Triple moon (triple goddess)

The moon’s phases are as old as the sky, but the goddess they stand for here is a modern figure, and her history is mostly a history of scholarship. Ronald Hutton, the historian of modern Paganism, points out in a 2025 Gresham College lecture that in only one late ancient text, the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, is a female deity declared the embodiment of all goddesses, the mistress of nature, and represented by the moon. That image came back with the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century, and from them, Hutton says, it can be traced into English literature, Robert Graves’s The White Goddess among it, and into the standard goddess of modern Paganism through the occultists Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune and Gerald Gardner.

The idea of a goddess with a maiden and a mother in her came from a Cambridge classicist. In Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903), Jane Ellen Harrison argued that a Greek goddess took a twofold form that resolved “into the two stages of a woman’s life, as Maiden and Mother”, and that the many threes of Greek religion, three Moirae, three Charites, three Horae, grew out of that pair. Hutton sums up her view as a single goddess in three aspects, “the first two being maiden and mother”. The writer Judith Laura, quoted by Christ, calls the Triple Goddess whose three aspects relate to moon phases “a 20th century idea, initially most fully developed by Robert Graves and a few decades later adopted by spiritual feminists”.