Pagan and Wiccan symbols
The triple moon, the pentacle, the horned god, the elements and the Wheel of the Year of modern Paganism and Wicca, what each means to the people who use it, and how recent or old each one is.
- Triple moon (triple goddess)A full moon between a waxing and a waning crescent: the sign of the Triple Goddess of Wicca and Goddess Spirituality, whom the Covenant of the Goddess calls the goddess “of the waxing, full, and waning moon”.
- Wiccan pentacleA five-pointed star in a circle, the emblem of Wicca. On a Wiccan altar the pentacle is also a disc engraved with the star, used, in the Covenant of the Goddess’s words, “to symbolize Earth and its properties”.
- The four elementsEarth, air, fire and water, with spirit often added as a fifth. Wiccans set a tool on the altar for each, and write the elements as triangles: fire pointing up, water pointing down, and air and earth the same, each crossed by a bar.
- Horned godThe god of Wicca, honoured beside the Goddess: “the Horned God of the sun and animal life”, in the Covenant of the Goddess’s words. Wiccans write his sign as a circle with a crescent resting on it, horns up.
- Wheel of the YearThe eight festivals of the modern Pagan year, the sabbats, pictured as a wheel with eight spokes: the solstices and equinoxes, and the four old festivals of Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh between them.
- ChakrasSeven centres of subtle energy pictured along the spine, from its base to the crown of the head. The scheme comes from Hindu tantric yoga; the chart most people meet today, with a psychological quality for each centre, is a twentieth-century Western reworking of it.
About pagan and Wiccan symbols
Modern Paganism is a family of religions that have appeared over the past century, starting in England, inspired by the religions of pre-Christian Europe and the Near East. That is Ronald Hutton’s definition, from his Gresham College lectures of 2024 and 2025, and he counts modern Pagan witchcraft, usually called Wicca, as its oldest and most influential tradition in its present form. Wicca came into the open in England in the 1950s; Gerald Gardner, who said in 1951 that he had been initiated into a surviving coven, is still its only known source. Britannica calls it the largest of the modern Pagan religions. The pages here are its symbols and the ones it shares with the wider Pagan movement: the triple moon of the Goddess, the Horned God, the pentacle, the four elements, the Wheel of the Year and the chakras, which Pagans took from Hindu tantric yoga.
A living religion
These are the symbols of people practising today, and each page gives their meaning in practitioners’ own words first: the Covenant of the Goddess, the Pagan Federation, Circle Sanctuary. The Pagan Federation, as Hutton reports it, names three characteristics besides the inspiration of ancient paganism: the honouring of goddesses as well as or instead of gods, divinity within the natural world, and the belief that the divine does not give laws to humans but leaves them free to develop, while doing as little harm as possible to others. Wicca, in the Pagan Federation’s words, is “an initiatory path, a mystery tradition”, and most Wiccans today practise alone.
Old and new
Many of these symbols are younger than they look, and the pages say so. Early Wicca presented itself as the world’s oldest religion; historians showed from the 1970s that the people tried as witches had not belonged to a surviving pagan faith, and Hutton calls what Gardner revealed “a viable and successful new one”. Each page sets the practitioners’ account beside the historians’. The five-pointed star’s longer history, from the Pythagoreans on, is on the pentagram page.
Sources
- What Is Modern Paganism?, Professor Ronald Hutton, lecture of 18 September 2024 (text), Gresham College, text
- Modern Pagan Witchcraft, Professor Ronald Hutton, lecture of 14 May 2025 (text), Gresham College, text
- Wicca, Ethan Doyle White, Encyclopaedia Britannica, introduction
- Witchcraft & Wicca, The Pagan Federation
- Basic Philosophy, Covenant of the Goddess
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research