Drawing Down the Moon

Drawing Down the Moon is a central invocation of Wicca in which the Goddess is called into the body of a priestess so that, for the duration of the rite, she is held to embody and speak for the deity. In the initiatory Gardnerian and Alexandrian traditions it is performed by the coven's high priest, who invokes the Goddess into the high priestess, after which she may deliver the words known as the Charge of the Goddess. That text has its own layered history: Doreen Valiente, working with material Gerald Gardner had drawn partly from Aleister Crowley's writings and, more distantly, from Charles Godfrey Leland's 1899 folklore collection Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, rewrote the Charge in the 1950s into the poetic form most Wiccan traditions use today, deliberately removing much of the overt Crowley material Gardner had originally included.

The rite gives ritual expression to Wicca's conviction that the divine is immanent and can be present in a human being, and its name evokes an older literary image, reaching back to ancient descriptions of Thessalian witches said to draw the moon down from the sky, which the modern tradition took up and reinterpreted for its own theology rather than continuing any unbroken practice. A parallel and less commonly performed rite, Drawing Down the Sun, invokes the God into the high priest instead, though the moon rite involving the priestess has always been the more central and widely practiced of the two. The traditional pairing of a male priest invoking a female priestess has itself been adapted or reworked in some contemporary and queer-inclusive covens, which perform the invocation without assuming that gender pairing.

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.