I’ve been interested in ‘alternative’ forms of spirituality since I was quite young, and I first started reading serious books on Wicca and paganism when I was about 17. This was in the late 80s, bear in mind, and the situation was rather different from today. Back then, witchcraft (very few people used the term Wicca) was regarded, by anyone who’d heard of it (usually via the tabloids) as ‘devil worship’. Popular ‘teen witchcraft’ was yet some way in the future (possibly no bad thing), and you couldn’t just walk into mainstream bookstores and buy those books. So, things were pretty limited. I cobbled together a few books from secondhand stores, and searched out a few more in the far reaches of the library system, and that was more or less it till I started work in London, which allowed me access to some more unusual stuff.

After getting through the unhelpful and somewhat complicated ‘spellbook’ stage, I learned a lot from authors like the Farrars and the late Doreen Valiente. Later, I discovered the extensive and very useful works of Scott Cunningham. They are all authors I’d still recommend to any interested beginner.

But Starhawk’s book, for me, was a watershed in that it was one of the first I’d seen to look at Wicca, and ritual in general, as a living thing, something you could create yourself – using the raw stuff of your own life, your own concerns and celebrations and needs – rather than something repeated from an old script.

It was also part of (more on that later) my introduction to the meaning of gender relations, the whole business of what being male or female meant in relation to spirituality, of how the spiritual and personal were political, and the meaning of power. Those are recurring themes in Starhawk’s work, of course, but the idea that they were connected was utterly new to me, coming from a background in which politics and religion were both separate and taboo, and personal power was nothing to do with either of them.

Also, it simply contains some fantastic, visionary writing, and puts across some of the poetry of good ritual.