Hear the words of the Star Goddess, the dust of Whose feet are the hosts of Heaven, whose body encircles the universe:
I Who am the beauty of the green earth and the white moon among the stars and the mysteries of the waters,
I call upon your soul to arise and come unto me.
For I am the soul of nature that gives life to the universe.
From Me all things proceed and unto Me they must return.
Let My worship be in the heart that rejoices, for behold, all acts of love and pleasure are My rituals.
Traditional by Doreen Valiente, as adapted by Starhawk
In the early 1990s, while doing research on Witchcraft for my novel, Witchfire, I came across The Spiral Dance. Eager to learn more about a spiritual tradition I thought had vanished with the Witch burnings of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, I read the book rapidly. By the time I was halfway through it, my inner voice was saying incredulously, “Why--why you’ve been a Witch all your life and haven’t known it!”
Until now.
For me, reading The Spiral Dance felt like coming home. Brought up in a household of jolly atheists who celebrated the fun aspects of the so-called Christian holidays, as a teenager I felt the need for community. At 13 I joined the Protestant Episcopal Church, which did feel like home for a while. However, the distance between me and a remote sky god seemed unbridgeable, so at 17 I reverted to atheism.
Busy, as we all are with our paths through life—in my case, education followed by marriage, motherhood, and work--for years I was too preoccupied to give much thought to what was missing in my life. I knew my abiding reverence for the natural world made me something of a spiritual maverick, but I was used to that; I’ve always been a nonconformist, so solitary pursuits, thoughts, and feelings have been a normal state of affairs for me. But when I’d wake up to a sapphire summer dawn, when my dazzled eyes contemplated the sight of the Blue Ridge Mountains silhouetted against a pale blue sky, when I was moved almost to tears by the lights and shadows of an autumn afternoon, I was conscious of a void. I wanted to thank someone for the privilege of seeing such beauty, but there was no one to thank.
Enter Starhawk. “Mother Goddess is reawakening, and we can begin to recover our primal birthright, the sheer, intoxicating joy of being alive,” she writes in the first chapter of The Spiral Dance. “We can open new eyes and see that there is nothing to be saved from, no struggle of life against the universe, no God outside the world to be feared and obeyed; only the Goddess, the Mother, the turning spiral that whirls us in and out of existence, whose winking eye is the pulse of being—birth, death, rebirth—whose laughter bubbles and courses through all things and who is found only through love: love of trees, of stones, of sky and clouds, of scented blossoms and thundering waves; of all that runs flies and swims and crawls on her face; through love of ourselves; life-dissolving world-creating, orgasmic love of each other; each of us unique and natural as a snowflake, each of us our own star, her Child, her lover, her beloved, her Self.”
This is the concept of immanence. “Immanence,” Starhawk explains, “means that the Goddess, the Gods, are embodied, that we are each a manifestation of the living being of 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.”
I cannot describe the feeling of liberation these ideas wrought on my consciousness. To feel empowered—to know that one was created in the image of the Great Mother—to know that “all acts of love and pleasure were Her rituals” instead of despicable urges to be suppressed—was as heady an experience as the realization on one’s twenty-first birthday that one is finally grown up.
All my life I had been given to understand that I was worthless because I was human and evil because I was female. The society I inhabited let me know that nothing I ever did would be quite good enough; that I could never be as strong, as smart, as altogether capable as a man. My parents did not inculcate this attitude, quite the opposite. But the church I attended with my grandmother, the people around me, everything I read in the newspapers or learned in school or saw on television, reinforced the idea that women were inferior and that the things belonging to women—the three great blood mysteries of womanhood, menarche, childbirth, and menopause—were shameful.
Starhawk dispels this idea. “No matter how simplistically or superstitiously the Craft is understood, it offers women a model of female strength and creative power; in that, it has remarkably little competition from other religions.” And, “The Craft also demands a new relationship to the female body. No longer can it be seen as an object or vilified as something dirty. A woman’s body, its odors, secretions, and menstrual blood, are sacred, are worthy of reverence and celebration. Women’s bodies belong to themselves alone; no spiritual authority will back a man’s attempt to possess or control her.”
What a revelation this was: that femaleness was something to embrace with joy. For example, in the 1950s, when I was growing up, menstruation was shrouded in secrecy and shame. “Is there anything on the back of my skirt?” we’d ask each other anxiously in junior high. How we hoped our colleagues wouldn’t notice our temporary acne, our flashes of ill temper, our propensity to eat everything that wasn’t nailed down. We did everything we could to hide the fact that we were having our monthly flow. But in the Craft of the Wise, menstruation is no longer “Eve’s curse” but “sacred moon time.” We feel the pull of the moon, of the tides, and rejoice to be part of the cycle of life. I liked this complete reversal of what I’d been told all my life; I taught the other women in my group at work to refer to menses as “sacred moon time.” We noted the monthly symptoms in each other by saying, “Oh, she’s in the Moon Lodge, cut her some slack.”
In our society old women are despised because they are no longer attractive or able to reproduce. My hair is gray; often, in my everyday life, when I speak to young men they don’t “see” me. When I ask where to find a given object in a commercial establishment, they fix their eyes on a distant wall while they give me directions. Such invisibility is a fact of life for older women; we learn to live with it and if we are blessed with a sense of humor, even extract a certain amount of amusement from it.
But in the Goddess religion old women are revered. “All phases of life are sacred: Age is a blessing, not a curse,” Starhawk writes. This made a profound impression on me during my first “week between the worlds,” a spiritual retreat known fondly by its participants as “Witch Camp.” Walking from one place to another around the camp, I felt pleased and validated when young men bowed respectfully to me when our paths crossed. I was a Crone, an elder whose wisdom and experience were considered to be assets.
Starhawk states, “The Old Religion, as we call 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.”
We Witches celebrate eight sabbats during the Wheel of the Year as it turns through the seasons: Samhain, the Witches’ New Year (which runs from sunset on 31 October to sunset on 1 November); Yule (the Winter Solstice, usually about 21 December); Imbolc (31 January-1 February); Ostara (the Spring Equinox, usually about 22 March); Beltane (30 April-1 May); Litha (the Summer Solstice); Lammas or Lughnasadh (31 July-1 August); and Mabon (the Autumn Equinox).
One Beltane our Circle held the ritual on my screened porch. Each of us leaped three times over the sacred smoke of the cauldron fire, calling out wishes we hoped Goddess would grant during the coming year. It was a euphoric spring night with a full moon, so after the ritual two of my Circle sisters and I tripped down the hill to the creek, still holding our wineglasses, to make an offering.
At the bottom of the hill we saw a small dogwood tree in full bloom, its starry white blossoms reflected in the water. “To You, Great Mother of All!” we cried, and emptied our glasses into the creek. As we climbed back up the hill to the house, Risa looked up at the moon, laughed, and exclaimed, “I love being a woman!” Leni, our new young Circle sister, looked at her in amazement. To her this was evidently a new idea: that womanhood, femaleness, was something to be embraced with enthusiasm. Leni later became a Witch and ever after, when she moved to a new city, she found a local coven (easy enough to do if you know the code) and made friends in her new community.
The Spiral Dance changed my life and undoubtedly the lives of many others. My friend in Germany, an environmental scientist, read it and became a Witch. We write to each other of our sabbats and esbats and the different ways we celebrate them in our respective countries.
To women and men wounded by patriarchy, the Goddess offers healing, validation, and love. It’s a complete mental change to live life knowing that this world is something that we do not want to be saved from. This world, this Earth, our Gaia, is our Mother; from Her we came and to Her we shall return. We tread lightly on her, we are reverent toward her when we use Her resources, we take only what we need to survive and leave the rest.
And should you yourself wish to look upon the face of Goddess:
Look in your mirror. You’ll see Her there.