The Maiden

In the threefold scheme the Maiden holds the waxing moon, the fortnight between new and full, and everything that phase is taken to stand for: beginnings, growth, the energy of a project that has not yet met its difficulties. In practical coven work that gives her a fairly specific use. Workings undertaken to start something, to increase something, or to gather momentum are conventionally timed to the waxing moon and addressed to her, and the seasonal festivals of early spring are the ones most often given her name in the ritual calendars that circulate in print.

The qualities attached to her are independence and self-possession rather than innocence, and practitioners are generally careful about that distinction. Popular summaries outside the tradition tend to read Maiden as virgin in the modern sense; inside it, the older sense of a woman who belongs to herself is the one usually intended, and several widely read Wiccan authors say so explicitly.

She is not a separate goddess with a separate cult. Wiccan theology as it is normally set out holds that there is one Goddess and that the three aspects are ways of approaching her, so a ritual may address the Maiden without implying that a different being is being invoked from the one addressed as Mother a month later. Named goddesses out of Greek, Irish or Welsh mythology are frequently attached to the aspect as examples, and which names are used varies considerably between traditions and between authors.

The threefold Goddess is a modern formulation and the honest version of its history is short and well documented. Robert Graves set out the scheme of a goddess in three persons, tied to the phases of the moon, in The White Goddess in 1948. That book is a work of poetic argument and idiosyncratic mythography rather than historical scholarship, and it assembles its case from a wide and highly selective reading of unrelated mythologies. Gerald Gardner and, more decisively, Doreen Valiente placed the Goddess at the centre of Wiccan liturgy through the 1950s, and later Goddess centred writers, Starhawk's The Spiral Dance of 1979 above all, developed the Maiden, Mother and Crone framing into the form now in general use.

Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon, published in 1999, is the standard history of that reception, and it traces the adoption of the scheme as a twentieth century event rather than a survival. No single ancient religion is known to have held a goddess in this particular threefold form. Individual triads of goddesses certainly existed, and so did goddesses with three names or three faces, but the specific Maiden, Mother and Crone arrangement matched to lunar phase is not one of them.

Saying so is not a criticism of the practice. A tradition can be recent and still be a religion, and Wiccans who know the history continue to use the aspects because they work as ritual and psychological categories. What the atlas will not do is repeat the older claim that the scheme is ancient, because the evidence does not support it.