Commentary on the Charge of the Goddess 24: Keep pure your highest ideals

Keep pure your highest Ideals, strive ever towards it [sic]. Let naught stop you or turn you aside.

Sources and Influences

Ye Bok of Ye Art Magickal: Keep pure your highest ideal: strive ever toward it. Let naught stop you or turn you aside.

Crowley: Law of Liberty: Keep pure your highest ideal; strive ever toward it without allowing aught to stop you or turn you aside, even as a star sweeps upon its incalculable and infinite course of glory, and all is Love. (2)

Thealogy

This passage is one of the few in the final version of the Charge which remains as an unedited direct quotation from Crowley, albeit missing the reference to love. Is anyone really as single-minded as this? Of course it is a reference to Crowley’s True Will, and an exhortation to concentration on that alone.
The search for the True Will is relatively unemphasised in Wicca, in comparison to Thelema, and neither is an ultimate goal in temporal or soteriological (salvation) terms generally proffered as an aim, which raises the question of what the point is of Wicca. I feel that this is an aspect which has not been adequately developed in Wiccan thealogy, and truly it is difficult to answer the question: ‘What is the point, our highest ideal which we must ever strive towards, of being a witch?’
Of course the point is not given. It would not be in the nature of Wicca to lay down a final reason, since Wicca embraces a vision of time which is ever unrolling, and ever repeating. Given that most witches hope that they will be reincarnated in some form, the lack of a final aim for Wicca allows Wiccans to embrace both the aims of this life and aims we may have to work towards in future lives. It is not possible to see beyond our present life, to know what lies for us in the future, because there we would be as Gods.
And that must be the final answer: the purpose of pursuing our highest ideal must be that we will become as Gods. True, ‘there is nothing in me that is not of the Gods’, but the point of successive reincarnations must be to attain ever closer to Godhead.
But there is something wrong with this idea: it introduces an element into Wiccan cosmology of striving for some future ‘reward’, which is totally alien to Wicca. To modify the metaphor somewhat: the reason for successive incarnations can be seen as lying within each individual incarnation. This changes the focus from some future nirvana, to the concentration on the present, which makes it all-important.
Imagine, for the moment, that you do not think you are going to be reincarnated, and that you know you will die in the near future. The effect that this would have on your actions is exactly the effect I mean, of not focussing on some abstract distant future. To maintain your highest ideal in a context of imminent death, with no assurance of opportunities to have another go, would impart so great an importance to your actions, that for the time left, you really would focus on your highest ideal and all else would be turning aside.
Perhaps this explains Crowley’s image of a star on its incalculable course: it literally cannot be swept aside, there is only one place for it to go, and its journey is the whole meaning of its existence.