Surya and his two wives. Standing in the light of conscious awareness, we see a long shadow cast before us, the shadow of ourselves. This shadow is like a reflection of ourselves, in which we can see ourselves more clearly. Most of the time we do not notice our shadow, but when we turn to face it, we may see parts of ourselves that we were unaware of. Seeing that it is dark, we may becomes scared of our own shadows, afraid of facing up to what lies therein. "Everyone carries a shadow," Jung wrote, "and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is." The Jungian shadow is everything outside the light of consciousness, whether good or bad. It represents the aspects of yourself which are unknown to you, which have become repressed through self-denial. What aspects of yourself do you keep hidden? What aspects of yourself do you refuse to aknowledge? These aspects of yourself may be revealed to you through your dream...

This is my personal understanding of divinity in Wicca. Firstly, there is the pantheistic concept of the divine as the One and All, the very Being of the Cosmos, the Source, the Dryghten. This is an impersonal, non-anthropomorphic way of understanding the divine, but sometimes it is symbolised by a hermaphrodite, an ouroboros, an infinity symbol, or a spiral. It is the self-creating infinite oneness of all that exists, and is not an object of worship. Dryghten is the Godhead which is understood by us in the form of Goddess and God. Patricia Crowther wrote the following blessing in her book Witch Blood! The Diary of a Witch High Priestess!  "In the name of Dryghten, the Ancient Providence, Who was from the beginning and is for eternity, Male and Female, the Original Source of all things; all-knowing, all-pervading, all-powerful; changeless, eternal. In the name of the Lady of the Moon, and the Lord of Death and Resurrection. In the name of the Mighty Ones of the Four Q...

My last two blog posts spoke of the Horned God and the Great Goddess, but there is a third concept of deity in Wicca, known as Dryghten, the One, or the All.  This monistic impersonal ultimate pantheistic divinity is acknowledged but not worshiped, and is not to be confused with the monotheistic idea of a single supreme personal deity.  Unlike religions that place a divine creator outside of Nature, Wicca is pantheistic, seeing Nature as divine in itself. I first came across the term pantheism when I was in my early teens. The word was constructed from the Greek pan "all" and theos "god" by the English mathematician Joseph Raphson, in his work De spatio reali , published in 1697. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy offers a contemporary definition: Pantheism is a metaphysical and religious position. Broadly defined it is the view that (1) “God is everything and everything is God … the world is either identical with God or in some way a self-expressi...

This image dates to 2600–1900 BCE in the Indus Valley. The image was discovered during the excavation of the Mohenjodaro archaeological site. The depiction is identified as Pashupati "Lord of Animals". Some authors argue that this was a prototype of the god Shiva.The Hindu deity Shiva is known as "the destroyer", the one who dissolves the Ego. He wears garlands of skulls and snakes to signify his primal cthonic nature. Shiva is often depicted holding a stag, a symbol of wisdom. He is worshipped as a teacher of yoga, music, and wisdom. Hindu iconography sometimes shows him sitting on a deer-throne and surrounded by sages receiving his instruction, other times Shiva sits in ascetic isolation. I find the image strikingly similar to that of Cernunnos below.  This 1st century image was found on the Gundestrup cauldron, the largest known example of European Iron Age silver work. It was found in 1891 in a peat bog near the hamlet of Gundestrup in the Aars pari...