Wiccan God and Goddess

So I know as Wiccans, we worship the Lord and Lady.
But we also honor many deities, such as Isis, and Artemis, ect.
But... how do these gods and goddesses tie together, if we say "God" and "Goddess" yet honor many "gods" and "goddesses".

My question is: Do Wiccans believe gods and goddesses are manifestations/ out-branches of the God and Goddess?

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I can tell you how I view it from my experiences.

There is only one Divinity, the primal source from which all come to be and is divided in to opposites, male and female- or God and Goddess, that work in tandem as one. God, as an emanating force, static and passive, being present and providing, and the Goddess, the active one, having angels under her command and helping souls find their way on the otherworld and here.

All of the other "deities" as we call them (Artemis, Venus, Zeus, Venus- whatever they be or from any of the tradition) are primal archetypes and are a part of our collective unconscious and represent parts of ourselves only with exaggerated traits and energy gathered through thousands of years of belief in them. They are in fact part of ourselves but on a certain level of existence, or consciousness, all of these energies may seem to appear as separate, individual entities.

In this case, praying to Athena for prudence is actually a prayer to that part of ourselves that is prudent and is in this way called out to be more apparent.

However, this is from my point of view, as a future psychiatrist, and from my experiences. I have found out that most all of believes have a common root in something like this.

Hope this helps. :)

Ah! I as well want to be psychiatrist. :)

and thanks a ton. This helped a lot! I thought it was something along these lines, but wasn't sure.

Thanks!

Not all Wiccans believe that all of the Gods and Goddesses are manifestations of a single Divine.

There are two main schools of thought on this. Soft polytheists believe that all of the Gods and all of the Goddesses are simply different facets of a single Divine being. This is sort of a modified monotheistic point of view. Others believe that each God and each Goddess are separate and unique entities onto themselves...these are known as hard polytheists . People often start out as soft polytheists because it feels familiar to them. Later they may become hard polytheists. Or they may not.

Personally from my own experiences with the Divine, I am a hard polytheist. To me each God and each Goddess are unique individuals. They feel nothing alike. While there may be some unknowable Divine that is beyond our ability to understand, the many Gods and Goddesses are not simply facets of this being. They exist on their own, independent of this unknowable presence.

One of the things about the nature of the Gods in Wicca is that what is important is your personal experience with them. It doesn't matter what someone else senses about the Gods, it's about how you interact with them and how they present themsevles to you. Over time you will come to have an understanding of their nature that you know feels right to you.

Understand too that one of the reasons that Wicca talks about The God and The Goddess is that when Wicca was formed by Gerald Gardner there was a particular God and a particular Goddess who were considered the Deities of Wicca. This remains true in British Traditional Wicca to this day. The names of these particular Deities are oathbound and revealed only to initiates in BTW Traditions such as Gardnerians and Alexandrians.

Thank you very much Lark. I am glad you are here to teach us, I try to read all your posts.

as of right now im a Soft polytheist, I've only been studying for about 2 years now. i'm gravitating toward a hard polytheist but I still believe a lot of what Lightbarer was saying. the answer is really yes and now because so many wiccans have so many different beliefs that like lark said can be boiled down to the soft and hard polytheist