Starhawk
Ritual affirms the common patterns, the values, the shared joys, risks, sorrows, and changes that bind a community together. Ritual links together our ancestors and descendants, those who went before with those will come after us.Collection: Community
The Old Religion, as we call it, is closer in spirit to Native American traditions or to 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 it's 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.Collection: Stars
Through the Goddess, we can discover our strength, enlighten our minds, own our bodies, and celebrate our emotions.Collection: Mind
Patriarchy values the hard over the soft; the tough over the tender; punishment, vengeance, and vindictiveness over compassion, negotiation, and reconciliation. The 'hard' qualities are linked to power, success, and masculinity - and exalted. The 'soft' qualities are identified with weakness, powerlessness, and femininity - and denigrated.Collection: Compassion
The long sleep of Mother Goddess is ended. May She awaken in each of our hearts - Merry meet, merry part, and blessed be.Collection: Mother
Only those who must bear the consequences of a decision have the right to make it.Collection: Decision
What shames us, what we most fear to tell, does not set us apart from others; it binds us together if only we can take the risk to speak it.Collection: Truth
It is not easy to be a Witch, a bender, a shaper, one of the Wise; nor is it safe, comfortable, laid back, mellow, uplifting, or a guarantee of Peace of mind. It requires openness, vulnerability, courage and work. It gives no answers, only tasks to be done and questions to consider....It functions in those deeper ways of knowing which our culture has denied and for which we hunger.Collection: Uplifting
Spirituality leaps where science cannot yet follow, because science must always test and measure, and much of reality and human experience is immeasurable.Collection: Uplifting
The terrain of the mysteries is the ordinary. To seek out mystery, we don't have to go anywhere. We must simply change our preception, our description, our consciousness of where we are.Collection: Ordinary
Fear doesn't go away but you walk toward fear naked and the gate opens.Collection: Going Away
Life demands honesty, the ability to face, admit, and express oneself.Collection: Honesty
Any ritual is an opportunity for transformation.Collection: Opportunity
A spiritual organization with a hierarchical structure can convey only the consciousness of estrangement, regardless of what teachings or deep inspirations are at its root.The structure itself reinforces the idea that some people are inherently more worthy than others.Collection: Spiritual
Systems don't change easily. Systems try to maintain themselves, and seek equilibrium. To change a system, you need to shake it up, disrupt the equilibrium. That often requires conflict.Collection: Justice
On every full moon, rituals ... take place on hilltops, 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 the Dance of Life. The religion they practice is called Witchcraft.Collection: Teacher
Witchcraft offers the model of a religion of poetry, not theology. It presents metaphors, not doctrines, and leaves open the possibility of reconciliation of science and religion, of many ways of knowing.Collection: Knowing
Magic is the craft of shaping, the craft of the wise, exhilarating, dangerous - the ultimate adventure. The power of magic should not be underestimated. It works, often in ways that are unexpected and difficult to control.Collection: Wise
The Goddess falls in love with Herself, drawing forth her own emanation, which takes on a life of its own. Love of self for self is the creative force of the universe. Desire is the primal energy, and that energy is erotic: the attraction of lover to beloved, of planet to star, the lust of electron for proton. Love is the glue that holds the world together.Collection: Falling In Love
The antidote to climate change is community.Collection: Community
Sexuality is a sacrament.Collection: Sex
Without a vision human beings are nasty creatures.Collection: Vision
Any action, like any act of magic, is in some sense an act of faith ... I've seen the desert bloom, the flower that emerges from the barest hint of water, and I know the power of life will rise, stubborn and persistent to be renewed. May our actions be the wind that brings the rain.Collection: Rain
She changes everything she touches. And everything she touches changes.Collection: Paganism
It happens over and over again—a group of people come together, fired up with passion to create change. They begin with huge inspiration and enthusiasm—and a year later, it’s all foundered in the mire of conflict. We could have changed the world ten times over—if we didn’t have to do it together with other people, those irritating, self-righteous, controlling, fluff-brained, clueless idiots who are our friends and allies.Collection: Inspiration
The witches, the wise women, and the healers were also always the counselors. It's a whole other tradition of knowledge and learning that has been suppressed because it had political implications.Collection: Wise
Panic is not an effective long-term organizing strategy.Collection: Stress
Magic is another word that makes people uneasy, so I use it deliberately, because words they are comfortable with, the words that sound acceptable, rational, scientific, and intellectually sound, are comfortable precisely because they are the language of estrangement.Collection: People
Despair breeds fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism. A world of truly shared abundance would be a safer world.Collection: Despair
Any creative work that is truly alive is influenced by a thousand chance factors in its generation.Collection: Creative
The Crone, the Reaper... She is the Dark Moon, what you don't see coming at you, what you don't get away with, the wind that whips the spark across the fire line. Chance, you could say, or, what's scarier still: the intersection of chance with choices and actions made before. The brush that is tinder dry from decades of drought, the warming of the earth's climate that sends the storms away north, the hole in the ozone layer. Not punishment, not even justice, but consequence.Collection: Dark
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.Collection: Stars
Those who would practice magic must be scrupulously honest in their personal lives. In one sense, magic works on the principle that 'it is so because I say it is so.' For words to take on such force, you must be deeply and completely convinced that it is identified with truth as you know it. To a person who practices honesty and keeps commitments, 'As I will, so mote it be' is not just a pretty phrase; it is a statement of fact.Collection: Honesty
Creations, whether they are children, poems, or organizations, take on a life of their own.Collection: Children
Unless I have enough personal power to keep commitments in my daily life, I will be unable to wield magical power. To work magic, I need a basic belief in my ability to do things and cause things to happen. That belief is generated and sustained by my daily actions.Collection: Commitment
Solidarity is based on the principle that we are willing to put ourselves at risk to protect each other.Collection: Risk
What affects one thing affects, in some way, all things: All is interwoven into the continuous fabric of being. Its warp and weft are energy, which is the essence of magic.Collection: Essence
The test of a true myth is that each time you return to it, new insights and interpretations arise.Collection: Tests
Sexual integrity means honestly recognizing our own impulses and desires and honoring them, whether or not we choose to act on them. If we value integrity, we must also value diversity in sexual expression and orientation, recognizing that there is no one truth, or one way, that fits everyone.Sexuality is sacred because through it we make a connection with another self - but it is misused and perverted when it becomes an arena of power-over, a means of treating another - or oneself - as an object.Collection: Integrity
Now, on the longest day, light triumphs, and yet begins the decline into dark. We turn the Wheel for we have planted the seeds of our own changes, and to grow we must accept even the passing of the sun Set Sail See with clear eyes See how we shine!Collection: Eye
To Witches, the cosmos is the living body of the Goddess, in whose being we all partake, who encompasses us and is immanent within us. We call her Goddess not to narrowly define her gender, but as a continual reminder that what we value is life brought into the world ... She has infinite names and guises, many of them male.Collection: Names
The Goddess is the Encircler, the Ground of Being; the God is That-Which-Is-Brought-Forth, her mirror image, her other pole. She is the earth; He is the grain. She is the all encompassing sky; He is the sun, her fireball. She is the Wheel; He is the traveler. He is the sacrifice of life to death that life may go on. She is the Mother and Destroyer; He is all that is born and is destroyed.Collection: Mother
Our physical senses and our embodied brains allow us to perceive only a small fraction of reality. We cannot see microbes or untraviolet light, for example. We can hear only a small range of sounds. When we try to describe the otherworld of energies and spirits, we are limited not only by our bodily constraints but by the expectations, assumptions, and language patterns ingrained in us by the culture we were raised in.Collection: Reality
We need the discipline of magic, of consciousness-change, in order to hear and understand what the earth is saying to us. And listening to the earth, doing the rituals the land asks us for, giving back what we are asked for, will also bring us healing, expanded awareness and intensified life.Collection: Healing
Force, punishment, and violence are patriarchy's answer to conflicts and social problems. Patriarchy finds its ultimate expression in war.Collection: War
In Witchcraft, each of us must reveal our own truth.Collection: Paganism
If Goddess religion is not to become mindless idiocy, we must win clear of tendency of magic to become supertition. Magic - and among its branches I include psychology as its purpose to describe and change consciousness - is an art.Collection: Art
[On 9/11:] ... those towers represented human triumph over nature. Larger than life, built to be unburnable, they were the Titanic of our day. For them to burn and fall so quickly means that the whole superstructure we depend upon to mitigate nature and assure our comfort and safety could fall.Collection: Fall