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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in Doreen Valiente

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

It's a byword in New Crete, Robert Graves' Goddess-worshiping utopia of the future: “Nothing without the hand of love.” Love is the culture's central value.

In New Crete, love's opposite is not hatred, but unlove: self-interest disregarding of others. “How utterly unloving!” say the New Cretans of such actions, shuddering.

In 1961, W. Holman Keith—protegé of Gleb Botkin, founder of the Long Island Church of Aphrodite—observed in his ground-breaking Divinity as the Eternal Feminine that any Goddess-based religion must necessarily adopt love as its central principle.

Doreen Valiente would seem to have felt the same when, in the late 1950s, she drafted her well-loved prose “Charge of the Goddess”, in which the Lady of Witches tells her people: “My law is love unto all beings.”

Doubtless this intriguing dictum restates the Thelemic principle “Love is the law, love under will”, but let us ask: What does the Lady's Law of Love mean? What are its implications for the actions of Her People?

Does she mean that we should love viruses and flatworms? Does she mean that we should all become vegan? Does she mean that we should love the deer as we shoot it? If the latter, what does it mean to love what you kill?

In a sense, the statement is a commonsense observation about all living things that reproduce sexually.

More broadly, though, I think that she's talking about a general approach to life. Taking love as your central principle and prime motivator will change the way that you think about what you do. Next time you make a decision, ask yourself: What is the loving thing to do here?

The Lady's Law of Love governs not only our behavior toward others of our own kind, but those not of our kind as well: other humans that we perceive as not being like us, as well as our larger family of kin, animals, plants, and ultimately the entire “non-living” world.

Lest you think the concept of a Love Culture redolent of hippie-dom or naiveté, let me cite another proverb of New Crete:

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  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    I think it was in an issue of Natural History magazine that I read an article about St. Hubertus. It mentioned that traditionally

Best Moon Stars Pictures [HD] | Download Free Images on Unsplash

The first thing to notice about Doreen Valiente's classic Charge of the Goddess is that it's not one charge, but two, each with its own introduction. Let me call them the Charge of the Great Mother and the Charge of the Star Goddess.

Why, one might wonder, this liturgical redundancy?

I first theorized a difference in purpose for the two: that we see here a charge for the Full and Dark Moons respectively. It would make sense to honor the Star Goddess at Dark of the Moon, when the stars are seen most clearly.

At the time, though—this was the 80s—few Wiccan groups observed New Moon, but (as they still do) rotely recited both charges at Full Moon in seeming unawareness of the inherent internal contradiction. It occurred to me that the founders of Wicca may originally have intended celebrations at both New and Full Moons and prepared appropriate charges accordingly, but that when the proposed Dark Moon celebrations (for whatever reason) never materialized, they retained both charges despite the seeming contradiction. Really, the Star Goddess charge is just too good to lay by.

It wasn't a bad theory, but it foundered on the reef of fact.

In fact, the two charges are a product of the piece's compositional history. The Charge of the Goddess is made up of two component charges because they are drawn from different sources.

Even before the compositional history of the Charge was clarified by the publication of the Farrars' ground-breaking Eight Sabbats for Witches in 1988, it was clear to me that the text could not possibly predate the “20th” century. The Charge of the Great Mother is clearly derived from C. G. Leland's 1899 Aradia: Gospel of the Witches; in fact, it is based not on the original Tuscan text, but on Leland's English translation of the Tuscan. Aradia being essentially a text of Moon worship, this explains the lunar orientation of Charge A.

Charge B, however, is drawn from a different source: in fact, from Crowley's Book of the Law. That the words were originally those of the Thelemite Star Goddess Nuit explains the piece's astral orientation. This also explains the second charge's difference in tone and subject matter from the first.

The Charge of the Goddess is, unquestionably, Doreen Valiente's masterpiece. While Valiente wrote competently enough, she was certainly no great prose stylist. In the prose Charge, though, she surpasses herself.

(At the risk of being catty, I would invite the reader to compare the prose Charge's rounded cadences with the jangling iambs of the rhymed version: Mother Darksome and Divine,/Thine the scourge and Thine the kiss.... There's no real comparison.)

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 Dancing Witches, Disciplined - streetsofsalem

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The bonfire is a universal symbol of human celebration.

The flaming cauldron is a distinctive symbol (in the English-speaking world at least) of the new paganisms.

Here's the story that marries these two divergent facts.

 

Bonfires are really pretty impractical things. For one, they're a waste of wood. They're of no use for cooking; a bed of coals is much better for that purpose. Likewise, a small fire is a much better means of keeping warm. You can't really get close enough to a big fire for long enough to warm yourself through.

That's why, universally, a bonfire means: something special, out-of-the-ordinary, spendthrift. That's why a bonfire means: celebration.

 

In the normal way of things, cauldrons have fire on the outside, not the inside. Generally, fire in a cauldron means a burned dinner.

Yet, by virtue of this very unusualness, the flaming cauldron has become a distinctive symbol of Wicca: so much so that, from within the movement, its self-contradictory nature has gone largely unremarked.

Why?

 

Here's the story. In the beginning, modern revival witchcraft insisted on skyclad ritual. For practical reasons, both meteorological and sociological, this mostly meant indoor ritual.

But you can't have a bonfire indoors.

Enter the flaming cauldron.

At this remove of time, we no longer know who lit modern paganism's first flaming cauldron. A likely candidate would be “Aunt” Doreen Valiente who, as a novice, was tasked with creating Wicca's first Yule ritual. (“Emeth, dear, write us up a nice Yule for tonight, would you? There's a good girl.”) The rite that she crafted on the fly that afternoon in December 1953, with the flaming cauldron at its very heart, has become the Book of Shadows' quintessential rite of Yule.

The cauldron-as-indoor-firepit is a brilliant use of available resources. Though historically an intimate attribute of the witch—being shorthand for potion-brewing—the cauldron otherwise has (with one exception) little presence in classic Wiccan ritual, an odd fact directly attributable to Wicca's rootedness in Ceremonial Magic. (Few, if any, historic witches would have had even the slightest idea what a "pentacle" was.) Most lists of Wicca's sacred tools don't even include the cauldron.

 

Modern Paganism has an Indoor Problem. “Nature religion aside,” as Bast observes in Rosemary Edghill's Bowl of Night, “most pagans are indoor people.”

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Fain

 “...ye who are fain to sorcery...”

 

There shall ye assemble, ye who are fain to sorcery, yet have not won its deepest secrets: to these shall I teach such things as are yet unknown.

So speaks the Goddess of Witches to her people in Doreen Valiente's foundational masterpiece, The Charge of the Great Mother.

Valiente's evocative phrase is based, nearly word-for-word, on Charles Leland's English rendering of “Madalena”'s Tuscan text: She who fain would learn all sorcery yet has not won its deepest secrets, them [ i.e. the deepest secrets] my mother [i.e. the Goddess of Witches] will teach her, in truth all things as yet unknown.

Fain. Already in 1899, when Leland published his Aradia: the Gospel of the Witches, fain read archaically, mysteriously.

Don't confuse it with fane: that means “temple,” from the Latin fanum. Nor (speaking of homonyms) is it the same as feign, “pretend, fabricate” (< French feindre). (Which is not to say [snarkiness alert] that we all haven't met some who are feign to sorcery.)

No, fain is a good Old English word. In the dialect of the Hwicce, the original Anglo-Saxon Tribe of Witches, faegen (pronounced, more or less, fain) meant “glad, joyful, rejoicing.” (The Old Norse cognate, feginn, means “joy” tout court.)

As a verb, fain means “to rejoice in, enjoy; to take to gladly.” As an adjective, fain is “disposed, inclined or eager toward, willing.”

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Why Pagans Do Ritual

It's still the single best rationale for pagan ritual that I've ever heard.

Back in the early days of the Wiccan revival, a reporter asked Gardner's first post-Valiente priestess, Dayonis, "Why do you do your rituals?"

"Because," she told him, "if we didn't, the Sun wouldn't come up in the morning."

Now that's a proper pagan answer.

Aunt Doreen—rather peevishly, one thinks—later dismissed this reply as simple-minded. Well, she knew Dayonis better than I do.

But I still think she missed the point.

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"Witches' Rune" Originally Sung to Stephen Foster Tune, Says Historian

AP: London

According to Wiccan historian Philip Heselton, Doreen Valiente's famous chant “Witches' Rune” was originally intended to be sung to the tune of the Stephen Foster tune, “Camptown Races.”

“According to some recently-discovered correspondence, that's the tune that she originally wrote the words to fit,” said Heselton. “Of course, since then it's been sung to many other tunes as well.”

American composer Stephen Foster (1826-1864) wrote “Camptown Races” (also known as “Camptown Ladies”) in 1850, and the tune was a favorite of Valiente's first husband, Joanis Vlachopoulos, who had learned it while in the Merchant Navy.

Although the Foster tune was Valiente's intended setting for her lyrics to what was to become a classic Wiccan liturgical chant, it never caught on with British witches, perhaps because they were unfamiliar with the American tune.

An interesting aspect of this discovery is the fact that the original words to “Witches' Rune” were slightly different from those now found in most recensions of the Book of Shadows.

According to Heselton, the first verse, along with a now-disused chorus, originally went:

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