Maiden, Mother, Crone: The Goddess Cycles in Nature and Your Life

According to heaps of archaeological evidence, the Goddess was once worshiped all over the world by many different names. She was often depicted in three forms: Maiden, Mother, and Crone. Sometimes these three goddesses were sisters, sometimes separate goddesses reflecting different archetypes, and sometimes as the same goddess in different life cycles.

The Maiden

The Maiden embodies the new moon, springtime, and the dawn, as well as moments of new potential and possibility. She is the Greek Persephone, originally referred to as Kore, which translates to “maiden.” She is also Brigid, the beautiful red-haired Irish goddess of early spring, representing the energy that pushes the very first shoots of grass and flowers up through the snow. She is birth and rebirth after death in the Goddess cycle.

The Mother

The Mother is the creatrix, like the Greek Demeter, goddess of grain, who brings life to the Earth. She is known as Gaia, Mother Earth, Nut (the Egyptian sky goddess who gave birth to Earth and all the stars), and all other goddesses who create. She embodies the full moon, the brightness of summer, midday, and the energy of fullness, abundance, and creation.

The Crone

The Crone is the wise one: the older woman who has all the gifts of long-lived experience. Hecate, Greek goddess of witchcraft, is often understood as a Crone, but she’s also referred to at times as a Maiden. The Cailleach is Old Woman Winter in Celtic mythology. The Slavic Baba Yaga is the Witch of the Woods, an old woman who lives in the forest in a hut that has chicken legs. She is ready to either help or eat the children that come her way, depending on her mood. The Crone embodies the waning moon, winter, and evening time, as well as the energy of death and endings that ultimately prepares us to meet the Maiden all over again.

The Goddess Perspective

In our current patriarchal world where mostly male gods are worshiped, our understanding of the world is linear. We live, and then we die, and if we are lucky, we get to go to Heaven and stay there forever. God is often present in the church or temple, or is embodied by his priests, but is not present in the forest, the river, or the cherry pit that one day becomes a tree. Goddess-centered traditions have a much more cyclic energy, present in the seasons, the moon, and our life experiences from birth to death.

But while more patriarchal god-oriented perspectives tend to think of life and death as very separate, ancient Goddess-worshippers generally saw life and death as two sides of the same coin. The Goddess holds everything: the dark, the light, the bitter, and the sweet. Worshiping her was about worshiping the land, the seasons, the rivers, the moon, the fruit from the tree that gives us life, and the composted dirt that nourishes that tree.

The Many Phases of a Woman’s Life

Some people believe these three faces of the Goddess represent the three phases of a woman’s life. She is a Maiden as a child and a young woman; a Mother when she is of childbearing age; and a Crone when she has passed through menopause. But because there is so much more to a woman’s life (and so many more faces to the Goddess as well), this can feel very reductive.

A human Maiden can seem like an innocent, a blossom to be plucked. The Goddess as Maiden brings the energy of new life and potential, but she also holds all the other Goddess energies within her at all times. Some Maidens are also fierce Warriors: The beautiful goddess Durga from Hindu tradition essentially uses her youthfulness and apparent innocence to draw out the demons that she then destroys while riding on the back of a lion.

Human women may have complicated relationships with the archetype of Mother. The Goddess, in her multitudes, can be whatever kind of Mother we need her to be, especially if our human mothers aren’t so great. Unlike our human mothers, the Goddess isn’t limited by our human capacities for managing stress and trauma.

The idea that a woman should be a Mother simply because she is in her childbearing years can feel very oppressive to those who cannot or do not want to become biological mothers. Ancient goddesses often presided over fertility and death, partly because these two energies are not as separate as we tend to think in modern times. Thankfully, women do not die in childbirth as often as they used to, but the act of bringing new life into the world brings us close to the portal of death.

The idea of the Crone has something of a bad connotation: an ugly, old woman, unwanted in society. But the Crone was a revered aspect of the great Goddess at one time. Baba Yaga, for example, may have once been a sort of goddess of the forest, and her more unsavory child-eating characteristics probably came about in the witch-hunting era when women were commonly persecuted by Christian authorities, often because they held some older knowledge or influence that threatened the powers that be at the time. In any case, the Goddess is able to hold these archetypes and more—and that’s for her to hold, and not for us to try and emulate.

Maiden, Mother, and Crone are potent archetypes in terms of the turning of the seasons, the phases of the moon, and the way we can understand the cycles of life, death, and rebirth in our own lives. Maybe there’s something powerful for us in simply remembering this ancient knowledge.

Learn more about how to embody the triple goddess.