AVAILABILITY: Active Record (Readily Available)

Publication Date: April 1997
Publisher: Beacon Press
Binding: Trade Paper
Topics: SEX; WITCHCRAFT

Description: Featuring narrative, chants, songs, and rituals, Dreaming the Dark (100,000 copies sold) brilliantly combines the world of magic and spirituality with the world of political and social change. This fifteenth anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author.

This book links magic, political activism and psychology through an analysis of power, contrasting power-over with power-from-within. It features narrative, chants, songs, and rituals; it features stories of direct actions at the Diablo Canyon anti-nuclear blockade in 1981, and includes an appendix which provides a detailed historical look at the Witch burnings.

A writer, activist, and witch, Starhawk is the author of numerous books. She lives in San Francisco.

Review(s): "Dreaming the Dark is [Starhawk's] best book; it offers myths of fulfillment, rituals of healing, an unusual but perhaps ultimately pragmatic cultural perspective, and a vision for survival and growth." - The Bloomsbury Review

"Persons of all genders, religions, and politics interested in healing self or planet would do well to avail themselves of this extraordinary text." - The CoEvolution Quarterly

"[Dreaming the Dark] is the story of a journey; its author's movement from a place of despair to one of action. It is meant to start the reader on a similar path from the numbness and hopelessness often felt in the face of racist and sexist violence, poverty and unemployment, chemical spills, and the threat of nuclear annihilation to an internal sense of strength and knowledge. It is ultimately a message of hope and optimism, for Starhawk shares not only a vision but tools for personal empowerment, the building of community, and the transformation of culture." - New Directions for Women

"Dreaming the Dark is cause for celebration, the clear and beautiful articulation of a newer vision." - Association for Humanistic Psychology Newsletter

"Reading this book is in itself transformational.... You're sure to come away from [Starhawk's] work richer, deeper, more truly informed." - New Age Magazine