Beliefs and Ethics
There is no Wiccan creed and no pagan catechism. What follows is not what you must believe. It is what most of us at the Hearth do believe, written plainly, with the arguments left in.
The Goddess and the God
At the centre of Wicca stand two: the Goddess and the God. She is the moon, the earth, the sea, the womb and the tomb; he is the sun, the horned lord of the wild wood, the grain that is cut and rises again. They are not two separate beings so much as two faces of a single mystery, and most of us also honour them under particular names: Brighid, Cernunnos, Isis, Pan, the Morrígan, Lugh, and many more.
Older Wiccan writing leans hard on the polarity of female and male. Many of us now hold that more loosely. The Goddess and God are poles of a field, not a rulebook for human bodies, and our circles are open to people of every gender. A God who is also the Green Man and a Goddess who is also the storm have never been confined to anyone's idea of a man or a woman.
The Triple Goddess
The Goddess is often honoured as Maiden, Mother and Crone, mirrored in the waxing, full and waning moon. The Maiden is beginning and independence; the Mother is fullness and fierce care; the Crone is wisdom, endings and the dark of the year. Brighid herself is a triple goddess in the Irish sources, though her three faces are poet, smith and healer rather than stages of a life. We like both arrangements.
The Horned God
He is the oldest image we have: a man with antlers, painted on a cave wall. He is the hunter and the hunted, the lord of animals and of death, the Oak King who rules the waxing year and the Holly King who rules the waning. He is not the Christian devil, who borrowed his horns much later. He is wildness, and we need him.
The elements
We work with four elements and a fifth that holds them: Air in the east, Fire in the south, Water in the west, Earth in the north, and Spirit at the centre. They are the structure of the cast circle, the pattern of the pentacle, and a way of understanding ourselves. The tables of correspondence give the colours, tools and qualities of each.
The Rede
Eight words the Wiccan Rede fulfil:
An it harm none, do what ye will.
This is our whole law and it is not permission; it is a demand. "An" is an old word for "if." The Rede says: if your action harms no one, you are free to do it. The weight falls on the first half. Before you act, before you work, before you speak, you must ask who it touches and how. "None" includes yourself. It includes the land. It includes the person you are angry with.
The Rede does not say harm is always avoidable. Sometimes every choice costs someone something. It says you must look, honestly, and choose with your eyes open, and own what follows.
The Threefold Law
Many Wiccans hold that whatever you send out returns to you three times over. Some take this literally, as a law of the cosmos. Others, including several of us, understand it as a teaching about attention: what you practise, you become, and a witch who practises cursing becomes a cursed sort of person. Either way it points the same direction. Work for healing and you grow into a healer.
Not all witches accept the Threefold Law, and some traditional witches reject the Rede too, holding that a witch who cannot hex cannot heal. We respect that argument and do not share it. Our covenant says where we stand.
Death and the Summerland
We do not fear death, or we try not to. The wheel turns; the grain is cut and sown again; the Goddess receives the dead into the Summerland, a place of rest and remembering, and in time they return. Some of us believe this literally. Some hold it as a story that makes grief bearable. At Samhain we set a place for them either way.
Magic
We believe that focused will, raised in ritual and released with intention, can change things: ourselves first, the world a little. We do not believe magic breaks physics. We believe it works in the cracks, the odds, the heart, the timing. We believe it must be ethical, that it must be asked for by anyone it is worked on, and that it is never a substitute for calling a doctor.
Next: Traditions and Paths