Who is your wiccan goddess

Why do they have different names in different Wiccan traditions, and how do you begin to work with them in your personal practice? Magical Deities , by best-selling author Lisa Chamberlain, answers these questions and more. Going beyond the usual brief introduction to the God and Goddess found in many beginner guides to Wicca, Lisa covers the origins of the Wiccan deities, as well as their varying manifestations among different Wiccan traditions.

What's more, she explains the difference between traditional duotheism and more eclectic polytheistic practices, both of which are found among the diversity of forms within this dynamic religion. You'll find advice for learning to forge your own spiritual connection with the divine masculine and feminine, and introductions to sixteen ancient deities who often function as "aspects" of the God and Goddess within Wiccan practices. Finally, you'll find ideas for honoring and working with these deities in your magical practice-and make no mistake, having the assistance of the gods and goddesses of the Universe is an enormous boon in the magic department Foundations in Wiccan Concepts of Divinity and Magic For many practitioners who keep to the traditional duotheistic concept of Wicca, the ancient deities are "aspects" of the "supreme" Goddess and God and don't have a role to play on their own.

For those who fall into the category of "eclectic" Wiccans, the inclusion of ancient deities is more polytheistic. In both approaches, deities may be called upon for assistance with specific magical aims. But it's not simply a matter of speaking a god's or goddess' name in your spellwork-you need to develop an understanding and personal relationship with your chosen deities.

Magical Deities will help you to do just that, with valuable information including: The history of the Wiccan Goddess and God and their evolution through various traditions An introduction to the Triple Goddess and her three aspects: Maiden, Mother and Crone Introductions to the Sun God, the Horned God, the Green Man, and the Holly and Oak Kings How to represent the God and Goddess on the Wiccan altar The mythology, cosmology, and magical practices of the ancient cultures that gave rise to Wicca The most popular deities of the Egyptian, Roman, Greek, and Celtic pantheons Advice for choosing deities to work with, and magical goals and methods specific to each one The paths to connection with the God and Goddess, or to any of the deities "borrowed" from other cultures are as multiple and varied as the people who worship them.

Ultimately, your intuition and your heart are your best guides along your journey. But the more you know about the gods and goddesses you seek to work with, the more authentic and astounding your connection with them has the potential to be. As you make your way deeper into the realm of Wicca, Magical Deities will be a trusted travel guide Scroll to the top of the page, hit the buy button, and you'll receive an exclusive free gift.

Stay In the Loop. Login Login Logout. IN the past few years two well-respected scholars have independently advanced essentially the same theory about Wicca's founding. In Philip G. Gardner Davis wrote that the origins of the Goddess movement lay in an interest among the German and French Romantics—mostly men—in natural forces, especially those linked with women. Gardner admired the Romantics and belonged to a Rosicrucian society called the Fellowship of Crotona—a group that was influenced by several late-nineteenth-century occultist groups, which in turn were influenced by Freemasonry.

In the s Gardner introduced a religion he called and spelled Wica. Although Gardner claimed to have learned Wiccan lore from a centuries-old coven of witches who also belonged to the Fellowship of Crotona, Davis wrote that no one had been able to locate the coven and that Gardner had invented the rites he trumpeted, borrowing from rituals created early in the twentieth century by the notorious British occultist Aleister Crowley , among others.

Wiccans today, by their own admission, have freely adapted and embellished Gardner's rites. Hutton had conducted detailed research into the known pagan practices of prehistory, had read Gardner's unpublished manuscripts, and had interviewed many of Gardner's surviving contemporaries.

Gardner seems to have drawn on the work of two people: Charles Godfrey Leland , a nineteenth-century amateur American folklorist who professed to have found a surviving cult of the goddess Diana in Tuscany, and Margaret Alice Murray , a British Egyptologist who herself drew on Leland's ideas and, beginning in the s, created a detailed framework of ritual and belief. From his own experience Gardner included such Masonic staples as blindfolding, initiation, secrecy, and "degrees" of priesthood.

He incorporated various Tarot-like paraphernalia, including wands, chalices, and the five-pointed star, which, enclosed in a circle, is the Wiccan equivalent of the cross. Gardner also wove in some personal idiosyncrasies. One was a fondness for linguistic archaisms: "thee," "thy," "'tis," "Ye Bok of ye Art Magical. Some Gardnerian innovations have sexual and even bondage-and-discipline overtones. Ritual sex, which Gardner called "The Great Rite," and which was also largely unknown in antiquity, was part of the liturgy for Beltane and other feasts although most participants simulated the act with a dagger—another of Gardner's penchants—and a chalice.

Other rituals called for the binding and scourging of initiates and for administering "the fivefold kiss" to the feet, knees, "womb" according to one Wiccan I spoke with, a relatively modest spot above the pubic bone , breasts, and lips.

Hutton effectively demolished the notion, held by Wiccans and others, that fundamentally pagan ancient customs existed beneath medieval Christian practices.

His research reveals that outside of a handful of traditions, such as decorating with greenery at Yuletide and celebrating May Day with flowers, no pagan practices—much less the veneration of pagan gods—have survived from antiquity. Hutton found that nearly all the rural seasonal pastimes that folklorists once viewed as "timeless" fertility rituals, including the Maypole dance, actually date from the Middle Ages or even the eighteenth century. There is now widespread consensus among historians that Catholicism thoroughly permeated the mental world of medieval Europe, introducing a robust popular culture of saints' shrines, devotions, and even charms and spells.

The idea that medieval revels were pagan in origin is a legacy of the Protestant Reformation. Hutton has also pointed out a lack of evidence that either the ancient Celts or any other pagan culture celebrated all the "eight feasts of the Wheel" that are central to Wiccan liturgy.

Historians have overturned another basic Wiccan assumption: that the group has a history of persecution exceeding even that of the Jews. The figure Starhawk cited—nine million executed over four centuries—derives from a late-eighteenth-century German historian; it was picked up and disseminated a hundred years later by a British feminist named Matilda Gage and quickly became Wiccan gospel Gardner himself coined the phrase "the Burning Times".

Most scholars today believe that the actual number of executions is in the neighborhood of 40, The most thorough recent study of historical witchcraft is Witches and Neighbors , by Robin Briggs, a historian at Oxford University. Briggs pored over the documents of European witch trials and concluded that most of them took place during a relatively short period, to , and were largely confined to parts of present-day France, Switzerland, and Germany that were already racked by the religious and political turmoil of the Reformation.

The accused witches, far from including a large number of independent-minded women, were mostly poor and unpopular. Their accusers were typically ordinary citizens often other women , not clerical or secular authorities. In fact, the authorities generally disliked trying witchcraft cases and acquitted more than half of all defendants.

Briggs also discovered that none of the accused witches who were found guilty and put to death had been charged specifically with practicing a pagan religion. If Internet chat rooms are any indication, some Wiccans cling tenaciously to the idea of themselves as institutional victims on a large scale. Generally speaking, though, Wiccans appear to be accommodating themselves to much of the emerging evidence concerning their antecedents: for example, they are coming to view their ancient provenance as inspiring legend rather than hard-and-fast history.

By the end of the s, with the appearance of Davis's book and then of Hutton's, many Wiccans had begun referring to their story as a myth of origin, not a history of survival.

An even more controversial strand of the challenge to the Wiccan narrative concerns the very existence of ancient Goddess worship.

One problem with the theory of Goddess worship, scholars say, is that the ancients were genuine polytheists. They did not believe that the many gods and goddesses they worshipped merely represented different aspects of single deities. In that respect they were like animistic peoples of today, whose cosmologies are crowded with discrete spirits. Not until the second century, with the work of the Roman writer Apuleius, was one goddess, Isis, identified with all the various goddesses and forces of nature.

As Christianity spread, the classical deities ceased to be the objects of religious cults, but they continued their reign in Western literature and art. Starting about they began to be associated with semi-mystical natural forces, rather than with specific human activities. In the writings of the Romantics, for example John Keats's "Endymion" comes to mind , Diana presided generally over the woodlands and the moon.

In the German classicist Eduard Gerhard made the assertion, for the first time in modern Western history, that all the ancient goddesses derived from a single prehistoric mother goddess. In the Swiss jurist and writer Johann Jakob Bachofen postulated that the earliest human civilizations were matriarchies. Bachofen's theory influenced a wide range of thinkers, including Friedrich Engels, a generation of British intellectuals, and probably Carl Jung.

By the early s scholars generally agreed that the great goddess and earth mother had reigned supreme in ancient Mediterranean religions, and was toppled only when ethnic groups devoted to father gods conquered her devotees. In the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans excavated the Minoan palace at Knossos, on Crete, uncovering colorful frescoes of bull dancers and figurines of bare-breasted women carrying snakes.

From this scant evidence Evans concluded that the Minoans, who preceded the Zeus-venerating Greeks by several centuries, had worshipped the great goddess in her virgin and mother aspects, along with a subordinate male god who was her son and consort. Throughout the s and s archaeologists excavating Paleolithic and Neolithic sites in Europe and even Pueblo Indian settlements in Arizona almost reflexively proclaimed the female figurines they found to be images of the great goddess.

The archaeologists drew on the work of late-nineteenth-century anthropologists. A belief that Stone Age peoples and their "primitive" modern counterparts did not realize that men played a role in human procreation was popular among many early British and American anthropologists.

Female fertility was an awesome mystery, and women, as the sole sources of procreation, were highly honored.