Commentary on the Charge of the Goddess 38: Bibliography

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Philip Heselton: Gerald Gardner and the Cauldron of Inspiration. Capall Bann, Milverton, 2003.

Phil Hine: Condensed Chaos: An Introduction to Chaos Magic. New Falcon Publications, Tempe, Arizona, 2003.

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Michael Howard: The Occult Conspiracy. Rider, London, 1989.

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Commentary on the Charge of the Goddess 37: Conclusion on the Thealogy of the Charge

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.

---

[1] Phil Hine: Condensed Chaos: An Introduction to Chaos Magic. New Falcon Publications, Tempe, Arizona, 2003.

[2] D’Este and Rankine, 2008.

[3] For more on the nature of this, as well as countless examples of it, see Owen Davies: Grimoires: A History of Magic Books. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009.

Commentary on the Charge of the Goddess 36: And thou who thinkest to seek me...

And thou who thinkest to seek me; Know that thy seeking and yearning shall avail thee not unless thou know the mystery, that if that which thou seekest thou findest not within thee; Thou wilt never find it without thee. For behold; I have been with thee from the begining, and I am that which is attained at the end of desire.

Sources and Influences

BAM: And if thou sayest, I have journied unto thee, and it availed me not, Rather shalt thou say, I called upon thee, and I waited patiently, and Lo, Thou wast with me from the beginning For they that ever desired me, shall ever attain me, even to the end of all desire.

Cro. LXV: But I have called unto Thee, and I have journied unto Thee, and it availed me not. I waited patiently, and thou wast with me from the beginning. (2.59-60)

‘Alipilli’ cited in L.A. Cahagnet, Magnetic Magic, 1898:[1] That if that which thou seekest thou findest not within thee; thou wilt never find it without thee.

Cro. LXV: They that ever desired Thee shall obtain Thee, even at the End of their Desire. (3.63)

Thealogy

This final part of the Charge returns to the important theme of the presence of the Goddess within the witch, and the nature of the witch’s search for her. For the Wiccan nature of the search for the Goddess and its end are both contained in the realisation that she is already within, reminiscent of the maxim found in the mystery religions and subsequent occult traditions: ‘Know thyself,’ concluding the Charge’s journey inwards to the revelation that the journey ends within.

The understanding of knowing ourselves must inevitably be coloured by the event of greater understanding in psychology and psychoanalysis from the nineteenth century onwards. Dion Fortune is an example of an occultist who united the understandings of traditional occultism and of modern psychology. The Gods and Goddesses can even be seen as representative of forces within, which is not necessarily to denigrate their existence as genuine powers in the world, but can aid in the understanding of these powers, as Tau Allen Greenfield writes:

‘True occult initiates have always regarded the Ultimate Reality as beyond all names and description. Named “deities” are, therefore, largely symbols. “Isis” is a symbol of the long-denied female component of deity to some occultists. “Pan” or “The Horned God” or “Set” or even “Satan” are symbols of unconscious, repressed sexuality. To the occultist, there is no Devil, no “god of evil.” There is, ultimately, only the Ain Sof Aur of the Qabala: the limitless light of which we are but a frozen spark. Evil, in this system, is the mere absence of light. All else is illusion.

‘The goal of the occult path of initiation is balance. In Freemasonry and High Magick, the symbols of the White Pillar and Black Pillar represent this balance between conscious and unconscious forces.’[2]

The Goddess may be seen, returning to the idea of the collective unconscious, as something which exists as a symbol in the collective unconscious of humanity, which is why she seems familiar to us and may be related to the concept of morphic resonance mentioned above. Interpreting the Great Mother as a Jungian archetype may appear to resolve the problem of the ahistoricity of this idea, but in its turn it creates a different sort of history. That is, in looking back at the existence of what we can now understand as an archetype, we undertake an essentially modern search, and once again may be imposing modern ideas on historical images. However Neumann writes that in seeking for a psychological understanding of the Great Mother this may be inevitable:

‘If we offend against “history” by removing documents and representations from their cultural context, we hope to compensate by correlating our archetypal investigation with a “psychohistory,” that is to say, with the stages in the development of the human psyche. Taking the development of consciousness as the decisive phenomena of human history, we arrive at an arrangement of the phenomena that does not, to be sure, coincide with the usual sequence of historical events, but makes possible the psychological orientation we require.’[3]

The journey within for the witch mirrors the Goddess’s descent to death and ascent, and is embodied in the initiations. Vivianne Crowley, who has perhaps the most psychological understanding of the Wiccan mysteries of published writers, believes inner transformation - with magical techniques and a Goddess religion – to be one of three facets found in Wicca.[4] She understands the Wiccan initiation both to cause entry into a particular coven or tradition and into the priestly, magical and mystical ‘current’ of Wicca, which she equates to renovatio, one of the forms of rebirth identified by Jung. [5]

In the first degree initiation, Crowley identifies the significance of being skyclad as signifying how we come into the world, as related to the rebirth of the initiation. The psychological aspects of initiation she relates to a meditation in which the candidate is asked to identify aspects of the personality she wishes to strengthen or weaken, with the elements. In the ritual of elements balancing undertaken before the initiation, the candidate is taken on an inner journey through her own elements, which Crowley likens to the candidate invoking the elemental quarters of her own personality; she states this is necessary because normally when the circle is cast the elements are balanced by the callings, but at an initiation the candidate is outside the circle when it is cast. The binding of the candidate represents the state of the candidate before initiation for Crowley: she is still bound to matter, and is not yet freed by initiation for her spiritual journey.

Crowley likens the challenge to the candidate to that made by the guardian of the candidate’s unconscious: passing through this gateway allows the candidate to face all that is unconscious about herself and face her shadows and fears. In the first degree initiation, the initiate is enabled to make the journey inwards to face these things (and also face the Goddess, since it is within that we must find her), in a position of vulnerability and weakness, and to progress from that position to develop magical ability and insight.

Enabled to do this work, the initiate can develop towards second degree initiation, frequently marked in Wicca by the ability to teach and initiate others. Crowley understands the much-misunderstood symbol of second degree initiation, the pentagram with two points uppermost, in psychological terms. The spirit point is at the bottom, underneath the points for the four elements, since spirit has emerged for the candidate, but is not yet master over the others. Discovering what is hidden is necessary for the pentagram to be turned over, with the spirit point at its rightful top position, at third degree initiation.

By the second degree initiation, the candidate, initiated in the first degree should have begun to recognise and sort out his ‘stuff’. In Crowley’s psychological understanding, second degree initiation is what enables a meeting between the Ego and the shadow side of our personality, the unconscious: another appearance of the motif of reconciliation of opposites, since the two sides of the personality have been likened to dark and light, male and female.

Second degree initiation brings the initiate into the succession of witches: the initiator doesn’t only will his own power into her, but connects her to the power of all witches, marking the initiate permanently as a witch, both in this and future incarnations. Crowley comments that initiation of the second degree can be a very lonely time for the witch, forced to rely on her own resources, which can frequently be a time of disillusionment with the human frailties of her initiators (compare with Farrar and Bone’s ‘Second Degree Syndrome’ mentioned above).

The theme of descent appears at second degree initiation, and Crowley once again interprets this in psychological terms. For a man, she sees the significance of the descent at second degree as being meeting his own anima, leading to reconciliation between his male and female personalities. For a woman, the journey is embodied in the Goddess’s journey into the underworld to meet the Dread Lord of Death, who represents the kingdom of the unconscious mind, signifying the woman’s animus, or male aspect. For both men and women, this leads to a meeting within aspects of their personalities: for this a journey is required, it cannot just happen, and this meeting is preparatory to the marriage between the two sides of the personality, which will happen at third degree, and is embodied in the Great Rite of Wicca.

Crowley understands the third degree initiation to recognise a certain level of development within the candidate, in which the seat of understanding is moving from the Ego to the Self, marked by the lessening of inner conflicts. This degree is celebrated in the Great Rites, which Crowley equates to the Heiros Gamos – or sacred marriage – of ancient Paganism, in which the participants are reborn as sacred twins. Crowley contrasts this Pagan approach to sexuality, in which one is merged with another, with the Christian approach, in which she states sexuality is ‘transmuted within the individual to achieve a higher state of consciousness.’[6]

While the externals of the third degree initiation consist of a sacred union of the Goddess and God invoked into the priestess and priest, Crowley sees the inner significance of this rite to be the union of the Jungian Ego with the Anima or Animus so that the Self may be born. In this psychological understanding of the rite, this union takes place and has its fruit inwardly. In this interpretation the third degree opens the way for the reconciliation of the conflicting aspects of the initiate’s personality:

‘The inner marriage is the marriage of soul and spirit, Ego and Self, and leads to individuation. It is the opening of the secret way by the few which will lead to the opening of the way for the many. The unconscious is like a jungle. Its paths must be hacked through with great effort and then kept open by continual use. ...

‘...our lives can be considered a sacred quest. It is a quest which may have begun in this lifetime or many lifetimes before. It is a quest to find ourselves: who and what we really are. To do this we must first cease to pretend to be what we are not. We must cast away our Persona or mask. We must be prepared to confront the Shadow, that which we are and would rather we were not. Only then can we unify our conscious and unconscious minds and so give birth to the hidden Sun – the Self.’[7]

Crowley writes that the three degrees of initiation in Wicca can represent the stages of this process. Although this degree is analogous to the process of inidividuation, she writes that it may involve even more inner turmoil because of its quality of sacrifice. Individuation of the self involves clear differentiation from others, and the third degree Wiccan’s role of caring for others can mean making decisions on when to accede or not to the relentless demands which others may make.

This journey ends with meeting the archetype of the Wise Old Man (or Woman), who represents our true self; Crowley equates this to the concept of the knowledge and conversation of one Holy Guardian Angel in ceremonial magic. From this point on, the person is wholly reliant on inner wisdom, because the person has become her true self, and Crowley sees the initiation rites of Wicca as opening the gates within the self which can enable this to happen. The instruction which Crowley quotes from the rite strikingly parallels the creation myth of the Feri tradition quoted above:

‘Ere time began the One who is all looked inward on itself and beheld itself as though through a reflection in a pool and so came to self-awareness. And in that coming to self-awareness, the One was made two, subject and object; that which looks and that which is looked upon; and it divided from itself. And as the One was made Two, so the male and the female were made separate.

‘And it came to pass that the Two who had come from the One sought to be joined together and made whole again. And so shall the male and the female be joined as One and from that union with the other who is in truth but part of the Self, the doubt and the fear which are the product of the delusion of solitude shall be banished.’[8]

Truly, she has been within us from the beginning, the search starts within and ends within. In a sense the search for the Goddess of the witches finds its end in abandoning the search: when you no longer seek the Goddess you have found her. This relates to the magical practice of forgetting about work in progress, as stated above the reason is that turning over your intent in your mind calls it back to you and prevents it happening. Similarly forgetting about the search for the Goddess allows to come to mind the Goddess who is all things.

This thealogy differentiates Wicca from the New Age movements, with which it is often compared, and in which the emphasis is more on seeking human potential. In Wicca there is no further potential to be achieved, or rather no further potential to be sought outside the individual, because humans already have the fullness of their potential within them, the Goddess is within, she is also everything, and her influence can been seen and engaged with through the ‘correspondences’ of our lives.

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[1] Cited in Kelly, 2007, p. 185.

[2] Tau Allen Greenfield: The Secret History of Modern Witchcraft. In Richard Metzger (editor): Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult. Disinformation Company, New York, 2009, p. 267.

[3] Erich Neumann: The Great Mother. Pantheon Books, New York, 1955, p. 89.

[4] Interview in Michael Jordan: Witches: An Encyclopedia of Paganism and Magic. Kyle Cathie Ltd, London, 2000.

[5] Vivianne Crowley: Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Millenium (Revised and Updated). Thorsons, London, 1996.

[6] Ibid, p. 222.

[7] Ibid, p. 223.

[8] Ibid, p. 228.

Guest post: Nanny Ogg on etiquette with witches

I'm delighted to announce that this weekend this blog passed 10,000 page views. Thank you, all of you, I love my audience. The most popular pages remain the ones on Dione, the Circle, reading the tarot aces & Laurence Soper. The one on urinals is racing up behind, though. To celebrate, a 'guest post': Nanny Ogg on etiquette with witches:

'This is really quite straightforward. Witches are very lucky people to know, especially happy witches. When you meet a small dumpy witch, it is good luck to offer her a drink.
'If you happen to be baking & a witch comes calling - & it's amazin'ly occult, the way a witch turns up when you happen to be baking - it's good luck to give her a few scones, a bun or two, or maybe a whole cake to take away.
'If you want a cow who milks well. It's good luck to have some of the milk sent round reg'lar to the local witch. It's *amazin'* how rare it is for that kind of cow to give trouble.
'When brewing, a good beer will keep well if a jug or two is dispatched to the local witch. She will be too polite to refuse.
'Beware of bad luck caused by throwing away old clothes, which may be used by occult forces to put an evil 'fluence on you. Have 'em sent round to the local witch for disposal, especially if there's any decent lace or fine linen with a bit of wear left in it (you wouldn't believe the trouble occult forces can cause with that kind of stuff, it's amazin'.) It's no trouble.
'At Hogswatch, the keepin' qualities of your bacon & ham can be improved no end by sending a moderate portion round to the local witch. She will accept this modest burden.
'Witches are always helpful if approched properly, & never ask for anything in return.
'Incidentally, always remember that a proper witch has a string bag somewhere about her person, so any object you ask her to take away won't be too big.'
Terry Pratchett & Stephen Briggs: Nanny Ogg's Cookbook. Transworld, London, 1999, p. 107.

Commentary on the Charge of the Goddess 35: Mirth and Reverence

These, the last of the four pairs of Wiccan virtues, have strangely given me the most trouble.
I feel the reason for that may be our English-speaking puritanical Cartesian dualist history: I feel that, say, an Italian with a longer Catholic history would find it easier to equate these two. In Britain we are far too used to a solemn joyless religion, ruthlessly segregated from the rest of life. It is not for nothing that a high proportion of witches are ex-Catholic: the ritual and philosophical mindset imbued by authentic Catholic teaching, as opposed to the Jansenist caricature which made its way to a lot of English-speaking countries via Irish emigration, create a much more 'humane' mindset.
It is remarkable that while our modern movement was created in its early days by people with few pretensions to intellectual rigour misusing sources which have largely been discredited, yet when you look around for a philosophical basis for the things we do, you can usually find one in the strangest places.
So many aspects of Wicca and Witchcraft have been born in the cauldron of a deliberate self-differentiation from the surrounding culture, that this in itself may be the explanation for finding underlying philosophy where you least expect it. The people who stirred up the ingredients of modern withcraft were following their own bliss, & may have been unaware that the philosophically-minded had thought this out before.
The strange place to find a philosophy underlying our mirth & reverence is once again St Thomas Aquinas:
'As St. Thomas makes clear in his discussion of the virtue of eutrapalia or "wittiness," laughter can be outright sinful if it occurs in inappropriate circumstances. To laugh at certain moments would be unfitting and even insulting. Such a moment would be one in which the situation or the company demand a serious and meditative atmosphere. To laugh is in some way to "let yourself go," there are certain persons and situations before whom we ought not "let ourselves go." In this way, we avoid, as St. Thomas says, "losing the balance of one's mind altogether."1 So how can we refer, then, to laughter as an "infinite" affirmation? Moreover, why can laughter be seen as a verification of the Thomistic understanding of reality? In order to adequately answer these questions, we must first notice an essential feature of laughter. When a man is overcome with honest laughter, his laughter is always spontaneous. Laughter which is calculated and prejudged is not true laughter, it is especially not that "abandon" which we call hilarity. The reason why laughter is always spontaneous is that it is a consequence of the unexpected. The reason we know laughter is always a reaction to the unexpected is because man, being rational and, therefore, a fashioner of words, reacts to wit without words; he is "taken from himself" before he can perform his normal function of tying concepts to words. The person who immediately tells you "why" something is humorous, did not get it.
'There is something which is exceedingly interesting in this fact that laughter is a wordless response to a concept presented to our minds by wit. In a certain way, laughter is a product of supra-rational insight. It is based upon a reason beyond reason. Laughter speaks not of the plodding intelligence which the Medieval philosophers spoke of as ratio, but rather, of that immediate intuition which grasps the innermost core of a reality with a mere "glance," and which the same Medievals spoke of as intellectus. To laugh is to see and acknowledge the way things are, whether one wants to or not. Laughter often forces one to see what one, often, does not want to see. It is our guarantee that objectivity cannot be completely abandoned.
'What is it about laughter which makes it a guarantor of objectivity? It is, precisely, laughter's suprarational status which makes it such. It is no secret that in our own times, rather than think ideas which have been garnered from the structure of created reality, men, for the purpose of maintaining their autonomy, fabricate ideas and concepts which have no natural referent; "equality," "self-definition," and "gender neutral" are a few of these. These and other such contemporary concepts create a mental screen which sifts out those aspects of reality which contemporary men and women will not accept. With these concepts acting as a screen, we can truthfully state that these people do not "see" reality for what it is; for most of our contemporaries, the real has become "unthinkable."' (Source: http://lifeissues.net/writers/cho/cho_05humor.html)
That said, once again Thomas Aquinas's idea is slightly twisted: if laughter is the guarantor of spontaneity, of something outside us, then for we witches, it pairs up with reverence as the guarantor of the living Goddess amongst us, in everything yet also possible to differentiate from everything. Our mirth is what ensures we know the Goddess is in us: mirth is reverence for us, so they are not contrary or even polar opposites, one invokes the other.
It is interesting that while these two virtues were the ones added to the Charge by, presumably, Valiente during her attempt to rid the Charge of as much Crowleyanity as she could, they speak so much to the religion of Crowley. It may be that they were suggested to Valiente in her reading of Crowley, since she says that she recognised the Crowley origin of much of the Charge because of having spent 'years' studying these things. The analysis of the text which is to follow will make clear how she almost eliminated the Crowley material for the verse version, only to end up putting much of it back in for the final version, & it seems that she wound up inserting a Crowleyanity that wasn't there to start off with! His new religion of the new age where there is no slavery and we are free joyfully to pursue our Will is an idea which runs through Wicca at all points.
Similarly Crowley is the idea that if we have a message of hope for the world is this: religion can be like this. It can be joyful without guilt, with personal responsibility and without blame. While we shy away from Crowley's idea of the law being for all, I do feel that we have put out there the fact that religion can be *fun*. In fact, if you didn't know better, you could think that the whole modern phenomenon of Wicca & witchcraft was some huge joke, fabricated on an almost totally fictional base. This mirth/reverence continuum implies the childlike mind that is necessary to magic: if I make believe hard enough it'll happen, & it'll be fun!
Can you hear two old men chuckling?
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