Introduction to the Tenth Anniversary Edition

rings with such a tone of authority when I remember that time of my life as being quite insecure.

This book was really born the summer I was seventeen years old, the summer of 1968. I spent most of it hitchhiking up and down the California coast and camping on the beaches. For the first time, I lived in direct contact with nature, day and night. I began to feel connected to the world in a new way, to see everything as alive, erotic, engaged in a constant dance of mutual pleasuring, and myself as a special part of it all. But I didn't yet have a way to name my experience.

I returned home and started college at UCLA. A friend and I began teaching a class in Witchcraft as an independent project for our anthropology class. We didn't actually know anything about Witchcraft when we began teaching, but that didn't stop us from offering the course, which we ran as a sort of seminar, encouraging each of our fellow students to research some aspect of the subject and report. Thus we learned quite a lot, and even formed a coven, in spite of not knowing exactly what a coven was or what it was supposed to do. We improvised rituals, which as I recall involved a lot of banging on sticks and rhythm and group massage.

When we finally met real Wiccan Witches, they came to the converted fraternity house in which several of us were living in loose communal fashion and read us the Charge of the Goddess. As I heard the words, I had a strong sense, not of hearing something new, but of finding names and a framework for understanding the experiences I had already had.

The concept of a religion that worshipped a Goddess was amazing and empowering. Raised Jewish, I had been very religious as a child and had pursued my Jewish education to an advanced level. But as I reached young womanhood in the late sixties, something seemed lacking. The feminist movement had not yet entered its period of resurgence, and I had never heard the word patriarchy, but I sensed that the tradition as it stood then was somehow lacking in models for me as a woman and in avenues for the development of female spiritual power. (In subsequent years, certain branches of Judaism have opened up more directions for women's empowerment and broader ways of experiencing God, but at that time this process had not yet begun.)

The Goddess tradition opened up new possibilities. Now my body, in all its femaleness, its breasts, vulva, womb, and menstrual flow, was sacred. The wild power of nature, the intense pleasure of sexual intimacy, took center stage as paths to the sacred instead of being denied, denigrated, or seen as peripheral.

We began training with the Witches we met, but they wanted certain things from us that I was incapable of doing at the time: primarily, a regular discipline of meditation, study, and exercise. I drifted away but continued to treasure the introduction I had had to the religion of the Goddess.

In the early seventies, I lived in Venice, a section of Los Angeles that at that time was a strong community of many artists, writers, political activists, and generally eccentric characters. I had become deeply involved with the women's movement and identified myself as a feminist. To me, there seemed to be a natural connection between a movement to empower women and a spiritual tradition based on the Goddess.

While most feminists at that time were suspicious and critical of any turn toward spirituality, identifying it with either patriarchal control or apolitical escapism, some others were beginning to encounter the history and symbolism of the Goddess. In Venice, Z. Budapest, a hereditary Witch from Hungary, began teaching and training many women in a feminist tradition of Wicca. I met her one day close to the Spring Equinox, in her shop on a busy street, and she invited me to the first large all-women's ritual I attended. We walked to a beautiful hillside on the Santa Monica mountains, chanted, danced, and poured libations to the Goddess. I asked for healing for a friend who was going through an intense emotional crisis, and Z. looked me in the eye and said, "Ask for something for yourself." "No," I thought, "that's bad, selfish, and besides, I don't have any needs," but she was, wisely, adamant. "In our tradition it's good to have needs and desires," she said. "We are not a religion of self-abnegation."

I can't recall exactly what I asked for (which tells me how reluctant I was to own my own needs), but the ritual began a process of change and transformation, working in the way magic often does: by making everything fall apart. My relationship dissolved, my job ended, and I decided to leave town.

I had begun writing the week I turned twenty-one. My mother gave me an electric typewriter as a birthday and college graduation present. I was starting graduate school in filmmaking at UCLA, and I took a summer writing course. I sat down at the typewriter, and a feeling of doom overcame me. Something said, "You're going to spend a lot of your life here."

So that summer and fall I wrote a novel that won the Samuel Goldwyn Writing Award at UCLA, giving me what seemed at the time to be a staggering sum of money and illusory expectations of immediate success. I followed it with a second novel. Neither was ever published, which is just as well. They served their real purpose, which was to teach me the craft and discipline of writing.

But of course, nobody sits down and writes an entire novel with the idea that it is just an exercise. So, the summer I turned twenty-three, depressed by rejection slips, unsure what I wanted to do with my life, and eager for physical challenges and contact with nature, I took off with a bicycle to travel for a year.

That year was a formative one for The Spiral Dance, although I couldn't have imagined it at the time. It became an odd sort of vision quest. As I pedaled along in the wake of Winnebagos, camped in a leaking tent in the rain, and developed an expertise in getting taken in by strangers, as I spent every day out in the open air, tested the limits of my body, and encountered the intricate, untamed wild places of the West Coast, new dimensions of myself began to unfold. The year was an initiation during which I learned to trust my intuition and let it be my guide.

By winter, my intuition led me to New York City, where I tried unsuccessfully to find a publisher for my novels. I wanted to be a writer, which at the time seemed to be partly a function of living in New York and meeting the right people, but I didn't know how to go about meeting the right people or what to say to them if I met them. I cleaned house for an elderly woman for money and imposed on the hospitality of some very nice people who let me stay in their apartment far longer than they had any reason to. (I was, at that time in my life, the terrible sort of person who shows up to stay for a weekend and ends up living with you for three months. All I can say in my behalf is that since then I have more than repaid my karmic debts in this matter.)

I was cold, I was lonely, I was getting nowhere, and it seemed that everyone else was suddenly going to law school. Then I had a series of very powerful dreams. One told me to go back to the West Coast. In it I was standing by the ocean, looking out on a rock outcropping. Suddenly I realized that it was full of marvelous animals: sea lions, penguins, birds. "I didn't know all of these wonderful things were here," I thought.

In another dream I looked up to see a hawk flying across the sky. There was a feeling to the dream that I cannot capture in words, as if the universe shimmered and split to reveal some underlying shining pattern of things. The hawk swooped down and turned into an old woman. I felt that I was under her protection.

I made my way back to the West Coast (by car, not bicycle) and moved up to San Francisco with my friend Nada, where I began reading Tarot cards and palms at a series of psychic fairs and doing other odd forms of temporary jobs. One of the agents I'd met in New York had suggested I try nonfiction. She claimed it was easier to get published than fiction.

I decided that I wanted to write something about women, feminism, and spirituality, so I began researching the history and traditions of the Goddess. At first Nada collaborated, but after a short time she went on to other pursuits. At the same time I began teaching classes in ritual and related skills, and out of them the Compost coven was formed. For teaching I began using the name Starhawk, which I took from my dream about the hawk and from the Star card in the Tarot, which represents the Deep Self. And I began actually practicing some of the disciplines of magical training that had been suggested to me seven years earlier.

The Bay Area had a thriving Pagan community, and I soon met people from many other covens and traditions, including Victor and Cora Anderson, who trained me in the Faery tradition. Bay Area Witches formed the Covenant of the Goddess, which incorporated as a legally recognized church. I was elected first officer in 1976 and became active as a spokesperson for the Craft.

All this time I was writing draft after draft of The Spiral Dance, sending out proposals and sample chapters and receiving rejections in return. One that I'll never forget said: "I don't think this author knows what she's trying to say and I doubt that she has the intelligence to say it if she did." In the fall of 1977 I finished an entire manuscript of the book and, in a flush of enthusiasm, got married three months later. This manuscript, like the earlier proposals, bounced from publisher to publisher for the next year or two, receiving no interest from anyone. I was still teaching, still writing, still involved with my covens and with the small but growing community of people interested in ritual and Goddess religion. For money I did temporary secretarial work or wrote for technical films. But this was, to say the least, a discouraging time in my life. I had been writing seriously for five or six years with no success, as far as I could tell. In desperation, I applied to the creative writing program at San Francisco State University. They rejected me. (Perhaps you, the reader, are in a similar phase in your life? Good luck!) Finally, my luck turned. Carol Christ, coeditor of Womanspirit Rising, included an article I wrote about Witchcraft and Goddess religion. She invited me to present it as a paper at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. There she introduced me to Marie Cantlon, her editor at Harper 6k Row, San Francisco. Marie was interested in seeing my book, and I sent it to her. Months passed.

Then, at last, I got the news I'd been hoping for: They wanted to publish the book. At that point, I sat down to revise the manuscript and wrote the version you read here.

The past ten years have seen enormous changes, in my own life, in the Craft and Pagan communities, and in the world as a whole. Interest in feminist spirituality, Paganism, earth religions, and Witchcraft has grown enormously. Nobody registers Witches or keeps official statistics of Pagans, but some indication of this growth can be seen in the number of boob on the Goddess published since 1979. Many, many people have participated in circles and rituals. The Spiral Dance has sold over one hundred thousand copies and been translated into German and Danish. I have spoken and taught in communities all over the United States, in Canada, and in Europe. Pagan publications, newsletters, and even computer bulletin boards abound.

Feminist spirituality, Paganism, and Witchcraft overlap but are not identical communities. Many feminists explore their spirituality in the context of Christianity or Judaism, and within those traditions new avenues have opened up for women, although, of course, there are still many struggles to be waged. Others draw from Goddess traditions of many cultures or prefer to create their own rituals without identifying with any particular tradition.

Pagans, and even Witches, may or may not be feminists. Many people are drawn to earth-based spiritual traditions, to the celebration of seasonal cycles and the awakening of broader dimensions of consciousness, without an analysis of the interplay of power and gender. But the feminist Craft has also grown enormously, including many men as well as women and participating in many arenas of social and political struggle.

My own life has become much more politically focused in the past ten years. The Spiral Dance was written during the Carter era, a more sanguine time politically, before the right-wing backlash of the Reagan years. Many of us who had been politically active in the sixties felt that we could, perhaps, relax a bit. True, society was still full of inequalities, women's liberation was a process barely begun, and there had been no major shift in social organization, but perhaps the road to those changes needed to pass through the terrain of the interior and transform our cultural imagery as well as our economic system and national policy. Maybe, in fact, deep transformation of society could only come from an underlying transformation of culture.

I saw The Spiral Dance as a political book, in the sense that it brought into question the underlying assumptions on which systems of domination were based, and I still see it that way. But over the last decade, as the gap between rich and poor widened, as our nuclear arsenals were rebuilt, and the homeless began to die in our streets and the jobless to crowd the bread lines, as the United States moved into covert and overt wars in Latin America, and the AIDS virus spread while legislators sat on funds for education and treatment, as the environment deteriorated, the national debt quadrupled, and the hole in the ozone layer grew ominously, a more active political engagement seemed called for.

One of the core principles of the thealogy presented here is that the earth is sacred. Believing that, I felt that action to preserve and protect the earth was called for. So our commitment to the Goddess led me and others in our community to take part in nonviolent direct actions to protest nuclear power, to interfere with the production and testing of nuclear weapons, to counter military interference in Central America, and to preserve the environment. It led me down to Nicaragua and into ongoing work to build alliances with people of color and the native peoples whose own earth-based religions and traditional lands are being threatened or destroyed. It led me out of a faltering marriage to live collectively.

Many of these struggles are chronicled in my later books, Dreaming the Dark and Truth or Dare. If I were writing The Spiral Dance today, perhaps it would have a more overtly political focus. Yet in a way I'm pleased with the focus as it stands. Political awareness can become a tyranny of its own, not least because it locks us into the issues and perspectives of a particular time. But when we are looking at the questions of the sacred, we move beyond time. To create the changes in consciousness needed to transform society at a deep level, we need insights broader than those the issues of the moment can provide.

Spirituality and politics both involve changing consciousness. In fact, Dion Fortune's definition of magic as "the art of changing consciousness at will" could serve for both. Yet there are differences. Effective political action, of whatever sort, needs to offer directions and at least propose answers to current problems. But true spirituality must also take us beyond the will, down into the realms of mystery, of letting go, of echoing questions rather than resounding answers. So I'm glad to have written this book at a time when I had the luxury of pondering the mysteries.

Political activism does, however, increase our awareness in many respects, and for me this has happened especially around issues of inclusiveness and sensitivity to those who are different from myself. Over the last ten years, I've worked to build alliances between women of color and white women and have worked in groups with women and men of differing sexual preferences, class backgrounds, and life choices. I've learned that the viewpoints that arise from differing life situations are vital to complete our picture of reality, and the effort to include them, to take off our blinders and see through another's eyes, can be tremendously enriching. So my major critique of this work now centers on questions of inclusiveness. Inclusiveness is especially important when we consider the mysteries, the deep question of our lives. For these questions are meant not to generate dogma but to propel us on journeys. When we ask, "What is reality?" we are not so much looking for an ultimate definition as stating our willingness to be taken somewhere beyond the boundaries of our previous experiences. But that journey cannot be rich and varied unless we are willing to let go of seeing our own experience, our own answers and styles and insights, as defining reality for everyone. We need not deny our experience but must recognize that it is one facet of the gifts that are there for us in other perspectives. If I were writing The Spiral Dance today, I would include more material from many races, cultures, and traditions, especially in the historical sections.

When we ask the questions "What is femaleness? What is maleness?" we are stating our willingness to change in ways that may seem frightening, for our conditioning to experience our gender in culturally determined ways runs very deep and in a primary way determines how we experience ourselves. But Witches have a saying: "Where there's fear, there's power." In opening to these questions, we may encounter new aspects of ourselves that liberate our power-from-within.

The feminist movement has prompted the culture as a whole to reexamine questions of maleness and femaleness. For the definitions are no longer working, hey are oppressive to women and confining to men.

In this process of transformation, the Goddess and the Old Gods can open doorways for us into new dimensions of our own possibilities, for they are not just symbols but channels of power. Yet we must also be willing to examine how our own interpretations have been shaped by the limitations of our vision. And that is, perhaps, the most central change I would make in this book and the one upon which many of my comments are focused.

When I originally wrote this book, I saw femaleness and maleness as reified qualities, like liquids that could fill us. I believed, along with Jung, that each women had within her a male self, and each man a female self. Now I find these concepts unhelpful and misleading.

Today I don't use the terms female energy and male energy. I don't identify femaleness or maleness with specific sets of qualities or predispositions. While I have found images of the Goddess empowering to me as a woman, I no longer look to the Goddesses and Gods to define for me what woman or man should be. For any quality that has been assigned to one divine gender can elsewhere be found in its opposite. If we say, for example, "Male energy is aggressive," I can easily find five aggressive goddesses without even thinking hard. If we say "Female energy is nurturing," we can also find male gods who nurture.

Our whole modern tendency to look at myths and deities as role models may be a misappropriation of the power of these images, born of our desperation at not knowing how to be in the world and culture in which we find ourselves. We are looking for permission to be more than our society tells us we are. But the Goddesses and Gods are not figures for us to copy-they are more like broomsticks: Grab hold, and they will take us away somewhere beyond the boundaries of our ordinary lives.

Why are there two sexes? For the same reason we cut the cards before we shuffle the deck. Sexual reproduction is an elegant method of ensuring maximum biological diversity. Yet I would no longer describe the essential quality of the erotic energy flow that sustains the universe as one of female/male polarity. To do so enshrines heterosexual human relationships as the basic pattern of all being, relegating other sorts of attraction and desire to the position of deviant. That description not only makes invisible the realities of lesbians, gay men, and bisexual people; it also cuts all of us off, whatever our sexual preference, from the intricate dance of energy and attraction we might share with trees, flowers, stone, the ocean, a good book or a painting, a sonnet or a sonata, a close friend or a faraway star. For erotic energy inherently generates and celebrates diversity. And Goddess religion, at its heart, is precisely about the erotic dance of life playing through all of nature and culture.

In a world in which power and status are awarded according to gender, we necessarily identify with our gender in a primary way. In a world in which sexual preference is a grounds for either privilege or oppression, we necessarily identify with our sexual orientation. But to take one particular form of sexual union as the model for the whole is to limit ourselves unfairly. If we could, instead, take the whole as the model for the part, then whomever or whatever we choose to love, even if it is ourselves in our solitude, all our acts of love and pleasure could reflect the union of leaf and sun, the wheeling dance of galaxies, or the slow swelling of bud to fruit.

The Spiral Dance was written before the AIDS epidemic surfaced. It is harder today, but perhaps even more necessary, to affirm the sacredness of the erotic. For to say that something is sacred is to say that it is what we deeply value. And AIDS, which is an immune system disease passed on in many ways, only some of which are sexual, has become an excuse for an attack on the erotic, especially on those forms that do not meet society's approval. Out of fear of both the disease and the stigma attached to it, we close off options for ourselves and others.

If society valued the erotic as sacred, AIDS research would be a top priority, as would research on safe forms of birth control. Support would be given to those living with AIDS without extracting from them payment in the form of humiliation or guilt.

AIDS can be a teacher. By confronting us with death, one of the great mysteries, it challenges us to respond with courage, caring, and compassion. Because of AIDS we must speak openly, honestly, and publicly about sexuality. And as one of many immune system diseases we see arising at this time, it serves as a warning that the immune system of the earth herself is under attack from toxins and pollution. So AIDS challenges us on many levels to become healers, of ourselves, our communities, and the earth.

Another healing challenge that the Pagan community has begun to face over the last decade is that of confronting our addictions. Many Pagans are involved with Twelve-Step Programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous and have found their spiritual approach to recovery one that can deepen Craft practice. The Goddess can be a Higher Power, or perhaps we might say a Deeper Power. The language of the Twelve Steps and the traditional forms of meetings may not always work for Pagans, but their insights are extremely valuable to anyone struggling with addictions or codependence and can be adapted to fit our needs.

Awareness of these issues is reflected in one of the overall changes I have made to this edition of the book-the substitution of other drinks for wine in rituals and the change of what we used to call Cakes and Wine to Feasting. I do this not because I think no one should ever drink but so that ritual becomes a safe space for those who are struggling toward recovery from addictions. Those who choose to may still drink wine, but, out of our recognition that to some people in the circle it may be destructive, we no longer pass it in the ritual chalice.

Another overall change has been the elimination of the terms High Priestess and High Priest. Today, we work nonhierarchically. Any participant might take on the roles once designated for "leaders." Now that we have a core group of highly experienced ritual makers, power, inspiration, and recognition can be more equitably shared. (Which is not to say that we always reach this goal, but we aspire to it.)

The three core principles of Goddess religion are immanence, interconnection, and community. Immanence means that the Goddess, the Gods, are embodied, that we are each a manifestation of the living being of the earth, that nature, culture, and life in all their diversity are sacred. Immanence calls us to live our spirituality here in the world, to take action to preserve the life of the earth, to live with integrity and responsibility.

Interconnection is the understanding that all being is interrelated, that we are linked with all of the cosmos as parts of one living organism. What affects one of us affects us all. The felling of tropical forests disturbs our weather patterns and destroys the songbirds of the North. No less does the torture of a prisoner in El Salvador or the crying of a homeless child in downtown San Francisco disturb our well-being. So interconnection demands from us compassion, the ability to feel with others so strongly that our passion for justice is itself aroused.

And Goddess religion is lived in community. Its primary focus is not individual salvation or enlightenment or enrichment but the growth and transformation that comes through intimate interactions and common struggles. Community includes not only people but also the animals, plants, soil, air and water and energy systems that support our lives. Community is personal-one's closest friends, relatives, and lovers, those to whom we are accountable. But in a time of global communications, catastrophes, and potential violence, community must also be seen as reaching out to include all the earth.

The health of the earth has declined alarmingly over the last ten years, and the next decade may see us take an irrevocable turn, either toward destruction or toward regeneration. We are beginning to reap the results of exploitation and environmental callousness. The ozone layer is being depleted. We see tropical rain forests, the earth's lungs, destroyed at a rapid rate. Everywhere we find deforestation and poisoning of the rivers, lakes and aquifers, and oceans. Every day species become extinct. The sacred lands of native peoples are strip mined or taken as sites for military bases and nuclear tests. If we saw the earth as our extended body, perhaps we would treat her better. Or, given how many of us abuse and harm our own bodies, perhaps we would need a global Twelve-Step Program to counter our collective addiction to ecological destruction.

The problems are overwhelmingly clear, but to solve them we need both tools and vision. I see this book as a tool chest for visionaries, containing many processes for engaging our collective imagination, developing rituals, communities of support, spaces in which to create and enact something new.

Ultimately, the reemergence of the Goddess religion is a conscious attempt to reshape culture. In the past, culture has been reshaped by force. The Witch persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are themselves one example. They can be viewed as a mass brainwashing, a conversion through terror to the idea that women's power, and any power not approved of by the authorities, is dangerous, dirty, and sinful.

But we cannot reshape consciousness by force or through fear, for to do so would only reinforce what we are trying to change. We must bring about change through nonviolence, physical and spiritual. We are called to take a radical leap of faith, to believe that people, given the opening to dream of new possibilities, with tools and visions will create a living future.

Since divination is a traditional part of the Craft, I decided to consult the Tarot cards for an indication of what to expect for the next ten years. The card that turned up was the Priestess, the Moon Goddess who sits between the pillars of duality, guarding the veil of the mysteries. I take that as an indication that in the next decade we will go deeper into magic and mystery, into explorations of the spirit and forms of knowledge that go beyond the rational. But because the mysteries of earth religion are not separate from this world and this life, that deepened knowledge must lead us into the active work of change.

The renewal of the Goddess religion and other earth-based spiritual traditions will continue to grow over the next decade. As the community grows, our spirituality becomes more embedded in every aspect of our lives. As more children are ' born and grow up in the Goddess tradition, we will develop more materials for them and more rituals rooted in life cycles and transitions. And of course, the Goddess of inspiration continually moves us to create music, art, theater, and dance as well as creative actions to resist the destruction of the earth and her peoples and to make manifest our visions of what could be.

The possibility also exists that we will experience more repression as we become more visible. But we should never let fear silence us-or we do the oppressors' work for them. Personally, as I've become more public and more visible, I have at times experienced negative reactions, but they have been far outweighed by positive support.

The times we face are both exciting and alarming. The next decade will see crucial decisions made about the future of the environment, the social structure, and the health of the world we leave to the generations that follow. With courage, vision, humor, and creativity, we can use our magic, our ability to change our consciousness, our world view, and our values to reinstate the living web of all interconnected life as the measure by which all choices are judged.

Except in a few cases, I have not changed the original text of this book. Instead, I have added a running commentary, which you will find at the end, keyed to page numbers and phrases in the text. Throughout the text, asterisks mark sections for which new commentary appears, beginning on page 231. Single asterisks mark notes from the tenth anniversary edition; double asterisks mark notes from the twentieth anniversary edition. I suggest that you read each chapter through first and then glance back at the notes to find out what has changed in my thinking. Of course, some of you may want to read the notes first and then read the chapters. And if you're already familiar with the material in the original edition, reading through the notes as a whole will give you a picture of my current thoughts.

In some places I have given new versions of old myths or new interpretations of the material. You are, of course, free to prefer either the new or the old version and to use it as the basis for your own rituals and meditations. In general, all of the material in this book is presented so that you can take it and make it your own, adapt it and change it if need be to fit your inclinations and circumstances, add to what works and discard what doesn't. I consider this a book of tools, not dogma.

I have used these tools myself now for many years and have found that they work in my own life and community. Of course, as you will see, some have undergone change. Other tools continue to be developed. For a living tradition is not static or fixed. It changes and responds to changing needs and changing times.

Many years ago I had a vision of the Goddess, although I didn't know what it was at the time, and I have followed it ever since. I have no regrets. The Goddess continually offers us challenges, but knowing that she is within us as well as around us, we find the strength to meet them, to transform fear into power-from-within, to create communities in which we can grow, struggle, and change, to mourn our losses and celebrate our advances, to generate the acts of love and pleasure that are her rituals. For she is no longer sleeping but awake and rising, reaching out her hands to touch us again. When we reach for her, she reveals herself to us, in the stones and the soil beneath our feet, in the whitewater rapids and limpid pools of the imagination, in tears and laughter, ecstasy and sorrow, common courage and common straggle, wind and fire. Once we have allowed ourselves to look into her open eyes, we can never lose sight of her again. For she faces us in the mirror, and her steps echo each time we place foot to ground. Try to leap away, and she will pull you back. You cannot fall away from her-there is nowhere she is not.

And so it is no accident that this is the moment in history when she arises again, and stretches. For great as the powers of destruction may be, greater still are the powers of healing. Call her the Resilient One, for she is the circle of birth, growth, death, and regeneration. We, as cells of her body, if we listen to our deepest hearts, cannot help but serve the cycles of renewal. May our dreams and visions guide us, and may we find the strength to make them real.

CHAPTER 1. WITCHCRAFT AS GODDESS RELIGION

Between the Worlds

The moon is full. We meet on a hilltop that looks out over the bay. Below us, lights spread out like a field of jewels, and faraway skyscrapers pierce the swirling fog like the spires of fairytale towers. The night is enchanted.

Our candles have been blown out, and our makeshift altar cannot stand up under the force of the wind, as it sings through the branches of tall eucalyptus. We hold up our arms and let it hurl against our faces. We are exhilarated, hair and eyes streaming. The tools are unimportant; we have all we need to make magic: our bodies, our breath, our voices, each other.

The circle has been cast. The invocations begin:

All-dewy, sky-sailing pregnant moon,

Who shines for all,

Who shines through all...

Aradia, Diana, Cybele, Mah...

Sailor of the last sea,

Guardian of the gate,

Ever-dying, ever-living radiance...

Dionysus, Osiris, Pan, Arthur, Hu...

The moon clears the treetops and shines on the circle. We huddle closer for warmth. A woman moves into the center of the circle. We begin to chant her name:

"Diana. . ."

"Dee-ah-nah ..."

"Aaaah…."

The chant builds, spiraling upward. Voices merge into one endlessly modulated harmony. The circle is enveloped in a cone of light.

Then, in a breath-silence.

"You are Goddess," we say to Diane, and kiss her as she steps back into the outer ring. She is smiling.

She remembers who she is.

One by one, we will step into the center of the circle. We will hear our names chanted, feel the cone rise around us. We will receive the gift, and remember:

"I am Goddess. You are God, Goddess. All that lives, breathes, loves, sings in the unending harmony of being is divine."

In the circle, we will take hands and dance under the moon.

"To disbelieve in witchcraft is the greatest of all heresies."

Malleus Maleficarum (I486)

On every full moon, rituals such as the one described above take place on hill-tops, on beaches, in open fields, and in ordinary houses. Writers, teachers, nurses, computer programmers, artists, lawyers, poets, plumbers, and auto mechanics-women and men from many backgrounds come together to cele-brate the mysteries of the Triple Goddess of birth, love, and death, and of her Consort, the Hunter, who is Lord of the Dance of life. The religion they prac-tice is called Witchcraft.

Witchcraft is a word that frightens many people and confuses many others. In the popular imagination, Witches are ugly, old hags riding broomsticks, or evil Satanists performing obscene rites. Modern Witches are thought to be members of a kooky cult, primarily concerned with cursing enemies by jabbing wax images with pins, and lacking the depth, the dignity, and seriousness of purpose of a true religion.

But Witchcraft is a religion, perhaps the oldest religion extant in the West. Its origins go back before Christianity, Judaism, Islam-before Buddhism and Hinduism, as well, and it is very different from all the so-called great religions.

The Old Religion, as we call it, is closer in spirit to Native American traditions or to the shamanism of the Arctic. It is not based on dogma or a set of beliefs, nor on scriptures or a sacred book revealed by a great man. Witchcraft takes its teachings from nature, and reads inspiration in the movements of the sun, moon, and stars, the flight of birds, the slow growth of trees, and the cycles of the seasons.

According to our legends, Witchcraft began more than thirty-five thousand years ago, when the temperature of Europe began to drop and the great sheets of ice crept slowly south in their last advance. Across the rich tundra, teeming with animal life, small groups of hunters followed the free-running reindeer and the thundering bison. They were armed with only the most primitive of weapons, but some among the clans were gifted, could "call" the herds to a cliffside or a pit, where a few beasts, in willing sacrifice, would let themselves be trapped. These gifted shamans could attune themselves to the spirits of the herds, and in so doing they became aware of the pulsating rhythm that infuses all life, the dance of the double spiral, of whirling into being, and whirling out again. They did not phrase this insight intellectually, but in images: the Mother Goddess, the birthgiver, who brings into existence all life; and the Horned God, hunter and hunted, who eternally passes through the gates of death that new life may go on.

Male shamans dressed in skins and horns in identification with the God and the herds; but female priestesses presided naked, embodying the fertility of the Goddess. Life and death were a continuous stream; the dead were buried as if sleeping in a womb, surrounded by their tools and ornaments, so that they might awaken to a new life. In the caves of the Alps, skulls of the great bears were mounted in niches, where they pronounced oracles that guided the clans to game.In lowland pools, reindeer does, their bellies filled with stones that embodied the souls of deer, were submerged in the waters of the Mother's womb, so that victims of the hunt would be reborn.

In the East-Siberia and the Ukraine-the Goddess was Lady of the Mammoths; She was carved from stone in great swelling curves that embodied her gifts of abundance. In the West, in the great cave temples of southern France and Spain, her rites were performed deep in the secret wombs of the earth, where the great polar forces were painted as bison and horses, superimposed, emerging from the cave walls like spirits out of a dream. The spiral dance was seen also in the sky: in the moon, who monthly dies and is reborn; in the sun, whose waxing light brings summer's warmth and whose waning brings the chill of winter. Records of the moon's passing were scratched on bone, and the Goddess was shown holding the bison horn, which is also the crescent moon.

The ice retreated. Some clans followed the bison and the reindeer into the far north. Some passed over the Alaskan land bridge to the Americas. Those who remained in Europe turned to fishing and gathering wild plants and shellfish. Dogs guarded their campsites, and new tools were refined. Those who had the inner power learned that it increased when they worked together. As isolated settlements grew into villages, shamans and priestesses linked forces and shared knowledge. The first covens were formed. Deeply attuned to plant and animal life, they tamed where once they had hunted, and they bred sheep, goats, cows, and pigs from their wild cousins. Seeds were no longer only gathered; they were planted, to grow where they were set. The Hunter became Lord of the Grain, sacrificed when it is cut in autumn, buried in the womb of the Goddess and reborn in the spring. The Lady of the Wild Things became the Barley Mother, and the cycles of moon and sun marked the times for sowing and reaping and letting out to pasture.

Villages grew into the first towns and cities. The Goddess was painted on the plastered walls of shrines, giving birth to the Divine Child - her consort, son, and seed. Far-flung trade brought contact with the mysteries of Africa and West Asia.

In the lands once covered with ice, a new power was discovered, a force that runs like springs of water through the earth Herself. Barefoot priestesses trace out "ley" lines on the new grass. It was found that certain stones increase the flow of power. They were set at the proper points in great marching rows and circles that mark the cycles of time. The year became a great wheel divided into eight parts: the solstices and equinoxes and the cross-quarter days between, when great feasts were held and fires lit. With each ritual, with each ray of the sun and beam of the moon that struck the stones at the times of power, the force increased. They became great reservoirs of subtle energy, gateways between the worlds of the seen and the unseen. Within the circles, beside the menhirs and dolmens and passage graves, priestesses could probe the secrets of time, and the hidden structure of the cosmos. Mathematics, astronomy, poetry, music, medicine, and the understanding of the workings of the human mind developed side by side with the lore of the deeper mysteries.

But later, cultures developed that devoted themselves to the arts of war. Wave after wave of Indo-European invasions swept over Europe from the Bronze Age on. Warrior Gods drove the Goddess peoples out from the fertile lowlands and fine temples, into the hills and high mountains where they became known as the Sidhe, the Picts or Pixies, the Fair Folk or Faeries.[11] The mythological cycle of Goddess and Consort, Mother and Divine Child, which had held sway for thirty thousand years, was changed to conform to the values of the conquering patriarchies. In Greece, the Goddess, in her many guises, "married" the new gods-the result was the Olympian Pantheon. In the British Isles, the victorious Celts adopted many features of the Old Religion, incorporating them into the Druidic mysteries.

The Faeries, breeding cattle in the stony hills and living in turf-covered, round huts, preserved the Old Religion. Clan mothers, called "Queen of Elphame," which means Elfland, led the covens, together with the priest, the Sacred King, who embodied the dying God, and underwent a ritualized mock death at the end of his term of office. They celebrated the eight feasts of the Wheel with wild processions on horseback, singing, chanting, and the lighting of ritual fires. The invading people often joined in; there were mingling and intermarriage, and many rural families were said to have "Faery blood." The Colleges of the Druids, and the Poetic Colleges of Ireland and Wales, preserved many of the old mysteries.

Christianity, at first, brought little change. Peasants saw in the story of Christ only a new version of their own ancient tales of the Mother Goddess and her Divine Child who is sacrificed and reborn. Country priests often led the dance at the Sabbats, or great festivals. The covens, which preserved the knowledge of the subtle forces, were called Wicca or Wicce, from the Anglo-Saxon root word meaning "to bend or shape." They were those who could shape the unseen to their will. Healers, teachers, poets, and midwives, they were central figures in every community.

Persecution began slowly. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw a revival of aspects of the Old Religion by the troubadours, who wrote love poems to the Goddess under the guise of living noble ladies of their times. The magnificent cathedrals were built in honor of Mary, who had taken over many of the aspects of the ancient Goddess. Witchcraft was declared a heretical act, and in 1324 an Irish coven led by Dame Alice Kyteler was tried by the Bishop of Ossory for worshipping a non-Christian god. Dame Kyteler was saved by her rank, but her followers were burned.

Wars, Crusades, plagues, and peasant revolts raged over Europe in the next centuries. Joan of Arc, the "Maid of Orleans," led the armies of France to victory, but was burned as a Witch by the English. "Maiden" is a term of high respect in Witchcraft, and it has been suggested that the French peasantry loved Joan so greatly because she was, in truth, a leader of the Old Religion. The stability of the medieval Church was shaken, and the feudal system began to break down. The Christian world was swept by messianic movements and religious revolts, and the Church could no longer calmly tolerate rivals.

In 1484, the Papal Bull of Innocent VIII unleashed the power of the Inquisition against the Old Religion. With the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum, "The Hammer of the Witches," by the Dominicans Kramer and Sprenger in I486, the groundwork was laid for a reign of terror that was to hold all of Europe in its grip until well into the seventeenth century. The persecution was most strongly directed against women: Of an estimated nine million Witches executed, eighty percent were women, including children and young girls, who were believed to inherit the "evil" from their mothers. The asceticism of early Christianity, which turned its back on the world of the flesh, had degenerated, in some quarters of the Church, into hatred of those who brought that flesh into being. Misogyny, the hatred of women, had become a strong element in medieval Christianity. Women, who menstruate and give birth, were identified with sexuality and therefore with evil. "All witchcraft stems from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable," stated the Malleus Maleficarum.

The terror was indescribable. Once denounced, by anyone from a spiteful neighbor to a fretful child, a suspected Witch was arrested suddenly, without warning, and not allowed to return home again. She was considered guilty until proven innocent. Common practice was to strip the suspect naked, shave her completely in hopes of finding the Devil's "marks," which might be moles or freckles. Often the accused were pricked all over their bodies with long, sharp needles; spots the Devil had touched were said to feel no pain. In England, "legal torture" was not allowed, but suspects were deprived of sleep and subjected to slow starvation, before hanging. On the Continent, every imaginable atrocity was practiced-the rack, the thumbscrew, "boots" that broke the bones in the legs, vicious beatings-the full roster of the Inquisition's horrors. The accused were tortured until they signed confessions prepared by the Inquisitors, until they admitted to consorting with Satan, to dark and obscene practices that were never part of true Witchcraft. Most cruelly, they were tortured until they named others, until a full coven quota of thirteen were taken. Confession earned a merciful death: strangulation before the stake. Recalcitrant suspects, who maintained their innocence, were burned alive.

Generically, Witches are female-this usage is meant to include males, not to exclude them

Witch hunters and informers were paid for convictions, and many found it a profitable career. The rising male medical establishment welcomed the chance to stamp out midwives and village herbalists, their major economic competitors. For others, the Witch trials offered opportunities to rid themselves of "uppity women" and disliked neighbors. Witches themselves say that few of those tried during the Burning Times actually belonged to covens or were members of the Craft. The victims were the elderly, the senile, the mentally ill, women whose looks weren't pleasing or who suffered from some handicap, village beauties who bruised the wrong egos by rejecting advances, or who had roused lust in a celibate priest or married man. Homosexuals and freethinkers were caught in the same net. At times, hundreds of victims were nut to death in a day. In the Bishopric of Trier, in Germany, two villages were left with only a single female inhabitant apiece after the trials of 1585.

The Witches and Faeries who could do so escaped to lands where the Inquisition did not reach. Some may have come to America. It is possible that a genuine coven was meeting in the woods of Salem before the trials, which actually marked the end of active persecution in this country. Some scholars believe that the family of Samuel and John Quincy Adams were members of the megalithic "Dragon" cult, which kept alive the knowledge of the power of the stone circles.[14] Certainly, the independent spirit of Witchcraft is very much akin to many of the ideals of the "Founding Fathers": for example, freedom of speech and worship, decentralized government, and the rights of the individual rather than the divine right of kings.

This period was also the time when the African slave trade reached its height and the conquest of the Americas took place. The same charges leveled against the Witches-charges of savagery and devil worship-were used to justify the enslavement of the Africans (who were brought to the New World, supposedly, to Christianize them) and the destruction of cultures and wholesale genocide of Native Americans. African religions took on a protective cloak of Catholic nomenclature, calling their orishas saints, and survived as the traditions of Macumba, Santeria, Lucumi, and Voudoun, religions that have been as unfairly maligned as the Craft.

Oral tradition tells us that some European Pagans, brought over as indentured servants or convict labor, fled to join the Indians whose traditions were similar in spirit to their own. In some areas, such as the American South, black, white Pagan, and Native American elements combined.

In America, as in Europe, the Craft went underground, and became the most secret of religions. Traditions were passed down only to those who could be trusted absolutely, usually to members of the same family. Communications between covens were severed; no longer could they meet on the Great Festivals to share knowledge and exchange the results of spells or rituals. Parts of the tradition became lost or forgotten. Yet somehow, in secret, in silence, over glowing coals, behind closed shutters, encoded as fairy tales and folk songs, or hidden in subconscious memories, the seed was passed on.

After the persecutions ended, in the eighteenth century, came the age of disbelief. Memory of the true Craft had faded; the hideous stereotypes that remained seemed ludicrous, laughable, or tragic. Only in this century have Witches been able to "come out of the broom closet," so to speak, and counter tne imagery of evil with truth. The word Witch carries so many negative connotations that many people wonder why we use it at all. Yet to reclaim the word Witch is to reclaim our right, as women, to be powerful; as men, to know the feminine within as divine. To be a Witch is to identify with nine million victims of bigotry and hatred and to take responsibility for shaping a world in which prejudice claims no more victims. A Witch is a "shaper," a creator who bends the unseen into form, and so becomes one of the Wise, one whose life is infused with magic.

Witchcraft has always been a religion of poetry, not theology. The myths, legends, and teachings are recognized as metaphors for "That-Which-Cannot-Be-Told," the absolute reality our limited minds can never completely know. The mysteries of the absolute can never be explained-only felt or intuited. Symbols and ritual acts are used to trigger altered states of awareness, in which insights that go beyond words are revealed. When we speak of "the secrets that cannot be told," we do not mean merely that rules prevent us from speaking freely. We mean that the inner knowledge literally cannot be expressed in words. It can only be conveyed by experience, and no one can legislate what insight another person may draw from any given experience. For example, after the ritual described at the opening of this chapter, one woman said, "As we were chanting, I felt that we blended together and became one voice; I sensed the oneness of everybody." Another woman said, "I became aware of how different the chant sounded for each of us, of how unique each person is." A man said simply, "I felt loved." To a Witch, all of these statements are equally true and valid. They are no more contradictory than the statements "Your eyes are as bright as stars" and "Your eyes are as blue as the sea."

The primary symbol for "That-Which-Cannot-Be-Told" is the Goddess. The Goddess has infinite aspects and thousands of names-She is the reality behind many metaphors. She is reality, the manifest deity, omnipresent in all of life, in each of us. The Goddess is not separate from the world-She is the world, and all things in it: moon, sun, earth, star, stone, seed, flowing river, wind, wave, leaf and branch, bud and blossom, fang and claw, woman and man. In Witchcraft, flesh and spirit are one.

As we have seen, Goddess religion is unimaginably old, but contemporary Witchcraft could just as accurately be called the New Religion. The Craft, today, is undergoing more than a revival; it is experiencing a renaissance, a recreation. Women are spurring this renewal, and actively reawakening the Goddess, the image of "the legitimacy and beneficence of female power."

Since the decline of the Goddess religions, women have lacked religious models and spiritual systems that speak to female needs and experience. Male images of divinity characterize both Western and Eastern religions. Regardless of how abstract the underlying concept of God may be, the symbols, avatars, preachers, prophets, gurus, and Buddhas are overwhelmingly male Women are not encouraged to explore their own strengths and realizatiions, they are taught to submit to male authority, to identify masculine perceptions as their spiritual ideals, to deny their bodies and sexuality, to fit their insights into a male mold.

Mary Daly, author of Beyond God the Father, points out that the model of the universe in which a male God rules the cosmos from outside serves to legitimize male control of social institutions. "The symbol of the Father God, spawned in the human imagination and sustained as plausible by patriarchy, has in turn rendered service to this type of society by making its mechanisms for the oppression of women appear right and fitting." The unconscious model continues to shape the perceptions even of those who have consciously rejected religious teachings. The details of one dogma are rejected, but the underlying structure of belief is imbibed at so deep a level it is rarely questioned. Instead, a new dogma, a parallel structure, replaces the old. For example, many people have rejected the "revealed truth" of Christianity without ever questioning the underlying concept that truth is a set of beliefs revealed through the agency of a "Great Man," possessed of powers or intelligence beyond the ordinary human scope. Christ, as the "Great Man," may be replaced by Buddha, Freud, Marx, Jung, Werner Erhard, or the Maharaj Ji in their theology, but truth is always seen as coming from someone else, as only knowable secondhand. As feminist scholar Carol Christ points out, "Symbol systems cannot simply be rejected, they must be replaced. Where there is no replacement, the mind will revert to familiar structures at times of crisis, bafflement, or defeat."

The symbolism of the Goddess is not a parallel structure to the symbolism of God the Father. The Goddess does not rule the world; She is the world. Manifest in each of us, She can be known internally by every individual, in all her magnificent diversity. She does not legitimize the rule of either sex by the other and lends no authority to rulers of temporal hierarchies. In Witchcraft, each of us must reveal our own truth. Deity is seen in our own forms, whether female or male, because the Goddess has her male aspect. Sexuality is a sacrament. Religion is a matter of relinking, with the divine within and with her outer manifestations in all of the human and natural world.

The symbol of the Goddess is poemagogic, a term coined by Anton Ehrenzweig to "describe its special function of inducing and symbolizing the ego's creativity." It has a dreamlike, "slippery" quality. One aspect slips into another: She is constantly changing form and changing face. Her images do not define or pin down a set of attributes; they spark inspiration, creation, fertility of mind and spirit: "One thing becomes another,/In the Mother ... In the Mother ..." (ritual chant for the Winter Solstice).

The importance of the Goddess symbol for women cannot be overstressed. The image of the Goddess inspires women to see ourselves as divine, our bodies as sacred, the changing phases of our lives as holy, our aggression as healthy, our anger as purifying, and our power to nurture and create, but also to limit and destroy when necessary, as the very force that sustains all life. Through the Goddess, we can discover our strength, enlighten our minds, own our bodies, and celebrate our emotions. We can move beyond narrow, constricting roles and become whole.

The Goddess is also important for men. The oppression of men in Father God-ruled patriarchy is perhaps less obvious but no less tragic than that of women. Men are encouraged to identify with a model no human being can successfully emulate: to be minirulers of narrow universes. They are internally split, into a "spiritual" self that is supposed to conquer their baser animal and emotional natures. They are at war with themselves: in the West, to "conquer" sin; in the East, to "conquer" desire or ego. Few escape from these wars undamaged. Men lose touch with their feelings and their bodies, becoming the "successful male zombies" described by Herb Goldberg in The Hazards of Being Male: "Oppressed by the cultural pressures that have denied him his feelings, by the mythology of the woman and the distorted and self-destructive way he sees and relates to her, by the urgency for him to 'act like a man,' which blocks his ability to respond to his inner promptings both emotionally and physiologically, and by a generalized self-hate that causes him to feel comfortable only when he is functioning well in harness, not when he lives for joy and personal growth."

Because women give birth to males, and nurture them at the breast, and in our culture are primarily responsible for their care as children, "every male brought up in a traditional home develops an intense early identification with his mother and therefore carries within him a strong feminine imprint." The symbol of the Goddess allows men to experience and integrate the feminine side of their nature, which is often felt to be the deepest and most sensitive aspect of self. The Goddess does not exclude the male; She contains him, as a pregnant woman contains a male child. Her own male aspect embodies both the solar light of the intellect and wild, untamed animal energy.

Our relationship to the earth and the other species that share it has also been conditioned by our religious models. The image of God as outside of nature has given us a rationale for our own destruction of the natural order, and justified our plunder of the earth's resources. We have attempted to "conquer" nature as we have tried to conquer sin. Only as the results of pollution and ecological destruction become severe enough to threaten even urban humanity's adaptability have we come to recognize the importance of ecological balance and the interdependence of all life. The model of the Goddess, who is immanent in nature, fosters respect for the sacredness of all living things. Witchcraft can be seen as a religion of ecology. Its goal is harmony with nature, so that life may not just survive, but thrive.

The rise of Goddess religion makes some politically oriented feminists uneasy. They fear it will sidetrack energy away from action to bring about social change. But in areas as deeply rooted as the relations between the sexes, true social change can only come about when the myths and symbols of our culture are themselves changed. The symbol of the Goddess conveys the spiritual power both to challenge systems of oppression and to create new, life-oriented cultures.

Modern Witchcraft is a rich kaleidoscope of traditions and orientations. Covens, the small, closely knit groups that form the congregations of Witchcraft, are autonomous; there is no central authority that determines liturgy or rites. Some covens follow practices that have been handed down in an unbroken line since before the Burning Times. Others derive their rituals from leaders of modern revivals of the Craft-the two whose followers are most widespread are Gerald Gardner and Alex Sanders, both British. Feminist covens are probably the fastest-growing arm of the Craft. Many are Dianic: a sect of Witchcraft that gives far more prominence to the female principle than the male. Other covens are openly eclectic, creating their own traditions from many sources. My own covens are based on the Faery tradition, which goes back to the Little People of Stone Age Britain, but we believe in creating our own rituals, which reflect our needs and insights of today.

The myths underlying philosophy and theology (a word coined by religious scholar Naomi Goldenburg from thea, the Greek word for Goddess) in this book are based on the Faery tradition. Other Witches may disagree with details, but the overall values and attitudes expressed are common to all of the Craft. Much of the Faery material is still held secret, so many of the rituals, chants, and invocations come from our creative tradition. In Witchcraft, a chant is not necessarily better because it is older. The Goddess is continually revealing Herself, and each of us is potentially capable of writing our own liturgy.

In spite of diversity, there are ethics and values that are common to all traditions of Witchcraft. They are based on the concept of the Goddess as immanent in the world and in all forms of life, including human beings.

Theologians familiar with Judeo-Christian concepts sometimes have trouble understanding how a religion such as Witchcraft can develop a system of ethics and a concept of justice. If there is no split between spirit and nature, no concept of sin, no covenant or commandments against which one can sin, how can people be ethical? By what standards can they judge their actions, when the external judge is removed from his place as ruler of the cosmos? And if the Goddess is immanent in the world, why work for change or strive toward an ideal? Why not bask in the perfection of divinity?

Love for life in all its forms is the basic ethic of Witchcraft. Witches are bound to honor and respect all living things, and to serve the life force. While the Craft recognizes that life feeds on life and that we must kill in order to survive, life is never taken needlessly, never squandered or wasted. Serving the life force means working to preserve the diversity of natural life, to prevent the poisoning of the environment and the destruction of species.

The world is the manifestation of the Goddess, but nothing in that concept need foster passivity. Many Eastern religions encourage quietism not because they believe the divine

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 758