Commentary on the Charge of the Goddess 32: Beauty and Strength

Beauty and strength

These ‘virtues’ are the only ones left from the original Crowley text deriving from his Book of the Law. The new twist given to all the Crowley passages in the Charge makes me disinclined to believe that this pair of abstract qualities are to be understood in the way in which Crowley understood this passage, who – in characteristic style - refers them back to the idea of the Will, and notes that this beauty of doing ones Will will be visible:

‘...It is all a question of doing one’s will. A flaming harlot, with red cap and sparkling eyes, her foot on the neck of a dead king, is just as much a star as her predecessor, simpering in his arms. But one must be a flaming harlot – one must let oneself go, whether one’s star be twin with that of Shelley, or of Blake, or of Titian, or of Beethoven. Beauty and strength come from doing one’s will; you have only to look at any one who is doing it to recognize the glory of it.’[1]

If this truly is a collection of ‘virtues of the Craft’, why then is beauty included among them? For a long time this question gave me problems, and I had difficulty moving beyond the idea of physical beauty, or beauty as exemplified by, say, models in our society, but eventually found a way out of this difficulty in, of all people, St Thomas Aquinas, who relates beauty to goodness:

‘A good thing is also in fact a beautiful thing, for both epithets have the same basis in reality, namely, the possession of form; and this is why the good is esteemed beautiful. Good and beautiful are not however synonymous. For good (being what all things desire) has to do properly with desire and so involves the idea of end (since desire is a kind of movement towards something). Beauty, on the other hand, has to do with knowledge, and we call a thing beautiful when it pleases the eye of the beholder. This is why beauty is a matter of right proportion, for the senses delight in rightly proportioned things as similar to themselves, the sense-faculty being a sort of proportion itself like all other knowing things...’[2]

It may seem facile to say that a thing is beautiful when it pleases the eye of the beholder, but in the context of the Charge we must remember just who the beholder is, since it is the Goddess speaking to us. True, this virtue can refer to a particular approach to physical beauty, but on another level refers to the Goddess seeing us as beautiful, knowing that we are good.

Both the physical and goodness approaches to beauty have a ‘virtuous’ application here. One is purely countercultural, and can find inspiration in the ‘Venuses’ found from the ancient world, satirically called so because they do not look like Venus statues, but are rather images of real women, pregnant women, women who have no hope of ever being size zero, and which are sometimes interpreted (by Gimbutas for example) as statues of ‘the Goddess’. Witches can therefore be beautiful without thinking they have to be some impossible-to-achieve shape to be so. There is physical beauty in the real woman’s body, and indeed in the real man’s body. If beauty is truly a matter of knowledge, we can approach our own beauty with a different knowledge from that prevailing in our society.

This is not unrelated to the beautiful thing as the good thing, since in Wicca what the eye of the beholder sees is a person in whom ‘there is nothing that is not of the gods.’ Beauty of action is related to beauty of appearance, and comes ultimately from our nature as being of the gods. Our decisions and actions in witchcraft are the actions of the Goddess in the world, since this dynamic of beholding is inescapably reflexive. We and the Goddess look at each other, and our actions please each other. In some Craft traditions is told a creation myth where the Goddess is pleased by her reflection in the blackness of the universe and the whole creation is a result of her joy at the sight of herself:

‘The Star Goddess, named Quakoralina, was gazing out into the vast blackness of space. She caught a glimmering, a glimpse, and began to move toward it. Where the edges of space curved, a black mirror formed. In it, she saw herself and was struck by her great beauty. She began to llok upon herself with desire and, full of this desire, began to make love to herself. She was so beautiful and full of desire that the image grew substance and stepped forth. God Herself came in ecstasy, and stars spun across the sky.’[3]

This understanding of inner and outer beauty is not quite that of Gardner himself, who wrote:

‘... [Woman as representative of the Goddess] should be steadfast, trusty and easy; otherwise she is not fit to have the Goddess descend upon her. If she is cross and selfish and ungenerous, it is certain that she will never receive that divine blessing. Our Lady of Witchcraft has a high ideal set before her; she must be fresh and kindly and always the same to you...

‘Among the virtues she must have is the realisation that youth is among the requisites necessary for the representative of the Goddess, and that she must be ready to retire gracefully in favour of a younger woman in time...

‘So a true priestess realises that gracefully surrendering pride of place now is one of the greatest virtues, and she will return to that pride of place the next time, in another incarnation, with greater power and beauty. In a sense, the witch religion recognises all women as an incarnation of the Goddess, and all men as an incarnation of the God; and for this reason every woman is potentially a priestess, and every man potentially a priest; ...every manifestation of male and female is a manifestation of Them.’

‘There are many types of beauty, and beauty of the spirit is greater than that of the body. The purifications you undergo in the cult increase that secret beauty. The Mysteries in ancient times must have been a garden of fair faces. ...’[4]

Needless to say Gardner’s approach to the youth and beauty of the priestess was not without its detractors even in the early days of Wicca, and was among the causes of disagreement with Valiente when he included it in the Craft Laws. Nonetheless Gardner’s understanding contains the seeds of later understandings of both men and women as being beautiful as being the incarnations of divinity.

The fact that beauty is seen in polarity with strength is not unrelated to Gardner’s conception of the priestess as beautiful as the presence of the Goddess. In her analysis of the tarot Strength card, Sandra Thomson sees the maiden pictured in the Rider-Waite card as the feminine counterpart of the man seen in the Magician card.[5] She writes that the lion whose mouth is closed by an apparently impassive maiden represents the fiery life-force, and therefore the powerful feminine principle is bringing the seemingly uncontrollable force of nature into subjection. For the nature of this subjection, see the nature of the witch’s power, below.

That this feminine strength is magical is indicated by the lemniscate above the maiden’s head, creating a correspondence with the lemniscate above the head of the Rider-Waite Magician. Thomson sees the maiden’s strength as the feminine counterpart of the male strength of the Magician: in the context of the Charge, its feminine nature is sufficiently indicated by the fact that this speech comes from the mouth of the Goddess.

Thomson makes further links between the woman pictured in the Strength card and those pictured in the High Priestess and Empress cards: a reflection of the modern understanding of Maiden, Mother, and Crone. The Strength maiden is a younger version of the Empress who has yet to come to her full strength, as seen in the latter card. Thomson sees her as a cousin to the High Priestess, but in the Wiccan tripartite Goddess, Strength, High Priestess, and Empress may accord better to Maiden, Mother and Crone. The contrast between the women pictured in the High Priestess and in Strength, lies in their location: the High Priestess is secure in her temple, while the Strength maiden is using her power out in nature. Thomson sees this as the High Priestess’s power passing into action in the Strength card.

So the nature of the strength here is based on divine wisdom, and the beautiful feminine power to bring this divine wisdom into the domain of earth. Thomson sees the true nature of this strength as implied by the vulnerability of the maiden’s hand placed in reach of the lion’s mouth. She also sees in this card an image of the wildness of our instinctual nature, brought into gentle, wise order by the higher self: ‘The strength depicted here is one of trust and love. In return, the maiden’s instinctual self opens up to her with a lick rather than an attack.’[6]

This is different to the obvious understanding of these two virtues (particularly in the light of Gardner’s comments on beauty) of beauty as feminine and strength as masculine. Assigning one of these virtues to each of the genders is probably more common in the gender polarity practised in Wicca, but both of these virtues can also be understood as both masculine and feminine, and both men and women can be understood as containing both beauty and strength in their natures. As Thomson puts it, again referring to the Strength tarot card, although these words actually apply as well to the virtues of beauty and strength:

‘The card also is another representation of balancing opposites, in this case the masculine-feminine resolution (logic vs. Eros or love). Inner strength lies in the acknowledgement of both our mental, spiritual, and physical aspects, not in competition between them, or repression of one. They are not rivals; they are partners. Our objective (conscious) and subjective (unconscious) aspects are in balance, or we are working to achieve that balance.’[7]

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[1] Crowley, 1975, p. 176.

[2] St Thomas Aquinas (translated by Timothy McDermott, OP): Summa Theologiae (Volume 2: 1a.2-11). Blackfriars, Oxford, no date, p. 73.

[3] Feri Tradition creation myth. T. Thorn Coyle: Evolutionary Witchcraft. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, New York, 2004, pp. 208-209.

[4] Gardner, 2004, pp. 111-112.

[5] Sandra Thomson: Pictures from the Heart. St Martin’s Griffin, New York, 2003.

[6] Ibid, p. 322.

[7] Ibid, p. 322.