Starhawk, born Miriam Simos in 1951, is an American writer, activist and teacher of earth-based spirituality, best known for her first book, The Spiral Dance (1979), and as a co-founder of the Reclaiming tradition of witchcraft. Therapeutic Shamanism takes one idea from her, and credits it to her, the contrast between ‘power-over’ and ‘power-from-withinPower-from-within. Starhawk’s term for the healthy mode of power, as against power-over. Egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands held power this way; practising shamanism from power-over is ‘just more Fall’. More about this’, which it uses to describe the healthy relationship to power on which hunter-gatherer life rested.
Who is Starhawk? #
She was born Miriam Simos in St Paul, Minnesota, in 1951. The Spiral Dance (1979) became one of the best-known books of the Goddess and witchcraft revival in the United States. In the same year she and her friends held a public Samhain ritual with a spiral dance in San Francisco, and the group that grew out of it became the Reclaiming Collective.1
Her later books include Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics (1982), Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery (1987), the novel The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993), The Earth Path (2004) and The Empowerment Manual: A GuideGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this for Collaborative Groups (2011). She is also an activist and a trainer in non-violent direct action, has been part of the peace, women’s, environmental and anti-globalisation movements, and teaches permaculture through Earth Activist Training.1
What is the difference between power-over and power-from-within? #
In Dreaming the Dark, Starhawk describes our modern relationship with power as one of ‘power-over’ and ‘powerlessness’, in which power is not shared out fairly and evenly and some people have power over others. Against this she sets ‘power-from-within’.2 In Truth or Dare she names three kinds of power: power-over, meaning domination and control; power-from-within, meaning personal ability and spiritual integrity; and power-with, social power or influence among equals.3
In Therapeutic Shamanism, someone who has power-from-within has no wish to have power over others, and is not willing to hand their own power to others either. Starhawk’s book does not discuss hunter-gatherers directly, but power-from-within is what hunter-gatherer cultures were based on, and it is part of the reason they managed so well without leaders. Children were raised to have it from the start, without physical punishment, with trust and respect, and with kindness. The anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, describing the !Kung, or Ju/’hoansi, of the Kalahari Desert as she knew them in the 1950s, when they still lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers, found children who rarely cried because they had very little to cry about. Children raised in this way grew up into adults who felt little or no need to dominate others, and who were unwilling to hand their own power over.2 See How does animism understand power and hierarchy?
Why does power-from-within matter so much to Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Because practising shamanism, or most things, from a position of power-over is a Taker way of being, however good the intentions. Hunter-gatherers had an extraordinary respect for one another’s autonomy. They did not tell other people what to do, and rarely offered advice nobody had asked for. Most people today do the opposite, and as a teacher Paul Francis has found that one of the hardest things for new students is not learning to journey but getting the power dynamics right, which means stopping the problem-solving and advice-giving, and properly listening to the person they are working with.4
This is why Therapeutic Shamanism draws so heavily on Person-Centred counselling, which is rooted in respect for other people’s autonomy. Instead of handing out advice and opinions, the practitioner helps people explore their own thoughts, feelings and intuitions and make their own decisions, and in being treated this way people begin to discover and trust their own power-from-within.4 The same thread runs through the qualities of a True AdultTrue Adult. Not someone with a job and a mortgage, but a person shocked out of childish separateness who has taken up their place, interdependently, in both the human tribe and the more-than-human web. Adults decide; Elders advise. Read the full answer, who seeks to empower others where possible and appropriate, and of a true ElderElder (True Elder). The rarer stage beyond Adulthood. Adults decide; Elders advise. More about this, who seeks to empower other people.5 See What can person-centred therapy offer shamanic work? and How are Power-loss, soul loss and loss of personal power different?
Is Therapeutic Shamanism the same as Starhawk’s kind of spirituality? #
No. Therapeutic Shamanism borrows a phrase from Starhawk and credits it to her; it does not borrow her practice. Its own work is shamanic journeying to the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer and the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer, within an animism that worships nothing and places no being above another.
Earth-based, non-hierarchical pagan paths are kindred to that animism. They can share a love of the living world as sacred here and now, attention to the seasons, and circles where nobody is placed above anyone else. They are still not the same path, and the differences lie in how beings are related to and in which realms the work is done. See Isn’t Therapeutic Shamanism just paganism?
What have historians said about The Spiral Dance? #
Its history has been questioned. The book presented modern witchcraft as the rebirth of an ancient Goddess religion, and gave a figure of up to nine million people killed in the European witch hunts. Historians of the witch trials put the number far lower. Brian Levack estimates around 60,000 deaths, and Anne Llewellyn Barstow around 100,000.6
Starhawk’s later editions kept the original text largely as it was, and added new introductions and notes on how her thinking had developed. In the tenth anniversary edition she called the nine million figure “probably high”, putting the estimates at between that and a low of one hundred thousand, which is the figure Barstow gives; she also wrote that “nobody knows exactly how many people died in the persecutions”.7
