Goddess and God
First of all, why do we say Goddess before God? The simplest reason is that by honoring the Goddess first, we are trying to help undo two thousand years of having no feminine Deity at all. Her restoration empowers women and helps men regain a healthy relationship with women and with their own "unmanly" traits. So, in most traditions, the Goddess is introduced first and the priestess runs the circle. (There are other reasons for this that won’t become important until later.) In some groups, this interest in Goddess and women’s empowerment reaches a point where only the Goddess is worshipped and only women can stand in the circle. This, too, serves its purpose on the larger scale. However, most Wiccan groups try to strike a balance between Goddess and God, man and woman.
The Goddess of Wicca is most often seen as the Triple Goddess, whose three aspects are Maiden, Mother, and Crone. Some people claim that this way of looking at Her is universal, but it isn’t. There are several triple goddesses in Greek, Norse, and Celtic mythology, but they don’t always appear as Maiden, Mother, and Crone; and there are many more goddesses who don’t fit neatly into these categories. However, the Wiccan Triple Goddess still has important symbolism in relation to the God, the universe, and the cycle of the year.
The Maiden Goddess is virgin, in the old sense of belonging only to herself. She is playful but fierce, and she protects her secrets vigilantly. She may be called the Queen of Heaven, and is often associated with the moon or the stars. She also protects wild places and animals.
The Mother Goddess is the Earth Mother, the source of life and prosperity. Her power to create comes with a greater sense of responsibility and love for Her children. She is the lover of the God, and also His mother. (This is not to be taken as a condonement of human incest--it’s a symbolic relationship that will be explained further when we talk about the Sabbats.) She is powerful, and can still be fierce as a protector.
The Crone Goddess is the Goddess as Old Woman. She has seen into the World of the Dead, and she has previously been both Maiden and Mother; so she is a great source of wisdom and magic. The Crone sometimes also appears as a challenger, because sometimes before we can open to wisdom we have to be tested, or even suffer. This makes the Crone a scary figure to non-Wiccans, who see suffering as unquestionably bad. However, Wicca does not share this perspective. Sometimes we must suffer for the greater good, or simply because all things physical are mortal and must be released at some time. When we resist the release, we suffer. And, again, sometimes we learn through suffering. Another important reason to honor the Crone is that age has become devalued in our culture, and this is especially true for old women. Primitive cultures, however, see living to old age as a triumph, and revere their elderly for their years of experience. Wicca seeks to restore some of this perspective to our culture.
In some traditions there is also a fourth face of Goddess, the Dark Mother. She embodies all three aspects of Maiden, Mother, and Crone. She is the primal chaos or void out of which the universe is born, and into which it all dissolves again. Because she represents dissolution and death, which people often fear, she sometimes takes on a frightening face, like that of Kali in India. But in Wicca, like in Hinduism, death leads to rebirth, and the void is a source of comfort and liberation from fear when it is faced honestly. For if all we love must end, so too must all we do not love; suffering and fear are limited by nature, and once we know this, they lose some of their power over us.
If the Goddess is the cause of the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth, the God *is* the cycle incarnate. He is the one who leads us through the process by going on before us. In spring he is the Wild God, living in untouched pockets of Nature where life is starting to awaken. He is all energy and sex and sensation, like a youth just discovering the world. In the summer he is the Sun God, an adult in his prime. He becomes consort to the Earth Goddess and rules the living world. In the fall he becomes the Harvest God, who like the grain must be sacrificed (harvested) so that his people can live through the winter. But this sacrifice frees him of his worldly duties, and he moves into the Underworld to become the Lord of Death and the Goddess's true equal. In this aspect he waits to meet us when we die. He is also keeper of mysteries and protector of Witches.
Both the Lord of Death and the Wild God are sometimes depicted with horns and given the title "The Horned God." (In fact the Horned God is used as the general term to describe him in total, like the title of the Triple Goddess.) This causes some people to confuse him with Satan. In actuality, the Biblical Satan does not have horns, instead being variously described as a fallen angel or a serpent. The depiction of Satan with horns comes from the Middle Ages, when Christianity was just getting established in Europe. The Christians tried to discourage worship of Horned Gods like Cernunnos or Pan by claiming that He was Satan, the source of all evil.
_Pantheons_
A pantheon is the set of gods worshipped in a particular culture. Technically, the Wiccan pantheon is the Triple Goddess and the Horned God. However, most Wiccans believe that all gods are aspects of one Goddess and one God, who in turn are really one complete Being too immense for us to imagine. The reason we worship the gods under different names is to make them more comprehendible to us, to make it easier for us to relate to the Divine in some form. This is one reason why Wiccans don’t try to convert people: if we’re all worshipping the same Being already, why bother?
It must be said at this point that in some other pagan faiths, this idea of all gods being one is not universal. An untrained Wiccan might take this unity to an extreme, believing that because all deities are one, their names are completely interchangeable. At the other end of the spectrum, many reconstructionists—people who work exclusively with one pantheon and attempt to recreate its original faith as accurately as possible—believe in their Gods as completely distinct individuals Who, if anything, would take offense at being mistaken for each other. A serious Wiccan tends to be between these two extremes, believing simultaneously that each aspect of Deity is related to the whole, and that each is a distinct Being Who should be treated as such. This is a mystical view, and it is shared by some other mystical traditions, examples being the Christian idea of "Trinity" and the attitude taken in Hinduism, which one writer calls "polytheistic monism."
Some Wiccans, in fact, do not even work with the individual deities of other cultures, preferring to work with more abstract images and principles. Many members of the Fellowship of Isis (not all of whom are Wiccans by any means) hold to the Roman understanding of Isis demonstrated by writers like Lucius Apuleius, which was that Isis was the name behind all other names of the Goddess, that She was the One behind all the other faces. (However, other members of the Fellowship relate better to her traditional Egyptian aspects and prefer to work with Her as a distinct and definable Entity. Interestingly, either approach works.)
That said, many Wiccans do like to work with gods or pantheons of older pagan cultures. This is something that you are free to decide for yourself. Some people work with only one or two gods as their patrons. Others have a patron, but also work with the rest of that god's pantheon. Others are more eclectic, working with whatever gods appeal to them. So, for example, one witch might work almost exclusively with the Egyptian goddess Isis; another might have Brigit as her patron and work with other Celtic gods; another might borrow one or two each from Norse, Greek, Hindu, and Voodoo deities. Any of these is fine within our context as long as it works for you and the Deities involved.