Hecate

• 1. Introduction

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  In the 1st century CE, Ovid wrote of Hecate: "Look at Hecate, standing guard at the crossroads, one face looking in each direction." Hecate belonged to ancient Greek religion and mythology. Artists usually showed her with torches, a key, or snakes, or with dogs at her heels. Ancient writers linked her to night, light, magic, witchcraft, and the Moon. Her followers included Athenian households and the witches of Thessaly. One remark about her cult sums up the difficulty of pinning her down: "she is more at home on the fringes than in the centre of Greek polytheism. Intrinsically ambivalent and polymorphous, she straddles conventional boundaries and eludes definition." This documentary follows the evidence. Where did she come from, and why does her name resist explanation? Why did sculptors give her three bodies? How did a protector of ordinary homes become a patron of sorcery?

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• 2. Roots of a Name

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  Two Greek words compete as the source of the name Hecate. The first is ἑκών, which means "willing" and would make her "she who works her will". No ancient source names willingness as a major trait of hers, which weakens the idea. The second is Ἑκατός, Hekatos, an obscure epithet of Apollo meaning "the far-reaching one" or "the far-darter". Its supporters point to Artemis, who was closely tied to Apollo and often equated with Hecate. In their view, Hecate began as an aspect of Artemis. Once Artemis joined the Olympian gods, she came to stand for purity and maidenhood. Her darker traits, including magic, the souls of the dead, and the night, would then have been worshipped separately under the title Hecate. Many consider this the likeliest Greek origin, yet it cannot explain worship in Asia Minor, where the link to Artemis looks like a late development. R. S. P. Beekes rejected a Greek source altogether and suggested a Pre-Greek one.

  The Carians of Anatolia may have been her first worshippers. Most names that invoke Hecate, such as Hecataeus or Hecatomnus, the father of Mausolus, are attested in that region. There she remained a Great Goddess into historical times, with an unrivalled cult site at Lagina. Some evidence suggests she descends from local sun goddesses, and Arinna is cited as a comparison. Her monuments in Phrygia and Caria are numerous, though later in date. If her cult spread into Greece, it arrived in a world where Artemis and Selene already filled her role. That clash supports the widely accepted view that she was a foreign deity absorbed into the Greek pantheon.

  The Egyptian goddess Heqet offers a third candidate. She had the head of a frog, presided over fertility and childbirth, and, like Hecate, was linked with a word meaning ruler. The Egyptian word heka means magic, and Heka is also the name of the god of magic and medicine.

  In 1567, Arthur Golding translated Ovid's Metamorphoses and spelled the name Hecat, without a final e. Plays of the Elizabethan-Jacobean period later used the same spelling. In Early Modern English the name was often pronounced with two syllables, and that habit lasted well into the 19th century. Webster's Dictionary of 1866 gave Shakespeare much of the credit for the then-predominant two-syllable pronunciation. Shakespeare's own lines about her come near the end of this story.

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• 3. Three Faces

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  A small terracotta statue found in Athens is the earliest known image of Hecate. Its inscription, in lettering of the 6th century, dedicates it to her. She sits on a throne with a chaplet around her head, and nothing else marks her out. The statue has none of the symbols that later became her signature, and her form is single, not triple. A 6th-century pottery fragment from Boeotia may show her too. A crowned goddess with leafy branches offers a maternal blessing to two maidens who embrace her, with lions on either side.

  Pausanias, a travel writer of the 2nd century, credited the sculptor Alcamenes with the first triple Hecate. Alcamenes worked in the late 5th century BCE, and his statue stood before the temple of the Wingless Nike in Athens. Her cult became established in the city around 430 BCE, and the statue served her new temple. The original is lost, but hundreds of copies survive. The design places three figures around a central pole or column and is called a hekataion. Hekataia stood at crossroads shrines and at the entrances to temples and private homes. The figures hold items such as torches, keys, serpents, and daggers. A votive hekataion from Attica, made in the 3rd century BCE, adds dancing Charites circling the central column.

  Wooden poles at three-way crossroads may explain the shape. Masks hung on such poles, each facing down a different road, could have inspired the triple image around a pillar. This remains a speculation.

  The great frieze of the Pergamon Altar, now in Berlin, shows Hecate with three bodies in the thick of battle. She stands beside Artemis and fights the giant Clytius, with a torch, a sword, and a lance in her three right hands.

  Greek artists normally gave her three separate bodies, but the image eventually shifted to one body with three faces. The Greek Magical Papyri of Late Antiquity, and Egyptian-inspired writings connected with Hermes Trismegistus, describe three heads: one dog, one serpent, and one horse. Other portrayals give her the heads of a cow and a boar.

  At Lagina, the east frieze of a Hellenistic temple shows her helping to protect the newborn Zeus from his father Cronus. It is the only evidence that she played a part in that myth.

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• 4. Guardian of Gates

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  Five of her cult titles read like a map of thresholds. Apotropaia meant the one who turns harm away. Enodia meant she on the way, Propylaia meant before the gate, Triodia meant she who frequents crossroads, and Klêidouchos meant holding the keys. Borders, city walls, doorways, and crossroads all fell within her care, and so did the realms beyond the world of the living. Scholars call her a liminal goddess, because she belongs to the space in between. She mediated between the Olympian and Titan regimes, and between mortal and divine spheres.

  A goddess who turned away harmful spirits could also decline to do so. In that case she might even drive the demons against an unlucky person. Her link with entrances probably led, by the middle of the 5th century BCE, to her identification with Enodia, a Thessalian goddess. The name Enodia, "In-the-Road", suggests a watcher on the main road into a city or in front of a private house. Keys fit this role. So may her two torches, which, set on either side of a gate, lit the entrance and let a householder identify visitors.

  In 340 BCE, Philip II of Macedon besieged Byzantium, where small temples to Hecate stood close to the city gates. Legend says she revealed his night attack by lighting the sky, and the Byzantines honoured her as Hecate Lampadephoros, the lamp carrier. Another version has her alerting the townspeople with her torches and her pack of dogs. The tale is preserved in the Suda. According to Hesychius of Miletus, a statue of Hecate once stood at the site of the Hippodrome in Constantinople. Her bond with dogs may owe something to watchdogs, which raised the alarm at night when intruders approached. Greeks and Romans used them widely.

  Her post at the boundary led naturally to the underworld. Theocritus, in a poem of the 3rd century BCE, describes her keys as able to unlock the gates of death. The Greek Magical Papyri call her the holder of the keys to Tartaros. In the 1st century CE, Virgil named the entrance to hell "Hecate's Grove" and called her equally "powerful in Heaven and Hell." By the 5th century BCE she was strongly tied to ghosts. This may stem from a merging with Enodia, who travelled the earth with a retinue of ghosts. Coins showed Enodia wearing a leafy crown and holding torches, imagery strongly associated with Hecate. Cerberus, the monstrous watchdog of Hades, belongs to the same frontier. He stopped the living from entering the underworld and the dead from leaving it.

  The Romans often knew her as Trivia, from trivia, meaning "three ways", a title she shared with Diana. Both goddesses protected travel and crossroads. Cult images and altars of her triple form stood at three-way crossroads, and also before private homes and in front of city gates. In the 7th century, Saint Eligius preached to a recently converted flock in Flanders. In his Sermo, he warned the sick against putting "devilish charms at springs or trees or crossroads". According to Saint Ouen, he also urged: "No Christian should make or render any devotion to the deities of the trivium, where three roads meet..."

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• 5. Hesiod's Puzzle

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  Hesiod's Theogony, from around 700 BCE, is the earliest literary source to mention Hecate. In it she is the only child of Perses and Asteria, and Asteria's sister is Leto, mother of Artemis and Apollo. Phoebe, an ancient Titan goddess, is grandmother to all three cousins. Zeus honours Hecate above all. He gives her a share of the earth and the unfruitful sea, and honour in starry heaven. He takes nothing away from what she held among the former Titan gods.

  Hesiod's list of her powers is long. She sits beside kings in judgement and lifts favoured speakers in the assembly. She grants victory in battle and at the games, stands by horsemen, and gives fishermen a good catch or takes it away. With Hermes she increases herds and flocks. Zeus also made her a nurse of the young.

  Scholars find this praise troublesome, since other writers and surviving evidence suggest that Hesiod was the exception. One theory says his home village had a substantial Hecate following, and he spread her prestige through his poem. Another says that humble household worship could have been widespread yet rarely recorded. In Athens she was among the main household gods, with Zeus, Hermes, Hestia, and Apollo. D'Este and Rankine point to coins showing Hecate on the hand of Zeus as proof that her special position under him endured.

  The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, composed around 600 BCE, calls Hecate "tender-hearted". Helios, the Sun god, and Hecate tell Demeter what has happened after Hades abducts Persephone, and Hecate helps in the search. Afterwards she accompanies Persephone on her yearly journey to and from the realm of Hades, as a psychopomp, a guide of souls. In art and myth, she and Hermes light Persephone's way back from the underworld with torches. Because of this, she ranked among the chief goddesses of the Eleusinian Mysteries, beside Demeter and Persephone. A temple to her stood near the main sanctuary at Eleusis.

  Later writers could not agree on her parents. Musaeus made her a daughter of Zeus and Asteria, and Bacchylides called her a daughter of Nyx. Diodorus Siculus named Perses, a son of Helios, as her father. Orphic literature gave her Demeter, Leto, or even Tartarus as a parent. She stayed unmarried and had no regular consort, though some traditions named her mother of Scylla by Phorbas or Phorcys.

  In one rationalized account, Hecate is a mortal priestess of Artemis who bears Circe and Medea to Aeëtes. Another group of stories makes her a mortal priestess, often linked with Iphigenia, who insults Artemis. Artemis takes revenge and brings about the priestess's suicide. Such tales may show how Hecate entered the Greek pantheon without disturbing Artemis. A different story says that Hermes once chased Hecate, or Persephone, intending to assault her. She snored or roared in anger and frightened him off, which earned her the name Brimo, meaning "angry".

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• 6. Creatures and Herbs

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  A fragment of Euripides calls the dog her sacred animal. Dogs were sacrificed to her, and the offering played a significant role in purification rites. A marble relief of the 4th century BCE from Crannon in Thessaly, dedicated by a racehorse owner, shows Hecate with a hound beside her, placing a wreath on the head of a mare. Dogs were also sacred to birth goddesses such as Eileithyia and Genetyllis, so the link with Hecate may point to childbirth. In much ancient art the dog looks docile and Hecate looks friendly. That suggests the original meaning was positive. Later ages came to see her dog as a restless soul or daemon in her train.

  Lycophron told of Hecuba, the Trojan queen, who leapt into the sea after the fall of Troy. Hecate transformed her into a dog, and the friendly female dog beside the goddess was once a queen.

  The polecat has a stranger story. Antoninus Liberalis tells of Galinthias, daughter of Proetus of Thebes and playmate of Alcmene. The Moirai and Eileithyia, as a favour to Hera, kept Alcmene in continuous labour by sitting with their arms crossed. Galinthias ran in and announced that, by desire of Zeus, a boy had been born to Alcmene. The shocked Moirai let go of their arms, and Herakles was born. As punishment for deceiving the gods, they turned Galinthias into a weasel or polecat that lives in crannies. Hecate pitied her and made her a sacred servant. Aelian told another version, in which a sorceress named Gale was changed into the creature by Hecate's anger.

  Athenaeus of Naucratis, drawing on Apollodorus of Athens, says the red mullet was sacred to Hecate because the Greek word trigle sounds like her triple form, trimorphos. At Athens, a statue of Hecate Triglathena received offerings of the fish. Parker notes that the fish was often banned as food, since it delighted in polluted things, and that its blood colour suited the blood-eating goddess. Alan Davidson adds that wealthy Romans of the late Republic and early Empire caught a fever for red mullet. They obsessed over size, paid absurd prices, kept the fish in captivity, and enjoyed watching the colour change as one died.

  Alexander Haggerty Krappe noted that Hecate was also called hippeutria, "the equestrienne", since the horse was "the chthonic animal par excellence". Modern pagan writers have made the frog sacred to her as well, possibly because it crosses between two elements.

  Fragments of Sophocles's lost play The Root Diggers describe Hecate wearing oak. An ancient commentary on Apollonius's Argonautica pictures her head ringed with serpents twining through oak branches. Garlic was a favoured offering, and cypress, a tree of death and the underworld, is sometimes linked to her. Aconite, also called hecateis, belladonna, dittany, and mandrake are all associated with her. Many of these plants are poisonous, medicinal, or psychoactive. Dogs were used to dig up mandrake, and since at least the 1st century CE many sources attest to dogs digging plants tied to magic. The Greeks held the yew sacred to her. Her attendants hung yew wreaths on black bulls slaughtered in her honour, and yew boughs burned on funeral pyres.

  She was thought to teach the making of medicines and poisons. Apollonius of Rhodes names a pupil in the Argonautica, saying of Medea: "I have mentioned to you before a certain young girl whom Hecate, daughter of Perses, has taught to work in drugs."

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• 7. Shrines and Rites

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  The oldest direct evidence of her cult comes from Selinunte, near modern Trapani in Sicily, where she had a temple in the 6th-5th centuries BCE. At Miletus, a round stone altar to her was found in the Delphinion, a temple of Apollo. Dated to the 7th century BCE, it is one of the oldest known objects of her worship. There, worshippers left stone cubes called gylloi, often wreathed, as protective offerings at a door or gateway. At Ephesus, an area called the Hecatesion lay within the precincts of the Temple of Artemis and was served by priests called megabyzi.

  Her most important sanctuary stood at Lagina, a theocratic city-state where eunuchs served the goddess. Lagina lay close to Stratonikeia, a colony of Macedonians, where she was the city's patron. Strabo says the country of the Stratonikeians held two temples and that the more famous belonged to Hecate at Lagina. It drew great festal assemblies every year.

  On the island of Samothrake, the Zerynthian cave was an important sanctuary. Initiation rites there, with dog sacrifices, were thought to save initiates from terrors and storms. According to an ancient account, the people of Aigina worshipped Hecate above all other gods. They held yearly mystic rites, said to have been established by Orpheus the Thracian. A wooden image there, the work of Myron, had one face and one body. In Argolis, Pausanias saw a stone image by Skopas and bronze images by Polykleitos and his brother Naukydes. Near Delos, an islet called Hecate's island, or Psamite, took its name from the cake psamiton offered to her.

  At home, her shrine usually stood at the doorway. A small hekataion carved in wood or stone guarded against restless dead and other spirits. Larger ones, often inside small walled areas, stood at public crossroads near important sites. One lay on the road leading to the Acropolis. At the new Moon, people left food at three-way crossroads shrines to protect themselves from spirits and other evils. At Colophon in Ionian Asia Minor, a black female puppy was sacrificed to her as the wayside goddess, according to Pausanias. Plutarch observed that in Boeotia dogs were killed in purification rites.

  Athenians honoured her with the Deipnon, named for the Greek word for the evening meal. Once a lunar month, on the night of the dark moon, a meal was set out at a small shrine by the front door. The street and the doorway formed a crossroads, a place where Hecate was known to dwell. Offerings might include cake or bread, fish, eggs, and honey. Its purpose was to honour her and soothe the souls in her wake who "longed for vengeance." A second aim was to purify the house and atone for bad deeds that offended her. The rite had three parts: the meal, an expiation sacrifice, and purification of the household. The Noumenia followed the next day, when the first sliver of the New Moon appeared, and the Agathos Daimon came the day after that.

  In the Argonautica, a 3rd-century BCE epic from Alexandria, Medea acts as her priestess and prescribes a ritual for Jason. He must bathe at midnight in a flowing stream and wear dark robes. He digs a round pit, cuts the throat of a ewe over it, and burns the animal whole on a pyre beside the pit. After a libation of honey, he walks away without looking back, even if he hears footsteps or barking dogs. At Titane, a priest performed secret rites at four pits one night each year, chanting the charms of Medea.

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• 8. Witch, Moon, Legacy

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  Euripides associated Hecate with Medea and cast her as mistress of witchcraft. By the 1st century CE, her chthonic and nocturnal character had made her heavily associated with witches, magic, and sorcery. In Lucan's Pharsalia, the witch Erichtho calls on her in grim terms. Erichtho names Persephone as the third and lowest aspect of Hecate, the goddess witches revere. She describes her as a "rotting goddess" with a "pallid decaying body", forced to wear a mask when she visits the gods in heaven.

  No artwork before the Roman period connects Hecate to the Moon, and the written evidence is late. Her ties to Helios in literary sources and in cursing magic are still cited as signs of a lunar nature. In the lost play The Root Cutters, Sophocles has a speaker say: "O Sun our lord and sacred fire, the spear of Hecate of the roads, which she carries as she attends her mistress in the sky". It may or may not be a deliberate link to the Moon. In Seneca's Medea, the heroine calls her patron "Moon, orb of the night" and "triple form".

  Hecate and the moon goddess Selene were frequently identified with each other. Magical texts, including the Greek Magical Papyri, blend Selene-Hecate with Artemis and Persephone. In Italy, Diana the huntress, Luna the Moon, and Hecate of the underworld formed a triple unity. It appeared often in depictions of sacred groves, where Hecate marked intersections and crossroads. The Romans celebrated these multiple identities of Diana with enthusiasm.

  In the 2nd century, Apuleius wrote The Golden Ass, in which the goddess says some call her Juno, others Bellona, and still others Hecate. The Egyptians, she adds, call her Queen Isis. The Chaldean Oracles, of the 2nd-3rd century CE, make Hecate their primary feminine figure. They give her some rulership over earth, sea, and sky, and a universal role as Savior (Soteira), Mother of Angels, and Cosmic World Soul (Anima Mundi). Fragment 194 commands: "Labour thou around the Strophalos of Hecate." The strophalos is usually translated as a spinning top or a wheel used in magic. A magical papyrus in Michigan, dated to the late 3rd or early 4th century CE, invokes Hecate Erschigal against fear of punishment in the afterlife. The name identifies her with Ereshkigal, the Babylonian underworld goddess. Schwemer believes the foreign name merely gave the Greek goddess of the netherworld a mysterious sound.

  Strmiska, in 2005, claimed that Hecate, merged with Diana, appears in late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages in a legend complex called "The Society of Diana". It was tied to gatherings of women, the Moon, and witchcraft, and became established in northern Italy, southern Germany, and the western Balkans. Early modern lexicographers from the 17th to the 19th century connected the words hag and hexe to her name, though only a minority propose that today. A link has also been suggested between Hecate and the English word "jinx". The Byzantine polymath Michael Psellus describes a bullroarer, a golden sphere decorated with symbols and whirled on an oxhide thong. He calls it an iunx and says the ritual is sacred to Hecate.

  Shakespeare mentions Hecate in A Midsummer Night's Dream, written between 1594 and 1596, and again in Macbeth in 1605. In the title character's dagger soliloquy he says: "Witchcraft celebrates pale Hecate's offerings..." In King Lear, the king invokes "The mysteries of Hecate and the night" as he disclaims all paternal care for Cordelia.

  In 1929, Lewis Brown, an expert on religious cults, linked the 1920s Blackburn Cult, also called The Cult of the Great Eleven, to Hecate worship. He noted that the cult regularly practiced dog sacrifice and had secretly buried one of its queens with seven dogs. Samuel Fort added more parallels: nocturnal mystic rites, a female-dominated membership, the sacrifice of horses and mules, a focus on roads and portals, and an emphasis on death, healing, and resurrection. Today Hecate appears in Neopagan witchcraft and Wicca, and in reconstructions of Greek polytheism known as Hellenismos. In Wicca she has in some cases become the crone aspect of the Triple Goddess.

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