Commentary on the Charge of the Goddess 5: The Great Mother

A detail of Birmingham's disused Methodist Central Hall

...of the Great mother, who was of old also called among men...

Sources and Influences

Ye Bok of Ye Art Magical: of the Great Mother, who of old was also called among men

Ye Bok is obviously the immediate source of these lines, since it was what was being rewritten to form the new version of the Charge, however the passage is clearly influenced by the ideas in this passage from Apuleius's Metamorphoses:

‘For the Phrygians that are the first of all men call me the Mother of the gods at Pessinus; the Athenians, which are sprung from their own soil, Cecropian Minerva; the Cyprians, which are girt about by the sea, Paphian Venus; the Cretans which bear arrows, Dictynnian Diana; the Sicilians, which speak three tongues, infernal Proserpine; the Eleusians their ancient goddess Ceres; some Juno, other Bellona, other Hecate, other Rhamnusia, and principally both sort of the Ethiopians which dwell in the Orient and are enlightened by the morning rays of the sun, and the Egyptians, which are excellent in all kind of ancient doctrine, and by their proper ceremonies accustom to worship me, do call me by my true name, Queen Isis.’ (Apuleius (translated by W. Adlington): The Golden Ass (The Loeb Classical Library). William Heinemann, London, 1958, 11.5)

Thealogy

There is no single unified understanding of divinity amongst Wiccans and other Neo-Pagans. All positions on a continuum from monotheism to hard polytheism can be found. A few – very few - witches are actually monotheistic, believing that there is only one God. Some are henotheistic, a system of belief in which only one God is honoured, but others are acknowledged to exist – an example of this would be the Dianic practice of honouring ‘the Goddess’ who may have many names: the God may exist, but he is not normally honoured. The most common mode of belief among Wiccans is duotheistic, belief in the Goddess, and the God, who in practise may be syncretisms (i.e. a mixture; this word is most often used to refer to the mixing of elements from different religions) of any number of Gods and Goddesses into two on the basis of gender. It may or may not be seen that these divinities have different characteristics at different times, or may be known by many names, a position which is verging towards a ‘soft’ polytheism. Reaching the other extreme of the scale from monotheism is ‘hard’ polytheism, in which ancient Gods and Goddesses are seen as individual entities; while there may be an aspect in which there is a single ‘Being’ behind these many divinities, they are never seen as amalgamating with each other, but strictly separate.
Another continuum of belief and practice is found in what these Goddesses and Gods are believed to be. Again at one end of the spectrum is the belief that these divinities are genuine individual entities, who may be seen as superior beings to us, or there may be an element in which humans contribute to the existence of divinities by their worship of them. At the other end is the opinion that the Gods and Goddesses are psychological constructs, often referring to parts of our conscious or unconscious as Jungian archetypes. It has even been argued that it is possible to be a practising Wiccan with no actual belief in the divinities involved. As these differing views impact on the study of the understanding of divinity found in the Charge, one view is immediately apparent in the Charge itself: that there was of old a Great Mother, who was known by many names.
Who is or was the Great Mother? There are two main historical problems in answering this question: the first is that we as Pagans/Wiccans/Witches tend to think in terms of the Goddess, and so are in danger of reading this archetype into antiquity. At this length of time, and with the relative paucity of evidence, we cannot come to an unbiased understanding of how ancient people saw their divinities, and our understanding is coloured by what has come since, including such things as Romanticism, Darwinism, and even the myth of the Great Goddess itself. The second problem is that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we look back on Gardner’s development and understanding of his religious texts through a filter of sixty years of modern witchcraft, and under the influence of both the Feminist movement, and the modern Goddess movement.
I shall therefore attempt to outline the likely influences on Gardner’s understanding of the Great Mother, sources which are known to have influenced him and other Wiccans subsequently, but who did not have an influence on the thealogy of the Charge, and also consider what has come since his time, which colours our own understanding of who ‘the Goddess’ is.
Hutton dates the beginning of this idea of one female deity who is either the embodiment of all other goddesses or the most important, and the personification of the earth and the moon, to ‘a couple of centuries ago.’ (Ronald Hutton: The Triumph of the Moon. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001, p. 32. In this survey I have combined the view of Hutton with that of Goodison and Morris (covering the same ground, but with more emphasis on the modern Goddess movement) in Lucy Goodison and Christine Morris (editors): Ancient Goddesses. British Museum Press, London, 1998.) Until that time pagan deities were understood as they were in ancient times: as individual entities.
Around 1800 the impact of the Romantic Movement increased reference to female divinity in literature, emerging in an image of this divinity as personified in the green earth and the white moon. Meanwhile a scholarly debate was ongoing as to whether primitive religion was a repository of noble truths, which later degenerated, or a combination or superstition and fear. Models of both ‘progress’ and ‘deterioration’ of religions were used, depending on the writer’s point of view. A German classicist first suggested in 1849 that the Goddesses of ancient Greece had been preceded by a single one, who was worshipped in prehistoric times. The figures excavated from prehistoric graves, derogatorily dubbed ‘Venuses’ were not at this time interpreted as figures having any religious significance.
This changed in 1901, when Sir Arthur Evans changed from his previous view that these figures had been placed in male graves as symbolic ‘concubines’, to the view that ancient Crete had worshipped a single Goddess, began to interpret female figurines in the light of this theory, and believed that this Goddess was seen as both maiden and mother.
In 1903 Sir Edmund Chambers published a slightly different view: that the whole of Europe had worshipped a single Goddess in two aspects of creatrix and destroyer. Jane Harrison believed that this Goddess had three aspects, the first two named maiden and mother. She did not name the third.
Perhaps of more immediate influence on Wicca (since his works are still referenced by many Wiccan writers) is Sir James Frazer, who ultimately came to state that the whole of Europe worshipped a dual Goddess, mother and daughter. By the 1910s it was standard for textbooks of Greek religion to say that the veneration of a single Goddess later degenerated into the worship of multiple divinities.
Contemporary to these developments in the fields of history, anthropology, and archaeology, was the influence of Darwinian theories of development, so that society was seen to develop from an ancient matriarchal society, into a modern civilised patriarchal one, and the influence of the Jungian idea of the Mother archetype. Of course as this affects the theory of the Great Mother, the progress has been seen as starting from worship of a Great Mother and deteriorating into the worship of single polytheistic divinities, before developing again into monotheisms or henotheisms. The connection of an idea of improvement in connection with Darwinian theories is apparent here, and apparently historical accounts can be coloured by the moral assumptions of the viewer. A hopefully more morally-neutral view, which is not contradicted by the historical evidence, would be that religious beliefs and practices centred on individual deities were earlier in time than the later monotheistic beliefs.
There are several later writers who are known to have had a direct influence on Gardner and particularly on his composition (or fleshing-out of fragmentary inherited material) of the Charge, which includes lengthy direct quotations from two main published authors.
The first is Aleister Crowley: the passages from his works included in the Charge are either directly from or from works quoting his Liber Al vel Legis, his Book of the Law. An appropriate choice, since this is itself a channelled work which Crowley received from the Goddess Nut, for a third of which this Goddess is speaking. Gardner uses this slightly differently in the Charge, in that Liber Al does not mention a single Great syncretistic Mother, but individual deities, and Gardner has the Great Mother who is known by many names, speaking these words.
A second direct influence on Gardner in composing the Charge was Leland’s Aradia, or Gospel of the Witches. Aradia, the daughter of the Goddess Diana, is sent to earth as the saviour of the oppressed, very much in the tradition of the witch-cult as protest movement. There is again no mention of a single syncretistic Goddess, however, and once again Gardner uses the text slightly differently from how it appears originally, since in the Gospel it is Aradia who is speaking about her mother Diana. Once again Gardner changes emphasis to have the speaker speaking about herself.
Two other writers must be named, who have both been widely influential in Wicca since Gardner’s day; direct quotation from them in the Charge is unlikely, although there is evidence there of Graves’s ideas. One is Robert Graves, who in his book The White Goddess builds on the theory of a single Great Mother (which already existed) with three aspects (from Harrison), related them to the waxing, full and waning phases of the moon, and called the third phase the Crone (which is not mentioned in the Charge). This book could have influenced Gardner and/or Valiente in composing successive versions of the Charge, although direct quotation in the text is not apparent. The other writer is Dion Fortune, whose influence on Wicca has been great since Gardner’s time. Hutton does not think she had an influence on the development of Wicca (Ronald Hutton: Dion Fortune and Wicca (Address given at the Company of Avalon’s Dion Fortune Seminar 2009). <www.companyofavalon.net/documents/RonaldHuttonaddress.DF.doc> Updated 2009, Accessed 8.3.10.), although Clifton feels that the ‘elements and purpose’ of Drawing Down the Moon are already present in her novel The Sea Priestess, and reports that Valiente wrote to him in 1985, saying that Gardner was very fond of Fortune’s novels (Chas Clifton: A Goddess Arrives: The Novels of Dion Fortune and the Development of Gardnerian Witchcraft. <http://www.paganlibrary.com/editorials/goddess_arrives.php> Accessed 8.3.10.).  There are two possible influences on the idea of the Great Mother of the Charge from her novels. One is the famous dictum of ‘All the gods are one god, and all the goddesses are one goddess, and there is one initiator,’ from her novel The Sea Priestess (Dion Fortune: The Sea Priestess. Samuel Weiser, York Beach, Maine, 1985, p. 227.), but this idea alone could have come from other sources. Of her two novels in which the influence of Paganism and Goddesses further increase, and which have been influential in Wiccan circles since, Moon Magic could not have had an influence on the thealogy of the Charge because it was not published until the 1950s, and The Sea Priestess could chronologically have been read by Gardner, but Hutton feels it is not likely because it was published privately and did not sell well through the 1940s, although Valiente lists it among the books of which he was fond.
These are the likely and less likely influences on Gerald Gardner, in identifying the origins of his understanding of the Great Mother. It is clear that while Aradia and Crowley’s writings had a direct influence, their theology is not the same ‘Great Mother’ idea embodied in the Charge, and also clear that the theology of the Charge was present in wider cultural sources. A document which does contain the same syncretistic Goddess thealogy of the Charge – the Metamorphoses of Apuleius – does not show any direct influence on it. Gardner may have referred to it – there is a copy in the catalogue of his books  – and decided on other sources (New Wiccan Church International: Gerald Gardner’s Library. <http://www.newwiccanchurch.org/gglibrary/ac.htm> Updated 2005, Accessed 9.3.10. This catalogue cannot wholly be relied on for the contents of Gardner’s library at the time of his death, as the collection appears to have been added to, including books published since his death in 1964.).
The idea which is found both in Apuleius and in the Charge is the idea of a single Great Mother Goddess, who incorporates all other Goddesses into herself – in Apuleius she is identified as Isis, who also appears under other names. The only other appearance of this idea in classical antiquity is found in Lucian’s De Dea Syria – both these works are relatively late, dating from within the Christian era. In antiquity Gods and Goddesses were often conflated with each other, incorporating names and features from other divinities as their cult developed, including such titles as ‘mother of the Gods’. An example of this tendency would be the cult of Cybele, one of whose titles was ‘Magna Mater’ – Great Mother, in Latin; the difficulty of understanding the nature and history of the Goddess’s cult is complicated by the later complications of her history, and ‘the modern “myth” of the Great Mother. (Simon Price and Emily Kearns (editors): The Oxford Dictionary of Classical Myth and Religion. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, p. 140.)
It must be said that the overarching consensus from the academy is that the evidence which is used to support an ancient, matriarchal, single-Goddess-worshipping society, does no such thing. As far as I can see, the consensus is that the evidence is of such a nature that no final understanding of these matters can be achieved. The conservative understanding seems to be that no final conclusions can be reached on the religious beliefs or practices of the prehistoric world, but that the evidence does not likely suggest that ‘human society and religion began with the worship of a Goddess in a peace-loving, egalitarian, matriarchal society, and that female divinities everywhere represent survivals of this early mode of religious expression.’ (Goodison and Morris, op. cit., p. 6.)
Since Gardner’s time support for the idea of ‘the Goddess’ and of ‘Goddess civilisations’ has expanded, largely among non-academics, but also by the occasional academic (For a work by the academic who takes the concept of ‘the Goddess’ as read, see Maria Gimbutas: The Language of the Goddess. Thames and Hudson, London, 1989.).  The influence of the feminist movement since the 1960s has been shown, both in feminist and feminist-inspired reinterpretations of the available evidence, and in a search for suppressed feminine figures and the feminine divine in the past. Within the modern witchcraft community, the influence of this movement has been huge. Starhawk begins her influential book on witchcraft with a recounting of the myth of an ancient peaceful matriarchal Goddess culture (Starhawk: The Spiral Dance. Harper San Francisco, New York, 1999.).  Another strand is found in explicitly feminist witchcraft. In consequence witchcraft has tended to be seen (from the inside and outside) as a women’s activity (‘...Goddess rituals, spellcasting, and other womanly arts...' (Zsuzsanna Budapest: The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries. Wingbow Press, Oakland, 1989, subtitle.)), whereas other magical practices are for men (‘...one type of magic – chaos magic – appealed to ‘heavy metal’ motorcyclists without means.’ (Tanya Luhrmann: Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1989, p. 29.)), to the extent that more recently attempts have been made to reclaim the masculine in modern Pagan magico-religious traditions (For example Isaac Bonewits: The Pagan Man. Citadel Press, New York, 2005.).
Where does all this leave us in attempting to understand both what Gardner would have understood by ‘the Great Mother’ and what influences contribute to our understanding of her? At the time when Gardner was  developing Wicca as we know it from the sources he had inherited, it would have been a commonplace among non-academics (for which support could be found in the work of some academics), that the first religious belief of humans was a single Goddess, later deteriorating or developing into a number of Goddesses, which later still developed or deteriorated into worship of Gods (or a God). Goddess-worship was something which had an aura of antiquity, and was already present or incorporated into the early theology of Wicca.
Which raises the question of why people want to believe in the Goddess today and whether it matters to them that ancient peoples did not believe in her. Or  whether ancient peoples lived in peaceful, matrifocal civilisations. I would argue that it is different to believe in the idea of a single ancient Great Mother Goddess, and to live with whatever the Goddess means to us. To become too attached to a particular reading of history, which becomes an orthodoxy, has the danger of fossilising our modern spiritual traditions, and of exposing these traditions to ridicule if the foundation myths are disproved. Apparently the Flat Earth Society still exists.
Rather the mythology (using this word in its best sense) of ‘the Goddess’ and ‘Goddess civilisations’ provides us with a vocabulary to express modern ideals. As a religious movement we have not tended to espouse a past ‘Golden Age’, although Starhawk’s telling of Mellaart’s version of Catal Huyuk’s history comes close to a Golden Age myth. It does not so much matter whether it actually happened in the past, as whether we can do what it takes to help to create a Golden Age in the future.
Similarly ‘the Goddess’ may not refer to an actual single deity worshipped at any time or place in the past, but this idea of her worship can serve a modern function of referring to those in the past who have practised key activities of our modern religion: attempting to live in right relation with other people and the earth, knowing that there is nothing in me and other people that is not of the Gods, taking responsibility for ones actions in creating the present and the future. Understanding and acknowledging the sources of our own mythology is important for intellectual credibility, but since magical paths are usually based in experience rather than belief, the words ‘the Goddess’ can mean different things to different witches, whether as the energy which holds everything in life, or as a psychological construct, and so on. As magical people, we can hold two contradictory concepts in mind at once, and so it is both possible to think of ‘the Goddess’ (understood as you will), and maintain an awareness that she may not have been a historical reality.
The point of this for us as modern witches is what the Goddess can do today, perhaps best expressed by Hilary Valentine:

‘There is a saying in Witchcraft that “a healthy priestess makes all things whole.” Just as we cannot be completely happy in an unjust and disordered family or community, so a family or community cannot remain as unjust or disordered if one member heals. We can learn to call on the power of the Goddess and her ancient cultures to change ourselves. And we will inevitably change our surroundings, making our personal world and the people we love healthier, happier, and more whole.’ (Starhawk and Hilary Valentine: The Twelve Wild Swans. Harper San Francisco, New York, 2004, p. 26.)