It was in May 1997 that I decided to myself that I was "pagan". As far as I understood, this meant having an Earth-based spirituality, a connection with Nature, reverence for the Earth. I figured these sounded like lovely things, and it was at that time of year when Nature really comes to life and everything is wonderfully green. I knew that I felt a strong connection with all this Earthly stuff, and that this was what fed my spirit. The word "pagan" derives from Latin "paganus" which means “rural”, “of the countryside” or “outside the city”. It inherently has connotations of the uncivilised, the peasantry, the wild. In reference to religion, we are talking about the diverse temples and holy sites of country folk. When the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as its official religion, it was out in the wilderness that the ancient folk religions continued. Paganism referred to those practices outside the control of government officials. Before the...

I was recently asked a question by a friend of mine, regarding portrayals of the divine. She asked whether or not it was helpful to portray the Great Goddess in human form. Using a small statue to represent someone so boundless, so vastly supreme, may seem fruitless. Is it possible to accurately depict Her? Is it helpful to try and depict Her in human form? Since my childhood, I like to imagine Her as a warm and loving mother, but I knew that she was much more than that. And image we come up with is merely a symbolic representation of our experience of the divine.  The Metamorphoses of Apuleius describes a vision of the Great Goddess. She emerges from the sea, to announce that she is known by many names... "the Phrygians call me the mother of the Gods: the Athenians, Minerva: the Cyprians, Venus: the Candians, Diana: the Sicilians Proserpina: the Eleusians, Ceres: some Juno, other Bellona, other Hecate: and principally the Aethiopians which dwell in the O...

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...