Starhawk Quotes

The word "Witch" carries so many negative connotations that many people wonder why we use the word at all. Yet to reclaim the word "Witch" is to reclaim our right, as women, to be powerful; as men, to know the feminine within as divine.

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

The ascetism of early Christianity, which turned its back on the world of the flesh, had degrenerated, in some quarters of the Church, into hatred of those who those who brought that flesh into being. Misogyny, the hatred of women, had become a strong element in medieval Christianity. Women who menstruate, and give birth, were identified with sexuality and therefore with evil. "All witchcraft stems from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable," stated the Malleus Maleficarum.

Magic has always been an element of Witchcraft, but in the Craft its techniques were practiced within a context of community and connection.

The truth is that while men, in our society, are encouraged to have strong egos and to function in competitive, aggressive, intellectualized modes that may indeed cause them pain, for most women the ego is like a fragile African Violet, grown in secret from a seed, carefully nursed and fertilized and sheltered from too much sun.

On every full moon, rituals such as the one described above take place