Hecate

Hecate (Hekate) was a goddess of the old order, the daughter of the Titans Perses and Asteria, whom Zeus honoured above all others. She was a torch-bearing helper of Demeter, a guardian of crossroads and entrances, a goddess of the night and of ghosts, and in later poetry the patron of magic and of Medea.

Hecate’s Birth and Honours

Hesiod says that Asteria, whom Perses led to his great house as his wife, conceived and bore Hecate (Theogony 404–409). Unlike the other Titans, she was not stripped of her powers when Zeus took power. He honoured her above all, and she kept the share of earth, sea and starry heaven that she had held before (Theogony 411–415). Hesiod stresses that the son of Cronus did her no wrong and took nothing from what she had among the earlier gods, and that she was also honoured by the immortals in heaven. He gives a long list of what she can do for those who honour her: she can grant success in the assembly and in battle, in athletic contests, to horsemen, to fishermen and to herdsmen who pray to her, and she is a nurse of the young (Theogony 416–452). Hesiod twice calls her “only-begotten”, her mother’s only child.

In the war of the gods against the Giants, Hecate fought on the side of Zeus and killed the Giant Clytius with her torches (Apollodorus 1.6.2).

Diodorus Siculus preserves a quite different, rationalised account (4.45.1–5): Hecate was a mortal daughter of Perses, king of the Tauric Chersonese and brother of Aeetes; a huntress skilled in poisons who discovered aconite, poisoned her father, founded a temple of Artemis where strangers were sacrificed, married Aeetes and bore him Circe, Medea and a son Aegialeus. This version makes her Medea’s mother rather than her patron goddess, and no other author follows it.

Hecate’s Role

Hecate was a goddess of thresholds and of the roads that cross, and so of the borders between places. Small shrines called Hecataea stood before house doors (Aristophanes, Wasps 804), and each month the well-to-do set out a supper for her at the crossroads (Aristophanes, Wealth 594–597). She was a goddess of the night who carried a torch and appeared in the company of dogs; Plutarch says the Greeks sacrificed a dog to Hecate and offered her puppies as purification offerings (Roman Questions 52 and 68). She was also linked with the dead and with ghosts: In Theocritus (Idyll 2.12–14) the sorceress Simaetha sings to Selene and to “Hecate of hell”, before whom the very whelps shiver as she fares through black blood and across the barrows of the dead, and asks the goddess to make her spells as strong as those of Circe, Medea or Perimede. In later times a famous temple of Hecate at Lagina in Caria drew great festival gatherings every year (Strabo 14.2.25). The Romans called her Trivia, the goddess of the place where three roads meet, and Virgil, describing Dido’s rites, speaks of “threefold Hecate, the three faces of the maiden Diana” (Aeneid 4.511), and Dido herself calls on Hecate “whose name is howled by night at the city crossroads” (4.609).

Hecate helping Demeter

In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Hecate, in her cave, and Helios are the only ones to hear Persephone’s cry when she is carried off by Hades (lines 22–27). When Demeter has wandered for nine days with torches in her hands, Hecate meets her on the tenth, carrying a torch, and tells her what she heard. She goes with Demeter to Helios, who tells her that Zeus gave Persephone to Hades (lines 51–89).

After Demeter is reunited with her daughter, Hecate comes to them and embraces Persephone. From that time, the hymn says, “the lady Hecate was minister and companion to Persephone” (lines 438–440).

Hecate and Medea

In the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, Medea is devoted to Hecate: Argus tells Jason of a maiden who practises sorcery under the guidance of Hecate, daughter of Perses, and whom the goddess herself taught to handle magic herbs (3.477–478, 528–533), and Medea drives at dawn to the goddess’s shrine to meet him (3.738, 3.838–843). When Medea gives Jason the charm that will help him in the contests set by her father, she tells him to bathe in a river at midnight, dig a pit, sacrifice a ewe and pour honey on it as an offering to “only-begotten Hecate, daughter of Perses” (3.1026–1041). Jason does as she says, and the dread goddess, Hecate Brimo, rises from the depths to the sacrifice, wreathed in snakes and oak boughs, with torches flaring and the dogs of the underworld howling around her (3.1191–1224). In Euripides’ Medea (395–398) Medea swears by Hecate, the queen she reveres before all others and has chosen as partner in her task, “who dwells within my inmost chamber”, that none of her enemies will wound her heart and go unpunished.

Hecate’s Portrayal

In art she was at first shown as a single figure, often holding two torches, and later also a key, since the Orphic Hymn (1) calls her the keeper of the keys of the whole world. Pausanias (2.30.2) says that the Aeginetans worshipped Hecate most of all the gods, with yearly mystic rites they said Orpheus had founded, and that their wooden image by Myron had one face and one body; it was the sculptor Alcamenes, he believed, who first made three statues of Hecate joined together, the figure the Athenians called Epipyrgidia, “on the Tower”, beside the temple of Wingless Victory on the Acropolis. From then on her statues at crossroads commonly show her with three faces and three bodies.

See Also: Perses, Asteria, Demeter, Persephone, Helios, Hades, Medea, Jason