The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess

The Spiral Dance is Starhawk's own foundational 1979 book, published by Harper and Row, and is the founding published statement of the Reclaiming tradition of witchcraft, articulating a specifically feminist and activist understanding of Goddess spirituality that shaped much of the wider modern Pagan movement that followed. As the founder's own text it is the correct primary source for what this tradition originally claimed and taught, in Starhawk's own words, rather than a later secondhand description. Its limit is exactly that status, it is a practitioner's founding statement of a living tradition she was actively building, not a historical or scholarly account of witchcraft's origins, so a claim about Wicca's actual historical roots needs a scholarly source such as Hutton's history of modern Pagan witchcraft alongside this primary text.