Someone asked last week who the Lord and the Lady are within Wicca. They are the personification of the duality and polarity present within all nature as we know it. Throughout the universe, we see light and dark, matter and antimatter, protons and electrons, positive and negative, hot and cold. Within life as we know it, we have male and female as the catalysts for birth and evolution.
Thus, we have the Lord and the Lady, the God and the Goddess of Wicca. Generally, we associate the God with the sun and the solar cycles and sabbats, and the Goddess with the moon and the lunar cycles and esbats. Yes, there are cultures who have reversed this, but this is the usual association within Wicca. Some traditions will call upon them by specific names, such as Diana and Pan, or Cernunnos and Cerridwen. I prefer the more generic Lord and Lady, unless I am trying to call upon or invoke a specific personality. The terms “Lord” and “Lady” are a good representation of their relationship to us. They are overseers, protectors, judges, and benefactors.
Of course, while the Lord and the Lady represent a polarity, they really lie upon a spectrum. There are gods and goddesses who move along this spectrum, just as there are people and animals who do the same. There are those of us who will feel comfortable taking on gender-bending roles within the circle, invoking a god/dess of the opposite gender, removing or minimizing the distinct polarity implicit in the concept of the Lord and the Lady. There are also groups that emphasize one end or the other of the spectrum, Dianic covens who only focus on the Goddess, Men’s Mysteries groups who focus on the God. There are Fairy covens and other similar groups who specifically focus on serving the LGBTQ community.
As a public church, my group focuses on serving all who come to us for worship, doing our best to make sure that everyone is able to experience their own connection with deity through our rituals. We will often use a variety of God- or Goddess-names in our invocations, conjuring up a spectrum of images for people to work with. As a Wiccan church, our focus is on the cycles of nature and of life, in all their color and variety.