Commentary on the Charge of the Goddess 29: I who am the beauty of the green earth

Only I could use this cartoon to illustrate this post!

I who am the beauty of the green earth; and the White Moon among the Stars; and the mystery of the Waters; and the desire of the heart of man; l call unto thy soul; arise, and come unto me.

Sources and Influences

Ye Bok of Ye Arte Magical: I love you: I yearn for you: page or purple, veiled or voluptuous. I who am all pleasure, and purple and drunkenness of the innermost senses, desire you, put on the wings, arouse the coiled splendour within you, “Come unto me.”

Crowley: Law of Liberty: “I love you! I yearn to you! Pale or purple, veiled or voluptuous, I who am all pleasure and purple, and drunkenness of the innermost sense, desire you. Put on the wings, and arouse the coiled splendour within you; come unto me!” (2)

Crowley: Gnostic Mass: I love you! I yearn to you! Pale or purple, veiled or voluptuous, I who am all pleasure and purple, and drunkenness of the innermost sense, desire you. Put on the wings, and arouse the coiled splendour within you: come unto me!

Crowley: Liber AL vel Legis: I love you! I yearn to you! Pale or purple, veiled or voluptuous, I who am all pleasure and purple, and drunkenness of the innermost sense, desire you. Put on the wings, and arouse the coiled splendour within you: come unto me! (1.61)

For this passage I would favour Law of Liberty over Gnostic Mass as a source, and will treat it as such in the statistical analysis to follow, because in Law of Liberty it is preceded by the words ‘We have heard the voice of the Star Goddess,’ and in BAM it is preceded by the words ‘Hear ye the words of the Star Goddess’, which adaption would seem to indicate that that is the more likely source.

Thealogy

     This passage, which continues the description of the location, or nature, of the Goddess from the previous line, is one of the few passages where both the quotations from Crowley’s purple (in every sense of the word) prose have been completely rewritten for the final version of the Charge, without retaining at least some of the meanings of the Crowley passages. The idea has been made explicit in this passage that the Goddess can be seen in the world around us. Elsewhere in the Charge she is seen as both external and internal, transcendent and immanent.

     The Goddess is the beauty of the green earth, which introduces the idea of pantheism, an idea recurring throughout humanity’s religious history, even rearing its head in the monotheistic religions at times (where of course it occurs as a heresy attempting to resolve the conflict of the apparent distance of God with his apparent involvement in the world), whose base idea is that there is no difference between the God who is invisible and that which is visible (Information on pantheism taken from Ismael Quiles: Article ‘Pantheism’. In Karl Rahner (editor): Encyclopedia of Theology. Burns and Oates, London, 1975.). This understanding of divinity within Wicca is what places us forever outside the pale of the monotheistic religions, whose criticism of pantheism is that since it makes no difference between the divinity and the visible world, it must equate to atheism. I will take the opportunity of this slight shift in the understanding of the Goddess to introduce the theological jargon which describes the understanding of the Goddess in the Charge, which, apart from referring to polytheism, I have so far avoided using, because here the use of jargon can help to explain the understandings of the nature of the Goddess – thealogy proper – that are present in the Charge.

     What is called pantheism consists of two different views, either God is seen as so absorbed in the world that (s)he cannot be differentiated, or the world is seen as God’s means of manifestation. The latter trend is more properly called panentheism (God-in-everything) and is clearly the thealogy of the Goddess in the Charge and in Wiccan thealogy generally. If the Goddess could not be differentiated from the visible world around us, there would be no talk of Goddesses.

     These two modes are paralleled by two further contrasting theologies in pantheism: in immanentist pantheism, God is so completely in the warp and weft of the world that once again (s)he cannot be differentiated, only the experiential nature of the visible can be spoken of, and conversely in transcendent pantheism God is seem as the inmost being of things. Despite the emphasis placed in Wiccan thealogy on the closeness of the Goddess, and her involvement in our world, she can still be differentiated from the visible world, and is definitely seen as the inmost being of things. In the Charge she even says herself that she is. However there is also a pattern in which these two modes of pantheism can be mixed – in the immanent-transcendent form – where God both cannot be differentiated from the visible world, or perhaps it is better put from a Wiccan point of view that it is not possible to say that the world surrounding us is not the Goddess, and at the same time, in this view, God is realised in visible things. And so therefore Wiccan thealogy is actually an immanent-transcendent panentheism.

     A further division of pantheisms is possible, between the emanationist and the evolutionist. In the emanationist form, the visible world proceeds from the absolute unchanging divinity (this language is irresistibly reminiscent of the Qabalah). In the evolutionist form, the self-realisation of God is seen as occurring through the processes and evolution of the world, and so the emphasis on actions and deeds in the Charge and in broader Wiccan thealogy, places Wicca in this category, meaning that Wiccan thealogy is an evolutionist, immanent-transcendent panentheism.

     Where this journey into theological jargon leaves us is exactly where we started: the Goddess is the beauty of the green earth, but hopefully the journey helps to explain what this means for the Wiccan understanding of divinity, and where this differentiates this understanding from that of the dominant religions in our society.

     If the Goddess of the Charge is identified with the world around us, it is impossible to say that she is never present. This raises another aspiration for Wiccans, in an age when humans are seemingly intent on a headlong rush into oblivion: the recognition of the beauty of the green earth (and ourselves) as the Goddess implies a dedication to the avoidance of killing off the Goddess. Much more than a criticism of the defacement of our earth by the erection of masses of concrete, this radical understanding means that what we do to our earth, we do both to ourselves and to our Goddess, and it could result in our own extinction.

     This environmental motif, which has come to greater prominence in Wicca following the rise of environmental concerns in the 1960s, was relatively unimportant in the early days of the movement. It is, however, the natural outcome of the panentheistic (you see, there was a point to it) thealogy espoused in the craft’s rituals, for example, environmental concern is not mentioned explicitly in the Gardnerian/Alexandrian Book of Shadows, for example, but it is the natural outcome of the identification of the natural world as model and location of our divine life.

     The mention of the white moon among the stars, sounds an uncharacteristically Crowleyan note, apart from the occult significance of the moon for magic, and as representative of Goddess and feminine archetypes, in the material new to this version of the Charge, remembering his motto that ‘every man and every woman is a star.’ If that is so, then here the Goddess is pictured as among the stars, which are us, she is different from us, but definitely among us and involved.

The final words, ‘come unto me’, the only words retained from the Crowley quotation in the BAM Charge, once again change the placement of the Goddess from the immanentist emphasis of the beginning of this passage, to a being to whom one can go.