If Wicca has a text that comes near to scripture, it is the Charge of the Goddess: the address in which the Goddess, speaking through her priestess, tells her people who she is and what she asks.
In a Gardnerian circle the Charge is spoken by the High Priestess, usually at the full moon, after the rite of Drawing Down the Moon in which the Goddess has been invoked into her. It is heard, therefore, not as a reading but as the Goddess's own words to the people gathered in front of her. A charge, in the old sense, is a solemn instruction, such as a judge gives to a jury.
How it was put together
The Charge has a history that can be traced, and it is one of the most instructive stories in the making of the Craft.
The oldest layer
Its opening comes from Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, published in 1899 by the American folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland, who said he had it from a witch in Tuscany. In Leland's book the goddess Diana sends her daughter Aradia to earth to teach witchcraft to the poor and oppressed, and Aradia tells her followers:
Whenever ye have need of anything, once in the month, and when the moon is full, ye shall assemble in some desert place, or in a forest all together join to adore the potent spirit of your queen, my mother, great Diana.
Charles Godfrey Leland, Aradia, 1899
She adds that they shall be free from slavery, and that as a sign of their freedom they shall be naked in their rites. Anyone who knows the Charge will recognise where it begins.
Gardner's version
The earliest form of the Charge used in Gerald Gardner's coven was a compilation. It joined the passage from Leland to a number of passages taken from the writings of Aleister Crowley, and in places the joins showed.
Valiente's rewriting
When Doreen Valiente became Gardner's High Priestess in 1953 she recognised the Crowley at once, and with Gardner's agreement set about replacing it. She first turned the Charge into verse. Finding that some of the coven preferred prose for a long invocation, she then produced the prose version, completed by about 1957, that has been used ever since. She kept Leland's opening and the best of the older phrases, some of Crowley's among them, and the rest is her own.
We think it one of the finest pieces of religious prose written in English in the twentieth century, and it is a curious fact that most of those who know it by heart have never heard of its author.
What the Charge says
The text is in copyright, and we do not reproduce it here. It has been published in full many times, with Valiente's blessing, and is easily found. What follows is a description.
The Charge falls into two parts. In the first the Goddess speaks as the Great Mother. She tells her people to gather when the moon is full, and promises to teach them. She tells them that they shall be free. She asks them to sing, feast, dance, make music and love in her presence, and says that hers is the joy of the earth. She says that she requires no sacrifice of them, for she is the mother of every living thing and gives her love freely to the world.
In the second part she speaks as the Star Goddess, and the voice changes from the intimate to the immense. She declares herself to be the loveliness of the earth, the moon in the night sky and the soul of nature itself: the source from which everything comes and the end to which it goes back. She asks to be worshipped gladly, and gives the line for which the Charge is best known:
All acts of love and pleasure are my rituals.
The Charge of the Goddess
That line is one of the older phrases that Valiente chose to keep. It is adapted from an essay of Crowley's, and it shows how good her judgement was about what to leave alone.
She names the eight qualities she would have her people possess. And she ends with the teaching on which the whole rests: that those who seek her will seek in vain unless they know the mystery, which is that what they are looking for they must find within themselves or they will never find it outside. She has been with them from the first, and it is she who waits at the end of all longing.
What the Charge teaches
A great deal of Wiccan belief is contained in those few minutes of speech, and it is worth drawing it out.
- Worship is joyful. The Goddess asks for dancing and feasting, not for penitence. Mirth is named beside reverence as something she requires.
- Her people are free. The promise of freedom comes straight from Leland's rebel witches. It is the root of the Craft's dislike of dogma and of spiritual authority.
- The body is honoured. Love and pleasure are counted as acts of worship. Nothing in the Charge treats the flesh as an obstacle.
- No sacrifice is asked. The gods of the Craft are not appeased. They are loved.
- The divine is in the world. The Goddess is the green earth and the moon, not their maker standing apart.
- The search leads inward. The final teaching is that the mystery is not hidden somewhere else. It is found within, or not at all.
The Charge in use
Among Gardnerians the Charge belongs to the rites and is spoken by a priestess into whom the Goddess has been called. That setting gives it a force that no private reading can have. But Valiente published it for everyone, and it is used today by solitary witches, by open pagan groups and by people of no particular tradition, at full moons, at handfastings and at funerals.
We think she would be glad of that. She wrote it for a coven of perhaps a dozen people in a cottage in Hertfordshire. It has since been spoken on every continent, and it has probably done more than any other single text to tell the world what witches believe.