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I usually stick to much older history, but having had the chance to catch the Doreen Valiente exhibit at Preston Manor in Brighton, I figured I should share a few pictures as I know it's a bit tricky for many folks to get there. The exhibit itself is small but there's a great delight in seeing how intimately history is made by a most unassuming woman. I picked up Philip Heseltine's biography too and am much enjoying it. Here are some of the artifacts collected:
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The New York Times takes a look at the collection of Doreen Valiente. The way in which gods have "evolved" over time is considered. And the debate over politics within polytheism continues. It's Watery Wednesday, our weekly segment on new about the Pagan community. All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!
At Yule 1953, after lunch, Gerald Gardner turned to the then newly-initiated Doreen Valiente and said, “Write us up a nice ritual for this evening, would you my dear? There's a good girl.”
The result of this request, Valiente later told Janet and Stuart Farrar, “was the first chant or invocation I ever wrote for Gerald,” who was, she thought, “deliberately throwing me in at the deep end to see what I could do” (Farrar 148n3).
Gardner later described this ritual in his 1954 book Witchcraft Today:
The Charge of the Goddess is Doreen Valiente's masterpiece, incontestably the best of its kind.
In fact, the Charge has single-handedly created its own literary genre. Modern paganism's hodgepodge of gods, few of whom many of us grew up knowing about, has made the charge—a "self-description of a deity"—a liturgical necessity.
Note that the pagan use of the term, though, departs significantly from its original use in Freemasonry, where it means, essentially, "a list of instructions." Although the divine monologue was known in late antiquity—Classicist R. E. Witt would call it an "aretalogy"—Valiente's Charge is the Great Mother of all modern charges.
Think of the other charges that you know.
