Hekate

According to the current scholarly consensus, Hekate originated as a goddess in the pantheon of Karia on the west coast of Asia Minor. In Lagina, the home of her largest known sanctuary, she was the preeminent deity, ensuring the security and prosperity of the inhabitants and maintaining close relations with the Karian equivalent of Zeus. So far, none of the archaeological evidence for her cult at Lagina predates the Hellenistic period. Yet a number of Karian personal names contain the Hekat - root, suggesting that it is not Greek in origin, and that her worship was native to this area. In the Archaic period, her cult was apparently adopted by the Karians’ Greek neighbors, and was particularly prominent at Miletos, where she had an altar before the prutaneion as early as the sixth century and a shrine at the city gates by the fifth. A single terracotta figure inscribed with her name reveals her presence in Athens by the late sixth century.28

Her absence from Homer and the paucity of myths about her suggest a relatively late entry into the Panhellenic pantheon, and while her role in Hesiod’s Theogony (411-52) is substantial, it is also anomalous. For Hesiod, Hekate is a mighty goddess who has a surprisingly wide range of special prerogatives from Zeus: she assists kings and speakers in the assembly, gives victory in battle and athletics, helps mariners, fishermen, and herdsmen, and acts as a kourotrophos.29 While this portrait of the goddess conflicts with most of what we know about her Classical Greek cults, it closely resembles the Karian conception of her, right down to the special relationship with Zeus.

One of our few other Archaic sources is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, in which Hekate, together with the sun god Helios, witnesses the rape of Persephone (implicit in these lines is the later concept of Hekate as a moon goddess). At the end of the poem, Hekate becomes the companion of Persephone, who “goes before and follows after” her as she travels between the upper and lower worlds. This is our first evidence of what was to become Hekate’s most important role, as a deity who provided protection during transitions of all kinds, which were by nature perilous. It was in the interstices between safely defined territories (home, sanctuary, city) and times (new and old month) that dangerous spirits were emboldened to attack the unwary. Her very power to protect, of course, derived from her intimacy with and control over these spirits, the untimely and restless dead. By the Classical period, protective statues of Hekate (hekataia) were ubiquitous in Athens, functioning as complements to the older herms, and monthly garlanding of the family statues was a sign of conventional piety. The triple-formed Hekate sculpted by Alkamenes (c. 430) for the entrance to the Athenian Akropolis is the most famous example. A Hekate who simultaneously faced in different directions was presumably a more efficacious guardian; the form also expresses visually the goddess’ role as mistress of the crossroads, dangerous transitional spots where one was likely to encounter prostitutes and other dispossessed persons as well as angry ghosts. In Sophocles’ Rhizotomoi (Root-cutters), Hekate has a place on Olympos but also dwells at the crossroads; she is a terrifying figure crowned with oak leaves and serpents.30 Aristophanes (Plut. 594-97) and others tell how those who could afford it sent deipna (dinners) to Hekate at the crossroads when the new moon arrived. A related practice was the use of sacrificial dogs for the purification of private houses; the remains were set out at the crossroads for the goddess. Because the Greeks did not normally consume the meat of dogs, these sacrifices were doubly marked as outside the norm. Only extreme poverty or impiety would move someone to eat such food.31

Just as Kybele was assimilated to Greek Rhea, Hekate was sometimes accommodated in the Greek pantheon as an aspect of Artemis (both were thought to have an interest in weddings, childbirth, and the care of the young). Aeschylus (Supp. 676-77), for example, described Artemis-Hekate as a guardian of women in labor. An important Archaic version of Iphigeneia’s myth (recounted by Stesichorus among others) held that when Artemis demanded her sacrifice, the heroine was transformed into Hekate or Artemis-Hekate.32 Sometime before the fifth century, Hekate was also fully syncre-tized with the Thessalian goddess Enodia (She in the Road) and began to use her name as an epithet. Lacking evidence for the early nature of Enodia, we cannot say which of the two goddesses contributed the many characteristics they share, but given the longstanding association of Thessaly with drugs and witchcraft, it is logical to assume that Hekate’s role as a patron of magical practitioners originated here. Hekate’s interest in sorcery is attested first in

Sophocles’ Rhizotomoi (fr. 534 TrGF), where she is invoked by Thessalian women as they gather powerful herbs. Enodia also functioned, like Hekate, as a guardian of private houses and a protector of children. Fifth-century Thessalians set up small statues of the goddess in front of or inside houses, asking her aid “for a child’s sake.”33

Another relatively early center of Hekate’s Greek cult was Aigina, where Myron’s wooden statue stood in the goddess’ sanctuary. We do not know whether the mysteries of Hekate mentioned by Pausanias (2.30.2) were already celebrated in the Classical period, but the Aiginetan cult is unusual in any case because the goddess rarely achieved such full integration into any civic pantheon. Sanctuaries devoted primarily to Hekate were unusual, and the development of civic cult was probably hampered by the continuing growth of the goddess’ reputation as a deity invoked for private and nefarious purposes. As early as the mid-fourth century, Hekate Chthonia (of the Underworld) and Chthonic Hermes are the deities named in an Attic curse tablet incised on lead, which was intended to bind and neutralize the author’s opponent in a lawsuit.34