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 Starhawk: The Goddess religion asserts that the earth
is alive, and that everything on the earth is part of a living being. We
believe that you can celebrate life in many different images and forms,
that life moves in cycles of birth and growth and death and rebirth, and
that the same spirit moves through nature, through the cycles of the seasons,
through the birth and growth and death of plants and animals, and through
our lives as human beings. There is a multiplicity of images that you can
draw upon for understanding and power, but the reason we focus on the goddess
is partly to counterbalance the 5,000 years worth of focus on male holy
images, and partly to affirm that bringing life into the world is sacred.
Our goal is not to get out of the world or to get out of life, but to integrate
it, to celebrate it, to embrace it fully, and to embrace all the different
cycles within it.
We tend to look at images of goddesses and gods and take them as role models,
as though they are telling us how we're supposed to be as women or as men.
But I don't think that only women should identify with the goddess, or that
only men can identify with the god. Images represent doorways to certain
energies and certain constellations of power that any of us can open if
we seek access to them. They're all different potentials that we have within
us. If you look at the goddess Demeter in Greece, she was the goddess of
agriculture and fertility, of wheat and corn. She was goddess of the most
fertile place in all of Greece, where grain grew best. Up the hill was Athens,
and the goddess Athena, who was goddess of the olive. The olive is a tree
that grows well on stony hillsides and can bear fruit in areas that are
not very fertile, in other words, Athens had a different purpose and a different
energy. Goddesses originate out of a real connection with place, and then
they become vessels for the powers and qualities associated with them. The
goddess religion offers sacred images of female empowerment, and an opportunity
for women to take positions of authority and responsibility without having
to fight their way through a male dominated hierarchy.
Still, many men are attracted to a spiritual tradition that puts the earth
at the center. These are men who see themselves as children of the goddess.
My partner describes his affiliation in terms of a sculpture he's seen in
the Pyranees. There's a strange abstracted goddess figure that you'll find
over doorways and thresholds of churches around Europe where she's holding
her genitals open. In this particular one, the goddess is holding her genitals
open, as the head of a green man emerges from her vulva. That's how my partner,
and many men see this religion -- he emerges directly from the Goddess,
knows her secrets, knows who she is and has his own expression of the life
force and the cycles of growth and birth and death and rebirth.
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-life flowers and healing herbs. It's a big garden - I've
tended only one corner of it. Twenty years is long enough for perennials
to come into full bloom and for fruit trees to mature. We can look back
now and see the results of our planting, weaving and tending. In 1979, I
ended the book with a chapter called "Creating Religion Toward the
Future." Now the future is 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 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. Ten years ago, we were still putting down
roots, growing steadily but not as visibly. Today we are in that fine flesh
of perennial growth when the roots reach deep for underground waters and
runners begin to multiply and spread.
Take last year's fiasco in Seattle. In 1995, the World Trade Organization
was formed after a global agreement on taxes and tariffs, and in November
1999, the organization met in Seattle to establish new global trade agreements.
The WTO makes rulings that overrule the laws that we have made, democratically,
through our representatives. For example, it ruled - under threat of sanction
-- that the United States cannot ban products made with child labor, or
that we cannot ban tuna fish caught in nets that also kill dolphins, or
shrimp caught in nets that kill sea turtles. I went up to Seattle to help
a group called The Direct Action Network in its protest effort. It's the
group that organized the civil disobedience that took place where over 500
people were arrested, including myself. The police totally ran amuck and
attacked non-violent people. Anyway, though the media said the police were
disorganized, they also said that the protesters were disorganized, and
that they didn't seem to have any leaders. Well, the protesters weren't
disorganized, they were differently organized into affinity groups; we worked
by consensus. We weren't expected to answer to some external leadership
telling us what to do. So we shut the thing down and the WTO went home without
an agreement on the next round of talks, and has since been put in the hot
seat. The whole issue of globalization and how it should proceed and what
values it should include are out on the table. And, as a community, we are
now able to consider such things as who laws should serve and who they would
hurt.
The word witch is related to the root of the word "willow," a
very flexible tree. Since ancient times witches have been known as those
who can bend or shape fate. We twist the energies. The idea of witch became
synonymous with wise woman, and with others who were herbalists and healers
and keepers of the old traditions after the advent of Christianity. We were
the ones who really knew the land and knew what grew there, and how to use
it. Today, to be a witch is to be someone with a deep personal commitment
to the goddess tradition and to wicca or witchcraft. Witches can be men
as well as women, in fact men who follow this path are also called witches.
It also often means being part of a circle or a coven or a group of people
who celebrate together, teach each other, and support each other in doing
their spiritual work. For some people to be a witch means embarking on a
ritual initiation into a particular coven or tradition. There's witchcraft,
there's paganism, there's goddess religion, there's feminist spirituality,
there's earth-based spirituality. All of these things describe different
facets of a growing, spiritual, political movement of people who are connected
to the idea that the earth is alive, that it is sacred, and that we should
be doing something about it.
When The Spiral Dance was first published, its major thrust
was to challenge the spiritual supremacy of patriarchal males and male images.
I would have hoped those issues would be outdated by now, but they are not.
Yet the goddess remains a manifest deity. We connect with her through the
moon, the stars, the ocean, and the earth; through trees, animals, other
human beings and ourselves. She is within us all. She is the full circle.
She is air, fire, water and essence, body, mind, spirit, emotions, change
. . . and first of all, earth, the dark, nurturing mother who brings forth
all life. She is the power of fertility and generation, the womb and also
the receptive tomb, the power of death. All proceeds from her, all returns
to her. As earth, she is also plant life, trees, the herbs and greens that
sustain life. She is the body and the body is sacred. She is room, breast,
belly, mouth, vagina, penis, bone and blood. No part of the body is unclean.
No aspect of the life processes is stained by any concept of sin. Birth,
death and decay are equally sacred parts of the cycle. Whether we are eating,
sleeping, making love or eliminating bodily wastes, we are manifesting the
goddess.
And the god? He is no stereotype, neither that of the macho male, nor its
reverse. He's gentle, tender and comforting, but he is also the hunter.
He is the dying god, but his death is always in the service of life force.
He's untamed sexuality, but sexuality is a deep holy connecting power. He
is the power of feeling in the image of what men could be if they were liberated
from the constraints of patriarchal culture. For men the god is the image
of an inner power and of a potency that is more than merely sexual. He is
the undivided self in which mind is not split from body, nor spirit from
flesh. United, both can function at the peak of creative and emotional power.
It is a violation of the male body to use it as a weapon just as it is a
violation of the female body to use it as an object or a proving ground
for male virility. The god is Eros, but he is also Logos, the power of the
mind. In witchcraft there is no opposition between the two. The bodily desire
for union and the emotional desire for connection are transmuted into the
intellectual desire for knowledge, which is also a form of union. Knowledge
can be both analytic and synthetic; it can take these apart and look at
differences, or form a pattern from unintegrated parts and see the whole.
We do rituals to mark all that we know in the goddess religion. We do rituals
for the cycles of the seasons, and rites of passage for various stages of
life. There are rituals for marriage, coming of age rituals, such as first
blood rituals to mark a girl's first menstruation, death rituals, and funeral
rituals. A ritual is simply an orchestrated flow of energy. We always call
in the four directions and the four elements and the goddess and the god.
During her first menstruation, we take a young girl down to the beach with
her mother and tie their hands together with a red cord, and they run together
as far as the mother can run, and when she can't run any further, we cut
them apart and let the daughter run on alone. After that we take her back
and spend a little time telling her stories about our own first menstruation,
even though, for many of us, the stories aren't too wonderful. Sometimes
we were shamed, or it was painful, but we have a way of talking about them
that puts them into the context of women's history and makes them sacred.
After we have all shared our stories, we celebrate with the men as well.
Often, they prepare the food for the group in honor of this new part of
our daughter. A similar ritual is conducted for the boys, where they are
taken off to do a private men's thing and then returned for celebration
with all the women. Our young boys grow up knowing that women can also celebrate
their manhood, their coming of age, their masculinity, and it doesn't have
to be something negative and scary and awful to women.
I'm going to end with a vision I have for the winter solstice: There are
bonfires everywhere strung along the beaches, blazing on twin peaks on all
the high places. In the parks and on rooftops small groups gather around
cauldrons. There are no mass meetings, only circles. From the hilltops the
city is a mosaic set in green. Everywhere are gardens. The last rays of
the sun gleam rose in a thousand solar collectors. The witches take hands
around the fire. The wind rises, rattling the eucalyptus branches. Across
the city thousands of gaily painted windmills spin to life. Candles are
blown out, altars topple over. No one minds. They have what they need to
make magic. Their voices, their breath, each other. Through the long night
they chant each other's names. They sing hymns to the newborn sun, to the
eternally revolving goddess. They pour libations and give thanks, especially
the very old ones who remember when it was different. I am thankful that
in this city no one goes hungry. I am thankful that in the city no one is
left to die alone. I give thanks that I can walk the dark streets without
fearing violence. I give thanks that the air is clean, that life has returned
to the waters of the bay, that we are at peace. I give thanks that everyone
has work to do. The next day there will be a parade, concerts, parties,
masquerade balls, and special theater performances. The last day of the
celebration is quiet and peaceful. Families and covens eat together. At
night everyone returns to the hillsides to rekindle the fires. We join together
to earth the power of the season and to slip between the worlds, the voices
saying to every one of us, "Wake up, you are it, you are a part of
the circle of the wise. There is no mystery that has not already been revealed
to you. There is no power you do not already have. You share in all the
love there is. The goddess awakens in infinite forms and a thousand disguises.
She is found where she is least expected, appears out of nowhere and everywhere
to illumine the open heart. She is singing, crying, moaning, wailing, shrieking,
crooning to us, to be awake, to commit ourselves to life, to be a lover
in the world and of the world, to join our voices in the single song of
constant change and creation. For her law is to love all beings, and she
is the cup of the drink of life. The circle is ever open, ever unbroken.
The Spiral Dance:
A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess
by Starhawk.
$17.00. paper. ISBN0062516329. HarperSF |
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