Starhawk, née Miriam Simos, was born on June 17, 1951, in St. Paul, Minnesota to Bertha Claire Goldfarb Simos and Jack Simos, both children of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. Her mother, Bertha G. Simos, was both an author and professor of social work at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her father, Jack Simos, passed away when she was five years old. As a young woman Simos, an aspiring writer and filmmaker, attended UCLA and graduated with a BA in Fine Arts in 1972. While a graduate student in Film at UCLA, she wrote and received the Samuel Goldwyn Creative Writing Award for her autobiographical novel, A Weight of Gold, about growing up in Venice, California, although the novel was never published.

After a brief time living in New York City, Simos returned to California in 1974 and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she gave workshops for women in photography, writing, poetry, and feminist thought while working and traveling within the Bay Area’s feminist, peace, anti-nuclear, ecological, and anarchist circles. It was during this period that she first discovered and began studying Earth-based spiritualities and witchcraft with mentors and contemporaries including Victor and Cora Anderson, Sara Cunningham, and Zsuzsanna Budapest.

On October 31st, 1979, Simos published her first book, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, under the pen and Craft name Starhawk, by which she is still known today. Starhawk describes The Spiral Dance as “an overview of the growth, suppression, and modern-day reemergence of the old religion of the Goddess, the pre-Christian tradition known as paganism, Wicca, or witchcraft”. The same year she helped to co-found The Reclaiming Collective, also known solely as Reclaiming, a Neopagan witchcraft tradition and feminist collective that offered community, classes, public rituals, and spiritual counseling based in the Goddess religion. Starhawk describes the collective’s core values as based upon “the understanding that the earth is alive and that all of life is sacred and interconnected. We see the Goddess as immanent in the earth’s cycles of birth, growth, death, decay, and regeneration. Our practice arises from a deep spiritual commitment to the earth, to healing, and to the linkage of magic with political action”(Starhawk, 1999).

The Reclaiming Collective continues to thrive into the 2020s and yearly celebrates the cross-quarter sabbat Samhain, i.e. Halloween, with a now widely popular ritual incorporating a group spiral dance at University of California, Berkley. In 1982, Starhawk returned as graduate student to Antioch University West, earning an MA in Psychology with a concentration in Feminist Therapy. Currently the author and co-author of thirteen books, Starhawk continues teach and speak within Neopagan and ecofeminist circles.

Starhawk. (1999). The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (20th Anniversary Ed). Harper Collins.

Photo Credit: https://medium.com/conversations-at-rowe/the-goddess-is-embodied-in-every-human-being-c0375ab1a1c7