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.)

The Charge's compositional history makes it clear why this should be so. Valiente here surpasses her own limitations, both as a writer and as a thinker, because the piece is, in effect, a collaboration. Collaborations, at their best, wed strength to strength, creating something that is decisively more than the sum of its parts, as clearly we see here.

In the process of creating her own redactions of Leland's and Crowley's texts, it is to Valiente's credit that she made the decision to allow each to retain its own integrity. She could have decided—one shudders to think of the likely resulting jumble-sale mash-up if she had—to combine the two.

Thank Goddess she didn't.