A Twentieth Century Text Behind an Old Claim

The words most often spoken as the Goddess speaks through the priestess, known as the Charge of the Goddess, are usually credited largely to Doreen Valiente, an early figure in Gardnerian Wicca who reworked and greatly extended an earlier, shorter piece associated with Gerald Gardner, itself indebted to Charles Leland's 1899 book Aradia, which purported to record an Italian witch tradition and drew in turn on classical invocations, including passages adapted from a speech of Isis in the Roman writer Apuleius. The result is a text assembled in stages across the twentieth century from older literary and classical material rather than a verbatim survival of any single ancient source, though its final Wiccan form is recent. This layered authorship has made Drawing Down the Moon a frequent point of discussion within modern Paganism about what claims of antiquity can fairly be made for Wiccan liturgy: the rite's content is demonstrably a modern composition assembled from real historical fragments, while its function, a priestess entering trance to speak as or for the Goddess, is presented by practitioners as continuous with a much older shamanic and Mediterranean tradition of invocation and possession. Wiccan groups vary in how literally they treat the trance element, some describing genuine possession and others a more contemplative identification with the deity.