Commentary on the Charge of the Goddess 25:For mine is the secret

For mine is the secret which opens upon the door of youth; and mine is the cup of the Wine of Life: and the Cauldron of Cerridwen; which is the Holy Grail of Immortality. I am the Gracious Goddess who gives the gift of Joy unto the heart of Man.

Sources and Influences

Ye Bok of Ye Arte Magical: There is a Secret Door that I have made to establish the way to taste even on earth the elixir of immortality. Say “Let ecstasy be mine, and joy on earth even to me, To Me” For I am a gracious Goddess.

Crowley: Khabs Am Pekht: “There is a secret door that I shall make to establish thy way in all the quarters...”

Crowley: The Law of Liberty: Do not embrace mere Marian or Melusine; she is Nuit herself, specially concentrated and incarnated in a human form to give you infinite love, to bid you taste even on earth the Elixir of Immortality. “But ecstasy be mine and joy on earth; ever To me! To me!”(2)

Crowley: The Law of Liberty: For hear, how gracious is the Goddess: “I give unimaginable joys on earth...” (2)

Crowley: Liber AL vel Legis: There is a secret door that I shall make to establish thy way in all the quarters. (3.38)

Thealogy

In replacing the Crowley quote about the secret door with a reference to the cauldron of Ceridwen, a subtle change is made in the thealogy of the Charge. Doors imply passages to another place, an authentic and recurring motif in magic and witchcraft, that of travelling beyond the realms of everyday life to realms of magic and mystery. This motif is central to another tradition of witchcraft, that of the Hedgewitch, where the hedge has come to symbolise this boundary, which the witch both dwells at and crosses over in search of transformation and magic.
In the final version of the Charge it is plain where this door leads to: youth. It is also plain that for Gardner, youth and beauty in women equate to attributes of the Goddess, with his requirements that the High Priestess should step aside after a certain time for a younger model. It is tempting to see in this an indication that he was merely a dirty old man, but I feel that the significance of his emphasis on youth may lie deeper. At the time that Wicca was publicised, Gardner was already retired, already ill with breathing difficulties which necessitated spending time out of the country for much of the year. It would be natural to yearn for lost youth and health in these circumstances, even in the midst of initiating, in the final decade of his life, a new religious movement which has now become a worldwide phenomenon. The power to do the seemingly impossible remains in the hands of the High Priestess as representative of the Goddess, and Gardner may have felt that he had tapped into this Goddess power to achieve the seemingly impossible in the last years of his life:

‘They tell me that in the old days they often used to choose the prettiest young girl suitable to represent the goddess at large meetings. She was known as the Maiden. She was made a sort of acting high priestess and treated with the greatest honour and would often act as sort of hostess to distinguished visitors (i.e. the Devil if he turned up), but the real power remained in the hands of the true priestess, who usually worked all the magic. Often the Maiden was the high priestess’s daughter and would take the place of her mother in time and there was sometimes some mystification over this; seeing the resemblance at a distance ignorant visitors believed that the high priestess became young again at the meetings.’  (Gerald Gardner: Witchcraft Today. Arrow Books, London, 1975, p. 136.)

This passage is moreover not only about the gates of youth, but locates the magic of transformation in the cauldron. In The Meaning of Witchcraft, Gardner equates the cauldron as used at the Midwinter Solstice ritual to the gates of the Great Mother, equated by Neumann to the stones of trilithons,  further emphasising the liminal aspects of the cauldron (Gerald Gardner: The Meaning of Witchcraft. Weiser Books, York Beach, 2004.).
The esoteric significance of the cauldron is summarised by Valiente  (Doreen Valiente: An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present. Robert Hale, London, 1973.) using a quotation from a work on the Rosicrucians: ‘We claim the caldron of the witches as, in the original, the vase or urn of the fiery transmigration, in which all the things of the world change.’ ( Hargrave Jennings: The Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries (Second Edition). Chatto and Windus, London, 1879, p. 97.) In replacing this motif with the cauldron of Ceridwen the locus of magical transformation is moved, from outside the doorways found in liminal places, to within the witch herself, since it is the Goddess within the witch who is herself saying that she is the cauldron. Wicca inherits much from the dogmatic magical traditions of the grimoire tradition, the Golden Dawn, and Crowley, but there is an undercurrent, found in this passage, which places magical ability within the witch herself and, taken to its natural extreme, would mean independence from inherited magical traditions or teaching from other sorcerers. While Wicca is usually placed in the dogmatic and traditional end of the spectrum of magical systems, this undercurrent indicates a thread within Wicca which is closer to the nondogmatism of Spare, where the locus of the magic is entirely within the magician (  For more on these traditions and distinctions, see John Wisdom Gonce III: The Evolution of Sorcery: A Brief History of Modern Magick. In Daniel Harms and John Wisdom Gonce III: The Necronomicon Files (Revised and Expanded Edition). Weiser Books, Boston MA, 2003, pp. 71-84.).  There are occasions where this undercurrent becomes explicit, such as Gardner’s statement in The Meaning of Witchcraft that the locus of magical power is in the subconscious mind, and that the witch must use the means which are right for her (Gardner, op. cit.).
The ritual context in which this shift is made, counters, in Wicca, any extreme sense of individualism, and balances it with a hierarchical system. How does this happen? Because the person speaking these words is the Goddess present in her priestess, but the priestess is also High Priestess of a coven. It is therefore the coven organisation of Wicca which places a control on this. The individual witch does have the locus of magical power placed inside her, but the hierarchical organisation of the coven should hold her back from most of the more dangerous or outrageous actions undertaken by those who have let a sense of magical power go to their heads.
Gardner himself hints at another explanation for the placement of the magical locus both inside and outside the witch. The theme of placing the locus of magical power within the witch is underlined and reinforced by the theme of the presence of the Goddess within the witch, which recurs throughout the Charge. In Witchcraft Today,  in talking about the Holy Grail, Gardner likens it to the cauldron of Celtic mythology, in awakening the dead, and creating fertility (Gardner, op. cit.). Ultimately he sees the cauldron as being the Goddess, who, if she is present in the witch, and the cauldron is the source of the magic, the locus of the magical power is inside the witch, because of the presence of the Goddess. It is also outside, because the Goddess is everything.
In the next section of the Charge it is made explicit what this magical power from the Goddess gives to the witch.