The Crone holds the waning moon, the fortnight between full and dark, and the part of the year that runs from harvest into winter. In coven practice that gives her the workings concerned with ending rather than beginning: banishing, releasing, clearing away, and the deliberate letting go of something that has run its course. Festivals of the dark half of the year, Samhain above all, are the ones most often given to her in the ritual calendars in general circulation.
Her attributes are wisdom, judgement and the authority that comes from having seen a great deal. Practitioners who write about her tend to stress that the word crone is being reclaimed rather than used in its ordinary insulting sense, and that the aspect is not a figure of dread. Death appears in her sphere as the closing phase of a cycle that will turn again, which is consistent with the wider Wiccan reading of the seasonal wheel, and not as a punishment or an ending in the absolute sense.
The aspect has also carried a good deal of social weight inside the movement. Croning rituals, marking a woman's passage into the third stage of life, developed within Goddess centred and feminist influenced groups and are now a recognised observance in several traditions. They are one of the clearest cases of a modern religious formulation producing a genuinely new rite of passage rather than adapting an inherited one.