There is a moment, late, when the candles have burned down to a low amber and the circle has closed behind the last person to step inside it.
The room goes quiet in the way a room goes quiet when everyone standing in it is waiting for something.
Then a woman begins to speak, and the voice that comes out of her is not entirely her own.
What she speaks is the Charge of the Goddess, the central text of Wicca.
It is not a spell to be worked. It is an address delivered aloud, mouth to ear, in the dark.
The Goddess speaks in the first person, to anyone who looks for her.
The words are carried in ritual most often by a priestess. They were written to be heard, not held.
Nearly all of the text was shaped by Doreen Valiente, working over older material.
Beneath her sentences lie three older layers, and each one can still be heard through the surface if you listen for it.
What the Charge of the Goddess Is
A charge, in the older sense, is an instruction laid upon someone under oath.
The word survives in the charge given to a jury, in a panelled room, with a hand resting on a book.
Here the instruction comes from the Goddess herself, in her own voice.
It is usually called simply the Charge, with nothing else attached to it.
She says when to gather, how to gather, and what is expected of the gathering.
Then she tells the listener where she may actually be found.
The prose version is short, well under a thousand words. It is brief enough to carry in the memory, and a great many people carry it.
Most Wiccans meet the Charge early, and go on meeting it for years afterward, until the lines begin to arrive before they are summoned.
Where the Words Came From
The Charge is built out of three separate layers, laid down like silt.
The oldest layer is folklore collected in Italy in the nineteenth century. The second layer is ceremonial magic from the early twentieth century, cool and formal, heavy with ceremony.
The third layer is the poetry added when the whole text was rewritten, and it is the layer you hear first.
None of it is ancient, whatever the archaic grammar whispers.
The thee and thou belong to the style, not to the age of the writing. They are the dress the words wear, not the years standing behind them.
The Charge is a modern composition assembled out of much older material.
Knowing this takes nothing away from the force of the words. A liturgy is judged by what it does in the mouth, and in the room, and in the silence just after.
Doreen Valiente and the Second Writing
Doreen Valiente was initiated into Gerald Gardner’s coven in the nineteen fifties.
She found the coven ritual heavy with borrowed material, a weight that dragged when it was spoken. Much of it came recognizably from the writings of Aleister Crowley.
By her own later account, Gardner invited her to write something better.
She produced a Charge in verse before anything else. The verse glittered and was admired, but it proved awkward in ritual use, handsome on the page and stumbling in candlelight.
She then wrote the prose Charge that is spoken almost everywhere now.
It kept the shape of the older text and let most of the borrowing fall away.
Her version is the reason the Charge sounds like poetry rather than instruction, why it moves like water instead of like a list of rules.
The Aradia Layer
The first half of the Charge stands upon a book called Aradia.
Charles Godfrey Leland published it at the close of the nineteenth century. He presented it as the gospel of a surviving witch cult in Tuscany.
Scholars have argued about that claim ever since the book appeared, and the argument has never cooled.
Whatever its origin, the book gave Wicca several of the lines most often spoken aloud beneath an open sky.
Whenever ye have need of any thing, once in the month, and better it be when the moon is full, then shall ye assemble in some secret place and adore the spirit of me, who am Queen of all witches.
That sentence walked into the Charge almost unchanged, and carried its full moon in with it.
The Crowley Layer
The second half draws on ceremonial writing from the early twentieth century. Colder air, higher ceilings, a great deal more gold.
Several of its phrases can be traced to work by Crowley. The Star Goddess and the dust beneath her feet belong to that current.
The borrowings were recognizable, and being recognizable was part of the objection.
Valiente cut a great deal of this material away. Cutting all of it would have collapsed the shape of the text.
What remains has been reworked rather than simply lifted, until the seam no longer shows.
The result reads as a single voice instead of two speaking across each other.
The Roll of Names
The prose Charge opens by naming the one who is about to speak.
Listen to the words of the Great Mother, who was of old also called among men…
A roll of goddess names follows immediately after that opening line, and it falls through the hands like a rope of dark beads.
They are drawn from Greek, Egyptian, Welsh, Irish and Near Eastern sources.
Artemis, Astarte, Aphrodite, Cerridwen, Arianrhod, Isis and Bride are commonly among them. The exact list differs between traditions and between printed versions.
The purpose of the roll is not historical scholarship of any kind. It states that the many named goddesses are faces of one, turning in the same lamplight.
Everything after that line is spoken as though by the Goddess herself.
The Two Halves of the Text
The Charge divides cleanly at the middle, like a door with two panels.
The first half is practical, plain and easy to follow. It says when to meet, how to meet, and what the meeting asks.
The second half turns inward and stops giving instructions altogether. It describes what the Goddess is, and where she is to be found.
Read in order, the text travels from the circle to the self, from the ring of standing bodies to the small dark room behind the ribs.
That single movement is the entire argument of the Charge.
The Summons to the Full Moon
The very first instruction in the text is not a place but an hour.
Once in the month, and better when the moon is full.
This is the root of the esbat. The esbat is the working meeting timed by the phases of the moon.
Meeting once in the month is the least the text will accept.
The Charge asks for a secret place, not a temple. No building is named, no priesthood is licensed, and no roof is required.
A hedge, a spare room with the furniture pushed back against the walls, or a stretch of shoreline with the tide going out will satisfy the instruction.
What is required is the gathering, the moon overhead, and the intent that comes in with the people.
Freedom, and the Sign of It
And ye shall be free from slavery; and as a sign that ye be really free, ye shall be naked in your rites.
This is the most argued line in the text. It comes almost directly from Aradia, where the slavery meant was literal and not a figure of speech.
Nakedness is presented here as evidence, not as a requirement.
It is the mark of a person who answers to nobody.
Many covens work skyclad on that reading, and always have, in firelight and cold grass.
Many others work robed and hold that the freedom itself is the point, that the cloth is only cloth.
Both readings are very nearly as old as the text itself. The Charge does not settle the argument either way, and shows no sign of wishing to.
All Acts of Love and Pleasure
Let my worship be within the heart that rejoiceth; for behold, all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals.
This is the line most often carried away on its own. It refuses the idea that worship must be solemn, that praise must be spoken kneeling and low.
Singing, feasting, dancing and love are all named in the text as praise.
Joy is not a distraction from the rite. Joy is the rite, when it is felt honestly.
The same sentence quietly sets a limit on what counts.
An act that is not love and not pleasure for everyone inside it does not qualify, and the line closes against it like a door.
The Eight Virtues
And therefore let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honour and humility, mirth and reverence within you.
Four pairs, and every pair holds a tension inside it the way a bow holds its string.
Strength without compassion hardens quickly into cruelty. Reverence without mirth stiffens into something joyless and cold to stand beside.
Power without humility becomes exactly what witches have long been accused of.
Beauty without strength survives nothing at all, and goes first when the weather turns.
The eight are often listed on their own as the Wiccan virtues.
They sit beside the Wiccan Rede without repeating it. The Rede says what to avoid. The virtues say what to grow, and growing is the slower work.
The Star Goddess
Hear ye the words of the Star Goddess, in the dust of whose feet are the hosts of heaven.
The voice of the text changes at this point, and the temperature of it changes with the voice.
The Great Mother of the first half spoke of gatherings and conduct, of hours and meeting places. The Star Goddess speaks of scale.
Stars are the dust under her feet, and her body encircles the universe.
The goddess of one small circle becomes the shape of everything. Neither name cancels the other.
The same speaker is simply described at two different distances: near enough to hear breathing, far enough to hold the whole cold sky.
Nothing in this half asks the listener to do anything at all.
The Beauty of the Green Earth
I am the beauty of the green earth, and the white moon among the stars, and the mystery of the waters.
Three images, and every one of them is visible from where the listener is standing.
The Goddess is not placed above nature, or behind it like a hand behind a curtain. She is named as the thing itself.
The waters, the moon and the green earth are not treated as her symbols.
She is called the soul of nature, giving life to the universe.
This is one reason so much Wiccan practice happens out of doors, with wet grass underfoot and the wind working through the hedge. A walk under trees becomes a devotional act on this reading.
The Mystery Within
The Charge closes with a plain warning, and the warning is addressed to seekers.
If that which thou seekest thou findest not within thee, thou wilt never find it without thee.
Nothing else in the text is put so bluntly. Travel, initiation and study are all declared insufficient by themselves, however long the road and however patient the waiting.
The search fails unless something answers it from the inside.
For behold, I have been with thee from the beginning; and I am that which is attained at the end of desire.
The seeking and the finding are described as one thing, the lock and the key cut from a single piece of metal.
Where the Charge Is Spoken in Ritual
The Charge belongs to the moment just after the circle is cast, when the air inside the ring has altered and everyone standing there can feel it.
In traditional practice it follows the rite of Drawing Down the Moon. A priest invokes the Goddess into the priestess.
She then speaks the Charge as the Goddess, and not as herself. That is why the text is written in the first person.
It was never meant to be read silently from a page beneath a reading lamp.
Spoken inside a cast magic circle, the change in the room is the point.
Some covens use it at every esbat, and others keep it for initiations alone.
Who Speaks the Words
A coven usually gives the Charge to the high priestess to speak.
A solitary practitioner speaks it alone, which is now very common. Spoken aloud in an empty room, to one candle and four walls, it is a complete practice.
Some speak it from the page and some entirely from memory.
Copying it by hand into a Book of Shadows is the old method of learning it, with the ink still drying on the line above. The hand finds the rhythm before the memory does.
Nothing in the text forbids a man to speak it.
Traditions differ on that point, and the Charge sets no condition.
What the Charge Never Asks
Read closely, in daylight, with nothing else in the room, the Charge withholds a great deal that might be expected of it.
It demands nothing in sacrifice. It threatens no punishment for failure.
It names no enemy and no heretic. It sets no fee, no gatekeeper and no test of belief.
It never instructs the listener to bend another person to anything at all.
Against most liturgy of similar length, that silence is remarkable. The severity that runs like iron through older religious writing is simply absent from these pages.
What is asked is attendance, honesty and the eight virtues.
Why the Words Have Lasted
The Charge is barely older than the paperback book. It has still outlived every attempt to replace it.
Part of the reason is simply sound. The sentences fall into a rhythm that carries in the dark, over the crack of a fire and the wind moving at the edge of a field.
Part of the reason is the structure underneath, plain and steady as a beam.
The text asks for something, explains why, then sets the answer down inside the listener and leaves it there.
Very little religious writing manages that in so short a space.
Learn it slowly, and speak it aloud at least once, when the house has gone quiet.
The Charge is not a description of Wiccan magic. It is the voice that the magic answers.