Triple Hecate: goddess of crossroads, torches and the new Moon

Few Greek deities changed their faces as much as Hecate. In archaic poetry she is a powerful and kindly goddess, honoured by Zeus above all others. In the classical age she becomes the mistress of crossroads and thresholds, attended by torches and dogs. In late antiquity, finally, she turns into a great cosmic and lunar goddess, united with Selene and Artemis in a single three-faced figure. To follow this transformation is to cross a thousand years of ancient religion.

The goddess honoured by Zeus

The oldest and most surprising testimony is that of Hesiod. In the Theogony, probably composed around 700 BC, a long passage celebrates Hecate, daughter of the Titan Perses and of Asteria, as the goddess to whom Zeus left the privileges she had held from the beginning over earth, sea and sky. Hesiod credits her with the power to grant success in assemblies, in war, in contests, in fishing and in herding. There is no trace here of dark aspects.

In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, by contrast, Hecate appears in a more nocturnal role. From her cave she hears the cry of Persephone carried off by Hades and, torch in hand, accompanies Demeter in the search for her daughter. When Persephone returns from the underworld, Hecate becomes her companion. It is probably from this bond with the queen of the dead that part of her underworld character derives.

Suppers at the crossroads

In classical Athens Hecate was worshipped at the doors of houses and above all at the meeting of three roads, hence her Latin epithet Trivia. At every new Moon offerings of food, the so-called suppers of Hecate, were laid out for her at crossroads. Aristophanes, in the Wealth, jokes about these offerings, noting that the poor ended up eating them before the goddess could enjoy them. The monthly date already linked the goddess to the lunar cycle.

Pausanias attributes to the sculptor Alcamenes, active in the second half of the fifth century BC, the first statue of Hecate formed of three figures joined back to back, placed on the Athenian Acropolis near the temple of Athena Nike. From then on the triple image spread throughout the Greek world through the small pillars called hekataia, set up at crossroads and in front of doors.

Three faces, one goddess

Hecate's most important sanctuary was at Lagina, in Caria, where a great temple with a sculpted frieze was built in the Hellenistic period and where a procession of the key was celebrated, a symbol of the goddess who opens and closes passages. In Rome her figure merged with those of Diana and Luna. Virgil, in the Aeneid, invokes her as «threefold Hecate, the three faces of the virgin Diana».

In the centuries of the empire, the Chaldean Oracles and the Neoplatonic philosophers made Hecate an intermediate power between the divine and human worlds, a kind of soul of the cosmos. The Hecate of medieval grimoires and of literary witches, from Shakespeare onwards, is the last echo of this long history, but it represents only one of her faces, and not even the oldest.