Let’s Talk Witch – The God and Goddess
The Goddess and the God are everything and everywhere. They are the sun, the moon, the sky, the oceans, ants, flowers, nature, everything. You can see their splendor in a sunset, a child, a tree, in the stars; it’s everywhere, you just have to look and see it. They reveal themselves quite often in the most simplest forms. That seems quite a contradiction to what I just said about them being complex, but it’s true. Take a walk in the woods, or look at a butterfly, you’ll see it. The Goddess and The God are inherent in nature, and since they are so entwined in nature, we have to treat nature with just as much respect as we would a divine being.
The Goddess and the God as being part of the same being, just different aspects of that being. “Goddess”, refers to the female, creative aspect of that being. Both The Goddess and The God are equal, neither deserving more respect than the other. When you start focusing on just The Goddess, or just The God, things become unbalanced and unnatural. The ideal is a perfect balance of both energies. They are all of the deities that have ever existed, and the ones that will exist.
All the different gods and goddesses of all the different religions are the same being; almost but not quite the same idea as the 99 names of Allah, each name refers to a different aspect of that God. When you call the Goddess by the name of Bridget or Margawse, you are calling upon those aspects of The Goddess.
THE GODDESS
The Goddess is the universal mother. She is fertility, endless wisdom and love. She is all aspects of nature, harmful and helpful. Wiccans acknowledge both aspects of Her nature.
The Goddess has three aspects; The Maiden (Anu, Elaine, Blodeuwedd), The Mother (Badb, Arianrhod, Margawse), and The Crone (Morgan LeFey, Cerridwen, Macha). The Maiden is innocence, Springtime, renewal, youth, dawn and the continuation of all life. The Mother is the richness of life, nurturing, Summer, the day and a teacher. The Crone is darkness, night, the rest before the continuation of life, wisdom, counsel and reincarnation. Each of these aspects shows different stages of a women’s life, and each can be placed with the phases of the moon; The Maiden being the waxing moon, The Mother the full moon and The Crone the waning moon.
The Goddess of the Wicca is the Great Goddess. She is the Ground of Being, the Mother of All Living; the Creatrix, and the Destroyer, for She is ever Dual. She is the Earth Mother, the Lady of the Moon, and the Star Goddess. She is Queen of Heaven, Queen of Earth, and Queen of the Underworld. She is the Triple Goddess: the Virgin, the Bride, and the Hag, called the Three Mothers in Celtic regions.
The three aspects of the Triple Goddess are usually described as the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone; it must be remembered that the connotations of age associated with those titles derive from the experience of humans, who are subject to age and death; the Goddess is eternal: ever-changing and ever self-renewing, She will be young or old as She pleases.
As the Virgin, She is the Creatrix, the Lady of Birth and Death, the Star Goddess, the Queen of Heaven, the Giver of Inspiration, the Initiatrix.
She is Diana, Lady of the Moon and the Wild Things, Ever Virgin unto Pan: virgin unto the All, and therefore wed to None.She is also the Virgin Mother; and Her blue and white colors, and title “Queen of Heaven”, were borrowed by the Catholic Church for the Virgin Mary. Hers are the Waxing Moon, Venus as Morning and Evening Star, and all the vast starry realm; Her sacred color is White.
As the Bride, She is the Preserver, the Lady of Growth and Fertility, the Earth Mother, the Goddess of flocks and herds, Lady of Love and Fruitfulness and the fertility of the land; as Goddess of the Land She is also the Goddess of Sovereignty, and it is only by Sacred Marriage to Her that the King holds the right to the Throne. Hers are the Full Moon, the Earth, fruits and flocks and fields; Her sacred color is Red.
As the Hag, She is the Destroyer, the Lady of Decay and Death, the Goddess of Night and the Underworld, and also the cave and the tomb. For that which is born must also age, and decay, and die; and out of that which is dead and decaying arises new fertility, for life feeds ever on life. She is the Sow who eats Her own young, the “Nightmare Fertility and Death in One”, the Great Necessity by which the food chain and the cycle of life continue. Hence She is also the Goddess of regeneration. Hers is the Waning Moon, the dark night, the silence of the shadows, the midnight crossroads, and the wailing of the widow; Her sacred color is Black.
The Goddess is the Queen of all Witcheries: She is the Enchantress, the Shape-Changer; She is Isis, the “Lady of the Words of Power”; She is Cerridwen, the Sorceress at Her Cauldron; She is Hecate, the Mistress of the Magick of the Dark Moon. She is the Great Lady. She is the Goddess.
THE GOD
The God of the Wicca is the Horned God, the ancient God of Fertility: the God of forest, flock, and field and also of the hunt. He is Lord of Life, and the Giver of Life, yet He is also Lord of Death and Resurrection. For, like the Goddess, the nature of Her Horned Consort is also dual. For the Horned God is not only the Hunter, He is also the Hunted; He is the Sun by day, but He is also the Sun at Midnight; He is the Lord of Light, but He is also the Lord of Darkness: the darkness of night, the darkness of the Shadows, the darkness of the depths of the forest, the darkness of the depths of the Underworld.
The Horned God is the group soul of the hunted animal, invoked by the primitive shaman and the tribe: and as such, He is the Sacrificial Victim, the beast who is slain that the tribe might live, a gift from that group soul, who was often revered as the tribal totem or ancestral spirit. The Celts believed they were the descendents of the God of the Underworld, who was also the God of Fertility: the Latinized form of His name was Cernunnos, which means simply, the Horned One.
The Horned God is also the spirit of vegetation, of the green and growing things, whether of the vine or of the forest or of the field. Dionysus, Adonis, and many other vegetation and harvest Gods were all often depicted as horned, wearing the horns of the bull, the goat, the ram, or the stag: of whichever of the horned beasts was held sacred in that place and time. This aspect is the Dying and Resurrecting God who dies with the harvest and is rent asunder, as the grain is gathered in the fields; who is buried, as is the seed; who then springs forth anew, fresh and green and young, in the spring, reborn from the Womb of the Great Mother.
The Horned God is Osiris, who was often depicted with the horns of a bull. Osiris was believed to be incarnate in a succession of sacred bulls, and worshipped in that form as the god Apis. This was yet another form and manifestation of Osiris as the God of Fertility and also of Death and Resurrection. And Osiris bears the marks of a lunar, rather than a solar god, for Set tears the body of Osiris into fourteen pieces, the number of days of the waning moon; and then Isis, the Great Mother, gathers those pieces together and restores Osiris to life again.
The Horned God is the Great God Pan, the Goat-foot God with a human torso and a human but goat-horned head, the God whose ecstatic worship was so hated by the Church that they used His description for their “Devil” and called Him the lord of all evil. Yet, to the ancients who worshipped Him, and to the modern Pagans and Witches that worship Him still, “Pan is greatest, Pan is least. Pan is all, and all is Pan.”
The Horned God is not “the Devil”, except to those who fear and reject Nature, and the Powers of Life and human sexuality, and the ecstasy of the human spirit. The Horned God is the God of the Wicca.
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