Ren LehCrow
This is something that's always confused me about self-initiated and "solitary Wicca".
The names of the God and Goddess are held as sacred and kept secret until a person is initiated. Its only after that when they learn the gods' names. How can you dedicate yourself to a pair of deities when you don't even know who they are? Yes, they can "call" to you, but a divine calling can only reveal so much. At some point you'd need guidance from someone else.
The general idea is that of soft polytheism, that essentially, all gods and goddesses are really just different cultures' way of interpreting these two deities. This idea is encouraged not just by authors like Cunningham (who's a big fan of this interpretation) but mentioned in a few books about Wicca. Gardner himself seems to have held the view that
some gods were different interpretations of his own gods, but certainly not all or even most. Diana, Pan and Cernunnos tend to feature largely, as the former is a deity of some importance in "Aradia" (from which Gardner was very obviously inspired) and the latter two are gods with horns that reflect elements of his own god.
So essentially, the names used in Wicca are considered just a couple of options among many, and that the lord and lady have a massive number of names that can be used - or that one might prefer to use no names at all, and just stick with honorifics. "The Goddess" tends to be used the most often. Sometimes these two over-arching gods are worshipped, while other times gods are taken from different pantheons and "plugged in" to these two roles without this considered to be a bad thing, as they are considered facets or aspects of the two deities. In other words, a Celtic coven and a Greek coven would be considered to be worshipping the same deities, just with a preference for different particulars as far as names and trappings went.
This is also why you get people saying stuff like "but if you're true to the Goddess, she doesn't care if you're in a coven" because essentially the goddess of Wicca and the goddess of whatever else and the goddess this person is worshipping are all considered to be the same entity.
