In reality, the most "objective" of historians do the same; they're just not so blatant about it. Today I might exhibit more middle-aged caution, but to do so might undercut the real power of this history, which lies in the awakening of imagination and a sense of possibilities. What I and many others are saying is simply, "Hey, it wasn't always like this. It doesn't always have to be like this! So-what culture do we want to live in? Let's create it!"

That statement could be read as the Short Form of the Origin Story of Contemporary Goddess Worship. Recent attacks on the Goddess tradition have tried to discredit our history, often with scholarship that is blatantly biased and inaccurate. The idea seems to be that if they can disprove our origin story, they can invalidate our spirituality. This is odd, because nobody applies the same standards to the origin myths of other religions. Is Buddhism invalid if we cannot find archaeological evidence of Buddha's existence? Are Christ's teachings unimportant if we cannot find his birth certificate or death warrant?

Witches, on the whole, are interested in discussions of our history. There are now conferences, magazines, articles, and panels at the American Academy of Religions on the subject. But that interest is separate from any sense that the validity of our spiritual choices depends on documenting their origins, their antiquity, or their provenance. This has sometimes been misquoted as "not caring about truth." In reality, it's simply saying that the truth of our experience is valid whether it has roots thousands of years old or thirty minutes old, that there is a mythic truth whose proof is shown not through references and footnotes but in the way it engages strong emotions, mobilizes deep life energies, and gives us a sense of history, purpose, and place in the world. What gives the Goddess tradition validity is how it works for us now, in the moment, not whether or not someone else worshipped this particular image in the past.

In the past twenty years, our rituals have taken on a life of their own separate from any question of origins. This year, on the Winter Solstice, the temperature suddenly dropped below freezing on Solstice Eve. Nevertheless, over two hundred people gathered on the beach, and most of us stripped off our clothes and went running into the ocean for our now-traditional ritual purification. The exhilaration of the cold, the wind, the beauty of the night, the sheer wild craziness of the plunge, and our naked ecstatic dance around the bonfire created an archetypal Pagan ritual that felt thousands of years old. I know this particular tradition was born out of a whim less than twenty years ago, not Divine Decree lost in ages past. On one of the first Solstices I celebrated with my early women's coven, we went to the beach to watch the sunset before our evening ritual. One woman said, "Let's take off our clothes and jump in. Come on, I dare you!" "You're out of your mind," I remember saying, but we did it anyway. After a few years, it occurred to us to light a fire, staving off hypothermia, and so a tradition was born. (Do something once, it's an experiment. Do it twice, and it's a tradition.) My knowledge of the less-than-celestial inspiration of this rite doesn't diminish the power of the ritual for me in the least. "What is the origin of this ancient custom?" is not something Pagans are likely to say, although we might well ask, "Whose idea was this, anyway?"

In the history of the reawakening of the Goddess, 1979 was a pivotal year. The ground had been fertilized by many people: Witches meeting secretly in small covens, a very few open Pagan groups, the hippies of the sixties, and the feminists of the early seventies. Z. Budapest had been teaching feminist Wicca in southern California for many years. Women were beginning to look at religion and spirituality as a feminist issue. Merlin Stone's book When God Was a Woman was published in 1976. In 1979, three important works were published. One was this book. Margot Adler's Drawing Down the Moon chronicled the growth of Witchcraft and Paganism through the seventies. And Womanspirit Rising, edited by Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow, introduced the world to the challenges women were posing to patriarchal religion both within and outside of the churches and synagogues.

The year 1979 was also when my friends and I organized a large public ritual. In part as a celebration of the publication of this book, we gathered artists, musicians, and dancers and wrote poetry and music for a Halloween ritual we called "The Spiral Dance Ritual." As in gardening, some things you plant persist and take on a life of their own. The Spiral Dance has now become an annual tradition in San Francisco, with its own body of music and liturgy. (See Resources.) Last year fifteen hundred people danced the double spiral.

The group that put on the first Spiral Dance evolved into a collective we called Reclaiming. Many of us participated in nonviolent direct action throughout the eighties, and the lessons we learned in empowerment, participatory organization, and consensus process strongly influenced our organization and the way we planned, taught, and created ritual. Over the years, Reclaiming also evolved. From teaching, training, and offering ritual in the San Francisco Bay Area, we began giving weeklong summer intensives, "Witch Camps," in other parts of North America and, later, Europe. Each camp, in turn, became the nucleus of teaching and organizing in other communities. Our local newsletter grew into a national magazine. Its latest issue reports classes and rituals in fifteen or sixteen communities throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Reclaiming has become much more than a local collective. We are a tradition of the Craft. In the midnineties, we began a period of reorganizing and restructuring, struggling with the question of how to expand without becoming a hierarchy or a bureaucracy. In 1997, we reached consensus on the following statement of our core values:

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 773