In her book The Spiral Dance, Starhawk relates a story told to her by Victor Henry Anderson:

Victor Anderson, Faery Priest, tells the story that when he was a young man beginning to study the Craft, he met two shining, beautiful guides on the astral, who told him that he must make a choice. If he wanted great magical power, he must give up the hope of lasting love in his life. His reply was “Powers of Evil, begone! Get you to the Outer Darkness! I will have both power and love.”

“How did you know that they were evil?” I [Starhawk] asked him.

“No truly helpful being will demand that you give up something that is natural and beautiful,” he said. [Starhawk, The Spiral Dance, Twentieth Anniversary Edition, 1999, pg 172]

Victor Anderson did not say whether it was ‘power’ or ‘love’ that was natural and beautiful. My first impulse is to say, “it is love that is beautiful,” for power has, at best, a mixed reputation for so many of us. Yet Victor Anderson’s statement is ambiguous and raises the question: How is the exercise of power, magical or otherwise, compatible with love?

In any magical working I hold power. I set my intent, and in performing the ritual I intend to change the world. At minimum the ritual will affect myself, my own spirit and psyche, enabling me to use power to bring my intent into manifestation. However, as a Witch, I also see the world as animate, filled with consciousnesses not my own. My ritual, an action in the little world of my sacred space, is seen and heard by the larger Animate World, and that World listens and changes in response to our ritual. Those who listen may actively aid in accomplishing my intent. Both may be true; they do not contradict each other.

In either case, my magical ritual is an exercise in power, for power is the ability to bring forth change according to the will of the ones performing the magic.

Thus I believe Victor Anderson meant that both power and love are natural, beautiful—and inseparably intertwined. In contradiction to the lie told by the guides, it is impossible to truly have power without being able to love.

Power without love is ugly, possibly unnatural, and even a contradiction. Ultimately, all power is relational. Any unilateral expression of power leads to ongoing conflict, wastes energy, and always has unintended consequences. Application of such power leads only to temporary change and often, a worsening situation for all.

Yet love without the power to manifest change is also ineffective—so solipsistic that it is no longer recognizable as love. Love changes the one loved as well as oneself, and thus love is always an exercise in beautiful and natural power.

Perhaps it is best when I, as a Witch, view any action I take in my life as magic. My actions always have an intent (even if that intent is unconscious), and they always cause change, which is the exercise of power. When magic is performed in the light of Starhawk’s and Anderson’s teaching, we awaken a fierce power: the ability to manifest love, love manifest in a life lived in right relationship with all those who live.

Not just love. Not just power. A witch must have both.