Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics - Softcover

Starhawk

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807010251 ISBN 13: 9780807010259

Publisher: Beacon Pr, 1989

Synopsis

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. This anniversary edition of the best-selling classic includes a new preface reflecting on the fifteen years since the book's original publication.

About this title

Review:

Wisdom from a witch: a thoughtful but sometimes sloppy-minded blend of manifesto (down with the patriarchy!), grand Manichean vision (soulless technocracy's war on Immanence), historical primer (how the Protestant ethic, the Enclosure Acts, the Industrial Revolution, etc., cut the umbilical cord binding us to the earth), personal memoir (the Diablo Canyon blockade), and practical advice on running a coven/consciousness-raising group. As in her 1979 The Spiral Dance, Starhawk (Miriam Simos) shows herself to be a passionate but sensible radical, a leading light in what she hopes will be the glorious pagan renaissance - to end the Dark Ages of hypermasculine barbarism, militarism, devastation of nature, sexual persecution, and so forth. All this is fine, especially since Starhawk has a realistic awareness of how San Francisco-weird her sermons about union with the Goddess, and her stories about blissful naked worship, must strike the average feminist. Still, there are problems with her argument. She often oversimplifies: all "power-over' hierarchical structures are bad. (Has she tried raising kids in her role as an egalitarian "facilitator"?) She's as naive as the Playboy folk in imagining that sexual guilt can or ought to be wiped out in our lifetime. And once or twice she loses touch completely: the Diablo Canyon power plant never opened because the rituals and "many focused powers" of the protestors, past and present, put a beneficient whammy on it. Such lapses aside, Starhawk is an eloquent spokeswoman for many good causes (which, she plausibly insists, are really a single cause). Flawed but forceful. --(Kirkus Reviews)

About the Author:

A writer, activist, and witch, Starhawk is the author, most recently, of The Fifth Sacred Thing and Walking to Mercury. She lives in San Francisco.

About this edition

• Publisher: Beacon Pr
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0807010251
• ISBN 13: 9780807010259
• Binding: Paperback