The Liberated Wiccan

Of all the popular writers on women's spirituality and Wicca, Starhawk has always been the most poetic and the most political. In 1979, her book "The Spiral Dance" portrayed Wicca as a spiritual philosophy that included a psychology of liberation, a feminist ethos, and a radical politics. In writing about "The Spiral Dance," Ronald Hutton, in "The Triumph of the Moon," says that besides the book's emotionally powerful writing, "it reworked the whole image of witchcraft to give it a new significance, and respectability, to a modern liberal reader. She showed how the coven could be turned into a training group in which women could be liberated, men re-educated, and new forms of human relationship explored which were free of the old gender stereotypes and power structures."

Starhawk's next book, "Dreaming the Dark," went a step further. It combined the insights of radical affinity groups that were protesting nuclear power and nuclear war--groups like the Clamshell Alliance--with the insights of the coven, redefined as a group of like-minded people who come together to change themselves and the world. Magic was redefined as a liberating psychology, and the line between the psychic and the psychological became, perhaps intentionally, blurred.

In "Truth or Dare," Starhawk's next nonfiction book, she began with a revealing story: 600 women are sitting in a gym on the second day after they have been arrested in a protest action. There is no privacy. The food is inadequate. People are arguing. Tempers are short, and there is little unity. Suddenly, a woman runs into the gym, chased by six prison guards who shout, "Grab her." The women in the room instinctively surround her and begin a wordless chant. The guards back away, confused, and they withdraw. "For a moment," Starhawk writes, "mystery has bested authority...in that moment in the jail, the power of domination and control met something outside its comprehension. To know that power, to create the situations that bring it forth, is magic."

Although Starhawk wrote these three books, much of her teaching work is done collectively. To understand Starhawk's work, you need to know something about Reclaiming, the Wiccan tradition and collective that informs much of her work:

Reclaiming works by consensus.

Reclaiming workshops are almost always facilitated by more than one person.

Reclaiming differentiates between three types of power: power over (domination--the kind of power we often see in our governments, armies, and institutions), power from within (the kind of liberating power that was experienced during that moment in the jail), and power with (a kind of leadership that is not based on domination). Much of Reclaiming's work and many of Starhawk's books attempt to give people the techniques of this "psychology of liberation" so they can liberate themselves and create meaningful change in the world. Supporting this effort are Reclaiming-run five- to seven-day Witchcamps all over the United States and Canada, which to date have been attended by thousands of people.

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