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The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk Book Club
146 Plays1 year ago
This book makes us ask the hard questions like, what must be given up to achieve the dream of a better future? To heal 5,000 years of violence and destruction, what if it takes 5,000 more years to bend the arc of history? What is the true cost of nonviolence? Carly and Caroline delve into these questions and develop a fuller picture of the solar punk genre.
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Transcript
Introduction and Spoiler Alert
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello listeners, this is your spoiler warning. We will be spoiling The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk and any of the other books we have read this season. Also, this book has some graphic violence, so this discussion may not be appropriate for anyone with sensitivity towards that topic.
00:00:21
Speaker
We hope for a harvest, we pray for rain, but nothing is certain. We say that the harvest will only be abundant if the crops are shared, that the rains will not come unless water is conserved and shared and respected. We believe we can continue to live and thrive only if we care for one another.
00:00:41
Speaker
This is the age of the reaper, when we inherit 5,000 years of postponed results, the fruits of our callousness toward the earth and toward other human beings. But at last we have come to understand that we are part of the earth, part of the air, the fire and the water, as we are part of one another.
Main Characters and Setting
00:01:01
Speaker
Welcome to the Book Club Podcast. Today we are discussing The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk. I'm Caroline, and I absolutely adore this book. Just reading it.
00:01:12
Speaker
Any small bit of it makes me happy. It has a beautiful portrayal of what the world could be. But I think of all the books we've read, this book also has the greatest challenge to the readers about what must be given up and what must be reckoned with to achieve this dream.
00:01:33
Speaker
I'm Carly, and I've found this book hard for those reasons and heartbreaking. I mean, I enjoyed it. It's a beautiful book. I agree with everything you said, but because of that, I found it just kind of hard, you know? This book is just an open challenge to the readers and to the society it's in. But let's give some of the story here first. So the story is set in the year 2048.
00:02:01
Speaker
after a catastrophe has fractured the United States into several nations. The main characters are Maya, a woman in her 90s who first came to San Francisco in the summer of love, Madrone, a young psychic healer and her granddaughter, and Bird, her grandson, who is a prisoner in the South after he was imprisoned following his destruction of a malfunctioning nuclear plant.
San Francisco's Society
00:02:26
Speaker
Maya and Madrone live in the same house, part of a multi-generational polyamorous family.
00:02:32
Speaker
After the catastrophe, the people of San Francisco set up their city to have a sustainable economy using wind power, local agriculture, and the like. It is presented as a mostly pagan city where the streets have been torn up for gardens and streams, where no one starves or is homeless, and where the city's defense council consists primarily of nine elderly women who listen and dream.
00:02:57
Speaker
The city recognizes the four sacred things, earth, air, fire, and water, and does not allow anyone to appropriate them or profit off them or destroy them.
00:03:09
Speaker
Maya talks to her deceased lovers, Johanna and Rio, the grandparents of Madrone. Madrone overextends herself, healing people from a new epidemic and mourning her partner, Sandy, who passed away in the previous epidemic. The Defense Council thinks the epidemics were bio-engineered in preparation for an attack from the South, where the millennialists, also known as the stewards, are in control.
00:03:33
Speaker
Madrone is able to manipulate her patient's chi and focus energy from the earth into her patients to heal them. She calls on the goddess in many forms, including Côte Liqueux, an Aztec mother goddess, and Tiamat, a Mesopotamian primordial goddess
Healing and Suspicion of Epidemics
00:03:49
Speaker
of the sea.
00:03:49
Speaker
to help fight the virus in the spirit realm. The fight leaves her weak, but most of the remaining patients recover. And Maya comes to Madrone to bring her back to corporeal life. Maya and Madrone don't know what happened to Bird, only that he disappeared 10 years ago. Bird wakes up in prison, having no memory of where he is and how he got there. He uses his witch's ability to break out of prison with his friends Hijon and Little John.
00:04:15
Speaker
High John goes back to his people who are leading a rebellion against the millennialist. In other words, the theocratic Christian group who controls the South. Bird and Little John find a community of so-called monsters who have birth defects from the nuclear plant that Bird destroyed. He helps heal them and agrees to come back to teach them how to heal or to send someone who can. Bird also learns that the South is planning to invade San Francisco. Bird makes the long journey on foot back to his home.
00:04:43
Speaker
where he struggles with the trauma of his time in the South. After several months of rest, Madrone travels south to fulfill Bird's promise. She learns that the millennialist government gives their soldiers medications to make their immune systems weak. She creates a process for quarantining the soldiers who defect so that their immune systems can recover. She also meets a group of women who commune with bees
00:05:05
Speaker
to practice a different form of healing. They teach her how to deal with the bee magic. Madrone travels with Hye Jon. While there, she helps the rebellion by teaching people about the four sacred things, which are air, fire, water, and earth, in contrast to the millennialist four purities, moral purity, family purity, racial purity, and spiritual purity.
00:05:27
Speaker
Back in San Francisco, the community plans to meet the invading army with nonviolence and to tell them, there's a place here at our table for you if you want it.
Nonviolent Resistance Plans
00:05:37
Speaker
They will do this because overturning violence is a shot at overturning the 5,000 year history of the earth and the start of something new.
00:05:45
Speaker
When the army invades, San Francisco offers only nonviolent resistance. The army kills people who won't get out of their way. Bird is captured and tortured. He only agrees to help the army when a young girl is threatened. And from then on, he appears to help the Southern Army. The army cuts off the water, but they are divided racially and by class, and individual soldiers start wondering what they're fighting for. When he is being tortured,
00:06:11
Speaker
And as a result of being tortured, Byrd tells the army about San Francisco's secret weapon, which they don't really have. But he claims the secret weapon is San Francisco's relationship with the dead. Byrd paints this as demonic because quite frankly, he's trying to scare them and he's desperate from being tortured.
00:06:29
Speaker
But when he relays this to the council, they realize that this is useful and they start haunting the army by having people, living people, approach individual soldiers and tell the soldiers about the people that the soldiers killed. One soldier, 09, is the subject of this and he loses his mind and shoots the first person who does this to him. Then another from the same family takes that person's place. He shoots that one. Then a third. He finally throws away his gun
00:06:59
Speaker
When the five-year-old from that family steps into the place of the family members he has already killed, he defects from the army and the San Franciscans take him in and start healing him from the immune suppressing drugs. He is the first one, but other soldiers begin to defect after that. Then the army decides to use Bird, who they still have in custody. They drug him and put him on stage, telling him to shoot Maya, his grandmother.
00:07:24
Speaker
He almost does because he is so afraid that she will be tortured if he doesn't. But Rio's ghost tells Bird he has nothing to be ashamed of. He met a force that's stronger than himself. Rio says, force makes us all feel shame. Madrone, who is watching, tries to reach out to Bird with her healing magic. She feels the ghosts of the dead and the history of violence.
00:07:46
Speaker
and she puts that power into bee magic and a bee stings bird. With that, he has an epiphany that the real power is reflected in nature, which is offering itself and asking nothing in return. And he identifies this as the real gift, love, the fifth sacred thing. He lays down the gun, choosing to be killed rather than kill for the army. At that point, the army turns on itself and is
Themes of Violence and Healing
00:08:10
Speaker
defeated. Many of the soldiers stay in San Francisco.
00:08:13
Speaker
Maya, who is 99 years old, seems to be dying. She starts thinking about other places in the world that perhaps are untouched by pollution, places in the ocean where dolphins frolic. The book closes on her hopes and dreams. She would believe, she had always needed to believe, that at daybreak in some warm ocean, seahorses still rose to greet their mates with a circular dance.
00:08:37
Speaker
She had never seen them, but she would go and find them, stranger than any mythical beast, the living creatures of the ancient, unwounded earth." Wow. Yes. This book, unlike, say, the last one, seems to put forward the idea that there's 5,000 years worth
00:08:57
Speaker
of corruption, pollution, and oppression that need to be fixed. I think that's in contrast to some of the other books we've read, like Psalm for the Wild built, which didn't directly correspond to Earth history, but it was pretty well implied that things there started to go wrong during the factory age.
00:09:16
Speaker
which I took to be essentially the Industrial Revolution. And it's been kind of the same with some of our other books. Looking backward to the period where things started going wrong, it seems to be either 50 years ago or maybe 250, but somewhere in that range.
00:09:32
Speaker
But this book, this book is saying no, it's the last 5,000 years have been a history of violence and oppression and mutilation of the earth. So I think the real question from this book is do we need to solve all 5,000 years of history in order to have the society that's pictured here? Just a light question, you know?
00:10:00
Speaker
Yeah, there is a real connection to the past. Maya is always thinking about her past, and she has been a revolutionary since the 1960s. And, you know, it's her generation that has created this city for her grandchildren, for Bird and Madrone. And I found it really interesting how she was so upset that they had this fight in front of them and talked to her
00:10:24
Speaker
her ghost friend Johanna and talk about how they had worked so hard to build the city so that their kids and grandkids wouldn't have to fight so hard. And I thought that was really interesting to include this sort of sadness of essentially she succeeded, but she lived long enough to see the next challenges for what she had built. And there's a real pain and grief in that. Yeah, there is a moment halfway through the book where
00:10:50
Speaker
It sort of transitions from at least what I felt as the reader. Oh, like this is amazing. The society they're describing, they've achieved so much to a realization that it's far from perfect. It's still ongoing. The next generation will have their own problems.
00:11:07
Speaker
It's not solved. Right. So Maya has her own past because she has such a long life. She has her own past to reconcile.
Confronting Personal Traumas
00:11:13
Speaker
And then Madrone has to reconcile and Burt has similar memories. Burt and Madrone both saw their parents killed in violent uprisings when they were children.
00:11:24
Speaker
and that does kind of haunt them. So Madrone has to confront that. She has a very powerful experience floating in the ocean where she's connected to the goddess in the ocean. I love how it's all of these names for the same goddess and through many different religions, like real religions that have actually existed. But she connects to the sea mother goddess
00:11:51
Speaker
and that helps her connect to the memory of her own mother and confronts that very traumatic memory so she's confronting her personal past too and bird loses his memory and has to gain it back i don't know if there's a lot going on there with like your own personal history you know in that last moment that final climax of the story madrone when she's
00:12:12
Speaker
watching Bird, and she's trying to reach out to him. She has this thought that, you know, with all her powers and all her skills, she could only watch and not shield herself from the pain as she no longer hid from her own memories. Like, trying to hide from the pain of this moment is somehow dishonoring it.
00:12:33
Speaker
And she continues to take in, you know, she's drawing on this history to try and fix this, heal this issue that's happening in this violent conflict. And she has a recognition that she has to take in all of it. She has to take in not just the blessings from her ancestors and the blessings from the earth, she has to take in the pain of it too. And I'm making the leap of like the pain of death and the pain of suffering that it all
00:12:59
Speaker
She can't just take one piece of it. She has to take it all in together to be whole and so and that's when they're talking about 5,000 years taking this history and
00:13:11
Speaker
At one point, Bird is like, that's too much for me. I can't take on their responsibility for healing 5,000 years. It's a lot. Yeah. There's a lot in what you just said, and in particular, this idea of hiding from pain. I mean, part of what Bird and Madrone both decide at the end is to not hide from pain and future suffering. And for Bird, that means letting go of the illusion of control. He cannot.
00:13:38
Speaker
control whether or not Maya is tortured or dies. And in letting that go, you know, he's able to act ethically. So I think there's also a thread in here about trying to avoid pain and trying to have control and what that leads you to. And I think perhaps in some ways the culture in the south is an indicator of that.
00:14:02
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really good point. I'm not ready to go there yet and talk about the South just yet. There's a lot to talk about there. Back on the topic of, you know, 5,000 years, right? It makes sense. I mean, probably in a number of ways, but right. Violence, sexual oppression have been around a long time.
00:14:23
Speaker
And maybe we can find exceptions, societies that didn't seem to have that or didn't seem to conduct themselves that way, but they're the minority and the exception, right? Right. And so I know Burt at one point acknowledges that he has ancestors who have been oppressed and have been enslaved. But then he also has ancestors who were the enslavers and were the oppressors. And I thought that was like we are inheritors of all of it.
00:14:53
Speaker
Which I'm having a hard time making the connection of being able to acknowledge that but then also have faith that it can be healed. Right. That's the issue because it's so big when you start talking in terms of millennia of pain and suffering. How can you meet that with a proportional amount of hope?
00:15:13
Speaker
Yeah, can we? Well, so and it's it's similar to like nonviolence, too, when you're talking about Bird recognizing that he doesn't have control and he's willing to die rather than kill Maya and acceptance that his death wouldn't be that big of a deal. Like it's not as bad as it is his. Sorry. There's there's something in that that accepting that your own death
00:15:41
Speaker
isn't the worst thing that could happen or the worst, you know, like isn't even the worst thing that could happen to you. Right. And it's something that I think Lily Fong, the head of the Defense Council early in when they're talking about using nonviolence. And there's one character who I really connected with named Cress, who is like a skeptic on this whole nonviolence approach and wants to fight back. I said some good points. Yeah. Yeah.
00:16:09
Speaker
But Lily, you know, as a very old, wise woman, she's like, well, then we will die. And it's like, I think that's a sort of thing you have, you that you have to go through a lot to come to to learn that, to accept that. So it makes sense to me that it would come from a very old woman who's been meditating about these things for many decades. But but but when you're trying to
00:16:32
Speaker
convince the rest of your city that no, no, no, I swear this is the right way. Yes, some of us will die and some people they do die and it's it's not nice and it's not pretty and it's not there's there's no escaping it. But somehow that's still the happier ending. Yes, that is hard to really fundamentally agree with, right? Like I can say those words and I can see the reasoning.
00:16:59
Speaker
If I sit here and I really think hard and put myself in the frame of mind of everything has a season and a cycle to everything and particularly start thinking about how the earth continues and those sort of soothing thoughts, I could maybe form the sentiment that my own death doesn't matter that much in the face of that. I don't know how long I could feel that.
00:17:23
Speaker
especially when it's not a quick conflict either.
Nonviolence and Sacrifice: Effective?
00:17:27
Speaker
It takes time and people have time to lose their resolve and to start to grieve and really grieve and not want to lose more. That's the part of this book that is hard. Even though there's so much magic involved that is sort of supernatural, it still feels very real. They're just very real consequences to people's decisions. I mean, what if it takes another 5,000 years?
00:17:52
Speaker
I don't know. I mean, what, what do I care? What happens 5,000 years from now? Right? Like, I don't know. But on the other hand, I mean, if I was convinced my life had that sort of meaning, right? Like I'm slowly bending the arc of the world towards healing and justice. That's a very inspiring idea. But what if it takes 5,000 years, right? It's one thing to say, what if it happens in the next generation or the one after, but what if it takes 5,000 years?
00:18:20
Speaker
Yeah. I think, yeah, that's what Maya is confronting a lot of the time. I think that because you don't get a visitor from 5,000 years in the future saying like, yes, good job. You did it. You have to have faith. Yeah. And there's a lot of talk in this book about how the world is still very damaged even now. I think it's 20 years after whatever this catastrophe was. And it's very clear the world to some extent fell out of the industrial age.
00:18:48
Speaker
But the damage that was done is still around, right? A lot of people in the city are dedicating their lives to cleaning the water. There's like a long description of how the muscles, you know, like the little oysters or whatever in the bay are, some of them are toxic.
Environmental Damage and Solarpunk Comparison
00:19:05
Speaker
And so they're breeding new strains that can filter out the toxins. And like this damage is still ongoing, right? Even though this society, at least right here in San Francisco has changed.
00:19:17
Speaker
Right. It makes sense. Hundreds of years of polluting and extracting the Earth, that doesn't get fixed in a short period of time.
00:19:30
Speaker
I think that's also different from the other Solarpunk books we've read that wherever they start, kind of assume a fresh start at some point and then they tell the story from there. Yeah. I mean, so we're not free from a history. I wonder if talking about the Seder part would help us think about how they're confronting history because that part was really intense. So Maya is Jewish.
00:19:55
Speaker
or was raised Jewish and she has a lot of memories of Seder and so they do have a Seder in this book. It's so funny like the person hosting the Seder talks about like what the significance of each of the foods is and just to remind people that Seder is the Passover meal and
00:20:12
Speaker
the Jewish tradition each of the foods has a particular symbolism related to the Passover story and so one of the hosts is like you know here's what the Jewish tradition says these these mean but really we here's how we connected to earth air fire and water our four sacred things and Maya's like I don't think my Jewish ancestors like that very much
00:20:33
Speaker
and then part of the seder is singing a song that is inviting elijah to join them and they open the door and invite elijah to join the meal and maya's like wait a minute we i don't want elijah here like he's an asshole i don't want him and one of the other guests sam
00:20:50
Speaker
It's like I always remember my family singing this song and I like it's a part of the holiday for me. And it's, you know, so like for Sam, singing the song is it's just about nostalgia and remembering his family and his childhood and the tradition of singing the song. But for Maya, it has real power to bring Elijah to the meal and she does not want him there. And I thought that was a really interesting conflict to have.
00:21:16
Speaker
Yeah. And to be clear, she doesn't want him there because there's a story about Elijah causing 400 priests of Baal to be put to death. And so there's a conflict between welcoming in Elijah in the currently very tolerant pagan society that they're in now in San Francisco, right? And so she calls that out and they end up coming up with a compromise where I think they sing the song
00:21:42
Speaker
But then what they invite in are the ghosts of people who've been oppressed, right? Yeah. So that's just providing that context. That's what they decide to do.
00:21:53
Speaker
What were you saying about the song? They use it, its value is in the nostalgia factor? For Sam, like Sam says, I just like the song. Is that a crime? It brings me happy memories of my childhood, the whole family sitting around the Seder table fighting like we are now. And before that, Maya had said, you're talking about singing an invocation, opening a door to a spirit and feeding him. To me, that's an act of magic.
00:22:19
Speaker
I think I'm a step behind because I just got it. Like what you were saying, we're talking about the past and you're saying, here's this example, the Seder. To someone it's just enjoyable, but to someone else, Maya, we need to really interrogate the roots of it and what it means and change it so that it reflects our current values.
00:22:36
Speaker
right well and then and then the next part of that is that night Maya has a dream where Elijah comes to her and she like lets him have it she's like she says for hundreds of generations Jewish women have invited you in each year to eat the sacred foods prepared by their own hands the egg and the greens
00:22:56
Speaker
the salt water of tears, and the sweet charosette, the unleavened matzah, bread of affliction, we call it. Yet when have you ever lightened so much as a crumb of our affliction? And I'll tell you something else. Those foods are the real carriers of the tradition, the sacred mysteries, not what comes out of your men's mouths, the words and the stories and the endless arguments and explanations, but what we women provide to put into your mouth, the taste of pain, the taste of spring,
00:23:25
Speaker
the taste of hope and new beginnings. Oh, my God, I love Maya so much. I know, right? Oh, she's so awesome. She just lets them have it. Yeah. Right. Right. But Elijah says, yes, you're right. And yes, for centuries, women have doing this. And maybe I have recognized that and I have changed. And now I am fit to be invited. And Maya's like, well, crap.
00:23:51
Speaker
I've had all of this anger and rage towards Elijah. And this dream is what leads her to go to the council and suggest non-violence as an approach to the South. I can feel that frustration of I have an enemy, I've been fighting my enemy, and I have this righteous anger. And then what if your enemy capitulates? What do you do with that righteousness, you know? When he says,
00:24:20
Speaker
what happens to the enemy who's invited to share the feast? Does the enemy not transform, right? And so if you really believe that and someone sits down at your table, you have to let that anger go. You have to transform too. Yeah, yeah, that's right.
00:24:37
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, God. Sorry. I got to calm down. I'm so excited. I mean, I feel so righteous with those words that Maya spoke. And then it's like, no, it's time to put that away. It's time to invite your enemy to your table. And that's what they do. Those are the words that they say to the soldiers who have killed their loved ones.
00:25:00
Speaker
And so I think if we're talking about healing 5,000 years of trauma, of abuse, of pain, it's not as easy to accept that that can be healed, I guess. Maybe that's what I'm getting at. I agree. How do you accept that? You have to want to, I guess. And maybe that's one of the Solarpunk themes that people's beliefs change when they're face to face with the consequences.
Belief, Hope, and Societal Change
00:25:29
Speaker
And maybe, you know, they in the story are standing at a moment of history where they can say, I think accurately, you know, violence has never done any good. We've got the data at this point. We need something new. We can see around us how the earth has been destroyed and poisoned and polluted. And we know enough history to know that violence met with violence just tends to grow one way or another.
00:25:54
Speaker
So maybe there's an argument for it, but also, to some extent, this isn't susceptible to arguments, right? This is hope. This is belief we're talking about. Right. It's faith, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Madrone repeats over and over to herself, we become what we do. And that's, she says that a lot when she's traveling through the South and learning about how people live there.
00:26:19
Speaker
I mean, this book gives us a lot because it gives us the sort of utopian view of the city, but then gives us a good contrast of the South. Like we can see in the story the full results of not believing what our main characters believe and not living in this way. Yeah, let's talk about the South.
Oppressive Southern Society
00:26:38
Speaker
So, brief description of the millennialists or the stewards.
00:26:43
Speaker
It seems that at some point they were pretty much Christian fundamentalists, it sounds like, with that emphasis on sexual purity, which is also an emphasis on racial purity when you get to the bottom of it. Various crises happened and allowed them to consolidate power. Now they own everything and they sit on top of a highly stratified society where even the water is owned.
00:27:08
Speaker
And you know, everyone on the bottom is thirsty and dirty all the time because there's water simply is not available. The surrounding environment has been.
00:27:19
Speaker
stripped bare in a number of ways, both deliberately and then as an unintended consequence of various actions. What I also think interesting is that they are called the stewards, which is a term that appears in the Old Testament and the New, actually. There are some Christians who view that as establishing man's relationship to the earth, that he's a steward over it.
00:27:41
Speaker
and should take care of it but like kind of in the way you take care of something that is put that you own and is supposed to serve you and they're not doing a very good job of taking care of it so i kind of wonder if she's pointing out the contrast between oh yeah i'll take care of this thing i own versus the earth is sacred and i would die to keep it safe right those are very different but they can be united at least if like in a shallow way under a general
00:28:10
Speaker
umbrella of environmentalism of, oh, take care of the earth. Sure, why not? But truly, they're very different. What did you think about the South? Well, the most striking thing is they describe how this millennialist Christian sect split from the previous Christian churches by saying that Jesus was not God made flesh because God, as spirit, would never become flesh.
00:28:38
Speaker
Right, because it's sort of defiling in some way. So they say God is always has been and always will be spirit. I thought that was really interesting that their division is about spirit. And this book is called the fifth sacred thing. And we're told that it's fifth sacred thing is spirit.
00:28:56
Speaker
And so how different, like supposedly their whole faith is about spirit and the purity of spirit, but it's so different from what we see in the North about, like you said, sacred. Well, there the spirit is never embodied. In fact,
00:29:14
Speaker
there's a dichotomy, anything that is embodied and that is fleshy is dirty, lower, sinful, right? Which is a dichotomy you see in certain many strands of Christianity now. This is an extension of existing types of thought, right? And if you see things that are worldly as dirty, yeah, how could you take care of the earth?
00:29:36
Speaker
Yes. Yes. Well, and they see your spirit, your soul as something that can be lost. Like you can do something in such a way that you lose your soul. And once you lose your soul, you lose basically your autonomy as a person. Like Madrone, Madrone and Bird have mixed heritage. Mexican, African-American, Maya is a white Jewish. Like they're all mixed and they speak different languages in San Francisco and they speak a lot of Spanish. Madrone and Bird in particular.
00:30:06
Speaker
And Madrone goes south and she says some phrase in Spanish and they're like, don't speak Spanish or they will, you will lose your soul or like you will lose, you will lose your right to claim you have a soul. Right. And then once that happens, you can be imprisoned, enslaved, used in all sorts of terrible ways. It's really very convenient, right? You have the powers in charge to have a way to determine that some people just don't have any worth
00:30:34
Speaker
and therefore don't have any rights and et cetera, right? It's convenient actually. Right. And so, you know, the declaration that's at the front of the book of the city about how the four sacred things cannot be owned. They belong freely to everyone and cannot be owned or profited from. And then the fifth sacred thing is spirit. That allows spirit to thrive.
00:30:56
Speaker
So if you start from the opposite perspective where you can own earth, air, fire and water, then that in the South, it leads you to be able to own spirit or, you know, people in another way. Like it shifts. Certain people are able to own other people. And it starts with owning the elements, owning the water. I think you're right.
00:31:21
Speaker
Another thing that stood out to me is that somewhere in the book, they're talking about the fifth sacred thing and they say, someone, I think Bird says, sometimes the fifth sacred thing appears as human or in a human form.
00:31:37
Speaker
But not always. It's sometimes also just sort of out in the world, like this overarching presence infusing everything. Whereas the souls that the millennialists talk about seem like locked up in individual people.
00:31:52
Speaker
Yeah, and there's so much I mean, I didn't even realize it because I don't think they use the word spirit so much. But like, every time a drone is like drawing on the earth or drawing on gods or goddesses to help her heal, she's infusing herself with spirit, she's drawing spirit into her. And that communication between her and her patients that sharing of energy and moving of energy to heal, like that's that's the movement of spirit. It wasn't explicitly said, but I think that's what's going on. You're right. Yeah. Yeah, that is another example of
00:32:22
Speaker
spirit, not the spirit, but just spirit moving out and about between people and things in the world. So at the end, Bird calls the fifth sacred thing love. And I think, so I want to talk about sex because in this book, it's like plenty of it. There's plenty of sex. And so Madrone and Bird are part of a polyamorous. There's three other partners in their group, two women and a man.
00:32:50
Speaker
At least. And Sandy was part of it too. And he passed away before the story starts. Maya had relationships with both Johanna and Rio when they were alive and others. I think she had other partners too. But one thing that was interesting, like Madrone and Bird, when they're traveling in the South, they find sexual partners and they each say at different times that having sex with someone from the South was about bodies and they missed that deeper connection.
00:33:17
Speaker
And then there's a scene of polyamorous love where there is a very deep soul connection and it is somewhat healing for Bird.
00:33:27
Speaker
Yes. Yeah, I agree. It is very much presented that way. It's presented as an act that's infused with spirit and also very fleshy. I mean, there's plenty of talk about desire and, you know, the what and why and how, you know, it's not just a spiritual practice. It's clearly both, right? Like some of these descriptions are quite, uh, detailed. Yeah.
00:33:54
Speaker
Yeah, I mean this this sort of thing that wanting that that spiritual connection through physical affection and the fact that it was missing with people from the south and they didn't even know what they were missing,
Spirit, Sexuality, and Polyamory
00:34:06
Speaker
right? Like they didn't even realize I had no idea. Yeah. And that reminded me a little bit of ecotopia. This I this need to like, like, you know, look at me. I'm here. I'm a human. Be with me in this moment. You know, that sort of connection. And do you think the sex is presented in this book?
00:34:24
Speaker
Obviously, much more emphasized the spiritual aspect. They talk about it as though it were a ritual. Sometimes it deliberately is, but sometimes it's just in how it's described. And ritual meaning something that reaffirms your values and connects you to something larger.
00:34:42
Speaker
while still being very fleshy, right? Right. Well, yeah, I think that's a, I mean, as someone who grew up in a Christian house, Protestant Christian, recognizing that these material fleshy things, not just sex, but like also the food of Seder, for example, like there's a connection to the sacred through the body and feeling through your body, your physicality and connecting with the physicality of other people, other things.
00:35:10
Speaker
Yeah, I feel you on that, having been raised similarly. I think there was a bedrock belief that the more abstract something was, the less worldly, the less fleshy, the less concrete and immediate, the better it was. The more moral, the more intellectual, the stronger. Whatever the specific adjective, it was better.
00:35:33
Speaker
Yeah, we've seen polyamory in these stories and I'm wondering how much of that is going to be going forward in our solar punk. Like how much is polyamory part of solar punk in this idea? I think it's a very like I haven't seen it explicitly laid out like why is polyamory part of these better futures where we're better connected to the earth like
00:35:53
Speaker
You know, I think there's an implication that being closer to the earth, being more fully human, leads to polyamory, which, okay, that's a that's a hypothesis, but I haven't seen it really fully explained in these books so far. I think part of it is that there aren't the same
00:36:13
Speaker
underlying ideals of control and the underlying background of isolation that impact so many monogamous relationships. Certainly not all, that's certainly not a given, but a lot of them are impacted and maybe even twisted in a deep way by the desire to kind of own another person, to have one person that's just yours. There are good versions of this. I am happily monogamously married.
00:36:43
Speaker
But you can't deny that there's some, there's some bad ideas floating around in, you know, certain exclusive relationships and how we think about them, right? So maybe there's ideas of ownership in their control, um, both like control of your own desires, control of theirs. Uh, and maybe, you know, polyamory appears in these stories a lot because the underlying values have changed, right?
00:37:09
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. I thought it was interesting. Katie is a woman that Madrone meets in the South and is like the first person that she feels like a real friendship with. And Katie is pregnant with Hye Jon's baby. And when Madrone and Hye Jon go out on a mission, you know, Madrone is
00:37:31
Speaker
really upset and stressed out, and she and Hye Jon comfort each other and have sex. And I know Madrone in that moment, she thinks to herself, why would my friend Katie, who cares about me, deny me this comfort in this moment? And I'm like, oh, poor Madrone. Oh, she does not know. No. And Hye Jon says, well, you're not going to tell Katie. Madrone's like, I can't keep it a secret from her. I wouldn't have done it if I had known it would hurt her. And Hye Jon,
00:37:59
Speaker
Like, so of course she tells Kate she's not going to lie to Katie. Yeah. And Katie gets mad at her and like refuses to be her friend anymore. And Katie says to Madrone that Madrone is like an animal because she just follows her impulses.
00:38:12
Speaker
And I thought that was fascinating. I mean, first of all, is being like an animal a bad thing in Madrone's worldview? I'm not so sure. I mean, definitely not, right? But in Katie's, it is. Right. And I thought it was fascinating this conflict. Two people who care about each other, Katie and Madrone, with these different ideas about how to express love.
00:38:36
Speaker
And Katie is really upset. And I mean, I identify more with Katie in this scenario, personally. Katie, who is fighting the stewards, like she does not agree with their worldview, but she still has this sense of monogamy. It hurts her that Madrone was sleep with Hijon with her partner. So I don't know. I think I'm still trying to figure out why that fascinates me so much, this conflict between Madrone and Katie.
00:39:03
Speaker
Well, part of what's fascinating to me is Madrone just has no idea, right? She's been raised in this other culture where this sort of thing was never questioned. I mean, it's a culture clash and it's a fascinating way to set up this interaction because the whole story is told from the point of view of people like Madrone and Bird.
00:39:24
Speaker
uh, were immersed in this culture. And so you see it from their point of view and it's like, well, I don't know, to me it made sense, even though, you know, obviously I am not from that culture in a number of ways.
00:39:37
Speaker
Yeah, it really puts the onus on Katie to explain why her viewpoint is correct. Starhawk doesn't spend a ton of time on this. It's like a couple of pages maybe, but it's a pretty good example of the culture clash between North and South.
00:39:56
Speaker
Yeah, I mean Madrone gets into a few confusing sexual situations like with Sarah. Sarah like develops this whole fantasy about Madrone and like comes to her a couple times. He's like, are you okay with me finding another lover? And Madrone's like, what are you talking about? Like, yes, of course. Like, why are you even bothering me with this?
00:40:16
Speaker
She has to, like, find patience to, like, be kind to Sarah in that moment. I mean, in the South, purity is so important that, yeah, there is a lot of weight placed on sex, but it's a weight that's not that same power that the Northerners experience with sex. Like, it's not powerful, but it's a weight somehow.
00:40:41
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's one of the things. So Sarah and Madrone have like one sexual encounter and then Sarah thinks they're, she essentially thinks they're beholden to each other in some way. And that's why she keeps coming to Madrone and saying things like, did it hurt your feelings that I, you know, we never, we never had sex again, or does it hurt your feelings to see me with my new partner? And Madrone is just, you know, baffled honestly, but trying to be polite. And she's like, no, it's okay. Right. Yeah.
00:41:12
Speaker
I think this, because Beth and Katie, no sorry, Sarah and Katie come north eventually and start to integrate into the north. And I wonder how that will go. There's also 09 we mentioned in the summary, who is renamed River.
00:41:30
Speaker
And there was some, you know, at the end, I was wondering how this was going to happen with this with the final ending of the of this conflict that so Bird lays down his gun and then River, formerly 09 jumps up and takes the gun and the other soldiers who defected essentially take up the guns and subdue the invading army. And it's like the nonviolence worked.
00:41:56
Speaker
to win over the soldiers who could defeat with violence? Is that too simple? I think that's a little of an overstatement because of the numbers involved. So it seemed like most of the soldiers were one over to nine violence, like the vast numerical majority. But then at the end, it was a showdown between them, the ordinary soldiers,
00:42:24
Speaker
and the elite guard that operated around the general. So my impression is that it was this small percentage that was never going to defect and was not persuaded at all by what this city had to offer. And yes, it's true. There was violence between that group and O-9's unit. But it seemed like a lot of it, for the majority of soldiers, they just defected
00:42:48
Speaker
Left disappeared into the city. It was kind of my impression. I don't know if that makes it better or worse. It is still true that it it ended because someone was violent, right? Yeah, it's curious how these folks are actually going to integrate because like polyamory
Integrating Defected Soldiers
00:43:04
Speaker
There are many, many cultural mores that are probably not even conscientiously thought of, but they just, I mean, they're just part of the way things work. And then, I mean, it's true of every culture, but there's one like tolerating many different languages, tolerating many different religions. Yeah. I mean, how are all these people going to be?
00:43:24
Speaker
integrated and acculturated to the culture here, which is crucial to its way of life, right? I don't know. There's one meaning where they're trying to invoke all the gods. People keep standing up to invoke gods and someone's like, can we just invoke them all at once because we're going to be here all night just invoking gods.
00:43:46
Speaker
So there's some moments of real humor in this book, and many of them I think are in the meetings because there are so many meetings. And it doesn't drag on in the book. I mean, Starhawk is a good writer. She doesn't put you through that. But she does make it clear that the price of this sort of cooperative and democratic lifestyle is a lot of meetings.
00:44:09
Speaker
A lot of meetings and a lot of hours spent, you know, cross legged on the ground, listening to someone standing up and saying their piece, right? Right. Yeah. And as lovely as the society is, not every person in it is lovable all the time.
Human Flaws in Utopia?
00:44:26
Speaker
Oh yeah, definitely not. I mean, there's annoying personalities. There's just kind of grating personalities. There's boring people. I mean, you know, they're all still people.
00:44:36
Speaker
One last thought I'm sort of working on, and it's back to what we talked about earlier when we started about accepting pain, both yours and historical pain. And it's just sticking out to me how much of this book is about torture. I mean, brutal torture, everything with Bird, right? He's tortured for the 10 years. He's a prisoner in the South. And then those wounds continue to plague him.
00:45:04
Speaker
as he continues to the north. And then once the army evades in the north, he is captured again and tortured. It's a lot of time spent.
00:45:14
Speaker
thinking about how someone would stand up to suffering. And I don't know, just because it's such a big percentage of the book, is she making a broader point about how you expect to handle suffering in your own life? I mean, stuff that falls short of torture? What is the point of making... So there's three main characters.
00:45:35
Speaker
90% of one of them, the storyline is about torture, right? Yeah. Well, at the end, I thought it was really interesting. The ghost of Rio says to Bird, you don't have to be ashamed. You're just a person and you met a force that was more powerful and that's okay. And you're ashamed of breaking under torture specifically because he did and he's ashamed of it. So sorry, go on.
00:45:58
Speaker
Yeah, so force makes us all feel shame, which we've talked a little bit about shame before, because I think that's really interesting is like pointing at, you know, where people feel shame or think you should feel shame that tells you the sort of the outlines of what society, what the societal rules are. So yes, right. And it seems like if we if we take that equation, shame tells you where the societal rules are.
00:46:26
Speaker
and force makes us all feel shame, it seems like force is antithetical to society. Or society, some of them, enacts itself through force. If you are being shamed, if you feel shame, that's how you can tell you're being forced to do something. Oh, you're being forced to live according to the rules of a society and that you're not 100% in agreement with at that moment. Right. Or that part of you is not in agreement with, which I think is
00:46:56
Speaker
can be the trickier thing. I don't think that comes up in this book, and maybe it doesn't come up in the others, but certainly in my life, there have been things I agreed with, like overarching principles that I still didn't want to follow, or didn't want to follow at that moment, or part of me didn't want to follow, and I had felt shame about that.
00:47:16
Speaker
You know, that's not to imply it's always wrong to feel shame. I think we said that last time. Some kinds of shame are good and productive. But I don't think that's what her hawk means. I don't think that's... I'm not sure she would feel that way about the shame. What do you think? Okay, just to compare Madrone again. Does Madrone feel shame for hurting Katie's feelings? I don't know that that's... I don't know that's what she feels. I think she's really sad that she hurt her friend and regrets it.
00:47:43
Speaker
And she's like, I even taught him a few things. If you sleep with him again, you might enjoy it more. It's like, that's not helping. No, she definitely doesn't feel shame. I think maybe Starhawk is talking about the more corrosive kind of shame, you know, maybe what we'd call nonproductive guilt or, you know, something that just sort of disables instead of leading to anything.
00:48:07
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, Bird had no good choices. He was a prisoner. He was being tortured. People he cared about were imprisoned and being tortured. Right. And that powerlessness. And yes, he gave in. And I think Rio's comforting him by saying, you had no good choices. You did what you could. And it doesn't make you a bad person. Yeah. You came up against a force stronger than you. That's what Rio says. Yeah.
00:48:36
Speaker
Which I think in a lot of contexts or in a lot of cultures wouldn't be comforting. You know, I think there's this idea that I've certainly sometimes believed that we're supposed to be stronger than anything, like able to stand up to anything, able to take it. And Rio's just like, no, that's not true. There's plenty of things that are stronger than you. Yeah. It's an interesting dichotomy against Madrone who seems so powerful, like everything she comes up against.
00:49:03
Speaker
she conquers and seems to gain more power from it. So I feel bad for Bird, but yeah, because Madrone seems to offer the exact opposite. Like I don't think anyone else feels shame in this book. I don't know if I noticed it. They certainly don't use shame as a
00:49:19
Speaker
corrective force at all in the city. Well, wait, that's not entirely true. At one point, Madrone is asked when she's in the South, she's asked something like, well, why don't people just steal or something like that? And she says, well, you know, their friends wouldn't be very impressed with them. And they would essentially, they would
00:49:37
Speaker
feel social shame. But other than that, which is kind of presented in the abstract and not as something that actually happens, everything, every way that the south or that the north has of doing things is presented as just kind of logical and enjoyable. Right. I mean, there is some mention of like bird when he returns
00:49:56
Speaker
He doesn't just have the physical injuries and scars. He has psychic scars and he closes himself off in a way. It seemed to me that at one point, Madrone was like, we can see each other.
Privacy vs. Community
00:50:12
Speaker
We know when they're lying. You know what I mean? If someone tried to steal, they wouldn't be able to keep it a secret because everyone's so connected and involved with each other that they would know if you had a secret.
00:50:23
Speaker
And so there's there's no like hiding in that. But I don't know. I don't know that there's necessarily something wrong with wanting secrets or privacy. You know what I mean? So like I don't know that that's true for every single person. I can imagine there are plenty of people who really just take joy in knowing things that other people don't. I don't think that that's morally wrong.
00:50:46
Speaker
Right. I mean, this is certainly a culture that is more prone to large group shared everything, but I don't think you're not allowed to have private time. Yeah. It's just our characters are very not private with each other. Yeah. Very true. Do you want to talk about genre themes? Sure. So I think a theme that we've definitely seen before, albeit handled different ways, is how to handle violence. What is the solution?
00:51:16
Speaker
And remembering Ecotopia, we had the war games that sort of drained off that energy. And that was overall sort of utilitarian, like it was bloody and people were injured, but far fewer than were injured if they had let people just have those violent impulses and be out in society. Here, there is a, what I feel like is a more direct answer, but a far more intimidating and demanding one, which is nonviolence.
00:51:45
Speaker
Right. But if someone is not able to integrate, they can go live with the wild boar people and the wild boar people go hunt boars and they're allowed in the city once a year to sell their meat. It's very convenient to have these wild boar people who just take all your cash offs. Another theme that we've seen again and again is the importance of one's relationship to nature that is really centered in these stories. And here it is.
00:52:14
Speaker
the center. I mean, it is the sacred center of one's life. Yeah. Okay. So open display of emotions and public display of what you'd call private moments. Can you tell me some examples of that? Remind me in the story of that.
00:52:29
Speaker
So that's what I think we were talking about just a moment ago. This society, like many of the other ones we've seen, has lots of people living together in one house. Nobody lives off by themselves. People are just constantly around. There are a lot of relationships.
00:52:46
Speaker
I mean, there's a couple of moments with Bird where he has recently returned from the South and clearly struggling. And people are just around him all the time, sort of prodding him and urging him to get it out, like say it, tell us what happened. And it's effective in the story, but it is very pushy and communal, right? I think it's interesting that's a theme that seems to go along with
00:53:12
Speaker
these other more overtly solar punk themes. So I like how that keeps coming up. Yeah, it makes me wonder if like giving up isolation, how much privacy do you have to give up to give up isolation? That seems like a cost. If we were moving into a better society, that's something I would want to think about. What's the trade off between a strong community and a loss of privacy? Yeah, that's the tipping point.
00:53:36
Speaker
You know, other themes we've seen obviously, plenty of futuristic technology.
Futuristic Crystal Technology
00:53:41
Speaker
I don't think we really talked about it in this episode, but the city has some sort of futuristic crystal technology that essentially, it sounds like the crystals have auras and that's essentially the internet.
00:53:55
Speaker
They're energetic. They have energy, and if you come to them with the wrong energy, they will not give you the information you want. Right. They won't operate under stress. Any other themes you noticed?
00:54:11
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there's a moment where Bird is walking north and he's left his fellow inmates who broke out behind. And he just is able to climb a hill or something and finally see the ocean and have the sunshine on his skin. And it has a real healing effect on him. And I was wondering if that, just the concept of nature of sunshine
00:54:36
Speaker
and ocean and fresh air, like having this, this amplified effect on, on a person. Is that, is that a part of Slurpunk regenerative effect? Yeah, I think that's been a theme. And honestly, that's been part of why these books are so pleasant to read because there's so many descriptions of nature. Yes. And gardening and yeah, I love anything with the gardening. I'm there for it. Yeah. Um,
00:55:05
Speaker
Anything else? No. Final thoughts? I still love this book. Yeah. Every time I read it, I adore it. Yeah. I think it's clear with the trade-offs. It's clear laying out many different trade-offs in place, not just
00:55:28
Speaker
I like that it feels real in that way, and I like that it gives us that reality that there's not a simple solution, or even simple solutions require deeper change within ourselves.
00:55:45
Speaker
Yeah, that's what I really love about this book. It has all the pleasing images and cool ideas that I like in Solarpunk. But it also has this ballast of what would that mean? What would the sacrifices be? What would you need to believe and hope for? And so it just has a depth to it that I just keep coming back to again and again.
00:56:10
Speaker
Yeah. Listeners, what did you think of The Fifth Sacred Thing? Have you read any other books by Starhawk? What do you think about solar punk, utopias, dystopias, magic? Let us know by recording a voice memo and emailing it to openingquestionatgmail.com. You can also complete the feedback form on our website at bookclubpod.com. We will read your responses and play your voice memos on our feedback episode at the end of the season.
00:56:37
Speaker
Our next book discussion will be about Suncatcher, Seven Days in the Sky by Aaliyah G. Read it with us. We'll release that episode in two weeks. You can get your copy by using the affiliate link in our show notes. Also subscribe to our sub stack at bookclubpod.substack.com.
00:56:59
Speaker
The Book Club Podcast is produced by me, Carly Jackson, and Caroline Gorman. Music and audio editing by Alex Marcus. Thanks for listening.