"As above, so below. As within, so without." This basic Law in all of its various forms is one of the fundamental building blocks of spirituality and magickal practice. It reminds us that all things are interconnected, speaks of magickal correspondences, and gives us what may be our most powerful tool for personal growth with the Craft: a mirror of ourselves within the story of the Goddess and the God.

Mythology has often been looked upon as a representation of the human growth process. In most pantheistic traditions, the deities cry and laugh, fall in love and hate, and generally live lives that our very similar to our own in most aspects of personal growth. Wicca does not name a specific Goddess or God to represent the divine, but refers to the Goddess in her threefold splendor and the God by his dualistic Oak King/Holly King persona. Within both of these forms, we find an ideal and a template with which we can direct our personal growth and the patterns of our lives.

The triumvirate Goddess embraces each phase of our life, from early childhood until extreme old age. To us, she is maiden, mother and crone, three phases of life in one persona, containing the entire essence of the human experience. All at once, she embraces the youthful exuberance of maidenhood, the nurturing maturity of motherhood, and the wisdom and worldview of the crone. Not only does she symbolize the stages of our life, but she is representative of the phases of our Craft life.

Many of us come to Wicca with a youthful exuberance, much like that of the maiden. Although we are inexperienced in Craft-life, everything is new and exciting, and our eagerness to learn and grow is contagious to those around us. In the maiden phases of the Craft, our focus doesn't necessarily have to be focused on discovering all of the hidden wisdom of the Craft, nor do we need to feel pressured to lock into one specific path or hurry to become initiated. As maidens, it is our time to grow and learn, to play and rejoice in the freedom of being new to magick and mystery. Just as we made mistakes growing up, we will make them as new Wiccans. Some will be embarrassing tales we'll laugh over with our friends one-day. Others may be painful. But from each, we will learn and grow, maturing as we stay true to our hearts and explore the Craft.

Soon, we will grow and mature and enter the mother phase of Wicca. Those just entering the maiden stage of the Craft will look to us for guidance and wisdom. Just like a nurturing parent, we will help them take their first steps. As our vision begins to grow, so our view of another "parent" begins to slowly change. Mother Earth, who, when we were a maiden, filled us with all the awe that a young child feels toward their parent, begins to become more familiar to us, more of an equal. No longer do we just know that all life is intimately connected; we begin to understand and feel it. Many of us begin to live a green lifestyle: recycling, planting herbs, cutting down on meat or eliminating it from our lives entirely. Others feel the "parenting urge" and allow younger witches to gather around them, forming a family, a coven or circle, and we begin to teach and help raise another generation in the Craft.

Although we may always retain the awe and exuberance of the maiden, though we will continue to be the loving nurturer of the mother, we still continue to grow. As we keep studying and learning on our own path, staying one step ahead of the maidens we are teaching and who are so eager to learn, we begin to realize that we have to refer to books and other resources less and less to answer their questions. We have stumbled and learned from our mistakes, the seeds of wisdom, and have slowly begun to embrace the crone.

It is said that a shaman is a unique, living library of wisdom and magickal knowledge. The same is true of the crone. There is no greater resource than one who has truly lived through each aspect of the Goddess. Their path may not quite be our own, but their wisdom is universal, and often they have seen the problems we face through many viewpoints, on many occasions.

The Goddess may give us the road-map to our Craft life, but it is the God who reminds us of balance. Just as we cannot truly embrace the Craft only through the femininity of the Goddess and dispose of the masculinity of the God, he reminds us that we contain a great duality even within ourselves. In his dual Oak King/Holly King persona, he is light and shadow, life and death, the God of both the waxing and waning year. Should we try to embrace only light, we would disregard our shadow. Though their is undeniable power in love and a kind word, there is also vibrant strength in anger. One is water, finding the path of least resistance, upsetting as little as possible to reach its goal; the other is raw dynamic power.

We are made of both, light and dark, but as witches we are challenged to balance both. Though we have the right to be angry, we must remember the Wiccan Rede and "harm none," not even ourselves. Our right to experience anger does not empower us to lash out at others. It is a tool, much like fire, that can burn us and others if not tended. But we need that fire. The God teaches us that.

The Wiccan Rede goes on to remind us that each of our actions and intents will return to us three times more potent that it originated. This isn't a goad to do good or a threat in case we're bad. Once again it is a tool by which we can grow. As we show love to those around us, it comes back to us threefold. Experiencing this multiplied love, our own capacity to experience love grows and we become more loving people. Many of us think of life here on this planet as "Earth School." If our actions only came back to us in the same extent we performed them, our lives would become stagnate and we'd never learn. There would be no change. But the threefold law promises that we will grow, not according to some great cosmic plan, but by our own choices, by our own hand.

The Wiccan Rede also encourages us to "merry meet and merry part and merry meet again." We are all part of the same magickal family, growing with the same guidelines, with the Goddess and the God as our inspiration. Even as we are interconnected with all life, we have an even closer bond with our fellow Wiccans, sharing similar experiences and a similar outlook on life. Many of us use the blessing "by the Lady, blessed be" or simply, "blessed be," when we meet or part. It is part of a longer blessing, either with five or seven points, blessing the various parts of our bodies and linking them with the Goddess and the God. Although the deities provide us with guidance in our magickal growth, we are encouraged to remember that each or us is blessed and sacred, and that each of us has great worth, not because of something we do, but simply because of who we are.

Just as the Sabbats tell us the story of the Goddess and the God as they dance around the Wheel of the Year, sharing the world as a whole, so our lives are shared by our masculine and feminine sides. In the Craft, we find the tools we need to flourish. The Goddess shows how to grow, giving us a role model to follow in our magickal growth. The God teaches us to live in balance and not to be ashamed of who we are, for each of us embodies both darkness and light, and both are powerful and necessary parts of us. And the Wiccan Rede reminds us to "harm none," to remember the "threefold law," and remember that we are blessed and as sacred as the deities themselves.
by Graelan Wintertide
Summer Solstice 1997
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