The Goddess Cycle on the Wheel of Virtue

In the scheme of the Wheel of Virtue (WoV), the God of the Craft is the divine manifestation of Humanity. The Goddess of the Craft is the divine manifestation of the World. The interaction of the God and the Goddess is symbolic of the interaction between Humanity and the World/Universe. The Goddess, the Great Mother, is eternal and lies behind all. Her nature appears to change over the duration of the cycle because the nature of the God changes over the cycle, and the Goddess presents to the God according to His stage of evolution. The Goddess never manifests as a child. Her most youthful aspect occurs at Beltane, when She appears as a young maiden in the first flush of womanhood, beautiful and virginal, an image of the highest good which the God can perceive. When the young God unites with Her, she begins to age. At Litha She is a mature, queenly woman, maternal and nurturing toward the new creation which the God has brought into being with Her. She continues to age along with the God until Lammas, when She becomes the Crone, and Her youthful beauty is gone, replaced by stern and bleak Wisdom arising from the experience of the new creation fully actualised, an image of the flaws and hardness of it revealed in practice, as Her youthful beauty was an image of the promise of it before it was manifested. Seeing the World thus created in that image of beauty in all its ultimate consequences with its glories and its failings both, the God recognises His fate, and the Goddess strikes the sacrificial blow at Lammas. As the God descends to the underworld, the Goddess begins to age in reverse. She descends to the underworld at Samhain as a woman in late maturity, an image of wisdom not unmixed with comeliness. The harsh aspects of the world which They created are transfigured to an image of remediation of those negative aspects, and this it is that inspires the God as Death to unite with Her again in Her guise as the more severe and compassionate Beauty to bring forth His replacement and begin the next cycle. The Goddess continues to age in reverse until She appears in the form of the young mother of the newborn God at Ostara, and finally is fully renewed as the surpassingly beautiful virginal Maiden at Beltane. Her image at this time is never identical to any previous image of Her in any previous cycle. She shows the characteristics of Her ongoing evolution as She changes under the influence of the God in cycle after cycle. The challenges of each cycle are never identical to any prior cycle, and the answers to those challenges, embodied in the beauty of the Maiden, are thus never identical to those of any prior cycle. The Maiden at this point is virginal because she is symbolic of a path not yet taken.