Psychotherapist, writer, teacher, political activist,
and witch, Starhawk is a founding
member of Reclaiming. A Center for Feminist Spirituality and Counseling in San
Francisco, California. She is the author of Truth or Dare (1987), Dreaming the
Dark (1988), The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great
Goddess (1989), and The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993). She was
featured in the
National Film Board Studio 1) productions Goddess
Remembered and The
Burning Times.
ALEXANDER BLAIR-EWART : What kind of witch are you?
S T A R H A W K : Well, perhaps I had better define witch as I use
the word.
A witch is somebody who has made a commitment to the spiritual tradition of
the Goddess, the old pre Christian religions of Western Europe. So I am a
witch in the sense that that is my
religion, my spiritual tradition. I am an
initiated priestess of the Goddess.
A B E : Do you have a sense of past lives?
S T A R H A W K : Yes, I do. I think most witches believe
in some version of
reincarnation.
A B E : Do you feel you've been a witch before?
S T A R H A W K : I feel I have, yes, quite a number of
times. You could say
that the work that I attached
myself to somewhere way back had to do with the
Goddess and the Craft and keeping the tradition alive.
A B E : I've oftened wondered to what extent the kind
of witch that you are now is the same as a pre Judeo Christian Islamic witch.
There's obviously been some kind of evolution there. Can you talk about that?
S T A R H A W K : Certainly in the Craft, the rituals that we do today
are not the rituals that they did in 25,000 B.C.; there's no way they possibly could
be, because we're not the same people and we're not living in the same
culture. We like to believe that we have roots that go back that far. Some
people believe they are a sort of direct transmission; other people believe
they have more a spiritual sense of connection. And we have ongoing debates
within the Craft about that. But to me, what's important about witchcraft
and about the pagan movement is, essentially, that it's not so much a way of
seeing reality, as it's a different way of valuing the reality around us. We
say that what is sacred, in the sense of what we are most committed to, what
determines all our other values, is this living Earth, this world, the life
systems of the earth, the cycles of birth and growth and death and
regeneration; the air, the fire, the water, the land. In that sense, we're
very much aligned with the same kinds of
understandings as in the Native traditions from this continent, and from Africa and other tribal cultures.
A BE : We have a technological society which sees all of nature including
people as resource. So we have resource ecology, and we have deep ecology,
which is the awareness of the sacredness of nature. I wonder if you can talk
about how much of an uphill climb it's going to be to get technological world
humanity and I think it does embrace the whole world now to stop seeing
nature as resource, and start seeing it as Being.
S T A R H A W K : There's no denying it's an uphill climb, that it does
require on the one hand a real radical transformation of our values, our way of life,
our economics, our material culture. I happen to believe it would be a very
healthy transformation. People often portray it as, "We have to sacrifice
this, give up that," and in one sense we do. We certainly can't go on driving
our huge cars everywhere. But in another sense, I think that the benefits that
we would find, spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, physically, from
those changes would far outweigh any losses. We would look back on what
we had and say, "Why were we afraid to make that change?'
A B E : Our culture is afraid of that change.
S T A R H A W K : It's tremendously afraid of that change, and it's full of
very strong vested interests that do not want to make that change
and will oppose it in every possible way. At the same time, my basic belief is that the Earth
is a living being. She is an organism and She's intelligent. She's smart and
She's not suicidal. [laughter]
A B E : I wonder what the role of theology is in that worldview. For instance,
a lot of people in Canada, and certainly mainstream society, first became
aware of you through the Matthew Fox/Creation Spirituality controversy. Can
you talk about that involvement with Matthew Fox and Creation Spirituality?
S T A R H A W K : Yes. Matthew Fox is someone who is really trying to make
some of those transformations from within the Catholic Church. He believes
very deeply in ecumenism, that the church needs to learn from other
traditions. So he brought me in, as well as other Native teachers, African
and American teachers, to share something of our traditions as resources for
people to draw on, not in the sense of trying to turn nuns into witches,
although there's often not that great a difference. And it's been a wonderful
experience for me. I've met wonderful people there. But a couple of years
ago the church hierarchy decided that they were going to crack down on
Matt and silenced him for a year. He's now out of his year of silence,
teaching again and speaking.
ABE: There is the other part of this question, which is the relationship
between "paganism" in the widest sense and Creation Spirituality.
Can that marriage actually work?
ST A R H A W K : I think it does work. There is a difference between
my theology and Matt's theology. And it's really a difference of about
a word.
ABE: You mean "He" for God, as opposed to "She" for God?
STARHAWK: No, because I think Matthew would use both, and
actually so would I at different times. But the difference is that
Matthew Fox talks about God being alive in Nature, whereas for pagans God is Nature. There
are pantheists and there are panentheists. This is what keeps him from being
a heretic. [laughter] But I don't have to worry about that, not ever having
been in the Catholic Church to begin with.
A BE : So basically you're talking about the immanence versus
transcendence metaphysical debate?
S T A R H A W K : In some ways it's not really an either/or thing. If you look
into the mystical part of any of the traditions, you find that there's a place
where whatever that is that we like to call God, Goddess, or whatever is both
immanent and transcendent. But pagans come down more on the immanent
side, and tend to stress that as focus, and say, "Look, it's not that there is
some external spirit out there living in the tree. It's that the tree itself
is sacred." And I think theology does make a difference. I think if we define
God, if we define the sacred as being outside the world, then the world itself
gets profoundly devalued, because what we call sacred really is what
determines our values, what we as a society, as a culture, are willing to risk
ourselves for. What we say has a value that goes beyond expediency and
beyond human ends. So you can imagine if we were to say, "Okay, water is
sacred," as it was to many of the ancient Goddess traditions, to the Keltic
tradition, to the Native Canadian and American traditions of this land, then
the idea of polluting the water would be a heresy, would be unthinkable.
And that definition of the sacred really makes a whole lot of sense
because if you look at what people called sacred the water, the air, the fire, and the
earth those were the things that we needed to live, to support life. It only
makes sense that you would protect them, that they would be the primary
value of a culture, of a society that wanted to survive.
A B E : What is it going to take for people to feel that, because, obviously,
if they don't feel it, they won't do it?
S T A R H A W K : I think there are many possible ways to come to feel that.
For me, one of the reasons I do rituals and teach rituals is because it's one of
the most important and most accessible ways that people can begin to feel that
sense of sacredness in the cycles around us, in our own lives, in nature. I
would hope that people could come to feel that sense of sacredness through
reflection, through education, through exposure to these ideas. My fear is
that people will only come to feel that through great ecological catastrophe,
which we seem to be heading into more and more. We're in a state of
tremendous cultural denial about what we've done to the Earth, and
it's always hard to break through that denial.
A B E : Do you feel it's something that we should be teaching our children in
school?
S T A R H A W K : Absolutely. In fact, I think we'd do better teaching
our children, if instead of having them sit at desks all day, locked up
indoors in school, which you and I wouldn't stand for, we took them out. In a
novel I've written, one of the characters starts a school where she takes
kids out and says, "You need to learn about something from beginning to
end. We're going to learn about water by going up to the Sierras, the
mountain range in California, and find the source of the stream, and
follow it all the way down. And we're going to learn about mathematics by
learning how to read a compass, and about physics by learning how to
steer a raft down the rapids."
A B E : The Anglicans have female bishops, and so on. The Catholic Church
and the Protestant churches, I guess, are still pretty adamantly antifeminist
in that sense. What do you see the future role of women in the Catholic
Church and in Judaism as being? Is there going to be real change there? Is
real change even possible?
'S T A R H A W K : I think there will be real changes, or women will simply
leave those traditions and gravitate to other traditions where they can have the
kind of power and responsibility that they are entitled to. I see the Catholic
Church from outside, but it appears to me that women have always really
supported the Church in the sense that it couldn't have survived without the
work of the women of the religious orders. And those women are pretty
angry about their position. I think they're in a dilemma. There was an
article in the paper about how the Church is feeling such a loss in terms of
priests and nuns and people coming into the clergy, especially priests, that
they don't have enough chaplains to provide for the troops in areas of
conflict. The average age of a priest is sixty something, and the other
religious warriors are getting on beyond that.
A B E : There's a real change coming there, regardless of what Rome decides
about it. Does the same thing hold true in Judaism, in the synagogues?
S T A R H A W K : Well, Judaism actually has made some changes. In Judaism
you have the reform, the conservative, the reconstructionist, and the
orthodox. And the orthodox is the slowest to change, though there is a big
feminist movement within it.
A B E : That's within Hasidism?
S T A R H A W K : Not only within Hasidism. Hasidism is just one branch of
orthodoxy. But the conservative and the reconstructionist and reform now all
do ordain women rabbis. For example, there's a prescription in Judaism
where you need ten men to make what is called a minyan. My grandmother
was never in her life counted in a minyan. You could have forty women and
eight men and you still couldn't say certain prayers. But after she died, when
we went back to Minneapolis where she was buried to have a headstone
setting, we were discussing with my uncle how the service was going to go,
and could we say certain prayers, and he said, "Well, we'll have so and so,
and so and so, your cousin Stevie and Ruthie and you, and that's ten. And I
said, "Since when did you start counting women in the minyan?" And he
said, "Oh, we do that all the time in our synagogue," which is conservative
leaning to orthodox. Now they're very orthodox, they keep kosher, very
strict. And I thought it was a very hopeful sign that even though my
grandmother was never counted in her lifetime, her children and
grandchildren around her grave had become full human beings.
A BE : Theologically speaking, Judaism and paganism are diametrically
opposed worldviews. How do you reconcile those two things?
S T A R H A W K : Well, yes and no. Superficially it might seem like that. But
to me there are a lot of elements in Judaism that go back to an ancient earth
centered tradition. All of the holidays, all of the festivals are celebrations
of the seasons and the cycles and the different forms of renewal that nature
takes. And paganism is pretty eclectic. Paganism is polytheistic. It says you
can have many gods and goddesses. It says you can have many different
ways of naming the truth and seeing the truth.
A B E : I see what you're saying from that side. But from the point of view of
what we'll call the "people of the book," the Jews, the Christians, and the
Moslems, they all have a monotheistic he god. So how would a bridge be
possible from that side?
S T A R H A W K : Well, fortunately, it's not my task to make that bridge from
that side. It's my task simply to live with my own contradictions, and I
guess as I get older I feel more and more comfortable being a Jewish
pagan, or a pagan Jew.
A B E : Which raises the subject for me of rituals. Can you envision future
rituals that would be in the true sense syncretistic and really work? Are you
involved in the creation of new rituals?
STARHAWK: Oh yes, I've done them. One of the things we've been doing
over the last couple of years is, from time to time, creating rituals that are
multicultural, multiracial. We did one for Samhain, which is Hallowe'en.
One particular year we had three Samhain rituals, three public rituals,
because over the years we had this continual problem of getting bigger
and bigger. One year we did a ritual for over a thousand people, which
was very exciting, but enormously exhausting to organize and costly in
terms of space. So we decided we could do three smaller ones more easily
than one big one. The first ritual focused on the idea of Samhain as a time
to remember our own beloved dead and mourn those who had gone, and
kind of visit with our relatives. The second one honored the ancestors of
many cultures. And the third was Samhain as the new year, creating a
vision of the future. The ritual for the ancestors of many cultures was planned by a group
including myself, Louisah Teish, who is a priestess of the Uribe
traditions, Raphael Gonzales, who is a Mexican American very much involved with
some of the old Aztec traditions and Native American traditions, and many
people from a lot of different groups. We gathered together a lot of people
and asked them to make an altar to their ancestors. So when you walked
into the space, there was a Hispanic altar with the skeletons and the skull
and the candles and the paper cutouts and the marigolds, and there was a
Keltic altar with all kinds of things from Samhain. And there was an African
altar that had African cloth, foods, birds and grains, and things. And there
was a Middle Eastern altar, a Jewish altar with a challah and Yorzeit
candles, and there was a Japanese altar with sushi and those kinds of
offerings. It was just gorgeous, and people had time to circulate and to look
at all the different items and to bring their own offerings and place them on
the altars that they felt drawn to. When we invoked the directions, we used a
drum rhythm that came from a different culture to call each direction, and
dancers who moved differently for each direction. We took people on a
trance journey to go back to the cave of the ancestors, and to see what gifts
their ancestors had left them and to see which ones were actually useful to
them at this time, and which ones should have been discarded a while back.
[laughter] And we did a spiral dance. It was a very, very wonderful ritual,
because it just had an incredible life and color and richness to it.
A B E : You're pointing at something that is very much the essential ground
of the new age movement, which is one worldism and the embracing of
every religious and spiritual tradition. But there is this sifting going on of
what in the traditions are useful and valuable, where the live seeds are and
where the dead husks are.
S T A R H A W K : Right. And also the idea of being able to bring together all
of those differences, without turning them into a bland kind of mud. But really
having. respect for the differences and to bring them together in such a way
as to retain their individuality. There was some criticism of that ritual
afterwards by some people, which was that there needed to be in it more
acknowledgment of the reality of racism, the reality that we are living in a
world that doesn't value these differences, that the vision was so far beyond
what the day to day reality of people's lives are, that it was hard to make
that leap for some people. So one of the things I would like to do in the
long run is work with that idea, work with how we could do that kind of
education within the context of a ritual.
A B E : I'm wondering what your perception of the new age
movement is at this stage?
STARHAWK: Well, you know, it's hard to say. It seems that the movement
is so vast and encompasses so many differences, that it's almost hard to talk
about it generically. I think I have seen over the last few years a greater
level of political awareness and involvement, that people are saying less that this
is a way to escape from the world, and instead are saying, "We have to figure
out a way to make this relevant to the real problems that we're facing."
That's where I would hope the new age movement will go.
A B E : One of the things that has been emerging over a number of years, but
now seems to be mainstream inside the new age movement, is the
Brotherhood movement. How do you see the Brotherhood and Sisterhood
movements? Is there a new male/female reality working there? How do you
perceive the emergence of what could turn out to be a new patriarchy?
S T A R H A W K : Well, that is really something that happened for
women back in the early seventies with the feminist movement. I guess I feel cautiously
optimistic about it in terms of what's happening for men. I think that men
have been tremendously harmed by this system, which I prefer to call
wararchy, instead of patriarchy, because I think war is so much at the center
of it, at the heart of it. And a young man pointed out to me that calling it
patriarchy, which literally means the rule of the fathers, was hard on men
who were really trying to reclaim the role of father, trying to function as a
real nurturing father. So I'm kind of playing with that change of language.
But I do think that men, as a whole, men as a class, still retain so many more
privileges than women do, that there's always a danger that this just
becomes one more way for men to get something new without looking at
some of those other changes that need to go on.
Robert Bly talks about the difference between being a wildman and
being a savage. I'm not sure if those are exactly the terms I'd use, but I
think there is a difference between free, untamed energies and violence. And I
would really like to see the men's movement take on the question of
violence, both interpersonal and domestic violence, and organized violence
and war, and ask, "What does it mean to us as men that we have been
conditioned for five thousand years to see ourselves as weapons, as
expendable, as machinery of war? What is it really going to take to change
that?" I think men pay a tremendous price for the privileges that they have.
And as we're seeing now, that price is the body bag. The price is, especially
for a young man, that your life is expendable, your life is considered
something your society can decide to throw away.
A B E : You've always been associated with radical politics. Can you express
a general overview, or what the most important part of your radical political
approach, the cutting edge of your process, is at this stage?
S T A R H A W K : In terms of my thinking, I guess, I don't feel like it falls
into the old lines of left and right, you know, socialist, communist, anarchist,
whatever. I think all those things are breaking down anyway. For me, I think
the conflicts that we're seeing played out politically right now are conflicts
about what is sacred to us, what are the overarching values that our society
is going to hold. And for me, what is sacred is the interconnected systems
that sustain and support life, both the natural systems and the cultural
systems. So that puts me, I guess, politically on the side of Native peoples
and their struggles for land rights and self determination. It puts me on the
side of nonviolence as opposed to violence, on the side of the
environment and fairly strict and far ranging changes to protect the environment.
A B E : When you were in Toronto several years ago, it was for some
National Film Board of Canada films that you had been involved with.
S T A R H A W K : Yes, Goddess Remembered and The Burning Times, which are
about the history of the Goddess tradition, and the suppression and burning
of the witches. There is a third film now called Full Circle, which talks
about the emerging Goddess movement currently. They're beautifully filmed and
they're important parts of history that people should know about. Often a
response we get from people who have seen them is, "How come nobody ever
taught me this before? I've been to school, studied history, I've got a
degree, and nobody ever told me this information."
A B E : What kind of people come to your events and lectures? I guess
they're predominantly women, are they?
S T A R H A W K : With the lectures it's a pretty mixed crowd. The
workshops tend to be predominantly women. Often I do things that are' just for women.
But I also do events that are mixed. Some of the people who attend these
come out of the new age community; some come out of the politically active
community, the peace community; some of them out of the feminist
community; some of them out of the mainstream churches, people who are
looking for something that they haven't been finding there.
