Analysis Of Doreen Valiente's The Charge Of The Goddess

Though it has changed very slightly over time, The Charge of the Goddess and other poems written by Doreen Valiente are still used in pagan rituals especially in the BTW traditions. As a result, there is a general acceptance of a Goddess deity within Pagan culture. In 1979, it was estimated that there were less than one hundred thousand modern Pagans in the United States, as of 2006 that estimate has swelled anywhere from four hundred to six hundred thousand in the US and over a million worldwide (Adler: 2006). To understand how historical events may have led to what is now Neo-Paganism, many pagans from different traditions were interviewed about their knowledge and understanding of the Goddess Movement that arose out of the theories presented

Murray based her theories on her studies of the witch trials and decided to treat the testimony of the accused witches as ethnographic data. The ethnographic approach attempts to analyze the statements of the participants in a culture without prejudice, no matter how illogical or repulsive they may seem to one's own cultural viewpoint. Eventually Murray put together a framework which explained all the witchcraft testimony in a very literal way. Murray was trying to figure out why in an era of no mass communication, people accused of Witchcraft often confessed to the same experiences. While many have speculated that it was because the torturers forced them to confess to what was laid out in the Malleus Malificarum (The Hammer of the Witches) as how witches attended ‘Black Sabbats and worshiped the Devil. She found that the witch trials were barbaric, but they did follow established legal procedures. Of particular note is that not all confessions were extracted under torture and in some cases the accused willingly testified, even going to their deaths insisting that their faith was the true religion. (Hare:2001). Her theory concluded that there was an underground nature religion in Europe that originated in the Neolithic age and had survived up to (then) modern times. She did not think that a Goddess was worshipped by them, although she believed the cult was egalitarian. Unfortunately, she also described human sacrifices and cannibalism. To this day this has caused much debate among the pagan community and historians. There wasn’t any proof to back up this theory and modern pagans do not nor do they condone the practice of human sacrifice or cannibalism. In 1939, she published The God of the Witches, basically all the same information from Witch Cult except made generally appealing to a broader market and the human sacrifice and