Welcome to Gaia! ::

Official start date 5th or 6th of May but start whenever you like, really.

That's the one I'll be reading. My girlfriend should be finished with it tomorrow.

I'm reading 20th anniversay edition too. Both the intros seemed quite...I can't really find the right word for it...almost inspirational but kinda lacking...that probably doesn't make much sense. xp But what was up with her criticism of Buddhists? That was entirely uncalled for.

THIS. This this this.

When I first read the book I remember feeling like I'd missed something. Everyone I knew who found out I'd read it waited for me to gush about how it had changed my life or something...this expectant, pregnant pause...that I couldn't ever answer. Because it didn't change my life. It didn't fill me with awe or wonder. I saw a lot of bad history and patriarchal bashing, and I couldn't make myself like it. I think it completely turned me off the idea of 'Goddess Religion' entirely.

I grew up in the country. I know how to piss (about) outdoors already. Maybe if I'd been a city kid and mucking about in nature was new to me, I'd have had that moment.

You know the weird thing? She SAYS she knew s**t all about it. She actually admits total ignorance of the natural world, and that eventually she started doing classes in biology and so on to remedy it. But her previous ignorance and so on doesn't appear to have been a problem for her.

Edit: To quote:

"...I had spent years immersed in my on and others' internal imagery. I loved nature: I worshipped her and had often gone to jail defending her, but in many ways I knew nothing about her... I... took long walks in the hills, but often the garden, the forest and the ocean were simply scenic backdrops to my thoughts." (pg cool

I expected her to go into this paragraph about how she had agonised over her previous silliness in this area and regretted time lost and that she had so ignored what she claimed to love and worship... and classes taught based on an idealised, romanticised interpretation of nature that existed only in her mind. But turns out she just decided to take some classes. This might be a more productive and sensible action to take, it just baffled me, is all.

I haven't gotten that far yet. But I can't say that would surprise me.

Edit: my views as I read:

p27 - aside from anything else, is she claiming Neanderthalensis religious potterings about with bear skulls as something our ancestors did? Did people still think we were descended from Neanderthals in the 70s, or what?

Difficult to even force oneself to read the "history" when I've already read the notes where she admits to making it all up. Difficult to take "ley lines" seriously when we know they were made up by some guy in the 20s.

Her footnotes are weird. I generally like books that provide citations, but in this case it's REALLY misleading. Often citations are made to back up claims made in-text or to provide a source for a direct quote. In this case they're just the examples of the art she's talking about - not, as one might infer, actual evidence for them being in any way related to witchcraft or her goddess.

It just... it feels really, really imperialistic for her to take the art and monuments and settlements and personal belongings of millennia of people and dozens of civilisations and cultures and erase all their culture and history so you can impose your own culture over the top of it. It's horrifying. I mean I can't even really process the enormity of that offense.

It gets worse when the Greek pantheon is abducted for her own feminist agenda, and the Fair Folk of the isles are actually witches (wtf?), driven to the outskirts of the land by teh evil mean gods of war. (Has this woman never heard of the Morrigan?)

29 - "Clan mothers, called the 'Queen of Elphame'..." That word, "Elphame"? That's from "Alfheim". You know - a word belonging to one of those evil war-mongering cultures that pushed the "fairies" out into the stony hills to live in hobbit-holes?

I had to check out footnote 12 of the first chapter, because I just couldn't believe it. Murray. WHAT a shock. I think she'd been debunked by 1978, hadn't she? For shame, Starhawk. Have the integrity to edit your work when it turns out your source was a massive pile of s**t.

I'm only halfway through the first chapter and already I'm starting to think this woman has done more damage to witchcraft and Paganism than Ravenwolf. After all, I can pick out bits and pieces that Ravenwolf obviously read and repeated, like that number "nine million dead".

34 - her growing sexism is disturbing. Her insistence that believing in a goddess is all but essential to be a well-adjusted woman who loves her body is both baffling and offensive - I'm sure atheist women cope very well, as do many women who believe in only a god.

35 - "The Faery (Feri) Tradition goes back to the little people of stone age Britain". Is this a straight lie, or had Anderson not fessed up that he had created Feri at this point? Reading about the current schism within Feri, it seems pretty well accepted and even defended that he had created the religion.

35 - "The values and attitudes expressed are common to all of the Craft." Oh, I can't WAIT. Although I'm sure if I pointed anything out to her she'd file it under "little detail" rather than "value or attitude". (Value/attitude number one: theism. Not all witches are theists, lady, let alone worship your goddess you claim is so ubiquitous.)

I want to find this woman, and punch her in the face.

The first time I read it I couldn't get through the two introductions. I believed about possibly getting inspiration and started on the path when she did her bike trip, but most of the stuff I knew was s**t. I dont know a whole lot about nature but I know enough that the idealised every creature living in harmony and balance picture of nature is not true at all.

I thought she was 28...? Where did I get that number from?