The Triple Goddess

The triple moon is a Goddess symbol that represents the Maiden, Mother, and Crone as the waxing, full, and waning moon. It is also associated with feminine energy, mystery and psychic abilities. You often see this symbol on crowns or other head-pieces, particularly worn by High Priestesses.
The Maiden represents enchantment, inception, expansion, the female principle, the promise of new beginnings, youth, excitement, and a carefree erotic aura. The Maiden in Greek Mythology is Persephone - purity - and a representation of new beginnings. Other maiden goddesses include: Brigid, Nimue, among others.
The Mother represents ripeness, fertility, fulfillment, stability, and power. The Mother Goddess in Greek mythology is Demeter, representing wellspring of life, giving and compassionate. Other mother goddesses include: Aa, Ambika, Ceres, Astarte, Lakshmi.
The Crone represents wisdom, repose, and compassion. The Crone in Greek mythology is Hecate - wise, knowing, a culmination of a lifetime of experience. Crone goddesses include: Hel, Maman Brigitte, Oya, Sedna, Skuld, and others.

These aspects may also represent the cycle of birth, life and death (and rebirth). Neopagans believe that this goddess is the personification of all women everywhere.
Followers of the Wiccan, Dianic, and Neopagan religions, as well as some archeologists and mythographers, believe that long before the coming of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the Triple Goddess embodied the three-fold aspect of Gaia, the Earth Mother (Roman Magna Mater). A mother goddess was worshipped under a variety of names not only in the Ancient Near East and the Aegean and Anatolia, but also in pre-Islamic Arabia.
Neopagans also claim historical antecedent for their beliefs, holding that in Old Europe, in the Aegean world, and in the most ancient Near East, the Triple Goddess preceded the coming of nomadic speakers of Indo-European languages.
In South Arabia the moon-god Hubal was accompanied by the three goddesses: Uzza the youngest, Al-Lat "The Goddess" and Manat the Crone, the three cranes.
Wiccans often work with the Goddess in her triple form but may sometimes look at a particular goddess as Maiden, Mother and Crone even when there is no historical proof of this. An example of this would be the goddess Hecate, who was originally depicted as three maidens when in triplicate or as an old woman by herself in later times. Another example is the goddess Morrigan.
Another cross-cultural archetype is the three goddesses of Fate. In Greek Mythology they are the Moirai; in Norse mythology they are the Norns. The Weird Sisters of Shakespeare's Macbeth and Wyrd Sisters of Terry Pratchett's novel of the same name are believed to be inspired by these Fates. The three supernatural female figures called variously the Ladies, Mother of the Camenae, the Kindly Ones, and a number of other different names in The Sandman graphic novels by Neil Gaiman play self-consciously on both the triple Fates and the Maiden-Mother-Crone goddess archetypes.
http://www.crystalinks.com/triplegoddess.html

HEKATE

HEKATE (Hecate) was the goddess of magic, witchcraft, the night, moon, ghosts and necromancy. She was the only child of the Titanes Perses and Asteria from whom she received her power over heaven, earth, and sea.

Hekate assisted Demeter in her search for Persephone, guiding her through the night with flaming torches. After the mother-daughter reunion became she Persephone's minister and companion in Haides.

Three metamorphosis myths describe the origins of her animal familiars: the black she-dog and the polecat (a mustelid house pet kept by the ancients to hunt vermin). The dog was the Trojan Queen Hekabe (Hecuba) who leapt into the sea after the fall of Troy and was transformed by the goddess. The polecat was either the witch Gale, turned as punishment for her incontinence, or Galinthias, midwife of Alkmene (Alcmena), who was transformed by the enraged goddess Eileithyia but adopted by the sympathetic Hekate.

Hekate was usually depicted in Greek vase painting as a woman holding twin torches. Sometimes she was dressed in a knee-length maiden's skirt and hunting boots, much like Artemis. In statuary Hekate was often depicted in triple form as a goddess of crossroads.

Her name means "worker from afar" from the Greek word hekatos. The masculine form of the name, Hekatos, was a common epithet of the god Apollon.

Hekate was identified with a number of other goddesses including Artemis, Selene (the Moon), Despoine, the sea-goddess Krataeis (Crataeis), the goddess of the Taurian Khersonese in Skythia, the Kolkhian (Colchian) nymph Perseis, the heroine Iphigeneia, the Thracian goddesses Bendis and Kotys (Cotys), the Euboian nymph Maira (the Dog-Star), the Eleusinian nymph Daeira and the Boiotian nymph Herkyna (Hercyna).

http://www.theoi.com/Khthonios/Hekate.html

Famous Witches - Margaret Murray (1863 - 1963)

Margaret Alice Murray was a prominent British anthropologist and Egyptologist, well known in academic circles for scholarly contributions to Egyptology and the study of folklore. Although her reputation as a witchcraft historian is poor and she has been roundly criticized by contemporary historians (as well as by many Wiccans and Neopagans), her works became popular bestsellers from the 1940s onwards and were popularly believed to be accurate. Although her thesis of a highly organized universal Pagan cult existing throughout early modern Christian Europe (and particularly the idea of a pan-European, pre-Christian Paganreligion that revolved around the Horned God) remains largely discredited and rejected, her theories have significantly influenced the emergence of Wicca and reconstructionist Neopagan religions during the 20th Century.

She was born in Calcutta, India on 13 July 1863, and she attended the University College of London as a student of linguistics and anthropology. As a young woman, she was a pioneering campaigner for women's rights, and her scholarly interests and her willingness to pursue them against the barriers of the day were quite atypical for a Victorian woman, indicating considerable personal strength. She accompanied the renowned Egyptologist Sir William Flinders Petrie on several archaeological excavations in Egypt and Palestine during the late 1890s and was named Assistant Professor of Egyptology at the University College of London in 1924, a post she held until her retirement in 1935. She became a fellow of Britain's Royal Anthropological Institute in 1926, and was voted President of the Folklore Society in 1953 at the age of 90.

However, Murray's best known and most controversial legacy was her book, "The Witch-Cult in Western Europe", published in 1921 during a period in which she was unable to find field work in Egypt. It laid out the essential elements of her thesis that there was a common pattern of underground Pagan resistance to the Christian Church across Europe, and that the European witch-hunts and the associated trials had not been the result of superstitious delusion and social pressures, but were an attempt by the Roman Catholic (and later the nascent Protestant) churches to eliminate a rival sect. She also maintained that Pagan beliefs and religions dating from Neolithic times through to the medieval period secretly practised human sacrifice until exposed by the witch hunt around the middle of the 15th Century.

The book may well have been influenced by “La Sorcière” (published in English as “Satanism and Witchcraft”), an 1862 book by Jules Michelet, which, although largely inaccurate, was still notable for being one of the first sympathetic histories of witchcraft. According to Michelet, medieval witchcraft was an act of popular rebellion against the oppression of feudalism and the Roman Catholic Church, taking the form of a secret religion inspired by Paganism and fairy beliefs and organized in the main by women.

Margaret Murray's book "The God of the Witches" (first published 1933) (from http://weread.com/book/1595479813/ The+God+of+the+Witches/BOK-15059871-1)

Her "The God of the Witches" of 1931, clearly written for a more popular audience than standard academic works, expanded on her claims that the witch cult had worshipped a Horned God whose origins went back to prehistory, and claimed that reports of Satan during the witch trials of the Middle Ages actually represented Pagan gatherings, with their priest wearing a horned helmet to represent their Horned God.

In "The Divine King in England" of 1954, she expanded further on her earlier claims there was a secret conspiracy of Pagans among the English nobility, the same English nobility which provided the leading members of the Church. Her theories of secret conspiracies involving early English sovereigns and nobles, and her re-writing of the deaths of Thomas à Becket and Joan of Arc as Pagan martyrdom, however, have not been taken seriously as history even by her staunchest supporters.

Critical analysis of Murray's work, mainly published in obscure journals, often failed to influence the reception of her books, and she became popularly regarded as a leading expert on witchcraft, and many found her theories attractive for the stress laid on freedom for women, open sexuality and resistance to Church oppression. Her work strongly influenced Gerald Gardner and later Wiccan pioneers, and the use of terms, concepts and phrases like the “Old Religion”, “coven” (as well as the specification of a thirteen-member coven), “Esbat”, the “Wheel of the Year” and the “Horned God” are largely influenced by, or derived directly from, Murrayite theory.

It is generally agreed today that, although her work did much to alert attention to the previously concealed history of European religion, Murray's ideas (heavily influenced as they were by the ideas of the anthropologist Sir James Frazer in “The Golden Bough”, also largely discredited) extrapolated more than could be supported from her limited sources. Her questionable methodology, poor sourcing, selective quoting from the testimony of accused witches and subjective interpretation or manipulation of evidence in order to conform to her theories have been roundly criticized, and there have even been accusations of deliberate falsification of evidence.

Murray died on 13 November 1963 at the age of one hundred.

http://www.witchcraftandwitches.com/witches_murray.html