Wicca does not promise heaven and does not threaten hell. Its teaching on death is older and plainer: that what dies returns, and that love is the thread that draws it back.
Gerald Gardner wrote that the witches he knew believed firmly in reincarnation, and that the hope they held out to one another was a particular one: to be born again at the same time and in the same place as those they had loved, and to know them again. Of everything he recorded about the beliefs of the Craft, this is perhaps what its people have held to most constantly.
Rest and return
The teaching in its usual form is this. At death the spirit passes into the keeping of the God, who is lord of the realm beyond. There it rests, is refreshed, and is made ready. In time it is born again of the Goddess into a new body, and takes up the work of living where it left off.
The place of rest is commonly called the Summerland. The name is not ancient. It was coined by American Spiritualists in the nineteenth century and came into the Craft through the wider occult world. It has been made welcome all the same, because it says what witches mean: a country of warmth and ease, where it is always the kind part of the year.
There is no judgement in this account, and no hell. The God of the witches does not weigh souls. Gardner's witches called him the comforter and the consoler, and the dead are thought of as his guests.
The Legend of the Descent
The Craft's central myth about death is the Legend of the Descent of the Goddess, which Gardner published in Witchcraft Today in 1954. It is enacted at the second-degree initiation. In outline it runs as follows.
The Goddess had never loved, but she wished to solve every mystery, and the mystery of death above all. So she went down into the underworld. The guardians of its gates challenged her, and required her to lay aside her garments and her jewels, for nothing may be brought into that land, and so she came naked before Death himself. He was so struck by her beauty that he knelt and kissed her feet, and begged her to stay with him. She answered that she did not love him, and asked why he caused everything she delighted in to wither and die. He replied that it was age and fate, against which he was helpless, and that he gave the dead rest and peace and strength so that they might return.
Still she refused him, and accepted in its place the ordeal that he laid upon her. In undergoing it she learned what she had come to learn. Then they loved and were one, and he taught her all his mysteries. The legend closes with a saying that is the nearest thing in Wicca to a creed. It names three great events in a human life, which are love, death and rebirth in a new body, and it binds them together: there is no rebirth without death, no death without birth, and no birth without love.
The meaning that witches draw from this is that death is not the enemy of life but its partner. The Goddess gives birth and the God gives rest, and each has learned from the other.
Among those we love
The promise of the rites is not simply that we shall live again, but that we shall find one another. It gives its full meaning to the best known of all Wiccan farewells:
Merry meet, merry part, and merry meet again.
A traditional parting of the Craft
The words are older than the Craft. The first two phrases come from the record of a Somerset witch trial of 1664, which Margaret Murray quoted, and the promise to meet again was added later. They are said at the close of every circle. They are also said at the graveside, where they carry their full weight.
How witches keep their dead
The festival of the dead is Samhain, at the end of October, when the year itself is dying and the boundary between the living and the dead is held to be at its thinnest. On that night a coven calls to mind those of its number who have gone, and those whom its members have lost in the year, and invites them to the feast.
When a witch dies, the coven holds a rite of farewell, which is described on the page about rites of passage. Its tone is of grief honestly felt and of confidence that the parting is not final.
In our coven
The Coven of Cythrawl keeps a book of names, begun in 1981, in which are written the Craft names of our own dead and of those who taught our teachers. It is read aloud at Samhain, from the first name to the last. The most recent name in it that belonged to a member of this coven is that of Wystan, our founding High Priest, who died in January 2016.
What this means for the living
A religion that expects to come back has a different attitude to this world from one that hopes to leave it. For witches the earth is not a waiting room. It is home, and will be home again. That is a strong argument for looking after it, and for leaving behind a place and a company of people that one would be glad to come back to.
It also takes much of the terror out of dying. Witches grieve like everyone else. But they are not, on the whole, afraid, and those of us who have sat with a dying member of the Craft have been struck by how much that matters at the end.
A note on certainty
Not every Wiccan believes all of this in a literal way, and none is required to. Some are agnostic about what follows death and find in the myth a truth about how to live: that everything is given back, and that love is what makes the giving bearable. The Craft has room for them. On this subject above all, it seems to us, a little humility is in order. Those who know for certain are not here to tell us.