Dowsing for Divinity

This is an excellent book, and it was the first nonfiction book about Paganism that I ever read, back in the late 1980s. I have just reread it in 2024.

There are many noteworthy things about this book: its engagement of witchcraft and politics, the fact that it is not gender essentialist—Starhawk notes that the qualities ascribed to men and women are based in culture and not biology—and its emphasis on equality, the importance of immanence, and its acknowledgment that sometimes progressive people tie themselves in knots trying to be “correct”. I also love the real life examples of protests and rituals and trance work.

In the early 1980s when it was written, much of the protest movement was concerned with the possibility of nuclear annihilation, although climate change and the destruction of nature were already rearing their heads. Nonetheless the tactics of magical resistance described in the book are still valid.

Some of the vocabulary in the original 1982 edition (which is the one I read in the 1980s and the version I just reread) is outdated which some might find jarring—but it is easy to see that the intent behind the words is progressive.

The history section in the appendix contains a few ideas that have since been demonstrated to be wrong or exaggerated—but their loss does not undermine the overall argument, which is that historically there was a move away from immanence and interconnectivity and towards transcendence and hatred of the world and the flesh. It’s also true that midwives were persecuted as witches in German-speaking lands—the evidence is there in 17th century German popular broadsheets—even if there was not a comparable persecution in English-speaking lands.

Overall this is still a great book and I would recommend reading it. I see there’s an updated version of the book too.