Our Lady of the Moon,
enchantment’s queen,
And of midnight the potent sorceress,
O Goddess from the darkest deep of time,
Diana, Isis, Tanith, Artemis,
Your power we invoke to aid us here!
- Doreen Valiente
Hear me, Lord of the
Stars,
For thee I have worshipped ever
With stains and sorrows and scars,
With joyful, joyful endeavour.
Hear me, O lily-white goat
Crisp as a thicket of thorns,
With a collar of gold for thy throat,
A scarlet bow for thy horns.
- Aleister Crowley
The Gods of Witchcraft are a pair, a dual deity, a
Goddess and Her consort the God. Like the Chinese symbol of Yin and Yang, the
Goddess and God of Witchcraft are complementary and inseparable, two sides of
the one coin. This holy pair are often symbolised by such natural phenomenon as
the Moon and Sun, the Earth and Sky or the human female and a mythical
goat-footed male. In many modern Witchcraft traditions, the Goddess is
envisaged as ‘ruling’ the Summer months of the year from the Vernal (Spring)
Equinox to the Autumnal Equinox while the God rules the Winter part of the year
from the Autumnal Equinox to the Vernal Equinox. This assigned rulership gives
us an indication of which Zodiac signs are attributed to the God and Goddess.
Being a shapeshifter the God/dess can manifest through each of the twelve
Zodiac signs, however the two Solstice points of Cancer and Capricorn are their
specific celestial thrones. Astrologically speaking then, the Goddess is
signified by the sign of Cancer and the God by Capricorn.
Cancer, symbolised by the crab and ruled by the Moon,
is the sign in which the Sun enters at the Northern Solstice point (being
Summer in the Northern Hemisphere and Winter in the Southern Hemisphere).
Solstice literally means "Sun stands still", the Sun reaches its most
Northern or Southern declination at the Solstices which occur around the 21st
of June and the 21st of December each year. The Tropic of Cancer, a line of
latitude on Earth which marks the Northern Solstice point, is found at the
latitude of 23.5 degrees North and runs through places such as Calcutta, Cuba,
Hong Kong and Taiwan. The Tropic of Capricorn, which marks the Southern
Solstice, point is found at the Latitude of 23.5 degrees South and runs through
Australia at Alice Springs and Rockhampton.
The Zodiac sign Cancer is the least visible of the
constellations and has been called by the ancients the "Power of
Darkness." Cancer is the sign of the gentle darkness of the sea, the womb
and the night. In the Horoscope, Cancer rules the 4th House which is the domain
of family, the mother, home life and the past. In Witchcraft, Cancer and the
4th House signify the nurturing domain of the Coven. Its symbol has most often
been a hard-shelled creature: a tortoise, scarab, crab and crayfish. Ancient
Astrologers saw Cancer as the gate through which souls came from the sky to
incarnate on Earth. The boat or Ark is an alternative symbol for Cancer. In
many different cultures, the boat represented the womb that carried the child
passenger as well as the vulva through which the baby passes into life, for the
vaginal opening has the shape of a boat. Cancer is the Cardinal sign of Water,
Cardinal signs being "beginnings" or "first impulse"; another
reference to birth-giving with the amniotic fluid signalling the onset of
birth. Because of the long connections of this sign with birth and fertility
and its rulership by the Moon, Cancer has been associated with the Great
Goddess as Mother. The writer and poet Robert Graves describes how one of the
myths of Hercules emerged from an age of struggle between patriarchal and
Goddess-worshipping cultures. In Hercules’ fight with the Hydra (which Graves
sees as representing the Goddess religion) the crab fought on the side of the
Goddess, pinching Hercules on the foot. For this service the Goddess placed the
crab in the heavens as a constellation.
Cancer’s polar opposite on the wheel of the Zodiac is
Capricorn, the Cardinal Earth sign, which is symbolised by a goat and is ruled
by Saturn. In the Horoscope, Capricorn rules the 10th House, the area that is
concerned with career, ambition, the father and the world outside the home. The
constellation of Capricorn was identified by the Babylonians who saw it as a
fish-goat who has a goat’s head and front legs and a fish’s tail. This image
was associated with their God, Ea, "the Antelope of the subterranean
ocean" and myths tell of the hero who appears out of the waters of Ea and
brings the arts of civilisation to the shore: agriculture, astronomy,
mathematics, reading and writing, architecture and medicine. The goat has long
been regarded as holy, in Greek myth Zeus placed the she-goat Amalthea in the
heavens as a reward for suckling him as an infant, European legends tell of a
love Goddess who appeared to her beloved clad in a net and riding upon a goat.
Goats were sacred to the Welsh Goddess Blodeuwedd and the Middle Eastern
bearded Goddess Mylitta also appeared naked and riding upon a goat. The Greeks
represented Pan, the great God of the wild and untamed places, as having the
legs and horns of a goat. In one story he is turned into a fish-goat like the
Babylonian Ea. Pan survived in medieval Europe as the goat-footed God of the
Witches and the consort of their Goddess. The church fathers turned the figure
of Pan into the devil and the cloven hoof, once the sign of the Goddess’s lover
was regarded as evil.
Thus the Goddess traditionally rules the Summer from
Her throne in the constellation of Cancer, which is the Zodiac sign of the
Northern Hemisphere Summer. She is the bearer of the Grail of amniotic waters,
who holds the world floating in Her womb. She faces the God across the Zodiac
who rules the Northern Hemisphere Winter, enthroned upon the constellation of
Capricorn, reposing at the zenith of the Zodiac while the goat leaps upon the
summits of the Earth. Astrology evolved in the Northern Hemisphere, as did
European Paganism. In Australia the Zodiac signs of Summer and Winter are
reversed; the Sun is in Cancer in Winter and Capricorn in Summer but the
Zodiacal symbolism is still valid as symbolism, even though the signs are
reversed.
