Product Description

This brilliant overview of the growth, supression, and modern-day reemergence of Wicca as a Goddess-worshipping religion has left an indelible mark on the feminist spiritual consciousness. In this beautiful 20th-anniversary edition, Starhawk now reveals the ways in which the practice of ritual and Goddess religion have, in the face of a changing world, developed over the last 20 years – and the ways in which these changes have influenced and enhanced her original ideas. This important spiritual guidebook provides both the tools of ancient practice and the means to adapt them to our lives today – for, according to Starhawk, ‘a living tradition is not static or fixed; it changes and responds to changing needs and changing times.’

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #30082 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-01
• Released on: 1999-09-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780062516329
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"A very beautiful call for a worldly spirituality."

-- -- New York Times Book Review

About the Author
Starhawk is a Witch, peace activist, ecofeminist, and author of several books, including The Pagan Book of Living and Dying, The Fifth Sacred Thing, and Truth or Dare. She is the cofounder of the Bay Area Reclaiming Collective, and she teaches and lectures in the U.S., Canada, Central America, and Europe.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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 flows 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 (1486)

On every full moon, rituals such as the one described above take place on hilltops, 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 celebrate 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 practice 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 Homed 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 Go 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.

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Customer Reviews

So positive an influence, so weak and troubling, too.
The Spiral Dance is not an easy book for me to evaluate. Or to live with either. Add the pluses and minuses together, and the two extremes of what's good and what I find troubling pretty much cancel each other out.

First the pluses. Nobody nowhere can *ever* measure just how influential this book has been on the modern neopagan movement. I would guess that just about every pagan I know, myself included, has a copy on the shelf. I'd also venture to guess that it's also been responsible for more women starting up their own covens than any other single book in the United States. (Scott Cunningham's Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner may be the most popular beginner's book these days, but Spiral Dance is still likely to be the #1 coven source book around.) The hugely important thing that Starhawk did was to take some of the basic ideas of modern Witchcraft as it was being exported from Britain to the United States and to marry those concepts with the developing feminist/earth-first/spiritual sensibilities that were active out on the West Coast in the early to mid 70's. Put the two together and in a blaze of white light you've given birth to the Goddess Movement. The Goddess movement, its core ideas and sensiblities, expanded the vocabulary of American Witches and allowed those Witches to continue to develop their own spiritual forms independently from the traditional Garnderian structures. Much of this was going on anyway, (check out the 13 Principles of Wiccan Beliefs, as promulgated by the Council of American Witches in 1974) but the Spiral Dance gave it an immediately accessible shape.

However, in that innovation itself lies some of the problems I have with Starhawk's work. Simply put, the Goddess Movement is not the same thing as Witchcraft or Wicca. The Goddess Movement is feminism turned into a religion, and its purpose is essentially political. This is not to say that this makes Goddess spirituality somehow illegitimate. It just means that it doesn't have the same purposes, meaning or heritage as Witchcraft, and it shouldn't pretend to be the same thing. For example, I for one find it disturbing that Starhawk herself admits that she and her associates were *teaching* witchcraft courses at the local university long before they'd ever even met a coven-trained witch.

Let me say something here before I go on, because for a lot of people reading this I'm sure I'm opening up a topic that's already caused hundreds upon hundreds of flame wars and arguements. I am emphatically *not* saying that the only legitimate witch is a traditional coven-trained witch. The Wicca that I practice myself is very much in the eclectic, find-what-works-and-make-up-what-you-don't-borrow mode. The thing that bothers me is that in the Spiral Dance, Starhawk is presenting her Goddess-centered, eco-feminist brand of Witchcraft (a perfectly fine thing in itself) as if it were Witchcraft itself, a revival of some millenia-old universal matriarchal belief system. Frankly, she puts a lot of claims forth in the Spiral Dance as if they were Facts and Truth, when they're really just Opinions and Stories. I have no problem with making things up. I absolutely agree with the value of Myth. I just ask that folks admit it when they invent their stories, instead of asserting that they're revealing ancient human wisdom.

The other problem I have with The Spiral Dance is that despite all her claims to the contrary, Starhawk is definitely a female chauvanist. For all her talk of valuing men and women equally, I firmly believe that in her heart of hearts, coming through between the lines in almost every chapter, Starhawk really does believe that men are inferior. I don't believe that she either understands or trusts men, and all throughout the Spiral Dance I could feel her unspoken premise that Goddess-worship and Witchcraft are the province of women. She does not see men and women as equal partners, or does so only when men essentially begin acting like women. Starhawk may not be as openly seperatist as some writers (check out Z. Budapest's assertion that Witchcraft is "wombyn's religion") but I got a very clear sense that she's really only speaking for folks who were born with a uterus.

So there you have it. An absolute cornerstone of the modern neopagan movement, an immeasurably liberating source-book for thousands upon thousands of women, beloved by mulitudes. And also very weak in scholarship, over-reaching in its claims, and quite off-putting in parts for this male witch. You buys your ticket, you takes your chance.

Peace all!

GREAT magickal theory-BAD historical scholarship
I am 33 years old. I've been practicing the Craft and neo-paganism for 12 years with diviations from the path to study Buddhism, Pantheism & Athiesm. I own the first edition of this book. It was my first introduction to the Craft along with Drawing Down the Moon. At the time it was one of FEW books on the subject of Witchcraft and Goddess Religion. I have extremely fond memories of it. When I read it I couldn't put it down. It described so many of my feelings about religion and spirituality and it didn't talk down to me like so many of the books I read later like stuff from Llewellyn Publishing. It spoke to my heart as no other religion had. Also, I kept expecting the chapter on magic to tell me that it was a state of mind not a thing that you could actually do and have it work! I have kept my tattered copy through seven moves. It survived a purging of my Craft books when I had moved beyond 101 stuff and decided not to keep hauling a huge library around for other people.

Now that I'm moving back to focus on the Craft again it was the first book I picked up, of course. And I was disappointed. Since I read it 12 years ago I have gotten a degree in History. It has become common knowlege that Margaret Murray's history is at best nice mythology. There is now a real debate going on about the Goddess utopia in ancient prehistory that is leaning HEAVILY towards the assertion that the concept is again, nice mythology. YET she still uses this bogus/controversial history as fact--in the main text!

She did not rewrite the chapter on The God at all for the *newest edition*, and it needed it because most of her information comes from Murray. I have not read through the whole thing only the chapter on The God, and breifly at that, but I also have it on good authority from someone who has read it that she only glosses over trying to correct SOME of the poor history--i.e. 9 million witches burned during the Burning Times--NOT.

I have read all the footnotes in the second edition and in them she completely made her Craft the dreaded "politically correct" with few corrections.

As much as this book brings back good memories and gives me the warm fuzzies, like the sound of rain after a long hot day, the smell of spring, my favorite soft blanket (and for that my copy will always stay in my library) it is old fashioned and out of date. And it breaks my heart to say it, because Starhawk will always have a very well tended place in my heart. She gave me the greatest gift I've ever gotten--she set me on the path to spiritual and psychologial self-healing through magick and devotion that gave me the gift of me.

I wish she'd break down and rewrite the Spiral Dance altogether. She goes into great detail that other 101 books don't dare to try. Her notions of how magick works and how the Other-realms function and interact with us is deep and thought provoking. She, from my understanding, is an LCSW (masters in social work) so she's well trained in sociolgy and the healing of the mind. What she writes is not psychobabble. If you want to heal your life, she has a great spiritual way for women and some men to start their journey. I just wish that she would redo so a new generation of Witches and Neo-pagans who know the historical facts, could have the chance to enjoy it for all its good points like I did 12 years ago.

If you don't mind the eco-feminist spiritual focus she takes her other books are interesting journeys. I have very much enjoyed The Pagan Book of Living and Dying. I am a solitary so her books about the Craft are not geared for me. All of the exersizes need a HPs to lead a student/coven-memeber through the exersizes. And all the rituals require a coven. :o(

marvelous - and extremely useful
The Spiral Dance is magnificient - I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Starhawk has done a truly outstanding job of providing the reader with an excellent groundwork for an introduction to wicca, providing invocations, rituals and meditations. But what I found most useful were her numerous mental exercises designed to develop awareness, improve visualization and meditaiton techniques. They have been extremely valuable to me.

Starhawk discusses the various aspects of Witchcraft at length as well, which is also useful reading. Chapters are devoted to the Goddess, the God, summoning and grounding energy, casting - everything one would expect in a book for beginner practioners but with much more depth in explaining the "whys" rather then simply the "hows."

I would only add that the book is a little "advanced" for many new to witchcraft or wicca - the writing is pretty mature and techincal, albiet very good. If you have read Cunningham or Sliverwolf (who are both good), and are looking for something a little more mature, this would be my first choice. Enjoy! And bright blessings.