Commentary on the Charge of the Goddess 15: and by many other names.

Sources and Influences

BAM: and by many other names.

Apuleius Metamorphoses: ...manifested alone and under one form of all the gods and goddesses. (11.5)

Thealogy

‘By many other names’ means of course that the Great Mother of the Charge is known by many different names, but both the names used here, and the fact that the Goddess has many names, have significance for Wiccans.
The occult Law of Names (Philip Bonewits: Real Magic. Sphere Books, London, 1974.)  indicates that the knowledge of something’s true name means gaining control over it. In an everyday magical sense this can mean the correct diagnosis of the problem for which you seek a remedy. There is no point casting a spell for, say, a whole new career to solve your money problems, when working some overtime would solve them. If the nature of the problem is not apparent, a divination will often reveal it.
However when it comes to Gods and Goddesses the significance of names refers rather to knowing their true nature: invoking Discordia for a love spell would not get you very far. The idea of a Great Mother does not actually need to contradict the idea of individual cults of Goddesses with other names, whether or not these are seen as part of the greater whole or individual personalities. For example in Hinduism, where honour may be paid to many divinities or to one without excluding the existence of others, these many aspects may still be seen as expressions of the one (Kim Knott: Hinduism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998.).   This may be contrasted with Vodou, which is often seen by westerners as polytheistic, but in reality there is only one God, who is not seen as involved in the daily occurrences of humans’ lives, and so the work is done with spirits rather than the God, or even Gods (Karen McCarthy Brown: Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991.).  Neither of these views is exactly the same as that given by Gardner in The Meaning of Witchcraft, in which he wrote that the witches believe that there is a Supreme Deity or Prime Mover, to which he refers as ‘It’, which is not known to us, either because It does not wish to be known, or that we are not sufficiently evolved to do so. He writes that the Supreme Deity has therefore appointed ‘under-Gods’, which are the tribal gods of various human societies. He names ancient Egyptian Gods as these, and even Yahweh of the Hebrews, and states that the witches believe each people should worship its own Gods (Gerald Gardner: The Meaning of Witchcraft. Weiser Books, York Beach, 2004.).
Conversely he also sees the cult of a single Goddess under many names as the one universal factor in human religious belief and practise, who seems to be much more involved in human life than is implied in the words above:
‘When you enquire the reasons for these resemblances [between the religious ideas which come naturally to people], at the bottom you always find the Cult of the Great Mother of all Living, the Moon Goddess. We may know her best as Ishtar of Babylon, but she was worshipped under many names in the various countries where she ruled; Attar, in Mesopotamis; Ather, in Arabia; Astar, in Abyssinia; Atargatis in Syria, and Astarte or Artemis in Greece. For she is the force which expresses itself in the giving and taking (or receiving again) of life, and she is also the “love force”...
‘She is the Great Mother of All, the giver of fertility and the power of reproduction. All life comes from her; all life-giving crops and fruits, animals and people are her children. She is the Bringer and the Taker Away, the Goddess of Life, Death and Rebirth; but all in a sweetly loving way. Laughingly she has been described as “The Mother who lovingly spanks and kisses her children.”’ (Ibid. p. 111)

The fact remains that in the Charge, without excluding the possibility that she can be called by many other names, a number of specific names are used for the Great Mother. I do not believe that the particular choice of Goddesses for naming in this key ritual element of Wicca to be a random selection of Goddesses. Because this is such a key ritual I believe that the Goddess names selected reflect the thealogy of Wicca, and express Wicca’s nature as a religious movement. Whether or not Gardner believed that he and his collaborators were continuing an old religion, resurrecting an old religion, or creating a new one, I do not believe the choice of names here to be a case of, as Elliot Rose puts it in his imaginative creation of a witch religion, ‘Gods with Persian names and Greek bodies would prove, on examination, to have thoroughly Bloomsbury minds...’ (Elliot Rose: A Razor for a Goat. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1989, p. 201.).  Rather I believe both that the selection of names indicates key elements of Wicca.
However there are a number of difficulties in identifying these elements. The first is that I realised I personally knew next to nothing about these Goddesses, which, recalling the difficulty the coven members of the 1950s had in pronouncing the names, makes me wonder how many other Pagans are in a similar situation. None of them is my personal Goddess, so I have not had cause to find out about them, and it is certainly true that the Goddesses’ large geographical spread mean that their names alone can be alienating.
The second difficulty is that the Pagan revival which followed the middle of the twentieth century means that it is difficult to know how a person of Gardner’s age and education would have understood these divinities, because we are seeing them through the filter of subsequent publishing be people who actually believe and work with ancient Gods and Goddesses. The catalogue of his library is of doubtful help here, since it has obviously been added to since his death, suffice to say it inclines more towards esoteric subjects than to solid academic works on the classics, history and comparative mythology of these Goddesses.
A third difficulty is that the origin of most of these Goddesses is in the ancient world, which causes difficulties of interpretation. ‘History began at Sumer’, indeed, but it cannot therefore be assumed that the whole history has been revealed, or that conclusions can be drawn from it. The Greeks and Romans in particular left a vast range of literary as well as artefactual evidence, which in some cases is doubtful of interpretation, and sometimes the most ‘popular’ interpretation of a passage or artefact is considered wrong by others.
The principle I therefore have followed in writing about the Goddesses named in the Charge was to try to find elements in their mythology connected to witchcraft or magic, elements which would underline key aspects of Wiccan thealogy as I understand it to have existed in the early days, and elements which I believe would have appealed to Gardner because of his apparent interest in them. These criteria are far from perfect, but may help to answer the key questions of: Why these Goddesses individually? Why these Goddesses corporately? And why not other Goddesses who may appear to have been more obvious choices?
There is a development of thealogy evident between the BAM and final versions of the Charges, in the choice of Goddess names. BAM only names five Goddesses: Artemis, Astarte, Dione, Melusine, and Aphrodite, whereas the final version of the Charge includes four more: Artemis, Astarte, Dione, Melusine, Aphrodite, Ceridwen, Diana, Arianrhod, and Bride. The additions, apart from Diana, are ‘Celtic’ Goddesses originating in Irish or Welsh mythology. The inclusion of Diana could have been prompted by her traditional association with night flying, or to obtain some sort of consistency with using Aradia as a source.
The inclusion of Celtic Goddesses is indicative of one of the historical streams which contributed to the right historical circumstances for the birth of Neo-Paganism, and from its inception have influenced Wicca: a romanticised view of the life of the Celtic language group of people. From the time of the Industrial Revolution (Information on the Celtic Revivals is taken from David Clarke and Andy Roberts: Twilight of the Celtic Gods. Blandford, London, 1995.)  a mourning for the passing of a traditional way of life was complemented by a romantic yearning for the inhabitants of Britain, who were seen as Celts, and who were perceived as having been ousted by the invading Anglo-Saxons. In this movement – known as the Celtic Twilight – efforts were made to collect surviving remnants of a vanishing civilisation, which was seen romantically as being spiritual, pure, and closer to the land. Clarke and Roberts write that it is actually to this movement that we know most of what we think we know about the Celts today. They comment further that actual facts about the ancient Celts are few, and that the idea of Celtic heritage is a modern creation, aimed at reconnecting people with their past when life becomes difficult. They comment that there was another Celtic revival in the turbulent days of the 1960s.
Robert Graves’s book The White Goddess, published in 1948, could have been the inspiration for the inclusion of these Goddesses in the later versions of the Charge. The four extra Goddesses included in the final version of the Charge are also included in Valiente’s verse version, so it could be that ‘Celtic’ mythology was an interest of hers. It is clear, however, that Gardner himself had an involvement and interest in Druidry, attending the annual ceremony at Stonehenge, for example, from 1946 (Philip Heselton: Gerald Gardner and the Cauldron of Inspiration. Capall Bann, Milverton, 2003. ).
There are several characteristics running as undercurrents through these Goddesses’ mythologies, none of which applies to them all, but may contribute to some understanding of these Goddesses as a group.
The first is conflict with monotheisms, found in Artemis, Astarte, Diana, and Bride (I include Bride because of the persisting legend that the Goddess was canonised by the church because her worship could not be stopped). The cult of Artemis famously came into conflict with the early Christians, and the account in Acts makes it plain that the people of Ephesus wanted to keep her (this conflict also applies to Diana). Astarte was present at the conflict between the proponents of what became Judaism as we know it today, and those who preferred the ‘old ways’. Diana was also present at another conflict with the church, when it was decreed that those who thought they rode with her by night should stop thinking so.
It has often been commented on the extent to which Wicca seeks in its own life to counter the values of the surrounding society, by such practises as ritual nudity, etc, and the inclusion of these Goddesses points to a further element of countercultural thinking: Wicca turns conventional religion so much on its head that the High Priestess kisses the candidate’s feet at initiations, and our Goddesses have always been present at conflict with monotheisms. A clear case of continuing to make cakes for the Queen of Heaven.
The second underlying current in these Goddesses’ mythologies is that of water: Gardner later wrote of the connection of the Goddess with water, which is the source of all living things:
‘A persistent connection will be noted between the Great Mother and water, or the sea. Venus arises from the sea. The moon goddess is associated with the sea, perhaps because of the tides. Shells are symbols of the Great Mother. Binah, the Supernal Mother of the Qabalists, is called the Great Sea. We know today that in actual fact the waters of the warm Palaeozoic seas were the womb of evolving life for the first living things upon earth. (Gardner, op. cit., p.54)’

So the connection of the Goddesses named in the Charge with water is connected to the aspect of fertility, in all its meanings, also found throughout Wiccan thealogy and elsewhere in the Charge.
A third element is that many of these Goddesses have disputed origins, origins which have been marked by syncretism with other divinities, and mythologies which have taken different forms in different places and times (Artemis, Astarte, Aphrodite, Diana, Bride). I believe this not only points to an underlying belief that there was an ancient Great Mother, but that it may point to a mutability of appearance leading to a transformation of substance, important in a religion where a key function is the creation by the individual witch of what they want or need.
The importance of magical transformation (the fourth element) to Wiccan mythology of the Goddess is made explicit in the myths of Dione (nominally a female transformation of Zeus), Melusine, Ceridwen, and Arianrhod. The Goddess of the witches is therefore a Goddess of transformation, both inner and outer, and of magic.
The fifth underlying element is that it is not entirely clear whether all these Goddesses actually started out their mythological life as Goddesses (Melusine, Arianrhod, Ceridwen), but are clearly named as such here, pointing to the Wiccan mystery that men and women not only are in the image of divinity, but can both personify and become them. Through the enactment rituals of Wicca, witches actually live out the life cycles of their divinities, sharing in something of their divinities’ natures, in token of the mystery that there is nothing in me which is not of the Gods.
The sixth element, fertility and sexual love, with its concomitant of motherhood, is actually present in the mythology of all the Goddesses in one way or another, and so therefore may be said to be the one element in these Goddesses’ mythologies which ties them together, and could have been the inspiration for the selection of these Goddess names in the early days of Wicca the fertility cult. These are the words of the Great Mother, and so Goddesses seem to have been chosen for naming, whose legends include some aspect of fertility, sexual love of motherhood.
More surprising, perhaps, is the non-inclusion of other Goddesses traditionally associated with witchcraft, such as Hecate. There is a very rich body of English folklore on witches, found in Shakespeare and other playwrights. Briggs, writing about the images of witches in the theatre from Shakespeare onwards, comments on the remarkable consistency of the witch image presented, and points out – in a link back to the Charge – all of the features of the classical witch, ointments, glamours, transformations, are already present in Apuleius (K. M. Briggs: Pale Hecate’s Team. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1962.) . These playwrights, however, are not keen to give a positive image to the witch, which may explain the lack of reference to classical witch deities. Certainly, comparing Hecate’s mythology to those of the Goddesses who are named, it become less surprising, even though some of the Goddesses both took on some of her features and became syncretised with her at later dates. Hecate’s literary and folkloric appearances are almost all connected with negative magic. Medea, while ultimately a tragic figure, is pictured in no kind light when she is calling upon Hecate, but as the stereotypical evil witch. Hecate’s authentic cult in the ancient world was too marked by images of graves, crossroads, and the howling of dogs. I feel Hecate’s presence is just too ‘dark’ to sit easily with the other Goddesses here, or with the whole tone of Wicca (although she’s a wonderful Goddess when you get to know her).
So I feel there are certain things that these Goddesses have in common, which could be the explanation for the selection of Goddess names here, although the in the absence of any evidence it is impossible to conclude this firmly. These common strands to their mythologies are common strands in Wiccan thealogy and ritual, and these strands seem to create a divine ‘milieu’ for Wicca, which would exclude divinities traditionally associated with Witchcraft, and may explain their non-inclusion.