Starhawk's Pagan Chants - stories & lore

 

Starhawk's Pagan Chants: Reclaiming Sings Ritual Music by Starhawk - released Spring 2025 - includes ten classic chants going back to 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

 

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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2. Rise with the Fire (Funky Samba Version)

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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.rec

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3. Weave and Spin (from Campfire Chants)

 

RQ: Tell us about this song.

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

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.

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.’”

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

RQ: What about the other lyrics?

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.

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

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.

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

Starhawk: No, just those two.

George: This might have been the first song chosen for this album – ever since I learned it for the 1993 ritual, I’ve wanted to record it. Weave and Spin pops up regularly at Bay Area rituals. In recent years, it has been the closing spiral dance song at Teen Earth Magic, where the line “Take the dream and make it real” captures our aim – to take our magic back into the world.

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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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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 used this some years as the closing song at Teen Earth Magic, and it’s a regular part of Reclaiming’s Elements of Magic classes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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Coming soon!

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Got chants stories?

 

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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