Ch.11 Adore the Spirit of Me (WMB 11.v)
Extract from: Wicca: Magical Beginnings written by d’Este & Rankine, 2008 (Avalonia.) PB / Kindle @ https://amzn.to/3Ay4HJr.
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Lift Up the Veil (continued)
There are many idiosyncrasies in Lift Up the Veil as there are indeed in the later Charge of the Goddess. Most curiously it is the use of material blended from Crowley’s writings which were meant at times for the Priestess and at times for the Priest. This shows a clear lack of understanding on the part of the person(s) who wrote this prose for the symbolism of the material they were using and may indicate that the person(s) were relatively unfamiliar with Crowley’s material – either that or perhaps they liked the sound of the words. What is interesting is that almost all the material can be found in the Law of Liberty which would also imply its nature as a source as we have already shown. Though there has been some suggestion over the years that the author(s) of this piece of prose drew their inspiration from the Gnostic Mass or from the Book of the Law, it would seem from the evidence that this is only in as much as that the material from both the Book of the Law and Gnostic Mass also appears in the Law of Liberty.
We also find that in the later Charge of the Goddess that some of the material from Crowley’s work is indeed removed, though by no means a significant part of it. What is even stranger is that some of the Crowley material which is removed is then replaced with further material which seems to be clearly influenced by texts written by Crowley! This once again seems to imply that if Doreen Valiente indeed was responsible for the later rewrite of the Charge as she claimed, she only changed the phraseology in places, and though she may have added some original words – inspired either by material written by Crowley, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn or by Church of England liturgy, she clearly only contributed a small part to the mystery of these pieces of prose which have become such an important part of both the esoteric and exoteric traditions of Wicca today.
What is clear is that the Charge of the Goddess, whilst drawing on a range of earlier sources, has developed a huge significance in the Wiccan tradition which cannot be ignored, irrespective of its provenance.
Extract from: Wicca: Magical Beginnings written by d’Este & Rankine, 2008 (Avalonia.) PB / Kindle @ https://amzn.to/3Ay4HJr. Shared here with the intention to inspire and inform the now and future generations interested in Wicca and other Pagan traditions inspired by it.
