Starhawk

Starhawk was born Miriam Simos in 1951 and raised in a Jewish family in Minneapolis and later Los Angeles, studying psychology, film and writing at the University of California, Los Angeles before turning toward feminist spirituality in the early 1970s, a period in which she was initiated into several Wiccan lineages and began teaching circles of her own in the San Francisco Bay Area. She took the name Starhawk during this period and has used it as her public and legal name ever since.

Her 1979 book The Spiral Dance, written while she was still in her twenties, set out a Goddess-centered Witchcraft explicitly framed around feminist consciousness raising, environmental awareness and collective ritual designed to be usable by circles without a formal initiator, reaching an American feminist and countercultural readership that earlier Wiccan writing, arriving mostly from England, had not spoken to directly. The book has remained continuously in print since, regularly updated, and is generally treated by scholars of contemporary Paganism as the founding text of specifically feminist Wicca in North America.

In 1980 Starhawk helped found the Reclaiming Collective in San Francisco, a tradition and later a loose network of communities that fuses Goddess-centered ritual explicitly with nonviolent direct action, organizing witches to take ritual and protest into the same event rather than treating spirituality and politics as separate spheres. Reclaiming trainings and public rituals, including large seasonal gatherings, spread from the Bay Area to chapters across North America and Europe, built around a consensus based, non-hierarchical structure that Starhawk's own writing on group process and collective leadership helped design.

Starhawk has been arrested dozens of times in nonviolent civil disobedience at anti-nuclear, environmental and anti-globalization protests since the 1980s, treating such action as an extension of ritual rather than a departure from it, and has taught permaculture design as part of the same practice of tending the living world she frames as sacred. Her later books, including the novel The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993) and Webs of Power (2002), carried the same fusion of Goddess spirituality and political organizing into fiction and activist theory, and she remains, into her seventies, an active teacher, writer and organizer within the Reclaiming network she helped found.