Book Review: Twelve Wild Swans

A Fair Trade Book You Never Expected to See Here



Title: Twelve Wild Swans

Author: Starhawk and Hilary Valentine

Author's web site: http://starhawk.org/

Date: 2000

Publisher: Harper  Collins

ISBN: 0-06-251684-1

Length: 320 pages plus index

Quote: “The community we speak of is called Reclaiming. We are part of the larger movement, called feminist spirituality, that critiques the patterns of domination embedded in patriarchal religions...we are willing to identify with the victims of the Witch persecutions.”

Say whaaat? How can a Christian web site touch this book? With a long explanation, of course, in three parts:

1. Sermon for Christian Readers

First the acknowledgment: For many women whose levels of feminist and spiritual consciousness are high, the whole idea of Neo-Pagan groups actively rebelling against their Jewish, Christian, or Humanist heritages seems (a) silly, (b) heretical, (c) satanic or at least vulnerable to satanic influences, (d) embarrassing, and/or (e) inherently subject to abuse and exploitation. Most women prefer to stay in our own faith tradition while critiquing whatever misogynist heresies may have crept into it.

This is a Christian blog. I am a Christian blogger. The last thing anyone at this web site wants would be to suggest that Christians, Buddhists, or Muslims need to try to revive the long-gone religious practices of departed ancestors who weren’t even our own. Nor did their cults, while active, succeed in liberating women from anything. If you are a woman who loves your brothers in faith and your Father in Heaven, you are blessed. You probably have only an academic interest, if that, in Neo-Pagan books.

If that’s the case, you’d do well to begin your study of Neo-Paganism with Starhawk, because she’s more than just the typical feminist heretic. Addressing an audience of misfits and iconoclasts allows her to say more about social psychology, more truthfully, than an academic psychologist could say, and her insights into group psychology are right on.

And if, on the other hand, you’re a woman (or a gender-confused person) who can’t imagine any way to identify goodness or even real power with a Father, whose experience of your religious tradition has been abusive...even if the abuse was limited to a confused admirer or a jealous woman saying “You look like a witch with that black hair,” you might be interested in the Humanist splinter group who’ve tried, during my lifetime, to revive the old custom of praying to “goddess” images. Some of them are True Greens. Some are fun to know. Some are already in your social network. Without necessarily wanting to join their group, you might be interested in reading about what one of the leading groups in this movement actually do.

Most of them have not studied their ancestral religions very thoroughly. They have no idea that the “Heavenly Father” to whom Jesus prayed was clearly described as a Spirit, never limited by the gender or number of a body. Of two names (as distinct from titles) used for God in the Bible, although both are used as “he” words, one has the form of a “she” word and the other has the form of a “they” word. The ancient Israelite religion constantly affirmed in every way that mortal minds can’t encompass an adequate image of the Infinite. God is not to be thought of as limited to any form we might be able to visualize. In the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt not make any graven image” (of God) actually comes before “Thou shalt not murder.” To profane the faith by perverting faith in a Supreme Being into worship of some three-dimensional mortal creature murders true religion; it causes nice Jewish girls like Miriam Simos to grow up trying to reclaim the Goddess of her ancestors’ Babylonian enemies. Unable to believe what she’d heard about the God of Abraham, Miriam Simos, a.k.a. Starhawk, chose to call herself a Witch rather than a Jew.

Before any correspondents start pointing to Starhawk’s use of Babylonian motifs, or to the medieval Pagan influences on the Kabbalah, as evidence that Judaism is particularly Satanic, let’s note: Although the Reclaiming group grew out of the environmentalist movement in Northern California, in most of the United States a person who wanted to work through the group exercises in this book would go to a Unitarian church. I seriously considered posting this as a Sunday Book Review. 

The Bible writer who noted “women weeping for Tammuz” (the Jewish precursor to Lent, an end-of-winter fast associated with a Babylonian myth and cult) in the temple of Jerusalem was not recommending the practice. Nevertheless, Unitarians host Neo-Pagan spiritual exercises in church. My collection of Starhawk’s books started at Unitarian-sponsored Berea College. I’m not sure that Christians ought to bring Neo-Pagan activities into the sanctuary, but if any religious group ought to be trying to encourage dissatisfied Humanists to try “exploring their spirituality” and perhaps work their way back around to a traditional belief, surely Christians should be it; real Christians don’t persecute heretics, but try to correct them—and correct ourselves by them—in a spirit of brotherly love.

If you believe the spirituality in this book to be a bad thing or (as I do) a thing less good than it ought to be, I’d suggest directing the blame toward the sexist perversions of the traditional religions.

Female baby-boomers started saying, “I’m not going to worship a (male body part).” The Bible never suggests that God has any specifically male body parts. The Hebrew language is particularly rich in metaphors, some of which compare abstract qualities to human and nonhuman body parts. If taken literally, the Bible credits God (and people) with wings, credits God (and a few people, but not Satan) with horns, pictures God’s Wisdom copying the marketing technique of the village harlot, and even describes God’s parental love for the Creation using the mixed metaphor of a “nursing father.” It credits God with rachamim, sometimes translated as “bowels of compassion,” literally meaning “female reproductive parts” and the motherly feelings associated with them. It describes God as Shaddai, the Almighty, which literally means “top-heavy” and can describe either a muscular man or a busty woman. (The ancient Israelites’ ideal woman was a farm girl who could work as hard as any man of her size.) But the Bible never uses the precise words for either male or female procreative parts, and although it uses words for “beard” with reference to men, including a prophecy of Jesus, it never describes God having one.

In the twentieth century, when some churches employed female ministers but tried to maintain policies that authorized payment only to male ministers, an absurd argument about a pastor having a “physical resemblance” to God was seriously made by sexist churchmen. Rrreally? According to the plain literal reading of the Bible, God seems to have more “physical resemblance” to Marilyn Monroe than to Billy Graham. “Well, obviously, that can’t be right!” Yes; that’s the point. During my lifetime Billy Graham had little physical resemblance even to Jesus—he was far too old! A behavioral resemblance to Jesus is what Christians are told to cultivate. I sometimes wonder whether Jesus needed to be a young man, with beard, muscles, and presumably all the other evidence of a full supply of testosterone, just to show that it’s possible for a young man to make choices that, apart from the hiking, sailing, and construction work, seem more like a woman’s or an old man’s choices.

2. So What’s in the Book?

The Reclaiming Collective had started operating “Witch camp” gathering for eco-activists who wanted to participate in the sort of politics-as-spiritual-practice Starhawk had described in Dreaming the Dark. Twelve Wild Swans describes some of the things they did at these camps: communing with nature, processing their emotions, strategizing, networking, and building their “organizer” skills. Activities were organized around the theme of a myth or folktale. In Twelve Wild Swans a German-Scandinavian tale was chosen, though the authors and contributors mention having used other tales other years. The stories chosen involve quests in wildernesses near oceans.

Everybody can benefit from Starhawk’s insights into how to keep group processes egalitarian. If anyone has spent her life actively resisting the temptation to become the sort of cult leader some followers actually want, she’s the one. She knows firsthand, and is willing and able to explain, more about how groups cohere or fail to cohere, how groups stay democratic and satisfactory or become cliques or cults, than any other living writer I have found.

Nevertheless, though written for as general an audience as possible, these observations are based on observation of the kind of people who attend “Witch camps.”

Much interest in Neo-Paganism has had to do with traditional drug-tripping rituals. Reclaiming officially disclaims any use of those. What we all learned in the 1960s is that anything LSD can do for the human mind, meditation (self-hypnosis) can do better. Twelve Wild Swans offers many guided meditations.

Another (overlapping)category of Neo-Pagans is the people who’ve built up a vast complex of residual emotions about their family’s religious tradition. As regular readers know, the position of this web site is: Fix Facts First: Feelings Follow. In mainstream North American culture, men often deny any emotions other than anger because people who express emotions other than anger are often emotionally abused by people who ignore the real problem (or spoil the real pleasure!) by wasting everyone’s time with attention to someone’s emotional feelings about it. (John Gray wrote a series of horrible books that actually coached husbands in doing this to their wives.) As a result it may be impossible to write about releasing residual emotions, on your own schedule and for your own benefit, in a way that completely rules out exploitation of your words by abusers. Any concession that residual emotions can become a separate fact that a few people need to fix can be used to feed abuse. The coauthors try to discourage that; I doubt that they’ve fully succeeded.

They do try to draw at least a thin, fine line between healthy present-time anger and residual anger.I think they could have drawn the line more clearly. At the very least, the story of the woman who “was able to find her rage, tracing it all the way back to her childhood” (blaming her mother, yet) might have been balanced with a story of the woman who “was able to find her fear, tracing it all the way back to her sexist miseducation, and hear the real, present-moment, adult emotions people are actually expressing, without rushing in to infantilize those people and blame their mothers.”

I think the authors pass too hastily by the present-time abuses people become activists in order to protest, in the discussion of residual anger. Arguably because that’s what the whole book is about. They give airspace to the wounded-inner-child line of talk that was helpful to some and abusive to others in the 1980s, then rush to a discussion of political correctness and “If we can be nice enough to members of ethnic minority groups, maybe a few of them will eventually join us.” They don’t actually say “When you feel more than usually annoyed by one of several undesirable things you see every day, instead of asking whether guilt, indigestion, drug reactions, a hormone imbalance, chemical pollution, increasing social or emotional stress, or simple overcrowding may be involved, just displace that emotion into an hysterical overreaction the next time someone says ‘Merry Christmas’ or ‘straight talk’”—but they come close to it.And the p.c. police certainly seem to be reading whatever advice they do read in just that way.

Baby-boomers grew up hearing a lot about “buried feelings from the past” but my own observation, admittedly of people who are more comfortable with their family culture than the average Neo-Pagan, has yet to identify a baby-boomer who’s actually had that problem. Few of us ever buried anything. Some of us thought we’d broken through to buried memories in the 1990s, then found that it was only Prozac Dementia. Some of the older generation may have buried emotions, and had other psychologically incorrect experiences that either Sigmund or Anna Freud lived to observe; if baby-boomers had psychologically incorrect emotions, we had different ones. We knew it was supposed to be okay to hate your same-sex parent and idolize your opposite-sex parent, so the only problem most of us had with that whole emotional complex was that it didn’t resonate with whatever emotional complexes we had, at all. People generally come down with the diseases for which they’ve not had the vaccine.

The co-authors go on to discuss ego inflation and ego deflation, the value of silence, the value of pageantry, emotionally grounding oneself against hostility or adulation, the problems of jealousy and envy, all in the context of fairy tales, pageantry, and game playing that engage the id...

“I thought witches cast spells.”

They do. The spells Reclaiming Witches consider “most effective” are the ones that aim to change the Witches themselves.

“I thought they worshipped the Devil.”

Reclaiming Witches are Humanists who weren’t content with classical scientific Humanism. They spiritualize their feelings about nature and the environment by worshipping a concept of “immanent divinity,” embodied as a female or couple, human or otherwise, sometimes identified with an old Pagan deity, sometimes with one of the four directions—usually with four or more different images within a prayer or ceremony. Images placed on their altars may include mirrors. They don’t actually believe it matters which images they use, except as it reflects the right kind of mental attitude toward other ethnic groups, because as Humanists they still believe that what they are worshipping is really the “spiritual” part of themselves. Most deny any belief in the Devil. Their belief system has features in common with Satanism, but it’s not the same.

“Y’mean they’re really worshipping themselves?”

They’re not dogmatically denying that there is anything Out There beyond themselves, but they don’t believe they know anything about it, or have any power to change anything beyond themselves. As the co-authors quote Doreen Valiente saying: if Neo-Pagan Witches don’t find what they seek within themselves, they’ll never find it beyond themselves. What they’re actually doing is plain old Jungian psychotherapy, with a left-wing, baby-boomer, American feminist flavor.

3. “And you think that’s something that can be useful to Christians?”

How useful it may be depends on which individual Christians we’re talking about and what they want to use it for.

If our primary motive is to understand and relate to friends who are drawn to Neo-Paganism, then anything written by the best writers in that movement, which would include Elizabeth Barrette, Luisah Teish, Barbara Walker, the late Mary Daly, and Jane Caputi as well as Starhawk, can be useful. Each of these writers has her own niche, or niches, and offers her own literary voice in addition to her insights into Neo-Paganism.

If our primary motive is to improve our Christian practice so that sincere, sensitive, True Green people will be more likely to reclaim Christianity than try to revive anything from ancient Babylon, then books like this one deserve serious study. The good that Starhawk is doing is the good we should be doing. Why aren’t we?

Christians don’t direct worship to the natural world. We give thanks for nature rather than to it. Sometimes we forget to show gratitude for nature.

We as a species are dumb enough to build nuclear reactors in earthquake zones, which is what put the “fear of the Earth Goddess” into a lot of people in California in the 1970s, which was where Reclaiming really started. We’re dumb enough to flatten beautiful, scenic, historic mountains to grub out a few more carloads of coal, and we don’t even need to burn that coal. We’re dumb enough to spray so much poison on so much land that our children get sick every time they play outdoors, and then we blame whatever pitiful little amusements they find for themselves, the books and comic books, TV and rock music, video games and cell phone messaging, for making them the pathetic lot of 4F’s they become. Rebellion against these forms of stupidity began with the older generation, grew in the baby-boomer generation, and is still growing for the young. Nature worship, which very few people are able to take seriously as a religion, is one way of rebelling against this abuse of nature. The bid for global totalitarian dictatorship, which really died with the old Soviet Union despite George Soros’s heroic efforts at life support, is studying and using this “Green” rebellion.

The only cure for this Poison Green cultural influence is a True Green movement. It would be convenient (for everyone except umbrella sellers) if every time a Socialist said it was raining outside, the rain would stop! Since the world is set up in favor of the umbrella sellers, we might as well acknowledge the rain. Some Poison Greens really are all about trying to set up a totalitarian government that will self-destruct and end American Democracy, but real Greens are seriously interested in preserving life—human and other forms of life—and respect Christians, like Ozarque or Wendell Berry, who care about that too.

Christians may not need to spend as much time on the Jungian self-help meditations as those in rebellion do; political demonstrations certainly aren’t part of our worship services. However, organizing and demonstrating are useful skills for Christians, and I know of no church group that really has no need for group reflections on how people handle ego inflation, ego deflation, and that tendency to form social hierarchies. In fact, in all churches where I’ve spent much time, I’d describe the need for Starhawk’s insights into group psychology as howling. I’d like to be able to recommend a Christian writer to these church groups; unfortunately the late lamented writer known as Ozarque, who came closer than any other Christian I know, had specialized in a different field and didn’t come very close to offering the same kind of insight Starhawk does.

Christians could usefully study the Reclaiming group’s pageantry of nature worship. We don’t need to do that but we need to ask ourselves, individually or in groups, what truth is in the reproof, how we’ve allowed ourselves to do such a poor job of stewardship that anyone could feel a need to look all the way back to ancient Babylon for correction. Where did we let the joy go out of our own concept of stewardship? How did we forget that the original “southern agrarian” writers, serving God through right use of the land they believed God gave their families in perpetuity, were the Bible writers?

The Twelve Wild Swans has been Out There long enough that this web site can offer it as a Fair Trade Book on the usual terms, $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment, as discussed on the Payment Information Page. From this base price of $10 we'll send $1 to Starhawk or the charity of her choice, presumably Reclaiming. Another book of comparable size and shape that would fit into the package beside this one is Truth or Dare, also a Fair Trade Book; if you order both, you pay $15 (or $16) and we send Starhawk or her charity $2.