Book of Shadows

Triple Goddesses

Triple Goddesses are an interesting concept. The Triple Goddess represents the three stages of a woman's life: The Maiden, represented by the waxing moon, the Mother, represented by the full moon, and the Crone, represented by the waning moon. The Maiden is portrayed as innocent and wild, in the same way an untouched wilderness is. The Mother is a mature woman representing fertility and nurturing, like the Earth, so she is often associated with agriculture. The Crone is an old woman who has gathered wisdom throughout her life.

Technically, the Triple Goddess is Celtic, and Celtic only. Brigid and Morrigan are both true Triple Goddesses, in that they are both single goddesses that can be split into these three aspects. However, Wiccans in particular will sometimes go out of their way to apply the Triple concept to every pantheon and every goddess. Sometimes this works, as in the case of Artemis, Selene, and Hecate. (Hecate alone is often considered a triple goddess because she was usually portrayed with three heads, but that's because she represented the crossroads.) It's sometimes easy to give a goddess a Triple designation, but I'd warn against trying to shoehorn every goddess into it. Calling Kali a Crone ignores the actual character of this goddess within her own culture!

The Triple Goddess is still an interesting and useful concept. TV Tropes describes it here: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheHecateSisters

(There is a complimentary male triad. Usually, Son, Lover, Sage, but sometimes Son, Father, Sage or Son, Warrior, Sage. It symbolically represents the stages of a man's life the same way the Triple is used to represent the stages of a woman's life. However, it is not as often used as a deity, since in Wicca the male counterpart to the Triple Goddess is the Horned God, another archetype loosely adapted from Celtic mythology.)