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Changing consciousness at will:An interview with Starhawkby Stephanie Hiller |
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Starhawk has done more than almost anyone to reclaim the word "witch" and share with hundreds of others the tools and traditions of the ancient Craft. Trained by Z Budapest, who claims to be the originator of the modern American witchcraft revival, Star went on to form ReClaiming, an organization of "cells" and "affinity groups" with centers throughout the world. Centered in San Francisco, ReClaiming holds public rituals to celebrate the pagan high holy days and offers classes. You can visit their website at http://www.reclaiming.org/ Starhawk is also the author of numerous books, beginning with Spiral Dance, an introduction to pagan ritual, which was recently re-issued in commemoration of twenty years in print, and many others, including two novels, The Fifth Sacred Thing and to Mercury . In October she released her latest book, in collaboration with Hillary Valentine: Twelve Wild Swans, a handbook for training and initiation into the practice of magic; it is reviewed in this issue. Since our first interview with Star two years ago, she has become very active in the movement against economic globalisation. We decided to talk with her again, to find out more about her recent work. We met in a café in Guerneville, California, a town located not far from her home in Cazadero.
How do you manage to accomplish so much? You've just published a new book, and you're doing trainings all over the world. How do you do it? Well I think it helps to be a Gemini! For a good long time there, I was actually spending most of my time wandering in the woods and gardening. I've learned over the years when I do write to be focussed and if I do have to write something, I have to do it by a certain date, and I know if I put it off I won't have another opportunity, so I sit down and I do it. But now, this year, I've decided that workaholic personalities were designed for times like these. What do you mean by "times like these"? I think we're in a real crucial time, politically and spiritually. Everyone I know who's psychic and tuned into the earth has a kind of this-is-it feeling about what's going on right now even though none of us can really articulate what "it" is. For me, what it's meant is I've been moved to let go of a lot of my usual stuff and take on more political organizing work and training and movement building work, which means even more traveling than I usually do -- and less gardening… And less writing? The only way I can afford to do all this is keep writing because all of this stuff doesn't pay any money so I'm hoping to get another book contract. But I still spend at least a couple hours a day, when I'm home, wandering around in the woods. That's what feeds me and what enables me to do a lot of work. And I've really learned over the years, that as long as I'm having fun, I can do amazing amounts of stuff. Because as long as the work is coming out of this sense of joy and excitement, then it's easy; but when I start getting pulled into working out of guilt and urgency then it just drains my energy and if I don't stop I'll get sick and my body will make me stop. How do you find the joy in this kind of political work, given that the situation seems so grim? The joy comes in actually facing it and the excitement of saying, hey we're really going to change the situation, we're gonna build a movement and we're going to inspire people to do it. And the connections that you make with people in the sense of solidarity, sisterhood, and seeing these young people who are just incredibly courageous and who go through these experiences and come out of them stronger &endash; to me that's just so exciting! What is the role of non-violent protest in changing the structure? I think non-violent protest can be a very potent force in changing the structure and there's a number of different ways that it can work. Non-violent protest works most effectively when it's part of a whole campaign that might start with things like public education and include things like writing endless letters to your elected representatives, lobbying and boycotting and divestment strategies, and putting that kind of pressure on. But what non-violent protest can do is it can be a spotlight. It can shine a light on something that's been invisible and bring it out into the public eye. I think we've seen that this year with the WTO and the IMF and the World Bank. It can raise the cost for the institutions of doing their business as usual. Nobody sat down and quite planned this. Nobody called a global strategy meeting to get people from Thailand to Tierra del Fuego to agree that they were going to shut down every globalization meeting on the planet, but essentially that's what's been happening. It's meant that they can't just do their business and go home, that every time they essentially have to institute a police state even to have a meeting and that tremendously raises their costs.
Could this kind of protest lead to more of a clamp down or do you think you're being heard? I think that part of the theory of non-violent direct action is a theory about power, and the way that it works is that institutions like the state rest on consent because they can't actually afford the political and social and economic costs of having to enforce every single decree that they come up with. The way that they work is that they get other people to consent to obey those decrees, out of fear or out of some hope about what the system might offer them. You can see how this system operates very clearly when you're in jail. In jail, if they'll say SHUT UP, and if they had to actually go in and force you to shut up, they couldn't do it. Every single person is making noise and they can't afford enough guards to do that. But most of the time they don't have to do that, because you think, if I don't shut up they could do something worse to me, so I guess I better shut up. So you potentially police yourself… But they could do something worse to you… They could do something worse to you, but that's the theory of non-violent direct action. You say, ok, I'm not going to police myself, I'm not going to act out of fear, and if they do something worse to me, then they do something worse to me. Well that takes a certain amount of courage… Yeah, that takes a certain amount of coverage or (laughs) a great deal of denial… I remember when I was growing up, as a Jew, a lot of us felt we didn't want to claim being Jews because what did they do about the Nazis? They just went like sheep on the trains, there were only two or four soldiers on the railroad cars, and why didn't they revolt? Well, first of all, there were a lot of revolts, there was tremendous Jewish resistance, so it's a myth that Jews just went like sheep, it's not the reality. But part of the reality is the psychology of that kind of power and intimidation &endash; unless you've thought about these issues, unless you've had some training or some practice or some kind of political background you don't have this analysis of power. When you have two or four guys on a train and they all have guns, most people are not going to spontaneously revolt. That's where training comes in. Part of the way that you get courage is through training, through practicing, through role playing, through knowing other people who have taken action and survived it. If you just round up your aunt Sadie and my uncle Joe and take them out of their nice peaceful life and throw them on a cattle car with two guards with guns, they're not going to spontaneously come up with a theory of peaceful resistance; they're going to be traumatized and just hoping to survive… So the training that you do is an effort to build up that courage? I love to do non-violent direct action trainings because it is about encouraging people to really look at systems of power and build up their personal courage and also to form support structures that make it easier. It's a lot easier to have courage if you know that people are there to support you, that even if you end up in jail, there are people outside who are going to keep putting pressure on the system Do you get people out of jail? Most of the protest people get out fairly quickly. At Prague there were people who were held onto for a long time. In Prague they never really changed the police from the old Communist era. They changed the government but the same people are still running the police and using the same methods. It was shocking that in Washington DC that the police were as much like the communist police as they were this year. Were you surprised? They were really quite brutal, especially because the people they arrested in Washington were arrested in a totally non-violent situation, in a kind of voluntary arrest, where they had crossed a line after a negotiation with the police chief [and it was agreed] that they would come forward and be arrested and the police wouldn't tear gas everybody. It was negotiated right there on the spot on the street, and then the police chief went and did a big PR thing about how this was America… and meanwhile the people who were arrested were really brutalized in jail. One of my friends was kept in handcuffs so long, he couldn't get his jacket off, and was not given any food or water for something like 18 hours, to the point where they all ended up drinking out of the jail toilet! They used all the classic intimidation techniques, and they worked on some people, who never had imagined they were going to face anything like that. But they also had about 200 people who stayed on in jail and held onto their jail solidarity and eventually forced them to essentially drop the charges down to a traffic ticket, not just for the 200 people but for everyone who participated in that action and had been arrested in that week. A $5 fine. I didn't end up getting arrested in that action. But I was arrested in Seattle. The young women that I was with in jail were so inspiring and so wonderful, I was just happy the whole time. It was kind of liberating. It had been a long time since I had been arrested in a real jail situation and I was starting to think, well, you know I'm older now and I like my little cup of tea and I like my comfort, I'm not 30 years old any more. After those five years, yes, I'm ready to go! And you have been going. I went to Washington and then I was in Europe doing other things but David, my partner, and I did some trainings in London and then some trainings in Prague. I'm going to be going to Quebec in January, linking up with some of the people organizing around the FTAA, which would extend NAFTA throughout the Western Hemisphere; and then I'm gong to go to Brazil to the World Social Forum*, which is being organized as a counter forum to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, where NGOs and people who are working on global justice issues can get together and propose their own vision of the world. It's a network, more than an organization. There's the groups that'll be doing the direct action but then there's this whole other world of NGOs of groups that do social programs and lobbying and public education. It's sort of like being fish that are swimming in the same ocean but in different thermal layers. It's like in Seattle, where you have the youth out on the streets and then you have the responsible adults (laughs)… I guess I've never become a responsible adult! What about the role of magic in changing the world? To me magic is the art of changing consciousness at will, and when you change your consciousness you can potentially impact the world around you; and actually that's the definition I like for political action as well. The election spell, for your readers… We were working on an ongoing spell which was, "May power and influence flow to those who will use them for the good of the earth and her people, and be withdrawn from those who won't." On election night, I suddenly felt compelled in the middle of the returns to light a little candle and put Bush's name on it and imagine support melting away. But I looked at it and it wasn't melting fast enough and I started to push it around &endash; and then it went out! And I thought oh, (she laughed) this is it, I've blown the election. I re-lit it quickly and just at that moment someone called and said, Well it's all over, Bush won. We were in a cabin where we didn't have any TV reception, where people would call us and tell us what was happening. There was a little group of us working up there. We were going to bed and we said, Shall we blow the candle out. And one of the other witches there who's worked in state government in Illinois said, No, all the returns aren't in yet, we don't know what can happen. I said if we don't blow it out, it's going to crack the plate. Then I said, To hell with it, it would be well worth cracking the plate to have Bush not win the election. We went to bed, I heard the plate crack sure enough, and later we had another phone call, You won't believe what's happened… With something like that, no one could say it was because we lit that candle that the election happened the way it did, although if you look at that spell, at this point we have no president at all! (laughs) But when you look at that spell about the power and resources flowing, I almost felt like the universe was just waiting for someone to speak those words. So if you can hook into what the universe wants, you can become a channel for that? Caroline Casey has talked about how the gods are right there and they're willing to help us, and they're always on call, but you have to call them in. It's sort of like the spiritual/magical etiquette that you have to ask for that help. So why do you need to go on the streets then, if you can sit in your cabin and "crack" the election, with the help of the gods…? It's interesting that you are willing to engage on these two levels. Well because if people hadn't been on the streets, then I couldn't sit in my cabin and crack the election. It's because those forces we tap into are [also the ones] propelling people onto the streets. And in magic, like in anything else, you don't get something for nothing. Magic is about knowing your intention, creating an image that embodies your intention and channeling energy through it. That's also what a political protest does at best. You know what your intention is, you channel energy through it, you embody it, and if you don't make it physical, if you don't make that magic manifest in the real world, then it doesn't have that kind of power behind it. We're fighting the most massive powers probably ever amassed on this planet to keep this system in place and working the way it's working. To challenge that, to change that, it's going to take everything we've got, on every possible level. Are you optimistic? I am optimistic. I don't know why. Suddenly I woke up the other morning, I had this amazing feeling of happiness for no reason at all, I had this old Beatles' song playing in my head, "It's all too much for me to take/ The love that's shining all around me" which I hadn't heard in years, and I thought, Doing all this activism, we're planting the seeds of a new way of being, of a non hierarchical way of organizing, of a direct democratic process. We have people in political discussion all the way literally from Buenos Aires to Prague to Quebec, all talking about these issues, they're alive, they're fermenting all over the planet, we're building these solidarity structures globally, we're building a global movement in a way that we never could have imagined even a few years ago. We're gonna make it, this is gonna happen, we're going to have a totally different way of living and being on this planet. It's going to be free and just and equal! So can you describe in terms of nuts and bolts what that culture would look like? One of the phrases I've used to describe it is a "rooted economic democracy." And what would that entail? Rooted means that it's rooted in community, that economic systems are seen as being responsive and responsible to an actual community, not these free floating energies that can just plunk down anywhere and suck all the resources. How would you define the borders of that community? Communities would define themselves. In San Francisco you've got a city, you can draw a line around it. Where I am, in the Cazadero Hills, we organized a group a few years ago called the Cazadero Hills Land Use Council and what was interesting was, even though we're no sort of standard definition of a community -- we're not a village, we're not a town, we're all just spread out over the hills -- but when we got up and drew a map, everybody knew exactly where the lines went. So part of democracy is self-defining. There is a movement going on separate but parallel to the demonstrations that's about watersheds, like the Gualala River Watershed council where people are bringing together all the different stakeholders in a watershed and figuring out programs and how to manage the resources. That's just as important as going into the streets? Absolutely, because not everybody is cut out to go out into the streets and that's not the only kind of action that's important or valuable. A lot of the political action we've done at CHLUC is like endless hours on the phone or reading Timber Harvest Plans The picture that emerges is a lot o' little tribes, but we have this huge interconnected global culture; will that work, for us to create stronger communities and how will that impact the global level? There are some issues that can be solved on a community level and others that need to be addressed on the global level. To me the change that needs to happen is a shift in our economic thinking from the manic and the huge to looking at what's the appropriate scale for any particular problem. What's the way to solve it that will not use up our precious resources. What are the steps? What do we have to do now? In magic, if you want to create a certain end, you know what your intention is and you create an image that embodies that and you throw energy into that image and then you let the energy work out its own path. You don't necessarily see every step of the way. I can't see every step of the way but I can see the vision, and I can see my immediate steps for the next six months and I know that they're in alignment with that vision. I would like to see a way that we could get to that vision without a major economic collapse, or a major environmental collapse. One of my friends, Donna, was recently putting out an e-mail [suggesting] that we start thinking in terms of gradual change and start using the image of compost. I said, this is really good, because the image I keep coming back to is the Titanic, and that's not the most cheerful and hopeful image.[laughs] It's hard to see how this can just happen as a nice gradual change but I do know that we have to stop this forward progress of economic globalisation, and I think we've made enormous strides in doing that this year. We've stopped the WTO, we've put the IMF and the World Bank on the defensive, I think we're gonna have a major impact on the FTAA this spring. There's a major global citizen uprising against these institutions that a few years ago was happily moving forward without anyone paying much attention to them. Alice Walker has been talking about a Council of Twelve Grandmothers. How do you feel about that idea? What would that involve? Well I'm not sure Alice has made that clear. I think the first thing such a council would do is deciding what it's going to do! For me, the premise is that there's a certain wisdom invested in women that needs to be heard. I would say that to be really useful there would have to be some way to have those women actually chosen by their communities that they would be speaking for. Or it could be a wisdom council that was open to all women that anyone could join. I think there's definitely some room for some specifically women's organizations. We used to have a lot more of that, and somehow we don't have so much of it in this new movement. I'd love to see that strengthened. We've talked about trying to get a gathering of anarchist women together, the young anarchist women and some of us older women. Anarchism is about non-hierarchical organizing, it's about putting the power back in the bottom instead of the top. Do you think we can talk to young women better if we approach them as anarchists, rather than as feminists? I think so! I think a lot of them sort of identify as feminists but they didn't come out of the same experience as we did. When we were starting to become feminists, women's oppression had been an invisible issue. People didn't even conceptualize it as oppression until we started to build a movement around it, and I think the younger women have grown up with that movement and take that for granted and don't necessarily feel some of the constraints we did or identify them in quite the same way but I think could benefit from a stronger feminist analysis.
We had to conclude our conversation then, as Star and Hillary were on their way to do a booksigning at a local bookstore. *For Star's reflections on the World Social Forum she attended in January, read her letter.
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