31 Starhawk Quotes + Interesting Facts & Bio

Starhawk Quotes:

Introduction

Starhawk (born Miriam Simos), is a philosopher, founder, and leader of the contemporary Wiccan movement.

She is known as a theorist of feminist Neopaganism and ecofeminism (a term used to describe a feminist approach to understanding ecology).

She has authored ten books, among them:

• The Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature;
• Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery;
• The Twelve Wild Swans: A Journey to the Realm of Magic, Healing, and Action, co-written with Hilary Valentine;
• Walking to Mercury;
• The Fifth Sacred Thing.

In her book ”The Spiral Dance,” she wrote:

“To reclaim the word ‘witch’ is to reclaim our right, as women, to be powerful; as men, to know the feminine in the divine.”

Her works have been translated into French, Spanish, Danish, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Japanese, Greek, and Burmese.

Interesting Facts & Bio

Miriam Simos was born in 1951 in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

After finishing high school in 1968, she moved to Venice, California, and enrolled at UCLA as a film student majoring in Art. In 1972, Starhawk graduated with a B.A. degree.

In 1982, she helped to found the Reclaiming Collective: A Center for Feminist Spirituality and Counseling. In the same year, Starhawk received an MA in Psychology, with a concentration in feminist therapy, from Antioch University West.

From 1983 to 1986, she worked as a psychotherapist in San Francisco.

In addition to her books, Starhawk made a few short documentaries that can be found on YouTube. Some of these documentaries are:

• Permaculture: Principles at Work;
• Permaculture in the City;
• Reclaiming’s Spiral Dance: Three Decades of Magic;
• The Spiral Dance Ritual.

In the present day, she is adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Here Is A List Of 31 Starhawk Quotes:

#1 ”The inner willingness is what makes the ritual come alive and have power. If you aren’t willing to be changed by the ritual, don’t do it.”

#2 ”To live with integrity in an unjust society, we must work for justice. To walk with integrity through a landscape strewn with beer cans, we must stop and pick them up.”

#3 “In a culture where profit has become the true God, self-sacrifice can seem incomprehensible rather than noble.”

#4 “Language shapes consciousness, and the use of language to shape consciousness is an important branch of magic.”

#5 “In the Craft the Goddess is not omnipotent. The cosmos is interesting rather than perfect, and everything is not part of some greater plan, nor is all necessarily under control.”

#6 “Insanity is repeating the same actions and expecting different results.”

#7 ”I am a witch, by which I mean that I am somebody who believes that the earth is sacred, and that women and women’s bodies are one expression of that sacred being.”

#8 ”Energy moves in cycles, circles, spirals, vortexes, whirls, pulsations, waves, and rhythms—rarely if ever in simple straight lines.”

#9 ”Knowledge gives answers; wisdom asks questions. Knowledge can be taught, wisdom grows from experience.”

#10 ”Everyone has the right to their own opinion about a ritual, and to their own aesthetics. There’s generally at least one invocation in every ritual that I could personally do without.”

#11 “Force, punishment, and violence are patriarchy’s answer to conflicts and social problems. Patriarchy finds its ultimate expression in war.”

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#12 “Through the Goddess, we can discover our strength, enlighten our minds, own our bodies, and celebrate our emotions.”

#13 ”Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power.”

#14 “All began in love, all seeks to return in love. Love is the law, the teacher of wisdom, and the great revealer of mysteries.”

#15 ”When we feel secure in our inherent value, we do not have to argue about our worth as human beings. Instead, we can attempt to solve the problem.”

#16 “Beware of organizations that proclaim their devotion to the light without embracing, bowing to the dark; for when they idealize half the world they must devalue the rest.”

#17 ”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.”

#18 “Despair breeds fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism. A world of truly shared abundance would be a safer world.”

#19 ”The depths of our own beings are not all sunlit; to see clearly, we must be willing to dive into the dark, inner abyss and acknowledge the creatures we may find there.”

#20 ”When we love all the children, when that love is truly sacred to us in the sense of being most important, then we have to take action in the world to enact that love.”

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#21 “For great as the powers of destruction may be, greater still, are the powers of healing.”

#22 “To work magic is to weave the unseen forces into form; to soar beyond sight; to explore the uncharted dream realm of the hidden reality.”

#23 “Let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you.”

#24 “The Judeo-Christian heritage has left us with the view of a universe composed of warring opposites, which are valued as either good or evil. They cannot coexist.”

#25 ”Any ritual is an opportunity for transformation. To do a ritual, you must be willing to be transformed in some way.”

#26 ”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.”

#27 ”We cannot change the world alone. To heal ourselves, to restore the earth to life, to create the situations in which freedom can flourish, we must work together in groups.”

#28 “To practice magic is to bear the responsibility for having a vision.”

#29 ”Earth Mother, you who are called by a thousand names. May all remember we are cells in your body and dance together.”

#30 “Life demands honesty, the ability to face, admit, and express oneself.”

#31 “Any ritual is an opportunity for transformation. To do a ritual, you must be willing to be transformed in some way.”

Image credit – Shutterstock

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References

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00938157.2012.680425?scroll=top&needAccess=true&journalCode=grva20https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257660942_TWO_PARTICULAR_EXPRESSIONS_OF_NEO-PAGANISM
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24717160