With Advanced Witches & Warlocks, I have had in mind a certain goal: to give the witch traditions the weight of actual occult practice. I do not want it to be a matter of "this witch has fire, that one has healing." There is more to it than that; it is about how one comes to terms with magic and divinity, with their coven, the world, and the self.
In pursuit of that, I have been drawn back to an old friend of my witch material, the Triple Goddess.
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| "Maiden, Mother, Crone" by Ben Honeycut |
For some time now the Maiden, Mother and Crone have served as my way of putting the threefold form of the Goddess into words. It is a familiar shorthand that says something essential about the craft. Yet as I put in the work on Advanced Witches & Warlocks, I came to see that this was no longer an idea or conjecture to be just a background notion. It could stand as a tradition in its own right.
Hence The Threefold Goddess Tradition.
It is not to be confused with a neo-Pagan convenience or the simple equation of witches worshipping Diana. Nor is it only a Triple Moon affair, though the moon holds center stage. What I am building is a framework, both magical and theological, by which a witch can make sense of many goddesses and many kinds of magic under one sacred pattern.
So I am going to steal a LOT from the Christian Trinity. Consider the contradiction:
The Goddess is the Maiden, the Mother, the Crone.
And yet the Maiden is not the Mother, nor the Crone the Maiden. All are the Goddess.
There is no problem with that. The point is precisely there. I am perfectly happy with contradictions.
I call it the Threefold Sign. One might be tempted to take the logic of the Shield of the Trinity diagram – where each is God but not the other, and apply it here. And the logic would hold up. But the visual language would be off. This is not Christian theology in a black dress with a moon pendant. It is witchcraft and requires a witch’s symbol.
So we use something on the order of a triquetra, or three circles interlinked. In the overlap of two you will find their mysteries touching; where the three come together is the Mystery of the Goddess herself, beyond any name.
Some covens will inscribe the words Maiden, Mother, Crone in those circles. Others will put the names of goddesses there, or three moons (crescent, full, dark), or perhaps three ravens, three keys, three wells. The symbol is meant to instruct the initiate that while the Goddess is whole, her faces are not to be conflated. The Crone is not simply an aged Mother, nor the Maiden a young one. They are distinct, they are complete, they are divine. They are unique and they are unified. Like I have said before, I like my gods messy.
To treat it as a puzzle is to miss what is happening. It is a mystery for the witch to enter into.
The most usual expression of the tradition, of course, is to honor the Goddess as Maiden, Mother and Crone.
One might call the Maiden the start of things. She is the first step and the new moon, the road left untraveled. She is the huntress and the girl in the woods, the rebel and the initiate, the question put to you that no one wishes to hear. There is a danger in her youth; she is not without power but is perilous in her becoming. The Maiden is the threshold and the keeper of the threshold. Through her there is deeper understanding of the beginning.
The Mother represents fullness. Think of the full moon, the hearth, or the field. She is the queen and the lover, the teacher and the protector, the witch at the coven’s heart. She has the power to create and to bless, yet do not mistake her for being soft. Those who consider the Mother harmless have never been on the receiving end of a mother defending her young.
Then there is the Crone, the ending and the memory. She is the waning and dark moon, the graveyard and the crossroads, the winter and the final spell. She is the truth from which there is no escape. Feared for what she knows and honored for what she remembers, she is the keeper of ghosts and curses and all final wisdom.
In concert they are the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth. It is a cosmology I have used for a very long time. Witches do not tend to view death as some sort of reward or punishment; to them it is part of the great turning, along with rest and rebirth. The Crone is not an end to the story so much as the one who readies the soul to start over. This is also the same reason why my witches can't be raised from the dead.
I have found a particular utility in what I term the Lunar Mask. In my campaign notes, there was a moon-priestess who came to see a deeper pattern in the goddesses she revered. She did not forsake her faith, but understood her goddess to be but one aspect of something older and more complete.
For Advanced Witches & Warlocks I cannot employ deity names from other published settings, though I have no need to. Our own real-world mythic structure is far superior. So for the Lunar Mask I have settled on:
Diana as the Maiden. The crescent moon and the silver bow. She is the wild wood and the fierce independence of the untamed, the arrow in the dark and the way into the forest.
Selene as the Mother. The luminous presence and the dream-giver. She is the tide of blessing, the lover, the full moon shining down on everything.
Hecate as the Crone. The torch and the key, the ghost road and the witch-night. She is the figure at the crossroads where the living must make their peace with the dead.
This serves as a clean substitute for the triad in my own play and is more broadly useful for the book. It also allows for a clear delineation between the larger tradition and individual covens. One coven may give its honors to Diana, Selene and Hecate; another will have different names for the same Threefold Goddess Tradition.
The Triple Moon Goddess Heresy
I find the notion all the more compelling here.
During a recent campaign discussion, I put forward the concept of a priestess who makes an unsettling discovery: the moon goddesses of her world are not distinct and unconnected powers as she has been taught. Rather, they are three aspects of some deeper lunar enigma.
The temples would call it heresy. The witch calls it revelation. One has to make that distinction. This is no case of a goddess making a thunderous appearance to confirm you are right, nor is it a tidy prophecy. It is a matter of scholarship and risk, of intuition and ritual. The priestess will pore over old songs for matching symbols or spot the same moon-shape in the carving above a long-forgotten door. She hears how a forbidden hymn in one temple is answered by the orthodox prayer of another. She starts to think the line drawn between the goddesses is not so much false as it is incomplete.
That is the sort of heresy I have for my witches. Where a cleric is content to uphold the temple’s version of the truth, a witch wants to know what the temple has left out.
In this way the "Triple Moon Goddess Heresy" can be made to work for the Threefold Goddess Tradition. It is not something every coven must accept, nor does it have to be true in every campaign. But it puts a fine tension on the tradition. For the Threefold Goddess is not simply a matter of old women in the woods with their rites; there is a dangerous theology to it. A witch-priestess might look at three rival temples and tell them they are all correct but have no idea why. That is very much in keeping with a witch.
Beyond the Moon
I am inclined to stick with The Threefold Goddess Tradition as the name precisely because I do not want to confine things to moon goddesses alone.
There really is no better symbol for the witch than the moon. It is the perfect sign in that it can change its shape and yet remain itself; it vanishes and comes back again. It is the ruler of tides, night, magic, madness, and fertility. The connections are so deep and so ancient I'd be a fool to fight them.
But the Threefold Goddess is a bigger entity than the moon. Other covens will have their own triadic powers to honor her with. A Brigidine coven might see her in poetry, healing and smithcraft, three flames to one fire. Or a Morrígan coven in battle, sovereignty and prophecy, which is to say three ravens and one fate. A Hecatean coven could honor her at the road, the threshold and the grave; a mystery cult as maiden of descent, mother of grain and crone of the underworld. A coven of fates may view her as Clotho the Spinner, Lachesis the Measurer, and Atropos the Cutter.
They are not the same coven, and they are free to disagree, even to charge one another with misapprehending the Goddess. Again, I have no objection to such contradictions when it comes to divinities. If anything, it gives the tradition an older, more vital feel.
The Daughters of Aradia
This also provides a good home for the Daughters of Aradia, a tradition I have been working on. I had considered them a tradition of their own, and they can still be, but this fits well enough. I have come to the view that they are better suited as a sub-tradition of the Threefold Goddess, or perhaps a coven of some power and mystery. In any case, their take on the threefold pattern is not the same as the Lunar Mask.
Under this arrangement, Diana is the Moon-Mother and wellspring of witchcraft; Aradia the Daughter, the liberator and teacher sent out into the world; Hecate the Crone, holding the night roads and what power is hidden from view. It is a more pointed and politically charged stance for the Daughters of Aradia. They are not simply moon witches but agents of resistance, secrecy and teaching. Their myth holds that mortals were given witchcraft to stand up to tyranny as much as to bless and heal.
Do they get along with witches of the Lunar Mask of Diana-Celene-Hecate? Some might, others might think their way is right, and the other is a dangerous cult of apostates. Can't wait to have some arguments at my table on this.
You will not find the quiet feel of a lunar coven of seers here, yet there is no reason both cannot exist under the wider umbrella of the Threefold Goddess Tradition. That is the kind of thing I am after in Advanced Witches & Warlocks. A tradition should be specific enough to give rise to strong covens and rivalries, but broad enough to serve as the basis for many characters and adventures.
For the purposes of the book, I would make the Threefold Goddess Tradition one of the principal ones. Mechanically, its witches are adept at divination, protection, healing, charms, dream work, transformation, curses, and dealing with spirits. There is a synthesis and mystery to their power that you do not get with the rigidity of the High Secret Order, the wildness of faerie ways or the grimness of the Daughters of Baba Yaga.
Their special abilities ought to reflect the threefold nature:
- The Maiden for courage, movement, discovery and warding off fear.
- The Mother for fertility, guardianship, healing and the protection of the coven.
- The Crone for prophecy, spirit speech, death-wisdom and defense against necromancy.
When a witch of this tradition reaches a certain level, she can call on the hidden center of the Threefold Sign. Not as Maiden or Mother or Crone but as the Goddess in her Mystery. It should be a rare and potent thing, bound up with the moon or some rite of initiation. Her highest Occult Power.
It also provides good material for roleplaying. A Threefold witch might be a midwife in one village and a forbidden priestess in the next. She could be put in the position of having to defend herself against accusations of heresy or syncretism, carrying three holy symbols and declining to offer clerics who want clean doctrine any explanation.
That is how I want to set witch religion apart from the clerical sort. Clerics have their temples and orders to serve their gods. Witches come to the divine through bloodlines, signs, dreams, and the mysteries of the coven, things that do not always conform to temple law. Witches are not just clerics with better fashion sense and killer eyeliner.
In the end, the Threefold Goddess is not three, nor is she one in any simple way. She is the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone. The moon is merely the sign by which we have learned to know her.
Three circles. One mystery.
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