Be witched

The large room is dark, expectant. One corner is decorated with a full-breast-and-bellied image of Brigit the Irish goddess. About 50 people – all women but for one brave man – gather round a candlelit altar. Starhawk steps forward in her shimmering green robe and invites us to create a ritual.

We’ve already discussed what we want to achieve with this deliberate focussing of our minds and emotions; now it’s time to follow our intention by raising and sending energy, so that our thought-forms can be made manifest in the world.

A woman offers to cast the circle. She walks round the room, stopping at points to invoke the seven directions – north, south, east, west, above, below and centre – by drawing symbols in the air with her hand. Other women use poetic imagery to invoke the four elements and their qualities: earth, air, water, fire: wisdom and intelligence, emotion and passion. People walk forward spontaneously, and politely and graciously call up any forces – gods, goddesses, energies, emotions – that they wish to have present in the circle. The spirits of compassion and healing are invoked, the spirits of our ancestors, and the spirits of the coming generations.

There’s nothing sombre or po-faced about the ritual. In fact there’s a lot of jokes and laughter, some of it, on my part, from nerves. This is very different to my experience of group ritual up to now, which has largely taken place inside a Catholic church. There’s something so raw and free about this non-hierarchical type of… of… (trance-inducement? life-worship? spell-weaving? prayer?) that nervous laughter rises to my lips as a defence mechanism. Not so long ago you could’ve been burnt alive for carrying on like this, so it’s hardly surprising that people from Christian cultures feel a vague anxiety when they’re involved in a witches’ circle.

When the drumming and singing starts it becomes clear that this ritual is actually a party, and my embarrassed nervousness turns to joy, because there’s nothing like music to set the spirit free – and to raise energy to do the work for which this particular ritual is intended; namely, to help free the world from the beast that is globalisation.

Globalisation, as Starhawk explains with such clarity in her writings, is a belief system that puts the value of profit above all other values in the world. Through institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, this belief system is being pushed globally, resulting in the rapid destruction of the planet and her people as corporations privatise and consume the world’s wealth and resources in their race for profit. The beast has its fingers everywhere – it’s behind mass starvation in Africa, behind wars over oil, behind the clearance of ancient woodland for bigger roads, behind the poor nutritional quality of the cheaply-produced food on our supermarket shelves, behind the deterioration of the earth’s air, water and other life-support systems.

“My spirituality,” says Starhawk, in her quietly passionate and balanced way, “is based on the understanding that the earth is a living being that we’re all part of, which we like to call the goddess but really you can call it anything. If you really understand that all life is interconnected and interdependent, you can’t sit back and let us destroy the basic life support systems of the planet, and you can’t sit back and let people live in poverty and despair and hunger and torment. You have to actually do something about it.”

Now approaching 50, Starhawk feels that political activism and activism training is her primary form of witchcraft. Since her first arrest at the age of 15 at an anti-Vietnam war rally she’s been arrested many times in her work as a social and environmental revolutionary, and is in fact on federal probation as we speak. She was at the frontline of the first big anti-globalisation or global justice rally in Seattle in 1999, where she was jailed for her efforts. She also experienced the appalling violence meted out to global justice protesters in Genoa. Currently she’s touring Europe teaching an extraordinary range of ‘magical activism’ skills, from how to strategically plan a non-violent direct action to coping with police tear gas and withstanding imprisonment to preventing activist burnout and despair in the face of an ever more violent ‘beast’. On top of all this, Starhawk is a prolific best-selling author of many books, spiritual, political and fictional. She also set up and helps run a 40-acre organic permaculture farm.

“The larger purpose of doing global justice protest is ultimately to de-legitimise the institutions that we’re protesting about,” says Starhawk.

“Those institutions that promote globalisation – the WTO etc – are based on tremendous violence. There’s a level of inherent violence in something like the IMF imposing policies in countries in the Third World that say no, don’t spend your money on education, don’t spend your money on food for children, don’t spend your money on improving clean water supplies for your people – instead you have to spend it on paying back these debts, and you have to open up your countries to international investment.

“When most people think of violence they think of somebody on the street bashing somebody; they don’t think of some nicely dressed clean, showered, powdered guy in a business suit sitting there on the telephone. But there’s a violence in those policies that so outweighs any amount of bashing on the street. The UN Commission on children estimates that six million children a year die from the policies of the IMF and the World Bank. But we don’t see those bodies. So when you do a protest and they respond with

draconian violence, it makes the reality of the system visible. It makes people look and say, ‘yes, this system is based on brute force’.

“We’re at a real crossroads for the human species. We have the potential for the kind of globalisation that would be very different; we can have friendships all over the world where we can learn from each other and share the best of our cultures and technologies and resources. We really could provide for the needs of everybody on the planet in a way that would allow people to have lives of beauty and abundance and security. We actually have the knowledge to solve a whole lot of our environmental problems; it’s not that they’re unsolvable, and it’s not that we don’t know how to solve them, it’s that we have vested interests that prevent us from doing what we need to do to solve them.”

Starhawk’s faith – her inner journey – is what keeps her strong on her outer path of trying to make the world a better place. As this magazine goes to press, Starhawk is at the border between Israel and Palestine, using ritual, action and education to help stop the violence there.

May the force be with her!