The Fifth Sacred Thing

About The Fifth Sacred Thing

An epic tale of freedom and slavery, love and war, and the potential futures of humankind tells of a twenty-first century California clan caught between two clashing worlds, one based on tolerance, the other on repression.

Declaration of the Four Sacred Things

The earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as air, fire, water, and earth.

Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them.

To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves became the standards by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. no one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy.

All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity.

To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible.

To this we dedicate our curiosity, our will, our courage, our silences, and our voices. To this we dedicate our lives.

Praise for The Fifth Sacred Thing

“This is wisdom wrapped in drama.” —Tom Hayden, California state senator

“Starhawk makes the jump to fiction quite smoothly with this memorable first novel.” — Locus

“Totally captivating . . . a vision of the paradigm shift that is essential for our very survival as a species on this planet.” —Elinor Gadon, author of The Once and Future Goddess

“This strong debut fits well against feminist futuristic, utopic, and dystopic works by the likes of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ursula LeGuin, and Margaret Atwood.” — Library Journal

1. Complete Title: The Fifth Sacred Thing (Maya Greenwood, #1)
2. Format: Paperback
3. Language: English
4. Number of Pages: 486
5. Publication Time: June 1, 1994
6. Publisher: Bantam
7. ISBN: 0553373803
8. ISBN13: 9780553373806

About Starhawk

Starhawk

Starhawk is an author, activist, permaculture designer and teacher, and a prominent voice in modern Goddess religion and earth-based spirituality. She is the author or coauthor of thirteen books, including the classics The Spiral Dance and The Fifth Sacred Thing. Her latest is the newly published fiction novel City of Refuge, the long-awaited sequel to The Fifth Sacred Thing.

Starhawk directs Earth Activist Training, (www.earthactivisttraining.org), teaching permaculture design grounded in spirit and with a focus on organizing and activism. “Social permaculture”—the conscious design of regenerative human systems, is a particular focus of hers.

She lives on Golden Rabbit Ranch in Western Sonoma County, CA, where she is developing a model of carbon-sequestering land use incorporating food forests and savannahs, planned grazing, and regenerative forestry.

She travels internationally, lecturing and teaching on earth-based spirituality, permaculture, and the skills of activism. Her web site is www.starhawk.org.

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