At the heart of Wicca stand two figures: a Goddess of the moon, the earth and the stars, and a Horned God of the wild, of death and of what lies beyond it.
Gerald Gardner described the witches he knew as worshipping two deities: a goddess whom they regarded as the giver of life and the great mother, and a horned god of death and what comes after death. Every form of Wicca since has kept that pair at its centre.
The Goddess
She is first of all the moon. Witches meet when the moon is full, and its waxing, fullness and waning are her most familiar image. From the moon she is known as threefold: the Maiden of the new crescent, the Mother of the full moon and the Crone of the waning one. The triple Goddess in this form owes a great deal to the poet Robert Graves, whose book The White Goddess appeared in 1948, and it entered the Craft after Gardner's first writings. It has since become one of the best loved of all Wiccan images.
She is also the earth, which bears and feeds everything that lives and receives it again at death. And in her greatest aspect she is the Star Goddess, the night sky itself, the source from which all things come and to which they go back.
The Charge of the Goddess opens by reciting some of the names by which she was known in the ancient world, among them Artemis, Astarte, Aphrodite, Cerridwen, Isis and Bride. The point of the list is that these are understood as the names of one who has been met in many places.
The Horned God
He is the lord of the wild: of the forest, the beasts, and the hunt by which men once lived. His horns or antlers are those of the animals, and they mark him as belonging to the world before the plough. Witches have seen his likeness in the antlered figure named Cernunnos on a Gaulish altar of the first century, in Pan of the Greeks, and in Herne the Hunter, the ghostly keeper of Windsor Forest.
He is also the lord of death. This is not a sinister office. In the Craft's teaching he is the one who receives the dead, gives them rest and prepares them to be born again, and Gardner's witches called him the comforter and the consoler. He rules the dark half of the year, as the Goddess rules the light.
And in the story that the Sabbats tell he is the sun, or rather the sun's yearly life: born at midwinter, growing through the spring, at the height of his power at midsummer, cut down with the corn and gone into the dark at Samhain. In this guise he is the consort of the Goddess, and the Wheel of the Year is his story.
Not the Devil
It ought not to need saying, but it does. The Horned God is not the Devil of Christian belief. Wiccans do not believe in a power of evil opposed to the divine. Such resemblance as there is belongs to the history of art. It is generally put down to the painters of the medieval Church, who are thought to have borrowed the horns and cloven feet of Pan and the satyrs when they wished to picture their adversary.
The two together
Neither is complete alone. The rites of the Craft are built on the meeting of the two, and that meeting is what witches mean by polarity: the creative tension between complementary powers, of which female and male is one image among several. Light and dark, summer and winter, life and death, the cup and the blade are others.
In a Gardnerian circle the High Priestess stands for the Goddess and the High Priest for the God. The Goddess, and so the High Priestess, is given the first place. Gardner explained this by pointing to the old myth, in which Death himself kneels before the Goddess. But the one cannot work without the other, and a wise High Priestess does not forget it.
Their names
In Gardnerian Wicca the Goddess and the God are invoked by particular names. Those names are among the things given at initiation and are not spoken outside the circle. This is why Wiccan writing so often says simply the Goddess and the God, or the Lady and the Lord.
Many witches outside the initiatory traditions address them by names drawn from the old pantheons. There is no harm in that. A name is a way of calling, and what answers is not confined to one.
What are the gods?
The Craft leaves this open, and witches have filled the space in different ways.
- Some are polytheists. For them the gods are real and distinct beings, of whom the Goddess and God of the witches are two.
- Some hold that all goddesses are one Goddess and all gods one God, so that Isis and Cerridwen are the same Lady under different names.
- Some believe that Goddess and God are themselves two aspects of a single source, which is beyond gender and beyond description.
- Some think of the gods as great images in the human mind, which are none the less powerful for being found within.
Gardner's own account lay somewhere among these. He wrote that the witches acknowledged a supreme power, which he called the Prime Mover, but held it to be unknowable, and so gave their worship to the gods who were near and could be loved. He added, in a remark that has stayed with many of us, that the gods are not all-powerful, and need our help as we need theirs.
Meeting the gods
What makes these questions less pressing than they might be is that Wicca is not chiefly a religion of belief about the gods. It is a religion of their presence. At the heart of the esbat is the rite called Drawing Down the Moon, in which the Goddess is invoked into her priestess and speaks through her to the coven. There is a corresponding rite for the God.
Those who have stood in the circle on such a night seldom argue much about theology afterwards. They know that something was there. What to call it, they are content to leave to the philosophers.