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Frequently Asked Questions

Since sexuality has traditionally been the domain of men, she is faced with the task of re-defining the male for women who have been alienated and oppressed by patriarchy. Starhawk is not opposed to men, but is rather distrustful of them, given the history of patriarchy. Speaking of the men's movement, she says:

Our fear is that the men's movement will do what men have always done, at least since the advent of patriarchy: blame women for their problems and defend their own privileges.[11]

Her thealogical method involves invoking a pre-historic time when, she believes, men and women were treated equally. In The Spiral Dance, she refers to this legendary world as an ideal, and stops short of calling it fact. Referring to oral history, mythology and tradition, she weaves a world where women and men were held as sacred, and where systems disallowed corruption and violence. She views the concept of human sacrifice surrounding goddess cultures as grafted on by biased (male) historians and cultural enemies. It was menstrual blood, she says, that was the true sacrificial mystery, not the sacrifice of human lives. This is a way of honoring the men of the past, subtly referring to their reverence of the sacred feminine, while also laying blame for the destruction of a peaceful society squarely on the shoulders of warring men.[12] She uses intuition, rather than historical documentation, as her source for reconstructing the history of indigenous Western European religious tradition (which she always refers to as "Witchcraft," reinforcing the idea of her thealogy as a revival of the "Old Religion").

Women were never sacrificed in Witchcraft. Women shed their own blood monthly and risk death in service to the life force with every pregnancy and birth. For this reason, their bodies were considered sacred, and held inviolate.[13]

In The Spiral Dance, it seems more important for her to present an alternate vision through storytelling, rather than to insist on this utopian world as historical fact. But between The Spiral Dance and Truth or Dare, she begins to rely more heavily on belief in archaeomythology as a means for freeing women from the bondage of patriarchy. Starhawk and others have been criticized for relying on this mythology as historical fact, as Diane Purkiss points out in The Witch in History (1996):

The Goddess was originally discovered - or invented - by male scholars serving an agenda which was far from feminist. The myth of an originary matriarchy serves to explain and justify women's subordination through a narrative in which men wrest control from women because women are oppressive and incompetent… by insisting that such (Great Goddess) figures were the dark, repressed underside of civilization, civilization was reproduced as exclusively a business for men.[14]

Also:

By refusing to see the Goddess as the male fantasy she was, modern witches believed, they made her less of a male fantasy and transformed her into a female fantasy. But were they right? The problem for witches who want to assert creativity and control is that witchcraft remains, on the whole, tied to an historical narrative which is well-nigh inescapable as a male fantasy about what femininity should be.[15]

Purkiss' hardly sympathetic view of the historical revisionism of feminist spirituality, particularly by Starhawk, whom she names repeatedly in her critique, makes a strong point, but misses another one. While (predominantly white, male) anthropologists up to and including the twentieth century generally saw the progression of culture from a primitive state to a more modern and civilized state as a mark of the proper evolution of culture, Starhawk bases her history largely on the work of Marija Gimbutas, who created the field of archaeomythology and took a different perspective on evidence of ancient matrifocal culture.

Gimbutas, Starhawk and others expressed a utopian view that sought a return to nature, and equated the natural with the positive. Thus, they sought to turn patriarchal culture against itself, arguing that patriarchy is a symptom of cultural entropy. In other words, things are gradually getting worse, not better, and if we hope to survive and thrive as humans, and keep from destroying the planet, we must return to a more peaceful state. The argument is admirable, though scholars such as Cynthia Eller in her book The Myth of Matriarchal Pre-History (2000) criticize it as unnecessary, and possibly counter-productive, to use constructed archaeomythology as historical fact. If universal matriarchy existed, then why did it fail? The societies that existed in pre-historic times would be impossible to emulate, in any case, due to simple population problems. "If we are certain that we want to get rid of sexism, we do not need a mythical time of women's past greatness to get on with the effort toward ending it."[16]

Next Page | This interpretation of the word "witch" would prove to be revolutionary...
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[11] Ibid., "A Men's Movement I Can Trust," from Women Respond to the Men's Movement: A Feminist Collection, ed. Kay Leigh Hagan (San Francisco: 1992), 28

[12] It is exclusively men that hold the blame for the desecration of the sacred feminine, according to Starhawk. She frequently blames male jealousy, fear and unrestrained need for control for the subjugation of women. While she does blame female complicity, women hold only a passive role in this vision of social destruction. Women, she believes, have the inherent desire to create a better world, whereas men have a greater tendency for corruption.

[13] Starhawk, The Spiral Dance, 32

[14] Purkiss, 33-34

[15] Ibid., 39

[16] Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Pre-History, 187