Also called drawing down, invocation of the Goddess
A full-moon rite in which a priestess calls the Goddess of the moon into herself and speaks with her voice. Central to Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca, named after the old Thessalian witches' boast.
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Take care: Drawing Down in its full form is an initiatory rite of Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca; respect that by not presenting a solo devotion as the coven rite. Keep candles away from robes and dry grass outdoors.
Greek writers credited the women of Thessaly with the power to pull the moon from the sky. In Clouds, Strepsiades jokes about hiring a Thessalian witch to drag the moon down and lock it away so that monthly interest never falls due. Plato used the phrase as a proverb about bringing ruin on yourself, since the witches were said to pay with their eyes or feet.
Gardner's Book of Shadows had the High Priest invoke the Goddess into the High Priestess, who then delivered the Charge. Doreen Valiente, initiated in 1953, rewrote the Charge in verse and prose, cutting much material Gardner had borrowed from Aleister Crowley and Charles Leland's Aradia.
The journalist Margot Adler took the rite's name for her landmark survey of American Pagan groups. Through her book the phrase came to stand for the whole revival, and eclectic and solitary witches adapted the rite into personal moon devotions.
The image is ancient. Greek and Latin writers, from Aristophanes and Plato to Virgil and Lucan, described Thessalian witches drawing the moon down from the sky, and Plato's Gorgias treats it as a well-known proverb. Lunar eclipses were sometimes explained this way, and the scholarship on Greek magic treats it as a fixed literary motif. Roman poets such as Virgil, Horace and Lucan repeated the motif.
Gerald Gardner, who published Witchcraft Today in 1954, made it the name of a central Wiccan rite in which the Goddess speaks through the High Priestess. Doreen Valiente's rewriting of the Charge of the Goddess in the mid-1950s gave the rite its best-known words. Historian Ronald Hutton traces these sources in The Triumph of the Moon (1999). Margot Adler borrowed the name for her 1979 study of American Paganism.
Setting food or water out under the full moon so it can take in the moon's light, then sharing it the next day. Rooted in India's autumn full-moon festival; modern witches do the same with water.
A Wiccan working gathering held on the full moon, separate from the eight seasonal sabbats, for magic, healing work and honoring the Goddess.
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