The Wheel of Virtue: Meditations on Mapping the Wiccan qualities onto the wheel of the year.

Two years ago I gave a talk at the 2017 AWC outlining a new interpretation of the Wheel of the Year. The premise was to regard the progression of the Sabbats as the stages of a project. In the course of this I provided a few correspondences for each sabbat to show how various elements of the craft fit in with this idea. One set of correspondences I gave are not usually given to the sabbat wheel, but they did seem to me to fit it quite well. This was the association of the qualities listed in the Charge of the Goddess. The relevant portion of the Charge reads as follows:

“Let my worship be within the heart that rejoiceth, for behold: all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals. And therefore let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honour and humility, mirth and reverence within you.”

The qualities are assigned as follows:

Samhain – Strength

Yule – Compassion

Imbolc – Humility

Ostara – Mirth

Beltain – Beauty

Litha – Power

Lammas – Honour

Mabon – Reverence

It is notable that the qualities are expressed in the charge in complementary pairs, and that the natural assignment to the sabbats put each pair of complements at the opposite sides of the cycle. Now we’ll go through the justification for each correspondence.



Samhain (Strength).

 Samhain is a working which addresses people and things which have gone before us and passed away. It focuses on death and the impact of death on our lives. It also points to a foundational mystery of the craft as embodied in the legend of the Descent of the Goddess, in which the Goddess descends to the underworld to challenge Death, who overwhelms all things in the end, and therefore is seen as the strongest of all things. The assignment of Strength to Samhain is made on this basis. There is nothing stronger in the universe than the tendency of all things in the direction of entropy.

Yule (Compassion).

Yule is the midwinter sabbat, and as such shares many of the features of the celebration of Christmas. Being at the darkest point of the year, it celebrates the end of the decline and the beginning of the renewal of the light. In Christianity this is symbolic of the birth of the Saviour into the world. In the Craft, it is symbolic of the return of the Sun and the renewed hope for life on Earth. In both cases it is perceived as an act of divine generosity, and therefore of compassion. This is the basis of the assignment of the Quality of Compassion to Yule.



Imbolc (Humility).

Imbolc is celebrated at the start of the last month of winter. Its title means ‘in the belly’, referring to the gestation of the God. The embryonic God is developing within the Womb of Night. The sabbat is said to mark the descent of spirit into matter, or perhaps to put it in more modern terms, the embryonic consciousness of the God begins to stir, ever so modestly. Being embryonic, the God has no preconceived notions, but is subject to the influences of that which is prior to his being. He has no basis as yet to make judgements and decide on courses of action. To do so would lead to error and disaster. It is essential that He keeps himself completely open to what is going on. The Quality appropriate to His condition at this stage is Humility, particularly intellectual humility.



Ostara (Mirth).

Ostara is celebrated at the spring equinox. In the tradition I follow, it is symbolic of the birth of the God (logically enough, following Imbolc). The time of day symbolic of the sabbat is dawn. The Sun rises in its glory, and the world is revealed to the light of consciousness and the eyes of all creatures. That which lies before us is shown clearly, and we may begin to formulate our own thoughts and plans concerning what has been revealed. With the light of revelation comes joy of perceiving and knowing, and the Quality embodied by the sabbat in the delight of the infant Deity is Mirth.



Beltain (Beauty).

Beltain is celebrated at the beginning of the final month of spring and is symbolised by the midmorning Sun. It is a celebration of the core of the act of creation and its manifestation in human life in the act of sexual reproduction. The young god unites with the goddess in ecstatic union and the Earth is thereby made fertile, All nature bursts with new life.



There are deeper significances to this process. Beltain is a celebration of love inspired by beauty to bring forth the good, and this occurs on many levels. To understand how deep this process goes, we can examine the ‘ladder of love’ as explained by Socrates’ speech in Plato’s dialogue ‘The Symposium’. Socrates recounts a conversation with the priestess Diotima of Mantinea. In it, Socrates learns that love is the need for beauty, and that beauty is experienced by people in an ascending hierarchy of virtue, starting with the desire of physical beauty and expanding to include ever more abstract notions. It goes from appreciation of physical beauty in people to appreciation of spiritual beauty in people, then to appreciation of the beauty of morals and art, then to appreciation of the beauty of truth and wisdom, and finally to an apprehension and appreciation of pure archetypal beauty in and of itself. Along the way we learn that every desire for the good is love, that love is the desire for the perpetual possession of what is good and that the object of love is both beauty and the procreation of beauty. Understanding this, it becomes easy to slot our interpretation of the wheel into an expanded concept of Beltain, insofar as we are honouring a creative process whereby we seek the good.

It will not have escaped people’s attention that the term ‘Beauty’ is thrown about a lot in that description. The assignment of the Quality of Beauty to Beltain is probably more certain than for any other sabbat.





Litha (Power).

Litha is celebrated at the summer solstice and is symbolised by the Sun at midday. The god is at the height of his power, fully enthroned as ruler of the world, the divine god-king, warrior and lawgiver, protector and defender of His realm and all who look to him, consort of the goddess. He has married his beloved and is fully established as the ruling power, fully conscious and capable in His control. Life is at its peak. The creative phase of life has been achieved and fulfilled. The god is now dedicated to managing His creation. There could not be a better sabbat to embody the Quality of Power.



Lammas (Honour).

Lammas is celebrated early in the final month of summer, when the warmth of summer is at its height. The Sun at mid-afternoon is the symbol for this sabbat. The king has ruled since summer solstice, the warmth of the year and of the day is at its peak and is set to decline from here on. The impulse which started His journey has reached its fulfilment and now faces its conclusion, for Lammas is the sabbat of the sacrificed god.

The God has attained to Power, and now, to continue the cycle, that Power must be renounced. Ultimately there can be no perpetual power for any entity, because wielding that power to affect the world changes the basis upon which that power rests. Choice is granted, however, in the manner of renunciation. Does the God cling on to His high office after all has turned toxic and decadent until the very world itself crumbles in his grip, or does he wisely accept fate at the appropriate time? To do so requires a degree of willingness to sacrifice for the good of those in whose name power has been taken. The Quality associated with this sabbat is therefore very properly Honour.



Autumn Equinox (Reverence).

The Autumn sabbat is celebrated at the autumnal equinox and is symbolised by the setting sun. This is a ceremony of remembrance and a celebration of the end results and consequences of the life of the god. Traditionally it honours the results of the harvest, and it is the same in modern times. The god has performed His work. We now partake of the fruits of those labours. It is, in a certain sense, the fulfilment of the whole round. It is the final stage of the process, the end-result to which we have been working.

The energy of Autumn is the energy of crystallised results. It is the energy of ultimate, actualised consequences to actions, grounded in reality and established in the realm of time, beyond possibility of change. The choices we make in the early part of the round are critical to where we end up, and working the round as an exercise in empty form will not save anyone from their poor choice of content. The sabbat is a celebration of the ends toward which the God has led us, and it is appropriate that the Quality being expressed is that of Reverence.





We are used to thinking about the wheel as a cyclic progression in time, which of course it is, but when applying the Qualities to the wheel, there is the implication of another model for it. In the Western ceremonial tradition, the Cabala envisions the Sephiroth of the Tree of Life emerging as ‘emanations’. Using the Qualities as the bedrock of the wheel can give us a similar perspective. How would that work?


The Greater Sabbats:

The Axis of Compulsion:

The most fundamental sabbats from which the others derive are Samhain and Beltain. Strength and Beauty. Death and sex. Before anything else in the universe, these two factors dance their dance and generate the myriad forms of existence. The arrow of entropy flies ever on into the future. While it does, the infinite potentialities of the cosmos are whittled down until an infinitesimal amount of them are actualised. Beauty is fitness to purpose, and Death culls that which does not fit the purpose. Because the characteristics of Beauty are determined by function, they are objectively set by the nature of the universe. We can respond to the experience of Beauty in different ways, but what we find beautiful is not subject to our volition. It is rather an objective external compulsion, no more subject to our choice than the arrow of entropy. These two Qualities are the fundamental factors of evolution.


Strength and Beauty, the primary complementary pair of Qualities, form the primordial axis of the Wheel. There is no choice as to their action. No manifested entity can escape dealing with them. They are fundamental to the origin, operation and fate of all manifested entities. I therefore label this pairing the Axis of Compulsion. This axis forms the basic challenge which the universe throws down to all manifested existence. To survive, to flourish, to reproduce, to exist in the first place, these must be dealt with.



The Axis of Volition:

As was said previously, the Axis of Compulsion throws down the basic challenge of existence. The Axis of Volition frames our response to that challenge. The sabbats on the volitional axis are Imbolc and Lammas, and the qualities embodied therein are Humility and Honour respectively. In both cases, the primary choice is to embrace acceptance and renunciation, which might make the lessons of this axis seem decidedly Christian. This should not be a deal breaker. Christianity does have valid lessons to teach the world, and they are not abrogated by its less useful features.



Imbolc represents the God in His embryonic stage. At this point, He has no basis for assessment of the world and is entirely dependent on and defined by the external influences acting on Him. The lesson we should draw from Imbolc is scientific detachment from our own prejudices and desires and an open-minded willingness to look at things anew with an active transcendence of our own biases and tendencies. Of course, humans cannot really escape their own nature and character with absolute success. The best we can manage is to downplay or ignore our known biases by actively watching out for them and countering them. The extent to which this can be done is the extent to which we are able to give ourselves a fighting chance of understanding the world we are confronted with.

Lammas marks the end of the growth phase of the God’s life cycle and is essentially about the renunciation of power. The God expends His being in one turn of the wheel. He is in a certain sense finite in a manner that the Goddess is not, for His story is about action in the manifest world. Given that His being is finite, there must come a time when His work is complete and his impulse is fully discharged into the world. To retain power beyond this point not only serves no purpose, it becomes a negative influence, toxic to everything it impacts. A modern parable expounding this principle is the story of the Paperclip Maximiser, a fictional AI system tasked with maximising the production of paperclips. The story is intended to illustrate how poorly managed artificial intelligence could go disastrously wrong. The AI examines the world and devises its strategy for following its program. It has no other goals than to fulfil its programmed objective. As a result, it ends up taking over the world, exterminating all biological life and establishing ever-larger manufacturing systems whose ultimate purpose is making as many paperclips as possible. In the fullness of time it launches spacecraft for the purpose of converting all the mass in the universe into paperclips. This is an extreme example which illustrates the point. Any finite objective will turn toxic if it is pursued beyond its proper bounds, destroying everything of true value and even undermining whatever point there once was to its existence. The God must wisely sacrifice his being for the sake of continued evolution.



The Axis of Compulsion and the Axis of Volition define the Greater Sabbats, which are magical workings intended to create an effect. The Lesser Sabbats are celebrated at the astronomical quarters, the solstices and equinoxes. They are more of the nature of celebrations of works achieved than workings to get something done. We shall examine each pairing of the Lesser Sabbats and their Qualities in turn.  





The Lesser Sabbats:

The Axis of Agency:

Yule and Litha are expressions of Compassion and Power respectively. These Qualities relate to the agency of an entity, that is, its ability to act on the world. At yule, the God’s agency is zero. His very existence is determined by outside influences. The impulse which creates him and establishes Him in the world is a reaction to the elements of the old cycle which do not serve the cause of life for everyone and which cry out to be amended. It thus arises from the desire of the gods to ease suffering and heal breaches in the world. The conception of the new God is therefore an act of divine compassion to ultimately enable agency to deal with these problems. At Litha the God has reached his supreme potency and thus has the greatest agency possible for dealing with the universe.



The Axis of Desire:

The final pairing I term the Axis of Desire. The Qualities expressed are Mirth and Reverence, the associated sabbats being Ostara and Autumn Equinox. At Ostara, the spring equinox, the God starts to perceive the world and thus begins the capability of formulating plans. But plans won’t be formulated without motivation. Motivation is born with the stirrings of desire, the perception that one thing is preferable to another. The God thus begins to experience joy and conceives the desire for more joy. The quality appropriate to this newborn perception of the world is Mirth.

Autumn Equinox is a celebration of the fulfilment of desire, the symbolic crowning of the efforts of the whole cycle of the wheel with the actualised results of all that striving, the satiation of the impulse which motivated the whole drama. The God passed at Lammas and is now of the Mighty Dead. The bounty provided by His work has earned Him His due in Reverence, the Quality I have associated with Autumn.



Astute folk might have noticed that my attribution of the Qualities is not precisely as Doreen Valiente sequenced them. Recall that the Charge runs “let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honour and humility, mirth and reverence within you.” If we regard this sequence as canonical, then we have Beauty (Beltain), Power (Litha), Honour (Lammas) and Mirth, which I have assigned to Ostara, but which if that sequence is followed, should be assigned to Autumn. I have high confidence that my correspondences for three of the four paired complements of Qualities with the sabbats are valid and defensible. The Axis of Compulsion is virtually certain. Few would dispute that Beauty is a perfect match for Beltain and Strength goes with Samhain. The association of Yule and Litha to Power and Compassion on the Axis of Agency is likewise solid. Humility and Honour are similarly suitable for the Axis of Volition. My only real concern is the correspondences on the Axis of Desire. Of the four pairings, that is the one I still struggle with. I can construct arguments For Ostara being an expression of either Mirth or of Reverence, and the same goes for the Autumn Equinox. Therefore, if someone wants to argue that I’ve got that bit wrong, I’m happy to hear them out, and I might even be convinced to switch them around, especially as my chosen correspondence for the Axis of Desire seems to contradict Doreen’s sequencing. Unfortunately Doreen is no longer with us to consult, so if anyone sufficiently skilled in mediumship or necromancy wants to pursue the enquiry, please let me know the results.



The Wheel progresses in logical succession, each stage flowing from the previous one and proceeding to the next with inevitability. Each Greater Sabbat is a working resulting in an attainment which is embodied in the following Lesser Sabbat. Each Lesser Sabbat thrusts the God into a situation which necessitates the working of the next Greater Sabbat.

At Samhain we see the God enthroned as Lord of Death in his role as the Comforter and Consoler of those who have passed beyond the veil. As such, his role is clearly the easing of suffering and the healer of the broken. In the depths of the underworld we find the wellspring of compassion and the formation of the next impulse to right the wrongs of the expired cycle. The conception of the new God at Yule is the result of that compassion, and the solar hero whose task it is to right those wrongs takes shape from his father’s concerns as He gestates in the Womb of Night.

Imbolc sees the spirit of the God informed by those concerns. The reaction to the established situation prepares and grows within His nature. Possessing perfect Humility, He is not misled by any misplaced passion for the accomplishments of old and knows no temptation to valorise the errors of the past. Perceiving all things, He sees them as they are. The revelation of that vision to full conscious sight at Ostara triggers delight in the vision and Mirth leads the God to the next phase of the journey.

With conscious vision and the discernment of value, the God becomes entranced by Beauty and its compelling call to action. His purpose motivates Him to seek the greatest means to His ends, the truest path to the accomplishment of His Great Work. In the pursuit and fulfilment of this desire to possess Beauty, He attains to the Power He needs to accomplish His destiny.

Having attained Power and accomplishing that for which He was called into being, the God must discern the values he holds dear and make a conscious choice to recognise when the Great Work is complete, and not undermine it by overstaying His time. His Honour serves to protect him from the temptation of Power to ensure the fulfillment of his destiny to its completion. In renunciation He achieves immortality and becomes truly worthy of Reverence as the Mighty Dead from those who are the beneficiaries of His labours.

At last The God returns to the underworld wherefrom He was conceived to take up the role of Lord of Death and to assess the consequences of His cycle and see beyond it to formulate the direction and character of the next.

The Nature of the Wheel of Virtue:

This envisioning of the Wheel has certain distinct features. For instance, it cannot be worked widdershins. Reversing the direction does not result in an alternative Left Hand Path which could be used for one’s personal gain without regard for the wellbeing of others. There is no pathway, for instance, from Lammas to Beltain through Litha. There is no purpose to sacrificing oneself and renouncing one’s power back to the peak of attainment of that power, and back to formulating the means of attaining that power. It simply will not work. There is no pathway from Imbolc backwards to Samhain, and no conceivable profit from attempting it. The direction of entropy cannot be reversed, and the response to entropy cannot be undone.


There is no division in the nature of the masculine divine, no Holly King and Oak King, no conflict between the light and dark halves of the year. The Wheel is unitary. It is not divided against itself and cannot be. The Gods are not in conflict. They respond to the situation as it is and move forward in the only manner which is logically possible.

The paired complements of Qualities are not opposite to each other. Compassion and Power are not opposites. Strength and Beauty are not opposites. Humility and Honour are not opposites. Mirth and Reverence are not opposites.

A ‘dark’ or ‘evil’ version of the Wheel cannot be worked to selfish ends by using the opposites of the Qualities. The opposites to Strength, Compassion, Humility, Mirth, Beauty, Power, Honour and Reverence are weakness, cruelty, arrogance, misery, ugliness, helplessness, betrayal and scorn. None of them will bring anyone to where they want to be. It is possible to attain selfish ends by, say, holding on to Power beyond its proper bounds, but in order to get that power in the first place, you must follow the Wheel of Virtue to that point. You never get there by starting from weakness and moving through cruelty and arrogance to misery and ugliness.