Many Wiccans affirm a divine duality of the God and the Goddess, the sacred understood as a complementary pair of masculine and feminine principles. The Goddess is often honored in her aspects as Maiden, Mother, and Crone and linked to the moon and the earth; the God as her consort, associated with the sun, the wild, and the cycle of the seasons, dying and being reborn. Their union and interplay express the fertility and rhythm of nature, and the turning of the year is celebrated as the story of their relationship, in some traditions elaborated as a seasonal contest between the Oak King and the Holly King, light and dark twin aspects of the God who alternately triumph at the solstices, an image many Wiccan writers trace to the poet Robert Graves's 1948 book The White Goddess, a work of speculative literary mythology that influenced Wicca's early symbolism considerably more than it reflects any documented ancient practice.
Gerald Gardner originally presented this theology as a surviving fragment of an ancient pre-Christian fertility religion, drawing on the Egyptologist Margaret Murray's witch-cult hypothesis, the claim that early modern witch-trial confessions preserved evidence of a real, organized pagan religion persecuted by the church. Historians of religion, Ronald Hutton foremost among them, have since concluded that Murray's thesis does not hold up under scrutiny and that Wicca's God-and-Goddess theology is better understood as a genuinely modern synthesis, drawing on nineteenth and twentieth-century occultism, folklore studies, and literary romanticism, presented in the language of ancient survival.