As a child of the Christian faith I was taught that witches are bad. Life has not confirmed my inherited bias that people can be divided into good and evil camps. In fact, I have learned that some of the most evil acts in history were committed by those who saw themselves as purely good and their neighbors as purely evil.
Starhawk is a Wiccan, sometimes known as a witch. When I actually got around to listening to her many years ago, I was surprised to find, not evil and scheming, but kindness and wisdom.
In case you have never listened to a witch I am including a passage by Starhawk. Her approach is not against men, but it is against patriarchal domination. Her approach is not against God, but it does critique abstract theologies that do not find the sacred in nature.
Here is a beautiful passage from Starhawk that may widen and deepen your perceptual horizon. The words are hers, the spacing is mine:
“The earth is a living, conscious being.
“In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water, and earth.
“Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them.
“To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standards by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged.
“No one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy.”
Starhawk says here that the earth is a living conscious being. I seriously doubt that minerals are conscious, but I am charmed by her perception of the elements as a kind of proto-intelligence. The periodic chart can be understood as a kind of unconscious intelligence beating in the heart of every element we dismiss as dead and thoughtless matter.
There is kind of “wisdom” that holds the universe together. While a focus on abstracted philosophy and theology tends to fragment humankind, I can’t think of anything more reverent and unifying than recognizing nature as our common body and as the most sacred of temples.