Starhawk published The Spiral Dance in 1979 through Harper and Row, a mainstream press rather than an occult specialty publisher, which itself signaled the book's ambition to reach beyond an already initiated audience. It succeeded on a scale few books about modern Witchcraft had before it, and it has never gone out of print since.
Rather than leaving the original text to age quietly, Starhawk revisited it twice in public. A tenth anniversary edition appeared in 1989, and a twentieth anniversary edition in 1999, each adding new introductions and notes in which she reflects openly on how her own practice, and the wider Pagan movement the book had helped build, had changed in the intervening years. She left the original 1979 material largely intact rather than rewriting it, treating the earlier text as a historical document worth preserving even where her own thinking had since moved past parts of it.
That editorial choice is itself informative about what kind of book this was meant to be. A living tradition's founding text, updated with commentary rather than replaced by revision, lets a reader see both where the tradition started and how its own founder watched it grow. Few religious founding texts get that treatment from their own author, twice, in full public view, twenty years apart.