Starhawk's Pagan Chants - stories & lore

 

Starhawk's Pagan Chants: Reclaiming Sings Ritual Music by Starhawk - released 2025 - includes ten classic chants including several from 1994's Second Chants, all five songs from 2016's Campfire Chants, plus our latest electronic, disco, and samba remixes!

 

Visit this page for stories, lore, and cautionary tales about each chant! All chants are already live in streaming services - links above.

 

1. She Changes Everything by Starhawk feat. Irene Rojas-Carroll

 

Starhawk: She Changes Everything was the first chant I wrote. In 1975, a friend in LA who was in my women’s consciousness raising group was dying of breast cancer, and we wanted to do a ritual for her. 

 

So I created a ritual with some friends that went through the different stages of grief and loss, an all-night ritual centered around the myth of Demeter and Persephone. I was young then - now I’m at a stage of my life where I don’t create all-night rituals!

 

As part of it, we put people to sleep in the underworld. I created a tape beforehand that told the story of Demeter and Persephone. As I recorded it, I started chanting things about Persephone, “She changes everything she touches, and everything She touches changes,” chanting that over and over. The tune is so simple because it comes out of the rhythm and music of speech.

 

The Kore words (which are recorded on Reclaiming's Chants: Ritual Music album) were written for this ritual.

 

[The chant often gets sung at Spring Equinox rituals.] It seems to fit that time of year - although the Eleusinian Mysteries were actually performed in the Fall. The “dead” time of year [in Greece] is Summer - things are hot and dry, and everything is dormant. Then the rains come in the Fall and everything is alive again.

 

But they also had rites in the Spring, and it seems to fit here in California when everything is green and we have regeneration.

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Reclaiming Quarterly adds: This bilingual version of a favorite chant was recorded as part of our early-2020s sessions, when we are resprising many 20th-century classics in new forms – bilingual, electronic, garage rock, and even disco! Several alternative mixes are features at the end of this Starhawk album.

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Thanks to Irene Rojas-Carroll for helping initiate this round of recording!

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2. Rise with the Fire (Funky Samba Version) feat. Miranda Wong

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Starhawk: I wrote Rise with the Fire when we were blockading at Livermore (Nuclear Weapons Lab) at Brigid 1982. It’s a Brigid chant, really. It’s about Brigid as poet, the speaker of truth; and healer; and smith, the forge.
 

Of course it was also referring to the nuclear fire and destruction we were trying to stop. At that time were very afraid that Reagan was going to unleash a nuclear war.
 

We sang it in trainings, we sang it at the gates. And I believe that was the action where we had a women’s ritual the night before and sang it. We blockaded in the morning and ended up in jail for a week. So we sang it in jail. We were all in this barracks in the women’s jail. We had a ritual where we took all of these sets of rules they’d handed us and folded them into origami paper cranes and flew them around, singing “I’m as free a little bird as I can be...”

We sang it a lot at different globalization actions, and I use it in classes to invoke fire.

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Reclaiming Quarterly adds: The street samba beat is played by Paul from Redwood Magic camp, who is responsible for the Afro-Caribbean rhythms of recent Reclaiming recordings. 

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3. Weave and Spin (from Campfire Chants)

 

RQ: Tell us about this song.

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Starhawk: This chant came from a multicultural ritual in 1993 at the Hall of Flowers.

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RQ:  Right, this was one of several Ancestors of Many Cultures rituals co-sponsored by Reclaiming and other Bay Area groups.

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Starhawk: We came up with this idea of weaving a basket. We had altars to many different ancestries and different cultures. Each altar had different strips of cloth. You could go to the altar and tell your story or hear a story, and take a strip of cloth. As part of the ritual we tied the strips together and danced the spiral. We danced into the center and wove a multi-colored basket of our visions.

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RQ: This song is really versatile. It can be the first chant you sing at a camp, or the last one – “This is how the work begins,” or “Take the dream and make it real.’”

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Starhawk: Yeah, it just kind of fell together that way. I wanted something around weaving.

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RQ: What about the other lyrics?

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Starhawk: Strand by Strand comes from Powerful Song (on Second Chants). It came out of BC Witchcamp, I think Pandora wrote it, possibly with somebody else. It works really well with Weave and Spin.

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RQ: And the second verse, “On the same wheel we spin”?

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Starhawk: That’s something I wrote for the Pagan Book of Living and Dying. It’s the same tune as Weave and Spin – but I tend to write a lot of things to the same tune! It goes with the chant We Are of the Body of the Earth.

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RQ: That’s funny – so we paired it with the wrong chant? Were there more verses?

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Starhawk: No, just those two.

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George adds: This might have been the first song chosen for the 2016 Campfire Chants album – ever since I learned it for the 1993 ritual, I wanted to record it. Weave and Spin pops up regularly at Bay Area rituals. In the 2010s it was the closing spiral dance song at Teen Earth Magic, where the line “Take the dream and make it real” captured our aim – to take our magic back into the world.

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It's a favorite maypole song at Bay Area Beltanes, where it is often sung as the ritual dance reaches its peak.

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4. Sweet Water (from Campfire Chants)

 

Starhawk: One of my goddess-daughters, Morgan, came to California Camp one year in the early 1990s. She brought us a song that was supposed to be one that the Vikings sang The Living River – Reclaiming’s Pagan Cluster carries a gauzy river through the streets of Miami, 2003. Photo by Ruby Perry, courtesy of Reclaiming archives. as they went to sea. The men would sing Hey-Oh, Ho-Hey (Em-D, D-Em), and the women would sing this la-de-la la part over it. We found that the low part made a great bass for lots of chants, or when you needed something without words.

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In 2003, Code Pink was doing a big demonstration in Washington DC, right before the start of the (2003 Iraq) war. Pagan Cluster people went there. We came up with a whole myth and prophecy that was about The River. The last verse was We Are Sweet Water.

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For the pageant they had a giant puppet that represented greed, war, and poverty. We threw balls of yarn over it and pulled it down.

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For Starhawk’s writings and workshops, visit Starhawk.org

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Zay: Sweet Water or The Living River chant originated with a peace march in Washington DC on International Women’s Day in 2003 as part of a fable written by Starhawk. 

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However, I learned it in late 2003 as tens of thousands of people – including over 70 Reclaiming witches – converged on Miami to protest the Free Trade Area of the Americas ministerial meetings, the latest in the plans to globalize capitalism.

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The privatization of water was a key concern to us. If you didn’t know the chant before, you learned it that day on the long march in the hot, abandoned streets of Miami under the oppression of the “Miami model” of police militarization. It kept us going through tear gas and rubber bullets.

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Sweet Water became the theme song of the Pagan Cluster, aka the Living River, the current that carried us forward. It was a spell to remind ourselves of what we were doing, of our collective power even at the most hopeless of moments.

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To this day when I need strength for a protest, an action, this is what I sing. It reminds me of the deep magic of collective action.

 

We are sweet water, we are the seed

We are the storm winds that blow away greed

We are the new world we bring to birth

A river rising to reclaim the Earth!

 

George: We’ve sung this many years at Teen Earth Magic, and it’s a regular part of Reclaiming’s Elements of Magic classes.

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In 2015 we sang Sweet Water for the final Reclaiming ritual at Cellspace, an artists’ warehouse in the SF Mission district that hosted our annual Brigid ritual for about 15 years. Cellspace was also home to many of the local artists who helped create Dia de los Muertos / Day of the Dead in the Mission.

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As the Mission gentrified in recent years, pressure increased to make more profit from the land, and ultimately the warehouse was bulldozed to make way for dot-com condos – another nail in San Francisco’s artistic coffin.

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The final collective that ran the space, which was known as Inner Mission SF for the last few years, decided not to contest the eviction in return for one final year in the space. In early 2015 we held our last Brigid ritual there, and later in the Spring helped organize a weekend jamboree of performances, music, dance, and one final ritual.

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The ritual included a long go-round where each person spoke about our history in the space, and those of us from Reclaiming got to see our pieces in the larger jigsaw puzzle of Cellspace.

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During the pre-ritual organizing meeting we discussed what song to use for the final spiral dance. Several possibilities jumped out, but the line about the “storm winds that blow away greed” sealed the deal for Sweet Water.

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Not to mention bringing a new world to birth and reclaiming the Earth!

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5. We Are the Power in Everyone (from Campfire Chants)

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Starhawk: This chant was written for the anti-nuclear actions at Livermore Lab* in 1982. We were blockading on Summer Solstice, and there also happened to be a lunar eclipse around that time.

 

I had written the chant We Can Rise with the Fire of Freedom (on Chants: Ritual Music) for the February blockade (at Livermore) that year. It was meant to be a closeted Brigid song.

 

So I was looking for another idea for Summer Solstice, and I thought of the dance of the moon and sun.

 

Sometime in the 1990s I was down in Mexico for a Bioregional convergence. A friend who taught organic gardening invited me to come to her course. At the end of the course she had people sing a song – and it was We Are the Power in Everyone, translated into Spanish. She had no idea I’d written it or where it came from! It was really nice to see it had taken on a whole life of its own.

 

In some ways it’s not so great as a power-raising chant. She Changes Everything She Touches (on Chants: Ritual Music) is so simple, you can pile on the harmonies. We Are the Power doesn’t work quite that well.

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* – RQ Note – Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco is one of two US nuclear weapons design labs. Civil disobedience actions have been organized there for years, with a total of about 3000 arrests between 1982-85, and hundreds more since then. The dozens of affinity groups for Livermore and other actions of this period included pagan groups that helped create Reclaiming.

 

Anti-Nuclear Activism and the Birth of Reclaiming

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Reclaiming was born in the alchemy of Earth-based, Goddess oriented spirituality and grassroots activism.

 

In the late 1970s, anti-nuclear protests on both US coasts began to create a new political culture based in consensus, feminism, and small group (“affinity group”) process.

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On the west coast, huge direct actions at Diablo Canyon power plant (1979 and 1981), Livermore Weapons Lab near San Francisco (1982-83), and Vandenberg AFB (1983) led to thousands of arrests and fed a thriving activist/artistic culture that endures to this day.

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People who helped organize Reclaiming in these years took part in these actions, some as part of pagan affinity groups such as Matrix. The actions were formative for Reclaiming’s culture.

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The story of these early 1980s actions is recounted in Direct Action: An Historical Novel, by Luke Hauser. Get a print copy of the book - or download a free PDF at our website

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6. Rising of the Moon (from Campfire Chants)

 

Interview with Starhawk by Reclaiming Quarterly

 

RQ: I associate Rising of the Moon with the globalization actions of the 2000s.

 

Starhawk: This is a song we’ve used a lot in political actions, in the streets. It’s a nice one to teach to activists. People really like the sense of bringing the fortress down – stamping down as they sing.

 

RQ: Did you write it for a specific action?

 

Starhawk: Yeah, in 2002, the G8 met in Calgary. We had a Pagan Cluster that went there to organize. We had a full moon ritual right before the action at a Unitarian church which had a labyrinth, and I felt like we needed a new chant. I was walking the labyrinth and preparing for the ritual, and came up with that.

We got to doing a lot of magic around the organizing. At first it seemed like the action would be really scary. These “terrible anarchists” were coming to town, and there was this big militarization around it. We did some magic where we set a magical drain for fear in downtown Calgary, and it seemed like things turned around. Suddenly the cops were all in bicycle shorts –

 

RQ: It’s always a good sign when the cops are in bicycle shorts!

 

Starhawk: So there was a big march, and nobody got arrested. It was a very successful first day of actions.

Then we had a second day. Like most mobilizations, we’d spent months planning the first day of actions, but no one had planned the second day. So we did a group trance about it.

 

RQ: Thank goodness for magic.

 

Starhawk: Somehow in the middle of the trance I was reminded of this vision that I’d had the one and only time I ever took ayahuasca. I had been invited to this ecumenical conference in Brazil. Everyone was doing their different rituals, and I was invited to a Santo Daime ceremony.

 

You’re supposed to go in with a question. The question I went in with was, “Do we have enough time to make all the changes we need to make?”

 

I had been asking religious leaders (at the conference), and getting various answers.

I asked the ayahuasca, and it said “No! But you’re a witch — you can work outside of time. Part the curtains of time, and plant the changes in that timeless place where they’ve already taken place.”

 

Then I had a vision of this huge fortress, overpowering, soldiers and clone-like robocops coming and coming. But when I looked, it was all cracked and brittle. And I heard “the fortress falls, and the ground beneath it shifts.”

 

RQ: So you brought this vision to the Calgary protests?

 

Starhawk: Yes. At the G8 protests in Calgary we worked with this image of the fortress, with vines and leaves pushing through the cracks and breaking it apart.

 

RQ: Which is the theme of the song. What was the actual protest you did?

 

Starhawk: We got this idea that on the second day of actions we would do Mud People, which is something a bunch of crazy artists and dancers were doing in SF. They’d go down to the financial district, strip off almost all their clothes, and cover themselves with mud. Once covered with mud, the rule was, you couldn’t walk normally or talk. So they’d be grunting and writhing through the financial district at lunchtime as an art piece.

 

RQ: I remember being part of a mud people action at California Witchcamp around 2000.

 

Starhawk: Right, Beverly brought this to witchcamp. So periodically, when we were having some deep consensus meeting, mud people would erupt and start crawling around stark naked.

 

We had this idea to do it in Calgary. Well, Calgary is like the Texas of Canada. All the oil companies are there, it’s the most conservative place in Canada.

 

We had 60 crazy people who stripped off their clothes and dove into the mud. A few of us were like, I don’t think I’m going to get naked and writhe through the streets of Calgary. I think some of us need to be able to talk.

So we started to write a flyer, and I suddenly said, this doesn’t call for a flyer – this needs a prophecy!

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George adds: I was in a spiral dance with Pagan Cluster people just back from the Calgary action. Every time we got to “bring the fortress down” they’d cast their hands downward – which when you're holding hands in a spiral is rather jarring!

 

As we were recording the Campfire Chants album, where this chant first appeared, I was part of a late-night song circle at 2016 JeWitch Camp. I shared We Are the Rising Sun, also from the album.

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Someone who had no knowledge of our not-yet-released album said, “That’s a beautiful song about the vision we’re struggling for. But life isn’t all about beauty. Sometimes we’re really angry. I want to share a song about those moments.”

 

And she launched into Rising of the Moon.

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7. Body of the Earth (from Campfire Chants)

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Starhawk:

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I wrote this for the Pagan Book of Living and Dying (around 1994). I felt we needed some songs about death and rebirth.

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I’ve often used it at Winter Solstice rituals. Something about the Winter Solstice and the night and stars.

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We used to do Winter Solstice up at Sebastopol Community Center, and they have a disco ball. It’s really nice to be singing about the circling stars with the disco ball – it’s quite trancey!

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When I was writing this song, I was thinking about physics. The Earth literally is made of stardust, and so are we.

 

George:

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It turns out there is another verse to this song, which magically migrated to Weave and Spin – the "Strand by Strand" descant.

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I learned this song from Sage Goode and Amy MoonDragon at California Witchcamp around 1998. We sang it over and over during a trance about caring for our bodies and recognizing them as divine.

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Ever since, “calling down star energy” has been my favorite purification.

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The song has been sung at various Bay Area rituals, and is a staple of Earth night during Reclaiming’s Elements of Magic classes.

 

Body of the Earth was the spiral song for the opening ritual at the 2016 Witchy Disco (a fundraiser for the Mysteries of Samhain retreat). Since then it has become the "theme song" of our October Mysteries retreat, sung as part of our closing spiral dance each year.

 

Musical note – the “Strand by Strand” descant of Weave and Spin also works with this song.

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8. Barge of Heaven

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RQ: Tell us about this chant, which I've heard sung at camps and rituals as a call-and-response. Pretty amazing for a 4000-year-old song.

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Starhawk: Barge of Heaven is an Inanna chant. Musically it's based on an older chant called Snake Woman; “Snake Woman, shedding her skin…” [on Reclaiming’s Chants: Ritual Music album].

 

In the late 80s, I was doing a lot of study of ancient history, looking at the question of how patriarchy came into being. in Mesopotamia, there’s a lot of early material - although none of it is completely pre-patriarchal, because none of it got written down until around the second millennium BC. 

 

But I think much of it comes from earlier material and maintains that connection. There are all these hymns to Inanna and to Dmuzi, her consort, that have an entirely different sense about sexuality, abotu female sexuality and male sexuality. 

 

The old poems have beautiful material that I wove together into a chant. One of the chants to Inanna says, “Pour it out for me, pour it out for me, anything you send me I will drink.”

 

Then Inanna sings the praises for her own vulva, her “crescent shaped barge of heaven..."

 

Then she sings the praises of Dmuzi. I love this version, it’s a really different version of male sexuality. It’s not identified with power and control and domination It’s identified with fertility and growth and nurturing. “At your mighty rising, the vines rise up and the fields rise up.”

 

Then I added a verse that I like to think of as the two of them singing together: “In the heat of the sun you are the shade, a well of water in a dry, dry land. Swelling fruits to feed the hungry, sweet cream to quench out thirst.”

 

RQ: How much is a poem you took over versus a bit here and there?

 

Starhawk: I took a piece from here, a piece from there. I looked at the poem and kind of put them together. 

I think I wrote it the first year we did Witchcamp - we did one in Vancouver and one in Ben Lomond, south of San Francisco. We were doing the [Pearl] Pentacle Path:  Sex, Pride, Self, Power, Passion. I remember singing this chant for the Sex point. Since then, we sing it when we’re working with Inanna. 

 

And it’s one I often sing at weddings and handfastings.  We sang it at my and David’s wedding.

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9. Free the Heart/Powerful Song

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10. When We Are Gone (feat. Anne Hill)

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11. Rise with the Fire (Pagan Protest Reggae Version) feat. Miranda Wong

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12. Weave and Spin (Disco Witchcamp Version) feat. Miranda Wong

 

Reclaiming Quarterly: This "disco witchcamp" version emerged as we were recording another chant. We started playing with the "come on, come on" idea - and pretty soon it became its own song. It is our ardent dream that there will one day be a Disco Witchcamp that will use this song for the climactic spiral dance!

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RQ: Tell us where this song came from.

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Starhawk: This chant came from a multicultural ritual in 1993 at the Hall of Flowers.

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RQ:  Right, this was one of several Ancestors of Many Cultures rituals co-sponsored by Reclaiming and other Bay Area groups.

​

Starhawk: We came up with this idea of weaving a basket. We had altars to many different ancestries and different cultures. Each altar had different strips of cloth. You could go to the altar and tell your story or hear a story, and take a strip of cloth. As part of the ritual we tied the strips together and danced the spiral. We danced into the center and wove a multi-colored basket of our visions.

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RQ: This song is really versatile. It can be the first chant you sing at a camp, or the last one – “This is how the work begins,” or “Take the dream and make it real.’”

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Starhawk: Yeah, it just kind of fell together that way. I wanted something around weaving.

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13. She Changes Everything (Big Band Spanish-English Version) feat. Irene Rojas-Carroll

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14. Ella Cambia Todo (Electropulse Version) by Reclaiming feat. Irene Rojas-Carroll
 

15. She Changes Everything She Touches (Elevator Version)

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Got chants stories?

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You can join the conversation by sending your own stories, anecdotes, questions, musings, etc. Let's share\ how these chants get sung! Email us at the contact just below.

CONTACT

ReclaimingQuarterly@gmail.com

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