Faces of the Crone: Starhawk
Faces of the Crone
Crones we love and celebrate as trail blazing Goddess Conference Elders
An honouring series of beloved Crones who the Goddess Conference co-organisers have personal connection with, randomly chosen from a selection of photos by Ann Cook©, Conference photographer of the last 20+ years.
Of course, there are many more trail blazing elders in the Goddess movement and beloved Crones of the Conference; this series stands to celebrate them all through the examples of these women, and the appreciation we have for them.
Starhawk
In our Goddess Movement, Starhawk is a much loved and revered teacher. Starhawk went to University and graduated with a bachelor’s in fine arts and a master’s in psychology. She set out to write novels, but when that didn’t happen at first, she moved to California and got involved with the Pagan community there and trained in witchcraft (with Victor Anderson and Zsuzanna Budapest). Following this she wrote her famous book ‘The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess’ which with the support of Carol P. Christ got published in 1979.
Starhawk has since been a leading woman starting the ‘Reclaiming’ movement, an earth-based spirituality based on witchcraft. Starhawk is now (in her 70ies) teaching all over the world and has written a number of inspirational books and is also actively involved with permaculture, environmental movement, nonviolence and direct action, the peace movement, women’s movement, and anti-globalisation movement.
Although I had been to a few of her talks in former Goddess Conferences and of course had read ‘The Spiral Dance’; my first real human experience of Starhawk was when we started to organise The Goddess Conference.
I must admit, I was a little bit starstruck by Starhawk when we first contacted her to come and present in the 2018 Moon Maiden Conference. But I couldn’t be more surprised by her attitude and way of working. First of all, she asked us what we wanted her to talk about, which I thought showed incredible humility, then during the conference she handled some tricky questions after her presentation with great insight, wisdom and calm. And as the piece the resistance, when we discovered that she had made a mistake about the time schedule, she actually rebooked her flight to make sure she could offer the planned workshop on the Saturday afternoon, everybody was so looking forward to.
All this actually has made me admire Starhawk even more. For me she is a great inspiration, as the famous Goddess author, teacher and presenter, with incredible insight, wisdom and experience, but most of all as a woman, who walks her talk and talks her walk, for which I most honour Starhawk as trail blazing Goddess Conference Elder.
Marion Brigantia
Goddess Conference co-organiser
