One glaring
absence from the thealogy of the Charge, one which is very prominent in later
Wiccan ritual must be mentioned: nowhere is there any mention of the God. The
most obvious explanation would appear to be that since this is the Charge of the Goddess there would be no reason
to mention him at all. In the modern ritual context of the Charge, in which the
moon is drawn down into the High Priestess by the High Priest, in their personifications of the divine
couple, this does not seem to make sense. This would mean that a central
mystery of the Wiccan religion is being acted out, and the Goddess then
completely ignores her consort to address a speech to the coven (in ‘you’ form,
therefore addressed to you plural).
This omission
makes even less sense in the earlier context for the use of the Charge, to the
newly initiated witch, after her initiation. Since the 1960s an address to the
new initiate has come into use in Wicca, which is quite different to the Charge
here examined. I am unable to account for the omission of the God from the
Charge, used to address new initiates in the early days.
Having examined
the sources and thealogy of the Charge, one thing is most striking: Wicca as an
achievement. Wicca is sometimes seen as the result of a number of different
cultural streams over the couple of centuries before it was made public in the
1950s. On the light of the thealogy found in the Charge, I would enlarge this
statement to say that I feel that Wicca is the culmination of these influences. Wicca’s syncretic nature leads to
criticism of it as a pick-and-mix religion cribbed together from any sources
that can’t get away, but the fact that a whole new religion could have started
from a collection of rather divergent sources, and emerged as a fairly unified
whole which hangs together is no mean achievement. The ‘ingredients’ –
folklore, contemporary understandings of ancient religion, freemasonry, western
occult tradition – do not of themselves imply that a unified whole could be
made from them. Saddle that mixture with the name of ‘witchcraft’, which has
had an overwhelmingly negative meaning at all times and in all places, and it
would seem to be doomed. Yet the respected chaos magician Phil Hine, whose own
early magical training was in Alexandrian Wicca, was able to write that by the
late 1970s, English occultism was dominated by Western
Qabalah, Thelema, and Witchcraft.[1] No
wonder if these three strands also draw on each other for inspiration. The fact
that decades on, this religion is growing and attracting interest in its own
rather eccentric way, is no mean achievement: you might almost call it magic.
Some particular
aspects of Wiccan thealogy, which run underneath many of the key ideas and
emerge in some unexpected places, must be mentioned. The influence of Aleister
Crowley, the ‘mad uncle in the attic’ of Wicca, on the Charge – both textual
and on its thealogy – even in the final version, cannot be ignored. Valiente’s
revision makes the Charge sound less
like Crowley’s
writing, but many of his ideas are still there, although given a new twist for
Wicca. His adage of ‘love is the law’ is altered to ‘my law is love’, for
example. His universality of ‘the law is for all’ is changed to a law which is
explicitly not intended for all, it is for those who are interested, and this
interest is often attributed to having been a witch in a previous life. Once
again, retaining influences from the notorious ‘Great Beast’ makes the
achievement of Wicca more remarkable. The new twist given to each of the ideas
inherited from him means that in my opinion Wicca is not a sort of folk version of Thelema, as is sometimes asserted,
but rather a wholly different tradition, drawing on some of the same ideas.
A similar
process is undergone by the passages quoted from Aradia: each is given a
subtle new appearance in Wicca, which is plainly not the witch-cult pictured in Aradia. Making love in the
woods becomes a central sacrament of divine union in Wicca, nudity becomes the
means of raising power, gathering under the moon gathers further occult
significance to itself.
Some of the
ideas (as well as direct quotations) in the Charge may also have come from Crowley; as noted
repeatedly in the thealogy, many of his ideas are also found in Wicca. It is
striking how passages from Aradia, which Valiente kept in the final
version of the Charge as supposedly ‘traditional’, are reflected in passages
from Crowley.
His writings talk repeatedly about human dignity, about intimacy with the Gods,
about freedom from slavery, about the joy of the authentic human being, and
about finding the Will and doing it. When Wiccans end a spell, ‘As I do will,
so mote it be,’ they need to understand the exact meaning of these words! I do
not believe the evidence supports the rumour that he had a hand in the composition
of the rituals, nor that he was ever involved in a pre-Gardner ‘witch-cult’,
nor yet that Wicca is a ‘pop’ version of Thelema. I think the resemblances
between Wicca and Thelema actually come from their birth and development in
similar environments, that is the occult worlds of the first half of the
twentieth century. They were both influenced by the same cultural world, and
the occult revival of the late nineteenth century again influenced them both.
Another notable
absence from the Charge is the grimoire tradition of ceremonial magic, a major
source for other Wiccan ritual texts, and of which some writers believe Wicca
to be a continuation.[2] Of
course it is there present in ideas such as the ability of the individual to
influence the world around them by magic, for example. Many of the ideas taken
from Crowley
may be taken as more religious than magical, as used in the Charge. The Charge
feels different from the grimoire tradition, with its evocations of demons,
commands, and conjurations, and perhaps this explains this tradition’s absence
in the Charge, which is after all a pagan Goddess speaking to us, whereas the
cosmology of the grimoire tradition is completely Judaeo-Christian. It is as
if, in the Charge, magical ideas have been ripped from their setting in the
Judaeo-Christian tradition, and placed in a different context.
Does it matter
that the roots of Wicca can be found in many diverse sources, and yet it is
presented as an ancient tradition, a tradition for which, moreover, there is no
evidence at all? Rather than seeing in this situation an indication that Gardner was an old fraud,
I believe it actually puts Wicca into a great tradition. Reading Gardner for
the first time, having already read the criticisms of him, I was struck by the
feeling that he is the real thing. If you read his books, ignoring the gaping
holes in his history and sheer ingenuousness of some of his explanations for
what happens in the witch-cult, and pay attention to the experience of which he is writing, you gain an impression of simple
joy, an urge to communicate this mystery he had discovered to others, and an
impression of a great magician. This is what places Wicca in a great tradition:
magicians have always ascribed their work to previous magicians,[3] it
is part of the psychic scene-setting which makes magic work, rather than a spurious
front: if you join Wicca thinking it to be the continuance of the hypothetical
witch-cult of Western Europe, and some time later discover the witch-cult never
existed, but nonetheless have discovered that Wicca works as a magico-religious
system, which promotes your personal dignity and improves the world around you,
this piece of scene-setting has merely done its job.
A major theme
recurring throughout the Charge is the presence of the Goddess: at times this
is concentrated within the individual witch, and at times explained by the
presence of the Goddess throughout everything. At the extreme of this idea, the
Goddess is everything, creating a
dynamic tension between her immanence within the individual witch and the
transcendence of a Goddess who is everything. The result of this tension is an
ideal of a right proportion in all things for the witch: Mother is both so
great that our loves and hates can be seen as insignificant compared to the
love of the Goddess for all living, and yet because of that love she is
intimately involved in everything. Conversely, it also seems that because of
the divinity within, the name of each individual witch is a name of the
Goddess, and the witch can name the things surrounding her as Goddess.
Compared to
this emphasis on immanence, the familiar Wiccan theme of polarity, especially
as experienced in the divine polarity of Goddess and God, is all but missing
from the Charge. In the Charge, however, the principle finds other expressions
than that of gender polarity, for example in the polarities contained in the
‘virtues’.
Gender polarity
is not, however completely absent: it is tacitly present in the emphasis on
fertility and sexual love, which are themselves often only implicit in the
Charge, being revealed by consideration of the ideas underlying the phrases. In
this, the Charge is a truly magical composition, since many of its
‘correspondences’ are only revealed by digging under surface meanings to reveal
them.
I have been
surprised at the extent to which the Charge can be interpreted (once again, I
am not claiming that any of these interpretations is the only possible one) as
referring to a mystery cult. Since the Book of Shadows has now been in print for
several decades, we can forget that there was a time when it was not. The ideas
about the mysteries that were current in Gardner’s
day may have contributed to the ideas of initiation, secrecy, enactments of the
divinities’ mythologies, ecstasy, liberal ideas about sexuality, and ideas
about what happens when we die.
The idea of
time in the thealogy of the Charge is different from that proposed in most
monotheistic religions, that is, cyclical rather than linear. In most
monotheisms, we are seen as only having one life, on which our eternal fate
depends, whereas in our view life is cyclical and recurring, so if we don’t get
it right the first time the opportunity will doubtless come round again. The
irony is that the linear monotheistic conception of our life can actually give
greater significance to the events and actions of our life, whereas a recurrent
view of history can lead to a certain fatalism. The ennui created by a
philosophy in which life has few ‘carrots’ can lead to restlessness and the
continuing search for distraction and achievement. Conversely the significance
of our lives’ events and relationships is granted a greater significance if the
people we love are those we have known and loved before.
Another current
underlying all aspects of Wiccan thealogy is its countercultural nature: and
this only begins with the fact that we call God ‘she’. The countercultural
elements most evident in the Charge are ritual nudity, secrecy, not seeing the
Goddess as other from ourselves, and sex as sacred. Practitioners of some other
religions will protest that sex is sacred in their religions as well, and so it
is, but in Wicca it is sacred in a different way. In Christianity the tendency
has been to protect the sacredness of sex by locking it up into certain approved
contexts, such as within marriage or only for procreation. In Wicca there are
no approved contexts for sex, it is the major sacrament of our religion, in
which the divine can both be met, and joined in union. In Wicca the only
context for sex which can be disapproved of is that which does not respect the
divinity of the other person, and their power to make their decision. Perhaps
these countercultural elements are what are most striking in the thealogy of
the Charge, and mean that Wicca as a religion is really like no other which has
come before.
At times these
countercultural elements of Wiccan thealogy are extended to become an inversion
of the values of the surrounding society: the most obvious being the inversion
of the wicked witch archetype into an archetype of a member of an oppressed,
ancient, minority religion. Ritual nudity could be taken as an inversion of our
society’s prevailing values: the Christians may get dressed up for church, but
we get undressed for it. That these two examples are the ones which spring to
mind may be no accident, and I would suggest that the principle of inversion in
Wicca is not basically an inversion of societal values. I feel that such an
inversion would have made Wicca a much more political animal than it is, and
would place it in the tradition of religious protest of such groups as the
Ranters, which tradition, while present in Wicca, is only an undercurrent in
most forms of it. It would also imply a thealogy of either ‘fallen’ humanity
and/or a Golden Age, which again can be found in some traditions, but is not a
major theme of Wiccan thealogy. Rather I feel the significance of the inversion
motif is that what is inverted is always something related to Christianity. For
example, ‘the Christians burned nine million witches, claiming that they were
devil worshippers, when actually they were the remnants of an ancient Pagan
religion.’ Certainly the prevailing Judaeo-Christian mores of our society have
helped greatly to the creation of a ‘diabolic’ witch figure, and Wicca is
consciously acting against the grain of these mores in creating a positive
figure of the witch. The purely religious function that these inversion seem to
serve, then, is the differentiation of the witches from both Christians, but at
the same time, from the prevailing Judaeo-Christian norms of the surrounding
society.
This inversion is
mirrored by the recurring theme of descent, which in Wicca appears most
obviously in the initiation rites and in the descent myth quoted by Gardner. This motif of a
descent necessary for ascent can be interpreted in several ways: in overtly
‘mythological’ language as a descent to the domain of Death, enabling a
rebirth, or as a psychological descent into the subconscious enabling wholeness
and integration. Perhaps these two interpretations may ultimately amount to the
same experience. Certainly the myth of descent leading to ascent is reflected
in the similarly recurring motif of love, birth, death, and rebirth, and the
precept that the Goddess must be sought within certainly implies an inward
aspect to these cycles.
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