The Foundation Behind the Charge of the Goddess

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Doreen Valiente Foundation was established in 2011 by John Belham-Payne, Doreen Valiente's friend and literary executor, to hold the literary estate and magical collection of the English Wiccan priestess and writer who worked with Gerald Gardner in the 1950s and helped shape much of the liturgy used across Wicca today. Valiente's most influential single contribution is her 1957 prose revision of the Charge of the Goddess, a central Wiccan liturgical text spoken in the voice of the Goddess, which draws on earlier material adapted from Charles Godfrey Leland and Aleister Crowley and which Valiente reworked into the form recited in covens across the tradition today.

Valiente bequeathed her papers and collection to Belham-Payne on her death in 1999, and the foundation he established twelve years later now holds them intact rather than sold or dispersed. The 1957 wording of the Charge remains in copyright, held by the foundation on Valiente's behalf, so the atlas records its history and authorship without reproducing that wording itself, describing the liturgy's origin and influence rather than quoting the text the foundation protects.