Triple - faced and treble - bodied , Hekate(also sometimes write " Hecate " ) is a goddess of crossroads who stage a different configuration to each direction . This is a meet depiction , as Hekate also seems to introduce a unlike visage to the varying times and cultures that consider her .
This statement is true of most gods andgoddesses . godlike beings , after all , have no documentary reality . They occupy within human vision , custom and lit . Their function , fib and manifestations change over clip and whatever stability they have stems from anchoring orthodoxies , text and optic industrial plant .
For many god and goddess in the Greek custom , Hesiod ’s eighth - century B.C.E. poem " Theogony " is just such a work . The Greek poet draw on diverge tradition to present a synthesized family tree for everyone from Aglaea to Zeus . Not only does Hesiod name Hekate in her early surviving literary appearing , the poet also devotes a apparently disproportionate amount of space to her praise .
As pointed out by Jenny Strauss Clay in " The Hecate of the Theogony , " Hesiod ’s " Hymn to Hekate " has even stood out to some historians as a potential insertion as " Hesiod appears to omit everything so as to launch into an extended panegyric of Hekate . "
The " Theogony " depict the goddess as an honorable and influential figure in the Grecian pantheon . Her mogul , it relates , predates the rise ofZeusand his Olympians , but Hekate avoids the destiny of the titans who opposed the new gods . Zeus , Poseidon and their kindred certainly surpass her , but she still retain influences in multiple vault of heaven , including the sea , childbirth and herd .
Hekate Was a Crucial Intermediary
As Clay describes , Hekate stands as a kind of anti - Prometheus in Greek traditions . While the fervency - bearing titan worsen relationships between gods and mortals , Hekate takes on the role of a crucial intermediary — a fitting attitude for a goddess of boundaries and crossroads . While some experts assign Hesiod ’s Hekate fandom to his own personal adoration of the god , or perhaps his home Greenwich Village ’s connection to her , Clay interpret the nidus as no bare whimsy , but rather a testament to Hekate ’s " critical mediating subroutine " in the pantheon .
As Patricia A. Marquardt target out in " A portrayal of Hecate , " Hesiod describes Hekate not as a distant entity but rather a direct force in mortal life sentence . She is a personal or house deity , and likely represents an autonomous spiritual tradition close up into the surpassing pantheon . Her origins are shrouded in enigma — also quite befitting of a goddess later associated with night and witchery — but she likely emerges from the Caria region of Western Anatolia , though Egyptian and Greek origins have also been proposed .
The Cult of Hekate
The oldest actual physical grounds of a rage of Hekate , institute in inscriptions at a temple of Apollo Delphinios in Miletus , actually dates to the sixth hundred B.C.E. , some two centuries after Hesiod . Her oldest surviving depiction also date to the same time full stop : a terracotta statue of the goddess seated on a throne . Her triple - bodied likeness , live as the Hekate - Epipyrgidia , appears afterwards in the form of a statue that tolerate at the entry to the Athenian Acropolis during the fifth C B.C.E.
As Patricia Monaghan points out in " The Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines , " Hekate has long been depicted holding a blaze away torch against the night and follow by dogs . In some picture , one of her three head is even a dog ’s head , alongside a serpent and a horse . The hotdog was sometimes an beast of sacrifice to Hekate for the Greeks , but the remnant from consecrated supper in her name were also left out for her dog ( as well as whatever mundane detent might prowl the streets ) .
Hekate ’s original , pre - Hellenistic var. is lost to account , and Hesiod ’s treatment of the deity — though glowing — folds her into the Greek pantheon with everyone else . Still other Grecian source , including Sophocles and Euripides , link up Hekate to witchery and decease . By the medieval period , European tradition would more expressly translate Hekate into a goddess of witchcraft and the moon . Later still , William Shakespeare stir this image of the immortal in his seventeenth - century turn " Macbeth , " drop a line " witchery celebrates Pale Hekate ’s offerings . " The bard also mention Hekate in " A Midsummer Night ’s Dream " and " King Lear . "
Even in late century , Hekate has continued to show differing and wide-ranging faces to the world . raw spiritual movements such as various neopagan and Wiccan feeling organization emit novel lifespan into her divine part . In many of these modern tradition , Hekate ’s affiliation with night and death once more take a back seat to her broader powers of influence , and her function as the goddess of bound , borders and transition .
Over the course of millennia , she changes and yet endures .
