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Starhawk

Priestess, drummer, author, lecturer, and activist, born Miriam Simos in New York.   She is perhaps the most famous and visible person in the Earth religion of Wicca, and her books, particularly The Spiral Dance, have had a major influence on the growth and expansion of that faith.  Since high school, when she participated in various protests and demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, she has been an ardent activist on behalf of world peace, the environment, feminism, human rights, antiglobalization, and other issues, and has gone to jail many times for her beliefs.

Raised in the Jewish faith, she was initiated into Wicca at 17, attracted to the religion's treatment of sex and nature as sacred and its high regard for the status of women.   Receiving her MA in Psychology from Antioch University, she became involved in the Wiccan and NeoPagan communties in San Francisco and was one of the founders of Reclaiming, an ecofeminist collective, of which she and her partner are still members.   In 1979 her book, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess,  a guidebook to the practice of Wicca detailing matters of thealogy, philosophy, meditations, spells, rituals, and practical life issues, was published.   The book sold over 50,000 copies by 1985 and sparked an explosion in the growth of Wicca, as thousands in the US, Canada, Australia, and South Africe began forming covens and Goddess groups based around the system she presented.   In 1982 Starhawk wrote Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Politics, and Sex,  which merged insights of Wiccan magick and ritual with the issues surrounding anarchic, feminist, and environmental activism.   These issues were further examined in Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority and Mystery, in 1987.  Truth or Dare won the Media Alliance Meritorius Achievement Reward for nonfiction the following year.

Starhawk's first novel, The Fifth Sacred Thing, was published in 1993.   This book, set circa 2040, presented San Francisco as an ecosocialist utopian enclave, with the rest of the US controlled by a political and religious right military dictatorship.   It centered around the efforts by the community's inhabitants to resist the invasion and conquest of their home by the dictatorship's forces.   The novel won the 1994 Lambda Gay and Lesbian Science Fiction Award.   A prequel, Walking to Mercury, was published in 1997.   Starhawk was a consultant for the documentary films Goddess Remembered and The Burning Times, and wrote the commentary for the documentary Full Circle.

Starhawk's activism has included  anti-nuclear demonstrations at the Livermore Weapons Lab and the Nevada Test Site,  a 1984 trip with Witness for Peace to Nicaragua, volunteer work for sustainability programs in El Salvador, and participation in the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle and the International Money Fund and World Bank in Washington, DC.   She was also present at the demonstrations in Genoa and documented the actions of police when cracking down on the protests.   Starhawk was a founder of the Cazadero Hills Land Use Council in Western Sonoma County, and also organized an AIDS-prevention needle exchange program in San Francisco.   Finally, she protested the censure of Father Matthew Fox by the Catholic Church, which objected to his inclusion of Starhawk and other Wiccan and Pagan leaders in his Creation Spirituality Institute.

At this writing, Starhawk is continuing her efforts against globalization and is also working on behalf of efforts to protect the redwoods.   She is also collaborating with film producer Donna Read on a documentary about archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, produced by the company they have co-founded Bellini Productions.  She continues to lecture throughout North America and Europe, and to give workshops on effective activism and civil disobedience.

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