The Godhead and Its Divisions

The Wiccan traditions are generally, incorrectly, seen as being Bitheistic because "they worship a God and a Goddess". But what lies beneath the surface is something more nuanced and complicated than outsiders tend to see or acknowledge. And that is the fact that these figures- the God and Goddess (sometimes referred to as The Lord and The Lady)- are merely just two faces of a singular Universal Divine force that really controls all life, made manifest through them for our understanding and interaction.

This single Universal Divine Force has gone by many names in the Wiccan tradition since its inception. Gardner, the father of Wicca, called it "The Prime Mover"; Starhawk eventually named it "The Star Goddess"; Scott Cunningham called it "The One"; Buckland referred to it merely as "It" on occasion, or variously as "Ultimate Deity" or "Supreme Power"; others have called it "The All" or "Dryghten". In all cases it is as a singular, univeral "Great Creator" who ultimately controls all life- not unlike the Abrahamic God is seen, though people don't tend to appreciate that parallel being drawn between the two.

Regardless of what it is called, this "Great Creator" is neither male nor female in gender or sex. Instead, Wicca views the Creator as a genderless force, being both the absense of gender and the union of gender at the same time ... Or, more correctly, male and female are seen as gendered extremes of a spectrum that, when unified, are the essense of the Creator- which is, itself, above the concepts of sex and gender. What follows, then, is best described as a semi-Hylozoistic, Bitheistic form of Pantheism.

To summarize: The Creator (henceforth refered to only as Deity) and the Universe are one and the same; it is greater than, and yet is creation simultaneously. Logically following from that, Deity is therefore all-encompassing, and immanent within all things, by its very nature as the Universe.

A portion of it- a Spark of Divinity- manifests both within ourselves, and within all of nature as well. The Divine is also active in everything, as manifested. It is the force that lights the stars and brings the flowers to birth; the very breath of life and spark of creation itself ... This is the nature of universality: There is nothing that isn’t of the Divine, and there is nothing of which the Divine isn’t.

Deity is so expansive and so encompassing as a result, however, that it becomes something far beyond our inherent ability to comprehend. We can therefore only really have the vaguest understanding of its true being. This is further made difficult by the fact that we as Humans are not whole ourselves; despite the fact that each of us carries within us a small spark of the Great Divine, each of us are still inherently fragmented by our very nature as non-Divine entities who live through a life that is ultimately traumatic to our bodies and psyche, our spirituality, and so on, in a variety of different ways.

Even though it remains incomprehensible to us, we still recognize its existence around us, though. More, we still wish to commune with it- and to act in co-creation with it as Witches who recognize the Divine Spark within us. Yet we cannot do that with an incomprehensible force we don't understand. And so, as a result, the whole must be consubstantially divided before us for better understanding and interaction.

The first and most logical division of Deity is into the fundamental elements of Humanic Polarity- or what can be understood as the humanic binary concepts of ‘Male’ and ‘Female’. Logically following that are other divisions of the Deity into additional corresponding polarities (Light / Dark; Sun / Moon; Wet / Dry; and so on). These are the most natural divisions, since these dualities are found everywhere in nature. Thus, they then become our representations of the Supreme Power which actually rules all life; the understandable forms through which we interact with Deity in ritual, and come to understand its various Mysteries.

Categorizing things into specific and wholly artificial binaries such as ‘Male / Female’, however, has generated much political debate over recent decades as science has disproven much of what our ancestors thought they knew about sex and gender based on their observation. But it is important to establish that this polaric model is not to the explicit exclusion or denial of all other modalities or spectrums.

Though the binaric or dualistic model is the primary way in which The Divine may come to be understood, it is only one way. And is it explicitly only the way through which the Wiccan comes to understand them. Yet even through this modality, each of these polarities is not a reality, nor a total factual statement about the complete Universal model. They are, rather, merely representations of observable extremes of the natural Earth Cycle which are most frequently relevant to (and most easily identifiable by) Human Beings as the creatures practicing the faith. Thus making it the easiest way to eventually understand the totality of Deity.

Furthermore, no classical Divinity that may act as a representation of the Great Divine has an actual human sex, gender, or orientation, either. However, as they are inherently observed and understood by us as some human-like manifestations, they still have expressions and ways assigned to them by our own ideas and by the mechanisms that we follow. And (perhaps ironically to these arguments) once one looks into the archaeological record, many classical Deities, historically, were quite genderfluid in many ways- taking on Hermaphroditic forms, genderswapping entirely in different eras, having opposite-gendered titles, and more.

In reality, the mask of this split, tri-Divine representation itself presents as a central face (Deity) looking forward, with one face looking to each side (the Polarities). Whenever one of the polar faces moves into Immanence, the other two faces fade away temporarily. But these divisions are merely two halves of the whole, connected both by their polarity and by their source; without one, neither could exist at all, and neither could the spectrum between them which comprises the true whole.

But despite any consubstantial division into polaric forms, Deity itself is (and will forever continue to) exist beyond any true scope of Human sex and gender entirely. It contains all as the immanent creative force, but is itself formless, agender, all-gendered, hermaphroditic, and androgynous all at the same time; it the non-manifested being whose polarities are still wholly integrated within its primordial unity.

It is everything in between- and yet is nothing at all.