In her bestselling novel The Fifth Sacred Thing, Starhawk imagined an entire culture informed by reverence for the Goddess, the ancient female principle of earth-based religion. This Berkeley-based writer, lecturer, and spiritual teacher lives as though that cultural transformation had taken place, honoring the Goddess by showing others how to revere the earth. With her collective, Reclaiming, she leads 'witch camps' that explore the heart of the mystery of pre-Christian faith.

'I don't like it when people assume that the Goddess, the great female principle, is just God in skirts,' says Starhawk. In workshops and lectures, and in books like The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979), Dreaming in the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics (1982), and the very successful 1993 fantasy novel The Fifth Sacred Thing (in which a San Francisco full of Goddess devotees is attacked by a fundamentalist army from L.A.), Starhawk offers an image of the Goddess that is both more subtle and more radical than the simple replacement of spiritual patriarchy with spiritual matriarchy.

'The Goddess means that the sacred is immanent--it's present right here and now, in nature and in ourselves,' she explains. 'And by `sacred' what I mean is not a great something that you bow down to, but what determines your values, what you would take a stand for. And when you locate that principle in the world, rather than beyond it, you also see that everything has its own inherent value.'

The social and political consequences are immediate: 'If the forest is sacred, we can't chop it down. If water is sacred, we can't pollute it, even a little bit. If there is sacred authority in the human body, then no external authority can tell people what to do with it--how to love, whether or not to end a pregnancy.'