This article develops charge as an analytic concept for examining how objects acquire efficacy and legitimacy outside institutional regimes of authorization. Drawing on contemporary Pagan material practices and art theory, it argues that charge should be understood not as belief, symbolism, or voiced invocation, but as a relational and procedural condition emerging from material arrangement, temporal persistence, and constraint.
The analysis centers on Wheels of Will, an independent Pagan art project composed of ritual assemblages, sealed vessels, and ephemeral installations that deliberately refuse explanatory discourse and institutional validation. Using visual analysis, material semiotics, and practice-based inquiry, the paper asks how charge operates through aftermath, decay, containment, and repetition rather than through declaration or transparency.
By withholding markers of authorship, intention, and ritual explanation, Wheels of Will functions as a counter-model to dominant regimes of legitimacy in both contemporary Paganism and academic knowledge production, where efficacy is increasingly recognized only when traceable to a clearly identifiable human source. The paper ultimately reframes anxieties about authenticity, authorship, and artificial intelligence as part of a broader crisis of legitimacy grounded in human-centered assumptions about agency and value.