Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, & Politics [B0956]

1982 PB with some wear. Starhawk is one of the most respected voices in modern Goddess religion and earth-based spirituality (Paganism). She is the author or coauthor of twelve books, including the classics The Spiral Dance and The Fifth Sacred Thing. This is a book about bringing together the spiritual and the political. Featuring narrative, chants, songs, and rituals, Dreaming the Dark has helped many thousands of women use magic, spirituality, and community to bring about political and social change. It is a book about power.

From recent-ish Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "This book is very dated, in both wonderful and cringey ways. Overall though, what's not to love about a radical feminist anti nuclear witch telling you how to both do spells and how to facilitate a meeting?"; "This book was an inspiration to those of us who risked arrest in nonviolent acts of civil disobedience that parallel the books' original publication date. As such it proved very inspirational for me. Decades later I still remember an idea made clear by this book which informed my life and my scholarship all the way through the acquisition of my PhD. It was the idea that POWER existed in two forms: power over, and power from within. Power over represented the kind of power we were all struggling against, the power to oppress and marginalize others so as to advance selfish interests. In my youth I was given to believe that this was the only kind of power that existed, so to lay claim to any kind of power was a sin in itself. But power from within was what we tapped into when finding the courage to stand up to oppressive forms of power. How do we cultivate power from within? There are many ways, several of which are articulated in this book. This is why the book will forever be meaningful to me."; "This is an excellent book, and it was the first nonfiction book about Paganism that I ever read, back in the late 1980s. I have just reread it in 2024. In the early 1980s when it was written, much of the protest movement was concerned with the possibility of nuclear annihilation, although climate change and the destruction of nature were already rearing their heads. The tactics of magical resistance described in the book are still valid."