THE MEANING OF LIFE
To gather experience over countless lifetimes.

We Realize who and what we really are, and come to behave like That.

Ignorance of That and associated bad habits result in mistakes and consequential suffering.

The accumulation of experience eventually brings us to realize that we are not separate from others, which forms habitual devotion to the ultimate welfare of all.
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Wicca the Ancient Way

    by Janus-Mithras and Mer-Amun

    The subject of the Mighty Ones is a fascinating and very little known teaching of the Craft, but one which is fundamental to its tradition.  Indeed, it is through this aspect of the teaching that the Craft transmits its own roots and history and expresses its modus operandi.  As a matter of fact, it is even possible to gauge the purity of the lineage of any particular “branch” of Wicca by its devotion to, explanation and application of the teachings of “The Mighty Ones.”

    In a general sense, the Mighty Ones are five great orders of beings, children or emanations of the Great Mother and her consort, the Horned One.  As such, they are extremely important not only in an over-all sense but in the daily life of a Witch, for they are the messengers and servants of the God and Goddess, and in a deeper sense, their ever present immediacy.  For this reason the individual Witch enjoys a very close and personal, day-to-day relationship with the Mighty Ones, always working in and through their presence and with mutual loving support.  It is with the deepest devotion and respect that they are summoned to Guard and to Witness all the sacred rites of the Craft.

    Actually, the term “Mighty Ones” is a general one, as stated before, and includes many different types of beings.  At the bottom of the ladder are the Elementals, the crude, basic awareness of the Elements themselves: the Four Great Hosts of Nature.  Next, the spiritually awakened intelligences of the Elements, identical to the Archangels and Angels of the Judaeo-Christian systems.  Beyond these are “The Mighty Dead,” all the great and powerful Witches who have every lived, and like the Goddess Herself, have made the sacred Oath of Eternal Return for the welfare of all that lives – the Sacred Oath to watch, to help and to teach all those in need, and to come to the Brethren when properly called, as was taught of Old.  Beyond all these are those great and exalted beings called “The Watchers”: the Sleepless Guides and Guardians of Humanity whose deepest concern and constant work is the evolution and the happiness of Mankind.  And finally, the greatest, mightiest of all, are none other than the Goddess and God, with their boundless Power, Love and Wisdom.

    Traditional Wicca teaches that it is the constant Work of the Mighty Ones to provide and maintain the elements of Nature.  It is taught that these great beings emanate or incarnate in and as the whole scale of Nature and its Forces, from the first Cosmic Explosion or Orgasm to the tiny oxygen producing unicellular organisms that make life possible.  If we understand this properly, then we begin to see how they are not only the cosmic field of Creation, and the contents thereof, but also the Guides and Guardians of it.  Legend has it that “The Dread Lords of the Outer Spaces” descended upon the Earth about fourteen million years ago, when Man was little more than a faint ethereal being, bringing with them as gifts the seeds of civilization, agriculture, and religion.  The Legend tells us that they are still here today, Watching, Guiding and stimulating mankind out of his childhood, always teaching the Ancient Wisdom.  It is to celebrate as well as participate in this very real on-going process of Guidance and Inspiration that Traditional Witches always salute the East to begin their rites, paying loving homage to these great beings and to the long lineage of ancient and modern Witches who have handed down the Teaching, for Tradition tells us that the Wisdom came from the East.

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    3 Responses to “The Mighty Ones”

    • james says:

      its the 1st time ive read into the wicca way and i found it an intersting site

    • Matthew says:

      I randomly came across your post when searching for more information about the mighty ones. There seems to be a lot of teaching missing these days in initiatory Wicca and this is probably the most important example.

      Recently I have been doing my own research into what the mighty ones could possibly be and have a few theories, which I would love t get your point of view on. however, back to your post.

      If you look at Wicca from a hermetic point of view, which is wise as its creator was a hermeticist, you can come to some interesting conclusions.

      The mighty ones could also describe the idea of the holy guardian angels, in fact in the BOK, GG mentions this himself. The basic idea of this being your higher and divine self.

      People often refer to angels as simply spirits opwho govern natural forces and I have always liked this. When we invoke the mighty ones in the corners, which happens to be the gods of the directional winds, who are often thought of as angels, this makese sense. I won’t go into how the structure of a Wiccan ritual is based upon the four arch angels now.

      But there has always been a belief in the hermetic world that you should invoke often to attain knowledge and conversation with the HGA. Wicca does this amazingly well in the form of the drawing down of the sun and moon. Funny that we call the god and goddess into ourselves rather than summoning them. This is very similar to the idea of the occult God Forms and there is an obvious thing that happens during that, which proves that point.

      I would have to say that I would not associate the actual elements themselves with the mighty ones. As we say between the world of men (the elements and Malkuth, the mundane worlld of the tree of life) and the mighty ones (Tipereth, the arch angels). The world between the two, Yesod, the foundation of our practice and our circle.

      Would love to chat more about this. BB

      Matt

      • Mer-Amun says:

        Hi. Thanks for your very thoughtful and considered comment. ( I didn’t know anyone was reading this site! )

        As I understand it, “the Might Ones” is a broad-spectrum general term that includes a lot of different beings, in entire hierarchies. I believe everything you said is true, but that because the term is so broad, elementals are also included, at the more specific part of the hierarchy, (as opposed to gods and Archangels that are at the more general or archetypal part of the hierarchy – I don’t like using “upper” or “lower” because there’s a subtle judgement implied in those words).

        Besides the very useful things you pointed out though, is that these hierarchies of Mighty Ones include a certain type of being called “The Watchers”, who are also known as “the Great Guides and Guardians of Humanity”. These are probably the most important among those invoked, when invoking the Mighty ones, because they are fully realized beings who have no reason to get involved in manifestation of any kind, but do so anyway, because of The Oath of the Sword, which is a fancy term for a promise not only to disallow evil to exist in their presence, but also a promise to return to manifestation, not because they are bound to it like most of us, but because they love us and want to help us realize the same thing they have realized, ourselves attaining happiness and divinity in the truest sense of the word.

        As for not including the elementals in the hierarchy of Mighty Ones, because of “between the world of men and the mighty ones” I would point out that the world of men is actually not the abode of the elementals, that the world of men is not precisely Malkuth. I was taught that technically, Malkuth is a subtle distance higher on the tree than the world of men, that the world of men is all over the place on the tree, but mostly just below Malkuth, on the edge of the Qlipoth (unbalanced forces). So since the world of men is not the same as the world of the elementals, the boundary between the world of men and the mighty ones could still include elementals as part of the vast hierarchy of beings included in the broad term, “The Mighty Ones”. For the purpose of this particular discussion, rather than placing the circle in Yesod, I would place the circle in the center of four complete trees of life, each emphasizing a different plane or element: similar to the tree of life in each of the four planes of Atziluth, Briah, Yetzirah, and Assiah – one to each of the four quarters. I said “almost” like that, because the Mighty ones are not quite Qabalistic in nature, though Qabalistic classifications like the tree of life and the Four Planes could be applied to approximate an understanding of those four hierarchies.

        Anyway, that’s what I was taught. There are lots of ways to see things from though, and I’m not invalidating what you said at all, merely adding a new and different perspective to the valid things that you said.

        Thanks again for your valuable comment.

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