As this new edition goes to press, Dreaming the Dark will have been continuously in print for over fifteen years. That decade and a half has seen both enormous changes and remarkable continuity. When I wrote Dreaming the Dark, Ronald Reagan was newly elected to office and we were poised on the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. I wrote the book on an electric typewriter, laboriously retyping each draft until I finally hired my friend Rose to do a professional job on the final version. The Goddess movement consisted mostly of a few small circles, primarily on the two coasts, and a handful of recently published books. I was a thirty-year-old graduate student in a chaotic marriage, trying to weave my excitement at the possibilities of nonviolent direct action together with my writing and teaching about the Goddess and my studies in psychology.
Today the Soviet Union no longer exists, and the nuclear threat, while still real, is no longer as immediate as it was in the early eighties. I am writing on my laptop computer, solar-powered at the moment by a system consisting of components that didn’t exist fifteen years ago, and when I am done with this draft I will log onto the Internet, check my email from people around the globe, and perhaps send this draft off electronically or by fax. Rose, who typed the original manuscript, has recently adopted a baby whose teenaged birth mother was not yet born when this book was written. Little Allison, whose premature birth occurred as I was writing the preface to the 1988 edition, is today a bright, delightful, sturdy youngster who shows no trace of her precarious entry into this world. The chaotic marriage dissolved and, after seven years alone, I found a new partnership with a calm and loving man. The kittens who grew into cats during the writing of the book have lived out their lifespans and are long gone to cat heaven. The dogs that I ran with on the beach have died of old age.
I have spent the last fifteen years in activism as well as writing, teaching, traveling, and serving the needs of the Goddess movement, which has grown organically, steadily, and phenomenally. The future, which seemed so precarious when I wrote the first chapters of this book, has already happened. I look in the mirror and observe the frosting of silver that has colored my dark hair, squint at the morning newspaper and wonder how long I can resist getting reading glasses to augment my contact lenses. I am no longer young, but middle-aged.
If life is like a long hike in the mountains, then middle age is that fortunate moment when you reach the crest. You can look back and see where you’ve been, and you can look ahead and view the inevitable descent. If you’re lucky, a long trail awaits you, following the ridgeline for a long way before you go down.
I glance back with a slight trepidation at the territory covered by this book. Will it still make sense? Will I be embarrassed by the insights of my earlier self? Will this work still be relevant as we head into a new millennium?
In 1988, in the preface to the second edition, I wrote, “Surprisingly, while I find much that I might add to the ideas here, I find little that I would change.” That statement still holds true. Dreaming the Dark is a juncture where paths of spirit and action converge into the trail I have followed ever since.
The core concepts expressed in this book have stood the test of time. The primary insight presented here is that the sacred is immanent, embodied in the world, in nature, in human culture, in action as well as in contemplation. Or, to turn it around, the living world, the cycles of nature and human life, are sacred—that is, of primary importance, of a value that goes beyond human expediency. Action in the world, then, becomes a means of connecting with the sacred as well as an imperative in a society in which nature and human survival are constantly threatened.
Dreaming the Dark is perhaps best known for the analysis of power it presents. We are most familiar with power-over, with structures of domination and control that derive ultimately from a worldview that removes sacred value from the earth and from the cycles of birth and death. In this book, I identify a different sort of power I call power-from-within, akin to the root meaning of power as ability, and derived from the recognition that each of us has immanent sacred value.
Our relations, our mythologies, our celebrations, our actions, and the structures of the groups we create can foster either power-over or power-from-within. In the latter part of the book, I suggest group processes which I still use, and give examples of rituals and actions that encourage empowerment.
All of the above seems as relevant today as it did fifteen years ago. The context has shifted: Reclaiming is now struggling to translate the group processes that we have found empowering in our small collective for a decade and a half into a structure that can work now, when we have projects and offshoots that span communities in four countries and three continents. We have become more than a collective; we have become our own Goddess tradition with thealogy, rituals, and training that derive from the concepts articulated here.
The last direct action I took part in, in September of 1996, was to protest the logging of the old-growth forest called Headwaters in northern California. As I write, people who are younger—or perhaps simply braver—than I are at this moment taking a stand hundreds of feet up in the redwoods, becoming treetop guardians of the threatened groves. Their counterparts in England have occupied ancient oaks threatened by road building. All of them have a deep, spiritual connection to the land, to the trees, and find action the natural expression of that tie. I like to think that Dreaming the Dark has been a thread in the fabric of that connection. I have been told that parts of this book were translated into Russian and circulated as part of an anthology on nonviolence that was influential in the movement that caused the fall of the Soviet Union. If so, then this book has played a small part in reshaping the political configuration of our world.
What I find least satisfying now, as I did in 1988, is the psychology derived from object relations theory. In the earlier preface, I wrote:
Of course what happens to us in childhood is important, but it must be seen in the context of a whole lifetime of experiences which either reinforce or help heal our traumas. . . . To focus exclusively on our individual early childhood experiences is like observing a group of people who live on a toxic waste dump, who are diseased, and saying, “Let’s treat their condition by examining how they were fed in infancy.” We might very likely find that those who were malnourished as babies were more susceptible to illness than those who were well fed. But we would still be ignoring the fact that none of them were truly healthy, because they were living in a toxic environment.
We are all living in a toxic psychic and emotional environment (as well as a physical environment which becomes more polluted daily), because we live embedded in structures of power-over.
I also find myself in an odd relationship to the material on sexuality; perhaps because I am middle-aged. The sex drive does not necessarily diminish with time. In fact, I find that age and possibly practice have only deepened the pleasure and intimacy I find in sexuality. (I admit this might have something to do with my current partner, as well.) What has diminished is my drive to talk about sex, theorize about it, and attribute most of the ills of the world to its repression. On the other hand, when we look at the current array of issues facing us, at the virulence and violence of the anti-abortion movement, at the raw hatred aimed at lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men, we have to conclude that fear and mistrust of sexuality are at the root of many of our current conflicts. That fear arises from a worldview that desacralizes the earth, the flesh, and the living world.
I also still agree with what I wrote in 1988 about AIDS:
Because of AIDS, we must exercise new caution in sexual expression. In a culture that fears and hates the erotic, the emergence of AIDS becomes a pretext for increased prejudice and persecution of those whose erotic desires and practices vary from what is prescribed. AIDS has revealed the frightening extent to which the dominant culture is willing to write off the lives and interests of those groups of people it considers of low value—gays, people of color, intravenous drug uses. The disease has revealed a deeper sickness at the heart of our society, and uncovered our failure to love.
In a culture that valued the erotic, a disease that made us fearful and limited our expression of passion would be a top research priority (as would safe and effective birth control). But in a culture based on power-over, on systems of domination and punishment, a culture that fears the erotic because it moves always beyond the boundaries of control, AIDS can be seen as “proof” that the erotic is really bad, dirty, nasty and dangerous. . . . AIDS, of course, is passed on in many ways other than sexual contact. Yet all those diagnosed with the disease must live with the stigma that clings to it, and contend with the assumption, whether voiced or not, that they somehow deserve their diagnosis. . . .
AIDS can also be a teacher. Those who are willing to face the mysteries embodied in the great processes of life and death, those who live with AIDS and those who open and touch and offer support to them, can find a new depth of connection and real intimacy. When we face the possibility of death, the simple moments of connection—looking into the eyes of a friend who understands what we say, sitting in a sunny window drinking tea, nestling into the strong arm of a lover, laughing together at a joke or tapping a foot to the rhythm of music, all the ordinary acts of life—become luminous and treasured, and we understand them to be the sacred gifts that they are. That is the true lesson of the mysteries and the real meaning of the immanence of the Goddess—that life itself has a value that is immeasurable.
AIDS also challenges us to confront the institutions and decision-makers that implement punishment, to demand that we shift our priorites to fund healing over killing, to speak openly about sex in all its varied forms, to educate and hope and love.
In the last fifteen years, I have lost deeply treasured friends to AIDS. Today, as new drugs begin to bring us some hope for long-term survival, their deaths seem even more painful and poignant. I envision the living, erotic Goddess opening her arms to embrace them, claiming them as her heros and heras. In an eros-loving culture, they would be our sacred martyrs. We would build temples and monuments to them, and inscribe their names on rolls of honor—especially those who caught the disease through sexual transmission, who died in the service of the erotic Goddess.
Although my use of trance has also changed over time, I still read the description of Joy’s trance with interest and pleasure. In the intervening years, I have probably led thousands of trances, ranging from guiding one person as I did with Joy, to drumming, chanting, and tale-weaving in groups of a hundred or more in the living ritual drama we call drum trance, to guiding over a thousand people on a journey to the Land of the Dead in Reclaiming’s Spiral Dance ritual for Halloween. I have also taught hundreds of people how to lead trances of various sorts. Today I see “trance” not as one particular state, but as many fluid possiblities of consciousness. I know that human beings naturally move in and out of these states all the time—that such states have been known and used consciously by magicians, artists and healers for millennia. As I also said in 1988, I feel less and less need for “cautions”—as they mostly convey to a Younger Self that something dangerous is about to happen. I sometimes use formal inductions, especially with people who are new to trance work. At other times, I trust in the power of the drum, the rhythm of words and music, and the power of visualization to move people into a deepened state. Perhaps because I almost always work with groups now instead of individuals, I have less interest in analyzing the content of people’s trances and prefer to work directly with the images and energies that arise. However, I still feel that in the right context, the type of analysis described here can be of great value.
Groups come and groups go, and I have spent a lot of my adult life in the middle of them. I have lived collectively for thirteen years, teach collectively, and collaborate on films; I have even, in recent years, written two books in collaboration with others. Group process never ceases to fascinate me, and I could probably write a several-volume series on it. Yet the discussion, models, and processes presented here have been the foundation of all the consensus-based groups I’ve been a part of, and still, in rereading, I find new insights. Were I to change anything, it would be to add some strong warnings about gossip. Friendly, newsy gossip knits a community together: “Heather is going to have a baby”; “Joe and Harry went home together from the party last night,” “Carl fell off the roof and broke his leg.” But malicious gossip and rumors can be terribly destructive—particularly because no one can be held accountable for their accuracy. And when people gossip and complain about a third person—especially when they do not ever directly confront that person—a group becomes unsafe and disempowering.
I am especially aware of how vulnerable writers, teachers, and other public people are to rumors; such charges are unanswerable because they are never directly made. At one Pagan conference I shared a room with a few other Reclaiming members, their children and their childrens’ accoutrements, including pizzas and videos. I took part in a panel on death and dying, in which many people spoke honestly about their personal experiences with death. The discussion was so moving that at the end I said I would be willing to stay a bit longer, if no other group needed the room. However, the National Guard was meeting in the same hotel and had the room reserved, so we left.
Not two hours later, a friend of mine was in the cafe and overheard the following conversation:
“That Starhawk! She’s up there in her celebrity suite on the locked floor, completely inaccessible! Who does she think she is?”
“I know, and she almost got the whole conference thrown out of the hotel because she wouldn’t stop talking at the end of her program and when the organizer said the National Guard needed the room, she sat down and said, ‘Hell no! We’re going to resist the military right here!’”
We all need to be responsible for verifying rumors before believing or repeating them. We need to remember that there is more than one side to every story, and that we should confront people directly instead of disparaging them to others.
All groups have conflict. Conflict in a group does not necessarily mean that something is wrong; it may mean that something is right. Sometimes, as my friend Alphonsus says, we need to confront people in order to stay in relationship with them. Honest, loving confrontation can deepen our intimacy.
While I used to believe that every conflict in a group was a systems problem and therefore should be handled by the whole group, I now am convinced that the best way to resolve most conflicts between individuals is for the two of them to work it out together, outside the group context. As soon as the group gets involved, an exponential number of new dynamics come into play, from old history between third parties, to people’s love of an audience and need for justification from a larger body, to our human need to save face—and a simple conflict that a conversation might have resolved becomes a Major Issue. Also, life is too short to spend endlessly processing other people’s conflicts—especially in middle age! To feel trust in a group, we need to know that others will tell us honestly what they’re feeling and will trust that we can openly disagree and still love and respect each other.
Another whole volume could be written on group dynamics and the Internet. Fifteen years ago, I didn’t own a computer. Today, the widespread web of Reclaiming-trained teachers and organizers communicates regularly on email. Our home collective not only has face-to-face meetings, but shares discussions, jokes, plans, and arguments electronically. We have observed a whole new class of email-generated conflicts: the message you never get a response to because you discover a month later that you never sent it; the embarrassingly irate letter you wrote at 3 A.M. and fired off without thinking; the message you meant to send to one person and accidentally sent out to fifty; and, quite commonly, the disagreement that should have been handled privately but because of the ease of electronic communication, instead is broadcast to the larger world.
I have also grown more interested in the functioning of unintentional communities. In the Cazadero hills, where my partner, David, and I now live much of the time, we are blessed with neighbors who happily lend tools, freely give advice, and cheerfully drop whatever they’re doing to help pull your truck out of a ditch or give you a jump when you’ve left your lights on. Our climate moves between extremes of wet and dry—we know that a neighbor’s carelessness in the summer could start a fire that would burn thousands of acres; that in the winter floods we might be dependent on each other for our lives. If I dial 911, one of my neighbors in the Volunteer Fire Department will be the first to respond. That type of day-to-day life-and-death interdependence is what most cultures on this planet have always known; a type of community that arises not from affinity but from proximity, and offers ongoing lessons in detachment from our personal likes and dislikes in order to further survival.
In the cities, we are equally interdependent, but we often behave as if we are not. How can we bring a sense of the sacred value in each of us not just to the groups we create and the relationships we choose but to the groups we don’t create—our neighbors, the homeless who beg on street corners, the youth gangs, our coworkers at the office? How do we generate trust and compassion in situations in which we are afraid to trust? These are not questions I have ready answers for, but I believe they are the crucial challenges we face if we wish to reshape the world.
“From compassion, we can generate community,” I wrote in 1988. “To put it crudely, we didn’t get into this mess alone, and we can’t get out of it alone. We need sustained support, both to mount resistance and to enact our visions of renewal, support that itself embodies the deep value we recognize in each other.”
While I still live my life in community, I have also discovered in recent years a deeper appreciation of solitude. When I’m not traveling, teaching, or attending meetings, I head for the hills where the communities are composed of trees, brush, grasses, wildflowers, birds, animals, and insects. I have grown more and more fascinated with the interactions of the elements of the natural world. After twenty-five years of being a priestess of the sacred earth, I want to learn something about the actual earth and not just its abstract, symbolic representation. I spend a lot of my time pruning trees, laying out garden beds, and shoveling manure. Of course, writing makes shoveling manure seem like light relaxation.
Living closer to the earth, my conception of the Goddess and God have changed. I see them even less as psychological abstracts and more as real personalities that are derived from real places, real interactions of plant, animal, and human communities, real powers. I know that Demeter was the Goddess of grain because she came from Eleusis, the most fertile area of ancient Greece (now the most polluted area of Greece). I know that Athena’s emblem was the olive because in the dry hills around Athens, olives were one of the few crops that could grow. Lions were sacred, I suspect, because they kept the crop-munching deer in check. I talk to the land and the land talks back, saying things like “Grow food, eat from me and then you will truly become the land,” and often, “More manure.”
“The Goddess is not just an intellectual concept,” I wrote in ’88, and believe even more strongly now. I went on to explain:
She makes demands on us. At the Ecofeminist Conference in southern California in March of 1987, Ines Talamantez, a Native American speaker, said, “If you have a vision of the Goddess, if you dream of Her, you are obligated to work for Her for the rest of your life.” When we really understand that the earth is alive, and know ourselves as part of that life, we are called to live our lives with integrity, to make our actions match our beliefs, to take responsibility for creating what we have manifest, to do the work of healing.
As I have become more rooted in place, I can look at the Goddesses and Gods of ancient times through the eyes of a farmer and understand that early religion was a direct reflection of people’s real relationships to the land they tilled, the food they ate, the patterns of wind and snow and rain. The linking of the Witch persecutions to the enclosure of the commons and the disruption of traditional patterns of land use therefore seems even more relevant to me now than it did when I wrote it in 1981. In fact, Appendix A, examining the historical context, is one aspect of this book in which I take the most pride.
I suspect the future direction of my own spiritual development is going to be downward, into the roots and the soil, my gurus being the earthworms and the mycorrhizal fungi. What vision could be more miraculous than the crystalline cellular structure of dirt? What magicians could equal the bacteria who live on the roots of legumes, snatching nitrogen from the air to feed their hosts?
For fifteen years I’ve lived by the ideals expressed in this book. As a young art student, I was educated in the tradition that artists must suffer and political radicals must be martyred for their beliefs. I began writing in the era in which every feminist poet seemed to commit suicide. However, far from suffering for my beliefs, I have lived a charmed and fortunate life. I have lost some battles and won others: but still I survive, and that is a victory I could not count on fifteen years ago. Although I’ve been arrested about two dozen times in the last fifteen years, I’ve never spent more than a couple of weeks in jail. I work very hard—but working hard is easy when you’re doing what you love. The years have brought the losses and disappointments of any life, but they have mostly brought the rich rewards of friendship, love, and real luxuries: fresh herbs from my garden, plums, peaches, nectarines, and berries enough to can, sweet figs to eat straight from the tree, and a surfeit of apples. I have traveled my path with companions who stimulate, support, and challenge me and I am well loved by a sweet partner. If I still spend too much time on airplanes I compensate for it by spending much of my time outdoors. Whether this means I’m doing something right or wrong or not doing enough, I cannot say. I’ve simply put my life energies toward the service of what is sacred to me.
At the crest of the mountain, I can look with some satisfaction down the path that brought me here. And I hope for a long cruise along the ridgetop before the trail slopes down to its end.
In some sense, then, this book is a trail guide—a description of the route I’ve taken; you can use it to find your own path. We each must discern what is sacred to us: what we most value, what we can devote our energies to with passion and joy, what we are willing to risk ourselves for and take a stand for. When we devote our best energies to what we most cherish, when we refuse to let our energies be diverted to further destruction or to serve other people’s ends, we tap into the power that creates the everyday miracles of birth, growth, and change, touch the fires that have not cooled since the beginning of the world, shift the very plates we stand on so that new continents can form. What is sacred to you may be different from what is sacred to me, but I must trust your passion as you must trust mine. When we do, we can remake the world.
October 1996