Welcome to Gaia! ::

Rightio then, thanks.

Man I'm slack >.>
I just want to get this done.

Christ there are more chapters left than I thought there were. Oh well, onwards.

Chapter 10, initiation

God she is so full of s**t.

Notice that she provides her own retelling of Gardner's "Legend of the Descent of the Goddess". Note: the "retelling" is pretty close to the original, word for word in some cases - yet she totally cuts out some of the most important parts of it (and thus the entire meaning and symbolism of the myth) because they conflict with her own very restricted and bigoted views on sexuality. She utterly destroys a beautiful myth in doing so. On top of this, rather than cite Gardner, who wrote the damn thing she so destroys, she calls it a "Traditional Craft Myth". Classy, Starhawk. Is that ignorance of the original author, or some sort of measured insult?

I can no longer take her seriously when she talks about "the goddess". It was hard to take her seriously to begin with, but I've now become pretty much convinced from reading this book that she doesn't actually believe in this goddess.

I know it sounds awful but reading the details of Paul's initiations on page 190 made me laugh. Imagine being in a garden and someone shining a torch on an ear of corn and saying "Behold, Kore!" Wouldn't you just crack up? rofl

The ritual is very like that one written by the Farrars. Did she nick it off them, or did the Andersens?

A short chapter, that one. I recognised the ritual from the Pagan Library, i think. A little low-content as far as the ritual goes but she did mention that she was leaving out parts of it.



Chapter 11

Moon rituals! I am actually quite interested to read this chapter because I want to incorporate more moon stuff into my practice.

Wow. Disappointing.

Okay, someone help me out here - why are none of these rituals really about the moon? The full moon one has an alright speech at the start, and the new moon one has a bit more detail, but the waxing moon one isn't about the moon at all. The full moon one is more about getting your spiritual pat on the back (literally) from your coven mates than it is about their goddess (the only mention of her occurs BEFORE the invocation) and the new moon one, while much better, apparently is held so they can juice up their scrying crystal or something. Do these people not care about their gods? Why is everything about THEM and so little about their deities in these rituals?


Chapter 12, Sabbats

It's all rituals. Pah. Why didn't she just write an accompanying book of rituals?

And the candlemas one is "dedicated to Brigid", a goddess she doesn't believe in, who doesn't even get a mention in the ritual itself. Disgusting.

Next on to Eostre, which she spells "Eostar" for some reason. In it, Persephone is matched up romantically with some deity called "Prince of the Sun", and then everyone has a self-help session.

All of these rituals include self-help sessions. Apparently everyone in her coven is desperately in need of counselling, and/or doesn't actually give a ******** about the deities let alone anyone besides themselves.

She advocates cutting out all references to the gods in her Beltaine ritual because the fact that the goddess is a girl and the god is a boy and the maypole is all sexual and stuff "has sparked controversy". OMG TOO HETEROSEXUAL!

pg 205 "...in the love that is death because it is so complete that all dissolves into the single song of ecstasy that moves the worlds". LOLZ. Run on sentence, much? In a ritual?

Hey, Lugh actually gets a mention in his Lughnasadh ritual! It is, of course, before the invocation, so he's not actually invited to attend. Then more self-help. I worry about this coven, i really do. All they do is talk about how afraid they are all the time and how much they don't want to be. If these rituals are helping, why are they still afraid, after all these years?

Oh god, chapter 13 is huuuuuuge and I bet it's full of crap. Still, I want to finish this tonight. I am going to hate this chapter because it is going to be 100% political wankery.


Hey, hey, I just had a thought, Starhawk is so anti-porn, it would make it that much more hilarious if all the goddess images from prehistory ended up being ancient pornography.

"Species abandon the earth", Starhawk? Really? They are not ******** abandoning the earth, they are being killed off!

Holy s**t, you guys. Check out the abhorrent sexism on page 279: "Twenty years ago I was more likely to believe that if you had the right genitalia - whether you were a human or a Goddess - I could trust you. Alas, life is not really that simple." No, actually, life is never as simple as a gross stereotype of a huge group of people based on genitalia could be.

"Otherwise, the new incarnation of the goddess will be subtly molded on the very forms we are working to trancend." See, this is why I think she's an atheist. Her goddess is something for her to mould and create, and she's doing it to further her political stance.

On page 280 she bitches that someone dared to criticise the "goddess movement" by saying "...a lot of these critics simply don't bother to read the sources that might contradict their prejudices. They practise a kind of pseudoscholarship that ignores the evidence...."
HAHAHAHHAhAhA oh god the IRONY.

God there is sooooo much sexism in this chapter. Half of it against women. Apparently you only "belong to yourself alone" if you "life Virgin". And women are super special and magical if they don't touch men.

She confused a spiral and a helix again. ********>. It wouldn't piss me off so much if she wasn't on about it being some sort of magical pre-Christian metaphor for DNA, or the other way around. <******** hypocrite goes on about how bad and misled "Our way or damnation" religions are and then goes on to say "Our way or spiritual destruction" as if that was somehow better.
"When expanded consciousness does not deepen our bonds with people and with life, it's worse than useless; It is spiritual self-destruction."

Oh, oh, and then she calls psychology "magic".

Oh and hey guys, turns out? feminism isn't about gender equality at all! It's about "healing our fragmentation"!

She keeps saying the same crap over and over again and I don't caaaare. Feminism, spirituality, spirituality, feminism, vague goddess concept. Women are good and special and should practise a religion in which they are good and special. Other religions are too focused on being BEST. Her religion is BEST, because it views things in this way rather than that way. Metaphors are good, but are not "truths".... which bothers me a little as I've read through this book entirely as well as the appendices and I still have no real idea what she believes or what her religion is about. She hasn't said, just given some metaphors. I appreciate that some things are ineffable but if one is writing a book on something, one should be able to verbalise what it is the book is about. Right now, to me, in this moment, the book is about abusing spirituality to further sexism. And that shouldn't be the message I take away from this.

Then the stories at the end. Which are.... sort of nice. Well, they start out nice, the last one is actually sort of creepy. They're written in a much better way than the entire rest of the book.

I remember being confused after reading the book the first time. I am hoping to get more out of it this time. I do think some of the exercises may be useful. Has any one else thought that the exercises could be useful?

It seems like all of the exercises in Chapter 3 were group based. And I would agree with the beginners thing, but I have also found that going back to basics even after years of doing advanced work can help strengthen the skills. But that is just from personal experience. Though I dont think that they were nessicarilly put in the right chapters. Why would a light and dark exercise be in a world view chapter?

I agree. I also have an issue with the "starlight vision" theme as well. I disagree with her statement that in everyday consciousness we only see one thing at a time. I personally notice many things. While my focus may be on one specific item in my sight, I do not ignore the rest. That and I see the connections in day to day life.

Now her statements about the subconscious and day to day consciousness I do agree with, as that has been my experience and it fits in a bit with the Temple Paradigm.

I enjoyed writing them, because i like to rant! rofl I'm also a critical person (to a fault at times), and to get through the book I had to vent on the issues I had with it, or I wouldn't have managed to get through it.

I seem to have abandon
d this book for the time being. We'll see if I can get through it at a later date.