Wicca is a nature-based, pagan religion. Now, that doesn’t mean that Wiccans worship nature like a 1960s stereotype, although some do follow a more natural path than others. Wicca is beautiful in the fact that our view of deities can differ.
Most Wiccans believe that energy flows through all aspects of like. Every object has energy. Even inanimate objects have some energy whether they carry energy from what made them, like wood from a tree, or whether they gather energy from things around them, like someone’s favorite chair they sat in for 50 years that now rocks from time to time when no one is around.
Finding deities in nature
As we search back through ancient religions and cultures, we can see two themes. We have gods that were almost like immortalized men, and we have humans worshiping natural phenomenons that they were yet to understand. These early humans worshiped nature and they understood how nature connects with our lives, and they were in awe of it. They saw the sun warm the earth and make it possible for life.
They said the sun faded and took the warmth and life giving rays away. Furthermore, they talked about the moon and how it controlled the tides and how it became part of a woman’s menstrual cycle. These became our first Lord and Lady. The Sun God by day and the Moon Goddess by night. Even looking back at our Neanderthal ancestors, we can see they saw a connection to something greater, and they also saw death not as an end, but as the beginning of a new cycle.
It was at this point that religion began to take a face. As humans still didn’t know what these inner feelings were, they could only assume that this spirit realm was more than just good crops or a celestial body. This spirit used nature to communicate. So this spirit must have a name, a face, a personality just like us.
Humans began to see the different emotions, the different “seasons” of nature, and they gave them all different names and faces. However, all of these different personalities are just like humans' cycle through emotions, it is all part of the same energy, life-force, universe.
This ever exchanging give and take, flow of energy is represented by our Lord and Lady, the God and Goddess, the Ying and Yang that control the universe. The Lord and Lady are in and part of everything. They are one. The best way to think of the Lord and Lady is most like the Ying-Yang. They are one yet two, the masculine and the feminine, the light and the dark, the Sun and the Moon.
We believe that because they are the infinite all that makes up our universe, that all deities are essential one. A tree is a tree. It may have different names in different cultures or languages, but we are all talking about the same object.
Most Wiccans start with the basic idea of the Lord and Lady. Later, as you follow the path, you will most likely have a calling to a particular deity. However, some Wiccans continue to view the Lord and Lady as a whole without following a particular pantheon. Every Wiccan must find his or her own path and calling. We are all children of the Lord and Lady, but how they call to us is their choice.