Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Deities

The Mother

Also Known As The Mother Aspect (English) · The Great Mother (English)
Wiccan Deities

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The Mother is the second of the three aspects through which most modern Wiccan and Goddess movement practice addresses the Goddess. She holds the full moon and everything at its height: fruitfulness, nurture, the fullness of summer, the point at which a thing is at its greatest strength. She is an aspect rather than a separate deity, and in Wiccan practice she is the one most often invoked at the Esbats, the full moon workings kept distinct from the eight seasonal festivals.

Facts
Function
Domain / Function
Motherhood 1Tradition: Wicca
Identity
Gender
Female 1
Sources
Textual NoteSourced to the subject's own account
Robert Graves's The White Goddess, a work of poetic scholarship rather than an ethnography of any living practice, is widely credited with shaping the specific imagery of the Mother aspect that later Wiccan writers adopted into the Triple Goddess framework. 3
Disputed
Origin Account
The Mother aspect draws on early twentieth century theories, associated with writers such as Jane Ellen Harrison, of a single Great Mother archetype uniting fertility goddesses worldwide, a picture later carried into Wiccan practice as the middle stage of the Triple Goddess. 2
This unifying reading has been substantially revised by later scholarship. Ronald Hutton and other historians of modern Paganism find no continuous, unbroken cult linking scattered prehistoric female figurines and separate historical goddess figures to twentieth century Wiccan practice, and argue instead that the Mother aspect is a genuine but modern synthesis rather than the survival of one ancient worldwide religion. The atlas records the aspect and the debate over its ancestry, not the disputed continuity as settled fact.
History
Historical NoteSourced to the subject's own account
Modern Wiccan and neopagan tradition names the Mother as the second aspect of the Triple Goddess, associated with the full moon, summer and fulfillment, following the Maiden and preceding the Crone in the yearly cycle. 3
Status
Standing as a Comparative Category
Largely abandoned as a comparative category 2
The threefold scheme in its popular modern shape derives from Robert Graves, The White Goddess (1948), and its adoption into Wicca is traced as a twentieth century event by Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon (1999). A modern formulation. Ancient goddess triads existed; this threefold lunar arrangement is not attested among them.
Cult
Attributes and Iconography
The full moon, a plain disc 1Tradition: Wicca
Worship and Practice
Invoked at the Esbats, the full moon workings kept distinct from the eight seasonal festivals 1Tradition: Wicca
Observance
Observance Note
In some modern pagan Lughnasadh rites, the Mother is symbolically honored through a corn dolly woven from the last sheaf of the grain harvest, a folk custom borrowed from older British harvest traditions and reinterpreted within Wiccan seasonal practice as an image of the Goddess in her fullness. 1
Attributions
Mythic Association
Some traditions place the Mother's own season at Lughnasadh and the harvest festivals of high summer, when the Goddess is held to be at her most fruitful, just before her long turn toward the Crone begins. 2
Belief
Theology
Duotheistic: a divine pair 2
Attestation
Era of Attestation
Mid twentieth century - present 2
Veneration Today
Actively venerated in a living tradition 2Tradition: Wicca
Historicity
Not a historical person: a divine or other-than-human being 2
Origins
Origin of the NameSourced to the subject's own account
Robert Graves's 1948 book The White Goddess, a work of poetic and often disputed scholarship rather than academic anthropology, was highly influential in popularising the modern triple goddess framework of Maiden, Mother and Crone that later Wiccan and Goddess movement writers went on to adopt and develop further. 3
Position Profile
Key Text
The Mother aspect of the modern Triple Goddess corresponds to the full moon and represents fertility, nurture and the height of a woman's generative power, and Wiccan liturgy commonly places her at the center of the harvest festival of Lughnasadh, when the earth's abundance is understood as her direct gift. 1
Learn More
The Full Moon and the Esbat

Of the three aspects the Mother is the one with the clearest place in the ritual calendar, because the full moon is the fixed point around which Wiccan working is organised. The Esbats, the full moon meetings, are distinct from the eight seasonal sabbats, and they are the ordinary business of a coven in a way the sabbats are not. The Goddess addressed at an Esbat is the Goddess at her fullest, and that is the Mother.

The attributes attached to her are fruitfulness, protection and abundance, and in practice she is also the aspect associated with responsibility: the phase at which something has been brought into being and now has to be maintained. Widely read Wiccan authors are careful to say that motherhood in this scheme is not restricted to women who have borne children, and treat it as a posture of care and creative fullness available to any practitioner.

The best known rite involving her is Drawing Down the Moon, in which the High Priestess is understood to become a vessel for the Goddess during the working. Practice around it varies a great deal between traditions, from an invocation performed by a trained priestess alone to a working the whole circle supports, and the reported intensity ranges from a mild sense of inspiration to something closer to possession. The specific wording used is each coven's own and much of it is either oath bound or in copyright, so the atlas records the structure of the rite and not its text.

One Goddess in Three, and Where That Came From

Wiccan theology as it is normally set out holds that there is one Goddess and that the three aspects are ways of approaching her rather than three beings. That is why the Mother can be addressed at a full moon in one month and the Crone at a waning moon in the next without any suggestion that a different deity is being invoked. The scheme's coherence is the reason it spread so widely, and its history is documented rather than mythical.

Robert Graves set out a goddess in three persons tied to the lunar phases in The White Goddess in 1948, drawing on a wide and highly selective reading of unrelated mythologies. Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente put the Goddess at the centre of Wiccan liturgy through the 1950s, and Starhawk's The Spiral Dance of 1979 carried the Maiden, Mother and Crone framing to a much larger audience and shaped the feminist leaning strand of the tradition. Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon, published in 1999, is the standard history of that sequence, and it treats the scheme as a twentieth century construction rather than a survival from an older religion.

Ancient religions did have goddess triads, and some goddesses were addressed with three faces or three names. What they did not have, on the surviving evidence, is this particular arrangement of Maiden, Mother and Crone matched to the waxing, full and waning moon. Modern Wiccans who know that history generally keep using the aspects anyway, on the grounds that a ritual category does not need to be ancient to work.

Correspondences & Relations

Pantheons

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

This source names The Mother directly: "domestic violence prevention law and the Mother See of Etchmiadzin's reaction, quoting the church that the traditional understanding of family cannot be a subject of bargaining for the nation, and..."

This source names The Mother directly: "House of Worship on Kikaaya Hill, the Mother Temple of Africa and the continent's first Baha'i House of Worship; not the right source for a claim about the faith's wider spread across Africa beyond..."

Source Baha'i Faith In Uganda (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Balkh, Cities

This source names The Mother directly: "was traditionally called Umm al-Bilad, the Mother of Cities, in Islamic-era Arabic sources for its antiquity and importance."

Source A History of ZoroastrianismMary Boyce
Barbelo, Emanations

This source names The Mother directly: "image or self-reflection, called the Mother-Father because she contains both begetting principles, and the Thrice-Male on account of the three powers, will, thought and foreknowledge, the text..."

Source The Nag Hammadi Library in EnglishJames M. Robinson (general editor)

This source names The Mother directly: "The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church), realizing Mary Baker Eddy's vision of a place where those relying on Christian Science for healing could find care."

Gaia, Figures

This source names The Mother directly: "oracle at Delphi before Apollo, and as the mother, by Uranos's spilled blood, of the Giants and the Erinyes."

Source TheogonyHesiod

This source names The Mother directly: "in Cao Dai cosmology, alongside the Mother Buddha and her retinue of fairies."

Source Cao Dai
Manichaean, Pantheons

This source names The Mother directly: "of emanated evocations, among them the Mother of Life, Primal Man, the Living Spirit and the Third Messenger, to contain the assault and begin separating the light that became mixed with darkness."

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

This source names The Mother directly: "This is Mary Baker Eddy's Manual of The Mother Church, first published in 1895, the governing document of the Church of Christ, Scientist, setting out its bylaws including the provisions..."

Source Manual of The Mother ChurchMary Baker Eddy

This source names The Mother directly: "The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church), written by founder Mary Baker Eddy, whose Article VIII, Section 13 sets a per capita tax of not less than one dollar payable annually by..."

This source names The Mother directly: "and, in the standard account, is the mother of the nine Muses by Zeus."

Nut, Figures

This source names The Mother directly: "forbidden becomes, every single day, the mother the sun itself is born from."

Source Moralia, Volume V: Isis and Osiris (De Iside et Osiride)Plutarch; Frank Cole Babbitt (translator)

This source names The Mother directly: "Related to the Viet Beliefs in the Mother Goddesses of Three Realms names the Phu Day Festival specifically as a major gathering, when communities travel to the temples for ceremonial worship of..."

Source Practices Related to the Viet Beliefs in the Mother Goddesses of Three Realms, UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of HumanityUNESCO Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage
Pochayiv, Cities

This source names The Mother directly: "thirteenth century, where a vision of the Mother of God appearing in a pillar of fire left an impression resembling a footprint in the rock, from which a spring is said to flow; the footprint and..."

Source The Orthodox ChurchTimothy Ware (Kallistos Ware)

This source names The Mother directly: "Related to the Viet Beliefs in the Mother Goddesses of Three Realms, one entry in the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, the same continuously maintained official..."

Source Practices Related to the Viet Beliefs in the Mother Goddesses of Three Realms, UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of HumanityUNESCO Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage

This source names The Mother directly: "in Punjab before its unification, and the mother-in-law of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, whose rise to power she actively engineered by allying the Kanhaiya cavalry with his own Sukerchakia forces."

This source names The Mother directly: "A statement on the official site of the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin, the central see of the Armenian Apostolic Church, dated 9 April 2024, from its Legal Advisory Committee, opposing proposed..."

This source names The Mother directly: "out his archetype concept, treating the mother, the child, the trickster and the wise old man as recurring patterns of the collective unconscious as Jung himself defined it, part of the Bollingen..."

This source names The Mother directly: "building programme that had begun with the Mother Temple of Africa already on this atlas's map, and it opened to the public the following week."

Source Santiago Baha'i Temple (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names The Mother directly: "recorded here, and seven years before the Mother Temple of Africa opened in Uganda in 1951, also recorded here."

Source Shoghi Effendi, "God Passes By" (1944)Shoghi Effendi

This source names The Mother directly: "in 1958, and the completed building, the Mother Temple of Africa and the continent's first Baha'i House of Worship, was dedicated on 14 January 1961 with a public inaugural service the following..."

Source Baha'i Faith In Uganda (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names The Mother directly: "Twelve years after the Mother Temple of Africa opened in Uganda in 1951, already recorded here, and sixteen years before the Iranian Revolution triggered systematic persecution of Baha'is in 1979..."

Theia, Figures

This source names The Mother directly: "The Homeric Hymn to Helios opens by naming Theia directly as the mother of this pre-eminent god, calling him a great god born of Hyperion and Euryphaessa, the same double name Hesiod gives her, so..."

Source TheogonyHesiod

This source names The Mother directly: "of the Catholicos of All Armenians and the Mother See of the Armenian Apostolic Church, making it the spiritual center of the worldwide Armenian Church in roughly the way Rome functions for Roman..."

Source The Armenian People From Ancient to Modern TimesRichard G. Hovannisian (ed.)

Member Of

The second of the three aspects, held to be one Goddess and not three.

Related To

The teaching that sets out the threefold form.

Worshipped In

Sources
1. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess
Starhawk, Harper and Row, 1979cited for the aspect as it is used in Goddess centred practiceView the Source
2. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft
Ronald Hutton, Oxford University Press, 1999cited for the history of the threefold scheme and for coven practice around Drawing Down the MoonView the Source
3. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth
Robert Graves, Faber and Faber, 1948cited as the literary source of the popular threefold formView the Source
Witchcraft Today
Gerald Gardner, Rider and Company, 1954cited for the early public presentation of Wiccan Goddess worship
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