Commentary on the Charge of the Goddess 28: Hear the words of the Star Goddess

Hear ye the words of the Star Goddess, She in the dust of whose feet are the hosts of Heaven; whose body encircleth the universe.

Sources and Influences

Ye Bok of ye Arte Magical: Hear ye the words of the Star Goddess.

Crowley: Law of Liberty: We have heard the Voice of the Star-Goddess: “I love you! I yearn to you!...” (2)

Crowley: Law of Liberty: Then comes the first call of the Great Goddess Nuit, Lady of the Starry Heaven... (2)

Crowley: Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente: Then I beheld myself compassed about with the Infinite Circle of Emerald that encloseth the Universe. (3.17)

Thealogy

This passage is much more than a mere linking passage between the two halves of the Charge. Remember that at Valiente’s initiation Gardner read the whole thing to her himself? Nowadays this and the words beginning ‘Listen...’ are the two parts spoken by the High Priest: the rest is spoken by the High Priestess in her persona of the Goddess. We have become accustomed to thinking of the Charge in terms of the ritual drama which surrounds it in its modern Craft use, but if it is only one divine person speaking throughout, there would be no reason for this interjection by the High Priest. If one person reads the Charge through, it becomes apparent that this passage actually introduces a new speaker – or a new ‘name’ for the many-named Goddess who is in the High Priestess.
I feel that this passage introduces another Goddess totally, even if syncretised into the Great Mother paradigm of the whole Charge. This Goddess is not named in the Charge, but her presence underlies a great proportion of twentieth-century magical tradition, and the changes made to this section of the Charge between the BAM version and the final version make her presence her even more apparent. She is the Egyptian Goddess Nut (or Nuit). This apparent disjunction in the Charge feels very much like the changes between sections of Crowley’s Book of the Law, heralding the arrival of different divinities.
In the works of Crowley quoted in the Charge, he refers to Nut as the ‘Star Goddess’: the use of these words makes her presence here clear alone. The addition of the lines about the hosts of heaven lying in the dust of her feet and her body encircling the universe make it even clearer that it is Nut who is referred to here, because of her connection with Egyptian understandings of the universe, which they understood both in observational and mythological terms. Anyone can see the sun rise every day, but the Egyptians explained this as the Sky Goddess Nut (her body was covered with stars) giving birth to the sun every morning, and she swallowed the sun God (who was variously understood as different Gods) at night and so he passed through her body at night, before she gave birth to him again in the morning (This information on Nut is taken from Leonard Lesko: Cosmology. In Byron Shafer (editor): Religion in Ancient Egypt. Routledge, London, 1991, pp. 116-121.).
Nut was illustrated as arching her body over the world (sometimes this position was taken by the heavenly cow or the Goddess Hathor), supported by Gods. Elsewhere the stars are seen as Gods travelling in crescent-shaped boats along the body of the Goddess: how much Greater a Mother than this could anyone want?
The literature described the sun making this same journey across her body, before descending to the place of reeds before being born again. All of these images are common Wiccan images: descent, stars, crescents, the cycle of birth and death.
The appropriateness of this Goddess to Wicca becomes even more evident in considering the names the Egyptian mythology gives to the places the sun passes on its journey across the body of the Goddess: ‘Winding Waterway’, ‘Nurse Canal’, and ‘Doors Thrown Open’, which Lesko believes refer to Nut’s female anatomy, thereby introducing the major Wiccan theme of woman as Goddess, and the fertility of her womb.
Nor is the death strand of Wiccan thealogy missing from Nut’s ancient mythology, since – remembering the sun passing across her before descending before being reborn again – she is often seen as the coffin, or the womb pregnant with a new life to be born. Her image was painted in tombs and even inside sarcophagi for this reason. The inscription on the bottom of the sarcophagus of Seti I includes the Goddess speaking (another familiar Wiccan motif) these words:

‘I have endowed him with a soul, and I have endowed him with a spirit, and I have given him power in the body of his mother Tefnut, I who was never brought forth. I have come, and I have united myself to Osiris, the king... with life, stability, and power. He shall not die. I am Nut of the mighty heart, and I took up my being in the body of my mother Tefnut in my name of Nut; over my mother none hath gained the mastery. I have filled every place with my beneficence, and I have led captive the whole earth; I have led captive the South and the North, and I have gathered together the things which are into my arms to vivify Osiris, the king, the lord of the two lands, ...the son of the Sun, proceeding from his body, the lover of Seker, the lord of diadems, the governor whose heart is glad... His soul shall live for ever!’  (E. A. Wallis Budge: The Egyptian Heaven and Hell. Martin Hopkinson and Company, London, 1925, volume 2, pp. 57-59.)

Of course we see the world differently from the ancient Egyptians, but a link may be found to the Mother whose body is covered in stars in the discovery of dark matter (Timothy Ferris: The Whole Shebang. Phoenix, London, 1998.).  It is apparent that galaxies contain much more matter than the visible, luminous matter which can be measured; the remaining matter – up to 99% - is this dark matter, which holds galaxies in being and controls their velocity. It cannot be seen – but things look different when seen through dark matter. A remarkable synchronicity occurs in the etymology of the word ‘matter’, which derives from the Latin materia – the stuff from which things are made – and materia itself derives from the word mater, which means Mother (Etymologies in H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler (editors, revised by E. McIntosh): The Concise Oxford Dictionary (Fifth Edition). Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1964, and J. Marchant and Joseph Charles (editors): Cassell’s Latin Dictionary (Twenty-fourth edition). Cassell and Company, London, 1946.).
Nut’s history also includes the theme of syncretism with other Goddesses:

‘As a goddess of the late historical period in Egypt Nut seems to have absorbed the attributes of a number of goddesses who possessed attributes somewhat similar to those of herself, and the identities of several old nature goddesses were merged in her.’  (E.A. Wallis Budge: The Gods of the Egyptians. Methuen and Company, London, 1904, volume 2, p. 100.)

An obvious explanation for Nut’s tacit retention in the Charge could be that for much of Crowley’s Book of the Law, from which most of the Crowley quotations used in the Charge ultimately come, it is Nut who is speaking. The two pages of The Law of Liberty from which Gardner took so many of the quotations he used in the BAM version of the Charge, contain the whole revelation by the Goddess Nut of a new age, which is altered slightly in the thealogy of the Charge. Crowley sees the age of the fear of sin and gloomy asceticism passing away to be replaced by an age of joy, in which people will follow the precept to drink and dance, granted by ‘...the Peace that passeth understanding. 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. (Aleister Crowley: The Equinox Vol. 3, No. 1, March 1919 (The Blue Equinox). Weiser Books, San Francisco, 2007, pp. 48-49.)’  This idea of the Great Goddess granting a new age, in which the slavemaster-gods of the past pass away, and humans can rejoice in their dignity of their humanity, is an idea which has passed over from Crowley into Wicca. And it was revealed to Crowley by Nut, by means of Aiwass.
The strange dislocation in the middle of the Charge may simply be explained by an overlooked glitch in editing it, and particularly in its change of use from an address read by one person to its present use. However in terms of Wiccan thealogy Nut’s unnamed presence, which is nonetheless there for those who can look under the surface, is more than adequately explained by a passage from Budge, a passage which could almost have been written by Gardner himself, since it contains almost every essential of Wiccan thealogy (it was first published in 1899):

‘Nut was the wife of Seb and the mother of Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys. Originally she was the personification of the sky, and represented the feminine principle which was active at the creation of the universe. According to an old view, Seb and Nut existed in the primeval watery abyss side by side with Shu and Tefnut; and later Seb became the earth and Nut the sky. These deities were supposed to unite every evening, and to remain embraced until the morning, when the god Shu separated them, and set the goddess of the sky upon his four pillars until the evening. Nut was, naturally, regarded as the mother of the gods and of all things living, and she and her husband Seb were considered to be the givers of food, not only to the living but also to the dead. Though different views were current in Egypt as to the exact location of the heaven of the beatified dead, yet all schools of thought in all periods assigned it to some region of the sky, and the abundant allusions in the texts to the heavenly bodies – that is, the sun, moon, and stars – which the deceased dwells with, prove that the final abode of the souls of the righteous was not upon earth. The goddess Nut is sometimes represented as a female along whose body the sun travels, and sometimes as a cow; the tree sacred to her was the sycamore.  (E. A. Wallis Budge: Egyptian Religion. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1972, p. 94.)