The word witch throws us back into a world who is a being, a world in which everything is alive and speaking, if only we learn its language.  The word brings us back to the outlawed awareness of the immanence of the sacred, and so it reeks of a holy stubbornness, an unwillingness to believe that the living milk of nurture we drink daily from the flowing world can be reduced to formula administered from a machine.

Starhawk, Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery