ELIZABETH ELLAMES

The Word That Awakened Something in Me

There are some books we read once and put back on the shelf, while others seem to become part of our story. Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess is one of those books for me. I first read it around 1992, and I remember being deeply inspired by it. 

At the time, however, I could not have known how significant some of the ideas I encountered would become part of my own spiritual journey, or how they would continue to unfold in my work with women over the decades that followed.

Now, more than thirty years later, I have found myself drawn back to The Spiral Dance. There is something rather beautiful about returning to a book that influenced you earlier in life, because you do not return as the same person who first read it. The words may be the same, but your understanding has changed because you have lived, experienced, questioned, explored and grown.

As I read it again now, I am noticing things I could not have fully understood back then. I can see connections to the work I have since developed around the Goddess, feminine archetypes, sacred ceremony, meditation, consciousness, embodiment and the transformative nature of the spiral. In many ways, it feels as though I am meeting an earlier version of myself while also recognising how much of what she was searching for has continued to guide me. There is one particular memory from my first encounter with this book that has remained remarkably vivid.

The Word Archetype

I remember coming across the word archetype. I didn’t know what the word meant at the time; I couldn’t explain, define, or tell you anything about its psychological or spiritual significance. Yet when I read it, something happened within me that I have never forgotten.

It was as though my whole being recognised the word. I remember feeling it speak to every fibre of my being, even though my conscious mind had no idea what it meant. It was not an intellectual understanding. It was a deep sense of recognition, almost as though I had encountered a language for something I already knew somewhere within myself.

Looking back now, I find that moment extraordinary because archetypes have gone on to become such an important part of my own work. I have spent many years exploring archetypes as patterns of consciousness and as ways of understanding the different qualities, potentials and stages of becoming what can emerge within us.

I now work with archetypal expressions such as the Queen, Hero, Healer, Visionary, Sacred Mother, Wise Woman, Enchantress and Alchemist, and I have come to understand an archetype is not simply a character or a role we adopt. It can become a way of recognising a quality of consciousness that is seeking expression through us.

Yet in 1992, I knew none of this.

This has made me reflect on the difference between knowing something intellectually and recognising something within ourselves. Sometimes an idea arrives before we have the language to understand it. We may not yet know what it means, but something within us responds with a quiet, unmistakable sense of recognition.

For me, that was the word archetype. I didn’t understand it with my mind, but something in me did.

And then there was the word witchcraft

There is an interesting contrast in my relationship with The Spiral Dance, because while the word archetype opened something within me, I have always felt quite differently about the word witchcraft. I have always been averse to it, and for a long time I couldn’t completely explain why. My response to the word has always felt deeper than simply having an intellectual objection to the term.

From my own spiritual perspective, I have wondered whether that resistance may be connected to what I may have experienced as a past-life memory of women being persecuted for their spiritual practices and beliefs. I can’t prove that interpretation, and I don’t need to establish it as historical fact for me to acknowledge the feeling that accompanies it. It is something I have experienced internally, and it has influenced the way I relate to the word.

When I hear the word witchcraft, I don’t instinctively think of the modern imagery that has grown around it. My thoughts turn instead towards women who were feared, accused, silenced and persecuted, and towards the historical reality that women were often particularly vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft.

It is here that another word has become increasingly important to me: misogyny. (It was also in the book.)

Misogyny is a word and behaviour I have learned to recognise over the course of my life, and to understand that the suppression of women is not always obvious. It can exist within cultural attitudes, religious structures, social expectations and assumptions about what women should or should not be.

Once we have language for something, we can begin to recognise it more clearly. That has been true for me with misogyny. And recognising it has strengthened something present within me for a very long time: my desire to support women.

I feel compelled to support women in this lifetime, not because I believe women are superior or weaker than men, but because I believe women deserve to experience their full humanity without having to diminish themselves to belong. They deserve to have their intelligence, intuition, creativity, authority, sexuality, spirituality and wisdom recognised as legitimate aspects of who they are. This has indeed become part of my life’s work.

What STARHAWK was Reclaiming

This is why I find Starhawk’s first chapter, “Witchcraft as Goddess Religion,” particularly interesting to revisit.

Starhawk was writing within the feminist and spiritual movements of the 1970s, at a time when many women were questioning the religious and cultural structures they had inherited. She sought to reclaim Witchcraft as a nature-based spiritual tradition centred on the Goddess, ritual, direct experience and the sacredness of life.

Although the word itself still does not resonate comfortably with me, I can understand what she was attempting to reclaim. At the heart of it is the idea that the sacred does not have to be separate from life.

Spirituality doesn’t necessarily have to be something we believe because someone else has told us what is true. It can also be something we encounter and experience for ourselves. That idea has remained deeply meaningful to me.

I began my own spiritual journey long before I had a sophisticated vocabulary for consciousness or personal development. By the time I read The Spiral Dance in 1992, I already understood that spirituality was something I wanted to experience rather than simply read about.

I wanted to know what happened when one’s consciousness changed. I wanted to understand what happened when people gathered with a shared intention. I wanted to explore what happened when we created sacred space and became quiet enough to listen to the silence and to something deeper than the constant activity of everyday life.

In that sense, The Spiral Dance gave language to something I was already beginning to explore.

An Opening Between the Worlds

The idea of “opening between the worlds” particularly captures my attention now. In Starhawk’s description, ritual creates a threshold between ordinary reality and sacred reality. The circle becomes a place in which our relationship with the world can change. We haven’t physically left our surroundings, but our consciousness has shifted. This is something I recognise from my own experience of meditation, ceremony and gathering with women.

I’ve experienced those moments when the ordinary and the sacred come closer together. It might happen in meditation, in nature, in a garden, during ceremony or simply through sitting with other women in a sacred circle. 

Opening between the worlds does not necessarily mean escaping this world and entering another. It can mean becoming sufficiently present to experience this world differently.

The Circle and the Spiral

The circle has become an important part of my own work. Over the years, I have gathered women together in meditation, conversation, ceremony and sacred space, and I have come to understand how powerful a consciously held circle can be.

When I sit in a circle with women now, I’m conscious of the many ideas and influences that have contributed to my understanding of a sacred gathering. I am also conscious that I’m not simply recreating something from the past. I am continuing an exploration in my own way and in response to the world in which we live now.

That is what I believe living wisdom requires. We can honour what has inspired us without being bound by it. We can receive an idea, question it, experience it and allow it to evolve through our own lives.

This is also where the spiral becomes so meaningful to me. A spiral returns, but it doesn’t return to the same place. We revisit something we have encountered before, but with a different level of experience and understanding. That is how I feel about returning to my book, The Spiral Dance.

Returning Thirty-Four Years Later

When I look back at my own journey, I can see that many of the ideas I encountered in 1992 have continued to unfold through my life and work.

They have found their way into The Living Goddess Code. They have influenced my understanding of feminine archetypes and the sacred feminine. They have informed the women’s circles I have created and the way I understand ceremony, embodiment and transformation. They have continued to evolve into the work I am now developing through the Living Attributes Codex.

And yet I would never say that Starhawk’s book gave me all of those answers. Perhaps it did something more valuable. It opened a door.

It introduced me to ideas that resonated deeply enough for me to keep exploring them in my own way. And perhaps that is what a truly influential book can do. It doesn’t necessarily give us the destination. It gives us a doorway. We then have to walk through it ourselves.

The woman who read The Spiral Dance in 1992 couldn’t have known where that doorway would lead. She couldn’t have known the women she would eventually work with, the books she would write, the circles she would create or the archetypal language that would become such an important part of her understanding of transformation. But something in her was listening. Something recognised the possibility. And perhaps the first word that called me forward was archetype. I didn’t know what it meant, but something in me did.

Bringing the Sacred Feminine into the Light

Today, I’m less interested in trying to reconstruct an ancient Goddess religion exactly as it may once have existed, and more interested in asking:

• What happens when women begin to recognise their bodies as part of their sacred experience rather than something to be judged?
• What happens when intuition is valued alongside intellect?
• What happens when women’s lived experience is recognised as a source of knowledge?
• What happens when ageing is understood not simply as a process of decline, but as an initiation into another stage of wisdom?
• What happens when women gather together in conscious relationship rather than competition?
• What happens when we bring the sacred feminine back into our consciousness?
• And what happens when spirituality becomes something we embody rather than something we simply believe?

These are the questions that matter to me now. Perhaps this is why I have been drawn back to The Spiral Dance at this particular point in my life. I am not simply returning to a book. I’m returning to a part of myself, returning to the woman I was in 1992, but not going back to become her again. I’m meeting her from where I stand today, with everything that has happened since.

The spiral has brought me around again. And this time, I can see more clearly. I can see the significance of that word that once spoke to me before I understood it. I can see the questions that were already beginning to form within me. I can see the connection between my attraction to archetypes, my exploration of the Goddess, my deep concern for women and my lifelong desire to bring what has been hidden into the light.

Some things are recognised before fully understood, and some words find us before we are ready to define them. And I believe the journey is not always about discovering something entirely new, but about remembering that some deeper part of us already knows.

The spiral continues, and I find myself returning to where I once began, not to repeat the past, but to see it with new eyes. The dance continues, and I am still embracing the person I came here to be.

Heart to Heart, Elizabeth