Maiden, Mother and Crone

Many witches know the Goddess in three faces: the Maiden of the waxing moon, the Mother of the full, and the Crone of the waning and the dark. It is one of the best-loved images of the Craft, and one of the youngest.

The page on the Goddess and the God introduces the two great figures of Wicca. This page looks more closely at the threefold Goddess: what each of her faces stands for, how the image came into the Craft, and why the third face, the one most people would rather not look at, may be the one that matters most.

The three faces

The Maiden

The Goddess young: independent, curious, beginning things. She belongs to the waxing crescent and to spring, and she is the patron of everything that starts out of nothing, of inspiration and of the arts. Her images vary more than the other two, from the untouchable virgin huntress of the woods to the laughing girl of May Day, and she is all of them.

The Mother

The Goddess in her fullness: the full moon and the height of summer, the earth that feeds every creature on it, love that asks nothing in return. She is the face most often invoked, and the one most people mean when they speak of the Goddess at all. A woman does not need to have borne children to stand for her, and neither does the Goddess.

The Crone

The Goddess old: the waning moon and the dark, winter, endings and death. She is also wisdom, the knowledge that comes only from experience, and the keeper of secrets and of magic. In many tellings she is the patron of witches above all.

Read together, the three are a life, the shape of every life, from the first crescent to the last. Many witches also read them as the round of the year, and some as the round of many lives, one after another, which is how the Craft generally thinks of death and rebirth.

Where the image comes from

Goddesses in threes are genuinely old. The three Fates of the Greeks spun the thread of each life, measured it and cut it. The Norse had their three Norns. Carvings of three mother goddesses seated side by side, the Matres, were set up all over the Roman provinces of Gaul, Germany and Britain. An Irish glossary of about the year 900 records that Brigid had two sisters of the same name, one a physician and one a smith. And the Greek Hecate, goddess of crossroads, was shown with three bodies facing three ways.

But none of these is the Triple Goddess of the Craft. The particular idea of one goddess whose three faces are the three ages of a woman, and whose image is the three phases of the moon, was set out most influentially by the poet Robert Graves in The White Goddess in 1948, drawing on the classical scholars of the generation before him. From Graves it passed into the Craft in the 1950s and 1960s, and from there into the whole of modern paganism.

Some writers have gone further, and told of a long golden age in which the peoples of Europe worshipped the Goddess alone, lived under the rule of women in peace and plenty, and were overthrown by sky-worshipping patriarchal invaders who demoted her to a wife or a daughter. It is a powerful story, and it was popular in the 1970s. Archaeologists today find very little evidence for it. Like the older story of an unbroken witch religion, it is better treated as myth than as history, and the Craft does not need it to be true.

None of this makes the image less real in the way that matters. A good image of the divine is not proved by its age. It is proved by whether it opens a door, and this one has opened doors for a great many people.

The Crone

The Crone is the face most people are afraid of, and it is not hard to see why. She stands for what our culture least wants to look at: age, decline, endings and death. In fairy tales she is the witch in the wood, and in history she was, too often, the woman on trial.

The people accused of witchcraft in early modern Europe were disproportionately old, poor and alone. The physician Johann Weyer argued in 1563 that many of them were confused old women who needed care and not the fire, and he was fiercely attacked for it. In 1711 the essayist Joseph Addison observed that when an old woman grew poor and became a charge upon her parish, she was generally turned into a witch. The fear of the old woman is a long and ugly part of the history of the word that witches now use for themselves.

The Craft has turned that fear round. Its Crone is not the destroyer but the transformer: the one who breaks down what is finished so that something new can grow, as the winter makes room for the spring. She is the night without which there is no morning. She is also the patron of the hardest work there is, the work of knowing oneself, and in the old stories the hero who goes to her in fear finds a monster, while the one who goes honestly finds a teacher.

Some covens, and many groups of women, keep a rite of croning for a woman who has reached the age of the Crone. It is a modern custom and a fine one. It honours a time of life that the world outside mostly ignores, and it reminds everyone present that the oldest woman in the room is very often the wisest.

The two faces of the God

The God has his own changes through the year, though they are usually told as two faces rather than three. There is the young God of the waxing year, the child of light born at Yule, the hunter, the lover of Beltane. And there is the old God of the waning year, the king who gives his life into the harvest at Lammas and reigns as lord of the dead at Samhain. Some covens tell the same story as the rivalry of the Oak King and the Holly King, as the page on Yule describes. The page on the Wheel of the Year tells the whole story of the God and the Goddess through the eight festivals.

How we use it

We do not teach the Triple Goddess as doctrine, and we do not think anyone should. The Goddess is one, and she has as many faces as there are people to see her. But the three are a good way in. They give each part of the moon's month a character that can be felt, as the page on working with the moon describes, and they give each part of a life a dignity that the world does not always grant it.