Need some extra power in your ritual? Call on a God or Goddess to help you - but be very sure that their special energy is what you need before you call on them! Some deities can be very intense, so get to know your chosen deity before you ask for their help.
The pantheons below contain some/most of the Celtic, ancient Egyptian, ancient Greek and ancient Roman gods and goddesses, plus some well-known others from assorted pantheons, with descriptions - the lists are by no means all-encompassing (especially not the Egyptian one!), but you'll find a deity for almost every type of working you'll ever do.
Ancient gods/goddesses and the God and Goddess
There may be some among you that have realised what I'm about to say here - if you think about it, inviting ancient gods and goddesses to your ritual alongside Spirit is a bit of a strange thing to do. You can't really have it both ways - you've kind of got to decide between believing in a whole lot of different gods and goddesses with specific areas of responsibility, or in a single all-powerful divinity like Spirit that looks after everything. This is a rarely-discussed and rather messy topic that people prefer not to pay much attention to - we don't like being conflicted, so we ignore the obvious elephant in the room and pretend this makes total sense. Mostly, people just take the fact Witches work with the God and Goddess as well as ancient pantheons as a given, and it never occurs to them to wonder how these two things work together.
The gods and goddesses in the ancient pantheons are basically representations of aspects (or facets, if you like) of a larger divine force (i.e., Spirit). If you want divine influence in matters to do with love, then you involve Aphrodite or Venus, because they represent the aspects of the divine that are appropriate for dealing with matters of love. Focusing on Aphrodite gives you an image on which you can concentrate to 'access' the right facet of the divine - like we use different colours for different types of magick to help send our energy in the right direction, we use different divine images to help us focus as well. We use their individual images to help us get in touch with the appropriate facet of the larger divine because it's easier for us humans to break up the big, all-powerful divinity into smaller pieces - it's much easier to associate our ritual with the image of a single god or goddess from an ancient pantheon than it is to try and get our head around Spirit in its entirety.
This doesn't mean you don't invite Spirit in general as well, because you want the God and Goddess to be with you while you're doing ritual, and it doesn't mean you have to use ancient gods or goddesses, either - if you're comfortable with just Spirit that'll work fine, and if you need a more specific divine focus that's fine too. I'm just trying to make you aware of what you're doing when you're inviting an ancient god/goddess to your ritual, and hopefully explaining how it works.
