im new to this site but have been looking at Wicca for a little while now, and have found certain aspects that i am interested in, however i am a little confused on the overall 'theories' of wicca such as God and Goddesses and other things and if someone would be able to apply all of their knowledge to me and help me out, i would be very grateful. a bit like a teacher but more of a source of lovely information? xxx
Hi Lightened, I've been a practicing Wiccan for 30 years and a High Priestess since 1996. If there are any specific questions I can help you with feel free to ask me.
In Traditional Wicca (Gardnerian, Alexandrian, etc.) there is a specific God and Goddess whose names are only revealed to the initiated.
However, in other forms of Wicca the deities may either be thought of generically as the Lord and Lady, the Goddess being Goddess of the Moon and the Lord being the Horned Lord. Or one can find a God and Goddess with whom they can build a personal relationship and work with those instead. Which deities you choose to work with is largely a personal choice. Perhaps when first starting out it might be easiest to simply refer to them as the Lord and Lady.
The Lady is symbolized by the three stages of the Moon, new moon, full moon, and waning moon. Sometimes this is symbolized as )0(. The phases of the moon represent the stages in the life of a woman, Maiden, Mother, and Crone.
The God is often portrayed wearing the horns of a stag or sometimes a ram. This shows his relationship to the natural world where he is sometimes called the Lord of Animals. He is also a deity tied to the idea of death and resurrection as he dies with each turn of the year and yet is continually reborn.
You can find some good information at http://wicca.cnbeyer.com/gods.shtml
I would also suggest the book "Devoted to You" by Judy Harrow which is a wonderful discussion on developing a personal relationship with the Deities.
well the god and goddess derive from the team dynamics in an ancient celtic tribe, the lady/goddess being the chiefess, the god being the horned one. When the village starved, they'd slaughter a deer, but since deer are sacred to them, they'd have to return the life that they took, and the horned one is appointed from a group of men, blessed by the chiefess and crowned with a crown of horns, he is sent as a sacrifice to run among the deer. The alpha in the herd may smell the foriegn intruder and they engage in combat, usually resulting in the death of the horned one, that is why he is known as the sacrifice and early pagans refused to be ruled by a king, but chafed to the rule of a queen instead, because the mother is eternal, and a king is merely at her side until he is called to battle, which is metaphorically being sent as a sacrifice
I'm sorry spellsinger but your post is absolutely full of inaccurate information. Where on earth did you find that material? What you speak about had nothing to do with the beliefs of the Celts, at least what little we know about them. Read any of the ancient tales from Ireland and Britain and you will clearly see that the tribes were ruled by "kings", almost never by women (although there were a few very exceptional women such as Boudicca who held power.) Nor did the Celts hold to a God/Goddess paradigm. They had a whole pantheon of different Gods and Goddesses and, with a few exceptions such as Cernunnos, their Gods did not bear horns.
And why on earth would a village sacrifice a deer if they were starving? Our ancestors were smarter and more pragmatic than that. If you were starving you ate the deer. Food was too precious a resource to throw away, even to the Gods, when you were starving.
The concept of the "dying God" comes from the Mediterranean and was related to Gods tied to plant life such as Dionysius. It had nothing to do with Celtic practices. So the death of the God came, not through ritual sacrifice, but with the harvest of the grain or the grapes every year. That's why Wiccans sometimes celebrate the death of the God at Lammas when typically the grain had been harvested.
