Drawing Down The Moon

When the British witches went public in the early 1950s, the idea that Christianity had had its day and furthermore was not always the right path for Westerners was often heard. The major difference between their religion and that portrayed in the witch-trial documents Margaret Murray studied, however, was the reintroduction of worship of the Great Goddess. She was seen both as Queen of Heaven and Earth/Sea Mother, depending on the context. The best evidence for Fortune's influence here lies in the construction of the key "Gardnerian" ritual called "Drawing Down the Moon."

In that ritual, developed and/or modified by Gardner and his contemporaries, the Goddess is invoked by the priest in the body of the priestess. It is expected that a type of divine inspiration will result. Drawing down the Moon is a key part of every Gardnerian ritual circle - and its elements and purpose are easily discernible in Fortune's novel The Sea Priestess, which she was forced by publishers' lack of interest to self-publish in 1938. Richardson, her biographer, calls it and its sequel, Moon Magic, "the only novels on magic ever written," considering the competition.

Although Gardner only hints at the workings of the ritual in his books, his successors, the Farrars, explain it more fully in Eight Sabbats for Witches. It comes after the drawing of the ritual circle - a conscious creating and marking of sacred space, defined by the cardinal directions and purified with the four magical elements, fire and air (incense), water and earth (salt). While the priestess stands before the altar (in a traditional Gardnerian circle she holds a wand and a lightweight scourge in her crossed arms, like a figure of Osiris), the priest kneels and blesses with a kiss her feet, knees, womb, breast and lips. Then a shift occurs, both in language and action. He ceases to address her as a woman and begins to address her as the Mother Goddess, beginning with the words,"I invoke thee and call upon thee, Mighty Mother of us all..."

When the invocation is completed, the priestess is considered to be speaking as the Goddess, not as herself. She may go on to deliver a passage (authored by Doreen Valiente, whose role I deal with below) that is based partly on material collected during the 1890s in Italy by the American folklorist Charles Leland.

I am the gracious Goddess, who gives the gift of joy unto the heart of man. Upon earth, I give the knowledge of the spirit eternal; and beyond death, I give peace, and freedom, and reunion with those who have gone before. Nor do I demand sacrifice; for behold, I am the Mother of all living, and my love is poured out upon the earth." She may, of course, speak spontaneously; Janet Farrar comments that "she never knows how it will come out." Sometimes the wording itself is completely altered, with a spontaneous flow she listens to with a detached part of her mind.

Dion Fortune believed that a re-introduction of both ritual and psychological approaches to the Great Goddess would even the psychic balance between men and women, a theme carried on today by a number of feminist psychologists and writers, although with scant acknowledgement. She wished every marriage to take on an aspect of the hierosgamos (divine marriage), and it is there that a parallel with Witchcraft ritual lies, since many rituals turn on sexual polarity, both symbolically and literally. Fortune foreshadowed this in The Sea Priestess when she wrote:

"In this sacrament the woman must take her ancient place as priestess of the rite, calling down lightning from heaven; the initiator, not the initiated.... She had to become the priestess of the Goddess, and I [the male narrator], the kneeling worshipper, had to receive the sacrament at her hands....When the body of a woman is made an altar for the worship of the Goddess who is all beauty and magnetic life... then the Goddess enters the temple."

This is not just Fortune's description of the magical side of marriage, but a virtual schematic of the Drawing Down the Moon ceremony and its concluding Great Rite, as Gardner called ritual intercourse at its conclusion (something more frequently performed symbolically). As the Farrars state, "The Great Rite specifically declares that the body of the woman taking part is an altar, with her womb and generative organs as its sacred focus, and reveres it as such."

GERALD GARDNER

The Great Goddess becomes more central in Gardner's works from the 1950s and is absolutely central to the Craft as it developed in that decade. She did not, however, appear in Margaret Murray's works on the alleged underground Paganism of the Middle Ages, which Murray wrote in the 1920s. There may, however, be echoes of a Goddess religion in Italy, based on Leland's research there in the mid-1800s. Leland provided another literary source for the Drawing Down the Moon ceremony.

The person who re-wrote that ceremony and gave Gardnerian tradition ritual much of its form is now known to be Doreen Valiente, who wrote four books on the Craft as well. Her contributions to the texts are discussed at length in The Witches' Way. Although not the only one of Gardner's original coveners still living (i.e., after he moved away from the coven that initiated him, most of whose members were elderly in the 1930s), she has been the only one publicly involved in a critical re-evaluation of the tradition's beginnings.

Although Gardner and Fortune were contemporaries, she does not know if they ever met, she told me in a 1985 letter. She did, however, say that she is "very fond of Dion Fortune's books, especially her novels The Sea Priestess, The Goat-Foot God, and Moon Magic. It is notable that her [Fortune's] outlook became more pagan as she grew older."

Whether this is a tacit admission that she drew upon Fortune's works, I cannot say. Witches are known for oblique statements, and Valiente walked a fine line between secrecy and disclosure.

Given England's size, its relatively interwoven cliques of occultists, and the small number of novelists dealing with Pagan themes, it is unlikely that Valiente and Gardner were not aware of Fortune's novels at the time they were giving their religion its present form. As we have seen, Gardner was himself engaged in a conscious search for magical learning in the 1920s and 1930s, and it was in the 1930s that Fortune's novels began appearing, while the chapters of Sane Occultism were published serially in The Occult Review , and influential British journal it is unlikely he would have overlooked.

Valiente, meanwhile, was initiated by Gardner as a priestess in 1953 and left his coven to form her own in 1957, the year after Moon Magic came out. With such a coincidence of subject matter, place and dates, it is difficult not to see Dion Fortune as a previously unadmitted but significant influence on the development of Gardnerian Witchcraft.

Today the Goddess revival seems to have its "applied" and "theoretical" wings, with the Neo-Pagans in the first category and various Jungians, writers on feminist spirituality and historians of religion in the second. With her combined psychological and magical training, Dion Fortune could be considered a foremother to each.