Commentary on the Charge of the Goddess 31: Let my worship

Let my worship be within the heart that rejoiceth; for behold; all acts of Love and Pleasure are my rituals; and therefore let there be Beauty and Strength; Power and Compassion; Honour and Humility; Mirth and Reverence within you. 

Sources and Influences

BAM: Let the rituals be rightly performed with joy and beauty. Remember that all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals. So let there be beauty and strength, leaping laughter, force and fire be [sic] within you.

Cro. L.L.: “...Let the rituals be rightly performed with joy and beauty!” Remember that all acts of love and pleasure are rituals, must be rituals. (2)

Cro. L.L.: “Beauty and strength, leaping laughter and delicious languor, force and fire, are of us.” (2)

Cro. XV: Let the rituals be rightly performed with joy and beauty.

Cro. CCC: Also there is this word: “They shall rejoice, our chosen; who sorroweth is not of us. Beauty and strength, leaping laughter and delicious languor, force and fire, are of us.”

Cro. AL: Let the rituals be rightly performed with joy and beauty! (2.35)

Cro. AL: Beauty and strength, leaping laughter and delicious languor, force and fire, are of us. (2.20)

Here also I prefer Law of Liberty over either Gnostic Mass or Khabs am Pekht as the source for this whole passage, because it occurs only in isolated quotations in the other books, while in Law of Liberty all of the quotations occur in two facing pages. It would seem more natural that a single passage of the Charge be constructed from quotations found in this way, than from the same quotations gathered together from disparate sources.

Thealogy

This section of the Charge makes explicit another current which underlines all Wiccan ritual and practice: that our religion is one of joy, not of sorrow. Christian criticism of Wicca often focuses on the fact that there is no concept of ‘sin’ in Wicca: they must find it strange that it is possible to have a religious system whose adherents do not consider themselves fallen, and while having no concept of sin and punishment, also have no mechanism to undo what they have done in life. In Wicca you are yourself creating your own future as you go through life, a future which will extend beyond death, drawing on the common occult conception of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of karma, usually as understood in Theosophy.

This understanding (Dion Fortune: Applied Magic. Aquarian, Wellingborough, 1985.) is that there are features of our personalities which need to be rectified to allow our ongoing spiritual development as we go through incarnations. These features (deliberately using a morally neutral word for them) can be the things that hold back the development, and we will keep being confronted with the same problem until it is resolved: this is the origin of this idea in the Craft. Fortune saw this repeated precipitation of the same trouble in people’s lives by the same feature of the personality as eventually requiring payment, which she saw as always being in spiritual values (although this may be mediated by mundane life events). She saw increasing development as leading to more acute problems, which would anyway be more keenly felt by the subject, since the soul which has forged ahead in its spiritual development can only do this by a sudden increase in the karmic debt required to be paid at once. She identifies the identification of recurring problems in people’s lives, and the associated karmic debt, as an essential part of the person’s development.

What does this have to do with Wicca? Superficially, nothing, but this common modern occult conception of karma is clearly at the root of the ‘mood’  proposed as normative for the witch in this section of the Charge. In Wiccan texts I can find no mention of repentance or sin, nor of sorrow or fear, but much on ecstasy, joy, pleasure, and love, and this more morally-neutral approach to human nature is behind it. The way Fortune phrases the occult idea of karma tends to focus on the problems we encounter as ways to rectify karma, but without that emphasis it equates to an approach to life in which we can proceed with joy and responsibility, knowing that we can create the future, there is no surrogate parent ready arbitrarily to punish us, but that we, and we alone, must do what we can to make our own future lives what we want them to be.

And in the Charge this approach is related as actually coming from the Goddess, in her own voice: all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals, indicating the freedom she allows her children. In Wicca there is no list of commandments, but acts of love and pleasure are our Goddess’s own rituals, they become religious acts.

Ironically the editing of the final version of the Charge removes much of the Crowley quotation present in the first version, while retaining what he understood these words to mean. This is his commentary on the passage about the right performance of the rituals; it also gives his reason for the joy:

‘A ritual is not a melancholy formality; it is a sacrament, a dance, a commemoration of the universe. The universe is endless rapture, wild and unconfined, a mad passion of speed. Astronomers tell us this of the Great Republic of Stars; physicists say the same of the Little Republic of Molecules. Shall not the Middle Republic of Men be like unto them? The polite ethicist demurs; his ideal is funereal solemnity. His horizon is bounded by death; and his spy-glass is smeared with the idea of sin. The New Aeon proclaims man as immortal God, eternally active to do His Will. All’s joy, all’s beauty; this Will we celebrate.

‘In this verse we see how the awakening leads to ordered and purposeful action. Joy and beauty are the evidence that our functions are free and fit; when we take no pleasure, find nothing to admire, in our work, we are doing it wrong.’ (Aleister Crowley (edited by Israel Regardie): The Law is for All. Llewellyn Publications, St Paul, MN, 1975, pp. 207 - 208.)

Another irony is that these words ‘love and pleasure’, proclaiming the liberty and joy of the children of the Goddess, are the ones most open to misinterpretation and abuse, since sex is doubtlessly one of the pleasures which are the Goddess’s rituals. To those of a puritanical mind-set these words sound like an invitation or endorsement of licentiousness and libidinousness. To them I would say: there is no idea in any branch of modern Paganism that sex is of itself wrong, or related to any concept of a Fall or disobedience.  In fact it is the major sacrament of our religion, intrinsically wrapped up in the mysteries of birth, creation, love and death, which lie at its heart.

I would also have to say, though, that anyone who expects sexual intercourse without gaining full consent from the other person, and having an eye to the law of the land, is not operating within a Wiccan framework. That would not be Wicca: that would be abuse. Nobody should ever be required to have sex with anyone else in our religion. Initiation should never be made contingent on intercourse with the initiator. Those who would try to use Wicca as a cover for forcing or manipulating others into sex with them, are merely bringing our religion into disrepute and providing fuel to the fires for those who would see us as a source of evil in society. Not only is this sacrilege, calling sex using force or intimidation the Goddess’s rituals of love and pleasure is also asking for trouble in every level of life, both spiritual and mundane, since Wiccans not only believe that all acts of love and pleasure are her rituals, but also that the consequences of our actions are inescapable. These lines of the Charge are not an empty precept of joy with no concept, but come with a heavy weight of responsibility and accountability.

The passage beginning ‘let there be...’ is sometimes referred to as the Eight Wiccan Virtues. In an interesting reworking of the quotation from Crowley used in the BAM Charge, Gardner and Valiente have created a summary of how it is possible to live as a witch in a religious context, subtly changing Crowley’s emphasis. Gardner had already dropped the ‘delicious languor’ of Crowley’s purple prose, which unfortunately has the effect of making this passage in the BAM version of the Charge sound rather hearty and fiery. The reworking into four pairs of balanced qualities makes the passage both less ‘flowery’ than Crowley’s original and less strenuous than the BAM version.

Wiccan ethics have a short but complex history, and there appears to have been little emphasis on how to practise witchcraft ethically, until Gardner produced his Old Laws in the late 1950s, and then a greater elaboration of ethical principles with the growth of Wicca after Gardner’s death. (John Coughlin: Ethics and the Craft. Waning Moon Publications, New York, 2009, provides an in-depth account of the development of Wiccan ethics)

Various codes and agreements have been proposed over the years, few of which have achieved acceptance beyond particular covens, groups or traditions, least of all by all those who would call themselves Wiccans or witches. However there is a common twofold foundation to Wiccan ethics: the Wiccan Rede – an it harm none, do what thou will – and in the idea that what you do will in some way return to you, usually to the power of three.

The adequacy of the Rede as an ethic has been questioned – including the difficulty of discerning the true will, and defining harm (Emma Restall Orr: Living with Honour: A Pagan Ethics. O Books, Winchester, 2007.) - but discussion at length of the nature and value of this foundation is beyond the scope of this commentary, since the foundation for this ethic is not found in the Charge, but one criticism is of relevance to this part of the Charge: the Wiccan rede and Law of Return as an ethical framework focus on the negative aspects of ethics. The rede focuses on not doing something, not harming, while the Law of Return can become an incentive to behave in a particular way for a reward or not to do something for fear of the consequences. Curott identifies the latter approach to the Law of Return as a remnant of Judaeo-Christian values (Phyllis Curott: Witch Crafting. Thorsons, London, 2002.). An ethic focusing on what not to do can be contrasted to some other Pagan ethical systems; for example in Asatru ethics are founded on virtues and principles, providing a framework in which to decide what ought to be done, usually focusing on some concept of honour.

This section of the Charge can be taken as a counterbalance to the relative poverty of the two main supports of the Wiccan ethical system, by providing suggestions for what may actually constitute virtuous living for the witch. In reality there are only four, rather than eight virtues, presented in what are usually seen as complementary pairs, another instance of the importance of balance and polarity in occultism.

This section is obviously based on the passage from Crowley used in the BAM version of the Charge, but is transformed into something quite different. In the Crowley text, there is no sense of complementarity or opposition, which is at the heart of this text. Here it is reminiscent of the way in which severity and mercy are on opposite poles of the Qabalistic Tree of Life, and are to be kept in balance:

‘...study well that Great Arcanum, the proper equilibrium of mercy and severity, for either unbalanced is not good; unbalanced severity is cruelty and oppression; unbalanced mercy is but weakness and would permit evil to exist unchecked, thus making itself as it were the accomplice of that evil.’ (Israel Regardie: The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic. Falcon Publications, Phoenix Arizona, 1984, vol. 6, p.20.)

The relationships between the two virtues in each pair are brought out more clearly by changing the words a bit: ‘beauty with strength, power with compassion, honour with humility, mirth with reverence,’ for example, gives a better sense of each of the two pairs influencing the other. It would also help to avoid a slip into the dualism of seeing power and compassion as opposite and irreconcilable. It must be seen that it is possible to operate with both power and compassion at the same time. Wiccan philosophy is usually seen as monistic, in which there are no extremes such as I have just mentioned, but instead everything is related and reconcilable to each other. However we live in a world influenced by dualism, usually mediated through the Judaeo-Christian tradition (i.e. God is good, the Devil is bad; heterosexual sex within marriage in the missionary position is good, any other form of sexual activity is bad – both of these examples are deliberately made as extreme and caricatured as possible to stress what dualism is), I shall try to deal with each pair of virtues as complementary and as balancing each other.